I am reading John Perkins’ book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, which reads a little like a history book/tabloid/memoir. What prompted me to read it has to do with a theory I had some time ago.
I thought that power and empire work purely to create more power and more empire. If not actual power or empire-making, then the perception might suffice. But I always wondered what hand individuals play in all of this. We can talk big, about the U.S. government doing this to that, about the particular brand of capitalism that exists in the world today as this giant, faceless, machine that requires more and more, and more and more. My dad works for a big-time engineering firm, but he is too kind to want to cause harm to other countries, let alone topple their governments. And I had started reading ‘radical lefty’ literature, but still, there was hardly any specific mention of this individual which did that. Maybe I unconsciously selected books that talked big.
These thoughts come with a foreground - I have been working with community and labor organizations for a couple of years now in different capacities, trying to work on economic issues as they affect people (immigrants and people of color) on the ground. Most recently, I got tired of that work (probably because its a lot of work) and decided to take a break. So I’ve seen locally how people are affected by various policies and how something on paper can leave an indelible mark on a person’s life.
Part of the reason I want to go to law school is to understand economics better. To me, economics and the law are all tangled up. Immigration laws have changed when there’s been a need for various types of labor. I know I probably wouldn’t be blogging from the states if the U.S. at the time my father came here (1970s) didn’t need highly educated and skilled workers to come and help the U.S. defeat them evil commies. There again, I don’t know whether my dad knew what was up - he just wanted to get a decent job and live in the states.
Enter Perkins’ book. I liked the title and the description. Here was a person who used to be an “Economic Hit Man” and is writing a book about it, and his struggles with the work he was doing. The author used to work for MAIN, an engineering consulting firm whose main competitors at the time were Bechtel, Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR), and Fluor-Daniel. Along the way, it is women (he says so explicitly in the book) that have changed and molded his life. At first, its a woman that seduces him into the role of a hit man, and then it was another woman who makes him follow his conscience. Ok. And then he meets famous people - Panamanian general and President Omar Torrijos, someone integral to the exiling of the Shah from Iran, etc. etc.
It all seemed a bit too surreal and fake to me. So I did a little research. Apparently, other people think so too. It turns out that the website for the book has a series of webpages devoted to proving its veracity.
Plus the writing is bad. And it reads bad. I wasn’t sure if it was me (because I have been known to be oblivious to bad writing), but it wasn’t. And apparently, the corporatocracy no longer needs these hit men. Corporations and our government have fully ingested the notion that burdening other countries with massive amounts of debt to keep them dependent on international finance is the way to go.
Maybe these hit men are no longer around but similarly shady characters have inhabited my imagination. When I was a kid, I used to think the government had one spy for every person in the U.S. Like, you always had someone watching you, making sure you go to school, said the pledge, etc. I don’t exactly remember whether they had good or bad intentions, just that they were there. So the birth rates as stated by the government were actually double because every other person is taken into a training program to become spies. I didn’t develop that theory too much, but the notion that there exist government-sponsored/sanctioned individuals with malevolent intentions is a strong one with me.
It was probably all those comic books I collected as a kid (anyone a fan of Spawn?).
Yeah, that guy has been a really good guest on Democracy Now! a few times, but I’ve read some of his critics and there are plenty of them, too. I remember getting a similar manuscript from an industrial spy who worked for Arthur Anderson back when I was a literary agent, but he was more involved in stealing machine designs and chemical formulas and that sort of thing…wonder whatever happened to that guy…
In any case, your childhood instincts were right on the money. Don’t you know that your shadow reports to the man?
Left by Harbeer on June 16th, 2006