Lesson Plans Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

The spectacular scenery ended abruptly as the Subaru sped out of paradise and into a modern vision of Dante's Inferno A gigantic monster reared up from the river, a mammoth gray wall. Its dripping concrete was totally out of place, completely unnatural and incompatible with the landscape. Of course, seeing it there should not have surprised me.

I knew all along that it would be waiting in ambush. I had encountered it many times before and in the past had praised it as a symbol of EHM accomplishments. Even so, it made my skin crawl. That hideous, incongruous wall is a dam that blocks the rushing Pastaza River, diverts its waters through huge tunnels bored into the mountain, and converts the energy to electricity. This is the megawatt Agoyan hydroelectric project. It fuels the industries that make a handful of Ecuadorian families wealthy, and it has been the source of untold suffering for the farmers and indigenous people who live along the river.

This hydroelectric plant is just one of many projects developed through my efforts and those of other EHMs. Such projects are the reason Ecuador is now a member of the global empire, and the reason why the Shuars and Kichwas and their neighbors threaten war against our oil companies. Because of EHM projects, Ecuador is awash in foreign debt and must devote an inordinate share of its national budget to paying this off, instead of using its capital to help the millions of its citizens officially classified as dangerously impoverished.

The only way Ecuador can buy down its foreign obligations is by selling its rain forests to the oil companies. Indeed, one of the reasons the EHMs set their sights on Ecuador in the first place was because the sea of oil beneath its Amazon region is believed to rival the oil fields of the Middle East.

The global empire demands its pound of flesh in the form of oil concessions. These demands became especially urgent after September 11, , when Washington feared that Middle Eastern supplies might cease. On top of that, Venezuela, our third-largest oil supplier, had recently elected a populist president, Hugo Chavez, who took a strong stand against what he referred to as U.

Ecuador is typical of countries around the world that EHMs have brought into the economic-political fold. All of those people—millions in Ecuador, billions around the planet—are potential terrorists. Not because they believe in communism or anarchism or are intrinsically evil, but simply because they are desperate.

Looking at this dam, I wondered—as I have so often in so many places around the world—when these people would take action, like the Americans against England in the s or Latin Americans against Spain in the early s. The subtlety of this modern empire building puts the Roman centurions, the Spanish conquistadors, and the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European colonial powers to shame.

We EHMs are crafty; we learned from history. Today we do not carry swords. We do not wear armor or clothes that set us apart. In countries like Ecuador, Nigeria, and Indonesia, we dress like local schoolteachers and shop owners. In Washington and Paris, we look like government bureaucrats and bankers. We appear humble, normal.

We visit project sites and stroll through impoverished villages. We profess altruism, talk with local papers about the wonderful humanitarian things we are doing. We cover the conference tables of government committees with our spreadsheets and financial projections, and we lecture at the Harvard Business School about the miracles of macroeconomics.

We are on the record, in the open. Or so we portray ourselves and so are we accepted. It is how the system works. We seldom resort to anything illegal because the system itself is built on subterfuge, and the system is by definition legitimate. However—and this is a very large caveat—if we fail, an even more sinister breed steps in, ones we EHMs refer to as the jackals, men who trace their heritage directly to those earlier empires. The jackals are always there, lurking in the shadows. When they emerge, heads of state are overthrown or die in violent "accidents.

When the jackals fail, young Americans are sent in to kill and to die. As I passed the monster, that hulking mammoth wall of gray concrete rising from the river, I was very conscious of the sweat that soaked my clothes and of the tightening in my intestines.

I headed on down into the jungle to meet with the indigenous people who are determined to fight to the last man in order to stop this empire I helped create, and I was overwhelmed with feelings of guilt.

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How, I asked myself, did a nice kid from rural New Hampshire ever get into such a dirty business? He spent the next three years in the Peace Corps in South America and then in joined the international consulting firm of Chas. Main, a Boston-based company of employees that kept a very low profile. The loans left the recipient countries wallowing in debt and highly vulnerable to outside political and commercial interests.

Perkins resigned his position at MAIN in He founded and became CEO of Independent Power Systems, pioneering technologies that promoted the use of "waste" power plant heat in hydroponic greenhouses and other cogeneration applications. In , he sold IPS and founded a nonprofit organization, Dream Change Coalition, which works closely with Amazonian and other indigenous people to help preserve their environments and cultures.

John began writing Confessions of an Economic Hit Man several times during the past two decades. He was persuaded to stop by lucrative business offers that were contingent on his silence. My daughter has grown up and left home. The time has come. Lessons for an EHM 4: Saving a Country from Communism 5: My Role as Inquisitor 7: Civilization on Trial 8: Jesus - Seen Differently 9: Opportunity of a Lifetime Pirates in the Canal Zone Soldiers and Prostitutes Conversations with the General The Saudi Arabian Money-laundering Affair We want the canal back, we want the military bases back in the canal zone and more than anything, we want you to stop talking to the Japanese.

I am not opposing the United States. We have the right to negotiate with whoever can build us the best canal. I have the right to negotiate with the Japanese.

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He took a very strong stand and within a few months, his plane crashed into a mountain, blew up and crashed into a mountain, and it was very strong evidence that it had been blown up by a tape recorder which was handed to him at the end that was full of explosives. There is no question in my mind and in the mind of much of the world that this was the jackals, the C. Just a couple of months before that, they had done the same thing to Jaime Roldos, President of Ecuador, the first democratically elected president of Ecuador in decades, had replaced a military junta, democratically elected, and he stood up to the U.

Why was he standing up to U. Because cnce again, he ran in the first democratic elections in Ecuador in many decades. He ran on a platform of sovereignty for his country. And if there is oil in Ecuador then, he said, the Ecuadoreans should benefit from it. And once he became president, he began to introduce this. He set up a Hydrocarbons Act, he called it, which was basically a petroleum act that would ensure that if oil came out of Ecuador, the majority of the funds from that oil would go to his people.

The oil companies would get a reasonable payment. But the majority would go to his people. And Roldos and Torrijos were really partners in a way. At the same time, they were supporting each other, and they both had to go. And they both went. And what were your thoughts at the time? I mean, you continued doing this work. It was a very pivotal point for me that —- throughout my work, as I describe in the book, my conscience was torn.

Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins

And to me this is one of most interesting parts of my own personal story. I think of myself as a pretty good person. I grew up years a yankee Calvinist in Vermont and New Hampshire. I come from a very patriotic background. I grew up in a very strictly Republican family, very conservative. I have very strong values. Descendant of Tom Paine and Ethan Allen? And my parents steeped me in American history and in the values of our founding fathers of our country. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all people, all over the world. I believed very strongly in this.

And yet at the same time, I was very seduceable to money, power, sex. All these things came my way, and I was doing things that I was patted on the back for by the president of the World Bank, Robert MacNamara. And I was Chief Economist of a big consulting firm in Boston. I was doing work that macroeconomics in college had taught me was good work to do. Why have very few people heard of this company, Main? We were a very quiet company. We had about 2, professional employees, which is not small.

We were a very private, very quiet company and we were serving the interests of empire. The company no longer exists. In the early s, the partners sold out to a larger engineering construction firm, and so the company essentially went out of existence at that point. I think it was getting a little too hot for us at this point. But it was intentional. We were very strictly forbidden from talking to the press. I broke that rule at one point.

I wrote an op-ed piece on the Panama Canal for the Boston Globe and was severely chastised within the company. So, it was intentional that we were very quiet. We have to break. When we come back, I do want to ask you about Robert MacNamara. As you talk about the corporatocracy, certainly he embodied that, from becoming C.

He is author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. Our website is democracynow. But before we do that, Robert MacNamara, you write about him. You know, they jump across these lines and MacNamara is a great example of that.

He was president of Ford and then he became Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson and then he became president of the World Bank. And in all three roles, his main job was to promote American business, to promote the corporatocracy, to bring the goodies home, to exploit the world. And he was in democratic regimes, Kennedy and Johnson. We had George Schultz under the former President Bush. So, the two Bushes both have these types of people, too. Government is filled with these people.

But it is not just a republican issue. It goes across all the lines, and MacNamara is a very good example of that. I think, at the same time, MacNamara was one of the most important people in terms of framing the new economics, what he called aggressive management, and it was aggressive about going out and basically taking the world and bringing it into us so that today we have, out of the largest economies in the world, 52 are corporations.

Like me, as an economic hit man, I went along with the system. I did more than go along with the system, I promoted the system. But I did so legally, for the most part, and I did so while being patted on the back by all the people that I was taught to look up to. So you worked for this international consulting firm called Main in Boston.

You became chief economist there. You begin your book in Indonesia. Talk about your training there and what you were trying to accomplish. Well, Indonesia, this is , , in that area. We know that at this point Vietnam is going to go. The midst of the war. So with the domino theory was in effect that if Indonesia went, the rest of Southeast Asia would go like dominos one country at a time.

And Indonesia was seen as the key to stopping that process. Also, Indonesia happened to have a lot of oil, which we needed or wanted, and it had the largest Muslim population of any country in the world. At the same time, putting Indonesia in tremendous debt to us, a debt that it would have a hard time getting out of, and therefore, become part of our empire. Shoring up Suharto, the dictator there for so many years. And an interesting aspect of that whole thing was at that time I was part of a team of 11, and the other 10 men on that team had no idea that we were doing the economic hit man thing.

They were designing transmission lines, fuel systems to bring the fuel into the power plants. They were designing the power plants, big power plants, distribution lines. I was the one that made the forecast. And they were just going along. You know, for them it was great.

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But he was taken out. Howard Parker retired from the New England Electric System, load forecast, forecasting electric demand. He was a very bitter man, and he saw what was going on, but he was also a very bitter man, and nobody really got along very well with Howard. And it was — my job was to forecast the economy of the country. His job was then to forecast the electrical needs of the country. This is a scam. You are buying into the system. And in a way that let me off the hook. I felt very relieved. At one point, I realized, my gosh, I can do what my handlers have trained me to do, what Claudine has told me I must do, and that is come up with these high electrical load forecasts, but my conscience is going to be clear, because Howard is not going to pay any attention to them anyway.

He has got these ridiculous low forecasts. You know, da da da da da da. But you have got to come up with the kind of forecast that we were looking for from him and we know you can do that because you do that for the economy. Well, Iran was under the Shah at the time. Iran is where economic hit men really get started because in the early s, Iran democratically elected a man named Mossadeq as premier. And he was held out for the hope of the Middle East and, in fact, the whole world of democratically elected president.

But as soon as he got into power, he went up against the oil companies. And foreshadowing what Roldos and Torrijos would do later on, he really stood up for his people. And he said, particularly British Petroleum, if you are going to be here, you are going to give your fair share to our people. The oil companies were very upset, so the United States made the decision to go in and do something about this. Now, at the time, we were terrified of thermal nuclear war.

Instead of sending in the troops, we sent in Kermit Roosevelt, a C. We all know about the Shah. So, in a way, I was back in this country where economic hit men started. One of lessons we learned, however, from Kermit Roosevelt was that he was a C. Had he been found out, the government would have been in trouble. So, shortly after that, the decision was made that economic hit men needed to be hired by private firms.

So Kermit Roosevelt goes from Iran, the fall of Mossadeq in , which continues to inform the population of Iran 50 years later in their attitudes to the United States, yet few Americans know about this. Going from Iran, he is then offered the job to go into Guatemala a year later to help overthrow Arbenz by the Dulles brothers, and he refuses.

And the next coup the next year is the overthrow by United Fruit and the C. The model got started and continued to grow tremendously. By the time I got to Iran, which was in the early s, after Indonesia, one of my next assignments, I went to Panama, and then Iran. I was working under the Shah and —. Iran was this pivotal country for us.

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

Its location was very important on the Russian border. And it had all this oil. And we needed to control oil. We wanted desperately to control all the Middle Eastern oil. We saw the Shah as being the person who could make this happen for us. The Shah — you know, the plan was that the Shah would help take over the rest of the Middle East, including Syria and Iraq, and we all know there was a war between Iraq and Iran much later. But from the very beginning, the idea was to become allies with the Shah.

We did everything we could to shore him up. And at the same time, we realize that he had a lot of oil money and so our companies were benefiting tremendously. And we were making tremendous numbers of people angry. Even to this day, Osama bin Laden cites what happened with the Shah, how we overthrew Mossadeq and brought the Shah in as one of the reasons for his anger. So, he, Mossadeq, went after Anglo American just to say that this is our oil and we should control it.

Anglo American, the British government, not allowing for any Iranian ownership, but then forcing — Anglo American eventually becoming British Petroleum, B.

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Yes, at that time, I believe the numbers were that 85 cents of every dollar of oil drilled in Iran went out of the country to Anglo American or B. And, of course, Mossadeq was incensed by this, as he should have been. If I remember correctly, Truman refused to be a part of this, but then Eisenhower came in and decided to support Britain in this.

Truman took a very integritous stand.

But very shortly after that, he was out of office and Eisenhower came into office, and he went along with the C. Oil is the source of so much pain. Oh, you know, every country in the world that has major supplies of oil, every third-world country or what — some of them no longer are, like Saudi Arabia, have suffered. Oil is not a benefit for these countries. Oil is a curse to the world. It may be the greatest curse the world has ever experienced.

In that period of time, our imports had increased. So you were involved in Iran. You also were tied up in Saudi Arabia. In the early s, OPEC really flexed its muscle. So it shut down oil production significantly. And as a result, the U. There were long lines of cars at gas stations, many of us still remember that. And we were afraid that it was going to be another crash like as a result of OPEC. And so the treasury department came to me and some other economic hit men and said this must never happen again. You have got to devise a plan.

What are you going to do about this? How can you make sure this never happens? And we knew the key was Saudi Arabia. For one thing, it had more oil than anybody else. We knew that the House of Saud, the royal Saudi family, was corruptible. They were corrupt, they are corrupt, and they were corruptible. So, to make a long story short, we put together this deal whereby they agreed, the House of Saud, to send most of their petro dollars, the money we paid for petroleum, back to the United States and invest it in U.

The interest from those securities would be dealt out by the treasury department to U. And the House of Saud would guarantee to keep oil prices within acceptable limits, limits acceptable to us, and we would guarantee to keep the House of Saud in power.

And we have done — all those things have followed since the early s. The policy still holds. Even to the point where, you know, we know that the House of Saud supports Osama bin Laden, supported him at our encouragement, of course, in Afghanistan, continues to support him and a lot of terrorist movements. But they have provided us with these stabilized oil prices and a huge market for our engineering construction companies.

What was your personal involvement there? Well, I structured —- I was one of the people that structured this plan. I like to think I was one of the—- I was the primary person that structured it and may have been. But there were a number of other people involved. What makes you think it was him? And in any case, the message came back to us that the House of Saud had accepted the plan, but now a number of princes had to be convinced because even though Saudi Arabia is not a democracy, apparently there was a certain amount of democratic consensus building within the family, anyway.

So, I was assigned to one of the princes and told that I needed to bring him around. He saw this coming. And so I knew my job was a challenge. He made it a little easier for me, because, in some respects because he, at the beginning, let me know that every time he came to boston or i visited him in new york or washington, he would expect to have a companion, a blue-eyed blonde, beautiful blue-eyed, blonde woman.

He described exactly what he was looking for. Fortunately for me, she did like him. And, Amy, it was one of the few illegal things that I did. Most of my job as an economic hit man was, strictly speaking, legal. Pimping is not legal. So I was pimping in Massachusetts at the time, and the only way I could pay for these services was by basically padding my expense accounts, and that also is illegal.

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I think we are. And so what happened with this? Well, eventually the prince was very happy with Sally, this blonde, blue-eyed woman, and he did at one point say, now he would like her to come and live in his little cottage on the Arabian peninsula, which is a big mansion, of course. But we eventually worked it out whereby we provided him with another blonde, blue-eyed woman from one of the Scandinavian countries. At that time, there was a large trade in white traffic of women to the Middle East, and we arranged for that for him. He became quite happy with all this and eventually he agreed to the plan that we wanted.

And the House of Saud completely supported it, and it went into place. We are talking to John Perkins. His book is Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. As we come to the conclusion in this last segment of our interview with John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is his book. He was chief economist at an international consulting firm in Massachusetts called Main. He made deals in Indonesia, in Iran, in Saudi Arabia, traveled to Ecuador and to Panama and to many other places, as well. It tells a remarkable story about the relationship between these international consulting firms, the U.

You tried to write this book over several decades. Other empires have been created militarily and everybody in the country knows the armies are going out there and creating empire. But this one has been done so subtly that most Americans have no idea that it is going on. Because when I first started writing it, and the word would get out because I would start talking to people who had been involved with me.

I wanted to have them help me remember certain things. I wanted to interview them and talk to them about it. And so i would receive subtle threats, but more importantly, bribes.