The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

by John Perkins

Over the past three decades, sixty of the world’s poorest countries have paid $550 billion in principal and interest on loans of $540 billion, yet they still owe a whopping $523 billion on those same loans. The cost of servicing that debt is more than these countries spend on health or education and is twenty times the amount they receive annually in foreign aid.8 In addition, World Bank projects have brought untold suffering to some of the planet’s poorest people. In the past ten years alone, such projects have forced an estimated 3.4 million people out of their homes; the governments in these countries have beaten, tortured, and killed opponents of World Bank projects.9

One percent of Americans received 95 percent of all the wealth created since the depression was officially pronounced as ended in 2009, while 90 percent of us became poorer. For every $1 billion of wealth created, the average US citizen gets one dollar. Globally, eighty-five individuals own more resources than half of the world’s population.19

Documents released by US federal authorities in response to a Freedom of Information lawsuit reveal that at least sixty-three drone sites, located in twenty states, were active in the United States (as of 2012). Many were operated by soldiers and were deployed from stateside military installations. Others were manned by law enforcement agencies and the US Border Patrol. Some, if not all, are designed to assassinate people.4

Following the one-year anniversary of the start of Occupy Wall Street, Bloomberg reports that “in 2010, the top 1 percent of US families captured as much as 93 percent of the nation’s income growth, according to a March paper by Emmanuel Saez, a University of California at Berkeley economist who studied Internal Revenue Service data.”