Economic Hitman | Predatory Capitalism (narration by John Perkins)

If you live in the US, AU, NZ, UK or Canada then you live in a nation that is part of the Five Eyes intelligence network. We are taught in school that we are the good guys, that democracy and capitalism is the right way. Well not from where I am sitting it is not. We are parasitical leeches siphoning off the riches and toil of developing nations and their resources and wealth and this is partly how we do it.

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 U.S. 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. — John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (2004)

Across several books, John Perkins exposes the lifestyles of the economic hit men. They inhabit a stateless global archipelago of privilege—a collection of private schools, tax havens, and gated residential communities with little or no connection to the outside world. They are people to whom nations are as meaningless as they are to the global corporations and to the international aristocracy they serve.

The system of contemporary capitalist globalization operates for the exclusive benefit of a global plutocracy that has no national boundaries or loyalties. Oligarchy, a word that has been applied exclusively to the modern-day capitalist barons of Russia, is no less real in the triad of the United States, Japan, and Europe.

The operation of this global system and its current financial architecture is as far as it could possibly be from the fairytale version of “free market” liberal democracy glorified in standard economic textbooks and the mainstream media. That is the reality that John Perkins’sConfessions of an Economic Hit Man has driven home for so many readers since it appeared in 2004.