Europa Newswire
Photo by: Luiz Rampelotto
November 12, 2009
By Amy Lieberman
The idea that the global economy
stands “on the brink of disaster,” plays like a broken record, but
economist John Perkins is now offering a new, yet perhaps abstract,
solution to establishing just, sustainable economic systems.
Governments and major political
leaders – even including U.S. President Barack Obama, Perkins joked
– don’t hold as much clout as they once did. The real power-players
are corporations, and in order to root the “cancer” of our global
economy, people have to direct their focus and energies to combating
the CEOs who run the “corporatocracy” in today’s world.
It’s all spelled out in Perkins’ latest book, “Hoodwinked: An Economic Hit Man Reveals Why the World Financial Markets Imploded – and What We Need to Do to Remake Them,” which hit the shelves on Nov. 10.
Perkins, an economist who has
advised the World Bank, United Nations and the International Monetary
Fund, said he decided to write his third book (his last one, “Confessions
of an Economic Hit Man” was a New York Times best seller) after
he held his infant grandson, and considered “what is this world going
to look like in six decades, when he is my age?”
“I know that if we stay the course it’s going to be ugly, but I also think we have a tremendous opportunity to do something else,” Perkins explained at the United Nations on Nov. 11.
People must work within a changing tide, in which “nations are losing relevance and we are moving into a geo-political realm where nations are not very important,” Perkins said.
Corporate control offers an
opportunity, however, for people to redirect their grievances, and for
international legislation to place restrictions on these leading companies.
For while corporations “control most politicians, provide money for campaigns…call the shots and strike the deals,” consumers still hold up these corporations by purchasing their products and services. That provides the general public with understated amount of power, Perkins asserted.
“If just 10 percent of the people I talk with within the next year send an e-mail to Nike and say, ‘We aren’t buying from Nike anymore because you still have sweat shops in Asia, Nike will have to come around, it will have to change,” he said.
Next month’s Copenhagen Climate
Conference offers “tremendous potential” to reestablishing more
environmentally and socially aware economies, Perkins told Europa Newswire,
but nothing will come of the talks unless “we push hard” on the
corporations also responsible for unsustainable practices.
There may be room for success
if “we can all bring the corporations around to understand that it
is to their advantage to get rid of what we call ‘economic externalities,’
where you don’t put a price on the terrible pollution from coal, or
the degradation… that comes out of sweat shops,” Perkins said.
“If we could include that [cost of pollution, human health] into our accounting and insist that companies do that, we will find that the greenest products, the ones that are the most socially and environmentally responsible, are also the cheapest.”
Without convincing corporations
of that win-win scenario, Perkins continued, the United Nations won’t
succeed in creating lasting, powerful agreements at Copenhagen.
“Hoodwinked,” (Broadway Business, $23.99) is available in all major bookstores.
