New Confessions and Revelations from the World of Economic Hit Men

Introduction: New Confessions

and Revelations from the World of

Economic Hit Men

John Perkins

Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly paid professionals who cheat countries

around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money

from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development

(USAID), and other foreign “aid” organizations into the coffers of huge

corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the

planet’s natural resources. Their tools include fraudulent fi nancial reports,

rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play

a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying

dimensions during this time of globalization.

I should know; I was an EHM.

I wrote that opening paragraph to Confessions of an Economic Hit Man as a

description of my own profession. Since the book’s fi rst publication in early

November 2004, I have heard TV, radio, and event hosts read those words

many times as they introduced me to their audiences. The reality of EHMs

shocked people in the United States and other countries. Many have told me

that it convinced them to commit themselves to taking actions that will make

this a better world.

John Perkins links his experiences to new revelations that expose the drive for

empire that lies behind the rhetoric of globalization.

2 A GAME AS OLD AS EMPIRE

The public interest aroused by Confessions was not a foregone conclusion. I

spent a great deal of time working up the courage to try to publish it. Once I

made the decision to do so, my attempts got off to a rocky start.

By late 2003, the manuscript had been circulated to many publishers—and

I had almost given up on ever seeing the book in print. Despite praising it

as “riveting,” “eloquently written,” “an important exposé,” and “a story that

must be told,” publisher after publisher—twenty-fi ve, in fact—rejected it.

My literary agent and I concluded that it was just too anti-corporatocracy.

(A word introduced to most readers in those pages, corporatocracy refers to

the powerful group of people who run the world’s biggest corporations, the

most powerful governments, and history’s fi rst truly global empire.) The major

publishing houses, we concluded, were too intimidated by, or perhaps too

beholden to, the corporate elite.

Eventually a courageous independent publisher, Berrett-Koehler, took the

book on. Confessions’ success among the public astounded me. During its fi rst

week in bookstores it went to number 4 on Amazon.com. Then it spent many

weeks on every major bestseller list. In less than fourteen months, it had been

translated into and published in twenty languages. A major Hollywood company

purchased the option to fi lm it. Penguin/Plume bought the paperback

rights.

Despite all these successes, an important element was still missing. The

major U.S. media refused to discuss Confessions or the fact that, because of it,

terms such as EHM, corporatocracy, and jackal were now appearing on college

syllabuses. The New York Times and other newspapers had to include it on their

bestseller lists—after all, numbers don’t lie (unless an EHM produces them, as

you will see in the following pages)—but during its fi rst fi fteen months in print

most of them obstinately declined to review it. Why?

My agent, my publicist, the best minds at Berrett-Koehler and Penguin/

Plume, my family, my friends, and I may never know the real answer to that

question. What we do know is that several nationally recognized journalists

appeared poised on the verge of writing or speaking about the book. They

conducted “pre-interviews” with me by phone and dispatched producers to

wine and dine my wife and me. But, in the end, they declined. A major TV

network convinced me to interrupt a West Coast speaking tour, fl y across the

country to New York, and dress up in a television-blue sports coat. Then—as

I waited at the door for the network’s limo—an employee called to cancel.

Whenever media apologists offered explanations for such actions, they took

the form of questions: “Can you prove the existence of other EHMs?” “Has

INTRODUCTION: NEW CONFESSIONS AND REVELATIONS 3

anyone else written about these things?” “Have others in high places made

similar disclosures?”

The answer to these questions is, of course, yes. Every major incident

described in the book has been discussed in detail by other authors—usually

lots of other authors. The CIA’s coup against Iran’s Mossadegh; the atrocities

committed by his replacement, Big Oil’s puppet, the Shah; the Saudi Arabian

money-laundering affair; the jackal-orchestrated assassinations of Ecuador’s

President Jaime Roldós and Panama’s President Omar Torrijos; allegations of

collusion between oil companies and missionary groups in the Amazon; the

international activities of Bechtel, Halliburton, and other pillars of American

capitalism; the unilateral and unprovoked U.S. invasion of Panama and capture

of Manuel Noriega; the coup against Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez—

these and the other events in the book are a matter of public record.

Several pundits criticized what some referred to as my “radical accusation”—

that economic forecasts are manipulated and distorted in order to

achieve political objectives (as opposed to economic objectivity) and that foreign

“aid” is a tool for big business rather than an altruistic means to alleviate

poverty. However, both of these transgressions against the true purposes of

sound economics and altruism have been well documented by a multitude of

people, including a former World Bank chief economist and winner of the

Nobel Prize in economics, Joseph Stiglitz. In his book Globalization and Its

Discontents, Stiglitz writes:

To make its [the IMF’s] programs seem to work, to make the numbers “add

up,” economic forecasts have to be adjusted. Many users of these numbers

do not realize that they are not like ordinary forecasts; in these instances

GDP forecasts are not based on a sophisticated statistical model, or even on

the best estimates of those who know the economy well, but are merely

the numbers that have been negotiated as part of an IMF program. . . .1

Globalization, as it has been advocated, often seems to replace the old

dictatorships of national elites with new dictatorships of international fi -

nance. . . . For millions of people globalization has not worked. . . . They

have seen their jobs destroyed and their lives become more insecure.2

I found it interesting that during my fi rst book tour—for the hardcover edition,

in late 2004 and early 2005—I sometimes heard questions from my audiences

that refl ected the mainstream press. However, they were signifi cantly

diminished during the paperback edition tour in early 2006. The level of so

4 A GAME AS OLD AS EMPIRE

phistication among readers had risen over the course of that year. A growing

suspicion that the mainstream press was collaborating with the corporatocracy—

which, of course, owned much of it or at least supported it through advertising—

had become manifest. While I would love to credit Confessions for

this transformation in public attitude, my book has to share that honor with

a number of others, such as Stiglitz’s Globalization and Its Discontents, David

Korten’s When Corporations Rule the World, Noam Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival,

Chalmers Johnson’s Sorrows of Empire, Jeff Faux’s Global Class War, and

Antonia Juhasz’s Bush Agenda, as well as fi lms such as The Constant Gardener,

Syriana, Hotel Rwanda, Good Night, and Good Luck, and Munich. The American

public recently has been treated to a feast of exposés. Mine is defi nitely not a

voice in the wilderness.

Despite the overwhelming evidence that the corporatocracy has created

the world’s fi rst truly global empire, infl icted increased misery and poverty

on millions of people around the planet, managed to sabotage the principles

of self-determination, justice, and freedom that form the foundations upon

which the United States stands, and turned a country that was lauded at the

end of World War II as democracy’s savior into one that is feared, resented,

and hated, the mainstream press ignores the obvious. In pleasing the moneymen

and the executives upstairs, many journalists have turned their backs on

the truth. When approached by my publicists, they continue to ask: “Where

are the trenches?” “Can you produce the trowels that dug them?” “Have any

‘objective’ researchers confi rmed your story?”

Although the evidence was already available, Berrett-Koehler and I decided

that the proper response was to answer such questions in terms that no one

could ignore and that only those who insisted on remaining in denial could

dispute. We would publish a book with many contributors, an anthology, further

revealing the world of economic hit men and how it works.

In Confessions, I talked about a world rooted in the cold war, in the dynamics

and proxy confl icts of the U.S.–Soviet confl ict. My sojourn in that war

ended in 1981, a quarter of a century ago. Since then, and especially since

the collapse of the USSR, the dynamics of empire have changed. The world

is now more multipolar and mercantile, with China and Europe emerging to

compete with the U.S. Empire is heavily driven by multinational corporations,

whose interests transcend those of any particular nation-state.3 There are new

multinational institutions and trade agreements, such as the World Trade Organization

(WTO) and North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA),

and newly articulated ideologies and programs, such as neoliberalism and the

INTRODUCTION: NEW CONFESSIONS AND REVELATIONS 5

structural adjustments and conditionalities imposed by the IMF. But one thing

remains unchanged: the peoples of the Third World continue to suffer; their

future, if anything, looks even bleaker than it did in the early 1980s.

A quarter-century ago, I saw myself as a hit man for the interests of U.S.

capitalism in the struggle for control of the developing world during the cold

war. Today, the EHM game is more complex, its corruption more pervasive,

and its operations more fundamental to the world economy and politics.

There are many more types of economic hit men, and the roles they play are

far more diverse. The veneer of respectability remains a key factor; subterfuges

range from money laundering and tax evasion carried out in well-appointed

offi ce suites to activities that amount to economic war crimes and result in

the deaths of millions of people. The chapters that follow reveal this dark side

of globalization, showing a system that depends on deception, extortion, and

often violence: an offi cer of an offshore bank hiding hundreds of millions in

stolen money, IMF advisors slashing Ghana’s education and health programs,

a Chinese bureaucrat seeking oil concessions in Africa, a mercenary defending

a European oil company in Nigeria, a consultant rewriting Iraqi oil law, and

executives fi nancing warlords to secure supplies of coltan ore in Congo.

The main obstacle to compiling such stories should be obvious. Most

EHMs do not think it is in their best interests to talk about their jobs. Many

are still actively employed in the business. Those who have stepped away often

receive pensions, consultant fees, and other perks from their former employers.

They understand that whistle-blowers usually sacrifi ce such benefi ts—and

sometimes much more. Most of us who have done that type of work pride

ourselves on loyalty to old comrades. Once one of us decides to take the big

leap—“into the cold,” to use CIA vernacular—we know we will have to face

the harsh reality of powerful forces arrayed to protect the institutional power

of multinational corporations, global banks, government defense and security

agencies, international agencies—and the small elite that runs them.

In recent years, the people charged with deceiving ordinary citizens have

grown more cunning. The Pentagon Papers and the White House Watergate

tapes taught them the dangers of writing and recording incriminating details.

The Enron, Arthur Andersen, and WorldCom scandals, and recent allegations

about CIA “extraordinary renditions,” weapons of mass destruction

deceits, and National Security Agency eavesdropping serve to reinforce policies

that favor shredding. Government offi cials who expose a CIA agent to

retaliate against her whistle-blowing spouse go unpunished. All these events

lead to the ultimate deterrent to speaking the truth: those who expose the corporatocracy can expect to be assassinated—fi nancially and by reputation,

if not with a bullet.

            continued