(Greg's website is down - the first link is to google's cache)
http://72.14.209.104/search?q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gregpalast.com%2Fjohn-perkins-jerk-con-man-shill%2F(edit to add coral cache link, which includes the comments on Greg's page)
http://www.gregpalast.com.nyud.net:8080/john-perkins-jerk-con-man-shill/http://www.gregpalast.com/john-perkins-jerk-con-man-shill/John Perkins: Jerk, Con Man, Shill
by Greg Palast
5 July 2007
I remember John Perkins. He was a real jerk. A gold-plated, super-slick lying little butthole shill for corporate gangsters; a snake-oil salesman with a movie-star grin, shiny loafers, a crooked calculator and a tooled leather briefcase full of high-blown bullshit.
This was two decades ago. The early 1980s. I wore sandals, uncombed hair down to my cheap collar and carried a busted ring-binder filled with honest calculations and sincere analysis. It was Economic Hit Man Perkins vs. Economic Long-Hair Palast. I didn’t stand a chance. The EHM was about to put a political bullet hole through me wider than a silver dollar.
Hit Men have “clients.” Perkins’ was a giant power company, Public Service of New Hampshire. PSNH was trying to sell New England lobstermen and potato farmers on the idea that they desperately needed a multi-billion dollar nuclear plant. The fact that this bloated atomic water kettle, called “Seabrook,” would produce enough electricity for everyone in the Granite State to smelt iron didn’t matter. That the beast could add a surcharge to electric bills equal to home mortgages was simply smiled over by Perkins and his team of economic con artists.
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I was an expert witness for some consumer groups, trying to explain to state officials that Perkins’ numbers were bogus as a bubble-gum bagel and his financial projections were from some New Hampshire on another planet.
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Here’s how it ended. The local Joe’s jumped head-first into the Perkins fantasy and bought his client’s power plant boondoggle. Within a couple years, the local electric companies had all gone bankrupt, the state treasury was drained, electric bills went from lowest to highest in the nation causing factories to close and dump, I figure, about 11,000 jobs.
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Greg Palast is the author of Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans - Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild.
To read an except from Perkins’ latest book, The Secret History of the American Empire, go here.
http://www.gregpalast.com/the-secret-history-of-the-american-empire-excerpt/