Interview: John Perkins - five ideas from an economic hit man to make you, and the world, a better place

John Perkins (pictured) is a self-confessed “Economic Hit Man”.  He believed what he was taught and told in the economic classes that rising tide would lift all boats meaning Western financial aid, primarily from America, would not only make the countries he worked in richer, but he was also helping stop communists, that the "rising tide" would play a role in ending poverty, and encourage democracy. As he matured, John came to realise that he wasn’t in fact helping those poorer counties in which he was working, rather he was making just a handful of people back in the U.S. fabulously wealthy while worsening the climate catastrophe. Emerging from something of an epiphany about the error of his ways, John assembled his thoughts and put them in one of the many books he has now written, “The Confessions of an Economic Hit Man”. The Economic Hit Man books have sold all around the world, been on The New York Times bestseller list, and taken John to many events, including Ostrava in Czechia, which John explains, was a town deeply embedded in the “death economy”, but now, following the exhaustion of its coal resource, has a “living economy” as locals have transformed the old coal works into a modern and sumptuous facility built around the arts in all its forms. Make sure you check out the John Perkins website where you can see him appear as a guest on TedX. Also, enjoy “Music for a Warming World”.