Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
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I love this book
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Lindsey
(last edited Aug 25, 2016 10:52AM)
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rated it 5 stars
Mar 09, 2007 02:11PM

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Capsule review: The DaVinci Code for Democracy Now! listeners. Pretentious junk food.
I first heard about this book from a friend who heard it promo'd on NPR (should have been my first warning sign) as a tell-all by some guy who was recruited by the NSA to snooker foreign governments into various construction boondoggles and development scams, and some other kind of ecomonic espionage or soemthing. So, I read the book, and Perkins just has some story about a sexy woman (the sexy, often exotic women are all over this book) who slept with him and got him to meet some vaguely NSA-ish person, and then boom, he's working for some shady consulting group that essentially pushes contruction boondoggles on foreign governments as a way of recycling petrodollars back to the US. That's it. No details about his actual relation to the government or the intelligence/policymakming apparatus. No names, no details, nothing except sex leading to a cushy job.
Also, some fairly obvious errors and slop thrown in. For example, he buys into some myths about Chavez and creates some of his own, IE saying that HCF "dissolved the VZA'n congress," which sounds like a repeal of democracy, when in fact it was a vote of the Venezuelan people that created a new constitution and government structure.
The book follows a cycle of Perkins supposedly getting sick of all the scummmy things he is doing, saying "how can I go on getting paid so much to do such terrible things and sleeping with all these beautiful, exotic women? I have to quit!" And then he sleeps with another beautiful, exotic woman, or quits for a while, or keeps working. It doesn't really matter, because soon the cycle starts again. Whatever.
And what makes it sickening is now Perkins gets to do the Demcoracy Now! circuit and tell adoring audiences how awful he feels now, having made all that money and banged all these hot women, and, oh please, won't someone in the audience help me soothe my tortured, sensitive conscience?
What a creep. John Perkins is a flaky fraud and his scam makes me want to vomit.
Instead of writing this book, John Perkins could have done a short article and a letter to Penthouse and saved everyone involved a lot of wasted time and breath.



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