John Perkins
Author Confessions of an Economic Hitman

The World Bank and many private banks of the IMF are all basically henchmen for the big corporations. So, my job was to identify countries with resources that corporations covet like oil and then arrange a huge loan for that country through the World Bank and sister organizations. But the money never actually went to those countries, instead it went to our own corporations to build big infrastructure projects in that country, power plants and industrial parks, things that would benefit a few wealthy families in that country as well as our corporations, the main beneficiaries, but not help the majority of the people. They’re too poor to buy electricity, they can’t get jobs in industrial parks because industrial parks don’t hire many people and yet they’re left holding a huge debt that they can’t ever repay. So, at some point we go back and say since you can’t pay your debts, give us a pound of flesh, sell your oil real cheap to our oil companies or whatever the resource is, without any social regulations or environmental restrictions or let us build a military base on your soil or vote with us on the next critical United Nations vote. In a few cases, where we fail, the jackals step in and they either overthrow the governments or assassinate their leaders. I talk in my books about how I failed with Jaime Roldos, the president of Ecuador, or Martin Torrijos, the head of state of Panama, I could not corrupt these men. I could not get them to buy into this game and both of them were assassinated. And in a few cases where the jackals also fail, like with Saddam Hussein, then the military steps in, so we had the three-tier approach, the economic hitmen, jackals, and the military.