This book is the confession of a man who, back when I was an EHM, was part of a relatively small group. People who play similar roles are much more abundant now. They have euphemistic titles; they walk the corridors of Fortune 500 companies like Exxon, Walmart, General Motors, and Monsanto; they use the EHM system to promote their private interests.

It [capitalism] includes local farmers’ markets as well as this very dangerous form of global corporate capitalism… which is predatory by nature, has created a death economy, and ultimately is self-destructive. (Emphasis mine.)

I was a twenty-three-year-old [Peace Corps] volunteer assigned to develop credit and savings cooperatives in communities deep in the Amazon rain forest.

[I]n many cases helping an economy grow only makes those few people who sit atop the pyramid even richer, while it does nothing for those at the bottom except to push them even lower.

I discovered that statistics can be minipulated to produce a large array of conclusions, including those substantiating the predilections of the analyst.

“Remember, countries like this have long histories of coups. If you take a good look, you’ll see that most of them happen when the leaders of the country don’t play our game.” (“Dirty Business”)

My business school professors had taught that financing infrastructure projects through mountains of World Bank debt would pull economically developing nations out of poverty and save them from the clutches of communism. Experts at the World Bank and USAID reinforced this mindset.

[T]here were two primary objectives of my work. First, I was to justify huge international loans that would funnel money back to… other US companies… Second, I would work to bankrupt the countries that received those loans, so that they would be forever beholden to their creditors and would present easy targets when we needed favors…

EHMs would never be paid by the government… As a result, their dirty work, if exposed, would be chalked up to corporate greed rather than to government policy… In addition [they] would be insulated from congressional oversight and public scrutiny, shielded by a growing body of legal initiatives, including trademark, international trade, and Freedom of Information laws.

“You can pick and choose. Keep England. Eat China. And throw away Indonesia.” (“Civilization on Trial”)

In 1903, President Roosevelt sent in the US warship Nashville, US soldiers landed, seized and killed a popular local militia commander, and declared Panama an independent nation. A puppet government was installed… (“Panama’s President and Hero”)

He said, “North Americans don’t know much about the rest of the world.”

“Do you know who owns United Fruit?” he asked
“Zapata Oil, George Bush’s company – our UN ambassador,” I said. (“Conversations with the General”)

It was exactly what we wanted: a tool that scientifically “proved” we were doing countries a favor by helping them incur debts they would never be able to pay off. (“Panama Canal Negotiations and Graham Greene”)

He went on to explain how, once forests as animals such as the buffalo are destroyed, and once people are moved onto reservations, the very foundations of cultures collapse. (“Iran’s King of Kings”)

“Your politicians must placate the Jewish vote, must get their money to finance campaigns. So you’re stuck with Israel, I’m afraid. However, Iran is the key. Your oil companies – which carry even more power than the Jews – need us.” (“Confessions of a Tortured Man”)

“The Indians and all the farmers who live along the rivers you’re damming hate you. Even the people in the cities… sympathize with the guerrillas who’ve been attacking your construction camp. Your government calls these people Communists, terrorists, and narcotics traffickers, but the truth is they’re just people with families who live on lands your company is destroying.” (“American Republic vs. Global Empire”) (Emphasis mine.)

Like earlier empires, [the global empire] opens its arms only to accumulate resources, to grab everything in sight and stuff its insatiable maw. It will do whatever is needed to help its rulers gain more power and riches. (“American Republic vs. Global Empire”)

[S]ome SIL members went in an encouraged the indigenous people to move from that land, onto missionary reservations… The condition was that the people had to deed their lands to the oil companies. (“Ecuador’s President Battles Big Oil”)

I never had to see the dying bodies, smell the rotting flesh,
or hear the screams of agony. But I too had committed a sin.

Carter may have been an ineffective politician, but he had a vision for America that was consistent with the one defined in our Declaration of Independence… Reagan, on the other hand, was most definitely a global empire builder and a servant of the corporatocracy. (“Ecuador’s Presidential Death”).

Blackie Lawless stated in an interview shortly after the release of the album (The Headless Children), that “The Neutron Bomber”, is about Ronald Reagan [“Neutron Ronnie”] and the power he and America had over the world, with such a large nuclear arsenal.

It was an unprovoked attack on a civilian population. Panama and her people posed absolutely no threat to the United States or to any other country. Politicians, governments, and press around the world denounced the unilateral US action as a clear violation of international law. (“The United States Invades Panama”)

Contrary to common public opinion, Iraq is not simply about oil. It is also about water and geopolitics. Both the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers flow through Iraq… Iraq controls much of the increasingly critical important water resources… many of the major companies that had set their sights on taking over small independent power companies now looked toward privitizating water systems in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. (“An EHM Failure in Iraq”)

“The numbers tell us that twenty-four thousand people
die every day from hunger.”

It [global economy] is based on war or the threat of war, debt, an extreme form of materialism that pillages the earth’s resources and is consuming itself into extinction. In the end, even the very rich will fall victim to this death economy. (“Conspiracy: Was I Poisoned?”) (Emphasis mine.)

These and many other conspiracies took the EHM system far beyond where it had been in the 1970s… The heart of this system remained the same: an economic and political ideology based on enslavement through debt and enforced by paralyzing people with fear.

“We’re all guilty. We have to admit that although the big corporations own the propaganda machine, we allow ourselves to be duped.”

Jack would disappear from our dojang for extended periods. He was an avid surfer, and he brought back surfing photographs. Still, [we] commented to each other that violent things happened in countries where he went surfing – a bombing in Indonesia, riots in Lebanon, an assassination in South Africa. (“A Jackal Speaks: The Seychelles Conspiracy”)

He went on to explain that the Kenyan army had an aircraft loaded with paratroopers standing by in Nairobi. After the jackals had killed René, the Kenyans would immediately arrive to accept credit for the coup.

And anyone who happened to read or hear about the raid on the Seychelles airport or the hijacking of an Air India 707 believed it was the work of terrorists – Communists – out to overthrow a legitimate government. The public had no idea that it was a CIA plot gone sour.

On an all-night shamanic journey, I saw that I’d been brought up on bland New Hampshire foods. Now I was living with people whose diet was very different. Among other things, because the rivers were filled with organic matter, they always mixed drinking water with a type of beer fermented with the aid of human saliva.

Faced with no alternatives, I ate their foods and drank their beer. That night, I saw that each time I did so, I heard a voice telling me it would kill me. I also saw that the Shuar were incredibly strong and healthy. As the night progressed, it became clear to me that it wasn’t the food and drink that were killing me; it was my mind-set. The next morning I was totally healthy.

“Ecuador Rebels”

In 1978, Texaco had only just discovered petroleum in Ecuador’s Amazon. Today, oil accounts for roughly half of the country’s export earnings. A trans-Andean pipeline, built shortly after my first visit, has since leaked more than half a million barrels of oil into the fragile rain forest – more than twice the amount spilled by the Exxon Valdez. A $1.3 billion, three-hundred-mile pipeline… had promised to make Ecuador one of the world’s top ten suppliers of oil to the United States. Vast areas of rain forest had fallen, macaws and jaguars had all but vanished, three Ecuadorian indigenous cultures had been driven to the verge of collapse, and pristine rivers had been transformed into flaming cesspools.