American soft power?

Yesterday was my performance at the Chinese Students & Scholars Association Lunar Splendor at Skirball Center at NYU. The show went very well. However, I had very long periods of downtime, in which I was able to finish this fascinating book.

It's called Confessions of an Economic Hitman, and it's by John Perkins, a quasi engineering consultant who worked covertly for the NSA (National Security Administration). His job was to go to countries like Ecuador, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Panama, Iran, and others, and convince them to take on loans that they could not afford in order to speed up their "modernization"process. The United States and the World Bank would provide these countries with those loans, at first, and then they would feel obligated to return the favor with political benefits (oil grants, trade exclusivity, democratic politics, etc)

Perkins makes the argument that yes, while a lot of these economic deals were struck to keep these countries from communism, they were also done to promote the opportunities of America's "military-industrial" complex, a loose term that refers to the many engineering, construction, and military companies in the US that focus on essentially taking over a country and making them reliant on America.

As a forecaster, Perkins was told to make as optimistic of forecasts as he could, so that the US Treasury would approve, and so that after the two governments met, they would hash out a deal that would often bequeath Perkins' company a lucrative contract. But by doing this, he simultaneously subverted the native population into "modern slavery," which he compares is just as horrifying as the more historical versions.

Why? Because these people have no other options. I was talking to my friend yesterday and she mentioned how these countries, while poor, and knowing that they were getting themselves into a debt that they could not repay, had no other alternative. They HAD to do this in order to get themselves out of poverty. If you try to fight against America, you get labeled a communist, a fascist, a drug dealer, a renegade, etc, etc - and you will be ostracized by the rest of the world at every attempt, suffering from trade embargoes and the threat of potential invasion.

And there are no other economic opportunities for these countries to modernize. But they do it with the understanding that, despite all of America's promises, they will still have large levels of poverty, unrest, a widening rich-poor income gap, and tremendous amounts of debt. They know that in this world if you're against America, you're going to get screwed.