Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and the Truth About Global Corruption.

[rodeodance]

i am going to get this book.

July 15, 2007
Covert Ops
By JOE QUEENAN

THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE
Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and the Truth About Global Corruption.

By John Perkins.

365 pp. Dutton. $25.95.

When discussing the movers and shakers who made the last third of the 20th century so special, people tend to rattle off names like Mao Zedong, Richard Nixon, Yasir Arafat, Henry Kissinger, Pol Pot and Ronald Reagan. Yet if John Perkins, the author of “The Secret History of the American Empire,” is to be believed, to that list must be added one more name: his own.

Perkins is the author of the fabulously successful, and in some quarters revered, “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man,” which explains how a cabal of wicked men like him have enabled perfidious corporations to seize control of the planet. Now, in a follow-up written not for crass financial gain but because he owes it to his fellow man, the promiscuously altruistic Perkins comes completely clean about the epochal role he has played in ruining life on earth.

After all, it was Perkins’s work for a Boston consulting firm that allowed nefarious multinational corporations to plunder Indonesia, Perkins’s acquisition of for-your-eyes-only population data from the mysterious “Dr. Asim” that enabled the Secret American Empire to take over Egypt, Perkins’s covert missions in Saudi Arabia that sealed Saddam Hussein’s fate, and Perkins’s invention of an ingenious payment system that led directly to the destruction of Bolivia’s economy. Thus, while the average person may think George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin are the ones who pull the strings on this planet, Perkins disabuses his readers of such naïveté. It is the economic hit men (E.H.M.’s) and their rough-and-tumble cousins, the corporate “jackals,” all of them in the employ of the “corporatocracy,” who decide who prospers, who starves, who lives, who dies. And, as is so often the case with deceptively omnipotent organizations, it is the Secret American Empire’s ability to dominate the world without having an official address or even a fax number that makes it so sinister, so powerful, so deadly.

This empire “is as ruthless as any in history,” Perkins writes. “It has enslaved more people and its policies and actions have resulted in more deaths than those under the imperial regimes of Rome, Spain, Portugal, France, England and Holland or at the hands of Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler, and yet its crimes go almost unnoticed, disguised in the robes of eloquent rhetoric.” ....

[KoKo]

1. He was on C-Span Booknotes talking about his new book this a.m.

It was great...and he offered positive comments about what we can do to change the situation. He says we need to force the Corporations to change because THEY are the ones who are writing the laws in Congress and who are the real rulers of our Global Economy.

[NoFederales]

2. Thanks for the book notice, I'm going to check it out as well.

You don't suppose that the Hollywood TV producers have been sneaking peaks at serious works to fuel such scintiallating series as "Dirty Sexy Money", airing this Fall? Good grief.

NoFederales