Resumo de Confessions Of An Economic Hitman

Title: Confessions of Economic Hitman
Author: John Perkins
Available: On shelves now
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers

    It did not receive much attention from the major news media, but it was
a bestseller during its initial months of release. Regardless, John
Perkins? Confessions of an Economic Hitman is a book you need to read.
As the author chronicles his life leading up to and during his career
as a negotiations agent for some of the world?s most powerful
corporations, he is able to expose their inhumane treatment of third
world countries. Perkins explains that it was his job to convince these
countries to accept enormous loans for infrastructure development,
loans that were so huge that they would never be able to return the
debt. Perkins claims that United States government worked in alliance
with these firms to strategically place the United States and its
companies in a position of power over these foreign nations, from
Panama to Indonesia. All of these countries had resources which were
vital to the United States and what Perkins calls its corporatocracy
remaining in power.

    The book?s story is as gripping as any of Tom
Clancy?s novels of international espionage, but its impact is so much
more profound given that the account is offered as fact. The subtlety
with which the corporatocracy wields its wrath hits you with an eerie
guilt once you realize that your own materialist lifestyle is one of
their weapons. Perkins points out that we have been trained to feed the
hand that bites us, showing that we too are a part of the machine,
though a much less culpable part. By the end of the book, the reader
cannot help but feel as if you are beginning to see the truth in the
socialist prophecies of philosophers such as Karl Marx or Howard Zinn.
Never before have you understood so clearly what those few and
persecuted academics meant when they exclaimed that the United States
deserved the attacks of September 11, 2001. Perkins said that it was
this event which eventually encouraged him to finish writing this book,
in hope that he might increase awareness that 9/11 was merely a symptom
of a sickness that has been building for decades. In the prologue, his
words seethe with repentance as he outlines the state of affairs in the
world:

    ?Today we see the results of this system run amok.
Executives at our most respected companies hire people at near-slave
wages to toil under inhuman conditions in Asian sweatshops. Oil
companies wantonly pump toxins into rain forest rivers, consciously
killing people, animals, and plants, and committing genocide among
ancient cultures. The pharmaceutical industry denies lifesaving
medicines to millions of HIV-infected Africans. Twelve million families
in our own United States worry about their next meal. The energy
industry creates an Enron. The accounting industry creates an Andersen.
The income ratio of the one-fifth of the world''s population in the
wealthiest countries to the one-fifth in the poorest went from 30 to 1
in 1960 to 74 to 1 in 1995. The United States spends over $87 billion
conducting a war in Iraq while the United Nations estimates that for
less than half that amount we could provide clean water, adequate
diets, sanitation services, and basic education to every person on the
planet.?

    After this quote he quips, ?And we wonder why the
terrorists hate us?? This statistic, along with the hundreds of others
offered in the book are all referenced in the book?s appendix, most of
which can cross-checked on the United Nations website. For more
information about the author, visit www.johnperkins.org.

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