SENTIENT TIMES • August/ September 2007
The World’s First Truly Global Empire
Interview with John Perkins
By Amy Goodman
John Perkins worked deep inside the forces driving corporate globalization. In his first book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, he spoke of his work as a consultant hired to strong-arm leaders into creating policy favorable to the US government and corporations by cheating poor countries out of trillions of dollars by lending them more money than they could possibly repay and then taking over their economies. His new book is The Secret History of the American Empire: Economic Hit Men, Jackals and the Truth about Global Corruption.
Amy Goodman: What do “economic hit men” do?
John Perkins: I think it’s fair to say that since World War II, we economic hit men have managed to create the world’s first truly global empire, and we’ve done it primarily through economics, without the military, unlike other empires in history. We work in many different ways, but perhaps the most common one is that we will identify a third world country that has resources our corporations covet, such as oil, and then arrange a huge loan to that country from the World Bank or one of its sister organizations. The money never actually goes to the country, it goes instead to US corporations who build big infrastructure projects—power grids, industrial parks, harbors, highways—things that benefit a few very rich people but do not reach the poor at all. The poor aren’t connected to the power grids. They don’t have the skills to get jobs in industrial parks. But they and the whole country are left with a huge debt, and it’s a good bet that the country can’t possibly repay it. So, at some point in time, we economic hit men go back to the country and say, “You owe us a lot of money. You can’t pay your debt, so you’ve got to give us a pound of flesh.”
What made you an economic hit man?
When I graduated from business school I was recruited by the National Security Agency, the nation’s largest and perhaps most secretive spy organization.
People sometimes think the CIA is that, but the NSA is many times larger.
Yes, much larger, at least it was in those days. And it’s very, very secretive. We know quite a lot about the CIA, I think, but we know very, very little about the NSA. It claims to only work with encoding and decoding messages, but in fact we now know, as came out recently, that they’re the people who have been listening in on our telephone conversations.
The NSA put me through a series of very extensive tests—lie detector tests, psychological tests—during my last year in college, and I think it’s fair to say that they identified me as a good potential economic hit man. They also identified a number of weaknesses in my character that would make it relatively easy for them to hook me, to bring me in. I call those weaknesses the three big drugs of our culture: money, power and sex. Who amongst us doesn’t have one of them? I had all three at the time.
I was then encouraged by the National Security Agency to join the Peace Corps and I spent three years in Ecuador living with indigenous people in the Amazon and the Andes, people who at that time were beginning to fight the oil companies—in fact, the largest environmental lawsuit in the history of the world has just been brought by these people against ChevronTexaco.
Those first three years was incredibly good training for what I was to do. While I was still in the Peace Corps I was recruited by a private US corporation called Charles T. Main, a very low-profile Boston consulting firm with about 2,000 employees that did a tremendous amount of work of what I came to understand was the work of economic hit men. That’s the role I began to fulfill and eventually I rose to the top of that organization as its chief economist.
How did that tie to the NSA?
That’s what’s very interesting about this whole system, there’s no direct connection. The NSA had interviewed me, identified me and then essentially turned me over to this private corporation. It’s a very subtle and very smart system, whereby it’s the private industry that goes out and does this work. So if we’re caught doing something, if we’re caught bribing or corrupting local officials in some country, it’s blamed on private industry, not on the US government.
And it’s interesting that in the few instances when economic hit men fail, what we call the “jackals,” people who come in to overthrow governments or assassinate their leaders, also come out of private industry. These are not CIA employees. We all have this image of the government agent with license to kill, but these days the government agents, in my experience, don’t do that. It’s done by private consultants that are brought in. And I’ve known a number of these individuals personally, and still do.
In your book, The Secret History of the American Empire, you talk about taking on global power at every level.
something very important is happening today. It’s a small world, where we’re able to immediately know what’s going on in Germany or in the middle of the Amazon or anywhere else. And we’re beginning to finally understand, around the world, that the only way anyone anywhere on this planet is going to be able to have a peaceful, stable and sustainable world is if everyone has that.
Please explain what the Group of Eight is.
The Group of Eight represents the wealthiest countries in the world, and they basically run the world. Although the leader is the United States it’s actually the corporations within these countries that run it. It’s not the governments, because, after all, the governments serve at the pleasure of the corporations. In our own country, we know that the next two final presidential candidates, Republican and Democrat alike, are going to each have to raise something like half a billion dollars. And that’s not going to come from me and you, primarily it’s going to come from the people who own and run our big corporations. So the G8 is a group of countries that represents the biggest multinational corporations in the world and actually serves at their behest.
What we’re seeing now in Europe—and also very strongly in Latin America, and in the Middle East—is a huge undercurrent of resistance, of protest, against this empire. It’s been such a subtle empire that people haven’t been aware of it, because it wasn’t built by the military, it was built by economic hit men. Most Americans have no idea that these incredible lifestyles that we all lead are because we’re part of a very vicious empire that literally enslaves people around the world, misuses people. But we’re beginning to understand this. And the Europeans and the Latin Americans are at the forefront of this understanding.
Tell us about the ChevronTexaco lawsuit.
When I was sent to Ecuador as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1968, Texaco had just gone into Ecuador, and the promise to the Ecuadorian people at that time from Texaco and their own politicians and the World Bank was that oil would pull their country out of poverty. And people believed it. I believed it at the time. The exact opposite has happened—oil has made the country much more impoverished, and while Texaco has made fortunes off extracting this oil they’ve also destroyed vast areas of the Amazon rainforest.
The current lawsuit in the name of 30,000 Ecuadorian people against Texaco (now owned by Chevron) for $6 billion is being brought by a New York lawyer and some Ecuadorian lawyers and is the largest environmental lawsuit in the history of the world. This suit is for dumping over eighteen billion gallons of toxic waste into the Ecuadorian rainforest. That’s thirty times more than the Exxon Valdez. Dozens and dozens of people have died and are continuing to die of cancer and other pollution-related diseases in this area of the Amazon. Vast amounts of oil have come out of this area, and yet it’s the poorest area of one of the poorest countries in the hemisphere.
One of the really significant things about this is that this law firm has not taken this on pro bono, which was a philosophical decision. It isn’t because they want to get rich off this, it’s because they want to encourage other law firms to bring similar suits in Nigeria, Indonesia, Bolivia, Venezuela and many other places. They want to see a business grow out of this, of law firms going in and defending poor people, knowing that they can get a payoff from the big companies who have acted so terribly irresponsibly in the past.
I was recently in Ecuador with Steve Donziger, the American attorney, and one of the very touching things he said is “You know, I’ve seen a lot of companies make mistakes and then try to defend themselves in law courts. That’s one thing. But in this case, Texaco didn’t make mistakes. This was done with intent. They knew what they were doing. To save a few bucks, they killed a lot of people.” And now they’re going to be forced to pay for that, to take responsibility for that, and hopefully open the door to make many companies take responsibility for other wanton destruction that’s occurred.
You became the chief economist at Charles T. Main.
Our official job was to do studies on the economy, to show how if the country accepted the loan it was going to improve its gross national product. We were producing economic reports that would prove to the World Bank that these huge loans would help Panama’s gross national product mushroom and pull the people out of poverty. These reports made sense from a mathematical econometric standpoint and, in fact, it often happened that with these loans, the GNP, the gross national product, did increase. But what also was true was that even if the general economy increased, the poor people with these loans would get poorer. The rich would make all the money, because most of the poor people weren’t even tied into the gross national product. A lot of them were living off subsistence farming. They did not benefit, but were left holding the debt, and because of these huge debts, their country in the long term would not be able to provide them with healthcare, education and other social services.
Talk about the Congo.
The whole story of Africa and the Congo is such a devastating and sad one. And it’s the hidden story, really. We in the United States don’t even talk about Africa. We don’t think about Africa. Congo has something called coltan, which most people have never even heard of, but every cell phone and laptop computer has coltan in it. Several million people in the last few years in the Congo have been killed over coltan, because you and I and all of us in the G8 countries want our computers and our cell phones to be inexpensive. But in order to do that, people in the Congo are being enslaved, the people mining coltan are being killed to provide us with cheap coltan.
And I have to say, if we want to live in a safe world, we must be willing, and, in fact, we must demand that we pay higher prices for things like laptop computers and cell phones and that a good share of that money go back to the people who are mining the coltan. And that’s also true of oil. It’s true of so many resources that we are not paying the true cost of, and there’s millions of people around the world suffering from that. Roughly 50,000 people die every single day from hunger or hunger-related diseases and curable diseases that they don’t get the medicines for simply because they’re part of a system that demands that they put in long hours at very, very low pay so we can have cheaper things in this country. The Congo is an incredibly potent example of that.
Where does Tibet fit into this picture?
Tibet right now is very depressing because the Chinese presence is extremely strong, and we can see how the Tibetan culture has been put down, but in the Amazon the oil companies and our own military are doing the same things. We can wave banners about freeing Tibet, which we should, but how about freeing the countries that are under our thumb, too? Tibet is the same kind of model that we are implementing around the world, and although most Americans are aware that the Chinese are doing it, they’re not aware that the US is doing it on a much greater level than the Chinese.
What made you change?
I grew up with very strong moral principles, came from a pretty conservative Republican family. During the ten years that I was an economic hit man I was pretty young, but it bothered my conscience. And yet, everybody was telling me I was doing the right thing. Presidents of countries, the president of the World Bank, Robert McNamara, patted me on the back. I was asked to lecture at Harvard and many other places about what I was doing. And yet, in my heart, it always tore at my conscience. I’d been a Peace Corps volunteer. I saw. As time went by and I began to understand more, it got to be more difficult for me to continue doing this. One day I was on vacation, sailing in the Virgin Islands, and I anchored my little boat off St. John Island and took the dinghy in and climbed a mountain up to the ruins of an old sugar cane plantation. It was beautiful. The sun was setting. I sat there and felt very peaceful. Suddenly, I realized that this plantation had been built on the bones of thousands of slaves. And then I realized that the whole hemisphere had been built on the bones of millions of slaves. And I got very angry and sad—it struck me that I was continuing that same process and that I was a slaver. I was making the same thing happen in a more subtle way, but it was just as bad in terms of its outcome. At that point, I made the decision I would never do it again. I went back to Boston a couple of days later and quit.
You quit, but writing about it was another matter. Talk about your attempts over time.
After I quit, I tried several times to write the book that became Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, and each time I reached out to other economic hit men I had worked with or jackals to try to get their stories, word got out and I was threatened. I had a young daughter at the time. She’s now twenty-five. And I also was offered some bribes. In fact, I accepted a bribe of about a half a million dollars. It’s called a legal bribe, but it’s a bribe, and it was given to me with the condition that I not write the book. I assuaged my guilt by putting a lot of that money into nonprofits I had formed that are helping Amazonian people fight oil companies. But I didn’t write the story. Then, shortly after 9/11, I came up to New York to Ground Zero, and as I stood there looking down into that terrible pit I realized that I had to write the book, I could no longer defer, that the American people had no understanding of why so many people around the world are angry and frustrated and terrified, and that I had to take responsibility for what happened on 9/11. In fact, we all have to take a certain responsibility, which is not in any way to condone mass murder by anybody ever—I’m not condoning that in any way—but I did realize that the American people needed to understand why there’s so much anger around the world. I had to write the book.
What do you see as the solution right now?
This empire that we’ve created really has an emperor, and it’s not the president of this country. The President serves for a short period of time, but it doesn’t really matter whether we have a Democrat or a Republican in the White House or running Congress—the empire goes on because it’s really run by what I call the corporatocracy, which is a group of men who run our biggest corporations. This isn’t a conspiracy theory. They don’t need to conspire. They all know what serves their best interest. But they really are the equivalent of the emperor, because they do not serve at the wish of the people, they’re not democratically elected, they don’t serve any limited term. They essentially answer to no one, except their own boards, and most corporate CEOs actually run their boards, rather than the other way around. And they are the power behind this.
So, if we want to turn this around, we have to impact them very strongly, which means that we have to change the corporations, which is their power base. Today corporations exist for the primary purpose of making large profits, making a few very rich people a lot richer on a quarterly basis, on a daily basis, on a very short-term basis. There is no reason for that to be.
Corporations have been defined as individuals. Indi-viduals have to be good citizens. Corporations need to be good citizens. Their primary goal must be to take care of their employees, their customers and all the people around the world who provide the resources that go into making this world run, and to take care of the environments and the communities where those people live.
We must get the corporations to redefine themselves, and I think it’s very realistic that we can do so. Every corporate executive out there is smart enough to realize that he’s running a failed system. As an economist, as a rational person, nobody can conclude anything otherwise. If you look at the fact that less than 5% of the world’s population live in the United States and we consume more than 25% of the world’s resources and create over 30% of its major pollution, you can only conclude that we’ve created a very flawed and failed system. It has to change. And corporate executives know that. They’re smart individuals. I believe that they want to see change.
When we have really pushed them to change, we’ve been extremely successful. For example, we got them to clean up rivers that were terribly polluted in the 1970s in this country. We got them to get rid of the aerosol cans that were destroying the ozone layer. We got them to change their policies toward hiring and promoting minorities and women. We’ve gotten them to put seatbelts and airbags in cars, against their initial resistance, and to change tremendously in any specific area where we’ve set out to do that.
We must convince them that their corporations need to be institutions to make this a better world, rather than institutions that serve a few very rich people with the goal of making those people even richer. We need to turn this around. We must.
Reprinted with permission from the June 5, 2007 Democracy Now! report. A national, daily, independent, award-winning news program hosted by journalists Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez, Democracy Now! airs on over 450 stations in North America on Pacifica, NPR, community and college radio stations; on public access, PBS, satellite television (DISH network: Free Speech TV ch. 9415 and Link TV ch. 9410; DIRECTV: Link TV ch. 375); as a podcast, and on the internet. Visit www.democracynow.org for archived transcripts and to find stations in your area which broadcast Democracy Now! Find out how you can help bring Democracy Now! to a radio or television station in your community by emailing outreach@democracynow.org.
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