All Episodes
Previous Next
March 20, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
37:12
Interview with John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hello, this is Mike Adams, the Health Ranger editor of naturalnews.com.
I recently had the opportunity to interview John Perkins.
He's the author of the book, Confessions of an Economic Hitman.
This is the book that tells the truth about who really runs our world and how empires seek to control the economies of developing nations.
Perkins is also the author of The Winked, a book that reveals why the world's financial markets imploded and what we need to do to remake them.
John Perkins joins us by phone in an interview.
Sorry about the audio quality.
It's not the best, but the info is outstanding.
Let's listen in.
Today we're joined by author and advocate John Perkins.
His website is johnperkins.org.
He's the author of several books including The Secret History of the American Empire, Confessions of an Economic Hitman, and Hoodwinked.
He joins us by phone today.
Thank you, John, for being on the show.
My pleasure.
Thanks for having me.
You're very welcome.
You are one of the authors that I admire and respect the most in the world.
Your book, Blew Me Away, The Secret History of the American Empire.
Can you give our readers, our listeners, a brief intro of your background and what you do, just in case they aren't familiar with your work?
Well, Mike, I guess my background is quite varied.
As you know, I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador back in the late 60s and early 70s.
I graduated from business school, and afterwards I was brought into a company called Charles T. Maine, a consulting firm in Boston, where I was an economist and I became chief economist.
Those were my official titles, but in actuality I was what we call an economic hitman.
And I think it's fair to say that we economic hitmen, since that time, the early 70s, have managed to create the world's first truly global empire.
And it's also the first empire in history that's been created primarily without the military through economics and therefore essentially in secret.
We who live in the empire and reap all of its benefits don't even understand that it really is an empire, but it is.
Well, I was going to say, I mean, the way we made this happen, the way we created this empire, there's many different ways that economic hitmen work, but perhaps most common is to identify a third world country I think we're good to go.
then arrange a huge loan to that country from the World Bank or one of its sister organizations, and yet the money doesn't actually go to the country ever.
It goes instead to our own corporations to build the infrastructure projects in that country like power plants and highways and industrial parks, things that benefit a few wealthy families in the country as well as our own corporations but don't help the majority of the people who are too poor to buy electricity things that benefit a few wealthy families in the country as well as our own corporations but don't don't hire many people anyway, and yet they, the people of the country, are left holding a huge debt that they can never repay.
So at some point we go back and say, since you can't repay your debts, give us a pound of flesh, sell your oil cheap to our oil companies without any environmental restrictions, allow us to build a military base on your soil or vote with us on the next critical United Nations vote,
And in the cases where we fail, and I talk in my books about how I failed with Jaime Roaldos, the democratically elected president of Ecuador, and Omar Torrijos of Panama, I was not able to corrupt these two presidents.
I was not able to bring them around to get them to accept these onerous deals.
And then the jackals come in and they either overthrow governments or assassinate the leaders.
And both Roaldos of Ecuador and Torrijos of Panama were assassinated because I and other economic hitmen fail to bring them around.
And in a few cases when the jackals also fail, like with Saddam Hussein, then, and only then, does the military go in and we become an overt imperialistic power.
Many people listening to this may find themselves in disbelief hearing what you just said.
Now, I've read your book, so I've been through all the details, and it makes sense to me.
And I know perhaps more about how the The way the world works than the average American who hasn't traveled.
But how do you even begin to convince an average everyday American who's living in the country and getting their news from America that these things are really true?
Because frankly, a lot of people cannot believe it.
You know, it's interesting, Mike, that I don't find that I have to convince too many people I get a lot of emails and I do a lot of public speaking in universities and even in corporations and so forth and the most common comment that comes to me is I always suspected these sorts of things were happening but there was never any proof until you wrote about it.
And so it seems as though there's an awful lot more people knowing that this kind of thing goes on than one would realize.
And I think that's one of the reasons Confessions spent over a year and a half on the New York Times bestseller list.
It's in over 40 languages because I think people really do deep down in and understand this.
We don't want to believe it.
I don't want to believe it.
You know, I'm a very loyal American.
I want to believe in the ideals of America.
I do believe in the ideals and I believe most Americans believe in those ideas.
I think our country really in many respects has been stolen by a band of robbers and we need to expose these things Get them out there so we can get it back.
Anybody who has disbelief can go to my books and go to the references and find tremendous amounts of information to support everything I say.
The things I talk about happened.
Roldoes and Torrijos were killed.
The CIA and FBI have never admitted that they blew up those airplanes, but there's a tremendous body of evidence that shows It's fascinating that many heads of state around the world,
and especially through Central and South America, are some of your greatest fans.
I think I remember Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa He actually wrote a little testimonial for your book.
Yes, he did.
I'm sitting in my office and I have a really nice letter hanging on the wall here from Rafael Correa, who, as you know, is a very interesting guy.
He has a PhD in economics from the University of Illinois.
He understands economics very, very well.
And he said, you know, yes, I've had this exact thing happen to me that Perkins describes.
I've had The economic hitmen have been threatened by jackals.
President Morales says something very similar and so is Chavez of Venezuela and a number of others.
There's a revolution going on in Latin America, a new wave of presidents coming in that's saying no to these.
It is standing up to the economic hitmen and putting their lives on the line, frankly.
And those three that we've just discussed are three, but in the last few years there have been ten presidents that in varying degrees have taken a very strong stance against this type of exploitation.
And in a number of cases said, we're not going to pay those loans that were signed off on by dictators here, unelected officials at the behest of economic hitmen.
Our people don't really owe that money.
Right.
Correa did that not too long ago last year, I think.
And, of course, in the Western world, it was described as Ecuador defaulting on loans.
But the other side of the story, well, you can probably explain the other side of the story.
Well, I write about it, and I quote Correa in Hoodwink, my latest book, so I am very familiar with the stance he took, you know, and I don't have it in front of me, so I'll paraphrase, but basically he said, you know, back in the 70s, and incidentally, that's when I was an economic hitman, Ecuador was run by a bunch of military dictators who basically were put into office and kept there by the CIA. And they signed off on these loans.
And Correa says, the people never agreed to them and we never got the benefits.
Those dictators got a lot of the benefits.
They've all left the country now.
They're either dead or they died of old age or they're living in Miami or Switzerland or someplace.
And he said, you know, they owe the World Bank this money.
And perhaps the World Bank owes the money because it was in cahoots with them, and the economic hitman says, he looks at me and says, maybe John Perkins owes this money.
He says, but the fact of the matter is the Ecuadorian people do not owe this money.
We didn't get any real benefits from it, and we never agreed to it, and so we're not paying.
And, you know, Argentina said this from time to time, Brazil has said similar things, and just a couple of weeks ago, Iceland You know, the first developed country to have gone bankrupt, in essence bankrupt, has just said the same thing.
93% of the population of Iceland voted on a referendum not to pay off the debts that the international banking community said Iceland owed them.
Moving on to natural disasters, you know, earlier this year, Haiti was, of course...
We hit with a major disaster.
And a lot of people are under the impression that when Western nations, such as the United States, come in with aid money, they think, well, all of that is going to the people of Haiti.
It's going to help those people.
But you explain what really happens in many cases in great detail.
And if you could, could you paraphrase some of that material?
Yeah.
Yeah, it's a shame.
It's a crime, Mike.
What happens?
Let me first say that at the beginning, and a lot of people, your listeners may have donated money to the Red Cross and so on right after the disaster.
Most of that money is usually well spent.
Water sent in, sleeping bags, tents, food, immediate relief from the disaster.
There may be some corruption involved in that, but in general, the intent is strong.
It's good.
But later, when...
Today in Haiti, for example, is when the bigger loans are approved, the things to redevelop the country.
Typically, what happens, and we don't have a final word yet on Haiti, it's still developing, but we know what happened after the tsunami in Indonesia and other parts of Asia.
This money goes in, and instead of helping the small farmer whose farm was destroyed in the tsunami or an earthquake to rebuild this farm, The money helps big agribusinesses.
It may help the small farmer, but not to do what he used to do.
He now is required to plant things that are going to be purchased by the big agricultural businesses.
Genetically modified seeds, for example?
Yes, and monoculture rather than the sort of subsistence farming that he did before where he sold his goods in a local market and everybody kind of lived off the land in a very sustainable way.
So that's all changed.
The same thing happens in the fishing industry.
Rather than helping the small fishermen rebuild their little fleets, it goes to helping big fishing industry.
And rather than helping mom and pop or restaurants and hotels and breakfast and so on rebuild, it goes to helping the big box of restaurants and hotel chains.
And this goes on and on and on.
And in many cases, it also opens a big door for the military.
We saw that happen in Aceh province in Indonesia, which was a province that was resisting government-mandated controls and now no longer resists.
And we're seeing that happen in Haiti, where we're developing a huge military presence there, as well as in Colombia.
And certainly, many of the other countries in Latin America see this as an enormous threat to them.
Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, Cuba.
See this as a direct confrontational threat that we're building up this military base in Haiti now as well as in Colombia.
Now, back in the US, some American people might say, well, hey, I actually support all this behavior that you're describing, John, because I, the American consumer, I want to live a high energy consumption lifestyle and I love the fact that economic hitmen are out there doing the dirty work so I don't have to.
Do you ever get that kind of response from people?
Yeah, somebody's never actually said that to my face, except you.
And you're doing it all, so I guess that's not quite to my face.
And I know that's not really coming from you, but I have seen people write things on some of the blogs to that extent.
And, you know, my response to that is that that's very old-style thinking.
We have to recognize today that we live on a very, very tiny planet where we're all extremely interrelated.
We can't just look out for the city of Boston or the state of Massachusetts or the country of the United States anymore.
We're global.
This has become a global planet.
And we need to face that fact.
And we need to face the fact that the system that we've created is a failure.
It's something I call predatory capitalism.
I'm a capitalist.
I'm not opposed to capitalism, but capitalism has been around for over 400 years, gone through many iterations.
And since the 70s, and particularly since the 1980s, the real watershed moment, When we, in the developed world, embraced a form of capitalism that was espoused by Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics, they were some of the main proponents, although it was embraced by many, many people, including every president, Reagan, and every president, Democrat, and Republican alike since, it's what I call predatory capitalism.
And it's built on three very, very faulty assumptions, in my opinion, but it has led us to a failed system.
We are living in a world today where less than 5% of us live in the United States and we consume more than 25% of the world's resources.
That can only be described as a failure.
It's not a model.
It can't be replicated anywhere else.
China can't buy into it.
India can't.
Latin America, Africa can't.
We did another planet just like this one without people in order to take this model global.
It is not a model.
It's a failure.
And I have a two and a half year old grandson.
I know that That if we stay on this course, he's going to inherit a terrible world.
It's already a very destabilized world where roughly half the population in the world lives in dire poverty, on the verge of starvation or actually starving, while 5% of the world, less than 5%, consumes more than 25% of the world's resources.
We all must recognize that that's not to anybody's benefit.
And this is a very old system.
We're living in medieval times.
You know, we in the United States live in the castle, and everybody else, most everybody else, with some exceptions, Europe, are outside of the castle.
And they're struggling to get in.
They're going to tear down the castle if we don't change.
We've got to change.
And we need to recognize, Mike, that we're at a watershed moment in history.
For the first time, every human being on this planet is confronted by the same crises.
You know, we've always had things like tsunamis in Asia and earthquakes in Haiti.
They usually don't affect other parts of the world too strongly.
But today, every one of us is being confronted by climate change, by overpopulation, by resources that are diminishing at an increasing rate, and prices for essentials like food and fuel that are increasing at accelerating rates.
We're all facing the same crises, and there are man-made crises.
And we've also, for the first time in history, we're all communicating with each other.
You know, through the cell phone and internet, every one of us is talking to each other.
We're from the highest villages in the Himalayas to the deepest ones in the Amazon.
People are now communicating.
So we're at this watershed moment, and we need to understand that we truly are a fragile species living on a very tiny planet, and we've got to come together To make sure that my two-and-a-half-year-old grandson inherits a sustainable world,
a just world, a peaceful world, and to realize the only way he's going to inherit that world is if every child growing up in Bolivia, in Botswana, in Indonesia, in Palestine, and Israel has that same expectation and is realized for all of us.
We've got to understand that We are a very small community on this planet today.
I love your description and how you paint that vision and I absolutely agree with you, of course.
Everything that we do comes back to us here on this planet.
It's not such a big world that we can just harm others or pollute other areas and think that we're not going to be No, and you know, that's only really that we've realized that since World War II in my lifetime, and every year we realize it increasingly.
But, you know, if you looked at the world back during World War II, we really did think that if we could make the world safe, make the United States safe, if we had borders, if we could protect our borders, we'd be...
To go to Europe and stop Hitler before he came to our borders and the Japanese before they came to our borders.
But it was basically about our borders.
And that's all changed now.
You know, I think we're at a time in history like it's very much like when city-states became nations, except now the nations are pretty much irrelevant.
And we can view the globe as this, you know, the Earth as this big globe with roughly 200 countries.
And in the past, a few of those had a lot of power, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, the United States.
But today, the power is these big clouds drifting around that planet.
And these are the big corporations who know no national borders and don't follow any specific sets of laws.
They really are calling the shots around the planet today, much more than presidents are.
And We, the people, are very interconnected by these corporations.
We all answer to them, and yet we all also have a lot of power over them.
They don't exist unless we buy their goods and services, and we need to understand that, too, and the power that we have over this new geopolitical system that we really haven't come to accept or understand yet.
We're living under the old politics, and yet we're operating under a new form of geopolitics.
I'm glad you brought that in about the power of corporations and the ignorance of mainstream consumers about how much influence corporations are wielding.
I wanted to ask you about that.
In your book, The Secret History of the American Empire, which, by the way, is a fantastic story.
You are a great writer.
It's a real page-turner.
It's not just people might think, oh, it's a boring documentary type of book.
No, this is quite a thrilling story.
But in there you talk about how corporations have encroached upon realms of power that had traditionally been political.
Elected officials were making decisions and now it's a board of directors at a corporation.
How much more is going to happen there?
Is the United States of America going to become a corporatocracy or is it already there?
Well, it is there.
The corporations control the politics of the United States.
I don't think anybody can have much doubt about that.
You know, we saw the current President, Obama, initially saying he wasn't going to accept money from big corporations, but ultimately he accepted a lot of money from them.
And I don't think he would be President if he hadn't probably gotten their support.
And now they're basically dictating a lot of his policies.
Wall Street is, you know, his whole financial system.
All of his financial advisors come out of Wall Street and most of his agricultural advisors come out of Monsanto or one of the other big agribusinesses.
And this is kind of the reality of the situation.
And even if he hadn't accepted that money and hadn't taken that course, if we'd gotten a president who didn't do that, he'd still be surrounded by a Congress that's beholden to huge corporations.
He'd still be surrounded by the 35,000 lobbyists who work in Washington alone, mostly for corporations.
And you still have to deal with the media, mainstream media that's controlled by corporations.
So the corporations really have control today.
And of course we know at the very top that they're all the same people anyway.
You know, one year a guy is CEO of some huge corporation and the next year he's running a government agency that has oversight responsibility for his old industry.
And several years later he's going to go back into that industry.
So at the very top, they're all the same people also.
So the big corporations call the shops, but the good news is that the marketplace is democratic if we choose to make it such.
Our vote when we buy something or choose not to is very significant.
It may be more important than our political vote.
They're both important, but we have to recognize that the marketplace vote is very, very important.
And we've used it effectively from time to time.
Back, you know, in the 70s, in the 60s and 70s, we boycotted companies that were supporting apartheid in South Africa.
That ended apartheid.
And we got companies to clean up terribly polluted rivers in the United States.
And we got them to get rid of aerosol cans.
We were destroying the ozone layer and to open the doors wider to women and minority groups.
And recently to get trans fats out of food and antibiotics out of chickens.
When we express ourselves, it doesn't take a lot of us.
It's some critical mass of voters in the marketplace.
It's extremely effective, and I think we need to ratchet that up a notch now and say, you know, we're only going to vote for companies.
We're only going to buy from companies that are committed to creating a sustainable, just, and peaceful world for us and for Mike Ramson, which means for every child on the planet.
I agree with you, and there are many organizations that have been very effective in You talk about the Rainforest Action Network.
I know we have a close relationship with the Organic Consumers Association.
Just a few days ago, they announced Procter& Gamble agreed to reformulate their shampoo products to take out 1,4-dioxane, which is one of the chemical contaminants that's been found in their products.
You're right.
It doesn't take very many consumers to pressure a corporation into making the right decision.
It's very interesting.
Yeah, well, I dare say that if all your listeners were to send an email, maybe it would only take 10% of them.
I don't know how many, but if a significant number were to send an email to Nike today, and it's so easy now by email, and say, you know, we like that you're making some progress in the environmental area, but you still get slaves working for you in sweatshops in Indonesia.
We're not buying from you until you convert those sweatshops into legitimate factories where the Indonesians get real pay and have decent working conditions.
I don't know what it takes, maybe 10,000 people to write those emails.
Then Nike has to change.
Or they'll go out of business.
They know that.
Phil Knight, the chairman of the board of Founder of Nike doesn't read all these emails, but he does periodically get matrices that tell him what kind of emails Nike's getting, how many in what category, and if he sees enough significant ones like that, he's going to have to make change, or he knows he'll go out of business, and if he makes change, then Reebok's going to have to do it too, and Adidas, and every other manufacturer of sporting goods.
Can you recommend an organization, or is there a website where people can go to find out A list of companies to boycott at a particular time and other companies to support who are environmentally conscious and socially conscious companies?
Yeah, one of the organizations that helped found a non-profit is Dream Change.
Another one is Pachamama Alliance, which is very involved with some of the work that you guys are doing in Ecuador.
But Dream Change has a website, dreamchange.org, dreamchange.org, one word, dreamchange.org.
And there's a lot of links on there.
And so what I'd say, anytime anybody's looking for a specific product, a bicycle, a pair of shoes, a pair of pants, go on there and go to the links on there and, you know, you can go specifically.
It almost has to be a product by product basis because there's some companies out there that do a very good job with specific products but don't do such a good job with other products.
And I think the other thing is, and I don't buy anything without going on there, and we have to recognize that no company at this point is perfect.
Maybe no company will ever be perfect.
Who's perfect?
But what we must do is support those that are making an effort and have made the commitment, and chastise those and refuse to buy from those that are not even making the commitment, and let them know.
We must send emails.
We must...
We must let them know why we're not buying from them or why we are buying from them.
Yes.
Just a reminder to those listening, this is an interview with John Perkins and your website is johnperkins.org and there you'll find descriptions, videos, articles, a wealth of information so be sure to check out that website.
John, I want to ask you perhaps more of a personal question.
This transformation that you describe in your book From being an economic hitman to now a globally conscious advocate of not only human rights but fair trade and many other important areas, this must have been a fascinating and in some ways even perhaps a spiritual journey for you.
How did this come about?
It's been an amazing journey, Mike, yes.
You know, I've gone through Dante's Inferno.
You know, I really think a lot of it started when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador, and spent a great deal of time living out in what's called the Odiente, the Amazon area, the Chua territory.
I learned a lot from the Chua people, indigenous people in that area, and then with the Quechua people up in the High Andes around Cuenca.
And then I became an economic hitman.
In the early years, I thought, you know, my education in the business school said that we were doing the right thing But I kept saying that we weren't.
And I think the fact that I had lived with people who were on the other end of the spectrum helped me really understand that all the statistics, all the theories, all the papers were wrong.
And that what we were doing through the World Bank and other organizations was making a huge, much wider gap between rich and poor.
And so that helped me tremendously.
And over a period of 10 years, which is the time I spent as an economic hitman, I increasingly became More conscious of what was going on.
And finally, after being in there for 10 years, I was sailing in the Caribbean.
I was in the Virgin Islands, St.
John Island, and I climbed up this hill to this old sugarcane plantation in ruins.
I sat there one evening watching the sun set over the Caribbean.
Very idyllic setting.
Bougainvillea going on these old ruins of a sugarcane plantation.
It was just beautiful.
But then, I was struck by the fact that that plantation had been built on the bones of thousands of slaves.
And then I had to accept the fact that it just struck me that the whole hemisphere is built on the bones of millions of slaves.
And then I had to admit to myself that I too was a slaver.
That the work I was doing was a modern equivalent of slavery.
Putting people in chains literally and hauling them out of the Congo.
But we...
We were doing a modern equivalent of that, and I decided at that point, and again, a lot of things were built to this, that I would never do it again, and I went back after that vacation and quit.
Wow.
Well, having that level of self-awareness is not only rare in the corporate world today, but it's also very courageous.
It makes you wonder, why don't other people...
In the corporate world, or why don't more of them suddenly discover this level of awareness that you discovered?
I mean, why aren't there more John Perkins basically out there who are seeing how the world really works?
I think it's happening.
I'm very hopeful.
You know, there's a lot of books recently that have come out and movies dealing with similar topics.
Workshops on shape-shifting and transformation at places like the Omega Institute and Esalen and Hollyhock around the United States.
Ten years ago, we didn't get business executives coming to those workshops.
Today, we do.
We recently had a retired high-up executive from Exxon, a guy who was in charge of the Valdez cleanup, come and take, I think, about an eight-day workshop with me on transformation, on shape-shifting.
Using techniques, in fact, that many of the indigenous people in the Amazon and Andes have taught me, very powerful techniques.
So I'm seeing a change.
And I do a lot of speaking at colleges and universities, including MBA programs.
Five years ago, when Confessions first came out, when I met with students for dinner before my speech, I would try to meet with a dozen or two dozen of them.
They were all telling me that what they were interested in was power and might.
They were quite frank about this.
Today...
Today, they don't say that at all.
They're all talking about wanting to see a greener world.
And then they'll say, you know, we've got big loans, we have to pay off, we have to go to work for corporations, but that's not really our goal.
Incidentally, I was in China about six or eight months ago lecturing there to a bunch of MBA students there, and I heard something very similar from them.
They said, you know, China's experienced this incredible economic miracle over the past 30 years.
It's come at a horrible price, environmentally and socially, but now we're determined our generation is going to make this place, China, the greenest country on the planet.
Wow.
And they meant it.
Yeah.
It was stunning.
They meant it.
Whether they'll do it or not, it needs to be seen, but, you know, my hope is let's have an Olympics that, you know, compete with which country is the greenest.
Let's let our business school students in the United States Compete with those in China and the Germans and Japanese and the Ecuadorians and the Brazilians and everybody else.
Let's have a big competition to see who can be greenest.
Wow.
We only have a few minutes left here, John.
I wanted to ask you about the pharmaceutical industry.
We've seen in North America this has been one of the most exploitive industries.
When I was in Quito recently, staying at a hotel there, I noticed there was a conference.
Merck was having a conference there to try to convince...
The medical leaders of Ecuador that everybody needs vaccines and everybody needs pharmaceuticals there.
Do you have any thoughts on the pharmaceutical angle in all this?
Incredibly powerful corporations, you know, that are doing everything they can to gain more and more power.
They're certainly part of this corporatocracy, as I call it, the modern empire builders.
And, you know, I think it's really important that we rein them in.
And, you know, their role has been terribly unconscionable in terms of not providing medicines to people who really, really need it and can't afford it in places like Latin America and Africa, even worse.
So it's very important that we single them out too and send them emails and demonstrate against them and let them know, you know, we're all for scientific breakthroughs and such things, but let's make sure that these are shared by plenty of people.
And I also think we have to be very, very concerned sometimes that they're actually doing things that could foment bigger problems around the world and epidemics at times so that they can sell their medicines.
I don't have any proof of that.
It's way outside my realm here, but I think there is some evidence out there that those sorts of things go on.
I think we need to be very careful with corporations that have that kind of power and that kind of control over human beings, over health and life and death situations.
I agree with you, and I think there's also an environmental issue now that the pharmaceutical industry, I mean, you know, fish are being found with HRT drugs and cholesterol drugs in their tissues, and No one's talking really about this and the corporations don't want to take responsibility for the chemicals that are flushed down the drain.
No, and you know, just recently some study came out that we have chemicals in a lot of the drinking water that are We're good to
go.
We need to follow our passions.
You know, we're all different.
I'm a writer these days.
That's what I focus on, writing and speaking and trying to inspire other people.
I'm 65, so that's how I see my life continuing, is to really continue to write and speak out.
You're doing something similar with your program.
And there's other people out there, though, that are more connected with, let's say, the pharmaceutical industry, and we must encourage them to follow their passion.
To do what they have to do to create change.
That's what democracy is all about.
And incidentally, it's the most rewarding and fun thing there is to do in life.
I was not a happy person when I was an economic hitman, despite the fact I was making good money, traveling first class around the world, staying in the best hotels.
I went through a terrible divorce.
I was popping Valium all the time.
I don't know how I avoided becoming an alcoholic.
I was miserable.
Today, I no longer fly short of class because I stay in the best hotels, but I'm really enjoying this life.
I think, you know, there's nothing more gratifying, more rewarding than working toward creating a better world for ourselves and our children and grandchildren.
Well said, and I completely agree with you.
John Perkins, everyone.
The website is johnperkins.org.
The books include Confessions of an Economic Hitman, The Secret History of the American Empire, And Hoodwinked, which explains how the financial markets imploded and what we need to do to remake them.
John, thank you so much, not only for sharing the time with us today, but also for your life's work and your transformation.
It is welcomed by everyone.
You're welcome, Mike, and thank you for the good work you're doing.
▲
Export Selection