Sometimes there is a witness you can't accuse of conspiracy thinking, because he's describing not someone else's theory but his own job. John Perkins is exactly that. He is not a journalist who dug up a plot, nor a YouTube blogger. By his own account, he spent years doing the very thing he later wrote about. In 2004 his book "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" came out and became a bestseller. And the most unsettling thing about it isn't the exposés but the everyday, engineering tone: a man describing not villainy but a well-oiled procedure.
Who the "economic hit men" are
Perkins was chief economist at the consulting firm Chas. T. Main, which worked hand in hand with the World Bank, the IMF, and the US Treasury. His definition of the profession runs like this: economic hit men are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the world; their tools are rigged financial reports, fraudulent elections, bribes, extortion, and, where needed, something worse.
It sounds like a cheap thriller. Perkins honestly admits he thought so too — until he found himself inside. And the facts the scheme is built on are mostly public. People just don't usually assemble them into one picture. Perkins assembled them — and described it as an algorithm.
The capture algorithm, step by step
Rewrite Perkins's account as pseudocode and you get an indecently simple function. The goal isn't to "help the country" but to make it a permanent debtor and take its assets.
- Step 1. Create the debt. The country is given a huge loan — always in dollars, not local currency.
- Step 2. Make sure it can't repay. GDP growth forecasts are inflated several-fold. Against the bloated numbers, an unpayable sum is lent.
- Step 3. Run the money in a circle. The loan goes to Western contractors for "infrastructure." The money leaves and returns to the top — while the debt stays on the country.
- Step 4. Wait for default and offer "help" with conditions: privatize assets, liberalize markets, devalue the currency, cut social spending.
- Step 5. Take the assets at a fraction of their real price — because the seller is in crisis and desperate.
The output is profit. Huge. Almost always. And the country ends up attached to the creditor for decades.
The core bug for the victim
The most insidious part is in step one. The loan is in dollars. The country earns in its own currency but owes in someone else's. Which means the lever controlling its debt sits not in its capital but where the dollar is printed.
Let the Federal Reserve raise rates and the debt of every country that borrowed in dollars grows heavier automatically. Without their consent, without negotiation, without a single shot. One person, with one decision, can deepen the burden of dozens of states at once. The book calls it remote code execution at the level of a state — someone else's command running right inside your economy. You appear sovereign, but the system has a backdoor, and you don't hold the key.
What happens when a leader says "no"
And if the head of a country refuses to play by the rules — won't take the loan, tries to control his own resources? Perkins writes about this plainly: then come those he calls the "jackals." And that is no longer a metaphor about economics.
He lays out a row of names, and many of those episodes have long been declassified and documented, including by the agencies themselves. Leaders who tried to nationalize resources or get off the debt needle too often ended the same way: a coup or death. Perkins honestly draws the line between levels — first the "economic hit men" work with numbers and loans, and only if that fails does the next tier step in. Soft power first, then hard.
Here it's important not to slide into cheap conspiracy: not every misfortune in the world is a planned assassination. But the pattern this insider describes is too regular to write off as chance.
Why it still works in our century
You might think: ancient history. No. The same logic is plainly recognizable in Greece, Argentina, Indonesia, and dozens of countries in Africa. The countries and decades change — the procedure doesn't: create debt, wait for insolvency, arrive with "help" and conditions, take the assets.
Perkins is valuable precisely because he shows that these are not the scattered misfortunes of separate countries but one repeating function, called again and again. The ancient Egyptians would have called the principle behind it Isfet — the inversion of fair exchange, a structure that draws the resource and puts nothing back. This structure has no villain's face. It has a procedure.
Where is the ordinary person in this
He is at the very bottom of the algorithm, in the line "take the assets." His pension, his water, his minerals, his labor — that is the resource flowing upward when a country falls into the trap. And nobody asks him: contracts are signed over his head, and then he's told that "a bad economy" or "bad luck" is to blame.
The answer: the MAAT token and DAO
The power of the "economic hit men" lies not in the genius of individuals but in the fact that they operate as a coordinated network with a ready algorithm — against scattered countries and scattered citizens ground down one at a time. Perkins exposed the procedure itself. The logical answer is to build a symmetric network, only in favor of people and out in the open.
That is MAAT. The MAAT token is membership in a cooperative and a single vote on the principle of one human, one vote — not "one dollar, one vote." Governance runs through a DAO, a decentralized organization with a transparent treasury where every movement of funds is visible to all, and no "consultant" signs a predatory contract for you behind closed doors. When millions of people from different countries pool their votes and funds, they gain what the victims of Perkins's scheme always lacked: coordination and a lever of their own. The entry is simple: read the book, take the token, get your vote — and step out of someone else's algorithm, where you've been assigned the line "resource."