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''Confessions of an Economic Hit Man'' is a partly autobiographical book written by John Perkins published in 2004. It provides Perkins' account of his career with engineering consulting firm Chas. T. Main in Boston. According to Perkins, his role at Main was to convince leaders of underdeveloped countries to accept substantial development loans for large construction and engineering projects while making sure that these projects were contracted to U.S. companies. Later these loans would give the U.S. political influence and access to natural resources for U.S. companies. He refers to this as an "economic hit man". Although he states that throughout his career he has always worked for private companies, and suggests a system of corporatocracy and greed, rather than a single conspiracy, he claims the involvement of the National Security Agency (NSA), which he interviewed for a job before joining Main. According to the author this interview effectively constituted an independent screening which led to his subsequent hiring as an economic hit man by Einar Greve, a vice president of the firm (and alleged NSA liaison). == Content == The book heavily criticize U.S. foreign aid and the widely accepted idea that "all economic growth benefits humankind, and that the greater the growth, the more widespread the more widespread the benefits". Suggesting that in many cases only a small portion of the population benefit at the expense of the rest, with the example including increasing income inequality where large U.S. companies exploit cheap labour and oil companies destroy local environment.〔 Perkins describe what he calls a system of corporatocracy and greed as driving force behind establishing USA as a global empire where he took a role as an "economic hit man" to expand it's influence. According to his book, Perkins' function was to convince the political and financial leadership of underdeveloped countries to accept enormous development loans from institutions like the World Bank and USAID. Saddled with debts they could not hope to pay, those countries were forced to acquiesce to political pressure from the United States on a variety of issues. Perkins argues in his book that developing nations were effectively neutralized politically, had their wealth gaps driven wider and economies crippled in the long run. In this capacity Perkins recounts his meetings with some prominent individuals, including Graham Greene and Omar Torrijos. Perkins describes the role of an economic hit man as follows: According to Perkins, he began writing ''Confessions of an Economic Hit Man'' in the 1980s, but "threats or bribes always convinced () to stop." In the book, Perkins repeatedly denies the existence of a "conspiracy". I was initially recruited while I was in business school back in the late sixties by the National Security Agency, the nation’s largest and least understood spy organization; but ultimately I worked for private corporations. The first real economic hit man was back in the early 1950s, Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., the grandson of Teddy, who overthrew the government of Iran, a democratically elected government, Mossadegh’s government who was Time‘s magazine person of the year; and he was so successful at doing this without any bloodshed—well, there was a little bloodshed, but no military intervention, just spending millions of dollars and replaced Mossadegh with the Shah of Iran. At that point, we understood that this idea of economic hit man was an extremely good one. We didn’t have to worry about the threat of war with Russia when we did it this way. The problem with that was that Roosevelt was a C.I.A. agent. He was a government employee. Had he been caught, we would have been in a lot of trouble. It would have been very embarrassing. So, at that point, the decision was made to use organizations like the C.I.A. and the N.S.A. to recruit potential economic hit men like me and then send us to work for private consulting companies, engineering firms, construction companies, so that if we were caught, there would be no connection with the government. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Confessions of an Economic Hit Man」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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