Letter from Lhasa, number 189. (Perkins 2006): Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi
Perkins, J., Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, Plume, 2006.
(Perkins 2006).
John Perkins
EHM: Economic Hit Man
EHMs: Economic Hit Men
As usual, in “government”/powers’ positions, psychopaths manipulate other psychopaths. If they wanted you knew these aspects [(Perkins 2006)], it was because they were absolutely indifferent to such publicity and they even had and have some or a lot of benefits from such “denunciations”. Differently, such a psychopath now simulating repentance could be easily neutralised, in a way or in another.
“My publisher asked whether we actually referred to ourselves as economic hit men. I assured that we did, although usually only by the initials. In fact, on the day in 1971 when I began working with my teacher Claudine, she informed me, “My assignment is to mold you into an economic hit man. No one can know about your involvement – not even your wife.” Then she turned serious. “Once you are in, you’re in for life.”
“Claudine’s role is a fascinating example of the manipulation that underlies the business I had entered. Beautiful and intelligent, she was highly effective; she understood my weaknesses and used them to her greatest advantage. Her job and the way she executed it exemplify the subtlety of the people behind this system.
“Claudine pulled no punches when describing what I would be called upon to do. My job, she said, was “to encourage world leaders to become part of a vast network that promotes U.S. commercial interests. In the end, those leaders become ensnared in a web of debt that ensures their loyalty. We can draw on them whenever we desire – to satisfy our political, economic, or military needs. In turn, they bolster their political positions by bringing industrial parks, power plants, and airports to their people. The owners of U.S. engineering/construction companies become fabulously wealthy.”
(Perkins 2006, p. xiii-xiv)
“Fascinating”?! Cleverness?! Subtlety? Just mercenaries dealing with other mercenaries and knowing that as they are scrupleless, others will be equally scrupleless. All the State/“government” psychotic criminals recruited for criminal State/“government” or para-State/“government” duty are equally recruited for “great” “tasks”. Tortures, assassinations, devastations, “economic” annihilations etc obey to the same logic and use similar mob, with similar recruiting, persuasion and “educational” techniques and procedures. Depressed mob feels suddenly important because pushed to commit insanities and crimes under State/“government” cover.
State/“government” pimps recruit State/“government” mob.
These State/“government” psychotic criminals self-convince themselves and tell everybody that they are altruistic good chaps. Actually, behind them, frequently intertwined with them, there are powerful military apparatuses, or even, simply, just stacks of bureaucrats in uniform or in plain clothes, eventually inefficient and corrupted, although anyway interested to perpetuate their jobs so to demonstrate [to taxpayers] that they are indispensable. And since they made and administer laws, there is a structural illegality. They make the law, and they check and impose that the same law they administer work for themselves. Even when they exhibit repentance, they forget that. Legality is the cover of illegality, since the administration of the law is not and cannot be independent from their wills.
“The subtlety of this modern empire building puts the Roman centurions, the Spanish conquistadors, and the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European colonial powers to shame. We EHMs are crafty; we learned from history. Today we do not carry weapons. We do not wear armor or clothes that set us apart. In countries like Ecuador, Nigeria, and Indonesia, we dress like local schoolteachers and shop owners. In Washington and Paris, we look like government bureaucrats and bankers. We appear humble, normal. We visit project sites and stroll through impoverished villages. We profess altruism, talk with local papers about the wonderful humanitarian things we are doing. We cover the conference tables of government committees with our spreadsheets and financial projections, and we lecture at the Harvard Business School about the miracles of macroeconomics. We are on the record, in the open. Or so we portray ourselves and so are we accepted. It is how the system works. We seldom resort to anything illegal because the system itself is built on subterfuge, and the system is by definition legitimate.”
(Perkins 2006, p. xxiv-xxv)
They do the law. They control the judges. The judges state that they are “the legality” and those who opposes them are the criminals [generally equally working for State/“government” services, if they belong to the organised criminality].
The author was identified as a very clever psychopathic, so easily seducible from power, and from the consequent need to serve and to feel exalted from the gratifications of its services. “Claudine” instructed him, screwed him and, finished the job, passed to do the same with somebody else. Alcohol and narcotics fill lives, if people need something else, and terminate lives when people cannot go on any more. There are billions’ people... ...Nobody is indispensable. Everybody is replaceable.
He was instructed to offer to different countries some basic services and structures perceived as indispensable from some development, to “scientifically” demonstrate what he offered was indispensable, to create financial and other mechanism imprisoned “his” customers in chronic debts, debts for common people [the mass of tax payers, in a way or in another] while compradoro oligarchies had personal material advantages. In practice, one offers the illusion of developments, while the Empire centres have only incoming flows of funds and merchandises for the “help” they provide, while the beneficiaries of such pseudo-development have only eternal dependence and costs, even when naturally rich of precious raw materials and other resources. Various technicalities permitted to get such results. He learnt them and skilfully applied them. Firstly, his immediate environment pushed him to such job. Later he was pushed in different or partially different directions, or anyway to look critically to what he was doing. Finally, he wrote his experiences, how he was bought and re-bought, and how from hit man of the butchers’ system he became its nurse.
If one already knows the matter, the book is of great interest, but since some field information it provides, not for its “philosophy” or when the author pretends to be normative. From these last aspects, the book is decidedly deceptive. It is only very interesting and useful if one already knows these questions.
There are some aspects one has to consider.
The book in centred on the denunciation of the U.S. imperial system. It avoids the British one. Also other imperial and sub-imperial systems founded on some legal, financial and military subordination, instead of essentially on the excellence of the imperial centres, are absolutely similar. In fact, this book is published from the Penguin Group and with world promotion and diffusion.
Just the author becomes a nurse of the imperialist system, he pretends to sell the ideology of alternative technologies and way of living. They are just illusions, sold on the illusions’ market and functional to the perpetuation of imperialist systems.
It is not true that one should provide solutions, alternatives and hopes. There are no solutions. There no alternatives. There is no hope. The access to sciences may be eventually free. Technologies inevitably follow paths, patterns, procedures. People are generally louses doing what is told them. Those who tell them what to do are not freer and more independent. Bosses or leaders are generally not freer, more independent or wiser than subjects. The EHMs becoming anti-EHMs continue to be functional to the EHMs system.
So, what is the REAL solution? There is NO solution. So, what people should do? Do NOTHING or do whatever you want but without any illusion. Simply, the world and the people do not work in this imaginary way of “good” people and of suddenly converted people suggesting good feelings and good “economic” behaviours. They diffuse illusion only for letting “the system” continuing keeping people in slavery.
So, how people should be made less slavish? Why do you think that people should be or would like to be less slavish? Perhaps, they like what they are!
Perkins, J., Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, Plume, 2006.
