Confessions of an Economic Hit Man Connections

 Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins

I’ve been reading Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.

It’s a story about how progress got weaponized.

John Perkins describes the 1970s—when he flew from one “developing” country to another, briefcase in hand, selling prosperity at 10 percent interest.

Power plants. Dams. Highways. Airports.

All paid for with loans so large they could never be repaid.

He calls himself an economic hit man, but the real weapon wasn’t a gun.
It was compound interest.

Every loan came wrapped in the promise of modernization.
And hidden in the fine print: dependency.

Countries took the money.
American firms got the contracts.
And decades later, the debts remain—still quietly shaping who gets schools, who gets medicine, and who gets told to privatize their water.

Often the leaders who agreed to these loans are long dead or discredited, often dictators who only ruled for themselves and their cronies with no interest in the future of the nation as a whole or it's people.

You can trace the pattern backward.

The British did it with railways in India.
The Americans with “development aid.”
The IMF and World Bank with “structural adjustment.”

Different names.
Same story.

Debt as diplomacy.
Spreadsheets as empire.

And here’s the irony—and I love ironies—
It wasn’t a conspiracy of villains twirling mustaches.
It was the logical outcome of everyone doing their job.

Economists ran their models.
Politicians chased growth.
Banks lent the money.

Each step rational.
Each decision defensible.
And yet, the result: a system that keeps half the world paying interest to the other half.

History doesn’t repeat, it recalculates.

A dam in Ecuador.
A loan agreement in Washington.
A line on a spreadsheet that ripples for generations.

That’s how progress happens—accidentally, unevenly, and often at someone else’s expense.

What Perkins gives us is not just guilt—it’s a map.

A way to see how all the switches are wired:
how good intentions can power bad outcomes,
how empire learned to run on debt instead of gunpowder.

And once you see those connections,
you start to notice new ones—
between your phone, your taxes, your electricity bill—
and the vast machinery of global finance ticking away behind it all.

Everything is connected... including the things we’d rather not be.

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