It is truly pathetic to see neoconservatives donning the clothes of freedom fighters and current Cheney-Baker-Kissinger Associates spokesperson George W. Bush cajoling Russia’s Vladimir Putin to step up his democracy campaign more briskly. Yes, neocon democracy is bursting forth throughout the world, or is it?

The truth is that death squads are not really inherently bad as far as the neocon freedom fighters are concerned, just as long as the global corporate interests such as Bechtel, Halliburton, Monsanto, United Fruit Company and the rest are served. You never heard one peep from Bush the Elder or Younger about Saudi Arabia’s atrocious record on civil liberties, did you? How about the death squads in El Salvador? We were more concerned about Daniel Ortega’s forces invading Harlingen, Texas. How about driving out Cuban construction workers in Grenada in the interest of global freedom?

John Perkins has seen it all from the inside and is courageous enough to tell his story about the CIA axis with global corporate interests, and how the squeeze was applied to poor nations as the deep pocket greed mongers took charge and played havoc with their economies. Perkins’s story makes some of the most vital reading to come down the pike in a long time. It should serve as a progressive manual for what is wrong as well as what is needed to correct a global system in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, with the ranks of the impoverished climbing by the minute. Perkins provides the greed mongers’ playbook chapter and verse.

An uncle of John Perkins’s wife had an executive position with the National Security Agency and was able to pull strings to give him a position that could have led to enormous riches, but in the process the New Englander developed conscience pangs as he saw predatory global economic activity from a participant’s perspective. The ultimate result was the writing and publication of “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man,” one of the most important critiques of global economics to surface in some time.

Shortly after leaving Boston University John Perkins was groomed in the late sixties to become an economic hit man. His journey began as a member of the Peace Corps where, ironically, rather than enhancing the lives of the indigenous Indian peoples of the Ecuadorian Amazon, the rain forest, and the Andes, the experience proves to be a stepping stone to another important position in which the objectives were anything but altruistic. Global corporate giant MAIN assigned Perkins to a new position. He returned home to Boston, where an attractive young woman taught him the ropes as she bluntly informed him that he was being groomed to become an economic hit man.

Perkins soon learned that the role he was assigned to play was one in which he posed as a friend to peoples of other nations, only to serve as an enthusiastic promoter of the World Bank and its loan policy to underdeveloped nations. He meets Robert McNamara, then the World Bank’s president, and is promoted rapidly through the ranks by preparing reports that masquerade as frank economic assessments but in reality are propaganda messages extolling the loan process of the World Bank.

The resulting process is simple and devastating. Heads of governments are implored to take out huge loans, all the while setting into motion a kickback process enabling cooperating heads of state to pocket enough to make themselves fabulously wealthy at the expense of the general citizenry. When the national treasuries are unable to keep up with exorbitant payment schedules the global economy barons exert control by taking charge as the corporate world assumes command, led by giants such as multinational Bechtel. In the process the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Perkins was on hand as the rain forest was plundered, causing him to develop grave misgivings about the predatory enterprise of which he was a part.

One head of state Perkins met, became a friend of, and greatly admired was President Omar Torrijos of Panama. He established a working relationship with Torrijos in which beneficial construction services were provided that aided the Panamanian economy and its people. Torrijos was a vanguard in seeking to have the Panama Canal turned over to the country where it was situated. This happened but not long thereafter the incoming Reagan Administration exhibited grave misgivings about the treaty signed by President Jimmy Carter and Torrijos.

Perkins holds deep suspicions about the plane crash that took Torrijos’s life in 1981. That same year another leader who had impressed Perkins with his selfless pursuit of economic justice for his people, President Jaime Roldos of Ecuador, who successfully campaigned for election on an anti-oil platform, also lost his life in a plane crash. Perkins states bluntly that both “fiery airplane crashes … have all the markings of CIA assassinations.”

Perkins is highly familiar with the manner in which the CIA intervenes on behalf of the global corporate community. He provides details on how CIA operative Archie Roosevelt, Theodore’s grandson, launched a successful coup in Iran to overthrow the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mossadegh after he had moved to nationalize the nation’s oil deposits in retaliation for what the incoming president deemed exploitation of the nation’s natural resources by the predecessor of British Petroleum. This brought to power the Shah of Iran, seen as a reliable bulwark of western economic interests. It was the Shah who initiated a repressive secret police known as SAVAK, which in turn infuriated large segments of the Iranian people, leading to his ultimate overthrow and the installation of the Islamic fundamentalist Ayatollah Khomeini regime.

Another important area covered by Perkins was the CIA’s activities in Guatemala under the democratically elected government of President Jacobo Arbenz. When Arbenz instituted reform at a point when a few large commercial interests and families controlled the vast majority of land, with less than 3 percent of Guatemalans owning 70 percent of Guatemala’s terra firma, he was stoutly opposed by the United Fruit Company, one of Guatemala’s leading landholders. A propaganda campaign was launched accusing Arbenz of being a Communist agitator. A CIA campaign brought him down. A repressive right wing totalitarian government replete with death squads replaced the popular Arbenz.

Another important area covered by Perkins was the CIA’s activities in Guatemala under the democratically elected government of President Jacobo Arbenz. When Arbenz instituted reform at a point when a few large commercial interests and families controlled the vast majority of land, with less than 3 percent of Guatemalans owning 70 percent of Guatemala’s terra firma, he was stoutly opposed by the United Fruit Company, one of Guatemala’s leading landholders. A propaganda campaign was launched accusing Arbenz of being a Communist agitator. A CIA campaign brought him down. A repressive right wing totalitarian government replete with death squads replaced the popular Arbenz.

Perkins also weighs in on the Saudis. He notes how the neocon Republicans have looked the other way where Saudi oppression is concerned. The author also exposes the vast hypocrisy of the “freedom march” into Iraq. It is strange how it came years after the worst of Saddam’s Hussein’s atrocities. It is stranger yet how nary a peep was raised at the time by the neocons when Saddam was unleashing his chemical weapons. Actually that came at a time when we were sending him supplies that enabled him to make them, with Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney nodding approval. As a matter of fact, how did Saddam Hussein’s ruthless Bath Party achieve power in Iraq in the first place? With the noble assistance of the CIA, that’s how!

It took tremendous courage for Perkins, a former consummate corporate insider, to pen a volume citing the gross misconduct and international power plays of the CIA as well as the rapacious dealings of the International Monetary Fund in concert with the World Bank. This book should serve as a wakeup call to the international community among those who seek justice and oppose exploitation of people in the interest of serving the cause of international monopolistic greed.