[Mb-civic] Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Smedley Butler, Meet John Perkins
by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

Remember Smedley Butler?

He was perhaps the most decorated Major General in Marine Corps 
history.

In the early part of this century, he fought and killed for the United
States around the world.

Butler was awarded two Congressional Medals of Honor.

Then, when he returned to the United States he wrote a book titled “War is
a Racket” which opens with the memorable lines: “War is a racket. It
always has been.”

“I was a high class muscleman for Big Business, for Wall Street and for
the Bankers,” Butler said. “In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for
capitalism.”

In a speech in 1933, Butler said the following:

“I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil
interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the
National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of
half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.
The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the
international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought
light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In
China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.”

Smedley Butler, meet John Perkins.

Perkins has just written a book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
(Barrett Koehler, 2004).

It is the War is A Racket for our times.

Some of it is hard to believe.

You be the judge.

In 1968, after graduating from Boston University, Perkins joined the
Peace Corps and was sent to Ecuador. There, he was recruited by the
National Security Agency (NSA) and hired by an international consulting
firm, Chas. T. Main in Boston.

Soon after beginning his job in Boston, “I was contacted by a woman
named Claudine who became my trainer as an economic hit man.”

Perkins assumed the woman worked for the NSA.

“She said she was sent to help me and to train me,” Perkins said. “She is
extremely beautiful, sensual, seductive, intelligent. Her job was to
convince me to become an economic hit man, holding out these three drugs
–- sex, drugs and money. And then she wanted to let me know that I was
getting into a dirty business. And I shouldn’t go off on my first
assignment, which was going to be Indonesia, and start doing this unless I
knew that I was going to continue doing it, and once I was in I was in for
life.”

Perkins worked for Main from 1970 to 1980.

His job was to convince the governments of the third world countries and
the banks to make deals where huge loans were given to these countries to
develop infrastructure projects.

And a condition of the loan was that a large share of the money went
back to the big construction companies in the USA – the Bechtels and
Halliburtons.

The loans would plunge the countries into debts that would be impossible
to pay off.

“The system is set up such that the countries are so deep in debt that
they can’t repay their debt,” Perkins said. “When the U.S. government
wants favors from them, like votes in the United Nations or troops in
Iraq, or in many, many cases, their resources – their oil, their canal, in
the case of Panama, we go to them and say – look, you can’t pay off your
debts, therefore sell your oil at a very low price to our oil companies.
Today, tremendous pressure is being put on Ecuador, for example, to sell
off its Amazonian rainforest -– very precious, very fragile places,
inhabited by indigenous people whose cultures are being destroyed by the
oil companies.”

When a leader of a country refuses to cooperate with economic hit men 
like
Perkins, the jackals from the CIA are called in.

Perkins said that both Omar Torrijos of Panama and Jaime Boldos of
Ecuador -– both men he worked with – refused to play the game with the
U.S. and both were cut down by the CIA -– Torrijos when his airplane 
blew
up, and Roldos when his helicopter exploded, within three months of each
other in 1981.

If the CIA jackals don’t do the job, then the U.S. Marines are sent in –-
Butler’s “racketeers for capitalism.”

Perkins also gives lurid details of how he pimped for a Saudi prince in
the 1970s, in an effort to get the Saudi royal family to enter an
elaborate deal in which the U.S. would protect the House of Saud. In
exchange, the Saudis agreed to stabilize oil prices and use their oil
money to purchase Treasury bonds, the interest on which would be used to
pay U.S. construction firms like Bechtel to build Saudi cities.

For years, Perkins wanted to stop being an economic hit man and write a
tell-all book.

He quit Main in 1980, only to be lured back with megabucks as a
consultant. He testified in favor of the Seabrook Nuclear power plant (“my
most infamous assignment”) in the 1980s, but the experience pushed him 
out
of the business, and he started an alternative energy firm. When word got
out in the 1990s that he was starting to write a tell-all book, he was
approached by the president of Stone & Webster, a big engineering firm.

Over seven years, Stone & Webster paid Perkins $500,000 to do nothing.

“At that first meeting, the president of the company mentioned some of the
books that I had written about indigenous people and said –- that’s nice,
that’s fine, keep doing your non-profit work,” Perkins told us. “We
approve of that, but you certainly would never write about this industry,
would you? And I assured him that I wouldn’t.”

Perkins assumes the money was a bribe to get him not to write the book.

But he has written the book.

You be the judge.


Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate 
Crime
Reporter, http://www.corporatecrimereporter.com. Robert Weissman is 
editor
of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor,
http://www.multinationalmonitor.org. They are co-authors of the
forthcoming On the Rampage: Corporate Predators and the Destruction of
Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press;
http://www.corporatepredators.org).

(c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

This article is posted at:
<http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/corp-focus/2004/000185.html>
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