I was en economic hitman for hire

We talked with John Perkins, former economic hitman for the United States, to discuss the rise of modern empires, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the current state of global affairs, and his hopes for a better future.

Agata Zadrożna, Rafał Górski: After interviewing Robert Bilott and Joel Bakan, we now have the honor of speaking with you. We hold you in the highest regard and are very grateful you agreed to this interview for our weekly journal. Your book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man was an international bestseller, staying on ,,The New York Times” bestseller list for over seventy weeks. It has sold over 2 million copies worldwide and has been translated into more than thirty languages. The first edition in Poland was published in 2006 by Studio Emka, with a recommendation on the cover from ,,Gazeta Prawna”.

Would you describe: who are you, and why should readers trust you?

John Perkins: I’m John Perkins. I was chief economist at a consulting firm out of Boston, MA, in the United States for 10 years, roughly, during the 70s. My clients included the World Bank, the United Nations, governments all over the world, including the United States government. And really, I was an economic hitman. I did things to basically enslave countries with debt, countries that had resources our corporations wanted, like oil, for example. And then we would make large loans to those countries. We would convince the countries to take these large loans that then would be used to hire our companies to build big infrastructure projects in those countries, like: electric power systems, highways, ports, airports, things that helped a few wealthy families, as well as the international corporations. The wealthy families own the industries and the commercial establishments that benefited from this infrastructure. But the majority of the people actually suffered because money was diverted from healthcare, education and other social services to pay off the interest and the debt… And in the end we go back and say: ,,Hey, since you can’t pay your principal on the debt… sell your resource – oil or whatever – real cheap to our corporations without environmental or social regulations and… or allow us to build a military base on your soil, privatize your public sector industries and sell them to our investors”. In that way, we were really creating this commercial, economic empire. Incidentally, the leaders of these countries knew that if they didn’t accept these deals, the people behind me that we call jackals were likely to make life difficult for them, maybe overthrow them, maybe assassinate them. And unfortunately, there’s a long history of that in the United States. With Arbenz of Guatemala and Allende of Chile and Mossadeq of Iran and… and on and on. So there’s that history. And in a way that made my job easy – because it was an easy way of convincing people to go ahead and sign the deal with us.

So, you know – my book – what I’ve written was strongly vetted by my publisher, first of all and later by a number of media channels, including the New York Times, which did a major article about the book at one point. In doing that – vetting – they did a lot of research and interviewed other people, looked at all my old passports, which I had kept, to show that I was in these countries that I wrote about at the time and that there were those incidents that happened to those countries. So you know, I think it’s reasonable to question why anyone should trust me. But I think it’s been very well established that the stories in my book are true, and the facts are all there.

Is there anything you would want to say to people who do question if you are telling the truth?

Well, do the research. It’s a good question, but you can research what’s happened in the countries that I write about. And you can count on the New York Times and my publisher that have established that I was in those countries at the time that I said I was in them. And I will say that there were some questions that came up back when the book first came out in 2005, 2004. But since then, there’s been so much vetting that I don’t even get that question asked of me, hardly anymore.

Who are today’s economic hitmen?

Well, I’m sorry to say, I think there’s a lot more economic hit today than in my day. In my day we were what you might call generic – in other words, we would go into these countries and get them to accept these loans and hire US corporations to build the infrastructure projects, but we really didn’t care which corporation they hired as the construction company. It could be Bechtel, it could be Halliburton, it could be Stone and Webster. As long as we got our piece of the action, we didn’t care. Today, you still have those kind of people around… working with the World Bank and other organizations, but you’ve also got economic hitman who work for every major international corporation, promoting the interests of that corporation, which wasn’t true in my day. So, for example, they might come to a country like Poland and say: We want to build a factory someplace in this area”… But it could be Poland, it could be Hungary, it could be the Czech Republic. We’re going to go to whoever gives us the best tax breaks and the least environmental and social regulations. And these economic hitmen, for this corporation that wants to build a factory, would put a lot of pressure on these countries to compete with each other. In addition, China has developed very, very successful economic hitmen. I taught at MBA [Master of Business Administration] program in China and, you know, I realized that the Chinese students were really trying to pick my brain as to what I did that was successful and what I did that was not successful. And they’ve been extremely good. The Chinese have been extremely effective at doing a better job, or more efficient job, let’s say, at being economic hitmen, than I ever did, or I think now, today most of the United States economic hitmen do. So we get a whole slew of new economic hitmen that work for big corporations and work for the Chinese and other countries also…

And I wonder if today’s technological advancements like the media play a huge role in it, maybe a bigger role than they did before…?

Yeah, I’m sure they do. Since I’m not involved in it today, I can’t be too specific, but economic hitmen thrive on the concept that perceptions mold reality. So, we know there is no United States, there’s no Poland, there’s no corporations, there’s no religion, there’s no culture – except as people perceive them. And once enough have accepted a perception and taken actions, like codifying it to law, it has a huge impact on reality. So when for example people created the perception in the United States back in the 1770s that there would be a United States – first, they had to perceive the whole idea, and then take the actions to make it happen. And so we know that modern psychology and modern quantum physics, marketing, politics, those are all based on perceptions – convincing people to perceive things in one way or another. And that’s exactly what economic hitmen do so well – use perceptions to convince countries to accept these huge loans and basically auction off their resources to our countries.

Who steps in when economic hitmen fail?

The people we call jackals, who are usually contractors to the CIA or someone else. And they put a lot of pressure on the presidents and others around them, like blackmail or other forms of coercion. And they remind these presidents of what happened to other leaders who did not play the game… and were either overthrown in coups or assassinated. And there’s lots of examples of those – I mentioned, some earlier: Allende of Chile, Arbenz in Guatemala, Mossadegh of Iran, Lumumba in the Congo, Đình Diệm of Vietnam. And fairly recently, Zelaya of Honduras. Those are just the presidents. But these kinds of things can happen to ministers of states too, and people lower than them. So there’s all kinds of ways to let people know that if they don’t play the game, they’re going to suffer and their family’s are going to suffer.

In your book, you write that the pillars of a modern empire are fear, debt, scarcity, and the „divide and conquer” strategy. What empire are you referring to, and could you explain these pillars in more detail?

Yes, throughout history, many empires – whether it’s the Roman Empire or the French Empire or the British Empire, the Chinese empire or the American Empire today – have used these four pillars. And historically, probably the most important one was fear – fear of military invasion or fear that if you didn’t join the alliance with the country that was trying to promote the empire, your neighbors or somebody else would attack you. We economic hitmen use this very effectively. For example, during the Vietnam War we claimed that if- if countries in Southeast Asia didn’t side with us then the Russians or the Chinese would take them over. And so there was this idea of fear. But in recent years, that’s been replaced very much by debt, because there’s the threat of nuclear war. And so countries like the United States and Russia, who are both big nuclear powers, don’t want to go to war with each other. The consequences are just too dire. People in Poland know only too well… And so, the battlefield becomes one of economics, where the economic hitman put countries into debt. And that all revolves around the other pillar, which is fear of scarcity. So you let countries know: ,,Well, you’re a poor country. You don’t have enough food for your people. You can’t take good care of your people”. For example, I was just in Ecuador recently and I have a long history in Ecuador. I was an economic hitman there and, as you know, Ecuador is a poor country with vast resources. There’s oil and gold and copper and cobalt and minerals that are needed for the high-tech industry. So the idea is to keep emphasizing to Ecuador that it’s got a lot of really poor people. And the only way it’s going to help those people out – is to allow us, to go in and create these loans and exploit these resources and then the country will have money to build hospitals and schools and other infrastructure for all of its people. The United States is doing that in Ecuador right now. But so is China. And China is winning in Ecuador. China has basically taken over Ecuador and most of Africa and most of Latin America too. China is the number one trading partner today, all over the world. It’s number one trading partner with something like 125 countries versus the United States’s 54 countries. It’s amazing how effective they’ve been. So that’s fear of scarcity. And then this idea of divide and conquer. That’s always been a big one, you know. Ok, the economic hitmen say to Poland, you come and join our forces, and then you can help us fight the Germans” – or whatever it happens to be the enemy at the particular time. But now the Chinese have taken a new approach to this. They’re doing the opposite. They’re saying: ,,No, we don’t want to divide and conquer the world. We want to bring the world together with the new Silk Road”. They’ve been very, very smart. They claim to want to help everybody become trading partners with everybody else. It’s a very, very smart move on their part.

Your book mentions the presidents of Ecuador and Panama. Could you explain why?

So I write a great deal about the presidents of two countries, who I deeply admire: Jaime Roldós – democratically elected president of Ecuador and Omar Torrijos, who was the head of State of Panama. And these two presidents would not accept my deals. They had huge integrity. And they knew that they were risking their lives, but they did not want to play this game. Torrijos especially was interesting because his was just a little country (Panama), but it had the Panama Canal, and he was negotiating the canal treaty with Jimmy Carter, President of the United States. And he was looked at as a David going up against Goliath. Little country going up against the huge country. And so he was famous around the world and highly regarded. And very popular in Panama. But, you know, he said to me, “I’m not playing this game with you. I’m not gonna sell my people down the tubes. I’m not going to betray my people”. Both of those presidents died in very mysterious private plane crashes within three months of each other, in 1981. And throughout Latin America and much of the world it was assumed that these were assassinations, and I believe they probably were too. There’s never been any proof because when somebody dies in a plane crash, if there is a smoking gun, it goes down with the plane. So we don’t know, but that scared other presidents. Presidents around the world believed that they were in danger of being assassinated. The perception, again, perception molded reality. The perception was that those two presidents had been assassinated and that meant that if you’re President of Peru or Argentina or Guatemala, you better listen, better play the game because otherwise your plane might crash.

In your book you wrote „While we in the United States are taught to fear China, Russia, and terrorists, much of the world is afraid of us. These people fear the Pentagon and the presence of American troops stationed in over 100 countries around the world. They fear the CIA, NSA, and other American intelligence agencies. They fear drones, missiles, and bombs. They are uneasy about our monetary system, based on the dollar and debt.” This is a passage from your book The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.

In Poland, we are taught to fear Russia and China while trusting the United States, with whom we are in a military alliance. What are your thoughts on this, and what advice would you give us?

Well, yeah. I think that it’s wise for smaller countries to fear the big powers and to fear exploitation. I’m a very loyal American – I believe that what the United States does for the most part is pretty good, but I also know how we’ve exploited people. My job was to do that. And one of the reasons that I exposed what I’ve done – I write about it – is because I think that the only way you can correct your mistakes is to first recognize them. So I do, and I also advise countries to be leery of the big powerful countries that offer loans. Now, Poland today is in a very difficult situation due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the idea that Russia probably wants to move back into creating something more or less equivalent to the old Soviet Union. I think Poland has every reason to fear Russia. And therefore NATO is your largest protector and the United States is part of NATO. So, my advice to the Polish people would be, yeah, trust NATO, use NATO, because you’ve got to defend yourself against Russia. At one point I was a speaker in 2017 at the Saint Petersburg (Russia) Economic Forum, along with President Putin. At that time I was fairly impressed with Putin. He was talking climate change and the world coming together to end climate change and terrorism and the nuclear threat. But something happened to him., In my opinion, Putin’s just gone crazy. It’s terrible what he’s doing, it’s horrible, there’s no justification, and the world needs to stop that from continuing. So, I think Poland is wise to put a lot of trust in NATO at this point. The trust is to be a defense unit against the forces of Russia, but at the same time not to sacrifice your resources, not to go deeply into debt. I’m concerned for Ukraine – just this morning I heard that they’re taking a huge loan from the European countries, and I’m afraid for Ukraine. They need to be defended, they need to be taken care of, they need to stop Russia. But at the same time, I hope that they won’t go too deeply into debt and be just forever beholden to the other countries of NATO at the end of all this. NATO should offer help that is based on grants, not on debt.

The cover of the third edition of your book features Chinese and American shipping containers. Why did you choose this cover?

We looked at a number of different covers, and we wanted to show that this is competition between China and the United States, but we didn’t want it to show it as a violent competition. We didn’t want to promote the idea that these two countries could actually go to war with each other. I certainly hope they won’t, and I don’t believe they will. So, the idea was: How do you present a struggle that’s commercial? And in fact, China has been beating the United States out around the world through trade; and that trade, a lot of it goes through these containers that could get carried on container ships and trucks and trains. So it seemed like that was a pretty good way to try to portray the competition, and you’ll notice that China’s stack of containers is a little bigger. China’s got two and a half containers and the United States has one and a half. China is rising above, so the symbolism is that China is winning this war at this point in time, they are winning this war, and the United States has not been very smart in the way it has approached this. Our economic hitmen have not done as efficient a job as the Chinese economic hitmen. At the same time, the United States has been very, very bogged down, with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world. China hasn’t been involved in these. China has put its resources to convincing the countries of Africa and Latin America and others in the world that those countries ought to side with China. They’ve taken advantage of many of our mistakes.

In 2023, at the Fifth Geopolitics Forum, we presented the documentary Apology of an Economic Hit Man, directed by Stelios Kouloglou. What inspired the film, and what does it reveal that the book doesn’t?

What inspired the film was that the director of the film was a well known TV personality in Greece. He and his film crew came to the United States and interviewed me three years in a row, and the interview was very popular in Greece. On the third year, he said to me: “Have you ever considered apologizing to any of the people that you hit as an economic hitman?” I replied: “I haven’t thought about it.” He said: “Well, what do you think about it?”, and I said: “I’d love to do it”. So he said: “Well, if I arrange to make a film and bring a film crew and you to Ecuador, would you do that?”, and I said: “Well, yeah, sure”. So that’s what happened. It gave me the opportunity to go back to Ecuador – a country that I dearly love where I was in the Peace Corps in the late 1960s and an economic hitman in the 1970s, and where I now take groups every year to learn from and support indigenous people. I’m a founder of a nonprofit organization, the Pachamama Alliance, that supports a lot of the work that’s being done to protect the Ecuadorian Amazon region. That was the inspiration behind doing the film, that was the motivation. He brought a film team down, and they rented a very large auditorium in Quito, and it was just as you’ve seen in the film, there was a huge audience that came to hear me speak and gave me the opportunity to say what I felt, which is that I really am sorry for the work that I’ve done and for the exploitation that’s occurred in Ecuador and in many other countries, at the hands of other economic hitmen.

The American military-industrial complex profits from the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. What is your take on this?

Well, I certainly agree in defending Ukraine. It’s very, very important to stop this Russian aggression. It’s important to protect Ukraine, the Ukrainian people. But it’s also important because I do fear that the war would not end in Ukraine. That there would be an attempt to rebuild what used to be the Soviet Union. And what’s going on in Gaza is horrible. Nobody should deny that Israel has a right to protect itself, but Israel’s gone way beyond that, increasingly expanding settlements where it is encroaching on Palestinian territories. And the latest thing that Israel has done with these weapons with blowing up people, pagers and telephones that that civilians is outrageous. And again, I don’t question Israel’s right to protect itself, but I think Israel is doing the opposite. By its killings of civilians Israel is making much of the world lose respect for it.

I’m disturbed that the Biden administration is continuing to provide weapons. I think the Biden administration has done a very good job in many areas, but an area where they failed I think is to pressure Israel to stop killing civilians. There needs to be a two-state solution. And one of the ironies right now it appears to me is that the United States is providing weapons to Israel, which are being used to kill civilians in Gaza. At the same time, we’re telling the Ukrainians that they can’t use weapons to attack Russia. Which doesn’t make any sense to me. It would seem to me that that’s a contradiction in terms of how you can allow Israel to use our weapons that we provide to attack Gaza, but Ukraine can’t use weapons that we provide against Russia. None of the other European countries make those prohibitions against Ukraine. So it’s very disturbing to me.

What advice would you give to Poles resisting the economic hit men?

Yeah, I think to be very, very smart. Be very careful of people that come and offer you something that seems too good to be true. As my grandfather used to say: “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is”. So be careful of people that come in and offer to build industrial and infrastructure facilities or offer big loans to do these things. Read between the lines. Look for the story behind the story. Always look for the story behind the story. Why are these people doing this? Just 9 times out of 10, it’s not done out of altruism – it’s done to gain something. Some of that can be done through altruism. That does happen, sometimes, but unfortunately it’s a fairly low probability; so just keep your eyes open and read between the lines and look for the story behind the story.

What kind of future do you think awaits the world?

The world is going to change, because we’ve created what we call a death economy., a degenerative economic system that is consuming and polluting itself toward self-destruction. There’s no question that today we have a failed economic system globally. The glaciers are melting, the oceans are rising, people are starving around the world. There’s outrageous wars, small wars, big wars, all kinds of wars. Species are going extinct. This is an economy that’s destroying itself. It’s done a lot of great things in the past. We’ve created amazing science – the fact we can have this conversation on Zoom is pretty incredible – and it’s created incredible medicine, technology, art, music, all kinds of things. But it’s gone too far. We must understand that it’s based on the premise of maximizing short term profits for corporations, regardless of the social and environmental costs and materialistic consumption for everybody. And that’s not working any longer. So, we’ve got to change. We’ve got to create a life economy, an economic system that’s regenerative, that pays people to clean up pollution – figure out ways to gather up all the plastic that’s floating around in the oceans and recycle it – regenerate destroyed environments – plant trees where forests that have been destroyed – and develop new technologies that create energy out of the air, out of water. Solar and wind are a step forward, but it’s just a pioneering effort. We need to move forward. I’m talking about an economic system that pays people to do good things, and it has as its goal maximizing long term benefits, for all life. Yes, corporations need to make some profit in order to continue, businesses do, but they don’t need to maximize short term profits. They can earn some short term profits but also invest in the futur, pay their employees decent salaries and give them healthcare and retirement pensions and so on. I’m not sure how that is in Poland, but in the United States that really doesn’t happen anymore. We’re moving into this phase where we must transition from a degenerative system to a regenerative system. If we don’t, then we’re looking at disaster, and I don’t want to believe that human beings are stupid enough to continue down a road to disaster. I devote my life to a hope, a belief, that we will change for the better, that we will create a life economy. It’s what I write about these days, it’s what I speak about, it’s what I devote my life to. And I do have great hope that it will happen. If I didn’t have hope, I wouldn’t be doing this interview. But I also realized the alternative is that we don’t do what needs to be done. And that’s what’s going to lead to disasters, to a lot more human suffering and animal suffering and environmental suffering. It’s likely going to lead to reductions in populations, but not in a good way – reduction of population violently. Who knows how – through more diseases, through nuclear war. Who knows? But we’re going to have to change. Probably in your lifetime, you’ll see some pretty radical changes. I have great hope in your generation, frankly, and also feel very apologetic and sad because my generation has put your generation in a very, very challenging situation. But the good news is challenges can be fun. So, try to have fun with making the changes.

It’s kind of heartwarming that you have so much hope that we can transform because, honestly, when I’m talking to people from my generation, we’re kind of losing hope – because the changes that you were describing are already happening, and there are still so many people that kind of either live in denial or just don’t want to do anything. But you’re right that there are a lot of people in my generation who want to make the world better.

Yeah, and, you know, not everybody has to agree by any means. We just need, what we call a critical mass. We don’t know what that is exactly, but I also have to say I took a lot of hope from when I was teaching at a MBA program in Shanghai, China. The MBA students there, had been hand selected by the Chinese Government as being the future leaders of China. And one of the things that really interested me was that the young Chinese MBA students said: “You know, we in China created an economic miracle. We had economic growth of about 10% a year for 30 years. Nobody else has ever done that. We brought 900 million people out of dire poverty. That was almost three times the population in the United States at the time. We created an economic miracle, but we did it at a terrible price environmentally and socially. But we created a miracle and now we, this generation of young people in China, we’ve suffered through horrible pollution. We don’t want that for our children. We’ve suffered through some pretty bad social disruptions. We don’t want that to happen to our children. So we want to create the next miracle, an environmental and social miracle. And we know we can create miracles here.” I loved hearing that. It was so powerful to hear them saying that, and I do hear young people in the United States say it too, and in Europe I’ve been speaking at these big events, this big music festival in the Czech Republic, three different years were a lot of young people express their desire to turn things around. And you know, there’s a consciousness revolution that we’re going through across the world where people are waking up to the fact that we’re in the process of destroying life as we know it. We’re doing that. And we’re becoming conscious of it, and that’s the first step. You have to change perceptions, and when you change perceptions, then you start changing actions, which then change reality. That’s where we need to focus now – what actions do we take to turn this around. As I travel around the world, speaking at different events I find that there’s a real awakening everywhere. However, whenever there’s a revolution of any kind, the status quo pushes back, those who have money and power don’t want to see change. I’ve been a martial artist most of my life, and I know as a martial artist that if I’m up against a guy who’s bigger and stronger than me, I don’t try to overpower him. I use his energy against him and I think we can take that model into where we are today, that when there’s pushback by the status quo we take energy from that, and we understand that they’re pushing back because they know they’re losing. So, this is the time for the people who are really determined to make change, to take heart, and to understand that the resistance against that should give us strength to move forward and push for more and more change because we know that has to happen.

To summarize, I feel like we are very blessed to be alive right now, because there’s this tremendous opportunity to do something that human beings have never done before. We’re on the verge of a huge movement that history will look back on and, if we’re successful, say: “Thank God they did what they did.” If we’re not successful, there won’t be any historians in the future to look back on this time! [laughs]

Everywhere I go, I’m very encouraged by the number of people who are waking up, who want to make change, so I think that I’m lucky, because I get to hear these people, and I do want to inspire people to continue to work to make the necessary changes. If I do ever up in Poland, giving a talk, I’ll talk about all the things we’ve done that are wrong because those are interesting stories, and they set the stage, but then the ending is always, “But what can you do?” And here’s what you can do: I tell people to ask themselves five different questions that lead up to what they can do, which are in my book.

The first question is: “What do I most want to do for the rest of my life? What will bring me the greatest satisfaction?” It’s a really important question to ask ourselves at all stages of life, and I would answer that by saying: “I want to write. I love to write. I’m writing right now. I’m writing a novel.”And I have a friend who’s at the opposite end of the spectrum. He’s a carpenter, he says: “I want to work with my hands and wood”.

And the second question is: ,,How do I do this in a way that helps transform the death economy to a life economy?” And I would say: ,,Well, I’m gonna write books that inspire people to do that”. And my Carpenter friend would say: ,,Well, I’m only going to use sustainable materials, and I’m going to plant a tree for every tree that’s cut for the wood that I use”.

The third question is: ,,Well, then what’s stopping me? What’s keeping me from doing this?” And I would say as a writer: “I know I’ve got to write for at least two hours a day if I want to be a successful writer. I just don’t have time”. And my carpenter friend would say: “my clients don’t want to spend the extra money for me to plant trees or use sustainable woods”.

And so the fourth question is: ,,When I change my perception, what happens? How do I change my perception?” And my answer would be: ,,Well, I could turn off the television for two hours every night and write, or get up a little earlier every morning and write”. And my carpenter friend would say: “I’m going to tell my clients that if they pay a little extra money for sustainable wood, it’s not a cost, it’s an investment in the future. They’re investing in the future”.

And then the 5th question is: ,,What actions do I take immediately?” Well, the writer has to sit down and start writing, and the carpenter builds cabinets or houses out of sustainable wood and tells his clients: ,,We’re doing this for a reason. We’re doing this for the future, it’s an investment”. So I think every one of us, whether you’re a teacher or a student or a parent or a child or a plumber or carpenter, or a journalist. Whatever you are, you can always ask yourself these five questions. And ask them fairly frequently, because at least the last three will change periodically.

But we all can play a role in this amazing time, when we’re going through this soul-searching and know that we must transform what it means to be human beings, being human on this planet? This is an amazing time to be alive, doing this.

Agata Zadrożna, Rafał Górski