Corporatocracy”. The Lifestyles of an “Economic Hit Man”

the Economic Hit Man

An Interview with John Perkins

Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign “aid” organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet’s natural resources. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization. I should know; I was an EHM. — John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (2004)

Across several books, John Perkins exposes the lifestyles of the economic hit men. They inhabit a stateless global archipelago of privilege—a collection of private schools, tax havens, and gated residential communities with little or no connection to the outside world. They are people to whom nations are as meaningless as they are to the global corporations and to the international aristocracy they serve.

The system of contemporary capitalist globalization operates for the exclusive benefit of a global plutocracy that has no national boundaries or loyalties. Oligarchy, a word that has been applied exclusively to the modern-day capitalist barons of Russia, is no less real in the triad of the United States, Japan, and Europe.

The operation of this global system and its current financial architecture is as far as it could possibly be from the fairytale version of “free market” liberal democracy glorified in standard economic textbooks and the mainstream media. That is the reality that John Perkins’sConfessions of an Economic Hit Man has driven home for so many readers since it appeared in 2004. I spoke with him in September 2012.

Ravi Bhandari (RB): As a fellow former EHM, pushing for the privatization of land in Nepal through the World Bank’s market-led land reform of the 1990s, I feel that your work has helped to give me, like countless others around the world, a better understanding of the disastrous consequences of our actions on the vast majority of the people and the planet. Since you wrote the famous opening paragraph, quoted above, in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, many people throughout the world have been shocked to learn about the operations of EHMs and how globalization works in the real world. Were you surprised by the impact of the book?

John Perkins (JP): The public interest aroused by Confessions was not by any means a forgone conclusion. I spent a great deal of time working up the courage to try to publish it. By late 2003, the manuscript had been circulated to many publishers—and I had almost given up on ever seeing the book in print. Despite praising it as “riveting,” “eloquently written,” “an important exposé,” and “a story that must be told,” publisher after publisher—twenty-nine, in fact—rejected it. My literary agent and I concluded that it was just too anti-corporatocracy. [A word introduced to most readers inConfessions, “corporatocracy” refers to the powerful group of people who run the world’s biggest corporations, the most powerful governments, and history’s first truly global empire. —Bhandari] The major publishing houses, we concluded, were too intimidated by, or perhaps too beholden to, the corporate elite.

Finally, Berrett-Koehler, a relatively small publishing house, took it on. Almost instantly it hit the bestseller lists. But despite all the success the book had, an important element was still missing. The major U.S. media refused to discuss Confessions or the fact that, because of it, terms such as “EHM” and “corporatocracy” were now appearing on college syllabi. It is interesting that a book entitled Confessions of an Economic Hit Man earned its author an international peace prize. I was recently awarded the Lennon Ono Grant for Peace—mainly because of that book but also recognizing my work on protecting the rainforests and indigenous peoples in Latin America. Fighting the global corporatocracy has led me most recently to Iceland and Ireland, where I have encouraged the voters to refuse to pay back the debt that the big banks claim they owe. READ MORE

...as a wealthy woman