Confessions of an economic hit man

It's the title of a book by John Perkins, where the author claims to have worked for an American company connected to the National Security Agency. Perkins' official job was to go into a developing country, assess its medium-term economic potential, and produce forecasts to be used as part of the process of getting the country in question loans from international organisms such as the World Bank.

In reality, Perkins says, he and some of his colleagues were charged with artificially inflating such economic forecasts, corrupt the local leaders, insure long-term lucrative contracts for a few well-positioned American companies, and especially operate so that the country to be “helped” would in fact find itself in so much debt to the US that it would fall inescapably under the latter growing geopolitical influence.

The book isn't particularly well written, and I don't know how much of what Perkins says about his own activities is false or inflated. Part of the book reads more like the sometimes simplistic internal struggle caused by the tension between Perkins' conscience on the one hand and his propensity to be lured by money and women (well, who doesn't experience that struggle from time to time?). In some sense, this is Perkins' attempt to come clean with what bothered him, and if that is the case, more power to him.

The interesting stuff is made of the glimpses that he gives about some of the more or less covert American operations that have marked US foreign policy through the second part of the 20th century, including the (allegedly) CIA-orchestrated assassination of two South American leaders (Ecuador's Jaime Roldos and Panama's Omar Torrijos' -- interestingly, both under the watch of Ronald Reagan). There is no way to know from the book how accurate Perkins' account actually is, but the external references check out historically, and it hasn't exactly been a secret that the US has in fact used a panoply of coercion means -- from economic pressure to assassination to outright invasion -- to expand its "democratic" empire in the world.

Perkins' book makes for good reading, though one's bullshit detector ought to be turned on at maximum level throughout. More importantly, it would be a good thing for the citizens of this country to re-examine their own history from the very beginning (starting at least with the idea of "manifest destiny" which provided a "justification" for the mass murder of native Americans). It would then appear clear that the US is a complex and contradictory entity, where the highest human ideals live side by side with some of the most egregious instances of violent interference in other countries' welfare. Perhaps it can't be otherwise given the nature of human affairs, but at least let's try to take off the pink goggles from time to time.