Book Review
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
By John Perkins
Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco
250 pp
Review by Fouad Khatib
In
1960, the income of 20 percent or world’s
population living in the wealthiest countries was
30 times that of the 20 percent living in the poorest
countries. After three and a half decades of ‘economic
development’ of poor countries engineered
by World Bank, IMF, USAID etc, the ratio stood at
74 to 1 in 1995. All the while, these various agencies,
banks and corporations have maintained that the
system of “aid” giving has been working
and that countries have made progress. This dichotomy
between the reality of the poor countries and the
perceived progress attributed to aid clearly begs
an explanation.
John Perkins has attempted to explain this dichotomy.
He argues that contrary to general perception, the
main purpose of the “aid” has never
been to uplift poverty stricken countries, but rather
to ease them into huge debts. Various “development”
schemes are offered to them to exploit their resources
such as oil, minerals, and metals. Once deep into
the debt trap, these countries keep transferring
their wealth to lenders in wealthier countries via
interest payments.
Why would so many countries allow themselves to
be sucked into this modern slavery? Who are the
beneficiaries? The answers to these questions form
the crux of Perkins’ book. He has coined the
term “corporatocracy” to describe the
interests of wealthy families and financial institutions
and their strong connections with the US government
and the media. Typically, a group of “economic
hit men” would descend on a country to gauge
the potential for development to “help”
the country. Estimation of the potential and the
need would be grossly exaggerated to justify huge
turnkey projects. Then money would be lent for the
projects, the beginning of the debt trap. Later,
more development projects would be offered, ostensibly
to propel them out of debt.
If the leadership of a country refuses to heed the
“advice” of the economic hit men, the
“jackals” – hit men of a different
sort - will follow. The death of Jaime Roldos, the
president of Ecuador in a helicopter crash in 1981
is regarded in Latin America as the work of the
“jackals”. And if the “jackals”
fail, military intervention becomes necessary. Perkins
contends that the first Gulf War in 1991 and the
subsequent strangulation of Iraq were necessitated
by the failure of the economic hit men as well as
the jackals. The war was the eventual result of
Saddam Hussein’s refusal to accept the Saudi
model for development, which facilitated recycling
of petrodollars to major US corporations such as
Bechtel through enormous development projects that
transformed the Saudi landscape.
This general formula of persuading countries to
relinquish real control of their resources seems
to have worked fairly well for half a century. According
to Perkins, the genesis of this method was the work
of CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of Teddy
Roosevelt, who succeeded through payoffs, bribes
and threats in overthrowing the popularly elected
Mossadegh in 1953 when Iran tried to wrest control
of its oil resources from British oil interests.
Perkins’ claim to insight into the workings
of economic hit men is based on his personal experience
of three and a half decades. He was an insider,
an economic hit man himself who was covertly recruited
and trained by the ultra-secretive National Security
Agency and placed in a Boston-based consulting company
as an “economist”. His work took him
all over the world from Indonesia, to Middle East
to Central and South America. He was never quite
at ease with his success erected upon the misery
of millions. Over the years, he tried to commit
his conscience to paper but was deterred by circumstances.
After September 11, 2001, he finally decided to
write this book.
“Confessions” principally chronicles
the experiences of the author rather than describing
the exploitative “corporatocracy”. It
is not a tell-all book, but rather the result of
pangs of conscience. Perkins sounds neither like
a conspiracy theorist, nor like an idealist. He
seems genuinely concerned about the post 9/11 world
his daughter has inherited. He reasons that the
“corporatocracy” is self-destructive,
and identifies its vulnerabilities, among them the
impossibility of multiple simultaneous military
interventions in a growingly defiant world, and
the collapse that will follow if just one commodity,
oil, is no longer traded in US dollars.
Perhaps seeking atonement, Perkins offers advice
on responsible living and comments at length on
exploitation. This account of his experiences will
persuade readers to see recent and contemporary
news stories from an entirely different perspective,
stories such as rebuilding of Iraq and the sharp
language at the Mar del Plata summit of leaders
of the countries in the Americas. Perkins’
account of the intrigues of the “corporatocracy”
in Latin America is thought provoking. This reviewer
found the accounts of exploitation of Indians in
the Andes particularly saddening.
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