The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

by John Perkins

servant of the corpor...

He would serve the men who appeared to serve him but who in fact ran the government — men like Vice President George H. W. Bush, Secretary of State George Shultz, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, Richard Cheney, Richard Helms, and Robert McNamara. He would advocate what those men wanted: an America that controlled the world and all its resources, a world that answered to the commands of that America, a US military that would enforce the rules as they were written by America, and an international trade and banking system that supported America as CEO of the

global empire.

knew from history that empires do not endure and that the pendulum always swings in both directions.

knew that he had been a Torrijos admirer and had applauded Carter for his courageous stand on the Panama Canal issue. I felt certain that Roldós would not falter.

Early in 1981, the Roldós administration formally presented his new hydrocarbons law to the Ecuadorian congress.

The oil companies reacted predictably — they pulled out all the stops. Their public relations people went to work to vilify Jaime Roldós, and their lobbyists swept into Quito and Washington, briefcases full of threats and payoffs.

But Roldós would not cave in to intimidation. He responded by denouncing the conspiracy between politics and oil — and religion. Although he offered no tangible proof, he openly accused the Summer Institute of Linguistics of colluding with the oil companies, and then, in an extremely bold move, he ordered SIL out of the country.

Roldós warned all foreign interests, including but not limited to oil companies, that unless they implemented plans that would help Ecuador’s people, they would be forced to leave his country.

He died there in a fiery airplane crash, on May 24, 1981.

Osvaldo Hurtado took over as Ecuador’s president. Under his administration, the Summer Institute of Linguistics continued working in Ecuador, and SIL members were granted special visas. By the end of the year, he had launched an

ambitious program to increase oil drilling by Texaco and other foreign companies in the Gulf of Guayaquil and the Amazon basin.

Nevertheless, I was shocked. It was just so very blatant.

had concluded, after our phenomenal success in Saudi Arabia, that such wantonly overt actions were a thing of the past.

had no doubt that Roldós’s death had not been an accident. It had all the markings of a CIA-orchestrated assassination. I also understood that it had been execu...

The jackals were back, and they wanted Omar Torrijos and everyone else who might consider joining an anti-corporatocracy crusade to know

But Torrijos was not buckling.

and he adamantly refused to give in to the Reagan administration’s demands to renegotiate the Canal treaty.

Two months after Roldós’s death, Omar Torrijos’s nightmare came true; he died in a plane crash. It was July 31, 1981.

He was a charismatic voice for social justice who, many believed, would be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Now he was dead. “CIA Assassination!” once again headlined articles and editorials.

There were men who hated Torrijos, and the list included people with immense power. Before his death, he was openly loathed by President Reagan, Vice President Bush, Secretary of Defense Weinberger, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as by the CEOs of many powerful corporations.

The military chiefs were especially incensed by provisions in the Torrijos–Carter treaty that forced them to close the School of the Americas and the US Southern Command’s tropical warfare center.

Among Torrijos’s corporate enemies were the huge multinationals.

The Bechtel Group was a prime example of the cozy relationship between private companies and the US government.

Bechtel was the United States’ most influential engineering and construction company. Its president and senior officers included George Shultz and Caspar Weinberger, who despised Torrijos because he brazenly courted a Japanese plan to replace Panama’s existing canal with a new, more efficient one.

Torrijos stood up to these men, and he did so with grace, charm, and a wonderful sense of humor. Now he was dead, and he had been replaced by a dictator who referred to himself as the Maximum Leader of National Liberation, Manuel Noriega,

“Omar’s ideal is freedom; the missile is not invented that can kill an ideal!”

I could not have known, back then, that Torrijos would collaborate with Carter to return the Panama Canal to the people who rightfully deserved to own it, or that this victory, along with his attempts to reconcile differences between Latin American Socialists and the dictators, would so infuriate the Reagan–Bush administration that it would seek to assassinate him.

Had Torrijos lived, he undoubtedly would have sought to quell the growing violence that has plagued so many Central and South American nations. Based on his record, we can assume that he would have tried to work out an arrangement

to mitigate international oil company destruction of the Amazon regions of Ecuador, Brazil, Colombia, and Peru. One result of such action would have been the alleviation of the terrible conflicts that Washington refers to as terrorist and drug wars, but which Torrijos would have seen as actions taken by desperate people to protect their families and homes.

By the end of the decade, these two plants had revolutionized the utility industry, directly contributing to new national antipollution laws by proving once and for all that many so-called waste products actually can be converted into electricity, and that coal can be burned without creating acid rain, thereby dispelling long-standing utility company claims to the contrary.

1 As an added benefit, the IPS power plant sent vented heat to a three-and-a-half-acre hydroponic greenhouse, rather than into cooling ponds or cooling towers.

No one outside the company could fathom how Enron was able to accomplish such miracles. Those on the inside simply smiled at the rest of us and kept quiet. Occasionally, when pressed, they talked about new approaches to management, about “creative financing,” and about their commitment to hiring executives who knew their way through the corridors of power in capitals across the globe. To me, this all sounded like a new version of old EHM techniques. The global empire was marching forward at a rapid pace.

Then, Spectrum 7 found itself poised at the brink of bankruptcy and was purchased, in 1986, by Harken Energy Corporation; G. W. Bush was retained as a board member and consultant with an annual salary of $120,000 (in 1986 dollars).2 We all assumed that having a father who was the US vice president factored into this hiring decision, since the younger Bush’s record of accomplishment as an oil executive certainly did not warrant it.

“Once Bush took his seat on the board, wonderful things started to happen to Harken — new investments, unexpected sources of financing, serendipitous drilling rights.”3

“I wonder if it’s really worth it,” he continued, shaking his head sadly. “Is the son’s career worth risking the presidency?”

I was familiar with Middle Eastern politics; and I knew that the Bush family, just like the Enron executives, was part of the network that I and my EHM colleagues had created; they were the feudal lords and plantation masters.5

The EHM concept had expanded to include all manner of executives in a wide variety of businesses.

During the 1980s, young men and women rose up through the ranks of middle management believing that any means was justified by the end:

an enhanced bottom line. Global empire was simply a pathway to increased profits.

Congress originally envisioned the law as a way to encourage small, independent companies like mine to develop alternative fuels and other innovative approaches to producing electricity. Under this law, the major utility companies were required to purchase energy generated by the smaller companies, at fair and reasonable prices (calculated using the “avoided cost” method).

However, the reality turned out to be something very different.

Milton Friedman, a member of the Chicago school of economics, had won the Nobel Prize in Economics by maintaining that the only goal of business should be to maximize profits, regardless of the social and environmental costs, and that government oversight, in general, was

unnecessary and counterproductive.

The wealthiest companies in the energy industry interpreted these ideas as license to do whatever it would take to gain more control and market share and to increase profits, rather than honoring the intent of PURPA to develop innovative approaches and new sources of energy.

Many of them launched aggressive programs to drive the independents into bankruptcy and then purchase them.

George H. W. Bush had made his own fortune as an oilman.

What was going on in the energy field was symbolic of a trend that was affecting the whole world. Friedman’s “maximize profits” credo was promoted by government and business leaders on every continent.

Concerns about social welfare, the environment, and other quality-of-life issues took a backseat to greed.

International organizations such as the World Bank bought into this notion, advocating deregulation and privatization of water and sewer systems, communications networks, utility grids, and other facilities that up until then had been managed by governments.