Is This How George Soros Is Spending His Money?

A reader noticed that his local library system had a dozen copies of Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hit Man--and the explanation from the librarian was that it was a very popular book. Two nearby library systems, he says, also had a dozen copies.

I searched Boise Public Library, and they had seven copies--it looks like one in every branch (only one of which is actually checked out).

Sonoma County Public Library system has thirteen copies--apparently one in every branch, and two in one branch. This being a county of multimillionaires, six of them are checked out.

Santa Monica Public Library: six copies for all four branches. Four copies are checked out.

Perkins' book is just wonderful and completely believable, if you read the leftist descriptions like this one. Publishers Weekly had this to say about it:

He says he was trained early in his career by a glamorous older woman as one of many "economic hit men" advancing the cause of corporate hegemony. He also says he has wanted to tell his story for the last two decades, but his shadowy masters have either bought him off or threatened him until now. The story as presented is implausible to say the least, offering so few details that Perkins often seems paranoid, and the simplistic political analysis doesn’t enhance his credibility. Despite the claim that his work left him wracked with guilt, the artless prose is emotionally flat and generally comes across as a personal crisis of conscience blown up to monstrous proportions, casting Perkins as a victim not only of his own neuroses over class and money but of dark forces beyond his control. His claim to have assisted the House of Saud in strengthening its ties to American power brokers may be timely enough to attract some attention, but the yarn he spins is ultimately unconvincing, except perhaps to conspiracy buffs.

One of the reviewers on Amazon.com sounds like he really wants to believe Perkins. Because the reviewer has a Mercer Island, Washington address, he is wealthy enough to be a fierce anticapitalist multimillionaire (unless that's just because he is still living with Mommy and Daddy). But even this guy points to some serious problems with it:

"Confessions" is at once too good to be true and too vague to be believed. The author apparently had a successful career supporting requests for development loans for major electric utilities projects to the various less developed countries by grossly inflating their projected economic growth. His motivation for doing so was admittedly to keep his job (his boss was fired when he provided more realistic projections) and flourish in a consulting company whose financial success was clearly dependent upon the loans being approved so that their clients could get the lucrative contracts to do the construction work. Nevertheless, Perkins attempts to make what would just be another sordid tale of Enron-style numbers spoofing into a nearly epic story of official U.S. chicanery by alleging that fraud was perpetuated at the request of the American government in order to trap the borrower nations, apparently too ignorant or corrupt to watch out for themselves, into an eternity of economic and political servitude by intentionally burdening them with debts they could not pay. Unfortunately, despite Perkins career as a self-proclaimed "economist", his book is devoid of even a single statistic backing up this claim. Instead, it rests almost solely upon the words of a mysterious "Claudia" - a woman who present herself not as a U.S. government agent, but as a consultant to Perkins's employer - who in a series of secret meetings imbued this revelation to Perkins from on high as it were, much as Gabriel dictated the Qu'ran to Mohammed. To say that this story is hard to believe is to treat it with a respect it is manifestly undeserving. Perkins's main pitch seems to be that his own apparently solid status as an establishment insider is sufficient proof of his own credibility, despite his enthusiastic admissions that made a substantial fortune exagerrating and lieing for a living. Yet Perkins is no McNamara, but a best a midlevel manager in the "corportocracy" he exposes, and his story lacks the abundant details which made true insider accounts, like Phillip Agee's "Inside the Company" so unmistakably authentic and powerful. In fact, it is precisely its quasi-fictional nature, rather like Carlos Castaneda's dubious account of his dealings with Native American shamans, which makes "Confessions" such a good read. It reads like fiction because it basically is fiction, albeit interlaced with enough true events from the author's life and recent history to give it the veneer of plausibility.

My reader asks asks if Perkins' book is being given to public libraries as part of a large scale propaganda campaign for Soros or one of the other billionaire leftists? The Soviet Union apparently did something similar during the Cold War--a way to get their ideas widely distributed, and put a lot of money into the pockets of a friendly author.

There's nothing terribly wrong with this. But it is something of a reminder that part of why the left keeps winning is that they have the money for this sort of thing. If anyone has written a detailed examination of Perkins' claims, it would be a good book to give to library systems around the country. (Feel free to do that with my book Armed America, too!)

There is one area where there might be something wrong with this: if Perkins' book is actually fiction, then it needs to be marked as such. Otherwise, it is fraud. Imagine if someone sent half a dozen copies of a book to every public library system that claimed that Bill Clinton had dozens of people murdered to hide his involvement with cocaine smuggling, child prostitution, and planning 9/11. I rather doubt that many libraries would put it on the shelf--certainly, they wouldn't put a copy in every branch.