The First Book Review: Confessions of an Economic Hitman

Where the fuck is the book review format

Title

Confessions of an Economic Hitman

Author

John Perkins

Date of Publication

2004

Reason for reading

I thought I remembered him on the daily show but when I went to their site I couldn't find him. I still don't know how I heard of this book.

Synopsis

The book is the story of its author who worked as an economic consultant for international consulting firms. Specifically, he would work in less developed countries to convince their officials in adopting huge loans (from the IMF oftentimes) for big infrastructure projects which these countries couldn't really afford. After these countries would fail on their loans, as a special sort of repayment of debt, companies like Haliburton, Bechtel, Brown and Root would come in and "lay waste" to the country.

Review

If it's true, 5/5 stars for bravery (although the writing was average). If it's a lie, 0/5 stars for greed.

Quotes

I forgot to write these down so I'll just take one from wikipedia:

I was initially recruited while I was in business school back in the late sixties by the National Security Agency, the nation’s largest and least understood spy organization; but ultimately I worked for private corporations. The first real economic hit man was back in the early 1950’s, Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of Teddy, who overthrew the government of Iran, a democratically elected government, Mossadegh’s government who was Time‘s magazine person of the year; and he was so successful at doing this without any bloodshed—well, there was a little bloodshed, but no military intervention, just spending millions of dollars and replaced Mossadegh with the Shah of Iran. At that point, we understood that this idea of economic hit man was an extremely good one. We didn’t have to worry about the threat of war with Russia when we did it this way. The problem with that was that Roosevelt was a C.I.A. agent. He was a government employee. Had he been caught, we would have been in a lot of trouble. It would have been very embarrassing. So, at that point, the decision was made to use organizations like the C.I.A. and the N.S.A. to recruit potential economic hit men like me and then send us to work for private consulting companies, engineering firms, construction companies, so that if we were caught, there would be no connection with the government.