| Book
buyers in the US have obviously been lapping up the
hard-back authored by John Perkins titled Confessions
of an Economic Hit Man. The book, which was published
in November last year has found, to the surprise and
dismay of some, a place in the New York Times non-fiction
best-seller list in 7 out of 10 weeks between weeks-ending
January 8 and March 12.
Perkins, who came from a middle class background (his
father was a school teacher), joined in 1971 the now-defunct
but once-leading consultancy, Chas. T. Main (MAIN),
which undertook studies to determine whether agencies
like the World Bank should lend billions of dollars
to developing countries to build hydroelectric dams
and other kinds of infrastructure. Perkins quickly rose
to be chief economist and head of a division, and stayed
with MAIN till 1980. He later set up his own small,
environmentally friendly power company, Independent
Power Systems Inc. (IPS), while still maintaining a
foothold in the consulting business. He subsequently
sold IPS for a tidy sum and chose to enter the non-profit
world, and was involved ferrying people to the Amazon
forest to learn from the nature-friendly and non-hedonistic
lifestyles of the Schuar tribe. In the course of all
that he turned author and writer, and finally, it hardly
bears stating, he wrote this book.
While this is indeed an unusual life, it does not in
itself provide the material for a bestseller. Nor can
detailing such a life be termed a confession. There
are however a number of other elements of that life—''coincidences''
Perkins terms them—that trigger interest. To start with,
right from the beginning Perkins makes clear that he
was no ordinary consultant with an undergraduate qualification
in business. Rather, he was officially an Economic Hit
Man or EHM. EHMs were specially recruited and trained
and placed in private firms and consultancies to utilize
''international financial organizations to foment conditions
that make other nations subservient to the corporatocracy''
running the biggest corporations, the governments and
the banks in the developed countries, especially the
US. They enticed developing countries into incurring
large debts, from multilateral and bilateral bodies
like the World Bank and the USAID, by convincing them
that this would help finance crucial investments in
infrastructure. This was done by generating inflated
forecasts of the growth that would result from such
investments, which provided the justification for funding
by those agencies. Once these countries got indebted
to an extent where they were unable to meet their debt
service commitments, their governments became pawns
in the hands of the governments of the developed countries,
especially the US, whose quest for empire is insatiable
in the author’s view. In the process, the EHMs were
able to ensure that the large sums provided as debt
to the developing countries were recycled into the coffers
of the giant corporations in the US and to the wallets
of the elites in developing countries, fattening the
profits and incomes of those who were already well endowed.
The net result is poverty and misery for much of the
population in the developing countries faced with the
loss of their livelihoods and a collapse of the environment
that supports them.
At one level, this is ground that has been covered many
times before. The idea that aid, much of which is debt,
is tied to contracts for consultants and corporations
from aid-giving countries and aid-spending has little
by way of linkage effects in the home country has been
argued for long. That the indebtedness such aid dependence
generates undermines sovereignty and affects the foreign
policy and the international relationships of the countries
concerned has been documented many times. And the fact
that the involvement of the World Bank and the IMF as
economic policemen in poor and not-so-poor developing
countries makes even dependence on non-aid flows a means
of entrapping them in an unequal and damaging global
compact is now well established even if ignored in mainstream
circles.
What makes Perkins’ experience interesting is the argument
that he was ''planted'' in MAIN by the National Security
Agency of the United States government. Based on a word
from his first wife Ann’s Uncle Frank, he was quite
early a recruitment target of the National Security
Agency. Despite qualifying for the job, Perkins chooses
to join the Peace Corps instead and spend two years
of his life in Ecuador. It is there that he was met
by Einar Greve of MAIN (who claimed to have acted as
an NSA liaison in the past) who hires him as an economist.
Moreover, life begins at MAIN with a programme in which
he is trained by the ''beautiful and intelligent'' Claudine
Martin, who informs him that he is being hired as an
EHM and that: ''Once you’re in, you’re in for life.''
Thus, according to Perkins, in the neocolonialism of
the 1970s, consultants traveling the world and persuading
developing country leaders to borrow and ''convincing''
developed country governments and agencies to lend were
purposively chosen and conscious of their mission—to
advance the interests of the corporatocracy and extend
the empire of the US. In return they were rewarded with
lavish lifestyles and hefty compensation packages, which
made them want to justify their actions and protect
their world.
In an interview by Amy Goodman of "Democracy Now",
Perkins had stated on November 9 last year: ''The first
real economic hit man was back in the early 1950s, Kermit
Roosevelt, the grandson of Teddy, who overthrew the
government of Iran, a democratically elected government,
Mossadegh’s government who was Time magazine's person
of the year; and he was so successful at doing this
without any bloodshed – well, there was a little bloodshed,
but no military intervention, just spending millions
of dollars and replacing Mossadegh with the Shah of
Iran. At that point, we understood that this idea of
economic hit man was an extremely good one. We didn't
have to worry about the threat of war with Russia when
we did it this way. The problem with that was that Roosevelt
was a CIA agent. He was a government employee. Had he
been caught, we would have been in a lot of trouble.
It would have been very embarrassing. So, at that point,
the decision was made to use organizations like the
CIA and the NSA to recruit potential economic hit men
like me and then send us to work for private consulting
companies, engineering firms, construction companies,
so that if we were caught, there would be no connection
with the government.''
Overtime, Perkins argues however, the need for the self-conscious
EHM disappears. ''Managers'' trained in the best schools
imbibe the philosophy of empire and stick by it since
it suits them personally, because of the pay-offs involved.
What was a conspiracy then, becomes the normal state
of things now.
The second reason why the book could be attracting the
attention of US readers is that it argues that the EHM
or his more socialized modern-day counterpart is the
most benign of the different agents in the chain aiming
to extend empire. If these agents fail to entangle developing
country governments into deals which result in indebtedness
or other forms of dependence that ensure support for
the global policies of the US and the profit-hunger
of developed country corporations, then the jackals
are sent in. These are assassins aiming to get rid of
political leaders and governments that cannot be seduced
into compliance with these requirements. Instances of
such leaders and governments abound. Examples referred
to by Perkins include Mossadegh in Iran, Jocobo Arbenz
in Guatemala, Allende in Chile and two other leaders
and their governments with whom Perkins personally worked:
Omar Torrijos, president of Panama, and Jaime Roldos,
president of Ecuador. Both had died in fiery air crashes
that were not accidental.
Both leaders paid because they challenged the corporatocracy.
In 1968 Omar Torrijos emerged as the head of state in
a coup-racked Panama. In Perkins’s view he stood up
to Washington while being outside the realm of Communist
ideology. He objected to the School of the Americas,
to the US Southern Command’s tropical warfare training
centre and to the lack of Panamanian control over the
Canal Zone. In 1977, he successfully negotiated treaties
with President Carter of the US that transferred the
Canal Zone and the Canal itself to Panamanian control.
Similarly, Jaime Roldos, who was democratically elected
President in Ecuador in 1979 after a long line of dictators,
presented a new hydrocarbon law to the Ecuadorian congress
that would reduce the power of the oil companies, Texaco
in particular. His hydrocarbon policy was accompanied
by an effort to curb the activities of US front organizations
like the Summer Institute of Linguistics, which was
an organization ostensibly committed to studying, recording
and translating indigenous languages that had an uncanny
affinity to target tribes located in areas with a high
probability of being home to oil resources.
In November 1980, Carter lost the US Presidential election
to Reagan. In Perkins’s view, Reagan ''was most definitely
a global empire builder, a servant of the corporatocracy.''
It was fitting ''that he was a Hollywood actor, a man
who followed orders passed down from the koguls, who
knew how to take direction. That would be his signature.
He would cater to the men who shuttled back and forth
from corporate CEO offices to bank boards and into halls
of government. He would serve the men who appeared to
serve him but who in fact ran government—men like Vice
President George H. W. Bush, Secretary of State George
Schultz, Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger, Richard
Cheney, Richard Helms and Robert McNamara. He would
advocate what those men wanted: an America that controlled
the world and all its resources, a world that answered
to the commands of America.'' Coincidentally, on May
24 1981, Jaime Roldos died in a helicopter crash Two
months after Roldos’s death, Omar Torrijos died in a
plane crash on July 31, 1981.
These are of course instances of the ''failures'' of
the EHMs that necessitated the jackals. Perkins also
deals with instances of success that he was involved
in. The most spectacular of this was the Saudi Arabian
Money-Laundering Affair (SAMA) in which ''Saudi money
was used to hire American firms to build up Saudi Arabia.''
And since no US funding involved, Congress had no authority
in the matter. He details how this process muddied the
West Asian scenario for the future, till this day.
The third feature of the Perkins book that appeals is
its view that the answer to the problem lies in the
US itself, in the hands of the individual American.
Perkins was at the centre of American power. He repeatedly
felt the need to opt out and tell all, but was bullied
or bribed into silence. But he finally confesses, and
hopefully exonerates himself, because he believes in
creating a future for his daughter (which he partially
destroyed) and because he feels that that conspiracy
is one of the silence of all. In doing so he was appealing
to the heart of the ordinary American.
Confessions of this kind answer the American unease,
which comes from the post-September 11, 2001 revelation
that there is a part of the world that deeply distrusts
America. Perkins’s book, which uses his life as the
principle to organize developments as distant as the
fall of Mossadegh, the massacre of the Communists in
Indonesia, the death of Torrijos and Roldos and the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, provides an explanation.
It does so by blaming the situation on the corporatocracy
which has defiled the principles on which American society
is based.
But when making his confession, Perkins distances himself
from conventional radicalism. Even if his life reflects
a deep conspiracy, the real world he argues is not one
of conspiracy. ''The empire depends on the efficacy
of big banks, corporations and governments—the corporatocracy—but
it is not a conspiracy. This corporatocracy is ourselves—we
make it happen—which, of course, is why most of us find
it difficult to stand up and oppose it.'' It is only
when Americans stop needing and believing in the corporatocracy
can matters change. The message is clear. It tells Americans
they must change themselves to change the world. It
is the fact that Perkins’s confession does not demand
that the reader challenge the system that generates
the corporatocracy but makes a case for individual reform
as the basis for social reform that possibly attracts
those who are thronging the bookshops to buy the Perkins
book.
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