If you thought we were saving the world, you missed something

Currently I am doing a lot of reading, and obviously not a lot of writing. One of the books I am reading right now I borrowed from my dad. It's called Confessions Of An Economic Hitman. It documents the career of a man, John Perkins, who worked for an international energy company in the 1970's and 80's. His job was to go around the world and basically sucker developing nations into taking enormous loans which they stood no possible chance of repaying. The loans were used to build up the infrastructure of the country, which sounds noble enough. However the contracts to build the infrastructure were exclusively given to American firms, essentially insuring that the money loaned by the US government did not go into the economy of the developing countries, but instead right back into the pockets of some of America's largest and most powerful multinational corporations. Then, when the countries cannot repay, the US takes their natural resources as payment, as well as demanding their cooperation with international foreign policy matters. I won't go into too much detail. It's a good read, and I recommend it to anyone who has the stomach for it.

Excerpt from the first Chapter