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Home » An Economic Hit Man Confesses and Calls to Action: John Perkins (Transcript)

An Economic Hit Man Confesses and Calls to Action: John Perkins (Transcript)

Read the full transcript of economist John Perkins’ talk titled “An Economic Hit Man Confesses and Calls to Action” at TEDxTraverseCity 2016 conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

The Confession of an Economic Hit Man

Thank you. I’ve stood in front of the Shah of Iran, the presidents of Indonesia, Ecuador, Panama, members of the Royal House of Saudi Arabia, and I’ve said something like: “In this hand I have millions of dollars for you and your friends if you play our game. In this hand I have a gun, in case you decide not to.” Now, my words were more diplomatic than that, but that was the message. I was an economic hit man.

We economic hit men have created a new global economy, really, a form of capitalism that I call “predatory capitalism.” It isn’t working, we all know this. The oceans are rising, the glaciers are melting. Less than 5% of us live here in the United States, and we consume almost 30% of the world’s resources while half the world is on the verge of starvation, or actually starving. That’s not a model. China can’t do it. India can’t do it. They’re trying, but they can’t do it. We have to change. We have to have a re-evolution. We must change this system.

Becoming an Economic Hit Man

I’ll get into that in a minute, but first: how did I become an economic hit man? While I was still in business school, I was interviewed by the National Security Agency, the NSA. They put me through a series of extensive psychological tests, including on a lie detector. It’s a long story, but to make a long story short, I ended up going in the Peace Corps and being sent deep into the Amazon rain forest.

Now, I’d grown up the son of a teacher in a boys prep school for very wealthy boys in rural New Hampshire. I grew up with lots of snow and cold, kind of like here in the winter, you know. And suddenly I find myself living in a thatched-roof hut in the steamy jungle. Do you think I adjusted easily to that?

After the Peace Corps, I then took a job – I was given a job – as an economist at an international consulting firm in Boston with close ties to the NSA and the CIA. I was trained by a woman named Claudine Martin, whose job was to train me to be an economic hit man. Now, Claudine had seen my NSA files. She knew that I wanted three things, that I thought all my prep school buddies, the rich kids, had had: money, power and sex. Claudine was really good at her job and she promised me the first two, money and power, and she taught me quite a bit about the third.

The Job of an Economic Hit Man

And then she told me what my job would entail. I would go to countries with resources our corporations covet, like oil, and arrange a huge loan to those countries from the World Bank or its sister organizations. But the money wouldn’t actually go to the country, it would go to our corporations: Bechtel, Halliburton, Brown & Root – familiar names – to build big infrastructure projects in those countries and incidentally make huge profits in the process.

They built power plants and industrial parks, things that would benefit a few wealthy families in the country, the ones that own the industries. But the majority of the people would suffer, they would be left holding a huge debt they couldn’t repay. So we go back and say: “Since you can’t pay your debt, sell your resource, oil or whatever, really cheap to our corporations, privatize, sell your utilities, your schools, your jails, everything like that to our corporations.”

And Claudine also told me that if the leaders of these countries refused my offer, people she called “jackals” would be right behind me. I didn’t actually carry a gun, but the jackals did.

First Assignment: Indonesia

My first assignment was in Indonesia, a country that had just ended a terrible civil war where more than a million people had been killed. It had a terrifying reputation. And I have to admit that, when I arrived in Jakarta, knowing I’d be there for about 3 years, my knees were shaking pretty bad, my stomach was filled with fluttering butterflies. I had no idea what I was supposed to do. I was a very young man. I just knew that I was expected to produce a report that would convince the Indonesian government to build an extremely expensive electrical system, hiring our corporations to do it.

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Claudine had made it sound simple, even kind of James Bond-ishly romantic. But now I’m struck by reality, and I felt naive, ill-prepared, vulnerable. Fortunately for me, the winner of the Civil War, President Suharto, who was actually a dictator, wanted the projects that I was offering, and he also wanted CIA and Pentagon protection. And so, every time I stumbled, and I stumbled often, somebody was there to pick me up.

A government official would appear with an incredible report that would indicate, beyond any doubt, that electricity was all the country needed to take off the huge growth. And a Harvard-trained mathematician showed up with a mathematical formula that proved that if they just built this electrical system everything would be fine. In the end I produced a report that forecasted the need for electricity at an unheard-of annual rate of 19%. Indonesia got its loan, our corporations made lots of money, and I was promoted, from economist to chief economist. It was quite a lesson.

Operation Condor and Political Assassinations

At that time the Cold War was really, really revving up, and Washington believed that Cuba was about to spread communism throughout the hemisphere. The CIA developed a program called Operation Condor to support right-wing dictatorships in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, throughout the continent. Jaime Roldós, president of Ecuador, democratically elected, and Omar Torrijos, head of state of Panama, strongly opposed Operation Condor.