Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
Review by Cate Montana
By John Perkins |
I first interviewed John Perkins in 1999. As the NW bureau chief and national correspondent for the Native American publication Indian Country Today, I was fascinated by his story of near-death in the jungles of Ecuador , his healing rescue by a shaman from the remote Shuar tribe near the Amazon River and the subsequent months he spent studying the tribe's ancient medicine ways.
During that interview he mentioned that he worked for the World Bank as an economist helping third world countries all across the globe develop their economies. He talked about how mystified he was when messengers from the indigenous peoples of these nations would appear - ghosts at his hotel doorstep, beckoning him into a different world. Indo-China or Pakistan, Peru or Malaysia, he would be invited by the shamans to set aside his briefcase and board room agendas to join them for weeks on end in their remote encampments learning healing, herbal preparations and how to dream a different dream than the Western ideal of money, prestige and power. He laughed and said these approaches were always surreal, like a scene out of the movie The Emerald Forest. |
What he didn't tell me – what he never told anyone until the 2003 publication of his book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man – was that his “help” included the deliberate infiltration and sabotage of undeveloped nations' economies by corporate America for political power and almost unlimited profit margins.
The formula was a simple one: 1) enter an undeveloped nation as a respected American economic advisor; 2) inflate the potential returns from the development of infrastructure in reports to the local government; 3) convince the government leaders of the wisdom of borrowing the needed development money from the World Bank and USAID; 4) recommend the American construction and development corporations to do the work. When the work was done (to the vast economic profit of the development companies) and returns were less than expected, the loans could not be paid off. The government would then be forced to sell its nation's national resources – timber rights, oil rights, water rights, mineral rights – to the very same US corporations for the money to service their national debt.
“Because of my fellow EHMs (economic hit men) and me, Ecuador is in far worse shape today than she was before we introduced her to the miracles of modern economics, banking and engineering,” writes Perkins. “Since 1970 … the official poverty level grew from 50 to 70 percent, under- or unemployment increased from 15 to 70 percent, and public debt increased from $240 million to $16 billion. Meanwhile, the share of national resources allocated to the poorest segments of the population declined from 20 to 6 percent.”
Detailed and readable, passionate and chilling, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man gives readers the chance to make sense of the political policies and corporate machinations of the US from Panama to Iraq over the last 30 years. He outlines the deliberate spread of global corporatization as the first world government and unflinchingly describes the results of this movement. He also manages to confess without a shred of self-pity – no whining or list of excuses here. As a result, he succeeds in not only exposing the corrupted side of democracy/corporatocracy, but he demonstrates the process by which a decent, well-meaning, well educated Westerner – like any one of us – can be seduced by corporate propaganda into dreaming a dream of world destruction.
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, 2004, John Perkins; Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. ISBN 1-57675-301-8 |
Pavel's Movie Pick
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