You're the one wrho predicts the future. Your forecasts de-termine the magnitude of the systems they design — and the size of the loans. You see, you're the key. Somewhere in my heart, I sus-pected I was not. But the frustrations of my past haunted me.
In the end, I convinced myself that by learning more, by experiencing it, I could better ex-pose it later—the old "working from the inside" justification. When I shared this idea with Claudine, she gave me a perplexed look. Once you're in, you can never get out. You must decide for yourself, before you get in any deeper. One afternoon some months later, Claudine and I sat in a win-dow settee watching the snow fall on Beacon Street.
A large part of your job is to encourage world leaders to become part of a vast network that promotes U. In the end, those leaders be-come ensnared in a web of debt that ensures their loyalty. In turn, these leaders bolster their political posi-tions by bringing industrial parks, power plants, and airports to their people. Meanwhile, the owners of U. Claudine described how throughout most of history, empires were built largely through military force or the threat of it.
But with the end of World War II, the emergence of the Soviet Union, and the specter of nuclear holo-caust, the military solution became just too risky.
The decisive moment occurred in , when Iran rebelled against a British oil company that was exploiting Iranian natural resources and its people. The company was the forerunner of British Petroleum, today's BP.
In response, the highly popular, democratically elected Iranian prime minister and TIME magazine's Man of the Year in , Mohammad Mossadegh, nationalized all Iranian petroleum assets. However, both countries feared that military retaliation would provoke the Soviet Union into taking action on be-half of Iran.
He then enlisted them to organize a series of street riots and violent demonstrations, which created the impression that Mossadegh was both unpopular and inept. In the end, Mossadegh went down, and he spent the rest of his life under house arrest. The pro-American Mohammad Reza Shah became the unchallenged dictator. Kermit Roosevelt had set the stage for a new profession, the one whose ranks I was joining. It also coincided with the beginning of experiments in "limited nonnuclear military actions," which ultimately resulted in US.
By , the year I interviewed with the NSA, it had become clear that if the United States wanted to realize its dream of global empire as envisioned by men like presidents Johnson and Nixon , it would have to employ strategies modeled on Roosevelt's Iranian example.
This was the only way to beat the Soviets without the threat of nuclear war. There was one problem, however. Kermit Roosevelt was a CIA employee. Had he been caught, the consequences would have been dire. He had orchestrated the first U. Fortunately for the strategists, the s also witnessed another type of revolution: the empowerment of international corporations and of multinational organizations such as the World Bank and the IMF.
The latter were financed primarily by the United States and our sister empire builders in Europe. A symbiotic relationship de-veloped between governments, corporations, and multinational or-ganizations. These EHMs would never be paid by the government; instead, they would draw their salaries from the private sector. As a result, their dirty work, if exposed, would be chalked up to corporate greed rather than to government policy. In addition, the corporations that hired them, although paid by government agencies and their multi-national banking counterparts with taxpayer money , would be in-sulated from congressional oversight and public scrutiny, shielded by a growing body of legal initiatives, including trademark, interna-tional trade, and Freedom of Information laws.
I took her words to heart. When Columbus set sail in , he was trying to reach Indonesia, known at the time as the Spice Islands. Throughout the colonial era, it was considered a treasure worth far more than the Americas. Java, with its rich fabrics, fabled spices, and opulent kingdoms, was both the crown jewel and the scene of violent clashes between Span-ish, Dutch, Portuguese, and British adventurers. The Netherlands emerged triumphant in , but even though the Dutch controlled Java, it took them more than years to subdue the outer islands.
As a result, Indonesians, espe-cially the Javanese, suffered terribly. Following the Japanese surrender, a charismatic leader named Sukarno emerged to declare independ-ence.
Four years of fighting finally ended on December 27, , when the Netherlands lowered its flag and returned sovereignty to a people who had known nothing but struggle and domination for more than three centuries. Sukarno became the new republic's first president. Ruling Indonesia, however, proved to be a greater challenge than defeating the Dutch. Far from homogeneous, the archipelago of about 17, islands was a boiling pot of tribalism, divergent cultures, dozens of languages and dialects, and ethnic groups who nursed centuries-old animosities.
Conflicts were frequent and brutal, and Sukarno clamped down. He suspended parliament in I and was named president-for-life in He formed close alliances with Communist governments around the world, in exchange for military equipment and training. He sent Russian-armed Indonesian troops into neighboring Malaysia in an attempt to spread communism throughout Southeast Asia and win the approval of the world's Social-ist leaders.
Opposition built, and a coup was launched in Sukarno es-caped assassination only through the quick wits of his mistress. Many of his top military officers and his closest associates were less lucky. The events were reminiscent of those in Iran in In the end, the Communist Party was held responsible — especially those factions aligned with China. In the Army-initiated massacres that followed, an estimated three hundred thousand to five hundred thou-sand people were killed.
The head of the military, General Suharto, took over as president in President NLxon had begun a series of troop withdrawals in the summer of , and U. The strategy focused on preventing a domino effect of one country after another falling under Communist rule, and it focused on a couple of countries; Indonesia was the key. The premise of U. The United States also hoped the nation would serve as a model for other coun-tries in the region. Washington based part of its strategy on the assumption that gains made in Indonesia might have positive reper-cussions throughout the Islamic world, particularly in the explosive Middle East.
And if that were not incentive enough, Indonesia had oil. No one was certain about the magnitude or quality of its reserves, but oil company seismologists were exuberant over the possibilities. As I pored over the books at the BPL, my excitement grew. I began to imagine the adventures ahead. My time with Claudine already represented the realization of one of my fantasies; it seemed too good to be true.
I felt at least partially vindicated for serving the sentence at that all-boys' prep school. Something else was also happening in my life: Ann and I were not getting along. I think she must have sensed that I was leading two lives. I justified it as the logical result of the resentment I felt to-ward her for forcing us to get married in the first place. Never mind that she had nurtured and supported me through the challenges of our Peace Corps assignment in Ecuador; I still saw her as a contin-uation of my pattern of giving in to my parents' whims.
Of course, as I look back on it, I'm sure my relationship with Claudine was a ma-jor factor. I could not tell Ann about this, but she sensed it.
In any case, we decided to move into separate apartments. One day in , about a week before my scheduled departure for Indonesia, I arrived at Claudine's place to find the small dining room table set with an assortment of cheeses and breads, and there was a fine bottle of Beaujolais.
She toasted me. I felt terrible. But later, as I walked alone back to the Prudential Center, I had to admit to the cleverness of the scheme. The fact is that all our time together had been spent in her apartment. There was not a trace of evidence about our relationship, and no one at MAIN was implicated in any way. There was also part of me that appreciated her honesty; she had not deceived me the way my parents had about Tilton and Middlebury.
Some of the books I read featured photographs of beautiful women in brightly colored sarongs, exotic Balinese dancers, shamans blowing fire, and warriors paddling long dugout canoes in emerald waters at the foot of smoking volcanoes.
Particularly striking was a series on the magnificent black-sailed galleons of the infamous Bugi pirates, who still sailed the seas of the archipelago, and who had so terrorized early European sailors that they returned home to warn their children, "Behave yourselves, or the Bugimen will get you.
The very names of its fabled islands—Java, Suma-tra, Borneo, Sulawesi — seduced the mind. Here was a land of mys-ticism, myth, and erotic beauty; an elusive treasure sought but never found by Columbus; a princess wooed yet never possessed by Spain, by Holland, by Portugal, by Japan; a fantasy and a dream. My expectations were high, and I suppose they mirrored those of the great explorers.
Like Columbus, though, I should have known to temper my fantasies. Perhaps I could have guessed that the beacon shines on a destiny that is not always the one we envision. Indonesia 22 Part 23 offered treasures, but it was not the chest of panaceas I had come to expect. In fact, my first days in Indonesia's steamy capital, Jakarta, in the summer of , were shocking.
The beauty was certainly present. Gorgeous women sporting colorful sarongs. Lush gardens ablaze with tropical flowers. Exotic Balinese dancers. Bicycle cabs with fanciful, rainbow-colored scenes painted on the sides of the high seats, where passengers reclined in front of the pedaling drivers.
Dutch Colonial mansions and turreted mosques. But there was also an ugly, tragic side to the city. Lepers holding out bloodied stumps instead of hands. Young girls offering their bodies for a few coins. Once-splendid Dutch canals turned into cesspools.
Cardboard hovels where entire families lived along the trash-lined banks of black rivers. Blaring horns and choking fumes.
The beautiful and the ugly, the elegant and the vulgar, the spiritual and the profane. This was Jakarta, where the enticing scent of cloves and orchid blossoms battled the miasma of open sewers for dominance. I had seen poverty before. Some of my New Hampshire class-mates lived in cold-water tarpaper shacks and arrived at school wearing thin jackets and frayed tennis shoes on subzero winter days, their unwashed bodies reeking of old sweat and manure.
I had lived in mud shacks with Andean peasants whose diet consisted almost entirely of dried corn and potatoes, and where it sometimes seemed that a newborn was as likely to die as to experience a birthday. I had seen poverty, but nothing to prepare me for Jakarta.
Our team, of course, was quartered in the country's fanciest hotel, the Hotel Intercontinental Indonesia. Owned by Pan American Air-ways, like the rest of the Intercontinental chain scattered around the globe, it catered to the whims of wealthy foreigners, especially oil ex-ecutives and their families. On the evening of our first day, our proj-ect manager Charlie Illingworth hosted a dinner for us in the elegant restaurant on the top floor. Charlie was a connoisseur of war; he devoted most of his free time to reading history books and historical novels about great military leaders and battles.
He was the epitome of the pro-Vietnam War armchair soldier. As usual, this night he was wearing khaki slacks and a short-sleeved khaki shirt with military-style epaulettes. After welcoming us, he lit up a cigar. We joined him. Cigar smoke swirling around him, Charlie glanced about the room. As will the U. Embassy people. But let's not forget that we have a mis-sion to accomplish. But that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Scott playing General Patton, one of Charlie's heroes. As you know, Indonesia has a long and tragic history. Now, at a time wThen it is poised to launch itself into the twentieth century, it is tested once again. Our responsibility is to make sure that Indonesia doesn't follow in the footsteps of its northern neighbors, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.
An integrated electrical system is a key element. That, more than any other single factor with the possi-ble exception of oil , will assure that capitalism and democracy rule. He took another puff on his cigar and flipped past a couple of the note cards.
Indonesia can be a powerful ally to us in that regard. So, as you develop this master plan, please do everything you can to make sure that the oil industry and all the others that serve it —ports, pipelines, construction companies — get whatever they are likely to need in the way of electricity for the entire duration of this twenty-five-year plan. You don't want the blood of Indonesian children — or our own — on your hands. You don't want them to live under the hammer and sickle or the Red flag of China!
Her discourses on foreign debt haunted me. I tried to comfort myself by recalling lessons learned in my macroeconomics courses at business school.
After all, I told myself, I am here to help Indonesia rise out of a medieval economy and take its place in the modern industrial world. But I knew that in the morning I would look out my window-, 24 Part Saving a Country from Communism 25 across the opulence of the hotel's gardens and swimming pools, and see the hovels that fanned out for miles beyond. I would know that babies were dying out there for lack of food and potable water, and that infants and adults alike were suffering from horrible diseases and living in terrible conditions.
Tossing and turning in my bed, I found it impossible to deny that Charlie and everyone else on our team were here for selfish reasons. We were promoting U. We were driven by greed rather than by any desire to make life better for the vast majority of Indonesians. A word came to mind: corporatoc-racy. I was not sure whether I had heard it before or had just in-vented it, but it seemed to describe perfectly the new elite who had made up their minds to attempt to rule the planet.
This was a close-knit fraternity of a few men with shared goals, and the fraternity's members moved easily and often between cor-porate boards and government positions. He had moved from a position as president of Ford Motor Company, to secretary of defense under presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and now occupied the top post at the world's most power-ful financial institution. I also realized that my college professors had not understood the true nature of macroeconomics: that in many cases helping an econ-omy grow only makes those few people who sit atop the pyramid even richer, while it does nothing for those at the bottom except to push them even lower.
Indeed, promoting capitalism often results in a system that resembles medieval feudal societies. If any of my pro-fessors knew this, they had not admitted it — probably because big corporations, and the men who run them, fund colleges. Exposing the truth would undoubtedly cost those professors their jobs —just as such revelations could cost me mine. These thoughts continued to disturb my sleep every night that I spent at the Hotel Intercontinental Indonesia.
In the end, my pri-mary defense was a highly personal one: I had fought my way out of that New Hampshire town, the prep school, and the draft. Through a combination of coincidences and hard work, I had earned a place in the good life. I also took comfort in the fact that I was doing the right thing in the eyes of my culture. I was on my way to becoming a successful and respected economist.
I was doing what business school had prepared me for. I was helping implement a development model that was sanctioned by the best minds at the world's top think tanks. Nonetheless, in the middle of the night I often had to console my-self with a promise that someday I would expose the truth. Embassy, meeting various officials, organizing ourselves, and relaxing around the pool. The number of Americans who lived at the Hotel Intercontinental amazed me.
I took great pleasure in watch-ing the beautiful young women — wives of U. Then Charlie moved our team to the mountain city of Bandung. The climate was milder, the poverty less obvious, and the distrac-tions fewer. We were given a government guesthouse known as the Wisma, complete with a manager, a cook, a gardener, and a staff of servants. Built during the Dutch colonial period, the Wisma was a haven.
Its spacious veranda faced tea plantations that flowed across rolling hills and up the slopes of Java's volcanic mountains. Finally, we were presented with memberships to the exclusive Bandung Golf and Racket Club, and we were housed in a suite of offices at the local headquarters of Perusahaan Umum Listrik Negara PLN , the government-owned electric utility company.
For me, the first several days in Bandung involved a series of meetings with Charlie and Howard Parker. Howard was in his sev-enties and was the retired chief load forecaster for the New England Electric System.
Now he was responsible for forecasting the amount of energy and generating capacity the load the island of Java would need over the next twenty-five years, as well as for breaking this down into city and regional forecasts. Since electric demand is highly correlated with economic growth, his forecasts depended on my eco-nomic projections. The rest of our team would develop the master plan around these forecasts, locating and designing power plants, transmission and distribution lines, and fuel transportation systems in a manner that would satisfy our projections as efficiently as pos-sible.
During our meetings, Charlie continually emphasized the im-portance of my job, and he badgered me about the need to be very optimistic in my forecasts. Claudine had been right; I was the key to the entire master plan. The walls were decorated with batik tapestries depicting epic tales from the ancient Hindu texts of the Ramayana.
Charlie puffed on a fat cigar. By the end of month one, Howard'll need to get a pretty good idea about the full extent of the economic miracles that'll happen when we get the new grid online.
By the end of the second month, he'll need more details — broken down into regions. The last month will be about filling in the gaps. That'll be critical. All of us will put our heads together then. So, before we leave we gotta be absolutely certain we have all the information we'll need.
Home for Thanksgiving, that's my motto. There's no coming back. He had never reached the pinnacle of the New England Electric System and he deeply resented it. This was his second assign-ment, and I had been warned by both Einar and Charlie to watch 28 Selling My Soul 29 out for him. They described him with words like stubborn, mean, and vindictive. As it turned out, Howard was one of my wisest teachers, although not one I was ready to accept at the time.
He had never received the type of training Claudine had given me. Or maybe they figured he was only in it for the short run, until they could lure in a more pliable full-timer like me. In any case, from their standpoint, he turned out to be a problem. Howard clearly saw the situation and the role they wanted him to play, and he was determined not to be a pawn.
All the adjectives Einar and Charlie had used to describe him were appro-priate, but at least some of his stubbornness grew out of his personal commitment not to be their servant.
I doubt he had ever heard the term economic hit man, but he knew they intended to use him to promote a form of imperialism he could not accept. He took me aside after one of our meetings with Charlie. He wore a hearing aid and fiddled with the little box under his shirt that con-trolled its volume. We were standing at the window in the office we shared, looking out at the stagnant canal that wound past the PLN building.
A young woman was bathing in its foul waters, attempting to retain some semblance of modesty by loosely draping a sarong around her other-wise naked body. Don't let him get to you. An elderly man had descended the bank, dropped his pants, and squatted at the edge of the water to answer nature's call.
The young woman saw him but was undeterred; she continued bathing. I turned away from the window and looked directly at Howard. I've seen what can happen when oil is discovered. Things change fast. I'll tell you something, young man. I don't give a damn for your oil discoveries and all that. I forecasted electric loads all my life — during the Depression, World War II, times of bust and boom. I've seen what Route 's so-called Massachusetts Miracle did for Boston.
And I can say for sure that no electric load ever grew by more than 7 to 9 percent a year for any sustained period. And that's in the best of times.
Six percent is more reasonable. Part of me suspected he was right, but I felt de-fensive. I knew I had to convince him, because my own conscience cried out for justification. This is a country where, until now, no one could even get electricity. Things are different here. I don't give a damn what you come up with.
It was a challenge I could not ignore. I went and stood in front of his desk. That's what it is. You — all of you — " he waved his arms at the offices beyond our walls, "you've sold your souls to the devil. You're in it for the money. Now," he feigned a smile and reached under his shirt, "I'm turning off my hearing aid and going back to work. I stomped out of the room and headed for Charlie's office. Halfway there, I stopped, uncertain about what I intended to accomplish. Instead, I turned and walked down the stairs, out the door, into the afternoon sunlight.
The young woman was climbing out of the canal, her sarong wrapped tightly about her body. The elderly man had disappeared. Several boys played in the 30 Part Selling My Soul 31 canal, splashing and shouting at each other. An older woman was standing knee-deep in the water, brushing her teeth; another was scrubbing clothes.
A huge lump grew in my throat. I sat down on a slab of broken concrete, trying to disregard the pungent odor from the canal. I fought hard to hold back the tears; I needed to figure out why I felt so miserable. I heard Howard's words, over and over. He had struck a raw nerve. The little boys continued to splash each other, their gleeful voices filling the air. I wondered what I could do. What would it take to make me carefree like them?
The question tormented me as I sat there watching them cavort in their blissful innocence, apparently un-aware of the risk they took by playing in that fetid water. An elderly, hunchbacked man with a gnarled cane hobbled along the bank above the canal. He stopped and watched the boys, and his face broke into a toothless grin. Perhaps I could confide in Howard; maybe together we would arrive at a solution. I immediately felt a sense of relief. I picked up a little stone and threw it into the canal.
As the ripples faded, however, so did my euphoria. I knew I could do no such thing. Howard was old and bitter. He had already passed up opportunities to advance his own career. Surely, he would not buckle now. I was young, just starting out, and certainly did not want to end up like him. Featuring 15 explosive new chapters, this new edition of the New York Times bestseller brings the story of Economic Hit Men up-to-date and, chillingly, home to the U.
Former economic hit man John Perkins shares new details about the ways he and others cheated countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. Then he reveals how the deadly EHM cancer he helped create has spread far more widely and deeply than ever in the US and everywhere else—to become the dominant system of business, government, and society today.
Finally, he gives an insider view of what we each can do to change it. Economic hit men are the shock troops of what Perkins calls the corporatocracy, a vast network of corporations, banks, colluding governments, and the rich and powerful people tied to them. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is a semi-autobiographical book written by John Perkins, first published in The book provides Perkins' account of his career with engineering consulting firm Chas. According to Perkins, his job at the firm was to convince leaders of underdeveloped countries to accept substantial development loans for large construction.
Read as many books as you like Personal use and Join Over We cannot guarantee that every book is. In all walks of life, we constantly make decisions about whether something is worth our money or our time, or try to convince others to part with their money or their time. If you see a Google Drive link instead of source url, means that the file witch you will get after approval is just a summary of original book or the file has been already removed. Loved each and every part of this book. I will definitely recommend this book to non fiction, economics lovers.
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