confessions of an economic hitman

Do you ever find a book that changes your perception of reality so dramatically that you wish you could force people to read it? "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" by John Perkins is that for me. Written by a man that was an economic hitman for most of his professional career, but after crippling guilt he had to come clean about the evil american/developed world empire that he was assisting through his work.

John concisely states the issue at hand and the book as a whole in an interview, "Economic hitmen, when I was playing that game, what we were really doing was we were exploiting 3rd world countries, economically developing countries. Creating huge amounts of debt (via loans) for those countries using that debt (those loans) to hire our own corporations to build big infrastructure projects in those countries, so the money never went to those countries it went to our companies. These projects, in addition to making profits for our own companies would help a few wealthy families in that country who own the industries, the commercial establishments, but not the majority of the people they'd be left holding a huge debt that would take away from their education funds, healthcare, and other social services and in the end we would go back and say hey since you can't repay your debts sell your oil or some other resource for real cheap to our corporations or privatize your electric utilities, your water and sewage systems, all of your publicly owned businesses sell them to our big corporations". 

John goes on to talk about how this system has created a global economic failure, an economy that is based on "debt, fear, militarization, and the destruction of resources" 

The reason I am including this reading suggestion in this blog is because of the drastic shift it has caused in my understanding of the developed world and more specifically The United States economic exploitation of developing countries.

I am curious to be in Rwanda and learn about well educated peoples understanding of this system, and less educated understanding of the developed world in general. I also want to understand how the people that the non-profit I work for interpret the donations they are receiving and the place and people it is coming from. While simultaneously looking at the vast amount of inequality these people face not only on the global scale but within their own country as well. I am also curious to see how Rwanda specifically deals with outside influences on their development. Influences with both positive and negative intentions.

I HIGHLY recommend reading this book or if anything, here is a link to a Ted Talk of the author highlighting his work as an economic hit man, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btF6nKHo2i0. Here is the authors website so you can learn more about his story and mission, https://johnperkins.org/.