Books with author John Perkinson

Shocking Bestseller: The original version of this astonishing tell - all book spent 73 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, has sold more than 1.25 million copies, and has been translated into 32 languages. New Revelations: Featuring 15 explosive new chapters, this expanded edition of Perkins's classic bestseller brings the story of economic hit men (EHMs) up to date and, chillingly, home to the US. Over 40 percent of the book is new, including chapters identifying today's EHMs and a detailed chronology extensively documenting EHM activity since the first edition was published in 2004. Former economic hit man John Perkins shares new details about the ways he and others cheated countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. Then he reveals how the deadly EHM cancer he helped create has spread far more widely and deeply than ever in the US and everywhere else - to become the dominant system of business, government, and society today. Finally, he gives an insider view of what we each can do to change it. Economic hit men are the shock troops of what Perkins calls the corporatocracy, a vast network of corporations, banks, colluding governments, and the rich and powerful people tied to them. If the EHMs can't maintain the corrupt status quo through nonviolent coercion, the jackal assassins swoop in. The heart of this book is a completely new section, over 100 pages long, that exposes the fact that all the EHM and jackal tools - false economics, false promises, threats, bribes, extortion, debt, deception, coups, assassinations, unbridled military power - are used around the world today exponentially more than during the era Perkins exposed over a decade ago. The material in this new section ranges from the Seychelles, Honduras, Ecuador, and Libya to Turkey, Western Europe, Vietnam, China, and, in perhaps the most unexpected and sinister development, the United States, where the new EHMs - bankers, lobbyists, corporate executives, and others - ''con governments and the public into submitting to policies that make the rich richer and the poor poorer.'' But as dark as the story gets, this reformed EHM also provides hope. Perkins offers a detailed list of specific actions each of us can take to transform what he calls a failing Death Economy into a Life Economy that provides sustainable abundance for all.

Johnnie Perkins lived in Oregon at a point in history when the combustion engine was rapidly replacing the horse as mankind's number one servant. The horse culture his father grew up in was fading. Johnnie was eleven in 1946, and he idolized the movie cowboys, but he was finding the changes in the world to be confusing. Even his beloved Uncle Rufus drove a vintage automobile and shunned horses. Still, "Unc" apparently provided a lot of Johnnie's education, making up for the limitations of the one-room school in Arock, Oregon.We have only Johnnie's word for most of his remembrances. Most of the old-timers have passed on. Of the school Johnnie attended, nothing now remains except a roadside memorial containing the brass school bell with an inscription by the Fretwell brothers, civic-minded pioneers who had saved the old bell from salvage.