Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, a Review

by Lynn Farquhar

Over and over during my reading of John Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hit Man I felt like exclaiming, "AT LAST! An insider familiar with the inner workings of the corporatocracy has found his conscience and is finally speaking out!"

From his Preface:

Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and other
foreign "aid" organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet's natural resources. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged
elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization. I should know. I was an EHM.

Perkins relates a deeply personal and, at the same time, historically significant story that can't help but make the reader step back and assess his or her own part in either shoring up or shifting the crumbling, yet still dangerous paradigm of Profit over People and the Environment.

There have been a multitude of wakeup calls for humanity to sit up and pay attention and demand transparency and accountability from those in power who claim to be working on behalf of all of us. For John Perkins, the undeniable wakeup call came as he visited Ground Zero in New York after the attacks of 911 and "wondered what the people who walked those streets today
thought about all this--not simply about the destruction of the towers, but also about the...24,000 who starve every single day...wondered if they thought about such things at all, if they could tear themselves away from their jobs and gas-guzzling cars and their interest payments long enough to consider their own contribution to the world they were passing on to their
children."

Readers of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man can find hope and solidarity in the return of a modern day Prodigal Son, whose story not only asks us to think about "such things" but to turn both inward and outward in our own
lives to question where we ourselves may need to "come clean," whether as individuals or as entire societies participating in the global culture.

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins
pub. Berrett-Koehler of San Francisco, 2004
ISBN1576753018
in hardcover $24.95 US