When the bombing of Iraq was followed by oil companies moving in, using USAID as the primary contractor for "rebuilding" Iraq (with Iraq paying, of course), the links between war and subsequent economic control were obvious. But is there another more covert war, not led by countries and cowboy presidents but by bow-tied executives meeting in boardrooms and universities? A strategy where crude weapons have been replaced by sophisticated facts, figures, graphs, surveys and statistics. It’s a world we all suspect exists but know little about. John Perkins attempts to take us into that universe guided by a breed of economic agents: "Economic hit men are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the ...(USAID), and other foreign ‘aid’ organisations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet’s natural resources.... I should know; I was an EHM."
Susan George’s classic How the Other Half Dies showed us in the ’70s how multilateral banks and corporations ruled the world. Confessions..., however, draws the broad outline of how these covert operations are conducted, but in contrast, falls short of substantiating it with necessary details. Perkins does not reveal the murky details of those happenings. It ends up therefore reading like a whodunit, failing to live up fully to its promise.
