John Perkins:
Jerk, Con-man, Shill
By Greg Palast
07/06/07 "ICH"
-- -- 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.
To steal millions, you need a top team of armed robbers. But
to steal billions, you need PhD's with color charts and
economic projections made of fairy dust and eye of newt.
Perkins had it all - including a magical thing called a
computer-generated spreadsheet (this was well before Excel).
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.
But this was the key point: Perkins slept in a suite at the
Omni. I had truck-rumble insomnia at the motel off exit 68.
He glared and grinned and glad-handed. I tried to keep my
eyes open.
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.
Perkins' clients walked away with barrelfuls of billions.
And Dr. Perkins pocketed plenty for his mortal soul.
But, as in every moral tale, Perkins, the modern Dr. Faust,
found redemption in confession.
And we're lucky he did. Because, in Perkins', "Confessions
of an Economic Hit Man," and his latest, the just-released
"Secret History of the American Empire," we find out what
makes these guys tick. By "these guys" I mean the vultures
who suck up development aide, the sharks who use the World
Bank as their enforcers, the corporate marauders, power
pirates and hedge fund hogs with their snouts in the
economic trough.
In "Secret History," Perkins, from the inside, gives the
details of the weird moral emptiness and pitilessness of men
who waylay the riches of the planet from the people to whom
it rightly belongs.
In New England, the pain imposed by the clients of the
economic hit men were financial; but, as Perkins wants us
never to forget, in much of the planet, the slick sales
pitch of the economic hit man is enforced by squads of hit
men with less subtle weaponry. Perkins writes:
"Three men toting AK-47s stood at attention outside. They
saluted as we drove past. One of the three opened the front
door opposite the driver. Leather Jacket and I climbed in.
He spoke into a walkie talkie. Tinted windows made it
impossible to see inside."
In lines heavy with Hemingway, Perkins takes us to
Indonesia, Bolivia, even tiny Diego Garcia and other
victim-states where doctorate-armed "consultants" put an
academic gloss on militarized plunder.
In the story of the guys with the AKs, Perkins is on
assignment in Guatemala for an outfit called SWEC, a Bechtel
twin trying to foist another mad power plant horror show on
the natives of Guatemala. (About the same time, I convinced
the state of New York to bring racketeering charges against
SWEC and its partners in a massive power plant building
fraud. SWEC and co-defendants settled the civil charges for
a payment of nearly half a billion dollars.)
Unlike the yokels of New Hampshire who fell for the smooth
Perkins line, the Guatemalans were no pushovers. Skeptical
locals, suspicious indigenous shamans and a couple of
improbably courageous politicians simply wouldn't roll over
to the corporate conquistadores.
The resisters, we are led to presume, will be dealt with
accordingly. As Perkins explains it, if his pie-charts don't
make the sale, the little men in his darkened car know a
little explosive wired to an ignition could be persuasive.
However, by time he got to Central America on the corporate
assignment, Perkins was already ill at heart with the SWECs
of this world. Ultimately, he refused to back their
destructive scheme.
Perkins had switched sides - and, in Confessions of an
Economic Hit Man gets his soul back from Satan only a little
soiled. In Secret History, the personal confession turns
into an illuminating, world-spanning jeremiad. From Latin
America to Africa to the Middle East, Perkins leaps from his
own story to the widespread caused by the greed armies sent
marching from the boardrooms of New York and London.
Today, Perkins is my confrere and colleague. He wears his
hair longish and I wear mine . . . well, I've stopped
wearing hair altogether.
And in his writings today, Perkins heart goes out to the
Third World targets of this new empire ruled by shock troops
and spread sheets. His empathy extends to those in the
occupied territory known as the USA. Because, says Perkins,
when the wretchedly ripped-off of the Earth rise in
rebellion, the lash of the backlash is felt by the children
of the lobstermen of New Hampshire, shivering under Humvees
in Falluja, and never the EHM's clients' fortunate sons,
frolicking in their Ferraris.
Greg Palast is the author of Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad
to New Orleans - Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White
House Gone Wild. Please visit his website
http://www.gregpalast.com
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