Common Ground: Conversations: John Perkins

August 2007 | Conversations

Conversations: John Perkins

Introduction by Charles Shaw, Interview by Keri Lynch

John Perkins first exploded into public consciousness with his 2004 New York Times best-selling exposé, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, a damning first-hand account of fifteen years spent as a corporate racketeer in the developing world. “Economic hit men (EHMs),” Perkins wrote, “are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex and murder.”

Beginning in the mid 1960s, Perkins’ job was to convince countries that are strategically important to the U.S. — from Indonesia to Panama — to accept enormous loans for huge infrastructure projects like highways and dams, contracting the work out to U.S. corporations. Saddled with huge debts, these countries then came under the control of the United States government, World Bank and other U.S.-dominated aid agencies that acted like mobsters, dictating to those governments the terms of repayment, extorting critical UN votes, demanding troops for American operations or forcing them to accept American “protection” in the form of military bases, hardware or missile installations.

His conscience eventually getting the best of him, Perkins left the EHM game in 1981 and — in a radical turn — began working with the indigenous tribal cultures his former corporate paymasters had so indifferently begun to extinguish. Although tempted for years to tell his story, he was always somehow dissuaded or bribed just enough not to do it. That was until the Bush Administration took power, and the “game as old as empire” he had helped rig for so long was now out in the open. He knew he had to act, and act big.

Now a trained shaman and environmentalist, Perkins spends his days traveling the world meeting with influential world leaders in an effort to expose the inner workings of American corporate imperialism. His latest book, The Secret History of the American Empire, continues the saga begun in Confessions. CG caught up with John Perkins at the Chicago Green Festival on Earth Day 2007.

Keri Lynch: At events such as the Green Festivals, topics have gone beyond environmental issues to include spirituality and peace. Do you see these issues coming together now?

John Perkins: Absolutely. They are all coming together on a very profound level. My true belief is that we don’t have to seek spirituality, it’s within us all the time. All we have to do is open our hearts to our spirit’s eyes. And we also need to understand why our spirits chose to take human form at this particular time in human history. This particular time in history is begging for transformation. It’s begging for human beings to become more conscious and more peaceful and more ecological.

What issues do you think are being most woefully ignored in public discourse?

We have created a failed model — a failed system. Less than five percent of the world’s population consuming over 25 percent of its resources and causing more than 30 percent of its pollution is a failure by any standard. It can’t continue. And that seems ignored. Periodically, the press gets off on global warming or the war or poverty and starvation or something else, but when you come down to it, the total system is completely flawed and we have to find a new one. It’s not an ecological issue, it’s not an economic issue, it’s not a social issue — it’s all of those brought together. It’s a failed system and we must change it.

Do you think the green thing is a passing fad?

No, of course the green thing isn’t a passing fad. If it’s a passing fad, then the human species is a passing fad. What’s amazing is that we’re even having a discussion about becoming sustainable because it’s only in relatively recent history that anybody would consider not being sustainable. Indigenous cultures that I’ve worked with around the world, and certainly all ancestral cultures, considered sustainability a fact of life, like breathing. To succeed as a culture, you had to be sustainable. We’ve gone on for centuries being unsustainable and now we’ve finally begun a discussion about “should we become sustainable?” It’s amazing we even have to ask that question. If the green movement doesn’t continue, and if we don’t work hard and become very sustainable soon, then we’re not going to be living on this planet in any form that you and I would recognize.

What question do you wish our readers would ask themselves?

The essential question everyone should ask is: What can I do to create a sustainable, stable, peaceful world — for everyone everywhere? We must understand that it has to include everyone everywhere because it’s a very, very small and highly interconnected world. People in the most remote forests of the Amazon now understand what’s going on in the rest of the world. They didn’t 10 years ago and they certainly didn’t when I first lived in the Amazon in the 1960s.

What keeps you focused, motivated and hopeful?

I grew up as a student of the American Revolution. My family was steeped in that tradition, my ancestors fought in the American Revolution and I used to wish I’d been alive at that time. I realize now that this is a much more important time, because we’re talking about applying those principles of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to people all over the world.

You can devote yourself to just the boring aspects of making money to live day-to-day. I’ve done that, and I don’t want to do it anymore. There is nothing more exciting than devoting yourself to shape-shifting human society if you realize it’s essential and you’re going to play a part in that. Every one of us impacts many people every single day. Every one of us is potentially a Rosa Parks, a Martin Luther King, Jr. or a Rachel Carson. Every one of us is an agent of change.

What’s your favorite conspiracy theory?

I sometimes am accused of being a conspiracy theorist and I’m not at all. The corporatocracy running things isn’t a conspiracy because it isn’t doing anything illegal most of the time. They’re not meeting in little dark rooms and putting together plots. They all come from the same school of knowledge and the basic idea to run corporations successfully and maximize the bottom line for the next quarter. It’s not exactly conspiracy, but it has resulted in the situation where a very few men make most of the decisions for the world and gain most of the money from it, and it’s not benefiting society. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s because that is the system we’ve allowed to develop — and we need to change that system.

Do you think voting with your dollars is an effective way to promote social or environmental change?

We will only be able to create a sustainable, stable and peaceful world when each of us realizes that every time we spend a dollar and every time we take an action, we need to do it with this goal in mind: that we are creating a better world, not only for ourselves, but also for future generations.

We also need to understand that a better world is not a more materialistic world. Property doesn’t make people happy. The wealthiest nation in the history of the world, the United States, is not a happy nation. We have some of the highest drug rates, incarceration rates, murder rates and family abuse rates of any society in the history of this planet. That proves that a high level of materialism does not create happiness.

Just take one step at a time. We are a consumer society, and so we have to honor those people that are making the things that we all tend to consume in an environmentally and socially responsible way. That’s a very important step. Another important step is to realize that we need to buy a lot less of all these things, regardless of how they are made. Both are important.

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