Economic Hit Man revistied

John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, talks about how guys like him gamed the system with countries with vulnerable economies by saddling them with enormous debt in order to get them to tow the US line in all things regarding foreign policy, access to said country's natural resources and undue influence of said country's political infrastructure. With the update to Confessions, Perkins talks about cities getting the same treatment, corporate style. Flint MI anyone?

Perkins was recruited, he says, by the National Security Agency (NSA), but he worked for a private consulting company. His job as an undertrained, overpaid economist was to generate reports that justified lucrative contracts for U.S. corporations, while plunging vulnerable nations into debt. Countries that didn’t cooperate saw the screws tightened on their economies. In Chile, for example, President Richard Nixon famously called on the CIA to “make the economy scream” undermine the prospects of the democratically elected president, Salvador Allende.

If economic pressure and threats didn’t work, Perkins says, the jackals were called to either overthrow or assassinate the noncompliant heads of state. That is, indeed, what happened to Allende, with the backing of the CIA.

Think Mosaddegh in Iran circa 1953