Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
John Perkins Ebury Press, 250pp, £7.99
ISBN 0091909104
I'll bet that, as a New Statesman reader, you have at some stage used the word "empire" to refer to the world dominance of the United States. You may have used it in connection with the war on Iraq, or the US-led project of economic globalisation. It is also quite likely that you have been scoffed at by someone for using the term, been painted as a naive old lefty who doesn't understand the subtleties of politics and power. If so, John Perkins is here to show that you were right all along - and that, if anything, you were probably understating the case.
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, Perkins's painfully honest autobiography, is one of the most remarkable books I have read in a long time. It is also one of the most frightening. From 1971 to 1981, Perkins was employed as an EHM (ie, "economic hit man") whose role is to "cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, pay-offs, extortion, sex and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on terrifying dimensions during this time of globalisation." It sounds more like the cover blurb for a John le Carre thriller than a work of non-fiction - and indeed, Perkins tells us that his publisher initially suggested he fictionalise the book, as no one would believe it otherwise.
His story begins when, as a young graduate, he is approached by an international consulting firm called Main and offered a job as an economist. He soon finds out what the work entails.
There were two primary objectives of my work. First I was to justify huge international loans that would funnel money to Main and other US companies (such as Bechtel, Halliburton, Stone & Webster and Brown & Root) through massive engineering and construction projects. Second, I would work to bankrupt the countries that received those loans . . . so they would be for ever beholden to their creditors, and so they would present easy targets when we [the US] needed favours, including military bases, UN votes or access to oil and other natural resources.
There, in a paragraph, is your recipe for empire, and over the course of a decade, Perkins helped build it.
He started in Indonesia, where his task was to plan an electricity grid for Java. He was instructed to produce wildly inflated economic growth forecasts that would allow international banks and Usaid to justify vast loans to the Indonesians, which their government would be unable to pay back, creating dependency on the US.
He did well, and was sent on to Panama to do the same thing for its "master development plan", under which the World Bank would invest billions in the country's infrastructure, sell the construction rights to US corporations and, as Main hoped, force an anti-American government to climb down over its ambitions to take back control of the Panama Canal.
Then it was on to Saudi Arabia, which provides perhaps the most shocking story of all. There, Perkins was required not simply to produce the usual inflated growth forecasts to justify loans and corporate contracts, but to "find ways that would ensure that a large portion of petrodollars found their way back to the United States". America needed dependable supplies of oil; there was to be no repeat of the Opec-led 1970s oil crisis that nearly bankrupted its economy.
Perkins did his masters proud with a plan that made Saudi Arabia "the cow we can milk until the sun sets on our retirement". The Saudi government agreed to maintain oil supplies and prices that would be acceptable to the US. In return, the Americans offered total political and military support. But the clincher was the desert kingdom's promise to use its petrodollars to purchase US government securities, the interest on which was to be spent "developing" the kingdom along western lines. In other words, "our own US Department of the Treasury would hire us, at Saudi expense, to build infrastructure projects and even entire cities throughout the Arabian peninsula". Genius.
At this point, it is tempting to give in to despair and stop reading, but please don't. Perkins's aim is to expose the empire in order to dismantle it. He got out, he emphasises - and the wider world can get out, too. We can disband the empire, but only if we know how it really functions. There are few better places to find out.
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