 |
|
|
|
|
|
Book Reviews
|
|
|
|
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man:
How the U.S. uses Globalization to Cheat Poor Countries
Out of Trillions
by John Perkins
(Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2004, 264 pp, $24.95)
|
|
|
|
You will definitely want to read this new bombshell, a controversial adventure thriller that connects the dots with corporate globalization, American Empire, and the House of Bush.
CONFESSIONS is a stunning and groundbreaking book written by an Economic Hit Man (EHM) who, while working for the World Bank and USA government, swindled Third World countries out of trillions of dollars. Perkins breaks the code of silence by revealing how the EHM mentality transformed the once-respected American republic into a feared empire.
Tools of trade include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder, in a gigantic international con game called "How the Richest of the Rich Steal from the Poorest of the Poor."
CONFESSIONS is a real-life, autobiographical account of international political intrigue at the highest levels and is a blistering attack on and expose of the little-known inner workings of both governmental and corporate policies that have fostered globalization and led to the impoverishment of untold millions of people across the planet. As a key player in this ancient Empire game, Perkins gives us his own bird’s-eye view of the operations of what professional economists call "the Washington Consensus." This is the post-Breton Woods system of top-down arrangements among the IMF, the World Bank, the world’s leading central banks, and an interlocking combine of several thousand multinational banks and industrial and raw material extraction corporations. This gang controls about 80% of the world economy, including the lion’s share of the strategic raw material wealth of the planet. These forces are above the law of nations, and seek a one-world "globalized" empire. They constitute what Perkins describes as the most sophisticated imperial apparatus that the world has ever known, and their power rests in their ability to enslave entire nations through the mechanisms of the IMF, World Bank, private debt, and corruption.
Perkins describes how the global debt-masters employ an EHM like him to trap targeted nations in bankruptcy, and then force them to turn over their national patrimony of raw material wealth and labor power. When a nationalist head of state resists, the debt-masters next bring in the "jackals," the professional assassins known to the CIA. It was the weight of this legacy of genocide-by-debt trap that prompted Perkins to write his confession. His book provides a vital flank against the EHM of the new imperium and the global financial oligarchy at a moment when their power arrangements of the past 34 years are on the verge of disintegration.
CONFESSIONS is a unique, brilliant, gripping, tell-all book written by a guilt-ridden man who started and stopped writing it on four occasions over the past 20 years. He was threatened and bribed in an effort to kill the project, but after 9/11 decided to go through with this expose of his former professional life.
Although it is a good read for the primary reason that it is groundbreaking and thus fills a void, some readers may find Perkins’s story too much of a personal odyssey and not enough like the "Pentagon Papers." The audacious claims by Perkins mark it as an important book to read, but it may become known more for the additional confessions it elicits and investigations it spawns than for the details it reveals.
Frank Kahl is a retired economist and peace/justice activist living on the Central Coast. He can be reached at peace4u88@sbcglobal.net
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
