Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

By John Perkins, 2004

Were it not for the tortured confessional aspect of his writing style, this revealing book might read like a real life James Bond story as Perkins describes the serendipitous sequence of events that led to him becoming an EMH, the mysterious women who furthered his education, his jet setting life rubbing elbows with foreign leaders all over the world and the part he played in leading these heads of state down the garden path.Yet, Perkins desperately wants the reader to know how our foreign policy has created a world that views us with less than open hearts and gratitude.

By exaggerating the energy needs of a country, economic hit men facilitate the granting of huge loans by the World Bank to developing countries. American corporations like Bechtel and Halliburton get the contracts to build dams, electrical grids, sanitation, etc that must then be maintained by them. The already wealthy local businessmen get richer, the poor are exploited as cheap labor while loosing their land and natural resources, the new project doesn't pay back as much as promised and the national budget is forever tied up in paying back the loan. Any money left over cannot begin to solve the problems created. The country is beholden to the bank and sucked dry by our corporations. And we're none the wiser because the veil of corporate privacy hides what happens to taxpayers' money. Yes our money in the form of U.S. aid to developing countries that hire these consultants.

More on our pursuit of oil. How corporate America runs all of Saudi Arabia. How corporate interests became our foreign policy, the sequence of events that led to U.S. invasion of Panama, how we might now be invading Venezuela had we not been occupied with invading Iraq.

The Bigger Brain ate all this up. Having been raised in a developing country that was the closest free port to Vietnam, BB has always been suspicious of U.S. meddling and it was good to have this suspicion confirmed. Perkins answered so many questions. The brilliance of his book is that he creates a narrative that pulls all this information together with an insider's interpretation.

Powerdown: Options and Actions For a Post-Carbon World

By Richard Heinberg, 2004

A short pithy book, updating his previous The Party's Over: War, Oil and the Fate of Industrial Societies. The picture looks even more grim as he describes what will be our future and all the reasons why we're not going to be saved by some miracle of technology or market economics. He also makes it the reader's responsibility to prepare for this future in his chapter "Building Lifeboats: The Path of Community, Solidarity and Preservation".

An easy 200 page read, but the Bigger Brain did not want this responsibility. After finishing this book BB wanted to do something absorbing and cleansing like sifting compost to escape from this burden. This is a gloves-off, hope-stripping narrative that clearly states the prognosis and the way out. The Bigger Brain hungers for the truth and thrives on meaty topics, but doesn't feel prepared for the effort it will take to make a bid for survival.