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DancingBear Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-22-05 11:09 AM
Original message
I MUST make a book recommendation here

John Perkins -Confessions Of An Economic Hit Man

I know many folks here have read it, but for those of you who have not please do so.

A very easy read, and a good book to give to someone as a primer of what really goes on behind the scenes with regard to U.S. efforts to expand the empire.

I'll leave the reviews to others, but suffice it to say once I started it I read it straight through to completion.
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cthrumatrix Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-22-05 11:15 AM
Response to Original message
1. A must read for all on DU....I just finished it myself
A review I saw on Amazon (see below). The book clearly shows the depths and reach of corprotacracy which has taken over America...it doesn't connect all the dots in a "bigger picture"...but it is very detailed on the corruptness of America.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

THE LIGHT OF TRUTH, January 11, 2005
Reviewer: Nick de Saint-Germain - See all my reviews
The author was employed as an economist for an international consulting firm. But his true job was taking part in scams to enrich international banks and multinational corporations usually at the expense of poor people in emerging nations. He eventually developed a guilty conscience and quit. To expiate his sins, he has written a book exposing this sleazy business. He had difficulty finding a publisher, since those whom he approached either feared stepping on big toes or else wanted him to disguise his writing as fiction.

Perkins is at his best when he is describing what he knows well: how what he calls the corporatocracy really operates. He is less convincing when proposing leftist ideas as solutions. For example, he praises President Chavez of Venezuela as someone who has helped his people, but Perkins does not mention how Chavez has also propped up the Castro regime in Cuba.

Perkins says that the corporatocracy is not an organized conspiracy. One can quibble about the conspiracy part, but he offers no insight as to why he does not consider it organized. Even primitive life forms like ants and bees exhibit a high degree of organization. The author himself says that he keeps seeing the same agencies, companies, modus operandis, and even actors involved. Yet he would have us believe that this is a random DNA match despite astronomical odds.

He also dances around the maypole as to who is behind it all. The face cards in his deck--McNamara, Bush Senior, Shultz, Weinberger, Cheney, Kissinger--are all members of David Rockefeller's Trilateral Commission. Yet the "T" word is never mentioned.

Perkins says that cozy ties of government, corporations, and Wall Street began in 1974 with the Arab oil embargo. Yet he fails to mention that Rockefeller, the Ace of Spades, created the Trilateral Commission the year before.

The author says that he refused to issue the book under the guise of fiction. But similar exposes have already been done. A made-for-television classic of the 1970's called "Brotherhood of the Bell" came very close to describing Skull and Bones, a shadowy organization whose members include John Kerry and the Bush family. A more recent film called "The Skulls" was practically a documentary about it. Another film called "The Firm" told of an ambitious law student from a disadvantaged background who climbed the heights of success after striking a Faust-like bargain with a sinister legal outfit. It sounds like an allegory of Bill Clinton's becoming a made Trilateralist, except that the character in the story developed a conscience at the end.

Anyway, the author himself blurs the line between fact and fiction. Most of the anti-American statements that he quotes were made by people with whom he supposedly had private conversations who are now dead or anonymously identified.

Perkins says that legitimate anti-Western movements in emerging nations are being hijacked by Muslim extremists because of mistreatment by Westerners. But anti-American despots treat their people worse than Westerners do. It was Kadafy of Libya who ordered the bombing of a Pan American passenger plane. Ayatollahs of Iran were complicit in taking American diplomats hostage. The Afghan Taliban sheltered 9/11 terrorist bin Laden and his al Qaeda operatives.

It would be nice to see Perkins write more especially about what he knows. One has the feeling that he has barely touched the surface in this book. Forgiveness of debt by poorer nations may become an even bigger scam than what Perkins was involved in. It appears that governments--but not private banks--are going to let some nations renege on debts. The result is that money which would have gone to repay debts to governments like the US will instead be used just to pay debts to banks like Rockefeller's J.P. Morgan Chase and Prince al Waleed's Citigroup. People in poor countries will see little benefit, and taxpayers in creditor nations will be subsidizing these billionaires.


http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1576753018/qid=1106410305/sr=2-1/ref=pd_ka_b_2_1/103-4828369-2937437
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pstans Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-22-05 11:29 AM
Response to Original message
2. I heard the author on AAR
and I thought he was very interesting. I added this book to my list of books that I want to read. Now I just have to find the time to read them all. Here is my list so far:

Thomas Frank: What's the matter with Kansas
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: Crimes Against Nature
Garrison Keiller: Homegrown Democrat
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DancingBear Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-22-05 11:38 AM
Response to Reply #2
3. Mrs. DB gave me the book for Christmas based on that interview
She is reading it now.
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justiceischeap Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-22-05 11:41 AM
Response to Original message
4. I went to check it out at my public library
but alas, they did not have it. Can people request libraries to buy books?
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Pastiche423 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jan-24-05 02:16 AM
Response to Reply #4
6. Yes
Or, at least my library does. They have yet to turn down any request I've made.
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pstans Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jan-24-05 12:43 AM
Response to Original message
5. Perkins was on BookTV on CSPAN 2 last night
I saw Perkins talking about this book on CSPAN2. Sorry, I wasn't around a computer to post it.

His talk was very interesting and makes me want to read the book even more. I thought it was very interesting that he said that when he went to see Ground Zero after 9/11 that he felt somewhat responsible.

The US would get 3rd World nations to take out loans from the World Bank, USAID, etc. Then the $ would get transfered out of the aid program directly to large US companies (Haliburton, Bechtel, etc) to do some service in the 3rd World nation. The 3rd World nation would become slaves to the US because of the large debt they owed and would never be able to pay back. Here are the steps the US took for these nations to agree to these deals.
1. the economic hitman would go in and propose the deal. If the 3rd world nation didn't bite, then...
2. a Jackyl, a CIA opperative, would go in and change the governments mind (He described 2 incidences where a helicopter "accident" and an airplane crash that killed leaders of countries that didn't accept the economic hitman's offer). If that failed then...
3. The US would get the military involved.

Perkins said that Saddam Hussein would still be in power today if he played "the game". He didn't in the late 1980's and didn't in the late 1990's. He also said that Saudi Arabia started to play the game after the Oil Embargo in the 1970's. The US has been protecting the House of Saud ever since and will do so as long as Saudi Arabia provides cheap oil.
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Al-CIAda Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jan-24-05 04:13 AM
Response to Reply #5
7. Listen to this interview w/the author
Edited on Mon Jan-24-05 04:15 AM by Al-CIAda
In it, toward the end, the question of 9-11 (LIHOP) is put to him...as well as possable stolen US elections...interesting answers.


Audio-
Guest: John Perkins, author of "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man"
Fri., December 10, 2004
Deadline Live w/Jack Blood

mp3's-
pt1- Interview starts approx. half way through
http://mp3.rbnlive.com/Blood/0412/20041210_Fri_JackBlood1.mp3
pt2-CIA sequence of Empire (economics, assasinations, torture, vote rigging, etc.)
http://mp3.rbnlive.com/Blood/0412/20041210_Fri_JackBlood2.mp3

Realplayer RAM-
http://mp3.rbnlive.com/Blood/0412/20041210_Fri_JackBlood.ram
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