新帝國遊戲

by Steven Hiatt, 李芳齡 (譯者)

在新全球帝國，金錢是唯一的子民

　　帝國、剝削、奴役……，不是歷史，是現實真相。當今世上有一個金權政體的超級新帝國，它不擇手段的掠奪資源，讓許多第三世界人民深陷困境。

　　本書收錄十位作者所寫的十個真實案例，揭露多家跨國企業與美國政府、世界銀行等機構合作，在第三世界國家假「全球化」之名、行掠奪剝削之實。這些作者中，有的是新聞記者，有的是國際組織工作人員，還有人曾是扮演「經濟殺手」角色的銀行家，他們根據親身經歷或一手觀察，將21世紀世界金權新帝國的駭人面貌公諸於世。

　　例如，過去十年，剛果民主共和國的內戰已奪去四百萬人性命，而尋求廉價鈳鉭鐵礦（生產手機所需的耐高熱礦物質）的多國企業正是助長剛果境內衝突的幫兇。例如，殼牌石油公司為保護該公司在奈及利亞的鑽油平台，以轉包方式雇用退役的英國海軍陸戰隊軍官，以武力驅逐當地攻擊者，當地人長年忍受煉油的汙染，卻未享受豐富油產帶來的好處。又例如，世界銀行使菲律賓成為其出口導向發展策略的實驗樣板，但其結果是坐大了菲國的獨裁政權（馬可仕）、貧窮和沈重的債務負擔。

　　了解真相，是為了改變現況。本書在揭露事實之餘，在最後一章提出終結此一金權帝國之道──「全球起義：反抗的網絡」，呼籲每一個世界公民了解自己在商業體系中扮演的角色，借鏡反對企業全球化的運動和主張，積極創造更公平的貿易秩序。

　　本書可說是《經濟殺手的告白》一書的延伸，但提供更廣泛而周詳的事實，具體指出經濟殺手、各國政府、半官方組織、政要、金融組織等形成一個全球金權政體，不只圖利少數權貴，且危害大多數族群的生存。《經》書作者約翰．柏金斯（John Perkins）為本書作序，主張藉由認識更多真相，擴展每一個人的良知，且創造一個穩定、安全而永續的世界。

　　本書個案涵蓋亞洲、非洲及拉丁美洲許多第三世界國家，筆觸生動而詳實，情節張力十足，是為關心企業倫理、制度化貪腐問題及全球化議題的讀者而寫。

Genres: Economics, Nonfiction, Politics, History, Business, Finance, Ebooks

352 pages, Paperback

First published February 28, 2007

Reviews

[Siddharth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is everything that it claims to be on the book jacket. It "uncovers the inner workings of the institutions behind these economic manipulations". In particular, it looks at some of the incredibly global institutions that are name dropped in a lot of contexts: World Bank, International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization. There are several stories here about loans that were given to countries which were supposed to build schools or upgrade the city hall building of a bustling city or one of a myriad of other reasons but never did that or help the people the money was supposed to help in any way.

I must admit that it was a pretty shocking revelation at several points. In particular, we get stories from the people in the field, the rank and file of organizations like the World Bank who are going abroad to assess if a given loan should be sanctioned or a banker who used to work in an island that was being used for offshore banking.

They tell stories about how their job affected the places that they were working in or the places they went to in Africa (this book focuses a lot on some countries in Sub-Saharan Africa) or about the ways in which the management and people above them were basically apathetic to the consequences of the things that their jobs were enabling. These stories are all backed up with actual data from reports or news articles which show the outcomes of the things that are discussed.

I particularly liked that the book doesn't work as a list of testimonials where the reader is simply supposed to believe the people who are telling the story and the editor and not really question where they got their data. This was a refreshing non-fiction book about global economics, in that sense.

I learnt a lot of things about the global economy. The chapter on offshore banking in Jersey, Englang, the chapter on exploitation of the Iraqi people and government in the name of "Production Sharing Agreements", the chapter about the strange policies that were implemented in Philippines despite continued realizations at different levels of the heirarchy that whatever they were doing was simply not working.

The most important insights for me came in the 11th Chapter by James S. Henry, The Mirage of Debt Relief. This chapter really shook me and my assumptions about national debt. I didn't know much about national debt before I started reading the book, but my belief was that having high foreign debt was quite common in most economies and that it wasn't really something to think much about because "banks and governments don't default on loans"! This assumption of mine was completely blown out of the water by the things that Henry shows in this chapter.

On the Debt/Capital Flight cycle

Debt goes to the Finance ministry of a government with no oversight or accountability to the tax payer.

This capital is either wasted on projects that are intentionally priced above the market rate or is fleeced by the people inside the government or companies with close ties to people high up in the government who are supposedly working on "development projects"
The fleeced capital is moved out of the country through a web of offshore investments contributing to capital flight. This is powered by clever, high priced lawyers and bankers who are working on islands like Jersey, England (a previous chapter)
The country is left holding the bag: An unproductive loan that taxpayers have to pay interest on as debt service, each year. The principal will almost certainly not be paid for several years.

The existence of this cycle might appear to be semi-obvious if you have followed the trajectory of some countries and their economies: They get huge loans from the World Bank or from a group of foreign lenders, but the money never ends up making any difference. Eventually, the country gets a follow-up loan or everyone gives up on the country's economy. Corruption and transparency issues are pegged as the root cause of this problem.

Here's the sitch: The debt-based development model doesn't work when it comes to low-middle income countries where the government is a weak institution and almost always over-run by corruption.

The World Bank model of neo-liberalism peddles the "free-market" as the silver bullet which is going to solve all the problems that plague the lower income economies of the world. But the problem with this model is that it is focused on lending to the government, reducing the government's role in the economy, bringing in private players for local services and foreign investment for new industries, effectively reducing the government to a license-issuing institution with no real power to set policy or even the minimum wage that should be paid to citizens or even control the amount of local labor that must be used for a given project.

In search of the free-market, the government has just accepted World Bank advise and reduced it's own role and made itself weaker. This makes it even more simpler for corrupt individuals to take over the government and fleece future and past loans even more efficiently! This kicks off the cycle which leads to a small elite who control the government, are extremely rich, keep their assets safely in First World economies in offshore investments, thus ensuring that anyone that the loan was originally meant for will never benefit from it.

Export Credit Agencies

The list of projects that were funded by ECAs from across the First World is quite long and each project has it's own problems. As the author of this chapter (chapter 10), Bruce Rich, introduces a lot of issues with ECAs: Lack of oversight, lack of accountability to the tax payer even though they can enjoy the benefits of tax money and the government's clout, an impenetrable curtain of secrecy that ensures that they don't even have to publish the list of projects that they approved and funded! The author uses a phrase that can be used in several situations including while describing the development that was supposed to come from the huge loans that have been sanctioned over the past few years to the lower income countries:

perpetually around the corner

There are some important numbers and a little bit of discussion about why China, India and Korea had some structural, geographical and political advantages and thus were able to mostly ignore advise from the IMF and outright reject the neo-liberalism that is being peddled as the "road to development".

I could not find anything problematic about the book. The sources are extensive and most of the facts that are not just personal experiences are backed up with official sources. My reading list after reading this book has a couple of papers about ECAs and how economists in the First World view them. The one thing that might threw me at first was how old all the data was. Reading the introduction gives some background on this, it appears as if this book has been around for a while but wasn't published by anyone because no one wanted to touch a book that was flaty critical about the global economic system and what had basically become a cartel of the richest countries bending loans and lower income countries to their will.

Quotes

China and India alone account for about $500 billion of this developing country "present value debt." Both countries have been careful about foreign borrowing, and they have also largely ignored IMF / World Bank policy advice. The result is that their foreign debt burdens are small relative to national income. Both countries -- partly because they refuse the follow orthodox neoliberal policies -- now have high growth economies and large stockpiles of foreign reserves.

-- p.222

The fundamental problem, glossed over by some debt-relief campaigners and conventional "end poverty now" economists, is that comabting poverty is not just a question of providing malaria nets, vaccinces, and drinking water, or incremental increases in education, capital, technology and aid. Ultimately, as China's example shows, long-term poverty reductions requires the promotion of deep-seated structural change. This implies the redistribution of social assets like land, education, technology, and political power. These are concepts that BWI [Bretton Woods Institutions] technocrats may never understand -- or may recoil from in horro. But they are the root of every major development success story that we know.

-- p.254

[Justin Tapp · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a compilation of essays written by former international bankers, development economists, foreign aid workers, and others. It's about offshore banking, bad loan schemes, "debt relief," tax evasion, incompetent World Bank projects. It's about the people who profit from these things, and the developing countries who get hosed by them.

I thought about writing a post entitled "Who was raped in order to make your cellphone?" One chapter explains the war in the Congo and the quest for an element called "coltan" used in cell phones, computers, PlayStations, etc. You can read the link instead for a full story. Some of the ingredients in your cellphone probably comes from the Congo....
The chapter about coltan starts with the story of a Congolese woman who gives birth to a still-born son (the pregnancy was the result of a rape) and minutes later is raped and tortured by men from the plundering Rwandan army. Really messed-up stories from Christian aid workers in the Congo. Why was she raped?

American and European multinationals who are in desperate need of the high-priced ore helped fund the Rwandan and Ugandan armies in their invasion of the Congo, where the ore is located, in order to help facilitate its mining. The armies systematically rape women of all ages and conditions in the villages they come across, like a hate crime. The ore is then exported via Rwanda to the West and the proceeds go mostly to the government who sponsor the atrocities. The multinational firms basically just look the other way at how it's acquired. Many Western companies acquired the mines when the Congolese government sold them off. Many former elected government officials serve on the boards of these firms, like Alcatel. Firms like Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Nokia, etc. claim not to use coltan from the Congo, but it's impossible for them not to.

Think Blood Diamond except with coltan. The violence has really warped these Congolese societies, as you might imagine. Truth is always much more unbelievable than fiction ever could be.
*UPDATE* Nicholas Kristof has an op-ed from the Congo today.

None of the other chapters are this graphic and emotional, however. Most are much more academic and it would help you to have an extensive economics background to read and critique them.

Confessions blew my mind 2 years ago, shook me to the core of my being like few books ever have. If you want an intriguing and sometimes suspenseful read, it's your book. If you're looking for more information and a more academic read then Empire is your book.

The 2 books together have taught me to always be aware of who I'm working for and be careful how I pursue a career in development. It's also made me think again about putting faith in models and being dogmatic about market efficiencies when there are so many caveats out there.

[Arlo · Rating 4 out of 5]

An amazing collected work that brings together such different experiences and viewpoints yet also ties them all together into a single shocking, even piercing, description of economic abuses. It was difficult to focus on certain chapters, because they are admittedly over my head, but the beautiful thing about the book is it was edited to be read in whatever order or even picked through by the reader to find what is of interest at the time. It further has an extensive collection of notes and appendices which will lead to other reading and resources to further the study and understanding of the reader! All in all a very handy book for those interested in having a better grasp of global finance and the impact of our current system.

[Joanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

From a close vantage point, he reiterates much of what Chomsky had stated was happening decades ago...the CIA is our economic bagman, we utilize out economic power to hold other countries hostage to our will, deftly subverting their own growth and interests in the process. It IS a game as old as empire..we just have new tools and new ways to manipulate the game. This book elaborates.

[Marcus Laws · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was really enjoying this book until it was stolen out of my car.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most important books anyone can read.

[Mac · Rating 3 out of 5]

Better than the memoir that "inspired" it, this is a set of essays about globalization, off-shore finance, and corporate greed destroying most of the developing world and a sizable chunk of the developed one. None of them are particularly great, and I don't know that I learned anything extraordinary, though I did get a handful of sources to back up things I pretty much already knew, in spirit if not in particular.

Similar to Naomi Klein's "No Logo" from a few years back, the book ends its cataloging of globalization's damages with a section on hope, and movements against the tide. But, just as Klein seemed to place her faith in graffiti artists and "Adbusters" magazine, the organizations and movements described here seem piecemeal and inconsistent. There was really no consensus or solidarity among people, and the problem has grown so large that it's never quite clear where to start. Some of the stories are quite inspiring, and deserve to be told, but it's hard to become too inspired when the previous 270 pages are so bleak.

[Steve]

Capitalist extraction and control of global resources is actually a foreign policy philosophy, known as "corporatocracy". This book sprang out of John Perkins' _Confessions of an Economic Hitman".

[Nadezhda · Rating 2 out of 5]

Очень "неровные" главы от познавательных до сокращённо популистских.

[Kalle Wescott · Rating 4 out of 5]

The John Perkins books are better, but after reading all his books this is a nice addition to knowledge and perspective.

[R. · Rating 3 out of 5]

This wasn't a bad book, and it was interesting academically. That said, it wasn't as well written in my opinion as the book it was flatteringly following along behind.

I did like how this went a little deeper into the weeds of how things happen it seemed like, but that's also probably what made it a little drier in terms of material.

[KT · Rating 4 out of 5]

Informative and mostly engaging collection of essays on the neocolonialist failings of the BWIs and global corruption and kleptocracy more generally. Although the essays varied in quality, there were standout chapters on debt, offshore banking/tax havens and critiques of BWIs

[Randy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow，quite an eye-opener. I had some knowledge about a few of the tops covered in this book, but I'm still shocked by a lot of others.

[Begüm · Rating 3 out of 5]

besides the other first and second book, this book does not contain perkin's writings , just he wrote introduction. The book contains articles about being an economic killers which been written by other economic killers

[Abby · Rating 3 out of 5]

My dad lent me this book to read the section about the Philippines, but I ended up reading the whole thing. The book is a sequel to John Perkins' "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" (which I also read). It's a series of essays from several ex-"economic hitmen" and people involved with global politics and finance. Little does anyone know how deeply entrenched multinational corporations are in the manipulation of politics in countries of the Global South. "Saving" the Third World cannot be done simply by foreign aid or loans/debt forgiveness. The neoliberal economic policies espoused by American conservative politicians are forcibly applied to developing countries while the industrialized countries enjoy protectionist economic policies creating an uneven playing field in which the revered free market is supposed to play out. Tax shelters, corrupt dictators, export-rich/import-dependence and the one-track-minded race to acquire oil are only some of the factors that play into the complex system that is purposely built to keep impoverished countries that way.

The book itself is somewhat uneven, as is often the case for collections of writings. Because there are so many essays about different aspects of the same thing, a lot of time is spent reiterating concepts that are explained in other sections, which is good if you are reading the book piecemeal, but a little tedious if you read it straight through. Some of the essays are written by people who are clearly not writers and can come off a little like first year college papers. That said, the large number of perspectives allows a broad coverage of several countries and the different players involved in the global corruption, from lawyers to bankers to CEOs to global agencies to contractors to foreign dictators to average citizens who are just cogs in the corporate machines.

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

pp to copy: TOC, 1, 2, 4

from the library
TOC:
Introduction: Confessions and Revelations from the world of economic Hit men
Ch 1 Global Empire: The web of control by John Perkins
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

ch 2 Selling Money--and Dependency:Setting the Debt trap
ch 3 Dirty MoneyInside the sectrt world of offshore banking
ch 4 BCCI's Double Game: banking on America
ch 5 the human cost of cheap cell phones
ch 6 Mercenaries on the Fron LInes in the New Scramble for Africa
ch 7 Hijacking Iraq's Oil Reserves: Economic Hit men at work
ch 8 The World Bank and the $100 Billion Question
ch 9 The Phillipines, the World Bank, and the race to the bottom
ch 10 Exporting Destruction
ch 11 The Mirage of Debt Relief
ch 12 Global uprising: The web of Resistance
About the Authors
Acknowledgments
Appendix\
Index







Hegemony or Survival America's Quest for Global Dominance

[Hendri sabeth]

ecomomic hit men merpakan salh satu buku yang cukup mencengangkan saya ketika membacanya,ternyata buku ini menguak tentang konspirasi amerika terhadap negara-negara berkembang salah satunya indonesia.....,dimana denagn kekuasaan ekonomi,politik,mapia dlll telah memberangus negar-negara berkembang untuk di jadikan sapi perah bagi amerika...

[Dave · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good but slightly repetitive collection of essays explaining how screwed the world is, who's screwing it and how

[Anthony · Rating 2 out of 5]

As much as I like critiques of trans-national capitalism. This book is poorly organized, does not have a core message, sometimes self contradictory, occasionally unduly militant.

[Joy Gucci · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not for those who can't take a hard hit from reality.

[Cem Dylan · Rating 5 out of 5]

perfect

[Kamil Salamah · Rating 5 out of 5]

nice reading

[Mano Chil · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was eye-opening to see how the bad guys are rigging the system and what can be done to stop them. One just has to be interested to read, listen, understand and know and take a tiny action.