Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man: The Shocking Inside Story of How America Really Took Over the World

By John Perkins

Ebury Press, 2006

250 pages, $24.95 (pb)

REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/33752

John Perkins cut a brazen figure at meetings of the international lending agencies in the 1970s, presenting, with self-important theatrical swagger, his forecasts of magical double-digit growth figures for the lucky recipient countries of massive international loans. But, writes a repentant Perkins in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, his bravado not only masked a knack for manipulating statistics and a lack of real economic science (his degree was in business administration, "emphasis on marketing") it held up, at economic gun-point, poor countries to resource theft, debts they would never be able to pay off and a miserable future as a playground for US engineering companies like Perkins' employer, Chas T Main Inc. (MAIN), and its cousins like Bechtel and Haliburton.

Perkins was "a nice kid from rural New Hampshire", "profiled" as an ideal employee for America's largest spy organisation, the National Security Agency (NSA), before opting for the Peace Corps as a "volunteer assisting a small cooperative composed of illiterate Andean peasant brick makers". With his uncle Frank, an NSA spy, pulling levers behind the scenes, Perkins eventually joined MAIN in 1971 as an Economic Hit Man (EHM).

The term was that of his "teacher", the MAIN/NSA liaison, Claudine, who put Perkins in the picture with both sinister threat ("once you're in, you can never get out") and open candour — his job, said Claudine, would be "to justify huge international loans that would funnel money back to MAIN and other US companies" (a condition of such loans) and which would bankrupt the debtor countries, tying them to their creditors and making the indebted countries "easy targets for favours" — whether it be military bases, UN votes, or access to oil and other natural resources.

"In essence", writes Perkins, "most of the money never leaves the United States". From the US-funded international banks, the loan money "is simply transferred from banking offices in Washington to engineering offices in New York, Houston or San Francisco", with the banks taking their kilo of flesh through never-shrinking debt repayments.

Perkins saw this winner-take-all game up close in Ecuador, Guatemala and Indonesia. In Ecuador, for example, for every $100 of crude oil now taken out of the Amazon basin rainforests, the US oil companies receive $75, three quarters of what's left goes to US banks for debt-servicing, leaving $2.50 for health, education and programs for the poor whose numbers, like Ecuador's public debt, have soared since the "oil boom" financed by development loans.

And if a country refuses to play along, right behind the EHMs come the CIA enforcers and, the ace in the pack, the military muscle. Perkins' beat took him to Panama, where President Omar Torrijos used the strategic value of the Panama canal to counter the Faustian foreign "aid" deal offered his country. This recalcitrant disappeared in a fiery airplane "accident" (a CIA hit) and when his successor, Manuel Noriega, didn't prove as compliant as needed, the marines finished the job (with 6000 Panamanian dead) in 1989.

Saudi Arabia's rulers proved more amenable in 1974, choosing not to flex Saudi oil wealth. Billions of mostly US-funded "development" loan dollars were pumped into the Saudi economy, with Saudi petro-dollars flowing back to US engineering companies (including a lucrative electrification contract for MAIN), whilst oil supply was guaranteed at a volume and price acceptable to the US, as was Saudi royal family loyalty to and dependency on US military and political support. In addition to his statistical boosterism, one of Perkins' tasks was to win over a Saudi prince to the deal, which Perkins achieved through procuring sex for the prince who had a liking for Western women.

By playing his part in producing phantasmagorical economic growth forecasts to justify billion dollar loans, Perkins' career soared. He looked at becoming a millionaire before the age of 40, and he dined off a menu rich in adventure, travel and women. Yet, his conscience was troubled. He had subdued its restless whispers with the rationalisations that he was doing some good, or, if not, he was "working from inside" to change things. He could always fall back on the old chestnut that if it wasn't him, someone else would fill his shoes so why be a mug.

Colombia broke Perkins' moral impasse. Huge loans to build electricity plants, highways and telecommunications systems were allegedly meant to open up the exploitation of natural resources which would repay the loan debt whilst making life better for the locals. Perkins, whose statistical "dexterity" had been central to this type of claim, had seen enough by now to divine the real aim — enriching US corporates and locking Colombia into debt and political subserviency.

After meeting Paula, a Colombian woman whose brother had joined the guerrillas after being tortured for peacefully protesting the destruction of indigenous lands by US oil companies, Perkins' conscience at last got the better of him — "I thought about the people who starved each day while my staff and I slept in first-class hotels, ate at the finest restaurants, and built up our financial portfolios" — and in 1980 he resigned from MAIN. For the next two decades, he thought of exposing what he knew, but corporate bribes and the NSA's veiled threat prevailed until the bloody bringing of Iraq into the Bechtel, Haliburton, World Bank and political puppetry empire of the US in 2003 persuaded Perkins that his story was still relevant and still urgent.

Perkins notes the evolutionary changes to the EHM breed — the NSA may no longer profile business executives for hiring by private corporations, and NSA liaisons may no longer explicitly spell out the EHM role or acronym. But "thousands of EHMs" toting outrageously high salaries "walk the corridors of Monsanto, GE [General Electric], Nike, GM [General Motors], Wal-Mart — every major corporation in the US", happily "funneling money from the World Bank, the US Agency for International Development, the Inter-American Development Bank and other foreign 'aid' organisations" into the "coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet's natural resources".

Perkins successfully bats away any charge of conspiracy theory by arguing that EHMs are not a "tight group meeting in clandestine hideaways with sinister intent" but that rather the "values and goals" of an economy dedicated to "profit through exploitation" are shared with the "national security" apparatus that protects that activity globally. The US foreign policy bureaucrats and the US corporate elite — what Perkins calls the "corporatocracy" — have their eyes on a common prize.

Whilst Perkins' prescription for more "compassion, democracy and social justice" is short on agency and sufficient specificity to match up to the scale and malignancy of the EHM problem (there is nothing inherently wrong with corporations, he says, just the perversion of the "ideals of the US Republic" by a lust for empire), his belief that "confession is the first step to redemption" is a necessary starting point. With his brave and honest book, Perkins has not only salved his conscience but opened to other people of conscience a revealing, secretive, insider's door on what lies behind the global economic and political discontents of the poor.