Confessions of an Economic Hitman | Hacker News Reader

Confessions of an Economic Hitman

kineticreaction.blogspot.com

9 pointschaostheory14 comments

it's interesting to get the big picture at times...

Great book.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/19489/Confessions-of-an-Economic-H...

Must have missed his other books Psychonavigation and Shapeshifting. Always nice to come back and see News.YC has moved another step closer to a Ron Paul-a-thon.

probably would help to actually read the book. besides the website having a ron paul for prez banner; this is really nothing about ron paul

Yes, it looks more like Naomi Klein type material:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_economic_hitm...

In any case, I agree: it belongs on politics.reddit.com, not here.

I haven't read them, but it seems like Perkins's other books are about shamanic type spiritualism -- not my thing, but it doesn't discredit his other work.

It seems overly opinionated to me. The facts provided, at least the facts in the commentary, generally don't seem strong enough to support to drastic (though entertaining) claims he's making.

Hmm. It does seem interesting. Will read, digest, forget, and get back to coding...

Not here dude, take it to politics.reddit.com

The embedded video is not about politics, it's just posted by a Ron Paulian.

Hey I love John Perkins as much as anybody, but conspiracy theories about how the CIA and World Bank is teamed up with multinational corporations to go around the world deliberately overthrowing democracy is not appropriate material for Hacker News.

The World Bank (as well as the IMF), and the CIA (and British and French intelligence) have a long, public history of nonsense like this. I think it is more of a conspiracy than a conspiracy theory.

But strictly economically speaking, it (the "corporatocracy") actually isn't nonsense. Perhaps it is politically and morally wrong;nonetheless it remains extremely profitable. Further, Perkins doesn't offer a viable alternative for the world, besides urging people to consume less, which isn't going to happen just because some fancy economists want it to.

I don't have personal knowledge of most of what he talks about in his book, but in the case of Guatemala he's spot-on. The CIA removed their first democratically elected leader, Arbenz, in 1954 and the country has never really recovered. I don't think Perkins is far off. I've worked in Guatemala and China extensively, and in government in Canada, and none of what he's written here sounds far-fetched to me.

This is 107 days old, but I can't help but mention how ridiculous it was for me to have said that I worked in Guatemala and China "extensively." I don't know what got in to my tea...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com