Confessions of a styrafoam safe-T helmeted Hitman

Upon the encouragement of a friend, I am posting a blog entry. Well, why not. After all, I need a little break. I'm reading "Learn ASP.net 2.0 in 24 hours" by SAMS. It consists of twenty-four hour-long lessons. I am nearing the conclusion of hour four, and have just built a mortgage calculator. Nothing fancy or complicated, and the book walks you through making it while explaining most of what goes into it.

Anyhow, speaking of books - I am very much into Audio books lately. I listened to my first this past August: "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" by Edward McWackenjob (or something like that). It was actually a fairly interesting book; which surprised me since it came upon the recommendation (insistence, really) of my friend Dan. He was supposed to read "Islam Unveiled" in exchange for subjecting me to the made-up-world of John Perkins ('Confessions' actual author), but he never completely read it. I could speculate for a while as to why he chose to go against his promise to me to complete the book, but I think the most likely reason of all was that his brain was two sizes too small (got to start reading the kids less Seuss). Well, if I am going to bring up Confessions, I may as well critique it a bit:

John Perkins was an engineer who worked for a big evil corporation. An electrical engineer, and not too-talented by his own description. His job was to jet around the world to forecast load requirements on the electrical grids his company was about to burden the host nation with. He was encouraged to inflate the numbers so that the evil corporation could build the biggest possible grids (we need to that here in the States!!!) and thereby maximize their evil profits, earned evilly and to be used toward all sorts of evil purposes; most notably the Guild of Evil Evil-Doers, the Rotary Club, Girl Scouts, Bechtel, Halliburton, Halliburton, Halliburton, etc. So this is why the book is entitled "Confessions"... because he would dupe all of those dumb world leaders into buying more electrical capacity than they really needed. In some countries, he even tricked them into getting the undercoating and over-charged for the scotch-guard too. And just where did these benevolent, if naive, Third-World leaders get the scratch to build such a fancy-schmancy electrification system? The US: by way of the World Bank and the IMF.

Perkin's assertion is that the US grants loans to third world countries so that it can call in favors from these countries when the US wants to flex its Empirical muscle. The US also insists that the country uses US firms to complete the work (no way, really???!!!). This brazen selfishness of lending money with a few strings attached is of course why 9/11 happened, according to the author. You see, in his mind the world is just so tired of the US bullying small helpless countries, that it was only inevitable that we would be attacked in the name of Allah. Now, the ignorant among us might perceive a slight disconnect between Islamic Terrorism and how the World Bank and IMF loans money to impoverished nations. If you are one of these people, you might just be lacking the colorful imagination required to fully grasp the nuances here.

Huh... this blogging stuff really is cathartic...

In all fairness to Perkins, he brings up VERY important points:

1) Politicians, using our tax dollars, loan money to countries and then that money immediately gets used by huge corporations. In turn, these corporations make big donations to campaign coffers, and surely influence legislation that directly affects their own business.
2) Even though we ARE helping the third world, they often don't appreciate this. I mean, Perkins himself didn't even see the value in what he was doing. He spoke about how he arrived in country and saw men using a small river as their "bathroom", while another person bathed in it down stream a bit, and yet another drank from it. First of all... like many parts of this novel, Perkin's experiences are too obviously allegory or metaphor to be taken seriously as actual experiences. Anyhow, what do you suppose his thoughts were upon seeing the river being used in such a way? He felt pity for the people having to use a single body water as bathroom/shower/tap, but he thought about how he was being so evil by "exploiting" them by burdening them with the loans... which would be used to do such awful things such as provide indoor plumbing, electricity, jobs... oh, the humanity of it all!! OK, I digress. The point is that there are many out there who think in Perkins stupid fashion. So why should we, the taxpayers, foot the bill?
3) We use our power for the sake of "Global Empire", is Perkin's assertion. But I can't say that he is wrong about this. I for one believe we need to be much more isolationist, at least from a political-perspective, than we have been.

In conclusion, I actually do recommend the book. Too often in this day and age we are not subjected to how other people think, despite or perhaps because of the fact that we have so many more choices in media, we end up consuming only that which affirms our already-established beliefs. Perkin's did open up my eyes to the need for democracies such as ours to be better stewards of where our money goes. And just how much we are dumping into endeavors that just have no place being funded by a government. But unfortunately, too many people - from the left and the right - don't understand that government needs to be extremely limited and controlled. It's just not in the zeitgeist of modern thinking like it once was.

Well, enough of that. There, I posted. Are you all happy now?...

(crickets chirping)