The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

For years Perkins works out at a martial arts dojang near his home in South Florida. In 1999 a stranger, “Jack,” joins the dojang and proves quite adept. He confesses that he was involved in an attempt on the life of France-Albert René, president of the Seychelles. The Seychelles are an island group in the Indian Ocean near the US naval base on Diego Garcia; René had threatened to reveal damaging secrets about the base. The attempt failed; part of the team hijacked an Air India 707 but was arrested when it landed in South Africa. All the would-be assassins were jailed.

Perkins remembers being prepped to visit the Seychelles to cajole and threaten the president into cooperating with the United States, but the trip was canceled just before the coup attempt.

Jack, an American, grew up in Lebanon, where he was kidnapped and tortured by the Palestine Liberation Organization. He moved to Africa and trained with the elite South African Special Forces Brigade. Jack is an avid surfer, and from time to time he leaves the dojang on extended surfing trips, and “violent things happened in countries where he went surfing” (223).

In 2003 Jack accepts a Middle East assignment and is gone for two years. When he returns, he helps Perkins with exercise therapy to help him recover from his recent intestinal surgery.

Jack explains that the Seychelles assassination team was released within months after a bribe was paid to René, who rescinded his threat to reveal American naval secrets and instead became a US ally. Jack remarks, “It all worked out in the end” (224). Jack reads Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, likes it, and wants Perkins to publish more, insisting that “[we] got nothing to hide” (224).

As for the Air India hijacking, the public “believed it was the work of terrorists—Communists—out to overthrow a legitimate government. The public had no idea that it was a CIA plot gone sour” (225).

Perkins doesn’t believe the government poisoned him; doing so would have made him a martyr and generated more sales of his tell-all book. Instead, Perkins thinks the so-called journalist merely “felt similarly to the people who wrote e-mails accusing me of being a traitor” (226).

Years earlier in the Amazon Perkins suffered a deadly illness but was cured by a shaman who, for payment, demanded that Perkins become his apprentice. Perkins learned about the “if you can dream it, you can make it happen” (227) mindset. In 2005, after his severe intestinal illness, Perkins realizes that he “had taken on a mindset of paranoia and guilt. I needed to change it” (227).

After some soul-searching, Perkins decides that writing books isn’t enough. He must become an activist. To do so, he resolves to rejoin the nonprofit groups he started, in particular the Pachamama affiliate in Ecuador, where the team works with indigenous peoples to fight against the oil companies. Their $1 billion lawsuit charges Chevron and Texaco with massive pollution of the rainforest.

Rafael Correa campaigns for president of Ecuador on a platform of resistance against the international corporations that have damaged Ecuador. Correa wins election and promptly rescinds payment on much of Ecuador’s debt, declaring it based on CIA corruption of previous dictators.

Correa also closes a major US military base in Ecuador, withdraws his country’s US investments, ceases cooperation with the CIA against Colombian rebels, and improves environmental protections. Finally, he renegotiates oil contracts, shifting them from a percentage of profits to a fee per barrel. The US plans a retaliation.

Honduran President Manuel Zelaya increases the minimum wage and small-farm subsidies, introduces free education and electricity for the poor, and reduces bank-loan interest rates. These policies displease two major corporations, Chiquita Brands and Dole Food. In 2009 Zelaya is overthrown in a coup.

Perkins visits Panama, where he talks with movers and shakers as well as people on the street to ferret out what happened. He learns that the locals remember well the many times the United States, going back to Teddy Roosevelt, sponsored coups and dictatorships to control their region.

Perkins confirms that the biggest irritant from the Zelaya administration is the 60 percent increase in the minimum wage, which would greatly increase costs for the big multinationals. American media report merely that Zelaya sought a constitutional amendment to extend his presidency.

In late 2010 a coup against Ecuador’s Correa is launched by police, who attack the military, apparently with the help of the CIA. Correa retains power, but he reverses course and auctions off “huge blocks of the rain forest to the oil companies” (237).

Perkins has dinner in 2011 with a Chase Bank executive who has read Perkins’s book. The executive suggests that techniques used in foreign countries by EHMs are also used in America on unsuspecting consumers: “in recent years bankers had convinced clients to purchase houses that were beyond their means” (238), with some loans requiring little to no documentation. The Great Recession bankrupts many such buyers, while the banks get rich on foreclosures.

Perkins recalls his Great Uncle Ernest, a small-town bank president in the 1950s. He thought of homebuyers as partners and considered Wall Street a casino. He would say, “All our money comes from local people, and it all goes back into the local economy” (240). Perkins feels guilty by comparison.

Months after the dinner with the bank executive, word comes that European banks have manipulated loan rates since 1991 and raked in billions in illicit profits. Fines are imposed, but not a single banker is indicted.

Perkins travels to Vietnam early in 2013 on behalf of a group that helps victims of land mines and other wartime explosives. Perkins visits the “Hanoi Hilton” prison where US war prisoners were held. Inside, Perkins sees the cramped cells where, during the French colonial period, men and women were tortured, raped, and beheaded.

An upstairs office displays photos of American military men working or eating in the prison. The images “delivered a clear message: the Vietcong had treated American prisoners far more humanely than the French had treated the Vietnamese” (246). Perkins, however, remembers learning that many Americans were also tortured here. Another room was “adorned with pictures of the havoc US forces had wreaked on Hanoi” (246).

Perkins feels saddened for everyone involved in that terrible war. He also feels guilty for his part, not in the war but in another kind of devastation, as “a man who had enslaved countries through debt” (248).

The EHM network today is vast, encompassing not only third-world but developed countries. Corporations now “locate their production plants in one country, their tax-sheltered banking in a second, their phone call centers in a third, and their headquarters in a fourth”, which “gives them immense leverage” (250). Countries vie to subsidize corporate interests; uncooperative government officials are blackmailed.

Turkey hosts a conference in April 2013, and Perkins attends. He meets with Turkish diplomat Uluc Ozulker, who agrees that empires have always relied on two main tools: “Fear and debt” (251).

Ozulker explains why Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi drew the ire of the United States. Gadhafi at first received aid from Soviet Russia, which he partly used to improve the life of his people; when the Soviet regime collapsed, he mended fences with the US and Britain. France, feeling left out of the resulting oil deals, aided Libyan rebels. The US and Britain, suffering bad press from their support of Gadhafi—who further alienated them by encouraging other countries “to sell oil for Libya’s gold dinar instead of dollars” (252)—turned on the Libyan leader, who was overthrown and killed.

Ozulker says the United States was involved in the 1980 coup that replaced Turkey’s government. America also takes advantage of “the schism between Sunnis and Shiites” in the Middle East and exploits “civil wars and tribal factions” that “create power vacuums that open the doors to exploitation” (252). Such internecine battles encourage both sides to take on more debt and buy more armaments. Ozulker blames “the CEOs and major stockholders of the multinationals that run the world. They are the roots of the problem” (253).

Ecuadorean President Correa, shaken by an attempted coup, opens bidding on blocks of the Amazon basin to oil companies in November 2013. Indigenous protesters, backed by Perkins’s group Fundación Pachamama, picket the presidential palace. Strangely, few oil companies make bids. One oil executive comments, “It just isn’t worth the risk of all the bad publicity” (257).

Police suddenly raid Fundación Pachamama offices and shut down the organization. Though Perkins is angry, he also realizes that Correa has no choice: “he had to compromise, keep his job, and fight battles he had a chance of winning” (258). Correa achieved much by standing up to oil companies and the World Bank, improving the lives of Ecuadoreans, and doing what he could to protect the Amazon.

Major banks are caught rigging foreign exchange rates, a scheme going back to 2007, and are fined billions in 2014. The situation demonstrates “that everything—conspiracy, collusion, fraud, unfair competitive practices—is justified by the corporatocracy, so long as it earns large profits” (260).

The EHMs involved are much more blatant than in Perkins’s day. Internal correspondence shows that they “relished their roles as bandits and mafiosi, bragged about being part of a cartel” (261). Perkins is angered by this and by the inaction of regulators who look the other way. He also feels frustrated “by how anesthetized the American public has become to being exploited” (261).

The 2015 FIFA soccer scandal becomes the latest example of the corporate system’s reach. Even within a sport, “the perpetrators employed many of the tools that had been part of my EHM kit, including bribes, fraud, and money laundering, and it was done in collaboration with the big banks” (262). Perkins is troubled that FIFA executives are carted away in handcuffs while the bankers walk free, since “the bankers are members of the corporatocracy, whereas FIFA officials are not” (262).

Despite the World Bank’s mandate to end it, poverty remains endemic; meanwhile, 1 percent of the world’s people control half the wealth. Sixty countries together still owe half a trillion dollars, and the “cost of servicing that debt is more than these countries spend on health or education” (263). World Bank projects have forced millions from their homes; protesters have been “beaten, tortured, and killed” (263).

The corporatocracy convinces the world that success is determined by “personal assets” rather than contributions to society, that “privatization and deregulation protect the public, that government assistance for the needy is wasteful and counterproductive,” and that the rich “are icons to be emulated” (264).

Corruption common to third-world countries has now infected American institutions. Modern EHMs “stroll from the corridors of the White House through the US Congress, along Wall Street, and into the boardrooms of every major company” (265). This has happened because “corporate EHMs draft the laws and finance the politicians who pass them” (265).

The infection runs deep. Former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle paints himself as a man of the people. Instead, he becomes a $2 million-a-year lobbyist for the DLA Piper law firm that works to protect The Gap and other companies from liability for the collapse of a Bangladesh garment factory and the death of 1,100 workers there.

Similarly, former senator and presidential candidate Chris Dodd portrays himself as a man of integrity, promising never to become a lobbyist for big business. Instead, he becomes “chairman and chief lobbyist for the Motion Picture Association of America” (267).

On the Republican side, Perkins points the finger at “Perkins Ashcroft, Bob Dole, Newt Gingrich, Phil Gramm, Chuck Hagel, Trent Lott, [and] Warren Rudman” (267), among others. The list of politicians-turned-lobbyists on both sides of the aisle “seems endless” (267). Revolving-door politicians “are EHMs, paid to support the corporatocracy, expand the corporate empire, and spread the tentacles of the death economy across the planet” (267).

Officially, the number of lobbyists in 2013 is 12,281, or 23 for every member of Congress, but some believe the true number approaches 100,000. Lobbyist spending is estimated to range between $3 billion and $9 billion. Big corporations spend 30 times as much money on lobbying as labor and public-interest groups combined. Corporate lobbyists use EHM techniques, including bribery and blackmail, to intimidate politicians into obedience.

Corporate EHMs called “site location consultants” put pressure on local governments to give companies special treatment: they “play to fears that communities will be rejected unless they offer the most lenient environmental and social regulations, the lowest tax rates, and other incentives” (269).

A chief difference between EHMs working in third-world countries and those plying the halls of government in America is that, “instead of World Bank loans, modern EHMs in the United States use tax policy and subsidies” (270). Tax breaks are much more efficient for corporations than trying to enforce payment of loans.

Big corporations, especially arms makers, oil companies, and agribusiness, are good at getting grants and subsidies. Since 2000, “a shocking 298 corporations each received subsidies of $60 million or more” (270).

Perkins singles out Walmart for its tax dodges that involve shell companies in Luxembourg and public assistance funding for its impoverished employees.

Vulture funds buy up third-world loan defaults for pennies on the dollar; then, when the struggling countries begin to repay, the vulture funds “demand payment of the debt, plus interest, often tacking on additional fees” (273). One such fund, Elliott Associates, buys $20 million in Peruvian defaults for $11 million, then sues Peru and wins $58 million.

During World War II, American soldiers rescued children from burning buildings and liberated Nazi concentration camps. In the 1950s CIA and FBI agents put their lives on the line when they infiltrated communist groups. Even the Seychelles jackals risk their lives, though Perkins disapproves of their task. Today, unmanned drones fly into residential areas and blow up buildings. Perkins believes this is cowardice: “They don’t risk their lives; they don’t hear the screams of the wounded” (276).

US drone strikes have killed thousands in the Middle East, many or most of them innocents. This ruthless policy “destroys the reputation of a nation that gained the world’s respect during World War II” (276).

Jackals today make use of resources once “considered inappropriate, cowardly, or even counterproductive” (277), including CIA torture, imprisonment, and assassination programs, military satellites and airstrikes, and Army Delta Force or Navy Seal strike teams that engage in spying operations and global manhunts.

The secrecy surrounding these activities makes it hard to determine the amount of collateral damage, including civilian casualties and loss of respect for America in the rest of the world, as well as the degree to which resentment causes people to join anti-American terrorist groups.

National fears after 9/11 caused Americans to “sacrifice privacy and freedom” to the NSA, CIA, and FBI, so that techniques “perfected overseas, including drones and surveillance aircraft, are now used to spy on us in the United States” (279). As early as 2006, reports surface that the NSA is “intercepting Americans’ phone calls and Internet communications” (280). Later it’s revealed that the NSA listens in on the phone calls of world leaders, including US allies.

The jackals use character assassination against American politicians. The impeachment of “President Clinton served as a warning to all leaders, present and future” (281). Sex scandals, innuendo, and false evidence remind our leaders that “modern eavesdropping technology can be used to destroy them—or to plant incriminating evidence that will destroy them” (281).

Mercenaries have become a major jackal tool. “By 2012, there were almost 110,000 contracted mercenary forces in Afghanistan alone, compared with 68,000 US military personnel” (281). The biggest mercenary contractors represent hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Mercenaries, because they are not directly part of the US military, help to insulate the American government from accountability.

As Perkins notes, “All of this is part of the corporatocracy’s determination to do whatever it deems it will take to maintain control” (282).

Ecuador’s President Correa, refusing to pay off some of his country’s sketchy past loans, turns to China for financing. By 2015, China owns 28 percent of Ecuador’s debt and is “buying almost 55 percent of Ecuador’s oil” (284).

At first third-world countries were overly dependent on US dollars. Despite the draconian terms of the trade agreements, “[t]hey fear they can’t survive without the corporations” (284). Today, China is an alternative to harsh US policies; the Chinese deals are much less severe. Still, “the simple fact remains that China is using debt—massive amounts of it—to further its own EHM system, to control countries and their resources” (286).

China has committed as much as $200 billion to Latin America, more than all Western loans there. China has also made deep inroads in Africa, India, and East Asia, catapulting itself to “the position of master of global debt” (286) in less than a decade. Its efforts in Ecuador include hydroelectric power, an oil refinery, “roads, highways, bridges, hospitals” (286), and more.

Perkins visits Ecuador’s Amazon region in the summer of 2015, where he confers with his Pachamama allies. They admire China’s miraculous growth over the decades but fear its increasing economic power in the region. Its domestic might is built on highly polluting technology; “people expressed fear that the Chinese model would cause even graver problems than the US model had” (287).

China’s tremendous growth is due in large part to the West’s appetite for consumer products. China has learned our industrial techniques; now it is copying America’s “death economy” in its exports to the third world. The solution isn’t simply about what things to buy but “about changing the ideas, the dogmas that have driven economics for centuries: debt and fear, insufficiency, divide and conquer” (288). Perkins believes the world needs “a consciousness revolution” (288).

Perkins receives the Lennon Ono Grant for Peace and a large contribution to his Dream Change nonprofit. This group sponsors a business conference, the Love Summit, which encourages “businesses to achieve higher, more compassionate standards” (289). The conference’s odd name seems to work; attendees agree that, if a company wants people to love it and its products, the company must produce “products that serve life” (289).

Some people want to be rid of corporations altogether. Perkins believes the odds of this happening are very low, and that it is wiser to “take the shamanic approach, to transform—shapeshift—the attitudes and goals of those who own and manage the corporations” (291).

Perkins learns from CEOs that they often want to implement more positive corporate strategies but are stymied by the system’s demand for short-term profits. Thus, “they crave consumer movements that generate thousands of letters and e-mails” (292) that they can show to their boards. Perkins realizes that the marketplace has attributes of a democracy, and that “every time we buy something, we cast a vote” (292).

Individuals can participate in this change by “following your unique passions, employing your skills, and joining the growing community that is determined to create a better world” (294). Recycling and driving less can help, but real change comes when people build communities of the like-minded.

Perkins meets the Dalai Lama, who tells him that praying is good but “if that is all you do, it’s a waste of time. It may even be a distraction. You need to take appropriate daily action” (294). Perkins believes people can do many things to help, including political activism, boycotts, blogging, making videos, and running for office, all in an effort to “spread the good news about a life economy” (296). People can support the life economy at work by encouraging sustainability and by pursuing their passions in ways that promote the new vision.

Most importantly, Perkins believes people should “enjoy the process. Follow your bliss. Make it fun. Don’t burn out” (297).

Different age groups can help birth the life economy in different ways. The suggestions that follow can also be mixed and matched by members of any age group, just “choose items that fit your passions, that raise your bliss factor, that bring joy into your life” (299).

First, Perkins lists 11 things everyone can do: Keep telling the new story; shop and invest consciously; live consciously; pick a cause that appeals to you; participate and spend locally; flood media with information; support your favorite reform movements; support creation of parks and preserves; campaign for finance reform and climate change regulation; use cash and pay off debt; and promote people who are working to make a better world as heroes.

Then he details nine things students can do: Learn what’s really going on in the world; question authority; find your passions; join others who work for change; speak out; stand up against debt; work only for firms and groups that support your stance; join organizations that support your stance; and make videos or films about ending the death economy and birthing a life economy.

Next, he focuses on six actions for retired people: Rattle the cage (because you can’t be fired); take action despite your fears; mentor younger people; demand responsible investments from your pensions, mutual funds, and the like; campaign for political and corporate reform; and share your story with others, especially the young.

He then introduces nine recommendations for those between student and retirement age: Learn what’s going on beneath the surface; improve your communication skills; campaign for economic and tax reforms; participate in movements that support businesses that constructively “serve a public interest” (305); support community-based business; join protests and movements that support better social and environmental conditions; become aware of your own biases; help younger people to take inspired action; and speak out at your corporation or stockholder meeting.

Next, Perkins lists 11 things corporations can do, which consumers should insist upon: Commit to the public, the environment, social harmony, and justice; convince your owners and workers that these commitments serve long-term corporate interests; create sustainability programs; institute fair-wage compensation for your workers and demand it from vendors; hire workers who want innovation and responsible change; encourage employee camaraderie and community through collaborative decision-making; invest in the community; listen constructively to criticism; encourage corporate diversity and inclusion; encourage ethical behavior; and promote the public-interest mission in all communications.

Finally, he lists five things entrepreneurs can do: “Follow your heart […] Get started […] Build communities and networks […] Be the company you envision for the future […] Undertake the eleven actions outlined in ‘Eleven Things Corporations Can Do’” (308).