Economic Hit Man Series

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins, 2004, Excerpts

George Schultz was secretary of the treasury and chairman of the Council on Economic Policy under Nixon, served as Bechtel president, and then became secretary of state under Reagan. Caspar Weinberger was a Bechtel vice president and general council, and later the secretary of defense under Reagan. Richard Cheney served as secretary of defense under George H. W. Bush, as Halliburton president, and as U.S. vice president to George W. Bush. George H. W. Bush, began as founder of Zapata Petroleum Corp., served as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. under presidents Nixon, Ford, and was Ford’s CIA director.

Reagan was most definitely a global empire builder, a servant of the corporatocracy. He catered to men who shuttled back and forth from corporate CEO offices to bank boards and into the halls of government. He served the men who appeared to serve him but who in fact ran the government – men like Vice President George H.W. Bush, Secretary of State George Schultz, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, Richard Cheney, Richard Helms, and Robert McNamara, He advocated what those men wanted: an America that controlled the world and all its resources, a world that answered to the commands of America, a U.S. military that would enforce the rules as they were written by America, and an international trade and banking system that supported America as CEO of the global empire.

The Bechtel Group, inc. is a prime example of the cozy relationship between private companies and the U.S. government. Bechtel was the United States’ most influential engineering and construction company. Its president and senior officers included George Shultz and Caspar Weinberger, who despised Torrijos because he brazenly courted a Japanese plan to replace Panama’s existing canal with a new, more efficient one. Such a move not only would transfer the ownership form the United States to Panama but would also exclude Bechtel from participation in the most exciting and potentially lucrative engineering project of the century.

Bechtel – loaded with Nixon, Ford, and Bush cronies, pulls the strings of the Republican Party.

Wikipedia Bechtel Corporation (Bechtel Group)

is the largest engineering company in the United States, ranking as the 9th-largest privately owned company in the U.S. With headquarters in San Francisco, Bechtel had 40,000 employees as of 2006 working on projects in nearly 50 countries with $20.5 billion in revenue.

The Bechtel family has owned Bechtel since incorporating the company in 1925. Bechtel's size, its political clout, and its penchant for privacy have made it a perennial target for journalists and politicians since the 1930s. Bechtel has maintained strong relationships with officials in many United States administrations, including those of Nixon, Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush. The company also has strong ties to other governments, particularly the Saudi Royal Family.

Recently, the company has come under criticism for alleged mismanagement of the Big Dig project, its financial links to the bin Laden family, and the manner in which it received Iraqi rebuilding contracts after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Bechtel's long involvement with oil, power, and water overseas has become a focus of criticism by the growing anti-globalization and environmental movements.