Worldview Politics

John Perkins on the US Empire
3 August 2008

John Perkins has written two bestsellers on corporate power, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man and The Secret History of the American Empire, as well as diverse books on shamanism, indigenous peoples, and other topics. He states that for 10 years during the 1970s, he was an 'Economic Hit Man' (or EHM) for major global financiers, under the auspices of the World Bank and kindred organizations, who helped saddle third-world countries with enormous debt, which in turn made those countries subservient to the interests of the United States government, as well as to major corporations like Halliburton, Bechtel and Big Oil. Indeed, he claims that US foreign policy is largely controlled by the 'corporatocracy', which has a firm leash on both major parties through the mechanism of campaign contributions. For decades, the American corporatocracy has been spreading its imperial tentacles all over the world, primarily through raw economic power and bribery, using assassination and military force only as a last resort. His veracity has been criticized by the US State Department and by columnist Sebastian Mallaby of the Washington Post, among others. I am currently reading his books, as he sounds many of the themes of a Noam Chomsky, though from an insider's point of view, which makes his testimony enormously valuable, in my opinion.

First, let us try to get some idea of Perkins' veracity, to make sure we are not dealing with some unscrupulous alarmist out to make a few quick bucks. The State Department has taken the somewhat unusual step of issuing a bulletin accusing him of outright fabrication of facts. In particular, they point to his claim that NSA hired him as a spy, arguing that NSA only deals with signals and cryptology and not with placing agents in foreign countries. Having read the first chapter of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, where Perkins describes how his career got off the ground, I can take the State Department's bulletin with a considerable grain of salt. Perkins merely notes that an influential friend at NSA helped him get a job at that agency, which he immediately traded for one in the Peace Corps, since he had an interest in the natives of the Amazon. His later involvement as an EHM, also facilitated by his NSA connection, was with a private 'consulting' firm headquartered in Boston called Chas T. Main. This is all credible enough, and Perkins never asserts that the NSA itself was involved in economic arm-twisting of third-world nations. All he said is that his high-powered friend at NSA helped him out, and we know that influence-peddling is common in the upper echelons of the government, as in private industry. Perkins does suggest that this NSA official was on the lookout for the right people to turn over to Chas. T. Main, and the rigorous NSA testing, including polygraphs, was helpful towards this end. Indeed, Perkins explicitly maintains that intelligence officials are generally too clever to get their agencies directly involved in illegal activities, preferring instead the deniability and lack of legal restrictions associated with private firms. Think Blackwater. Besides, who really knows the full extent of what the NSA does? It is an even bigger black hole than the CIA. The State Department also points out that the US government has taken some 'recent initiative to cancel the debt of many heavily indebted poor countries', but this hardly negates Perkins' overall thesis. The State Department's attempt to discredit Perkins is really quite 'bush league' (pun intended).

The article by Mallaby has even less substance. He starts out with unabashed ad hominem: 'This man is a frothing conspiracy theorist, a vainglorious peddler of nonsense.' He then tries to smear him by pointing to Perkins' New Age interests, as though a spiritual inclination necessarily renders one a liar or unreliable. Even Richard Dawkins makes no such claim! And what about all the conservative Christians who believe that Jesus rose from the dead in the flesh? Are they loonies? Mallaby also argues that third-world countries have sometimes benefited from capitalist investment, which is no argument against Perkins' accusation. Hitler made the trains run on time, but that hardly exonerates his many crimes. The question is one of detail and proportion. Also, the claim that the wages of multinational corporations are sometimes higher than the prevailing average is no guarantee that the workers are not being exploited. Again, the devil is in the details and in the numbers. And the fact that there may be some degree of competition between giant corporations proves nothing. Lions sometimes fight over a carcass. Mallaby's article is worthless, and my Google search has not yet found an establishment pundit making a better case against Perkins. Are these corporate-media hack reporters worth what we pay them? They can't even do competent hatchet jobs anymore.

Then there is a veracity memo disseminated by Perkins' publisher, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. We can rest assured that Chas. T. Main, Inc. did exist during the time period of the book, before being bought out, that it was large and powerful in its day, and that Perkins did work there, doing pretty much what he said he did. His former boss even acknowledged in the Tucson Citizen that 'basically his story is true', though later he got cold feet and backpedaled a bit. I'll believe his first candid admission. The publisher's memo also provides a long list of serious books dealing with Perkins' theme of corporate exploitation, and alludes to hundreds of articles, which no doubt exist.

Besides, what is so controversial about Perkins' accusation? We all know that bankers are in the business to make lots of money and can be quite ruthless. How many thousands of struggling homeowners have been evicted because they missed a mortgage payment or two? It happens all the time, and there is rarely any mercy. Why should it happen any the less with third-world people, who don't even have the minimal legal protections of American citizens? With the current banking crisis, we are learning how greedy, reckless bankers bamboozled ordinary, uninformed citizens by the thousands into adjustable-rate mortgages, which start out being easy but become a nightmare when rates rise and housing bubbles burst. Such schemes are standard fare for our brand of capitalism, and the poor, uneducated suckers are always the victims, as P.T. Barnum well knew. The main point of a book like Confessions is not to remind us of banalities regarding human nature but to provide juicy details from the point of view of an insider, as well as to connect the dots to broader US policy, which, he argues, is firmly in the hands of the very same financial moguls who exploit the poor nations.

The preferred tactic of the financiers is to bribe the rulers of other countries. Contrary to America's militaristic image, Perkins emphasizes that we are the first empire assembled primarily through economic power, with force used only as a last resort. Like politicians everywhere, the corrupt rulers of many third-world countries will spend money recklessly, knowing it is not they who will pay the bills. When the debt becomes unmanageable, then the financiers, with the full cooperation of the US government, will demand 'their pound of flesh', according to Perkins. This could include American access to cheap raw materials, or to cheap labor, or acquiescence in US military bases. It is the poor, teeming masses who pay. Their condition often deteriorates from a half-decent subsistence living off the land to the squalor of slums and sweatshops. The elites, meanwhile, wallow in luxury and extravagance.

When bribery does not work, the next step is to send in the 'jackals', who are clandestine agents charged with creating instability or even assassinating recalcitrant leaders on occasion, e.g. those who are determined that the wealth of their nation should benefit its people. Such a charge is serious and must be backed by evidence. We know for a fact that the CIA has been involved in coups on a number of occasions, e.g. in Iran in 1953, or in various Latin American countries, such as Chile in 1973. Perkins claims that he personally knew some of the jackals, or that circumstances surrounding various untimely deaths were simply too suspicious to suppose they were accidents. In some cases, he maintains, there was actual evidence. For instance, he mentions two plane crashes in Central America in 1981, which killed General Omar Torrijos of Panama and Jaime Roldos of Ecuador, both of whom were resisting US demands. Regarding Torrijos, he says that there was 'no question' that a bomb had been planted in a tape recorder, that he 'knew the people who did the investigation afterwards', and 'this is pretty well-documented in many places'. Of course, it is unlikely that an American is ever directly involved in such an assassination. Rather, a wink and a nod is given to a cooperative national at a place like the School of the Americas, perhaps a disgruntled or ambitious junior officer. Perkins often maintains the he was simply aware of what many people 'in the business knew', via the grapevine. This is credible enough and cannot be dismissed out of hand. Perkins may be just one witness, but trials are based on the testimonies of various witnesses, who hopefully corroborate each other. Defendants have been executed in our courts based on the testimony of a single plea-bargaining witness of dubious integrity!

Like many readers, I was skeptical of his account of a beautiful woman named Claudine Martin, who was assigned by Chas. T. Main to seduce him in all senses of the word. This does sound rather too much like James Bond! However, I am reminded of how the Israelis sent a beautiful woman to trap Mordechai Vanunu after he revealed nuclear secrets. I would have expected the no-nonsense Israelis to simply grab him off the street, but apparently seduction was involved. Anyhow, in certain business circles, call girls are quite common, so Perkins' story is not all that incredible. Perkins also states that Chas. T. Main forced him to cook the books, and I have no trouble believing that, what with the Enron and Arthur Andersen scandals. Just as our administration cooks its 'intelligence'. Why, it's sometimes the same people in both cases! (It's called the 'revolving door'.)

UPDATE (17 August 08): I've read most of Perkins' book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, and I must say that I find it both riveting and credible. He evidently did business with some pretty important people, such as General Omar Torrijos of Panama and Jaime Roldos of Ecuador, not to mention having played an important role in the epic but little-known US-Saudi 'money laundering' deal that followed the OPEC crisis, as well as many other important events. He even provides a photocopy of his resume with MAIN as 'hard' evidence, and he refers to articles he has written for important newspapers. I think we can believe his story. He has written other books, and in the bibliography to his Secret History of the American Empire, one can explore the growing literature on the US Empire, with an emphasis on the economic dimension, which is less obvious but at least as important as the military dimension. For example, I discovered books by David C. Korten, who worked for USAID and received an impressive Ph.D. in business from Stanford, and who echoes many of Chomsky's themes of Western imperialism and exploitation in a more systematic and scholarly way. (I may be unfair to Chomsky here. Most of what I have read by him was in the form of informal discussions. He may have some solid books out there that I am not familiar with.)

Influence of Money: Carlyle Group & NED

POSTED (20 August 08): Paul Craig Roberts just wrote another article blasting the Bush foreign policy. In it, he mentions his Ph.D. dissertation chairman, Warren Nutter, from back in Roberts' 'Nixon days'. Yes, Roberts is a former Nixon and Reagan man, who thinks the Republicans have gone off the deep end due to neocon influence. He does have a point that Nixon opened the door to China, while Reagan engaged in sincere diplomacy with the Soviets, even while haranguing them. Even more pointedly, as related by another Nixon and Reagan man, Pat Buchanan, Reagan shrank from war with the Ruskies on a number of occasions, contrary to his public image of toughness, and contrary to the actual behavior of the current radical administration, in Georgia and elsewhere. Anyhow, Roberts asked Nutter, who was Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, how the US government got foreign governments to do what the US wanted. 'Money', replied Nutter. 'You mean foreign aid?' asked Roberts. 'No', replied Nutter, 'we just buy the leaders with money.' This includes not only third-world types like Hosni Mubarak of Egypt but also our European allies, such as England, France, Germany, and Italy. Roberts gives the example of Tony Blair. Blair's own head of British intelligence told him the WMD evidence was shaky, but Blair supported the Iraq war anyway. Coincidentally, or not so coincidentally, he received, in effect, a multi-million dollar payoff once out of office, at the Carlyle Group, a elite club — er, investment firm — for important conservatives of a hawkish persuasion, often ex-politicians of major stature, who enjoy trading influence for a killing in the military-industrial complex. Another example is the 'American-educated thug, Saakashkvili the War Criminal', the current president of Georgia, who 'was installed by the US taxpayer funded National Endowment for Democracy, a neocon operation whose purpose is to ring Russia with US military bases, so that America can exert hegemony over Russia'.

UPDATE (27 August 08): Here's a great new article on this topic, by a noted though anonymous defesne analyst.

Iraq Evicts the United States

POSTED (25 August 08): If recent developments hold true, then the Iraqi government of Nouri al-Maliki has successfully negotiated for the US to withdraw all its troops by 2011. At first glance, this suggests that the US may back down from meddling with a country, provided all of its 'leaders' shows sufficient spine and integrity. In the case of Vietnam, by comparison, we were able to collaborate with various corrupt and unpopular cliques, and designate them as 'legitimate' governments compared to the Communists, and this enabled us to maintain our foothold for many bloody years. In Iraq, however, it seems that we could not find an equivalent corruptible gang to serve as a puppet government. Much to our surprise, Maliki proved too much of a nationalist. I suspect Islamic pride had something to do with it. Whatever the dark side of Islam, it at least seems to instill self-respect and an implacable rejection of foreign occupiers. Thus, it may be correct to state that the US has not been an outright conquering empire like Rome. Rather, we first try to buy influence in a prospective satellite, and only send in the military when we have some quislings we can designate as the 'legitimate' government. Barring such quislings, we may have no choice but to back off. Now, I will need to check this off-the-cuff impression against the testimony of history, but I record it here anyway as a plausible hypothesis. For example, consider the CIA overthrow of Mossadeq in 1953. Who was our quisling? Why, the Shah, of course. Indonesia? Suharto. Saudi Arabia? The Saudi royal family. And so on and so on. I see a pattern emerging. Our corrupt plutocrats seek corrupt plutocrats in other countries to designate as 'legitimate', to serve as partners in crime and split the resources of the country, with precious little trickling down to the people. Maliki refused to play such a role. Good for him, or for the Iraqi people, who forced him to show some spine and integrity. Note also that Iraq has explicitly affirmed that its soil will not be used to stage a US attack against Iran. Islamic solidarity delivers again! Or maybe just Shiite solidarity. Whatever. It seems to be working.

Online Articles

John Perkins: Personal website