A Game As Old As Empire: The Secret World of Economic Hit Men and the Web of Global Corruption by Steven Hiatt (PDF)

Description

John Perkins’ controversial and bestselling exposé, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, revealed for the first time the secret world of economic hit men (EHMs). But Perkins’ Confessions contained only a small piece of this sinister puzzle. The full story is far bigger, deeper, and darker than Perkins’ personal account revealed. Here other EHMs, journalists, and investigators join Perkins to tell their own stories, providing the first probing and expansive look into this pervasive web of systematic corruption. With chapters spotlighting how specific countries around the globe have been subverted, A Game As Old As Empire uncovers the inner workings of the institutions behind these economic manipulations. The contributors detail concrete examples of how the “economic hit man game” is still being played: an officer of an offshore bank hiding hundreds of millions of dollars in stolen money, IMF advisers slashing Ghana’s education and health programs, a mercenary defending a European oil company in Nigeria, a consultant rewriting Iraqi oil law, and executives financing warlords to secure supplies of coltan ore in Congo. Together they show how this system of corruption and plunder operates in real life, and reveal the price that the rest of the world must pay as a result. Most important, A Game As Old As Empire connects the dots, showing how the various pieces of this system come together to create the world’s first truly global empire.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: From the Publisher Review by Common Ground Magazine March, 2007 Written by Adrian Zupp In 2004, John Perkins’ Confessions of an Economic Hitman created waves, spoke the unspeakable and became a New York Times bestseller. In it Perkins came clean about how he’d helped US intelligence agencies and multinationals exploit the economies of Third World nations. A Game As Old As Empire – for which he wrote the introduction – is the follow-up, and this time a wide variety of in-the-know authors corroborate and expand upon Perkins’ story. And it’s frightening stuff. In plain language – and providing sufficient historical background – we are shown how First Word countries have used “economic hit men,” institutions like the World Bank and IMF, coercion and even outright strong-arm tactics to steal from the developing countries – often in collusion with the elites of those countries who are happy to hide their ill-gotten gain in offshore accounts. A Game As Old As Empire is well referenced, very readable and perversely entertaining. Hard data is combined with first-person narratives and the machinations of international economics are made accessible for the layperson. And the book goes one step further by offering hope and practical advice. The chapter “Global Uprising: The Web of Resistance” by policy-analyst Antonia Juhasz sheds light on how people can change the corruption and help create a better world. There is also an appendix: “Resources for Hope.” With chapters such as “The Human Cost of Cheap Cell Phones” and “Hijacking Iraq’s Oil Reserves,” Game has a conscience-pricking currency. This is an important book that should be read by anyone who wants to know how the world is run to the advantage of the wealthy few and the malicious disadvantage of the many poor. About the Author Steven Hiatt is an editor and writer who has worked for Apple Computer and Stanford Research Institute. He is the editor (with Mike Davis) of Fire in the Hearth: The Radical Politics of Place in America and is president of Editcetera, a cooperative of publishing professionals. Ellen Augustine’s passion to create a just, peaceful, and sustainable world has led her to run for U.S. Congress and found/cofound four nonprofits focusing on media violence, mentoring at-risk youth, citizen diplomacy, and environmental restoration. She co-authored (as Ellen Schwartz) Taking Back Our Lives in the Age of Corporate Dominance from an optimism that simultaneously recognizes the urgency of our times and the power of intention and conscious action. She currently speaks on “Stories of Hope”: profiles of people who are creating businesses that increase profits by being eco-friendly, communi- ties and schools that nurture and sustain us, and initiatives that revitalize our environment (www.storiesof hope.us). She has been a voice for the common good—balancing the present and future needs of people and the planet in all decisions—on numerous radio and television shows, and in magazines such as Utne Reader. She has served on several nonprofit boards, including the National Women’s Political Caucus and the Sierra Club. Following a varied career in industry and technical education, Steve Berkman joined the World Bank’s Africa Region Group in 1983. Hired to provide advice and assistance on capacity-building components for Bank-funded projects, he worked in twenty-one countries. Within a few years, he realized that the Bank’s approach to economic development was a failure, but his attempts to convince management of the extent of the problem went unheeded until the arrival of President James Wolfensohn in 1995. Retiring in that same year, he was called back to the Bank from 1998 to 2002 to help establish the Anti- Corruption and Fraud Investigation Unit and was a lead investigator on a number of cases. Since 2002 he has provided assistance to the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on legislation calling for reform of the multilateral development banks and Senate consideration of the United Nations Convention Against Corruption. He is currently finishing a manuscript on the World Bank that provides an inside look at the Bank’s management, its lending operations, and the theft of billions of dollars from its lending portfolio. He lives in Leesburg, Virginia. The English novelist Somerset Maugham famously described Monaco, the Mediterranean tax haven, as a “sunny place for shady people.” In the mid- 1980s, economist John Christensen returned to Jersey, a not-so-sunny place for shady people in the English Channel, to investigate how these offshore tax havens work. During the boom years of financial deregulation he worked as a trust and company administrator and as economic adviser to the island’s government. Though committed to principles of fair trade and social justice, he became involved in a globalized offshore financial industry that facilitates capital flight, tax evasion, and money laundering. In 1998 he resigned from his post on Jersey, moved with his family to the UK, and became a founder member of a campaign to highlight how tax havens cause poverty. He currently directs the International Secretariat of the Tax Justice Network (www. taxjustice.net). S.C. Gwynne is executive editor of Texas Monthly, having previously been a correspondent for Time magazine. After receiving a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1977, he was awarded a teaching fellowship in the writing seminars program under novelist John Barth at Johns Hopkins. But his writing career bracketed a five-year career managing international loan portfolios in the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia, first for Cleveland Trust and later in the Hong Kong office of First Interstate Bank of California. In the 1980s, Gwynne left banking to become a freelance writer, contributing to a number of publications including Harper’s, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Monthly, and California Magazine. He wrote his first book, Selling Money: A Young Banker’s Account of the Rise and Extraordinary Fall of the Great International Lending Boom in 1985. In 1991, Gwynne and fellow Time correspondent Jonathan Beatty won the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Financial Reporting for their stories on the BCCI scandal for Time and the Jack Anderson Award as top investigative reporters of the year. Their subsequent book, The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI, was named by Business Week magazine as one of the top ten books of the year. James S. Henry is a leading investigative journalist, economist, and lawyer who has written extensively about economic issues, developing countries, corruption, and money laundering. His news-breaking stories have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Nation, Fortune, Jornal do Brasil, Slate, and El Financiero. Henry’s investigations yielded documentary evidence that was instrumental in the 1992 conviction of Pan- ama’s Manuel Noriega; the tracking of offshore assets stolen by Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner; identifying the role played by foreign loans to the Philippines Central Bank in the enrichment of Ferdinand Marcos; and docu- menting the role played by major U.S. banks in facilitating capital flight, mon- ey laundering, and tax evasion in developing countries. He is the author of several books, including The Economics of Strategic Planning (Lexington Books, 1986) and The Blood Bankers (Avalon, 2003), and a contributor to Of Bonds and Bondage: A Reader on Philippines Foreign Debt, edited by Emmanuel S. De Dios and Joel Rocamora (TNI, 1992). His new book, Pirate Bankers, is forthcoming from Avalon in 2007. He is the author of a leading study of tax compliance by the American Bar Association’s Section of Taxation, and has testified several times before the U.S. Senate. Henry is currently managing director of the Sag Harbor Group, a strategy consulting firm. His newsblog, SubmergingMarkets (www.submergingmarkets.com), tracks developing countries and features contributing journalists from around the globe. He and his two children live in New York City and Sag Harbor, New York. Antonia Juhasz is a visiting scholar at the Washington, D.C.–based Institute for Policy Studies and author of The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time (ReganBooks/HarperCollins, 2006), which explores the Bush administration’s use of the military to advance a corporate globalization agenda in Iraq and throughout the Middle East (www.TheBushAgenda.net). Juhasz previously served as the project director of the International Forum on Globalization and as a legislative assistant to Congressmen John Conyers Jr. and Elijah Cummings. An award-winning writer, Juhasz appears regularly in the Op-Ed pages of the Los Angeles Times as well as numerous other newspapers and publications. She is a contributing author to Alternatives to Economic Globalization: A Better World Is Possible (Berrett-Koehler, 2004). She lives in San Francisco. Kathleen Kern has worked with Christian Peacemaker Teams since 1993. CPT “provides organizational support to persons committed to faith-based nonviolent alternatives in situations where lethal conflict is an immediate reality or is supported by public policy” (see www.cpt.org). However, teams in Haiti, Chiapas, and other locations have found that once the risk of lethal physical violence ends, the economic violence cemented in place by the cor- poratocracy can cause as much, if not more, suffering. Kern has served on assignments in Haiti, Palestine, Chiapas, South Dakota, Colombia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. She was a member of a fact-finding delegation to the eastern regions of the Democratic Republic of Congo in autumn 2005, where she gathered information that appears in this book. Kern says that she may be unique among the contributors in that she has never taken an economics or business course, so she recently married someone with a degree in economics who could vet her articles. Lucy Komisar is a New York–based journalist who traveled in the developing world in the 1980s and 1990s writing about movements to overthrow the des- pots who were running many of the countries she visited. When she talked to oppositionists in such places as the Philippines, Haiti, and Zaire, they in- variably said this about their local dictator: “He’s looted the country, stolen everything, and it’s all in Swiss banks.” The phrase was, as she discovered, shorthand for a parallel international financial system run by the world’s largest banks using secret accounts and shell companies in offshore havens like the Cayman Islands and Jersey to hide and move the money of dictators, corrupt officials, drug and people traffickers, terrorists, business fraudsters, stock manipulators, and corporate and wealthy tax cheats—and that their political power kept Western governments from acting against the system. Beginning in 1997, she shifted her focus to reportage about offshore banking. Much of what she has published over the last ten years (see www.thekomisarscoop. com) has never been published elsewhere. Based on her investigations, she is writing a book to be called Take the Money and Run Offshore. James Marriott, artist, ecological activist, and naturalist, has been a co-director of PLATFORM since 1983 (www.platformlondon.org). As part of PLAT- FORM he brings together individuals from a diversity of disciplines to create projects working for social and ecological justice. Since 1996 his work has focused on the oil and gas industry and its global impacts. He is the co-author, with Andy Rowell and Lorne Stockman, of The Next Gulf: London, Washington and the Oil Conflict in Nigeria (Constable, 2005). Greg Muttitt is a researcher at PLATFORM, a London-based organization working on issues of environmental and social justice. He specializes in the impacts of multinational oil corporations of human rights, development, and the environment. Since 2003 he has monitored and worked to expose the hid- den plans to open Iraq’s oil reserves to Western corporations for the first time since 1972. Muttitt has also researched and campaigned on British Petroleum’s Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline, including co-authoring the 2002 book Some Common Concerns, on Shell’s Sakhalin II oil and gas project in Russia’s Far East, and on a number of other oil industry activities around the world. John Perkins currently writes and teaches about achieving peace and prosperity by expanding our personal awareness and transforming our institutions. He founded an alternative energy company that successfully changed the U.S. utility industry. From 1971 to 1981, he worked for the international consulting firm of Chas. T. Main, where he held the titles of chief economist and man- ager of economics and regional planning—but in reality was an economic hit man. He continued to keep his EHM role under wraps until the events of September 11, 2001, convinced him to expose this shadowy and secret side of his life. The resulting book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (Berrett-Koehler, 2004), spent more than twenty-five weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List and has sold over 500,000 copies around the world. Bruce Rich is a senior attorney at Environmental Defense in Washington, D.C. Enjoying improbable challenges, he is involved in research and advocacy to reform export credit agencies, an undertaking that he concedes makes tilting at windmills seem by comparison an undemanding occupation. (See www. eca-watch.org.) He the author of Mortgaging the Earth (Beacon Press, Boston, and Earthscan, London, 1994), an environmental exposé and history of the World Bank that was widely acclaimed in reviews ranging from the New York Times to Le Monde Diplomatique. He has worked as a consultant for numerous international organizations, has testified many times before the U.S. Congress concerning U.S. participation in international financial institutions, and has been awarded the United Nations Environment Program Global 500 Award for Environmental Achievement. His most recent book, To Uphold the World: War Globalization and the Ethical Revolution of Ancient India’s Greatest Emperor, is being published by Penguin India in mid-2007. Andrew Rowell has often thought there must be better ways of making a living. He has been writing about economic hit men, transnational companies, and the underbelly of the global economy for fifteen years as an award-winning freelance writer and investigative journalist. Rowell has written three books, the last with James Marriott and Lorne Stockman: The Next Gulf: Lon- don, Washington and Oil Conflict in Nigeria (Constable, 2005). He writes a bi- monthly column for Alkhaleej, the second-largest selling Arabic newspaper in the Gulf and is a director of the nonprofit company Public Interest Investigations, which runs the Web sites SpinWatch.org and NuclearSpin.org. A tobacco PR man once described Rowell as “their public enemy number one,” whereas the man from Shell Oil said simply: “Oh no, not him again.” Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. John Perkins links his experiences to new revelations that expose the drive for empire that lies behind the rhetoric of globalization. Introduction: New Confessions and Revelations from the World of Economic Hit Men John Perkins Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign “aid” organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet’s natural resources. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization. I should know; I was an EHM. I wrote that opening paragraph to Confessions of an Economic Hit Man as a description of my own profession. Since the book’s first publication in early November 2004, I have heard TV, radio, and event hosts read those words many times as they introduced me to their audiences. The reality of EHMs shocked people in the United States and other countries. Many have told me that it convinced them to commit themselves to taking actions that will make this a better world. The public interest aroused by Confessions was not a foregone conclusion. I spent a great deal of time working up the courage to try to publish it. Once I made the decision to do so, my attempts got off to a rocky start. By late 2003, the manuscript had been circulated to many publishers—and I had almost given up on ever seeing the book in print. Despite praising it as “riveting,” “eloquently written,” “an important exposé,” and “a story that must be told,” publisher after publisher—twenty-five, in fact—rejected it. My literary agent and I concluded that it was just too anti-corporatocracy. (A word introduced to most readers in those pages, corporatocracy refers to the powerful group of people who run the world’s biggest corporations, the most powerful governments, and history’s first truly global empire.) The major publishing houses, we concluded, were too intimidated by, or perhaps too beholden to, the corporate elite. Eventually a courageous independent publisher, Berrett-Koehler, took the book on. Confessions’ success among the public astounded me. During its first week in bookstores it went to number 4 on Amazon.com. Then it spent many weeks on every major bestseller list. In less than fourteen months, it had been translated into and published in twenty languages. A major Hollywood company purchased the option to film it. Penguin/Plume bought the paperback rights. Despite all these successes, an important element was still missing. The major U.S. media refused to discuss Confessions or the fact that, because of it, terms such as EHM, corporatocracy, and jackal were now appearing on college syllabuses. The New York Times and other newspapers had to include it on their bestseller lists—after all, numbers don’t lie (unless an EHM produces them, as you will see in the following pages)—but during its first fifteen months in print most of them obstinately declined to review it. Why? My agent, my publicist, the best minds at Berrett-Koehler and Penguin/Plume, my family, my friends, and I may never know the real answer to that question. What we do know is that several nationally recognized journalists appeared poised on the verge of writing or speaking about the book. They conducted “pre-interviews” with me by phone and dispatched producers to wine and dine my wife and me. But, in the end, they declined. A major TV network convinced me to interrupt a West Coast speaking tour, fly across the country to New York, and dress up in a television-blue sports coat. Then—as I waited at the door for the network’s limo—an employee called to cancel. Whenever media apologists offered explanations for such actions, they took the form of questions: “Can you prove the existence of other EHMs?” “Has anyone else written about these things?” “Have others in high places made similar disclosures?” The answer to these questions is, of course, yes. Every major incident described in the book has been discussed in detail by other authors—usually lots of other authors. The CIA’s coup against Iran’s Mossadegh; the atrocities committed by his replacement, Big Oil’s puppet, the Shah; the Saudi Arabian money-laundering affair; the jackal-orchestrated assassinations of Ecuador’s President Jaime Roldós and Panama’s President Omar Torrijos; allegations of collusion between oil companies and missionary groups in the Amazon; the international activities of Bechtel, Halliburton, and other pillars of American capitalism; the unilateral and unprovoked U.S. invasion of Panama and capture of Manuel Noriega; the coup against Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez—these and the other events in the book are a matter of public record. Several pundits criticized what some referred to as my “radical accusation”—that economic forecasts are manipulated and distorted in order to achieve political objectives (as opposed to economic objectivity) and that foreign “aid” is a tool for big business rather than an altruistic means to alleviate poverty. However, both of these transgressions against the true purposes of sound economics and altruism have been well documented by a multitude of people, including a former World Bank chief economist and winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, Joseph Stiglitz. In his book Globalization and Its Discontents, Stiglitz writes: To make its [the IMF’s] programs seem to work, to make the numbers “add up,” economic forecasts have to be adjusted. Many users of these numbers do not realize that they are not like ordinary forecasts; in these instances GDP forecasts are not based on a sophisticated statistical model, or even on the best estimates of those who know the economy well, but are merely the numbers that have been negotiated as part of an IMF program. …1 Globalization, as it has been advocated, often seems to replace the old dictatorships of national elites with new dictatorships of international finance…. For millions of people globalization has not worked…. They have seen their jobs destroyed and their lives become more insecure.2 I found it interesting that during my first book tour—for the hardcover edition, in late 2004 and early 2005—I sometimes heard questions from my audiences that reflected the mainstream press. However, they were significantly diminished during the paperback edition tour in early 2006. The level of sophistication among readers had risen over the course of that year. A growing suspicion that the mainstream press was collaborating with the corporatoc-racy—which, of course, owned much of it or at least supported it through advertising—had become manifest. While I would love to credit Confessions for this transformation in public attitude, my book has to share that honor with a number of others, such as Stiglitz’s Globalization and Its Discontents, David Korten’s When Corporations Rule the World, Noam Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival, Chalmers Johnson’s Sorrows of Empire, Jeff Faux’s Global Class War, and Antonia Juhasz’s Bush Agenda, as well as films such as The Constant Gardener, Syriana, Hotel Rwanda, Good Night, and Good Luck, and Munich. The American public recently has been treated to a feast of exposés. Mine is definitely not a voice in the wilderness. Despite the overwhelming evidence that the corporatocracy has created the world’s first truly global empire, inflicted increased misery and poverty on millions of people around the planet, managed to sabotage the principles of self-determination, justice, and freedom that form the foundations upon which the United States stands, and turned a country that was lauded at the end of World War II as democracy’s savior into one that is feared, resented, and hated, the mainstream press ignores the obvious. In pleasing the money-men and the executives upstairs, many journalists have turned their backs on the truth. When approached by my publicists, they continue to ask: “Where are the trenches?” “Can you produce the trowels that dug them?” “Have any ‘objective’ researchers confirmed your story?” Although the evidence was already available, Berrett-Koehler and I decided that the proper response was to answer such questions in terms that no one could ignore and that only those who insisted on remaining in denial could dispute. We would publish a book with many contributors, an anthology, further revealing the world of economic hit men and how it works. In Confessions, I talked about a world rooted in the cold war, in the dynamics and proxy conflicts of the U.S.-Soviet conflict. My sojourn in that war ended in 1981, a quarter of a century ago. Since then, and especially since the collapse of the USSR, the dynamics of empire have changed. The world is now more multipolar and mercantile, with China and Europe emerging to compete with the U.S. Empire is heavily driven by multinational corporations, whose interests transcend those of any particular nation-state.3 There are new multinational institutions and trade agreements, such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) and North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and newly articulated ideologies and programs, such as neoliberalism and the structural adjustments and conditionalities imposed by the IMF. But one thing remains unchanged: the peoples of the Third World continue to suffer; their future, if anything, looks even bleaker than it did in the early 1980s. A quarter-century ago, I saw myself as a hit man for the interests of U.S. capitalism in the struggle for control of the developing world during the cold war. Today, the EHM game is more complex, its corruption more pervasive, and its operations more fundamental to the world economy and politics. There are many more types of economic hit men, and the roles they play are far more diverse. The veneer of respectability remains a key factor; subterfuges range from money laundering and tax evasion carried out in well-appointed office suites to activities that amount to economic war crimes and result in the deaths of millions of people. The chapters that follow reveal this dark side of globalization, showing a system that depends on deception, extortion, and often violence: an officer of an offshore bank hiding hundreds of millions in stolen money, IMF advisors slashing Ghana’s education and health programs, a Chinese bureaucrat seeking oil concessions in Africa, a mercenary defending a European oil company in Nigeria, a consultant rewriting Iraqi oil law, and executives financing warlords to secure supplies of coltan ore in Congo. The main obstacle to compiling such stories should be obvious. Most EHMs do not think it is in their best interests to talk about their jobs. Many are still actively employed in the business. Those who have stepped away often receive pensions, consultant fees, and other perks from their former employers. They understand that whistle-blowers usually sacrifice such benefits—and sometimes much more. Most of us who have done that type of work pride ourselves on loyalty to old comrades. Once one of us decides to take the big leap—“into the cold,” to use CIA vernacular—we know we will have to face the harsh reality of powerful forces arrayed to protect the institutional power of multinational corporations, global banks, government defense and security agencies, international agencies—and the small elite that runs them. In recent years, the people charged with deceiving ordinary citizens have grown more cunning. The Pentagon Papers and the White House Watergate tapes taught them the dangers of writing and recording incriminating details. The Enron, Arthur Andersen, and WorldCom scandals, and recent allegations about CIA “extraordinary renditions,” weapons of mass destruction deceits, and National Security Agency eavesdropping serve to reinforce policies that favor shredding. Government officials who expose a CIA agent to retaliate against her whistle-blowing spouse go unpunished. All these events lead to the ultimate deterrent to speaking the truth: those who expose the corporatocracy can expect to be assassinated—financially and by reputation, if not with a bullet. Less obvious deterrents also keep people from telling the truth. Opening one’s soul for public scrutiny, confessing, is not fun. I had written many books before Confessions (five of them published). Yet none prepared me for the angst I would encounter while exposing my transgressions as an EHM. Although most of us humans do not want to think of ourselves as corrupt, weak, or immoral, it is difficult—if not impossible—to ignore those aspects of ourselves when describing our lives as economic hit men. Personally, it was one of the most difficult tasks I have ever undertaken. In approaching prospective contributors to a book such as this I might tell them that confessing is, in the end, worth the anguish. However, for someone setting out on this path, that end seems very distant. I discussed these obstacles and the potential benefits of overcoming them with Steve Piersanti, the intrepid founder and CEO of Berrett-Koehler, who made the decision to publish Confessions. It did not take us long to decide that the benefits were well worth the struggle. If my Confessions could send such a strong message to the public, it made sense that multiple confessions—or stories about people who need to confess—might reach even more people and motivate them to take actions that will turn this empire back into the democratic republic it was intended to be. Our goal was nothing less than convincing the American public that we can and must create a future that will make our children and grandchildren—and their brothers and sisters on every continent—proud of us. Of course we had to start by showing journalists the trowels and the trenches. We decided that we should also include well-researched analyses by observers who came from a more objective perspective, rather than a personal one. A balance between firsthand and third-party accounts seemed like the prudent approach. Steve took it upon himself to find someone who could be an editor and also serve as a sleuth: he’d have to ferret out prospective writers and convince them that loyalty to country, family, and future generations on every continent demanded that they participate in this book. After an extensive selection process, he, his staff, and I settled on Steven Hiatt. Steve is a professional editor—but he also has a long history as an activist, first against the Vietnam War and then as a teachers’ union organizer. In addition, he worked for a number of years at Stanford Research Institute, a think tank and consultancy organization serving multinationals and government agencies around the world and closely linked to Bechtel, Bank of America, and other players in the EHM world. There he worked on research reports that he describes as essentially “the corporatocracy talking to itself.” Once the process of assembling this anthology began, I started speaking about it. When people asked those questions—“Can you prove the existence of other EHMs?” “Has anyone else written about these things?” “Have others made similar disclosures?”—I told them about the upcoming book. The wisdom of making that decision to publish an anthology was supported on February 19, 2006, when the New York Times ran a major article that featured Confessions on the front page of its Sunday Business Section. The editors, I am sure, were comforted by the results of a background check confirming my account of my life and the episodes described in Confessions; however, the fact that other EHMs and researchers had committed to writing this book was, I suspect, the most important factor in their decision to publish that article. The contributors to this book uncover events that have taken place across a wide range of countries, all EHM game plans under a variety of guises. Each sheds more light on the building of an empire that is contrary to American principles of democracy and equality. The chapters are presented in an order that follows the flow of money and power in the Global Empire. The chart on page 10 shows that progression: the selling of loans to Third World countries, the flow of dirty money back to First World control via secret offshore accounts, the failure of debt-led development models to reduce poverty, the accumulation of mountains of unpayable debt, the gutting of local economies by the IMF, and military intervention and domination to secure access to resources. Steve Hiatt, in “Global Empire,” gives an overview of the web of control that First World companies and institutions use to rule the global economy; each subsequent chapter exposes another facet. In brief summary: • S.C. Gwynne joined Cleveland Trust and quickly moved into the heady atmosphere of international banking, where he learned that ability to pay had little to do with placing loans. In “Selling Money—and Dependency: Setting the Debt Trap” he describes a culture of business corruption in which local elites and international banks build mutually supportive relationships based on debts that will have to be repaid by ordinary citizens. • John Christensen worked for a trust company on the offshore banking haven of Jersey, one of Britain’s Channel Islands. There he found himself at the center of the EHM world, part of a global offshore banking industry that facilitates tax evasion, money laundering, and capital flight. In “Dirty Money” he reveals the workings of a system that enables the theft of billions from Third World (and First World) citizens; the lures of an opulent lifestyle; and why he decided to get out. • The Bank of Credit and Commerce International was for two decades a key player in offshore/underground banking. It provided off-the-books/ illegal transactions for a startling range of customers—from the CIA to the Medellín cartel to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. In “BCCI’s Double Game,” Lucy Komisar recounts the bank’s rapid rise and fall—and its $13 billion bankruptcy. • Congo remains one of the world’s poorest countries and is caught in a civil war that has cost at least 4 million lives over the last ten years, with western multinationals financing militias and warlords to ensure access to gold, diamonds, and coltan. In “The Human Cost of Cheap Cell Phones,” Kathleen Kern provides an eyewitness account of the high price the Congolese have paid to bring cheap electronics to First World consumers. • Some 30 percent of America’s supply of oil is expected to come from Africa in the next ten years, but U.S. and UK oil companies will be competing with China for access to these reserves. Local communities have been campaigning to gain a share of this new wealth and to prevent environmental destruction of their region. In “Mercenaries on the Front Lines in the New Scramble for Africa,” Andrew Rowell and James Marriott tell how a British expat security officer found himself in the middle of this struggle for oil and power. • According to most estimates Iraq has the world’s second largest oil reserves—and access to Iraq’s oil has been one of the essential elements of U.S. foreign policy. The occupation regime is planning to sign oil production sharing agreements with U.S. and UK companies that will cost the Iraqi people $200 billion that they need to rebuild their country. In “Hijacking Iraq’s Oil Reserves,” Greg Muttitt reveals the EHM behind this high-level hit. • “Have you brought the money?” a Liberian official asked World Bank staffer Steve Berkman, clearly expecting him to hand over a satchel full of cash. In “The World Bank and the $100 Billion Question,” Berkman provides an insider’s account of how and why the Bank looks the other way as corrupt elites steal funds intended for development aid. • In the 1970s, the Philippines were a showcase for the World Bank’s debt-based model of development and modernization. In “The Philippines, the World Bank, and the Race to the Bottom,” Ellen Augustine tells how billions in loans were central to U.S. efforts to prop up the Marcos dictatorship, with the World Bank serving as a conduit. • Export credit agencies have a single job: to enrich their countries’ corporations by making it easier for poor countries to buy their products and services. In “Exporting Destruction,” Bruce Rich turns a spotlight on the secretive world of ECAs and the damage they have caused in selling nuclear plants to countries that cannot manage them and pushing arms in war-torn regions. • The G8 finance ministers announced before their Gleneagles meeting that they had agreed on $40 billion of debt relief for eighteen Third World countries. In “The Mirage of Debt Relief,” James S. Henry, an investigative journalist, economist, and lawyer, shows how little debt relief has actually been granted—and why dozens of countries remain caught in the West’s debt trap. Feel free to read the chapters according to your interests. Skip around, focus on one geographic area at a time or on one particular discipline, if you wish. Then turn to Antonia Juhasz’s “Global Uprising” to learn what you can do to resist global domination by the corporatocracy. As you read, please allow yourself to think about and feel the implications of the actions described for the world and for our children and grandchildren. Permit your passions to rise to the surface. Feel compelled to take action. It is essential that we—you and I—do something. We must transform our country back into one that reflects the values of our Declaration of Independence and the other principles we were raised to honor and defend. We must begin today to re-create the world the corporatocracy has inflicted on us. This book presents a series of snapshots of the tools used by EHMs to create the world’s first truly global empire. They are, however, a mere introduction to the many nefarious deeds that have been committed by the corporate elite—often in the name of altruism and progress. During the post-World War II period, we EHMs managed to turn the “last, best hope for democracy,” in Lincoln’s words, into an empire that does not flinch at inflicting brutal and often totalitarian measures on people who have resources we covet. After reading the chapters you will have a better understanding of why people around the world fear, resent, and even hate us. As a result of the cor-poratocracy’s policies, an average of 24,000 people die every day from hunger; tens of thousands more—mostly children—die from curable diseases because they cannot afford available medicines. More than half the world’s population lives on less than $2 a day, not nearly enough to cover basic necessities in most places. In essence our economic system depends on modern versions of human exploitation that conjure images of serfdom and slavery. Global Empire North and South FLOWS OF MONEY AND POWER The Global North has for decades sold a model of development based on debt. Loans pushed by First World lenders and eagerly grabbed by corrupt Third World elites have left Global South countries in a debt trap $3.2 trillion deep—often with little real development to show for it. Much of the money simply round-trips back to First World suppliers or offshore banking havens. Meanwhile, a new era of imperial domination has begun with interventions to secure control of scarce resources like oil and coltan. GLOBAL NORTH G8 NATIONS • MULTINATIONALS • WORLD BANK • IMF 1. FOLLOW THE MONEY S.C. GWYNNE Selling Money— and Dependency JOHN CHRISTENSEN Dirty Money: Offshore Banking LUCY KOMISAR BCCI: Banking on America, Banking on Jihad 2. DEBT-LED DEVELOPMENT STEVE BERKMAN The $100 Billion Question ELLEN AUGUSTINE The World Bank and the Philippines BRUCE RICH Exporting Destruction 3. INTERVENTION AND DOMINATION: ACCESS TO RESOURCES KATHLEEN KERN The Human Cost of Cheap Cell Phones ANDREW ROWELL/JAMES MARRIOTT Oil, Mercenaries, and the New Scramble for Africa GREG MUTTITT Hijacking Iraq’s Oil: EHMs at Work 4. THE DEBT TRAP JAMES S. HENRY The Mirage of Debt Relief GLOBAL SOUTH THE UNDERDEVELOPED WORLD We must put an end to this. You and I must do the right thing. We must understand that our children will not inherit a stable, safe, and sustainable world unless we change the terrible conditions that have been created by EHMs. All of us must look deep into our hearts and souls and decide what it is we can best do. Where are our strengths? What are our passions? As an author and lecturer, I know that I have certain skills and opportunities. Yours may be different from mine, but they are just as powerful. I urge you to set as a primary goal in your life making this a better world not only for you but also for all those who follow. Please commit to taking at least one action every single day to realize this goal. Think about those 24,000 who die each day from hunger, and dedicate yourself to changing this in your lifetime. Write letters and e-mails—to newspapers, magazines, your local and national representatives, your friends, businesses that are doing the right thing and those that are not; call in to radio shows; shop consciously; do not “buy cheap” if doing so contributes to modern forms of slavery; support nonprofit organizations that help spread the word, protect the environment, defend civil liberties, fight hunger and disease, and make this a sane world; volunteer; go to schools and teach our children; form discussion groups in your neighbor-hood—the list of possible actions is endless, limited only by imagination. We all have many talents and passions to contribute. The most important thing is to get out there and do it! One thing we all can—and must—do is to educate ourselves and those who interact with us. Democracy is based on an informed electorate. If we in the United States are not aware that our business and political leaders are using EHMs to subvert the most sacred principles upon which our country is founded, then we cannot in truth claim to be a democracy. There is no excuse for lack of awareness, now that you have this book, plus many others and a multitude of films, CDs, and DVDs to help educate everyone you connect with. Beyond that, it is essential that every time you read, hear, or see a news report about some international event, do so with a skeptical mind. Remember that most media are owned by—or dependent on the financial support of—the corporatocracy. Dig beneath the surface. The appendix, “Resources of Hope,” provides a list of alternative media where you can access different viewpoints. This may well be the most pivotal and exciting time in the history of a nation that is built on pivotal and exciting events. How you and I choose to react to this global empire in the coming years is likely to determine the future of our planet. Will we continue along a road marked by violence, exploitation of others, and ultimately the likelihood of our self-destruction as a species? Or will we create a world our children will be proud to inherit? The choice is ours—yours and mine. Notes 1. Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: Norton, 2003), p. 232. 2. Ibid., pp. 247-48. 3. For more on the corporatocracy as an international, interlinked power elite, see Jeff Faux, “The Party of Davos,” Nation, January 26, 2006. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐John Perkins wrote

⭐. In this book, A Game as Old as Empire, Perkins wrote an introduction to this book edited by Steve Hiatt. This book has 13 articles written by people who have had experiences similar to Perkins, experiences of saddling Third World countries with massive debt for loans whose funds are stolen by corrupt politicians. It is a real eye opener to see how the world of international finance works in the Third World

⭐After rave reviews of the first book, Confessions of an Economic Hitman, I decided to give this book a chance. Unfortunately, without reading the first, this book was hard to follow for me.It wasn’t that this book is a continuation of the original book but it expanded on the ideas and research shared in the original. However, those who aren’t econ students or history buffs or conspiracy theorists, this could be difficult.At times, the terms thrown at the reader felt foreign even if written in plain English. To sum this book up, there is an evil empire out there and globalization (world domination) is the game. Enslaving the world with debt, the world being third-world developing nations.The books chapters basically covers/exploits/shares all the bad stuff these economic hitmen have done around the world and how this evil empire of corporations are profiting off of capitalism and exploitation.I’d say, its much easier to watch both Zeitgeist movies but if your really into this stuff, I’d skip this book and pick up Confessions instead.

⭐The news on TV or in papers is rarely the whole story. Why be deceived as well by those that ‘sell’ a matter or a reason and you never know what lurks beyond the headlines. Travel the road (in reading) of those that know the “road” the problems and even most reasons. Otherwise, you may grow old and die and still believe in “The Tooth Fairy”.

⭐Very informative history of what’s going on in the world. I wonder if this information will help change the current conditions of our finite world. I wonder if people in positions of education and the general population will ever careabout their fellow man? I doubt it! it seems humanity is doing a good job in speeding up the “circling of the drain”.

⭐Well, mostly it is to the point but one particular contributor is clearly misleading the audience and I am afraid that author did it with full understanding that scope of presented work will mislead dedicated reader or analytic.

⭐If you like politics and economics it is definitely and interesting read, just not something you won’t be able to put down. It is somewhat boring on certain stories and a few really good ones. If you like Econ good read.

⭐greed will consume all and money is the root of all evil. the narratives in this book further highlight this basic fact and the human fallacy of being needy to the point of destruction. proves that economics is not really a zero sum game after all.

⭐Important info for all good U.S. Citizens to have

⭐Fine

⭐RECOMMEND THIS BOOK TO ANYBODY AND EVERYBODY; POLITICAL OR NON-POLITICAL, CURIOUS OR BORED.

⭐this was asked for as a christmas present ,it is not my subject but the person who recieved seem very happy with it

⭐Chilling!

⭐Die Verknüpfung von Konzernen mit höchsten Regierungskreisen und der internationalen Bankenwirtschaft ist starker Tabak.Die brutale Ausbeutung der Länder der Dritten Welt wurde bereits von John Perkins in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man aufgezeigt.Confessions of an Economic Hit Man: The Shocking Story of How America Really Took Over the World: The shocking inside story of how Amerca really took over the world

⭐A Game as Old as Empire – ist eine Kollektion von Aufsätzen, die von Journalisten, Akademikern, Rechtsanwälten und Wissenschaftlern erstellt wurden, die ihr Wissen an die Seite der ausgebeuteten Länder stellen. Themen sind unter anderem:* Strategien der Ausbeutung von Entwicklungsländern* Strategien, wie Länder mit Schulden abhängig gemacht werden* Korruption der regionalen Regierungen* Der Umgang mit Off-Shore-Accounts zur VerschleierungDie Illusion der Logik, dass Millionen, die als Kredite in die Länder der Dritten Welt fließen, hilfreich und förderlich sind, ist nach der Lektüre dieses Buches für alle Zeiten aufgelöst.Organisationen wie die WTO (World Trade Organization) geraten ebenfalls in das wissenschaftliche Feuer einer heftigen Kritik.Wie die Schuldenfalle funktioniert ist nach diesem Buch eindeutig geklärt.Der gleiche Inhalt vollkommen anders bearbeitet finde sich in:Prinz des Goldes: Fabelhafte Finanzkrise

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