BOOK REVIEW: Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins

By Rob Williams

Every once in a while, a book comes along that confirms one's suspicions about the way the world really works. John Perkins's Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is such a book. What is an EHM? Perkins explains:

Economic hit men 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 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.

George F. Kennan (1904–2005)
Godfather of the Vermont Independence Movement

By Thomas Naylor

Few Americans were aware that when the dean of the American diplomatic corps, George F. Kennan, died on March 17 at the age of 101, he had become a staunch advocate of the peaceful dissolution of the American empire and of the fledgling Vermont independence movement. Although best known as the father of “containment,” the mainstay of American Cold War policy, Kennan first revealed his radical decentralist tendencies in his 1993 book Around the Cragged Hill.

We are, if territory and population be looked at together, one of the great countries of the world—a monster country, one might say, along with such others as China, India, the recent Soviet Union, and Brazil. And there is a real question as to whether “bigness” in a body politic is not an evil in itself, quite aside from the policies pursued in its name.

Thomas Jefferson

Letter to Gideon Granger, 1800

Over the course of the twentieth century the United States were replaced by a confederation of special interests. Indeed, at the center America re­sembles a League of Interests more than it does a nation. Loyalty, resources, policy, passion and even principle—the elements that comprise the public weal—are now magnetized and drawn not to the commonwealth but to the iron pegs of special interests that have been driven deep into the heart of the republic.

Why this journal, Vermont Commons? And why now?

Vermonters, Americans—indeed, all the world—stand at a widening divide. Not between red and blue, right and left, conservative and liberal, capitalist and socialist, and other such worn political coinage. No, we stand at a truly immense divide: that between our past and our future.

Behind us, an experiment in democracy whose energies are still robust, but whose framework—the modern nation state—teeters in all its towering immensity. Behind us stand the great achievements of the Modernist era, molded by one of history’s great forces: centralization. Raw measures of power—governmental, military, scientific, economic, monetary, corporate—have reached levels of magnitude inconceivable a mere generation ago.

It is quite ironic: only a decade or so after the idea of the United States as an imperial power came to be accepted by both right and left, and people were able to talk openly about an American empire, it is showing multiple signs of its inability to continue. Indeed, it is now possible to contemplate its collapse.

The neocons in power in Washington these days, who were delighted to talk about America as the sole empire in the world following the Soviet disintegration, will of course refuse to believe in any such collapse. But I think it behooves us to examine seriously the ways in which the U.S. system is so drastically imperiling itself that it will cause not only the collapse of its worldwide empire but vast changes on the domestic front as well.