[D.o.w.n.l.o.a.d] 👌 (PDF) The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

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Review : Shocking Bestseller: The original version of this astonishing tell-all book spent 73 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, has sold more than 1.25 million copies, and has been translated into 32 languages. New Revelations: Featuring 15 explosive new chapters, this expanded edition of Perkins's classic bestseller brings the story of economic hit men (EHMs) up to date and, chillingly, home to the US. Over 40 percent of the book is new, including chapters identifying today's EHMs and a detailed chronology extensively documenting EHM activity since the first edition was published in 2004. Former economic hit man John Perkins shares new details about the ways he and others cheated countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. Then he reveals how the deadly EHM cancer he helped create has spread far more widely and deeply than ever in the US and everywhere else—to become the dominant system of business, government, and society today. Finally, he gives an insider view of what we each can do to change it. Economic hit men are the shock troops of what Perkins calls the corporatocracy, a vast network of corporations, banks, colluding governments, and the rich and powerful people tied to them. If the EHMs can't maintain the corrupt status quo through nonviolent coercion, the jackal assassins swoop in. The heart of this book is a completely new section, over 100 pages long, that exposes the fact that all the EHM and jackal tools—false economics, false promises, threats, bribes, extortion, debt, deception, coups, assassinations, unbridled military power—are used around the world today exponentially more than during the era Perkins exposed over a decade ago. The material in this new section ranges from the Seychelles, Honduras, Ecuador, and Libya to Turkey, Western Europe, Vietnam, China, and, in perhaps the most unexpected and sinister development, the United States, where the new EHMs—bankers, lobbyists, corporate executives, and others—“con governments and the public into submitting to policies that make the rich richer and the poor poorer.” But as dark as the story gets, this reformed EHM also provides hope. Perkins offers a detailed list of specific actions each of us can take to transform what he calls a failing Death Economy into a Life Economy that provides sustainable abundance for all. Read more

 

Review : My friend Stan is approaching his 50th and in his old age is becoming a bit of a conspiracy theorist. He emailed me a list of books to read, most of which are not easy to find, but Confessions was on it, so I ordered the new, expanded book to see what the fuss is all about. For starters, the “15 explosive new Chapters with new Revelations” are a waste of time. Whereas in the original you find yourself riding with John Perkins in Ecuador, Panama, Iran, Boston, Jakarta and Washington, in the second part you’re reading his interpretation of public information and it’s got to be said that this particular reading of it is covered much better by authors like Glenn Greenwald, Naomi Klein, John Mackey, Jeff Sachs etc. The man has little to add. The first part’s alright, on the other hand. In what is quite a tight narrative, you find out about the life and times of a Robert McNamara / Indiana Jones wannabe as he jumps from the Hilton to the Intercontinental, from Panama to Indonesia, from his wife to his clandestine girlfriend, leaving behind him a trail of destruction. Not quite, but not too far from it either. It’s cool. But it’s also grumpy. It’s basically like that Jim Rogers book with the yellow Mercedes on the front cover, except the guy swaps girls and uses the plane a lot. And rather than buy stocks along the way, he sells electricity projects, basically, and feels very bad about it because these people don’t need electricity, apparently. Oh, and he’s so negative about everything. That’s the downer. The guy feels so guilty, you know. Not guilty enough not to idolize the mythical “jackals” who hop from town to town to execute non-compliant dictators, but, you know, guilty. Which he needn’t be, since none of his actions really matter. The book was fun, but in truth the “Economic Hit Man” was a nobody. Allow me to elaborate on that, through the story of my own country. I was raised in Greece, which was quite genuinely on the frontline of the cold war. Athens was held by armed communists after WWII and the UK military quite officially (NOT clandestinely) joined the defeated Greek nationalist forces to drive the communists out. The “reds” who briefly took over my country were not a figment of somebody’s imagination, they had flesh and bones and Russian weapons. As soon as the civil war ended in favor of the Nationalists, my country was put on a strict diet of US aid, good and bad. Greece became the world’s #1 per capita recipient of Marshall Plan aid. Same as in Latin America, industries were pretty much “given” to the business aristocracy of the land. Loans were extended to Greek businessmen to buy cast-off American manufacturing equipment, for example, with the protection of gigantic tariffs taking care of the fact that the end products would not exactly be cutting edge. Never having originated in Greece, these businesses did not take advantage of my country’s idiosyncrasies and advantages. Extreme examples include a bauxite processing plant in beautiful Delphi (which incidentally still operates thanks to a grant of free energy), refineries and shipping docks in ancient Eleusis, fabrics in Patras etc. The only thing that saved us from the discovery of oil destroying the beautiful Aegean was that the equally enlightened Turkish government laid claim to the discovered oil, thankfully leading to the sensible decision to leave it under the ground where it belongs. Greece was forced to spend an unconscionable percent of GDP on NATO-procured armaments (and remains to this day one of the few members that allocate in excess of 2% to defense) and had a military dictatorship imposed from 1967 to 1974. We even had the odd extrajudicial killing of the kind Perkins describes, with two prominent members of the left (Labrakis and Panagoulis) perishing in suspect traffic accidents immediately before and after this period. In 1974 the US “military industrial complex” failed my country completely. Much as the CIA’s leadership was in cahoots with our military government, it was caught napping by Henry Kissinger as the State Department organized the Turkish invasion of Cyprus without consulting with President Ford or with anybody else until the facts on the ground were fully shaped. Retribution was swift. Greece not being a banana republic (at the time) or geographically located within the mandate of the Monroe doctrine, we proudly kicked out our US-backed dictators, withdrew from NATO and there was very little Uncle Sam could do about it as we went straight into the embrace of the European Economic Community (and then back into the NATO fold, but from a position of relative strength.) In 1981, five months after our new French (pay-)masters, we proudly elected a Socialist government, even. The story since then has of course not been a proud story at all. EU membership afforded to populist governments the funds to nationalize the collapsing hitherto tariff-protected industries, rather than shut them down. Funds meant to be invested in infrastructure transmogrified into several massive entitlements programs that persist today, IMF memoranda notwithstanding. The size of government rose 4-fold. As I’m writing this, the US Federal government only employs twice as many people as the Greek government (yes, that’s very far from a like-for-like comparison, but still!) Finally, membership in the Euro currency union allowed Greece to borrow more money than it will ever be able to repay. What’s the Economic Hit Man got to do with this all? How does my country’s story and the way I lived it counter John Perkins’ simplistic narrative? Every which way, is the short answer. I’ll choose letter N to answer this one. I have three friends called Nikos whose parents would have been direct interlocutors for John Perkins in Greece, had his work for the “military industrial complex” brought him to our shores. Nikos N’s daddy was in the energy industry and the engineer behind several electric power projects, of the kind that electrified my grandparents' house when I was a boy. Nikos K’s daddy was in the tobacco industry and a major beneficiary of the mercantilist economic policies, but also a generous contributor to causes and a very solid employer until tariffs collapsed with our entry to the European Community, laying waste to his empire. Nikos S’s daddy, finally, was by general admission a CIA operative. He had a steady job, but we all knew he was reporting back to his American masters. All are fervent nationalists, excellent family men and have spawned successful children, all of whom received their high school education in Greece, all of whom did some of their studies in the US and more than half of whom now live abroad. None of them has a fortune to show for his efforts or much to answer for, as far as I’m concerned, and that probably includes the CIA informer. With that out of the way and with no further ado, here’s a short list of how John Perkins' findings and confessions collide with my country’s story and my friends’ parents’ stories: 1. The country’s Debt/GDP ratio when we kicked out the Americans was 18%. I’m not saying that’s zero, but it’s a hell of a lot better than the 250% it reached later. Bottom line is because it’s American private companies that sell you the sundry projects / weapons, not the government, it is NOT in the interest of the US to see its allies over-indebted. Au contraire, if you place an order to buy Phantoms in five years’ time, you’d better look after your finances between now and then. By the way, that’s true everywhere, not just for the US. When horrible communist dictator Ceausescu died, there might have been an army of AIDS babies in Romania, but the state was pretty much debt-free. That was almost a condition imposed on its client state by the Soviets. SUMMARY OF THIS POINT: The US has never had a policy of controlling its client states through debt. To the extent that overborrowing occurred in Latin America it was a mistake made by the money center banks and they paid for it dearly. 2. There is absolutely nothing wrong with building roads and electrical plants in poor countries. Electrification is as close as you can get to a “fundamental right” in our days. I remember life in my grandparents’ house before electricity and I’ll sum it up in one word: dysentery. Similarly, India’s progress today is mainly halted by the absence of a road network. The Chinese are having to choose between the environment and electrification and it’s no contest. If somebody is offering you a loan to build your first electrical plant or an important trunk road, TAKE IT. And my friend Nikos N’s daddy is a national hero, as far as I’m concerned, for designing and building those plants. 3. Absolute right and wrong is a luxury in a world of scarcity and limited choice. Yes, my country did not only benefit from being a US semi-protectorate between 1948 and 1974. We took the rough with the smooth. But a quick look at the lasting predicament of our northern neighbors (Albania, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria) and the Yugoslavian civil war of 1992-94, especially, makes it patently clear we got by far the better of the two deals available. And if that meant we had to do some things to appease the military industrial complex, if that means a few of us had to work for the CIA, even, it’s a sad state of affairs, but you are only allowed to consider it in the context of your alternatives. 4. How is proud, sovereign, European Greece doing right now? How did Sarah Palin put it? The hopey-changey thing did not work out for us, did it? Under the Americans we knew what we were giving up, of course. But the EU was not exactly something for nothing. A priori, what Perkins is saying sounds wonderful. Hell, in principle I agree with him. In practice it looks very different. We wasted our sovereignty. With this little rant over, I must say I enjoyed his “Grumpy Jim Rogers” thing and I actually learned tons from it. Like, I don’t for one second doubt that his employer and Bechtel and Halliburton were at some point in time the tail wagging the dog of American foreign policy. Even if that’s mainly because foreign policy is not very important to the US, it is regardless quite interesting and the detail offered here is quite extensive. Names and addresses! And perhaps when the original book came out it was a surprise for people to hear that the US made the Bin Ladens. Also, I know terribly little about Latin American politics. I had no idea Panama was once the northern tip of Colombia. Manuel Noriega was to me a villain with bad acne who once did terrible things with a Coke bottle. Now I know he was a CIA informer for 20 years and that the CIA disposed of him rather ruthlessly when he turned against his masters. My feelings toward him and his acne are not much changed, but my bank of knowledge has expanded. In summary, the first part of this book is a fun read if you can stand the author’s negativity, but it’s not all it’s trumped up to be. The second part of the book you should skip. P.S. If I never hear about the Pachamama Alliance again, it might still be too soon