| CONFESSIONS OF AN ECONOMIC HIT MAN John Perkins San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2004 |
Rating: 3.5 Fair |
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| ISBN 1-57675-301-8 | 250pp. | HC/BWI | $24.95 | |
There's a good deal to like about this book. John Perkins has written a highly entertaining tale that carried me along swiftly. It's full of exotic locales described in travel-brochure style. The characters and situations are well-drawn, in a shallow sense. Confessions would work as a spy novel, maybe even as a fictionalized version of history. However, Perkins presents this book as a factual account, and that is its downfall.1
To compress it into a paltry few paragraphs, Perkins' plot is this: Disenchanted with the life his parents have planned for him, he drops out of Middlebury College, takes a newspaper job in Boston, earns a business degree from BU, and gets married. There, through his wife's family, he meets an executive with the National Security Agency (NSA). He's profiled and recruited by them. Then, at the NSA's urging, he and his wife Ann spend three years in Ecuador with the Peace Corps. Afterward, he's invited to work for a company known as MAIN.2 His job will be economic forecasting in LDCs (less developed countries), and he begins to study econometrics at the Boston Public Library in preparation. Before long, a mysterious woman he calls Claudine Martin (a pseudonym) sits down across from him at the BPL and introduces herself.
Claudine, it develops, is his trainer. This training, Perkins tells us, takes place exclusively in her apartment and is reinforced by his seduction and "verbal manipulation" by Claudine. The "manipulation" works because Claudine has access to his profile, which apparently convinced the NSA that he is prime EHM material. Claudine minces no words about his mission as an EHM, or economic hit man: It is to inflate the growth projections for the LDCs he visits so that loans from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund will pour in to finance mammoth construction projects. The projects will enrich American engineering firms like Bechtel, Fluor, Brown & Root — the "usual suspects" — while the LDCs will be unable to repay the loans on the overoptimistic schedules supported by his inflated growth rates, putting them in a state of economic servitude to Uncle Sam.
Despite some misgivings, Perkins goes along. For the next ten years, he relates, he wreaks monetary havoc in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. But his conscience troubles him every step of the way, and he keeps a journal of his activities, thinking to publish an exposé one day. Finally, while sailing his yacht with a lady friend in the Caribbean, he decides he can stand the anguish no longer. He goes back to Boston and resigns from MAIN. But still, threats and bribes keep him from going public until the terrorist attacks of September 2001 bring home the enormity of his guilt. He finds a small, brave publisher, and the rest you know.
Perkins speaks plainly about the import of his actions as an EHM. He is there to foster America's dastardly plan for world domination by subverting LDCs. If he fails to do so by economic means, the "jackals", the literal hit men, will move in — as they did, he asserts, on Torrijos and on Ecuador's Jaime Roldós. If the jackals fail, then it's the army's turn. Perkins lists several cases of army involvement, including our current operation in Iraq.
The premise of his book, then, is that it forms a true and accurate account of his career and its effects. I was willing to go along with that premise for a while. But when I got to Chapters 7 & 8, the many "red flags" began to register. Some of those are:
I did finish all 35 chapters. As I said, it's an entertaining read. Alas, I think that's about all it is. Perkins, to be sure, skillfully blends in plenty of historical facts. He quotes and cites a host of other books, many of which he's obviously read. All of this makes its veracity superficially plausible. But, on reflection, I see too many reasons to disbelieve that Perkins, or anyone else, was explicitly recruited as an "economic hit man". The primary reason, ironically, is the sense of jeopardy he invokes with his claims of assassins waiting in the wings. An obvious implication is that, given the stakes of the game he describes, he would be rubbed out if he spilled the beans. Yet, despite having told many people about his misgivings and his manuscript, he displays almost no concern over this possibility. And he obviously still lives. Then there's the statement from his daughter Jennifer (who's a major motivation for his coming clean, he says) to the effect that if they got her dad, she would carry on the work of exposing them.
Several times, while wandering on the Internet, I've encountered conspiracy nuts. Their stories follow a pattern. They all claim to have highly classified information of world-changing significance.5 People have been killed to suppress this information, they maintain, and they themselves are sore oppressed by the shadowy, sinister suppressors. Yet despite this risk, they are determined to get the truth "out there". And they are able — often for weeks at a time — to post messages about it freely. John Perkins' claims are nowhere near as absurd as those of the Internet kooks. Indeed, I have little trouble believing that, with certain projects in certain countries, the result resembles what he claims is regularly sought and accomplished. Else why the complaints about the IMF and globalization? Nevertheless, his book reminds me strongly of that same sort of conspiracy story. I cannot put any credence in his allegations of a purposeful drive to make America the new global hegemon.
The things he doesn't mention reinforce my doubts. The United Nations, it seems clear, would have something to say about the sort of American plan he postulates. Yet he barely mentions the U.N. except as an ambassadorial post once held by George H. W. Bush. Nor does he mention the Grameen Bank, or any sort of microlending. Surely his EHMs would be acting to prevent such financing from taking hold. There's almost no jargon from the field of economics, and no mention of the many instances when LDCs bring about their own money troubles. Finally, there's the fact that he and his team members are the only EHMs whose actions he describes. He does say that MAIN has competitors, and their operations in some areas (like Africa or India) would lock up LDCs there, keeping MAIN out of the picture. But given such operations, some sort of grapevine which would carry news of them to Perkins must exist, and since his stated goal is to stop such exploitation wherever it occurs, I would expect some such news to be part of his account. In short, the picture I get is one in which only John Perkins and a carefully restricted cast of characters matter.
So my assessment of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is this: A true, reliable account it is not. No one should call their congressman or start up a letter-writing campaign based on it.6 Still, I give it a recommendation in the Fair category. Here's why: It's a good read. Those who don't know much recent history will learn a thing or two from facts Perkins includes to bolster its verisimilitude, such as the deaths of Roldós and Torrijos. Its mostly correct index makes it easy to recheck those facts, and its 96 chapter notes make it a good source for the books that are true and reliable.
Finally, Perkins understands a truth that many who operate at his level forget. It is that though rewarding a country's elite while ignoring or disadvantaging the remainder of its population may confer a short-term benefit, it is a recipe for long-term disaster. As Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, former Saudi oil minister, once said, "When there is a conflict between short-term and long-term priorities, you must always go with the long term."
This is from a note for the book that Perkins reproduces on pages 180-181:
The old-fashioned slave trader told himself that he was dealing with a species that was not entirely human, and that he was offering them the opportunity to become Christianized. He also understood that slaves were instrumental to the survival of his own society, that they were the foundation of his economy. The modern slave trader assures himself (or herself) that the desperate people are better off earning one dollar a day than no dollars at all, and that they are receiving the opportunity to become integrated into the larger world community. She also understands that these desperate people are fundamental to the survival of her company, that they are the foundation for her own lifestyle. She never stops to think about the larger implications of what she, her lifestyle, and the economic system behind them are doing to the world — or of how they may ultimately impact her children's future. |
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