Visiting author and speaker John Perkins began his university lecture Thursday standing-room only Davis Auditorium with an apology.
“We’ve been handed an incredible world and we’ve kind of screwed it up,” said Perkins, author of the recent New York Times bestseller Confession of an Economic Hitman.
Perkins proceeded to share his first-hand experiences as an international insider into the power-economics that have built what he calls the “corporatocracy empire” in America today, drawing upon the three decades he spent working in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and North America as a business executive.
Starting with his work as a volunteer in the Amazon with the Peace Corps straight out of college, Perkins marked his experiences with indigenous people in the Amazon as the turning point at which he realized that with all his education in the U.S., he felt he had nothing to teach these people.
“They [the Amazonians] taught me about relationships…that everything we do affects everyone else,” said Perkins.
Perkins built upon this beginning narrative with recollections of his time spent in Panama, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Here, Perkins said he learned about how the economic hitman deals with unexpected consequences and “uncorrupted” collaborators.
Perkins explained this way of business saying that “what we [economic hitmen] do ought to be illegal, but since we write the laws, it isn’t.”
Tying these experiences to current events, Perkins commented that “our Latin American neighbors are teaching us a great deal about democracy,” in reference to the overthrow of dictators and the peoples’ repeated election of the current Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez.
Turning from the “bandaids” (problem-acknowledgement) portion of the “Corporatocracy empire,” Perkins spent the second half of the lecture focusing of solutions and a turn away from the current state of economics.
“Corporations need to act like good civil societies, like tribes,” said Perkins. He said that since consumers compose the economic power base, they can consciously change economic and corporate aims from profiting to taking care of their employees and suppliers and looking out for the next generation’s interests.
He cited an instance in which his colleagues in a corporation where he worked resisted this kind of change at first, but later thanked Perkins for making sure the right thing was done.
Perkins said that thinking American corporations are too big, strong and tough to change is a cop-out.
“What if George Washington had said, ‘Great Britian is too tough for us’? … Corporations are vulnerable; they depend on us [consumers] to buy,” Perkings pointed out.
“The very system we perpetuate, we can change,” said Perkins, who concluded his lecture’s vision for a more hospitable United States by asking the audience to imagine what it would feel like as a nation if we stopped sucking resources out of other countries, but rather started distributing resources to them while letting the local people benefit from their local resources.
Perkins mentioned the Rainforest Action Network, which now supplies a large portion of paper to American companies, as an example of a corporation that has ‘had the courage to do what’s right.”
As part of this future vision, Perkins added, “to make a sustainable, stable, peaceful world, we have to make it a good place not just for our kids, but for all kids.”
A book-signing followed the presentation, which saw a turnout of over 500 DU students, staff and community members who had to fill the stairways as the seats packed out.
Perkins has been touring the United States with his story since November 2004, and DU was his last presentation of the tour. He also heads the current WOW (Waking Our World) Project through the grass-roots movement, Dream Change.
