Confessions of an Economic Hit Man [Review]

I picked up John Perkin's latest book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man in Hong Kong this week. It was a hefty sum - 115 HK dollars(!) - but I needed more books. I'd seen this one referenced around MetaFilter and picked it up when the bookstore we were visiting failed to produce any substantial modern fiction.

Perkin writes a cloak-and-dagger account of being an obviously underqualified "Yes Man" economist for one of the original multi-national construction and energy companies called MAIN. He outlines a clear and systematic approach of trapping developing nations like Indonesia and Columbia with massive loans to develop their economies in the early 1970's. His company specialized in energy so his job was to invent electricity demand forecasts, tie them in with potential GDP growth, and use the reports to justify massive loans.

The loans themselves were too massive to be repaid. That much is obvious today when countries like Argentina and Ecuador are spending half of their national budgets supporting ancient loans. Furthermore, the loan money never made it down to those most in need because it circulated amongst the corrupt government officials and the American contractors who planned and built the power stations and electrical grids.

Anyone who follows current events closely should know this. There's not much of a confession yet, at least not a useful one. So what we get out of the book are two contentions he makes from this. The first is that this was on purpose, the second is that the NSA was involved.

I think the first contention is very plausible. American companies and the US government colluded to shackle developing countries in massive debt so they could be easily manipulated later for UN votes, military bases, and other services. His first boss at MAIN pretty much verified this when he said that, "what John's book says is, there was a conspiracy to put all these countries on the hook, and that happened."

The NSA contention is sketchy at best. He draws as his only source for NSA intrigue was that he was profiled and offered a job by them before he decided to join the Peace Corp. Someone in his wife's family sets him up with the interview and tells him it's OK that he's going to go into the Peace Corp because there will likely be a lucrative job at the end of his service. When he gets offered the lucrative job, he assumes it's an NSA front. He wavers in his own belief that this was the case, but ultimately he sides with it when he outright calls his first MAIN boss and recruiter an NSA liaison. Furthemore, a State Department rebuttal of the book is correct in saying that the NSA is a cryptographic [codes] and SigInt [tracking telecommunications] intelligence agency and isn't involved in the same kind of intrigue as the CIA.

I just wished he'd leave his NSA hunches as just hunchs and stuck with the facts. Perkin delivers in showing what happens when the "jackals" come out when politicians don't play the game: air crashes, riots, and coups. These aren't mere conspiracies, but documented practices of the corporocracy in action. He demonstrates vividly the links between government and the companies that get massive rebuilding contracts. Cheney being CEO of Haliburton is just the latest in a long history of tainted dealings in "development" and "aid." Americans need to know what's been done by their government and business leaders in the name of altruism and modernity.

Tags: Treyopia news current events current events book reviews John Perkins Perkins confessions of an economic hit man globalization development aid China NSA corporocracy

Off the Rails

There's a freedom living abroad that's difficult to describe. One is not judged the same as you are back home. Locals tend to attribute almost all our behavior - better or worse - as just being something foreigners do. The minor guilts that haunt everyday life are absent and true personalities shine. You begin acting on your own conscious without second thoughts instead of having to consider what other people think. That freedom is exponential in somewhere like Cambodia, an impoverished nation putting itself back together after wholesale slaughter during decades of civil war. There's an allure to the anarchy that draws many colorful characters.

It's also the subject of Amita Gilbao's Off the Rails in Phnom Penh: Into the Dark Heart of Guns, Girls, and Ganja. Unfortunately, it was horrific in every imaginable way. To begin with the writing was sloppy. There was no narrative arch, no story to unfold, and he simply doesn't have a writers hand at description. Three times in one paragraph he described Cambodian music as somber. He invents words - something I'm not opposed to - but sticks with the duds throughout the book. One of the words in his last sentence was "tragicomic." No one says this. Your last sentence is supposed to be poignant, reflective... tragicomic is what you come up with? It's almost as bad as him stopping to add "shopping arcade" in parenthesis to let us know that's his clever term for strip malls.

So we've got down that he's a bad writer... so what does he pick as the subject of his book? Whoring druggie pedophile expats. He delivers almost 200 pages about men running around in Southeast Asia snorting heroin before their English classes and renting teenaged peasant girls sold into sexual bondage.

He throws out his cards early by having someone describe his work as a being " Like a Gonzo rant from Hunter S. Thompson" on the cover but then falls on his face emulating the unedited stream of consciousness style that only a select few can pull off. There's also little tension between the writer and over-the-deep-end friends like Thompson had with Oscar Acosta. Thompson uses his lawyer almost as a proving point of his own sanity and keeps Acosta at a safe distance when he's is at his worse, you really get a feeling that Gilbao deeply admires the men he writes about. He wishes he could be brave enough to sleep with a $2 illiterate 14 year old prostitute too.

It's so disappointing because the subject matter is so rich. Gilbao brings up the Josef Conrad link early saying that there's a reason Kurtz goes crazy in Cambodia in Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Copalla's re-imagining of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Heart of Darkness is about a good man gone mad without any of the routine social factors keeping us sane. Deep in the jungle, far removed from civilization, morals and ethics bend beyond recognition. Gilbao makes the connection in the first chapter, but then does nothing more with it.

This would have been an excellent approach to the book instead of the self-important diary entries. Gilbao touches on it briefly, when he visits a brothel and leaves before anything happens, afraid that there was no turning back afterwards. It is precisely that moment, when heavy moral questions about actions disappear after trial, that is worth writing an entire book on. The depravity in and of itself is not interesting. It's the mental slide into an entirely different world where the values and norms you grow up with vanish without notice that holds literary weight.





Tags:Off the Rails Phnom Penh Cambodia Amit Gilboa Gonzo Thompson Hunter S. travel writing expat lifestyle Asia Treyopia