Confessions of an Economic IlliterateCame across this
interview with John Perkins, author of
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. He claims to have been employed by a private company while he secretly worked for the National Security Agency in a convoluted plot to get poor countries into debt so that our corporations could then go into those countries and rob them blind. Or something.
About the only evidence that Perkins offers is that he was the Chief Economist at a large firm in Boston. And if that's true, maybe he's got a case, because nobody who was legitimately a chief economist would say something as moronic as this:
And, so, we went to Saudi Arabia in the early seventies. We knew Saudi Arabia was the key to dropping our dependency, or to controlling the situation. And we worked out this deal whereby the Royal House of Saud agreed to send most of their petro-dollars back to the United States and invest them in U.S. government securities. The Treasury Department would use the interest from these securities to hire U.S. companies to build Saudi Arabia–new cities, new infrastructure–which we’ve done.That's pretty silly stuff. "The Treasury Department would use the interest..." how? In fact, the Treasury Department was
paying the interest to the Saudis. Yes, I am quite sure that the Saudis then turned around and used the money to build their modern cities and infrastructure, hiring many American companies to do so. That's just economic good sense (like investing a trade surplus in US government securities), because if you don't, the dollar will fall relative to Saudi currency, and then the Saudis don't make as much money selling their oil, as the oil is denominated in dollars.
