Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is a semi-autobiographical book written by John Perkins, first published in 2004.
The book provides Perkins' account of his career with engineering consulting firm Chas. T. Main in Boston. According to Perkins, his job at the firm was to convince leaders of underdeveloped countries to accept substantial development loans for large construction and engineering projects. Ensuring that these projects were contracted to U.S. companies, such loans provided political influence for the US and access to natural resources for American companies, thus primarily helping rich families and local elites, rather than the poor.
Suggesting a system of corporatocracy and greed, Perkins claims the involvement of the National Security Agency, with whom he had interviewed for a job prior to joining Main. According to the author, this interview effectively constituted an independent screening which led to his subsequent hiring as an 'economic hit man' by Einar Greve, vice president of the firm.
According to Perkins, he began writing Confessions of an Economic Hit Man in the 1980s, but "threats or bribes always convinced to stop."
Content
The book heavily criticizes U.S. foreign policy and the widely-accepted notion that "all economic growth benefits humankind, and that the greater the growth, the more widespread the benefits." Perkins suggests that, in many cases, only a small portion of the population benefits at the expense of the rest, pointing to, as an example, an increase in income inequality, whereby large U.S. corporations exploit cheap labor, and oil companies destroy local environment.Perkins describes what he calls a system of corporatocracy and greed as the driving forces behind establishing the United States as a global empire, in which he took a role as an "economic hit man" to expand its influence.
Perkins' function, according to the book, was to convince the political and financial leadership of developing countries to accept enormous development loans from institutions like the World Bank and USAID. Saddled with debts they could not hope to pay, such countries would then be forced to acquiesce to political pressure from the United States on a variety of issues. Perkins argues that these nations were effectively neutralized politically, with their wealth gaps driven wider and their long-term economies crippled. In this capacity, Perkins recounts his meetings with some prominent individuals, including Graham Greene and Omar Torrijos. Perkins describes the role of an economic hit man as follows:
Denying conspiracy
Perkins repeatedly denies the existence of a "conspiracy:"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 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 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.
— John Perkins, November 4, 2004, Democracy Now!, interview
Reception and criticism
Although the accuracy of the content has been questioned, the book did well in terms of sales, placing on the best-seller lists of both the New York Times and Amazon.Columnist Sebastian Mallaby of The Washington Post reacted sharply to Perkins' book: "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." This charge is brought against Perkins despite the fact that he denounces conspiracy-thinking at numerous places in the book itself. Mallaby, who spent 13 years writing for the London Economist and wrote a critically well-received biography of World Bank chief James Wolfensohn, holds that Perkins' conception of international finance is "largely a dream" and that his "basic contentions are flat wrong." 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 United Nations, he says, shows the number to be 29. In fact, this report can be quoted as saying "The results, as seen in Table 1, are striking, with only 29 countries figuring in the list of the top 100 international entities in terms of revenue." showing how both are wrong.
Other sources, including articles in The New York Times and Boston Magazine, as well as a press release issued by the U.S Department of State, have referred to a lack of documentary or testimonial evidence to corroborate the claim that the NSA was involved in his hiring to Chas T. Main. In addition, the author of the DOS release states that the NSA "is a cryptological organization, not an economic organization" and that its missions do not involve "anything remotely resembling placing economists at private companies in order to increase the debt of foreign countries."
Economic historian Niall Ferguson writes in The Ascent of Money that Perkins's contention that the leaders of Ecuador and Panama were assassinated by U.S. agents for opposing the interests of the owners of their countries' foreign debt "seems a little odd." This would be in light of the fact that, in the 1970s, the amount of money that the US had lent to Ecuador and Panama accounted for less than 0.4% of the total U.S. grants and loans, while in 1990, exports from the US to those countries accounted for approximately 0.4% of total U.S. exports. According to Ferguson, those "do not seem like figures worth killing for." However, Perkins maintains that the motives for such actions, rather than loans, would have been the securing of the Panama Canal as a permanent United States asset, and gaining access to Ecuadorian oil.
Chas. T. Main's former vice president Einar Greve, who first offered Perkins a job at the firm, initially affirmed the overall validity of the book:
Basically his story is true.… What John's book says is, there was a conspiracy to put all these countries on the hook, and that happened. Whether or not it was some sinister plot or not is up to interpretation, but many of these countries are still over the barrel and have never been able to repay the loans.However, on being asked by another reporter about Perkins' account, Greve re-read the book and denied the validity of some of the claims, such as the NSA having any links to Main, or that Perkins was seduced by Claudine Martin.
Later years
Perkins continued with writing four other books on the 'economic hit man' topic, focusing on other aspects:- A Game as Old as Empire: the Secret World of Economic Hit Men and the Web of Global Corruption ;
- The Secret History of the American Empire: The Truth About Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and How to Change the World ;
- Hoodwinked: An Economic Hit Man Reveals Why the World Financial Markets Imploded – and What We Need to Do to Remake Them ; and
- The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.
Documentary film
In 2009, Stelios Kouloglou directed a Greek–U.S. co-produced documentary titled Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, featuring interviews with Perkins filmed between 2007 to 2008. The film was shown at movie festivals around the United States.Numerous interview-style statements by John Perkins also appear in two other documentary films: and Four Horsemen''.