Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
23rd March 2006 by Sean
| Author: John Perkins |  |
The subject of this book is the thing John Grisham novels are made of. An economic planner for an international consulting firm persuades developing countries to enter into deals that make American companies rich. Somehow the NSA ties into all this as well, which I don’t exactly understand how, but I guess that’s an incentive to read it. After years of being an “economic hit man”, Perkins leaves his former life and writes his expose, despite bribes and threatenings.
I can already see major studio execs salivating over the story, corporate corruption, governmental cover-up and a lone soul that tells his story despite threatening phone calls and blown up mailboxes. Anyways it sounds like an interesting read, even if it doesn’t provide much business knowledge.
In the review snippets is a link to an interview between the author and democracynow.org as well as a statement from the State Department about the book. Intriguing stuff.
What John Perkins says in an interview with democracynow.org.
Basically what we were trained to do and what our job is to do is to build up the American empire. To bring — to create situations where as many resources as possible flow into this country, to our corporations, and our government, and in fact we’ve been very successful. We’ve built the largest empire in the history of the world. It’s been done over the last 50 years since World War II with very little military might, actually. It’s only in rare instances like Iraq where the military comes in as a last resort. This empire, unlike any other in the history of the world, has been built primarily through economic manipulation, through cheating, through fraud, through seducing people into our way of life, through the economic hit men. I was very much a part of that.
What the State Department says.
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, which Perkins says has been translated into some 20 languages, is popular because it is an exciting, first-person, cloak-and-dagger tale that plays to popular images about alleged U.S. economic exploitation of Third World countries. Perkins raises legitimate questions about the impacts of economic growth and modernization on developing countries and indigenous peoples. But his claim that he was acting as an “economic hit man” at the behest of the NSA appears to be a total fantasy.