by JIM MILES
The American Trap: My Battle to Expose America’s Secret Economic War Against the Rest of the World. Frédéric Pierucci (with Mathieu Aron). Hodder & Stoughton, London, 2020.
It becomes more clear with more and more readings that the “American trap” is the US dollar, and that for some it is no secret. Frédéric Pierucci’s well-written personal story tells how he became a pawn in the greater game of economic control of the world’s finances and the world’s politicians and corporations.
This story reminded me of John Perkins’ Confessions of an Economic Hitman in that it is not an academic research paper nor a journalistic exposé, but the story of one person’s journey into the darker side of geopolitical manipulations.
Different Themes
The work exposes several main themes as it works through Pierlucci’s adventures, and like all geopolitical stories, all the factors are interrelated. The first theme is, as per the title, the economic war waged by the US against the rest of the world. It has become in my view the overarching component of US efforts to prevent the failure of the US dollar as the global reserve currency.
If that happens – as China has expressed it is interested in doing and along with Russia having taken steps to avoid major repercussions – the US is powerless financially and only has its military left as a threat. The military is powerful, and extremely dangerous, existentially so, and its main purpose is not freedom nor democracy nor human rights but to protect the use of the US dollar as the global currency.
Combined with that theme, supporting and underlying it, are Pierucci’s accounts of the manipulations of the Department of Justice of the US using its self-created extraterritorial powers to force compliance to US demands (Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, 1977).
No surprise, this also includes the manipulations of foreign governments and corporations being forced to comply with the courts’ own manipulations and includes the assistance provided to domestic companies in order to control foreign enterprises. It shows clearly that corporation CEOs are only interested in the dollar value of the company to the extent they are willing to throw their own employees away in order to save their own skin from having to face a prison term in the U.S.
This leads to a smaller theme, that of the nature of the US For-profit private prison system. The conditions described by Pierucci are inhumanely terrible notwithstanding the argument that these are criminals and are receiving the results of their actions. The relationship between the threat of jail time, the threat of huge fines, the DOJ’s manipulations of the corporations and the prison system, all make for a system that is neither equitable nor just, nor capable of reforming any kind of criminal behavior.
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