The Secret History of the American Empire

Last week I appeared on a radio show with an author named John Perkins. This man is a frothing conspiracy theorist, a vainglorious peddler of nonsense, and yet his book, "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man," is a runaway bestseller. So now, out of concern for thousands of sufferers across this great nation, I offer up a Perkins antidote. If you see someone reading him, I want you to be prudent, approach cautiously and wait until the victim's fevers cool. Then administer these arguments.

The world, says Perkins, is governed by a shadowy "corporatocracy," an invisible empire of wealth and greed that deploys a combination of bribes, assassins and seductive women to enslave the poorest countries. Perkins served this empire as an "economic hit man," a consultant who bamboozled unsuspecting Asians and Latin Americans into borrowing too much, so puncturing their sovereignty. The loans financed lucrative contracts for American construction firms. Needless to say, Perkins is certain that they did not help poor people.

Perkins speaks with a beguiling purr, and you can see why he's greeted with standing ovations at bookstores across the country. Besides working as an economic consultant, he's written books about Latin American shamans, including one called "The World Is as You Dream It." But his account of international finance is itself largely a dream. Even if you believe the stories of seducers and assassins, which other journalists have questioned, Perkins's basic contentions are flat wrong. Sure, developing countries (like rich countries) borrow too much sometimes. But the poor don't always lose. Nor are corporations all-powerful.

Perkins likes to invoke Indonesia, the scene of his first hit-man assignment. The way he tells it, the development economists who persuaded Indonesia to borrow money around 1970 were peddling a ludicrous idea -- that Indonesia's economy could spring from the dark age to the modern age in a mere generation. Well, Indonesia's infant mortality and adult illiteracy rates each fell by two-thirds over the next three decades, and life expectancy shot up by 19 years. If the corporatocracy was trying to lay Indonesia low, this was a funny way of doing it.