“I’m haunted every day by what I did as an economic hit man (EHM). I’m haunted by the lies I told back then about the World Bank. I’m haunted by the ways in which that bank, its sister organizations, and I empowered US corporations to spread their cancerous tentacles across the planet. I’m haunted by the payoffs to the leaders of poor countries, the blackmail, and the threats that if they resisted, if they refused to accept loans that would enslave their countries in debt, the CIA’s jackals would overthrow or assassinate them.”

This, in a nutshell, is what the book is about. Perkins’s public work as an EHM vies with his private sympathies for poor and underserved indigenous peoples and his anger at America’s cold mercantilism.

“The fact that the debt burden placed on a country would deprive its poorest citizens of health care, education, and other social services for decades to come was not taken into consideration.”

When a small country accepts World Bank loans to pay for modernization, both sides assume the debt will be settled, in part, with money formerly budgeted for health care, education, and the like. For a time, then, the country may slide backward as it tries to modernize.

“[T]he main reason we establish embassies around the world is to serve our own interests, which during the last half of the twentieth century meant creating history’s first truly global empire—a corporate empire supported and driven by the US government.”

In the decades since World War II, most of the great colonial empires have dissolved. America, a beacon of freedom, makes a point of liberating countries; it can hardly assemble its own empire. Instead, the US manages a soft empire of small countries bound by economic dependence. Though this isn’t an empire in the formal sense, it behaves in many ways just like a real one, and in some ways may be the largest ever known.