According to John Perkins, he began writing Confessions of an Economic Hit
Man in the 1980s, but "threats or bribes always convinced [him] to
stop."
According to his book, Perkins' function was to convince the
political and financial leadership of underdeveloped countries to accept
enormous development loans from institutions like the World Bank and
USAID. Saddled with debts they could not hope to pay, those countries
were forced to acquiesce to political pressure from the United States on
a variety of issues. Perkins argues in his book that developing nations
were effectively neutralized politically, had their wealth gaps driven
wider and economies crippled in the long run. In this capacity Perkins
recounts his meetings with some prominent individuals, including Graham
Greene and Omar Torrijos. Perkins describes the role of an EHM as
follows:
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 included
fraudulent financial 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.
The
epilogue to the 2006 edition provides a rebuttal to the current move by
the G8 nations to forgive Third World debt. Perkins charges that the
proposed conditions for this debt forgiveness require countries to
privatise their health, education, electric, water and other public
services. Those countries would also have to discontinue subsidies and
trade restrictions that support local business, but accept the continued
subsidization of certain G8 businesses by the US and other G8
countries, and the erection of trade barriers on imports that threaten
G8 industries.
In the book, Perkins repeatedly denies the existence
of a "conspiracy." Instead, Perkins carefully discusses the role of
corporatocracy.[2] -- November 4, 2004 interview
I was initially
recruited while I was in business school back in the late sixties by the
National Security Agency, the nation's largest and least understood spy
organization; but ultimately I worked for private corporations. The
first real economic hit man was back in the early 1950s, Kermit
Roosevelt, Jr., the grandson of Teddy, who overthrew the government of
Iran, a democratically elected government, Mossadegh's government who
was Time's magazine 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
replaced 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 C.I.A. 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 C.I.A. and the N.S.A.
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.
Columnist Sebastian Mallaby of The Washington
Post reacted sharply to Perkins' book:[3] "This man is a frothing
conspiracy theorist, a vainglorious peddler of nonsense, and yet his
book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, is a runaway bestseller."
Mallaby, who spent 13 years writing for the London Economist and wrote a
critically well-received biography of World Bank chief James
Wolfensohn,[4] holds that Perkins' conception of international finance
is "largely a dream" and that his "basic contentions are flat wrong".[3]
For instance he points out that Indonesia reduced its infant mortality
and illiteracy rates by two-thirds after economists persuaded its
leaders to borrow money in 1970. He also disputes Perkins' claim that 51
of the top 100 world economies belong to companies. A value-added
comparison done by the UN, he says, shows the number to be 29. (The 51
of 100 data comes from an Institute for Policy Studies Dec 2000 Report
on the Top 200 corporations; using 2010 data from the CIA's World
Factbook and Fortune Global 500[5][6] the current ratio is 114
corporations in the top 200 global economies.)
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