In my archives there is a column or two that introduces the reader to John Perkins’ important book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.
An EHM is an operative who sells the leadership of a developing country
on an economic plan or massive development project. The Hit Man
convinces a country’s government that borrowing large sums of money from
US financial institutions in order to finance the project will raise
the country’s living standards. The borrower is assured that the
project will increase Gross Domestic Product and tax revenues and that
these increases will allow the loan to be repaid.
However, the plan is designed to over-estimate the benefits so that
the indebted country cannot pay the principal and interest. As Perkins’
puts it, the plans are based on “distorted financial analyses, inflated
projections, and rigged accounting,” and if the deception doesn’t work,
“threats and bribes” are used to close the deal.
The next step in the deception is the appearance of the International
Monetary Fund. The IMF tells the indebted country that the IMF will
save its credit rating by lending the money with which to repay the
country’s creditors. The IMF loan is not a form of aid. It merely
replaces the country’s indebtedness to banks with indebtedness to the
IMF.
To repay the IMF, the country has to accept an austerity plan and
agree to sell national assets to private investors. Austerity means
cuts in social pensions, social services, employment and wages, and the
budget savings are used to repay the IMF. Privatization means selling oil, mineral and public infrastructure
in order to repay the IMF. The deal usually imposes an agreement to
vote with the US in the UN and to accept US military bases.
Occasionally a country’s leader refuses the plan or the austerity and
privatization. If bribes don’t work, the US sends in the jackals—assassins who remove the obstacle to the looting process.
Perkins’ book caused a sensation. It showed that the United States’
attitude of helpfulness toward poorer countries was only a pretext for
schemes to loot the countries. Perkins’ book sold more than a million
copies and stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 73 weeks.
Now the book has been reissued with the addition of 14 new chapters and a 30-page listing of Hit Man activity during the years 2004-2015.
Perkins shows that despite his revelations, the situation is worse
than ever and has spread into the West itself. The populations of
Ireland, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy, and the United States itself
are now being looted by Hit Man activity.
Perkins’ book shows that the US is “exceptional” only in the
unbridled violence it applies to others who get it its way. One of the
new chapters tells the story of France-Albert Rene, president of
Seychelles, who threatened to reveal the illegal and inhumane eviction
of the residents of Diego Garcia by Britain and Washington so that the
island could be converted into an air base from which Washington could
bomb noncompliant countries in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.
Washington sent in a team of jackels to murder the president of
Seychelles, but the assassins were foiled. All but one were captured,
tried and sentenced to execution or prison, but a multi-million dollar
bribe to Rene freed them. Rene got the message and became compliant.
In the original printing of his book, Perkins tells the stories of
how jackels arranged airplane crashes to get rid of Panama’s
non-compliant president, Omar Torrijos, and Ecuador’s non-compliant
president, Jaime Roldos. When Rafael Correa became president of
Ecuador, he refused to pay some of the illigetimate debts that had been
piled on Ecuador, closed the United States’ largest military base in
Latin America, forced the renegotiation of exploitative oil contracts,
ordered the central bank to use funds deposited in US banks for domestic
projects, and consistently opposed Washington’s hegemonic control over
Latin America.
Correa had marked himself for overthrow or assassination. However,
Washington had just overthrown in a military coup the democratically
elected Honduran president, Manuel Zelaya, whose policies favored the
people of Honduras over those of foreign interests. Concerned that two
military coups in succession against reformist presidents would be
noticed, to get rid of Correa the CIA turned to the Ecuadoran police.
Led by a graduate of Washington’s School of the Americas, the police
moved to overthrow Correa but were overpowered by the Ecuadoran
military. However, Correa got the message. He reversed his policies
toward American oil companies and announced that he would auction off
huge blocks of Ecuador’s rain forests to the oil companies. He closed
down, Fundacion Pachamama, an organization with which Perkins was
associated that worked to preserve Ecuador’s rain forests and indigenous
populations.
Western banks backed up by the World Bank are even worse looters than the oil and timber companies. Perkins writes:
“Over the past three decades, sixty of the world’s
poorest countries have paid $550 billion in principal and interest on
loans of $540 billion, yet they still owe a whopping $523 billion on
those same loans. The cost of servicing that debt is more than these
countries spend on health or education and is twenty times the amount
they receive annually in foreign aid. In addition, World Bank projects
have brought untold suffering to some of the planet’s poorest people. In
the past ten years alone, such projects have forced an estimated 3.4
million people out of their homes; the governments in these countries
have beaten, tortured, and killed opponents of World Bank projects.”
Perkins describes how Boeing plundered Washington state taxpayers.
Using lobbyists, bribes, and blackmail threats to move production
facilities to another state, Boeing succeeded in having the Washington
state legislature give the corporation a tax break that diverted $8.7
billion into Boeings’ coffers from health care, education and other
social services. The massive subsidies legislated for the benefit of
corporations are another form of rent extraction.
Perkins has a guilty conscience and still suffers from his role as a
Hit Man for the evil empire, which has now turned to the plunder of
American citizens. He has done everything he can to make amends, but he
reports that the system of exploitation has multiplied many times and
is now so commonplace that it no longer has to be hidden.
Perkins writes:
“A major change is that this EHM system, today, is also
at work in the United States and other economically developed
countries. It is everywhere. And there are many more variations on each
of these tools. There are hundreds of thousands more EHMs spread around
the world. They have created a truly global empire. They are working in
the open as well as in the shadows. This system has become so widely
and deeply entrenched that it is the normal way of doing business and
therefore is not alarming to most people.”
People have been so badly plundered by jobs offshoring and
indebtedness that consumer demand cannot support profits. Consequently,
capitalism has turned to exploiting the West itself. Faced with rising
resistance, the EHM system has armed itself with “the patriot Act, the
militarization of police forces, a vast array of new surveillance
technologies, the infiltration and sabotage of the Occupy movement, and
the dramatic expansion of privatized prisons.” The democratic process
has been subverted by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling and
other court decisions, by corporate-funded political action committees,
and by organizations such as the American Legislative Exchange Council
financed by the One Percent. Cadres of lawyers, lobbyists, and
strategists are hired to legalize corruption, and presstitutes work
overtime to convince gullible Americans that elections are real and
represent the workings of democracy.
In a February 17, 2016 article in CounterPunch,
Matt Peppe reports that the American colony of Puerto Rico is being
driven into the ground in order to satisfy foreign creditors.
The airport has been privatized, and the main highways have been
privatized in a 40-year lease owned by a consortium formed by a Goldman
Sachs infrastructure investment fund. Puerto Ricans now pay private
corporations for the use of infrastructure that tax dollars built.
Recently Puerto Rico’s sales tax was raised 64% to 11.5%. A sales tax
increase is equivalent to a rise in inflation and results in a decline
in real incomes.
Today the only difference between capitalism and gangsterism is that
capitalism has succeeded in legalizing its gangsterism and, thus, can
strike a harder bargain than can the Mafia.
Perkins shows that the evil empire has the world in the grip of a “death economy.”
He concludes that “we need a revolution” in order “to bury the death
economy and birth the life economy.” Don’t look to politicians,
neoliberal economists, and presstitutes for any help.
Source: Counterpunch
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