Paul Romer, the NYU economist who was just awarded a Nobel Prize, is the inventor of the concept of “charter cities”—fully privatized municipalities. Honduras was supposed to be one of the first targets. Mark Ames (a close-up observer of the disastrous Russian privatizations of the 1990s) explains: “How to win a ‘Nobel’ in Economics: find a Latin American country whose military just overthrew its elected leftist president, propose dystopian privatization experiment giving multinationals complete dictatorial control over their sweatshop labor.”