Catholic missionaries–lay and religious–can tell their own stories in Third World countries that would fit in Perkin’s demonstration about what is wrong in US foreign policy. Missionaries’ work, as my own over the years, puts us in direct contact with the the poor and working classes victimized by the “Global Corruption.” We can testify to the devastating effects of the planning, that Perkins exposes as intentional and truly diabolical. We welcome this book for dispelling the official myths thus to lay bare the causes of world poverty. Perkin’s witness is that of an insider who formerly helped control the system.

Very easy to read, this book is full of anecdotes, with chapters of just three, hardly ever seven pages. But it is the content that is most striking for revealing an insider’s experience about how the global corporate enter prize works, i.e. with deceit, lies, blackmail, fraud, corruption of government officials, influence peddling, setting up puppet govenrments, murder and assassination of people in the way of the American corporate empire. Perkins exposes the where, when, and how this empire was created.

In the late 1960s after college Perkins joined the Peace Corps to serve in the Amazon and Andes of Ecuador. His entrance into Foreign Service for the corporate world was natural for a Peace Corp veteran with experience and language of another culture. He was tested, cleared by the National Security Agency and hired by Chas. T. Main, an international consulting firm, as in Perkin’s own words: “an ideal candidate for plundering the world”

Perkins operated in many countries in Southeast Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America. As his skills improved, contradictorily so did his conscience. One time in the Caribbean contemplating the location of the site of former slave auctions, he decided to quit, but then “was seduced by the system to continue.” Perkins saw that United States democratic ideals were compromised by the growth of the powerful multi-national corporations he served.” The world system replacing monarchy and co-opting democracy he claims became “corporatocracy.”

While Perkins sees the corporate world as promoting corporatocracy and leading the word to ruin, he also sees corporations having the power, know-how and systems to turn things around. That is his conviction and mission, in a sense, to make real the rhetoric of governments and corporations. He sees the role of the NGOs as critical, so too the role of the protests in the streets, the use of creative nonviolence to embarrass and challenge corporations and politicians to lift the veils of secrecy, to do their job minus the dirty tricks. The real democracy in the streets must reach into the corporate board rooms.

What can I do? Answering this, the questions he most frequently meets in his talks, Perkins in the last chapters of the book lists no less than 24 suggestions, mostly one-liners. His last two: “Offer study groups at local libraries, bookstores, churches and clubs.” The other: “expand this list and share it with everyone you know.”

This book hardly mentions God, Jesus or Church, yet it breathes the Spirit of Jesus, the Spirit of Truth. Perkins is a prophet for our day, who converted like a Saul of Tarsis, uncovers the demonic operating in society and in these last years of his life gives us a message of liberation. With this book John Perkins has put his life on the line, his “unifying principle - a commitment to create a stable, sustainable, and peaceful world for all people everywhere.”