The main characters of this economics, non fiction story are,. Get any books you like and read everywhere you want. Released February Publisher s : Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Start your free trial. The phone lines between Boston and Barranquilla went crazy. Everyone predicted that I, too, would soon be promoted; after all, I was one of Bruno's most trusted proteges. These changes and rumors were an added incentive for me to review my own position. While still in Colombia, I followed Paula's advice and read the Spanish version of my resume.
It shocked me. I once had taken great pride in that resume and that article, and yet now, seeing them as Paula did, I felt a growing sense of anger and depression. Further reading assured me that Ecuador's jungles were some of the world's most di-verse and formidable, and that the indigenous people still lived much as they had for millennia. We accepted. We lived in the Amazon with the Shuar whose lifestyle did indeed resemble that of precolo-nial North American natives; we also worked in the Andes with de-scendants of the Incas.
It was a side of the world I never dreamed still existed. I found my-self sympathizing with these indigenous people who subsisted on hunting and farming. I felt an odd sort of kinship with them. Somehow, they reminded me of the townies I had left behind. One day a man in a business suit, Einar Greve, landed at the airstrip in our community.
He was a vice president at Chas. Main, Inc. MAIN , an international consulting firm that kept a very low profile and that was in charge of studies to determine whether the World Bank should lend Ecuador and its neighboring countries bil-lions of dollars to build hydroelectric dams and other infrastructure projects. Einar also was a colonel in the U. Army Reserve.
He started talking with me about the benefits of working for a company like MAIN. When I mentioned that I had been accepted by the NSA before joining the Peace Corps, and that I was considering going back to them, he informed me that he sometimes acted as an NSA liaison; he gave me a look that made me suspect that part of his assignment was to evaluate my capabilities.
I now believe that he was updating my profile, and especially sizing up my abilities to sur-vive in environments most North Americans would find hostile. He asked me to send him reports assessing Ecuador's economic prospects. I had a small portable typewriter, loved to write, and was quite happy to comply with this request. Over a period of about a year, I sent Einar at least fifteen long letters.
In these letters, I speculated on Ecuador's economic and political future, and I appraised the growing frustration among the indigenous communities as they struggled to confront oil companies, interna-tional development agencies, and other attempts to draw them into the modern world.
During our private meet-ing, he emphasized that MAIN'S primary business was engineering but that his biggest client, the World Bank, recently had begun in-sisting that he keep economists on staff to produce the critical eco-nomic forecasts used to determine the feasibility and magnitude of engineering projects. He confided that he had previously hired three highly qualified economists with impeccable credentials — two with master's degrees and one with a PhD. They had failed miserably.
One had suffered a nervous breakdown in an isolated Panamanian village; he was escorted by Panamanian police to the airport and put on a plane back to the United States. And given your living conditions in Ecuador, I'm confident you can survive almost anywhere. I had turned twenty-six — the magical age when the draft board no longer wanted me. I consulted with Ann's family; they encouraged me to take the job, and I assumed this reflected Un-cle Frank's attitude as well.
I recalled him mentioning the possibility I would end up working for a private firm. Nothing was ever stated openly, but I had no doubt that my employment at MAIN was a con-sequence of the arrangements Uncle Frank had made three years earlier, in addition to my experiences in Ecuador and my willingness to write about that country's economic and political situation.
My head reeled for several weeks, and I had a very swollen ego. I had earned only a bachelor's degree from BU, which did not seem to warrant a position as an economist with such a lofty consulting com-pany.
I knew that many of my BU classmates who had been rejected by the draft and had gone on to earn MBAs and other graduate de-grees would be overcome with jealousy. I visualized myself as a dash-ing secret agent, heading off to exotic lands, lounging beside hotel swimming pools, surrounded by gorgeous bikini-clad women, mar-tini in hand.
Although this was merely fantasy, I would discover that it held el-ements of truth. Einar had hired me as an economist, but I was soon to learn that my real job went far beyond that, and that it was in fact closer to James Bond's than I ever could have guessed. These were referred to as partners or associates, and their position was coveted. Not only did the partners have power over everyone else, but also they made the big bucks.
Discretion was their hallmark; they dealt with heads of state and other chief executive officers who expect their consultants, like their attorneys and psychotherapists, to honor a strict code of absolute confidentiality. Talking with the press was taboo. It simply was not tolerated. As a consequence, hardly any-one outside MAIN had ever heard of us, although many were famil-iar with our competitors, such as Arthur D.
I use the term competitors loosely, because in fact MAIN was in a league by itself. The majority of our professional staff was engineers, yet we owned no equipment and never constructed so much as a storage shed.
Many MAINers were ex-military; however, we did not contract with the Department of Defense or with any of the military services. Our stock-in-trade was something so different from the norm that during my first months there even I could not figure out what we did. I knew only that my first real assignment would be in Indonesia, and that I would be part of an eleven-man team sent to create a master energy plan for the island of Java.
He would glide his fingers through the air and up over his head. No one talked much about them or seemed to know where he had gone. When he was in the office, he often invited me to sit with him for a few minutes over coffee.
He asked about Ann, our new apartment, and the cat we had brought with us from Ecuador. I grew bolder as I came to know him better, and I tried to learn more about him and what I wTould be expected to do in my job. But I never re-ceived answers that satisfied me; he was a master at turning con-versations around.
On one such occasion, he gave me a peculiar look. I was in Washington recently It'll be a while before you leave for Indonesia. I think you should use some of your time to read up on Kuwait. I knew that I would be expected to produce econometric mod-els for Indonesia and Java, and I decided that I might as well get started by doing one for Kuwait. However, my BS in business administration had not prepared me as an econometrician, so I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to go about it.
I went so far as to enroll in a couple of courses on the subject. In the process, I discovered that statistics can be manipu-lated to produce a large array of conclusions, including those sub-stantiating the predilections of the analyst. MAIN was a macho corporation. There were only four women who held professional positions in However, there were per-haps two hundred women divided between the cadres of personal 12 "In for Life" 13 secretaries — every vice president and department manager had one — and the steno pool, which served the rest of us.
I had become accustomed to this gender bias, and I was therefore especially as-tounded by what happened one day in the BPL's reference section. An attractive brunette woman came up and sat in a chair across the table from me.
In her dark green business suit, she looked very sophisticated. I judged her to be several years my senior, but I tried to focus on not noticing her, on acting indifferent. After a few min-utes, without a word, she slid an open book in my direction.
I looked up into her soft green eyes, and she extended her hand. I could not be-lieve this was happening to me. During our first hour together, she explained that my position was an unusual one and that we needed to keep everything highly confidential. She told me that no one had given me specifics about my job because no one wras authorized to — except her.
Then she in-formed me that her assignment was to mold me into an economic hit man. The very name awakened old cloak-and-dagger dreams. I was embarrassed by the nervous laughter I heard coming from me. She smiled and assured me that humor was one of the reasons they used the term. I confessed ignorance about the role of economic hit men. No one can know about your involvement — not even your wife.
Then you'll have to choose. Your de-cision is final. Once you're in, you're in for life. I know now what I did not then — that Claudine took full advantage of the personality weaknesses the NSA profile had disclosed about me. Her approach, a combination of physical seduction and verbal manipulation, was tailored specifically for me, and yet it fit within the standard operating procedures I have since seen used by a variety of businesses when the stakes are high and the pressure to close lucrative deals is great.
She knew from the start that I would not jeopardize my marriage by disclosing our clandes-tine activities. And she was brutally frank when it came to describ-ing the shadowy side of things that would be expected of me. I have no idea who paid her salary, although I have no reason to suspect it was not, as her business card implied, MAIN. At the time, I was too naive, intimidated, and bedazzled to ask the questions that today seem so obvious.
Claudine told me that there were two primary objectives of my wrork. My job, she said, was to forecast the effects of investing billions of dollars in a country. Specifically, I would produce studies that pro-jected economic growth twenty to twenty-five years into the future and that evaluated the impacts of a variety of projects.
Or I might be told that the country was being offered the op-portunity to receive a modern electric utility system, and it would be up to me to demonstrate that such a system would result in sufficient economic growth to justify the loan. The critical factor, in every case, was gross national product. The project that resulted in the highest average annual growth of GNP won.
The unspoken aspect of every one of these projects was that they were intended to create large profits for the contractors, and to make 14 Part In for Life" 15 a handful of wealthy and influential families in the receiving coun-tries very happy, while assuring the long-term financial dependence and therefore the political loyalty of governments around the world.
The larger the loan, the better. The fact that the debt burden placed on a country would deprive its poorest citizens of health, ed-ucation, and other social services for decades to come was not taken into consideration.
Claudine and I openly discussed the deceptive nature of GNP. For instance, the growth of GNP may result even when it profits only one person, such as an individual who owns a utility company, and even if the majority of the population is burdened with debt.
The rich get richer and the poor grow poorer. Yet, from a statistical standpoint, this is recorded as economic progress. Like U. Our schools and our press have taught us to perceive all of our actions as altruistic. Over the years, I've repeatedly heard com-ments like, "If they're going to burn the U. However, these people have no clue that the main reason we establish embassies around the world is to serve our own interests, which during the last half of the twentieth century meant turning the American republic into a global empire.
Despite credentials, such people are as uneducated as those eighteenth-century colonists who believed that the Indians fighting to defend their lands were servants of the devil. Within several months, I would leave for the island of Java in the country of Indonesia, described at that time as the most heavily pop-ulated piece of real estate on the planet. Indonesia also happened to be an oil-rich Muslim nation and a hotbed of communist activity.
If they join the Communist bloc, well You'll be well rewarded, of course, and can move on to other projects in exotic places. The world is your shopping cart. It's their job to punch holes in your forecasts — that's what they're paid to do. Making you look bad makes them look good.
I asked if they all were receiving the same type of training as me. She assured me they were not. You're the one wrho predicts the future. Your forecasts de-termine the magnitude of the systems they design — and the size of the loans. You see, you're the key. Somewhere in my heart, I sus-pected I was not. But the frustrations of my past haunted me. In the end, I convinced myself that by learning more, by experiencing it, I could better ex-pose it later—the old "working from the inside" justification.
When I shared this idea with Claudine, she gave me a perplexed look. Once you're in, you can never get out. You must decide for yourself, before you get in any deeper. One afternoon some months later, Claudine and I sat in a win-dow settee watching the snow fall on Beacon Street.
A large part of your job is to encourage world leaders to become part of a vast network that promotes U. In the end, those leaders be-come ensnared in a web of debt that ensures their loyalty. In turn, these leaders bolster their political posi-tions by bringing industrial parks, power plants, and airports to their people.
Meanwhile, the owners of U. Claudine described how throughout most of history, empires were built largely through military force or the threat of it. But with the end of World War II, the emergence of the Soviet Union, and the specter of nuclear holo-caust, the military solution became just too risky. The decisive moment occurred in , when Iran rebelled against a British oil company that was exploiting Iranian natural resources and its people.
The company was the forerunner of British Petroleum, today's BP. In response, the highly popular, democratically elected Iranian prime minister and TIME magazine's Man of the Year in , Mohammad Mossadegh, nationalized all Iranian petroleum assets.
However, both countries feared that military retaliation would provoke the Soviet Union into taking action on be-half of Iran. He then enlisted them to organize a series of street riots and violent demonstrations, which created the impression that Mossadegh was both unpopular and inept.
In the end, Mossadegh went down, and he spent the rest of his life under house arrest. The pro-American Mohammad Reza Shah became the unchallenged dictator. Kermit Roosevelt had set the stage for a new profession, the one whose ranks I was joining. It also coincided with the beginning of experiments in "limited nonnuclear military actions," which ultimately resulted in US.
By , the year I interviewed with the NSA, it had become clear that if the United States wanted to realize its dream of global empire as envisioned by men like presidents Johnson and Nixon , it would have to employ strategies modeled on Roosevelt's Iranian example. This was the only way to beat the Soviets without the threat of nuclear war. There was one problem, however. Kermit Roosevelt was a CIA employee. Had he been caught, the consequences would have been dire. He had orchestrated the first U.
Fortunately for the strategists, the s also witnessed another type of revolution: the empowerment of international corporations and of multinational organizations such as the World Bank and the IMF. The latter were financed primarily by the United States and our sister empire builders in Europe. A symbiotic relationship de-veloped between governments, corporations, and multinational or-ganizations. These EHMs would never be paid by the government; instead, they would draw their salaries from the private sector.
As a result, their dirty work, if exposed, would be chalked up to corporate greed rather than to government policy.
In addition, the corporations that hired them, although paid by government agencies and their multi-national banking counterparts with taxpayer money , would be in-sulated from congressional oversight and public scrutiny, shielded by a growing body of legal initiatives, including trademark, interna-tional trade, and Freedom of Information laws. I took her words to heart. When Columbus set sail in , he was trying to reach Indonesia, known at the time as the Spice Islands.
Throughout the colonial era, it was considered a treasure worth far more than the Americas. Java, with its rich fabrics, fabled spices, and opulent kingdoms, was both the crown jewel and the scene of violent clashes between Span-ish, Dutch, Portuguese, and British adventurers. The Netherlands emerged triumphant in , but even though the Dutch controlled Java, it took them more than years to subdue the outer islands. As a result, Indonesians, espe-cially the Javanese, suffered terribly.
Following the Japanese surrender, a charismatic leader named Sukarno emerged to declare independ-ence. Four years of fighting finally ended on December 27, , when the Netherlands lowered its flag and returned sovereignty to a people who had known nothing but struggle and domination for more than three centuries. Sukarno became the new republic's first president.
Ruling Indonesia, however, proved to be a greater challenge than defeating the Dutch. Far from homogeneous, the archipelago of about 17, islands was a boiling pot of tribalism, divergent cultures, dozens of languages and dialects, and ethnic groups who nursed centuries-old animosities. Conflicts were frequent and brutal, and Sukarno clamped down. He suspended parliament in I and was named president-for-life in He formed close alliances with Communist governments around the world, in exchange for military equipment and training.
He sent Russian-armed Indonesian troops into neighboring Malaysia in an attempt to spread communism throughout Southeast Asia and win the approval of the world's Social-ist leaders. Opposition built, and a coup was launched in Sukarno es-caped assassination only through the quick wits of his mistress. Many of his top military officers and his closest associates were less lucky. The events were reminiscent of those in Iran in In the end, the Communist Party was held responsible — especially those factions aligned with China.
In the Army-initiated massacres that followed, an estimated three hundred thousand to five hundred thou-sand people were killed. The head of the military, General Suharto, took over as president in President NLxon had begun a series of troop withdrawals in the summer of , and U. The strategy focused on preventing a domino effect of one country after another falling under Communist rule, and it focused on a couple of countries; Indonesia was the key.
The premise of U. The United States also hoped the nation would serve as a model for other coun-tries in the region.
Washington based part of its strategy on the assumption that gains made in Indonesia might have positive reper-cussions throughout the Islamic world, particularly in the explosive Middle East. And if that were not incentive enough, Indonesia had oil. No one was certain about the magnitude or quality of its reserves, but oil company seismologists were exuberant over the possibilities. As I pored over the books at the BPL, my excitement grew. I began to imagine the adventures ahead.
My time with Claudine already represented the realization of one of my fantasies; it seemed too good to be true. I felt at least partially vindicated for serving the sentence at that all-boys' prep school. Something else was also happening in my life: Ann and I were not getting along. I think she must have sensed that I was leading two lives. I justified it as the logical result of the resentment I felt to-ward her for forcing us to get married in the first place.
Never mind that she had nurtured and supported me through the challenges of our Peace Corps assignment in Ecuador; I still saw her as a contin-uation of my pattern of giving in to my parents' whims. Of course, as I look back on it, I'm sure my relationship with Claudine was a ma-jor factor.
I could not tell Ann about this, but she sensed it. In any case, we decided to move into separate apartments. One day in , about a week before my scheduled departure for Indonesia, I arrived at Claudine's place to find the small dining room table set with an assortment of cheeses and breads, and there was a fine bottle of Beaujolais.
She toasted me. I felt terrible. But later, as I walked alone back to the Prudential Center, I had to admit to the cleverness of the scheme. The fact is that all our time together had been spent in her apartment. There was not a trace of evidence about our relationship, and no one at MAIN was implicated in any way. There was also part of me that appreciated her honesty; she had not deceived me the way my parents had about Tilton and Middlebury.
Some of the books I read featured photographs of beautiful women in brightly colored sarongs, exotic Balinese dancers, shamans blowing fire, and warriors paddling long dugout canoes in emerald waters at the foot of smoking volcanoes.
Particularly striking was a series on the magnificent black-sailed galleons of the infamous Bugi pirates, who still sailed the seas of the archipelago, and who had so terrorized early European sailors that they returned home to warn their children, "Behave yourselves, or the Bugimen will get you. The very names of its fabled islands—Java, Suma-tra, Borneo, Sulawesi — seduced the mind. Here was a land of mys-ticism, myth, and erotic beauty; an elusive treasure sought but never found by Columbus; a princess wooed yet never possessed by Spain, by Holland, by Portugal, by Japan; a fantasy and a dream.
My expectations were high, and I suppose they mirrored those of the great explorers. Like Columbus, though, I should have known to temper my fantasies. Perhaps I could have guessed that the beacon shines on a destiny that is not always the one we envision. Indonesia 22 Part 23 offered treasures, but it was not the chest of panaceas I had come to expect. In fact, my first days in Indonesia's steamy capital, Jakarta, in the summer of , were shocking.
The beauty was certainly present. Gorgeous women sporting colorful sarongs. Lush gardens ablaze with tropical flowers. Exotic Balinese dancers. Bicycle cabs with fanciful, rainbow-colored scenes painted on the sides of the high seats, where passengers reclined in front of the pedaling drivers.
Dutch Colonial mansions and turreted mosques. But there was also an ugly, tragic side to the city. Lepers holding out bloodied stumps instead of hands. Young girls offering their bodies for a few coins. Once-splendid Dutch canals turned into cesspools.
Cardboard hovels where entire families lived along the trash-lined banks of black rivers. Blaring horns and choking fumes. The beautiful and the ugly, the elegant and the vulgar, the spiritual and the profane. This was Jakarta, where the enticing scent of cloves and orchid blossoms battled the miasma of open sewers for dominance.
I had seen poverty before. Some of my New Hampshire class-mates lived in cold-water tarpaper shacks and arrived at school wearing thin jackets and frayed tennis shoes on subzero winter days, their unwashed bodies reeking of old sweat and manure. I had lived in mud shacks with Andean peasants whose diet consisted almost entirely of dried corn and potatoes, and where it sometimes seemed that a newborn was as likely to die as to experience a birthday.
I had seen poverty, but nothing to prepare me for Jakarta. Our team, of course, was quartered in the country's fanciest hotel, the Hotel Intercontinental Indonesia. Owned by Pan American Air-ways, like the rest of the Intercontinental chain scattered around the globe, it catered to the whims of wealthy foreigners, especially oil ex-ecutives and their families.
On the evening of our first day, our proj-ect manager Charlie Illingworth hosted a dinner for us in the elegant restaurant on the top floor. Charlie was a connoisseur of war; he devoted most of his free time to reading history books and historical novels about great military leaders and battles.
He was the epitome of the pro-Vietnam War armchair soldier. As usual, this night he was wearing khaki slacks and a short-sleeved khaki shirt with military-style epaulettes. After welcoming us, he lit up a cigar. We joined him. Cigar smoke swirling around him, Charlie glanced about the room.
As will the U. Embassy people. But let's not forget that we have a mis-sion to accomplish. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Scott playing General Patton, one of Charlie's heroes. As you know, Indonesia has a long and tragic history. Now, at a time wThen it is poised to launch itself into the twentieth century, it is tested once again.
Our responsibility is to make sure that Indonesia doesn't follow in the footsteps of its northern neighbors, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. An integrated electrical system is a key element.
That, more than any other single factor with the possi-ble exception of oil , will assure that capitalism and democracy rule. He took another puff on his cigar and flipped past a couple of the note cards. Indonesia can be a powerful ally to us in that regard. So, as you develop this master plan, please do everything you can to make sure that the oil industry and all the others that serve it —ports, pipelines, construction companies — get whatever they are likely to need in the way of electricity for the entire duration of this twenty-five-year plan.
You don't want the blood of Indonesian children — or our own — on your hands. You don't want them to live under the hammer and sickle or the Red flag of China! Her discourses on foreign debt haunted me. I tried to comfort myself by recalling lessons learned in my macroeconomics courses at business school. After all, I told myself, I am here to help Indonesia rise out of a medieval economy and take its place in the modern industrial world.
But I knew that in the morning I would look out my window-, 24 Part Saving a Country from Communism 25 across the opulence of the hotel's gardens and swimming pools, and see the hovels that fanned out for miles beyond. I would know that babies were dying out there for lack of food and potable water, and that infants and adults alike were suffering from horrible diseases and living in terrible conditions.
Tossing and turning in my bed, I found it impossible to deny that Charlie and everyone else on our team were here for selfish reasons. We were promoting U. We were driven by greed rather than by any desire to make life better for the vast majority of Indonesians. A word came to mind: corporatoc-racy. I was not sure whether I had heard it before or had just in-vented it, but it seemed to describe perfectly the new elite who had made up their minds to attempt to rule the planet.
This was a close-knit fraternity of a few men with shared goals, and the fraternity's members moved easily and often between cor-porate boards and government positions. He had moved from a position as president of Ford Motor Company, to secretary of defense under presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and now occupied the top post at the world's most power-ful financial institution.
I also realized that my college professors had not understood the true nature of macroeconomics: that in many cases helping an econ-omy grow only makes those few people who sit atop the pyramid even richer, while it does nothing for those at the bottom except to push them even lower. Indeed, promoting capitalism often results in a system that resembles medieval feudal societies.
If any of my pro-fessors knew this, they had not admitted it — probably because big corporations, and the men who run them, fund colleges. Exposing the truth would undoubtedly cost those professors their jobs —just as such revelations could cost me mine.
These thoughts continued to disturb my sleep every night that I spent at the Hotel Intercontinental Indonesia. In the end, my pri-mary defense was a highly personal one: I had fought my way out of that New Hampshire town, the prep school, and the draft.
Through a combination of coincidences and hard work, I had earned a place in the good life. I also took comfort in the fact that I was doing the right thing in the eyes of my culture. I was on my way to becoming a successful and respected economist. I was doing what business school had prepared me for.
I was helping implement a development model that was sanctioned by the best minds at the world's top think tanks. Nonetheless, in the middle of the night I often had to console my-self with a promise that someday I would expose the truth. Embassy, meeting various officials, organizing ourselves, and relaxing around the pool. The number of Americans who lived at the Hotel Intercontinental amazed me.
I took great pleasure in watch-ing the beautiful young women — wives of U. Then Charlie moved our team to the mountain city of Bandung. The climate was milder, the poverty less obvious, and the distrac-tions fewer. We were given a government guesthouse known as the Wisma, complete with a manager, a cook, a gardener, and a staff of servants. Built during the Dutch colonial period, the Wisma was a haven. Its spacious veranda faced tea plantations that flowed across rolling hills and up the slopes of Java's volcanic mountains.
Finally, we were presented with memberships to the exclusive Bandung Golf and Racket Club, and we were housed in a suite of offices at the local headquarters of Perusahaan Umum Listrik Negara PLN , the government-owned electric utility company. For me, the first several days in Bandung involved a series of meetings with Charlie and Howard Parker. Howard was in his sev-enties and was the retired chief load forecaster for the New England Electric System. Now he was responsible for forecasting the amount of energy and generating capacity the load the island of Java would need over the next twenty-five years, as well as for breaking this down into city and regional forecasts.
Since electric demand is highly correlated with economic growth, his forecasts depended on my eco-nomic projections. The rest of our team would develop the master plan around these forecasts, locating and designing power plants, transmission and distribution lines, and fuel transportation systems in a manner that would satisfy our projections as efficiently as pos-sible.
During our meetings, Charlie continually emphasized the im-portance of my job, and he badgered me about the need to be very optimistic in my forecasts. Claudine had been right; I was the key to the entire master plan.
The walls were decorated with batik tapestries depicting epic tales from the ancient Hindu texts of the Ramayana. Charlie puffed on a fat cigar. By the end of month one, Howard'll need to get a pretty good idea about the full extent of the economic miracles that'll happen when we get the new grid online. By the end of the second month, he'll need more details — broken down into regions. The last month will be about filling in the gaps. That'll be critical.
All of us will put our heads together then. So, before we leave we gotta be absolutely certain we have all the information we'll need. Home for Thanksgiving, that's my motto. There's no coming back. He had never reached the pinnacle of the New England Electric System and he deeply resented it. This was his second assign-ment, and I had been warned by both Einar and Charlie to watch 28 Selling My Soul 29 out for him. They described him with words like stubborn, mean, and vindictive.
As it turned out, Howard was one of my wisest teachers, although not one I was ready to accept at the time. He had never received the type of training Claudine had given me.
Or maybe they figured he was only in it for the short run, until they could lure in a more pliable full-timer like me. In any case, from their standpoint, he turned out to be a problem. Howard clearly saw the situation and the role they wanted him to play, and he was determined not to be a pawn.
All the adjectives Einar and Charlie had used to describe him were appro-priate, but at least some of his stubbornness grew out of his personal commitment not to be their servant. I doubt he had ever heard the term economic hit man, but he knew they intended to use him to promote a form of imperialism he could not accept. He took me aside after one of our meetings with Charlie. He wore a hearing aid and fiddled with the little box under his shirt that con-trolled its volume.
We were standing at the window in the office we shared, looking out at the stagnant canal that wound past the PLN building. A young woman was bathing in its foul waters, attempting to retain some semblance of modesty by loosely draping a sarong around her other-wise naked body.
Don't let him get to you. An elderly man had descended the bank, dropped his pants, and squatted at the edge of the water to answer nature's call.
The young woman saw him but was undeterred; she continued bathing. I turned away from the window and looked directly at Howard. I've seen what can happen when oil is discovered.
Things change fast. I'll tell you something, young man. I don't give a damn for your oil discoveries and all that. I forecasted electric loads all my life — during the Depression, World War II, times of bust and boom. I've seen what Route 's so-called Massachusetts Miracle did for Boston.
And I can say for sure that no electric load ever grew by more than 7 to 9 percent a year for any sustained period. And that's in the best of times. Six percent is more reasonable. Part of me suspected he was right, but I felt de-fensive. I knew I had to convince him, because my own conscience cried out for justification. This is a country where, until now, no one could even get electricity.
Things are different here. I don't give a damn what you come up with. It was a challenge I could not ignore. I went and stood in front of his desk. That's what it is. Please also see The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, published in January ; Find out more about this important book and the worldwide movement it has spawned at www. Viii Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. Perkins, a former chief economist at a Boston strategic-consulting firm, confesses he was an 'economic hit man' for 10 years, helping U.
In his controversial book, John Perkins tells the gripping tale of the years he spent working for an international consulting firm where his job was to convince underdeveloped countries to accept enormous loans, much bigger than they really needed, for infrastructure development--and to make sure that the development projects were contracted to U. Once these countries were saddled with huge debts, the American government and the international aid agencies allied with it were able, by dictating repayment terms, to essentially control their economies.
It was not unlike the way a loan shark operates--and Perkins and his colleagues didn't shun this kind of unsavory association.
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