Author John Perkins wrote this tell-all about his life, from his frustrated youth at a boys’ school to his international jet-setting career as an economic hit man. He worked to convince third-world nations to take out huge loans to pay US companies to build modern infrastructure in those nations. That such work entraps countries, making them pawns of American foreign policy, so rankled Perkins that he quit his EHM career to embark on a life of activism and writing against the very system that once sustained him.

Claudine, alluring yet coldly cynical, trained Perkins to be an economic hit man, teaching him to lure developing nations into accepting onerous development loans. From Claudine Perkins learned that he is “in for life” and must always seek to benefit America and its corporations at the expense of the poor.

General Torrijos wanted to help the poor of his country, Panama. He knew full well how the American corporatocracy worked in developing countries, but Perkins’s open admiration for Torrijos’s work generated trust between the two. Torrijos and Perkins agreed that, for Panama at least, Perkins’s economic forecasts would be accurate; in exchange, Torrijos gave Perkins’s company all the work it could handle.