A Review of Confessions of an Economic Hitman

I don’t want to be overly negative, but Confessions of an Economic Hitman really irked me.  I was only four or five pages into it before I got the overwhelming feeling of wading knee deep through bullshit.  I think I might have been more tolerant if the book had been better written, but it wasn’t.  It was cliched, used lame tropes, got treacly in the and scanned like bad spy fiction.  The big problem with taking a bad John le Carre approach is that there were no stakes.  “Oh no, he might expose the truth, but he’s got to go yachting…”  It seems like the worst consequences he faced was boring consulting positions that paid way too much.  “He’s such a rebel he’s willing to risk a comfortable sinecure!”

So, the first thing that tripped my bullshit detector is that he claimed he couldn’t get a publisher (which I believe b/c the prose was so bad) b/c of the content.  This is a pretty incredible claim b/c here’s the book and if the powers that be wanted to suppress this book it would have been easy.  They allegedly orchestrated the death of two Latin American presidents.  If they can kill someone as high profile as Torrijos then how hard would it be to off a semi-nameless exec who goes yachting a lot. If what he’s saying is true, what is more likely from an assassination happy cabal trying to prevent the exposure of their secrets? His boat disappears at sea, no book written, maybe page 5 in the local paper.  Or, what he claims happens, he talks about what he’s writing but no one does anything for 15 years and then the CIA (or NSA but we’ll get into that) swings into action and discourages some publishers even though the revelation of these secrets could bring down the whole house of cards?  And it’s this kind of dumb crap throughout that made this book totally unbelievable.

The next thing that really bugged me is that he takes on a fake “common man” persona and dumbs down stuff that doesn’t need to be dumbed down.  He applies for the Peace Corps and is surprised to learn that Ecuador is in South America and not Africa?  This guy had a first rate education (including prestigious prep schools and admission to an ivy league college) and he didn’t learn where Ecuador was?  Later he’s in Panama during the 70’s, a time when latin America is on fire with revolutionary fervor, and he’s surprised to hear about refugees from Peru, Honduras, Guatemala, etc.  Even though he keeps talking about how he always kept up with this area of the world b/c of his love of Ecuador? You couldn’t turn around in the 70s and 80s without hearing about unrest somewhere in Latin America and how the US or CIA was involved.  Why would he cope this attitude?  Passages like these felt condescending.  I think the condescension gives a clue to the rest of the book.  He has so little respect for the reader’s intelligence that he thinks he can pass off even the most unbelievable stories.

My biggest beef is that he makes these insinuations that he worked indirectly for the NSA, but he has no idea of what the NSA does.  The NSA and CIA aren’t interchangeable organizations.  The NSA is responsible for things like code breaking, communication monitoring and intercepts. The CIA is responsible for infiltration, and the type of subversion he’s talking about in this book.  There’s tons of stuff available from the Church Committee that lays out exactly what kinds of illegal activities these two organizations were up to in the time period he’s talking about.  He could have figured this out with about ten minutes of googling and some basic research.  So, allegedly he’s working as an “EHS” for the NSA which doesn’t do anything like faking economic reports to score IMF money.  That’s more along the lines of something the CIA would do.   The

NSA do lots of terrible and illegal things, but before 9/11 they didn’t do stuff like this.  So, he can’t get his basic intelligence agencies right.  This was the point in the book where I almost put it down.  I decided to struggle through the rest of it to find out why it was so popular, but it only got worse.

He does the common and racist cliche of “brown people are so wise and spiritual”.  He talks about how much the people of the Amazon can teach us.  He talks about how he’s the only person in his team to get to know the local Indonesians.  He keeps bringing up how he likes to learn the local culture.  But then there’s the problem with pretending he’s totally oblivious to what’s going on in the rest of South America when he’s in Panama.  In Iran he tells a story about bedouins in Iran (Bedouins are Arab, not Persian.) and camel trails throughout the country (camels aren’t common in Iran, they’re mostly in the southwest corner that abuts Iraq and in the far east).  If he knew the basics about these areas he wouldn’t lapse into these cliched tropes.  Talk to a Persian, they’re least favorite thing in the world is to be confused with Arabs.

On top of all this he can’t even paint a coherent picture of the conspiracy he’s “exposing.”  He claims the US can make all these loans to foreign countries b/c we have a fiat currency, but then immediately goes on to explain why having a fiat currency with a large outstanding debt is a danger.  So, these genius created a master plan to loan money that will never be repaid by exposing the US to a debt crisis that will seriously harm, if not destroy, them in the future?  This is the dumbest conspiracy ever.

And so we get to my biggest problem with this book.  The CIA, the NSA, foreign development, and corporate corruption in the world governments, not just the US, is a serious problem.  This kind of dumb conspiracy theory crap makes criticisms of these problems easy to dismiss as quackery.  It also delays people from learning about the actual problems.  

Do government contractors fluff their estimates and expenses and behave in all sorts of horrific and illegal ways?  Yes, just look at Dynacorp’s child prostitution problems and KBR and Halliburton’s war profiteering.  But it’s not a big conspiracy, that’s what you get for political contributions. Snowden has exposed the NSA’s data collection, lots of journalists are covering the drone war.  These aren’t closely guarded secrets that have remained hidden for the past 50 years.  There’s too much corporate influence in government.  We have a lot of really bad foreign policy.  Just look at how the TPP is being negotiated right now. It’s not a secret conspiracy.  Almost all this stuff has been front page news for a while.

The problem isn’t a secret cabal.  It’s getting elected officials to do anything about it.  This guy didn’t help by misleading well intentioned people and making them sound like kooks.

I’m coming late to the whole Chipotle/no Latino(or Mexican) authors kerfluffle and I’d just like to throw in my two cents.  Chipotle did this Cultivating Thought campaign where they invited authors to write something for Chipotle to print on the cups and bags. However, they forgot to nab any writers of an ethnic background related to Chipotle's food (some groups are saying Latino and some are saying Mexican, I don't think anyone has said Chicano).  

My first big complaint is that people keep saying Latino authors weren't included and this goes to my pet peeve. Latino is too broad of a category.  Chipotle is Mexican food (sort of), which is different from Latino.  Latino culture is this huge varied thing without a lot of overlap.  Just like Mexican culture is a huge varied thing.

So, if we want to match the cuisine with the author’s race, a Latino wouldn't be good enough.  If Chipotle decided to have Junot Diaz as their ethnic author it would almost be more insulting.  Mexican isn’t the same as Dominican.  Ask a Mexican or a Dominican. Or look at a map.  Burritos aren't a part of Dominican cuisine, they have plantains and hefty braised meat dishes (as an aside, why do all the caribbean cuisines consist of slow braised dishes?  If I lived on a warm muggy island the last thing in the world I would want is to have a pot of beans or a braised goat curry cooking all day long on my stove.  Beans and plantains are delicious and I’m thankful for them, but that’s the last thing I’m going to cook on a warm humid day.).  The conflation of different Latinos as being a uniform block is just as racist as excluding them. It’s just a different form of dehumanization.

My next beef is that Chipotle isn’t really Mexican.  It makes Mission burritos, which are from San Francisco.  It is true that they were developed, invented, made by Mexican immigrants to California, but that is still different from Mexican.  Chipotle’s food is Mexican in the same way that Chicago deep dish pizza is Italian.  And if Domino’s decided to do something similar and didn’t have an Italian author I don’t think there’d be the same response.

So, I think it’s fine that there’s no Mexican author.  Because I don’t think that Chipotle is Mexican food.  I think it actually does Mexicans and Mexican Americans and Latinos a disservice to conflate all these groups and make them seem like a monolithic group.  It leads to the stupid news commentary that comes up at every election about the “Latino vote”.  I could give a flying fuck about maintaining the embargo on Cuba.  This issue however is super important to the Cuban Americans down in Florida.  Immigration means different things to different groups of Latinos.  I’d like to allow more immigration from Mexico and straighten out the Safe Communities program.  I’m sure this isn’t a huge concern to the Cubanos.  I still care a lot about the H-U Visa program, but this is probably more important to the Philipino and Russian/Ukranian’s who make up a lot of the mail order brides than the Chicanos that invented Mission burritos.  I’m interested in it b/c I care about domestic violence, not b/c of an ethnic/cultural basis. I think Ted Cruz is a disaster. I was pissed that LULAC backed Alberto Gonzales. We're not all the same and we have a lot of varied interests that can't be easily slopped together in a bucket and labeled "Latino Voting Issue" for the convenience of the media or politicians.

Last, I imagine that if Chipotle had tried to get some author to represent the cultural view of whatever, like there is any such cultural view, that they would have just approached the same authors who always get paraded about for these things.  I love Sandra Cisneros and I would love her writing to be on anything, however she’s already pretty well known and if she was chosen, I couldn’t help thinking that it would have been the laziest choice they could have made. 

Chipotle Ad Exec A: “We need a Mexican."

Chipotle Ad Exec B: "How about Junot Diaz?"   Exec A: "No, I think he’s cuban or something."

Exec B: "Is there a difference?"

Exec C:  "Well how about Sandra Cisneros?  My kid read The House on Mango Street at school and I'm pretty sure she's Mexican."

Exec A: "Great job Jeff.  Okay everyone, it’s lunch time.”

I don’t know who I would have like them to pick.  Maybe Natalie Diaz b/c her ethnic background is every bit as complicated as the circumstances that led to the Mission burrito.  But would I consider her to be representative of the culture as a whole?  No, b/c just like there’s no “white” author, there’s no Mexican/Latino/Black author.  There are just author’s who are white/Latino/Chicano/Ukrainian/Junot Diaz/Octavia Butler.

Does this mean that I think the people complaining are whiners?  No, I realize this problem creates a negative feedback loop.  If people aren't exposed to different types of Latinos they’re bound to conflate all of us.  If people aren’t exposed to different types of Mexicans they’re bound to conflate all of us.  But as long as people focus on one person representing the whole huge Latino world, it doesn’t solve the problem.

 

I used to write another blog but I kind of burned out on it. It was called Pocho Abogado and a lot of it was law stuff.  I’m no longer a lawyer, so I’ll probably stay away from talking about my experiences with that.  But I still like to complain about the legal field and lawyers.  I also complain about politics, racism, and music.

I will also write about stuff that I don’t complain about.  I really like coffee, baristas, podcasts, and books.  Those will be the less complaining posts.  I also like pork, a lot.  Oh pork...

Tying into the racism thing, I’m also very interested in pocho culture, mestizaje, and the cultural mash up that happens at the border, in multi racial peoples (half breeds like me), and watching the melting pot melt.

I haven’t figured out layout and the sidebar and all that stuff but some of you people can’t wait.  I saw I already have visitors and I hadn't written anything.  I don’t know what you were hoping for, but it probably wasn’t just the word “test”.  

So, hopefully I'll write more frequently than I did before, and lets have at it.

Test post