Sand Wars: The Sands are Running Out!

It's time to draw a line in the sand because we've had our collective heads buried in this loose material consisting of rock or mineral grains for far too long. The impact of this elementary particle on our lives is second to only air and water. I had no idea!

Yes, I knew that sand is melted and transformed into glass, that it's crucial to the computer industry, and, of course, to the sabbaticals we take to rest and recreate, but I had no idea that it's the foundation of our modern development, our infrastructure, our way of life. From highways and habitats--reinforced concrete is two-thirds sand-- to cleaning products to cosmetics to food and wine to you name it, sand is at the core.

The construction of one average house takes 200 tons of sand; hospital takes 3,000 tons of sand; each km of highway takes 30,000 tons of sand, and construction of a nuclear plant requires 12 million tons of sand. That's a hell of a lot of sand! This kind of demand has created the never spoken of sand wars, sand mafias, and most important of all, to environmental damage the likes of which we've never seen.

No, the following documentary has absolutely nothing to do with "flat earth". So please do not disregard if you are not a "flat earther"; it's far too important. Having said that, I am very grateful to him for uploading this all important documentary.

So Watch! and then follow it up by reading Sand Wars: True Crimes Against Nature at Clint Richardson's Reality Blog and discover that the situation is much worse than even this documentary depicts.

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Exposing REDD: The Agenda to Privatize Nature.

REDD+ claims to be a climate and deforestation solution, a pillar of the so-called "Green Economy."  In reality REDD+ constitutes a worldwide land grab and giant carbon offset scam to profit northern industrialized nations.  

The Global Alliance of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities on Climate Change against REDD+ And For Life  claim the "green economy" is:

“ ….. nothing more than capitalism of nature; a perverse attempt by corporations, extractive industries and governments to cash in on Creation by privatizing, commodifying, and selling off the Sacred and all forms of life and the sky, including the air we breathe, the water we drink and all the genes, plants, traditional seeds, trees, animals, fish, biological and cultural diversity, ecosystems and traditional knowledge that make life on Earth possible and enjoyable.

“ ….. Under the green economy, even the rain, the beauty of a waterfall or a honey bee’s pollen will be reduced to a barcode price tag and sold to the highest bidder. At the same time, the green economy promotes and greenwashes environmentally and socially devastating extractive industries like logging, mining and oil drilling as “sustainable development.

Watch the video below to get the real story of REDD, the deceptive climate ‘solution’ being proposed in California and being implemented within the UN climate negotiations and the World Bank. It sounds good on paper, but the reality is that REDD enforces the global colonization of Mother Earth; allows the polluting industry to expand its toxic emissions creating local toxic hotspots in faraway places; and creates a stolen future for Indigenous peoples, local forest dependent communities, communities living next door to a fossil fuel polluting industry, and a stolen future for the environment and all life.

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CEO Bankruptcy Bonuses

Some CEOs get bonuses even when their corporations go bankrupt.

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The Treasonous Billionaires Are the Real Terrorists.

On September 15, 2007, Iraq veteran Mike Prysner (left), after an anti-war march from The White House to The Capitol Building, and ended up as one of over 160 people arrested;  in his case, for crossing U.S. Capitol Police, that were blocking access to The Capitol Building. during a mass "die-in".

On the sixth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, Mike Prysner, gave a powerful speech (video below), revealing who the real terrorists are, at an event sponsored by Iraq Veterans against the War (IVAW) called “Winter Soldier”. 

"And I tried hard to be proud of my service but all I could feel was shame. The racism could not longer mask the reality of the occupation. These were people. These were human beings.

I've since been claimed by guilt anytime I see an elderly man like the one who couldn't walk and we rolled out on a stretcher and told the Iraqi police to take him away. I feel guilt anytime I see a mother with her children like the one who cried hysterically and screamed that we were worst than Saddam as we forced her from her home. I feel guilt anytime I see a young girl, like the one I grabbed by the arm, and dragged into the street.

We are told we are fighting terrorists; the real terrorist was me, and the real terrorism is this occupation.

Racism within the military has long been an important tool to justify the destruction and occupation of another country. It's long been used to justify the killing, subjugation and torture of another people. Racism is a vital weapon employed by this government. It's a more important weapon than a rifle, a tank, a bomber or a battleship. It's more destructive than an artillery shell or a bunker buster, or a Tomahawk missile. While those weapons are created and owned by this government, they are harmless without people willing to use them.

Those who send us to war do not have to pull a trigger or lob a mortar round. They do not have to fight the war, they merely have to sell the war. They need a public who is willing to send their soldiers into harm's way. They need soldiers who are willing to kill and be killed without question. They can spend millions on a single bomb, but that bomb only becomes a weapon when the ranks in the military are willing to follow orders to use it. They can send every last soldier anywhere on Earth, but there'll only be a war, if soldiers are willing to fight. And the ruling class, the billionaires who profit from human suffering care only about expending their wealth, controlling the world economy. Understand that their power lies only in their ability to convince us that war, oppression and exploitation is in our interest. They understand that their wealth is dependent on their ability to convince the working class to die to control the market of another country. And, convincing us to kill and die is based on their ability to make us think that we are somehow superior.

Soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen, have nothing to gain from this occupation. The vast majority of people living in the U.S. have nothing to gain from this occupation. In fact, not only do we have nothing to gain, but we suffer more because of it. We lose limbs, endure trauma and give our lives.

Our families have to watch flag draped coffins roll into the earth. Millions in this country without health care, jobs or access to education, just watch as this government squander over $450 million dollars a day on this occupation.

Poor and working people in this country are sent to kill poor and working people in other country to make the rich richer.

Without racism soldiers would realize that they have more in common with the Iraqi people than they do with the billionaires who send us to war.

I threw families onto the street in Iraq only to come home and find families thrown onto the street in this country and this tragic…tragic and unnecessary foreclosure crisis.

We need to wake up and realize that our real enemies are not in some distant land and not people whose names we don't know and cultures we don't understand. The enemy is people we know very well and people we can identify. The enemy is a system that wages war when it's profitable. The enemy is the CEOs who lay us off our jobs when it's profitable, is the insurance companies who deny us health care when it's profitable, is the banks who take away our homes when it's profitable.  Our enemy is not five thousands miles away, they are right here at home. If we organize and fight with our sisters and brothers we can stop this war, we can stop this government and we can create a better world. -- Mike Prysner

If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy... The loss of Liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger real or imagined from abroad..." - James Madison - Edité par Phaedrus

Mike Prysner's testimony:





Los Angeles anti-war demonstration, 8th anniversary of Iraq invasion:

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Corporate Media Deception = Mass Ignorance in the USA

Edward Bernays, "father of public relations", and nephew of Sigmund Freud pioneered media manipulation techniques. In fact, Bernays technique was so effective that Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, made abundant use Bernay's book, "Propaganda" throughout the Holocaust, often crediting Bernays.

Anyway, Bernays understood, as he said, the "conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is in an important element in a democratic society." And, today's mainstream corporatized news media has taken that "conscious and intelligent manipulation" to a whole new level. 

Americans cannot access the truth regarding the most important issues that are impacting their lives by relying on the mainstream corporate media. Unfortunately, the vast majority of Americans think they're getting the full story.


Project Censored released its top 25 censored news stories for 2009-10.

Here are the top 10:

1. Global Plans to Replace the Dollar

Nations have reached their limit in subsidizing the United States’ military adventures. During meetings in June 2009 in Yekaterinburg, Russia, world leaders such as China’s President Hu Jintao, Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev, and other top officials of the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organisation took the first formal step to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. The United States was denied admission to the meetings. If the world leaders succeed, the dollar will dramatically plummet in value; the cost of imports, including oil, will skyrocket; and interest rates will climb.

Foreigners see the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO) as Washington surrogates in a financial system backed by U.S. military bases and aircraft carriers encircling the globe. But this military domination is a vestige of an American empire no longer able to rule by economic strength. As Chris Hedges wrote in June 2009, “The architects of this new global exchange realize that if they break the dollar they also break America’s military domination. U.S. military spending cannot be sustained without this cycle of heavy borrowing. The official U.S. defense budget for fiscal year 2008 was $623 billion. The next closest national military budget was China’s, at $65 billion, according to the Central Intelligence Agency.”
In July 2009, President Medvedev illustrated his call for a supranational currency to replace the dollar by pulling from his pocket a sample coin of a “united future world currency.” The coin, which bears the words “Unity in Diversity,” was minted in Belgium and presented to the heads of G8 delegations.

2. U.S. Department of Defense is the Worst Polluter on the Planet

The U.S. military is responsible for the most egregious and widespread pollution of the planet, yet this information and accompanying documentation goes almost entirely unreported. In spite of the evidence, the environmental impact of the U.S. military goes largely unaddressed by environmental organizations and was not the focus of any discussions or proposed restrictions at the recent UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. This impact includes uninhibited use of fossil fuels, massive creation of greenhouse gases, and extensive release of radioactive and chemical contaminants into the air, water, and soil.
The extensive global operations of the U.S. military (wars, interventions, and secret operations on more than 1,000 bases around the world and 6,000 facilities in the United States) are not counted against U.S. greenhouse gas limits. Sara Flounders writes, “By every measure, the Pentagon is the largest institutional user of petroleum products and energy in general. Yet the Pentagon has a blanket exemption in all international climate agreements.”
While official accounts put U.S. military usage at 320,000 barrels of oil a day, that does not include fuel consumed by contractors, in leased or private facilities, or in the production of weapons.

3. Internet Privacy at Risk

Following in the steps of its predecessor, the Obama administration is expanding mass government surveillance of personal electronic communications. This surveillance, which includes the monitoring of the internet as well as private (nongovernmental) computers, is proceeding with the proposal or passage of new laws granting government agencies increasingly wider latitude in their monitoring activities. At the same time, private companies, and even some schools, are engaging in surveillance activities that further diminish personal privacy.

In spring 2009, Senate Bill 773, the Cybersecurity Act of 2009, was proposed, which gives the president power to “declare a cyber security emergency” with respect to private computer networks, and to do with these networks what is deemed necessary to diffuse the attack. In a national emergency, the president would also have the power to completely shut down the internet in the U.S. The proposal requires that certain private computer systems and networks be “managed” by “cyberprofessionals” licensed by the federal government. The bill permits the president to direct the national response to the cyber threat if necessary for national defense and security; to conduct “periodic mapping” of private networks deemed to be critical to national security; and to require these companies to “share” information requested by the federal government. In April 2009, the Obama Justice Department invoked the “state secrets privilege” to bar American citizens from suing the U.S. government for illegally spying on them.

4. ICE Operates Secret Detention and Courts

Agents of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are holding thousands of U.S. residents in unlisted and unmarked subfield offices and deporting tens of thousands in secret court hearings. “If you don’t have enough evidence to charge someone criminally but you think he’s illegal, we can make him disappear.” Those chilling words were spoken by James Pendergraph, then executive director of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Office of State and Local Coordination, at a conference of police and sheriffs in August 2008.

People are held in a vast network of more than 300 detention facilities, located in nearly every state in the country. Only a few of these facilities are under the full operational control of ICE — the majority are jails under the control of state and local governments that subcontract with ICE to provide detention bed space. However, ICE has created a network of secret jails designed for confining individuals in transit. These 186 unlisted and unmarked subfield offices are not subject to ICE detention standards, lacking showers, beds, drinking water, soap, toothbrushes, sanitary napkins, mail, attorneys, or legal information. Many of these subfield offices are in suburban office parks or commercial spaces that reveal no information about their ICE tenants — nary a sign, a marked car, or even a U.S. flag.
In addition, there is a complete lack of a real-time database tracking people in ICE custody, meaning that ICE has created a network of secret jails designed for confining individuals in transit that literally make people disappear. Immigrant detainees can be transferred away from their attorneys at any point in their immigration proceedings, and often are. Detainees can be literally “lost” by their attorneys and family members for days or even weeks after being transferred.

5. Blackwater (Xe): The Secret U.S. War in Pakistan

At a covert forward operating base run by the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and al-Qaeda operatives inside and outside Pakistan. The Blackwater operatives also gather intelligence and help direct a secret U.S. military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes, according to a well-placed source within the U.S. military intelligence apparatus.

Captain John Kirby, the spokesperson for Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Nation, “We do not discuss current operations one way or the other, regardless of their nature.” The Pentagon has stated bluntly, “There are no U.S. military strike operations being conducted in Pakistan.”
Blackwater’s founder Erik Prince contradicted this statement in an interview, telling Vanity Fair that Blackwater works with U.S. Special Forces in identifying targets and planning missions. A former senior executive at Blackwater confirmed the military intelligence source’s claim that the company is working in Pakistan for the CIA and JSOC. Blackwater’s first known contract with the CIA for operations in Afghanistan was awarded in 2002 and was for work along the Afghanistan–Pakistan border.

6. Health Care Restrictions Cost Thousands of Lives in U.S.

Despite national legislative health reform, health care in the U.S. will remain dismal for many Americans, resulting in continuing deaths and personal tragedies. A recent Harvard research team estimates that 2,266 U.S. military veterans died in 2008 due to lack of health insurance. The figure is more than 14 times the number of deaths suffered by U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2008, and more than twice as many as have died since the war began in 2001. Harvard researchers concluded that 1.46 million working-age vets lacked health coverage, increasing their death rate. The American Journal of Public Health published findings demonstrating that being uninsured raises an individual’s odds of dying by 40 percent.

Using more than 23 million hospital records from 37 states between 1988 and 2005, Johns Hopkins investigators compared the risk of death in children with insurance to those without. Other factors being equal, researchers found that uninsured children in the study were 60-percent more likely to die in the hospital than those with insurance.

7. External Capitalist Forces Wreak Havoc in Africa

Resource exploitation in Africa is not new, but the scale of agricultural “land grabbing” in African nations is unprecedented, becoming the new colonization of the 21st century. State violence against Kenyan indigenous pastoralists and Nigerian civilians in oil-rich regions has heightened, leaving thousands dead as the military burns whole communities to the ground and police commit extrajudicial killings, rapes, beatings, thefts, and arson, in addition to using intimidation tactics.

In the midst of a severe food and economic crisis, the “land grabbing” trend has grown to an international phenomenon. The term refers to the purchase or lease of vast tracts of land by wealthier, food-insecure nations and private investors from mostly poor, developing countries in order to produce crops for export. An estimated 90 percent of the world’s arable land is already in use, and the search for more has led to the countries least touched by development, those in Africa. The accelerating land rush has been triggered by the worldwide food shortages that followed the sharp oil price rises in 2008, growing water shortages, and the European Union’s insistence that 10-percent of all transport fuel must come from plant-based biofuels by 2015.

8. Massacre in Peruvian Amazon over U.S. Free Trade Agreement

On World Environment Day, June 5, 2009, Peruvian Amazon Indians were massacred by the government of Alán García in the latest chapter of a long war to take over common lands — a war unleashed by the signing of the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between Peru and the United States. Three Mi-17 helicopters took off from the national police base in El Milagro, Peru, at 6 a.m. on Friday, June 5, and flew over the section of the Peruvian highway that joins the jungle to the northern coast, which had been occupied for the past 10 days by 5,000 Awajún and Wampi indigenous peoples. The helicopters launched tear gas on the crowd (witnesses say they also shot machine guns) while a group of agents simultaneously attacked the roadblock by ground, firing AKM rifles. An estimated 500 police bore down on the protesters, some of whom were still sleeping, and opened fire. A hundred people were wounded by gunshot and between 20 to 25 were killed. Days after the clash, the government claimed that 11 indigenous protestors were dead, as well as 23 police agents. The indigenous organizations reported 50 dead among their ranks and up to 400 missing.

9. Human Rights Abuses Continue in Palestine

The Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa (HSRC) has released a study indicating that Israel is practicing both colonialism and apartheid in the occupied Palestinian territories. The HSRC commissioned an international team of scholars and practitioners of international public law from South Africa, the United Kingdom, Israel, and the West Bank to conduct the study. The team found that Israel’s policy and practices violate the prohibition on colonialism, which the international community developed in the 1960’s in response to the great decolonization struggles in Africa and Asia. Israel’s policy is demonstrably to fragment the West Bank and permanently annex part of it to Israel. Through these measures, Israel has denied the indigenous population the right to self-determination and has indicated a clear intention to assume sovereignty over portions of its land and natural resources.

10. U.S. Funds and Supports the Taliban

In a continuous flow of money, American tax dollars end up paying members of the Taliban and funding a volatile environment in Afghanistan. Private contractors pay insurgents with the hope of attaining the very safety they are contracted to provide. Concurrently, U.S. soldiers pay at checkpoints run by suspected insurgents in order to ensure safe passage. In some cases, Afghan companies run by former Taliban members, like President Hamid Karzai’s cousin, are protecting the passage of American soldiers. The funding of the insurgents, along with rumors of American helicopters ferrying Taliban members in Afghanistan, has led to widespread distrust of American forces. An estimated 10 percent of the Pentagon’s logistics contracts, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, are paid to … the very forces American troops are fighting.

Links:

Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade
Center Catastrophe

We have discovered distinctive red/gray chips in all the samples we have studied of the dust produced by the destruction of the World Trade Center. Examination of four of these samples, collected from separate sites, is reported in this paper. These red/gray chips show marked similarities in all four samples. One sample was collected by a Manhattan resident about ten minutes after the collapse of the second WTC Tower, two the next day, and a fourth about a week later. The properties of these chips were analyzed using optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray energy dispersive spectroscopy (XEDS), and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). The red material contains grains approximately 100 nm across which are largely iron oxide, while aluminum is contained in tiny plate-like structures. Separation of components using methyl ethyl ketone demonstrated that elemental aluminum is present. The iron oxide and aluminum are intimately mixed in the red material. When ignited in a DSC device the chips exhibit large but narrow exotherms occurring at approximately 430 °C, far below the normal ignition temperature for conventional thermite. Numerous iron-rich spheres are clearly observed in the residue following the ignition of these peculiar red/gray chips. The red portion of these chips is found to be an unreacted thermitic material and highly energetic.

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Dead Children: The Consequences of Corporate and Wall Street Greed

Currently, food aid is now at its lowest in 20 years. Tens of millions of the world's poor will starve as rich nations cut or cancel food aid funding in the next few weeks.

Big business and the enormous influence of corporate lobbyists not only undermines democracy, its overwhelming authority often results in dead children (must read) around the globe.

Why? U.S. food aid policy lines the pockets of corporate America - the agricultural and the shipping industry - instead of feeding the starving populations they are supposed to serve.

Current policy requires that at least 75% of food aid has to be grown and packaged in the U.S., and then transported using U.S. vessels. Most countries donate cash as food aid as it offers greater flexibility and enables the recipient populations to get more for their money.

While it's no secret that our economic system is based on profit motive, even when it comes to basic necessities, it's unsettling, to say the least, that profit motivation is the driving force behind programs created to help starving people around the world.

"We prefer cash donations as they offer us greater flexibility -- with cash donations we can purchase locally, enjoy greater flexibility and also speed things up. We can get more for the money if we have cash. We can do the job faster as cash lets us buy the right food we need at the right time." - Richard Lee, a spokesman for the United Nation's World Food Programme.

In 2007, humanitarian and food advocacy organizations called on Congress to rewrite food aid policy. Even George W. Bush proposed that 25% of the food aid be cash, available to buy crops locally for the people who need it. Congress failed to act, fully embodying MLK's description of the kind of men our economic system, that - as he says, "permits necessities to be taken from the many to give luxuries to the few" - produces: "...small hearted men to become cold and conscienceless so that, like Dives before Lazarus, they are unmoved by suffering, poverty-stricken humanity."

Sharp increases in global food prices and shipping costs, doubling over the last two years, the impact on food aid groups has been enormous.

"U.S. farm and shipping lobbyists have stifled efforts to simplify aid deliveries, leaving Africans to starve when they might have been saved." -- Andrew Natsios, a professor at Georgetown University in Washington who led USAID, the Agency for International Development, from 2001 to 2006.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization reports the minimum for avoiding malnourishment is 1,800 calories per day. The food supply that finally arrived "was enough to supply about 1,300 calories a day for a month." To put it in perspective, the average American consumes more than 3,700.

Many fear a return to the conditions of 1984 and 1985, when famines in Ethiopia killed more than 1 million people. During that time, according to Haylar Ayako, the Ethiopian farmer, who recently lost seven grandchildren, “Some people survived eating the wastes of their cattle, some even the skins of their cattle.”

Well, at least, as a Christian country, we live up to Christian principles, such as taking from the poverty-stricken to provide for the greedy, wealthy evil-doers. That is what Jesus preached, right?

The World Food Programme feeds nearly 100 million people a year.

There is some hope: Plumpy'nut . A French scientist trying to fight malnutrition discovered the answer at his own breakfast table.

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The Ten Worst Corporations

AIG: Money for Nothing. OK, not for nothing, but doesn't that describe half the corporations around the world? I guess AIG takes the grand prize in this category.

Cargill: Food Profiteers

Chevron: “We can’t let little countries screw around with big companies”

CNPC: Fueling violence in Darfur.

Constellation Energy: Nuclear Operators

Dole: The Sour Taste of Pineapple

General Electric: Creative Accounting

Imperial Sugar (Is there any question why this is the world's worst corporation with a name like that?): Other than that, 14 dead.

Philip Morris International: Unshackled

Roche: Saving Lives is Not Our Business

Multinational Monitor’s annual list of the 10 Worst Corporations of the year.

In the 20 years that we’ve published our annual list, we’ve covered corporate villains, scoundrels, criminals and miscreants. We’ve reported on some really bad stuff — from Exxon’s Valdez spill to Union Carbide and Dow’s effort to avoid responsibility for the Bhopal disaster; from oil companies coddling dictators (including Chevron and CNPC, both profiled this year) to a bank (Riggs) providing financial services for Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet; from oil and auto companies threatening the future of the planet by blocking efforts to address climate change to duplicitous tobacco companies marketing cigarettes around the world by associating their product with images of freedom, sports, youthful energy and good health.

But we’ve never had a year like 2008.

The financial crisis first gripping Wall Street and now spreading rapidly throughout the world is, in many ways, emblematic of the worst of the corporate-dominated political and economic system that we aim to expose with our annual 10 Worst list. Here is how.

Improper political influence: Corporations dominate the policy-making process, from city councils to global institutions like the World Trade Organization. Over the last 30 years, and especially in the last decade, Wall Street interests leveraged their political power to remove many of the regulations that had restricted their activities. There are at least a dozen separate and significant examples of this, including the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, which permitted the merger of banks and investment banks. In a form of corporate civil disobedience, Citibank and Travelers Group merged in 1998 — a move that was illegal at the time, but for which they were given a two-year forbearance — on the assumption that they would be able to force a change in the relevant law. They did, with the help of just-retired (at the time) Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, who went on to an executive position at the newly created Citigroup.

Deregulation and non-enforcement: Non-enforcement of rules against predatory lending helped the housing bubble balloon. While some regulators had sought to exert authority over financial derivatives, they were stopped by finance-friendly figures in the Clinton administration and Congress — enabling the creation of the credit default swap market. Even Alan Greenspan concedes that that market — worth $55 trillion in what is called notional value — is imploding in significant part because it was not regulated.

Short-term thinking: It was obvious to anyone who cared to look at historical trends that the United States was experiencing a housing bubble. Many in the financial sector seemed to have convinced themselves that there was no bubble. But others must have been more clear-eyed. In any case, all the Wall Street players had an incentive not to pay attention to the bubble. They were making stratospheric annual bonuses based on annual results. Even if they were certain the bubble would pop sometime in the future, they had every incentive to keep making money on the upside.

Financialization: Profits in the financial sector were more than 35 percent of overall U.S. corporate profits in each year from 2005 to 2007, according to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Instead of serving the real economy, the financial sector was taking over the real economy.

Profit over social use: Relatedly, the corporate-driven economy was being driven by what could make a profit, rather than what would serve a social purpose. Although Wall Street hucksters offered elaborate rationalizations for why exotic financial derivatives, private equity takeovers of firms, securitization and other so-called financial innovations helped improve economic efficiency, by and large these financial schemes served no socially useful purpose.

Externalized costs: Worse, the financial schemes didn’t just create money for Wall Street movers and shakers and their investors. They made money at the expense of others. The costs of these schemes were foisted onto workers who lost jobs at firms gutted by private equity operators, unpayable loans acquired by homeowners who bought into a bubble market (often made worse by unconscionable lending terms), and now the public.

What is most revealing about the financial meltdown and economic crisis, however, is that it illustrates that corporations — if left to their own worst instincts — will destroy themselves and the system that nurtures them. It is rare that this lesson is so graphically illustrated. It is one the world must quickly learn, if we are to avoid the most serious existential threat we have yet faced: climate change.

Of course, the rest of the corporate sector was not on good behavior during 2008 either, and we do not want them to escape justified scrutiny. In keeping with our tradition of highlighting diverse forms of corporate wrongdoing, we include only one financial company on the 10 Worst list. Here, presented in alphabetical order, are the 10 Worst Corporations of 2008.

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Bushido Culture, AIG Bonuses, Wall Street and Accountability

"Your Highness, if you believe I am your enemy. Command me. And I will gladly take my life." - Tom Cruise in "The Last Samurai"

Senator Chuck Grassley needs to take a refresher course in Japanese culture. Hara-kiri, ritualistic suicide, common amongst samurai warriors in feudal Japan's Bushido culture, pretty much died out a while back. In addition, Bushido is associated with seven virtues, these being: Gi (Rectitude), Yu (Courage), Jin (Benevolence), Rei (Respect), Makoto (Honesty), Meiyo (Honor), and Chugi (Loyalty), all of which are an anathema to Wall Street culture.

While it's true, that after World War II, business employees followed something similar to Bushido Code, where company loyalty was considered extremely important, businessmen did not commit hara-kiri when they failed to uphold company policy, they simply resigned their positions.

So, back to reality. Behind the scenes, as outrage over AIG bonuses grow, investigators are in looking into whether there are grounds for criminal prosecution — not just in the AIG case, but across the broad spectrum of Wall Street and corporate America. Why? Well, in the case of AIG, the reason is that AIG agreed to dole out millions of dollars in bonuses, early last year, despite multi-billion dollar losses, that either they knew about, or should have known about.

Yesterday, in response to a subpoena, documents received by Connecticut attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, show over $218 million, paid out in AIG bonuses. From that total, "at least $1 million were paid to 73 people, and five received more than $4 million."

How much did AIG know at the time that they made this decision? How will we find out? Well, the CEO of every publicly traded company is required to make a statement to the shareholders, every quarter, and as the economy worsens, it becomes more difficult to remain positive without, giving false testimony. However, if it's found that, there is a huge discrepancy between what’s been said in private conversation, emails, etc. and what's been said to shareholders, the CEO opens himself up for prosecution which could result in civil fraud, and possibly even criminal fraud, if the company goes into bankruptcy.

According to Roger Parloff, senior editor at Fortune magazine, author of the article, Wall Street: It's Payback Time, the head of the financial products unit, a.k.a., credit default swaps, made a statement that he did not see how they could lose a dollar on their portfolios back in 2007 and 2008. As it turns out, even if the bonds do not default, which many have not, the threat, of default, alone, is enough to require AIG pay out billions of dollars in order to secure the other party's interest. In and of itself, that is enough to destroy the company.

Post Enron and Serbian Oxley, the US Sentencing Commission created more severe punishments under the federal sentencing guidelines for white-collar offenses, which in this case, includes anything from ordinary stock fraud to insider trading to "Bernie Madoff" sized ponzie schemes. Federal sentencing guidelines for securities fraud links the length of a prison term to the size of the size of the financial loss to the public.

So, we're talking life sentences, here, because CEO’s - most of whom are in their 50s or 60s - of publicly traded corporations who engage in some type of crime involving securities fraud, can face up to a life sentence if financial losses are $2.5 million or higher. In today's market, that 's pocket change.

What about the contract obligations that Larry Summers claims are sacred? Why can't we call into question, the validity of these contracts? It's extremely likely that these contracts were induced via fraud, or that fraud was committed by the employees receiving bonuses.

Michael H. Trotter, in his article, AIG and taxpayers' money, brings up some very interesting points regarding “insurable interest” and the legality of the contracts involved:

However, the more important issue is what is AIG doing with the credit default swaps (CDSs) it issued to purchasers that did not have an “insurable interest” in the debt insured? These purchasers without an insurable interest don't lose anything except the “premium” they paid when they bought their swap, but they stand to make a lot of money on the gamble they have taken. An excellent case can be made that these CDSs unrelated to insurable interests are void as a matter of public policy for the same reason “Joe Doe” can't take out an insurance policy on my life. The rule of law should be and probably is: “No loan, no loss to insure.”

If we permit hedge funds or other gamblers to take out CDSs on the debt of a public company, it gives the gamblers an incentive to kill the company that issued the debt. This can be done in a variety of ways including short-selling (why hasn't the Securities and Exchange Commission reinstated the up-tick rule?), spreading of rumors and saying nasty things about a company's products or services, and none of this is in the public interest. The voiding of these contracts would greatly reduce the size of the CDS problem and the problems at AIG. Has either the new management of AIG or our Treasury Department even considered the possibilities?

What would be the amount of AIG's credit default swap obligations if all of the contracts without an insurable interest were canceled? We have been told that the face amount of these contracts outstanding greatly exceed the amount of debt outstanding to be insured. That tells us that well over half of AIG's obligations on these contracts are likely to be unenforceable, which would greatly reduce AIG's financial obligations. For instance, the newspapers report that Goldman Sachs has been one of the principal beneficiaries of the CDS payments to date. Goldman Sachs seems an unlikely candidate to have loaned large amounts to companies that have been unable to pay it back, especially in light of its bets on the decline of the collateralized debt obligation market.

We need to know how much money has been paid by AIG to the owners of credit default swap contracts without an insurable interest and to whom it has been paid.
[...]
Are credit default swaps insurance? Almost certainly! If the debt you insured goes bad, you are entitled to collect the amount of loss you have insured from a third party that issued the policy. The investment and legal geniuses who dreamed up this product went to great lengths to camouflage it to avoid regulation under the insurance laws. Hence we have credit default swaps instead of insurance policies and we have counterparties instead of insureds, but the end result is the same.

As to the enforceability of the bonuses paid to the employees of AIG's Financial Products division, there is an excellent column by Professor Lawrence A. Cunningham of the George Washington University Law School in the March 18, 2009, edition of The New York Times that sets forth the legal issues and theories that should be considered. Among the issues to be considered are the performance of each employee under his or her contract, grounds to terminate the employee for cause, did the employee withhold important information for the employer, did the employee commit fraud, and is AIG functionally insolvent? The government should have insisted that the bonuses be withheld until all of these issues could have been properly addressed in a court of law.

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Precarious Pollyanna and The Impotence of Positive Thinking

Why do the caustically cheerful or perfunctory perky, often times, trouble the nerves of the sepulchrally somber (Debbie Downers) amongst us ? Probably for the same reason the wording of this question is enough to make anyone's skin crawl. It tries way too hard to be something it's not.

Anyway, the genuinely joyful are excluded, unless, of course, they are morning people, then they're included, genuine or not. It's fairly easy to tell the difference between someone who just happens to be blessed with gleeful genes and the ones who create their cheery facade in order to hide the reptile that lurks beneath. If, all of a sudden, while talking to said person, despite his or her saccharine sweetness, an ax-murdering televangelist pops into your head...you know you've found yourself a charlatan of cheerful.

The "power" of one-dimensional positive thinking, underwrites the American belief that anything is possible and you will get whatever you want, even when accompanying circumstances are in clear opposition. In other words, if you fail to "achieve", it's your own fault because you lack the mental and emotional strength to stay chipper and perky despite the sky falling all around you. Just like in the book, "The Little Engine that Could", "I think I can" always translates to success.

However, when you think about it, the reason we're in this fiscal mess is because of this type of magical thinking, that distracts itself from anything that might interfere with its "positive" agenda. America doesn't like “negativity”, especially when it interferes with an envisioned fantasy that is supposed to transform their "reality".

Corporate America capitalizes on this false optimism and "Freudian denial" that defines our culture, in order to smooth over the fundamental contradictions and incoherencies that exist in the inconsistent logic it spews, which serves to line the top of the corporate hierarchy at our expense. Rose colored glasses are mandatory for employees in this environment and anyone who even questions or dares to face reality, quickly vanishes.

The enormous scale of deception that permeates our current economy has paid those who have participated in its creation very well. For all the rest of us...not so much. But, because so many Americans believe in the "power" of positive thinking, they dared not question the bill of goods being sold to them, in fear of being labeled "unpatriotic". You see, corporatism and consumerism is very intrinsic to patriotism, or so we're indoctrinated to believe.

On the other hand, negative thinking is certainly not the answer as it erodes self-confidence and motivation, and very often leads to depression. So, what is the answer? We could start by developing an awareness of things as they really are, and not how we would like them to be. Granted, it's not as easy as it sounds as we all carry with us, an inherent bias, that will delude our thinking. However, if it walks like a crook, quacks like a crook, and looks like a crook, it probably is a crook, no matter what color his skin, how much money he has, his status, etc...it's not rocket science.

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As the Corporate Bread Line Turns.

AIG, who received more than $152 billion from American taxpayers, is handing out more cash rewards, that serve to double or triple the salaries of some senior executives. Did I say cash rewards? My mistake. AIG refers to these bonuses as retention payouts. This "retention" program will pay out as much as $4 million to 38 managers.

Retention? Where are these people going? Haven't they heard? Thanks to them, the economy is in rapid free-fall. And, if they do decide to leave...who cares? What did they achieve?

The "Cockroach Theory" certainly applies to AIG. We still can't see the extent of the "infestation" for all the solid walls still standing...a fresh $10 billion in losses just found. In other words, retaining inefficient, greedy and exploitative employees at our expense should not be tolerated, but it is.

"The gibberish about needing to pay that much just to keep superstars from fleeing to private-equity firms or hedge funds is just another Wall Street myth. The truth is most of them are lucky to have a job at all and they know it." - William D. Cohan

Merrill Lynch’s chief executive requested a $10 million bonus this year for all the hard work he had to do putting "Humpty Dumpty" back together. However, it appears CEO, John Thain may not get his wish, as well as many other Merrill execs.

Morgan Stanley is getting tough. They are attaching strings by imposing claw-back provisions to the bonuses they will eventually pay out, but they will be paid out.

The collective liability clause honored by partners was replaced with a system where bankers and traders were encouraged to take short-term risks with shareholders’ money. Gone, too was the idea of being held responsible for your actions (short of outright fraud). Managers at publicly traded banks constantly exhorted their traders to do bigger and bigger deals and to take increasing amounts of risk, and then rewarded them with millions of dollars in compensation — money that belonged to shareholders. Reputations were made not by turning down imprudent business but by seeing how much business could be done. - William D. Cohan

The same lack of oversight issues remain, as the Treasury has yet to do anything about it further enabling the corporate breadline.

Executive Paywatch Database

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Internet is Slowly Changing Current Ownership Culture

"Ownership" implies control, and our Founding fathers conceived of an "ownership society" "We the People" could easily participate, enabling us to maintain a certain amount of control over our own lives. Back then, society was primarily agrarian, and owning land not only provided shelter but also offered, if one was willing to work hard, a source of income.

Today, owning land does not carry the same weight as it once did, making it much harder to maintain control over one's life, therefore making it impossible to preserve the Founding father's idea of what an "ownership society" looks like. In order to maintain their vision we must revise the outdated model based on agrarian culture and update it to an "ownership society" based on the technological society we currently have.

The birth of the Internet offers the potential of to forge a new type of "ownership society", once again giving everyone a chance to participate. Ecommerce or using the Internet as part of your business model allows us to participate as we have not been able to do for a long time considering a very small number of large bureaucratic corporations make it impossible to compete on our own, forcing most of us to submit to them where everything is on their terms. Web based services such as Ashop Commerce make it simple by providing shopping cart software anyone can customize in an attempt a start-up business of their own.

Of course, "We the People" have a long way to go before we can honestly say we own our own lives again because it is clear we do not, however, the Internet is one option available to all of us that can free us from the corporatization of society.

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Read the Fine Print...Your Company Can Spy on You Where You Least Expect

Everyone understands a company's need for the first level of security, mainly protecting the physical safety of their buildings and employees. The second level of "security", when companies spy on their employees, their competition, and their customers, is not quite as clear.

In order to remain competitive, it's essential companies have some type of monitoring system in place, now that the Internet is just a keystroke away, tempting employees with unlimited "entertainment" and escape from what they are being paid to do. However, the question is not whether companies should be allowed to spy, rather how far should corporations be allowed to go when engaging in the second level of spying?

Wal-Mart, the shining example of cutting-edge thinking and technology in the corporate world, is also leading the way with its massive internal investigative capability, and has very possibly strayed over the legal line, and most definitely over the ethical line as many places of business have. When corporations own computers more powerful than any one computer found at the Pentagon, that corporation is no different from an employee, one keystroke away from the Internet...the temptation to stray is overwhelming.

Apparently, after technician, Bruce Gabbard, was fired for having secretly taped conversations between Wal-Mart employees and a Times reporter, that same technician spilled the beans on a larger, sophisticated surveillance operation at Wal-Mart, proving once again, how disposable most of us are in corporate America.

Gabbard said the retailer employs a variety of means, including software that can monitor every key stroke on the retailer's network, to keep tabs not only on employees but also on its board of directors, stockholders, critics of the company, and in at least one instance, on a consultant, McKinsey & Co.

Wal-Mart is not the only company involved in corporate espionage. Hewlett-Packard started the ball rolling when it aggressively pursued the "leakers" amongst them by engaging in "pretexting" -- falsely representing an identity to a telephone company in order to obtain telephone records of that person.

A little over one year later, pretexting, now outlawed by Congress due to the public's reaction to the Hewlett-Packard spy scandal; Douglas Frantz reveals how "C.I.A. agents are pushing corporate espionage to ominous new extremes".

Most of the ex-agents employed by corporations engage in perfectly legal activities, from surveillance to lie detection. However, a few of these techniques are a little shady, at best. "Data haunts," which employ extreme methods to capture personal data from an individual is one example. Normally, an outside device is unknowingly place on the person's computer such as a trojan horse to record keystrokes, email traffic or the ex-agents will use an electronic device to track a person's cell phone calls. Sometimes, these corporations will even watch the tail markings of private jets to find out where corporate executives are going.

The "hard shoulder" is another example of corporate espionage taken to the extreme. This is where the company digs up derogatory information about someone and takes it directly to that person threatening exposure if that person does not comply...in other words, black mail or extortion.

One man, employed by a well-known insurance company questioned the company's accounting practices. The company thoroughly investigated his personal life, fired him and threatened if he ever spoke publicly, that they would expose him with whatever information they found on him. The scary part about that situation is that corporations have the power to manufacture information, if let's say, they couldn't find anything on someone they wanted to silence. What chance does that person have against a huge billion-dollar corporation?

Corporations will go as far as buying out the contracts of government agents, doubling their salaries in hopes of getting the targeted government employee to work for them. One such agent whose contract was bought out and whose salary was doubled said, the pharmaceutical company he works for now, doubles the amount of monitoring and background checks Homeland Security and the FBI conduct.

In addition, he said the company he works for install hidden microphones wherever employees gather to monitor conversation. Is it legal? Yes, because all of this is disclosed to the employee in the fine print of their contract. Read the fine print or risk signing away your right to privacy. It's possible the company you work for might bug your brief case, pocketbook, or even you, the employee, and you won't have a leg to stand on, if you happen to discover the people you work with know your favorite sexual positions or how you like your eggs, because you were given the chance to read it in the fine print.

Another scary possibility, WAN, LAN and now HAN (Human Area Networking) technology that uses the surface of the human body as a safe, high speed network transmission path.

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In Honor of Labor Day

Robert Reich argues our nation of citizens has transformed into a nation of powerful consumers and investors driving our country's focus on securing, protecting and maintaining the integrity of our labor force out.

“You and I are complicit. Our “great deals” are somebody else’s lower pay and some corporation’s lobbying."

Consumers, many times thwart the effort of corporations to "do the right thing" by refusing to pay the additional cost required to make "the right thing" work. Reich points out consumers will choose to save a penny rather than contribute to a worthy cause citing the "dolphin-safe" canned tuna example.

“Consumers wanted a dolphin-safe product,” but “if there was a dolphin-safe can of tuna next to a regular can, people chose the cheaper product. Even if the difference was a penny.” -- J. W. Connolly, former president of Heinz, parent company of Star-Kist,

Star-kist scrapped its effort to protect dolphins because consumers were not willing to spend an extra penny.

With the advent of the internet and other new technology, newly empowered consumers tipped the scale in their direction, all of a sudden making American businesses cater to consumers to give them what they want, lower prices...and they got it, Wal-Mart being one example.

According to Reich, Wal-Mart gave into consumer demand, and took the necessary steps to ensure its consumers get lower prices. Unfortunately, lower prices come with a huge price and that is forfeiture of the rights and protection of labor.

I admit I used to be the first one to seek out lower prices and consume as much as I can thinking I had scored big-time, but not so much in the last couple of years. I finall realized most of the "stuff" I had accumulated occupied precious space for absolutely no reason other than to make the the "stuff" I do have use for unusable because I needed a GPS system to locate it, whether it be a can of tuna, my favorite shirt, can-opener or the remote control.

Maybe, Wal-Mart's not so bad after all, or "we the people" are not so innocent.

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Entitlement Programs for Who?

CEO pay, executive pay and corporate profits are soaring —to 110 times the average, -- at the same time the pay of the typical worker in the United States has been stuck, with real earnings growing less than half as fast as productivity.

According to the Forbes business magazine’s annual executive pay survey, the top eight CEOs on the Forbes list each pocketed over $100 million last year. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, nine out of ten American families -- all but the top 10% of American wage earners -- saw their income fall by 11% after being adjusted for inflation over the last three decades, according to an analysis by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez.

The people at the top siphoning off most of the profits for themselves do not care about health care, Social Security, Medicare or any of the social programs we have now that are supposed to ensure American citizens are provided the basic necessities of life, including food, clothing, shelter, education, safety and medical care at the very least.

Obviously something is not working when we have 45 million uninsured Americans in the wealthiest, most powerful nation in the world. This ever increasing concentration of wealth distributed to an increasingly smaller and smaller part of the population can only serve to make these programs even less effective over time.

"We had a society 25 years ago in which there were some constraints imposed by public opinion, by strong unions, by a general sense that there were things that you don't do.

And maybe that led firms to make a decision to think of there being a sort of tradeoff between a "let's have a happy high morale" workforce, or let's have a super star CEO and squeeze the workers for all we can." -- Paul Krugman

The American middle class will cease to exist if this trend continues. There is no way stagnant wages can compete with rapidly increasing costs for health care, prescription drugs, energy, housing, etc especially when our lawmakers are in bed with giant corporations and powerful lobbyists to find more and more ways to rob the average American citizen blind.

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The Bushites Have Outsourced Our Government to Their Pals

The sprawling $43 billion homeland security department (HSD) is known chiefly for being the agency in charge of America's color-coded terrorist-threat alarm system ("Good morning, Americans. Today is Yellow. Be vigilant. Report all suspicious people.") It's boogeyman nonsense, of course, doing absolutely nothing to make our country safe. But such falderal helps those in charge obscure HSD's real mission: to serve as a giant federal cookie jar for corporate America. Go to HSD's website, and you'll find a prominent section called "Open For Business." There, on any given day, corporate shoppers can scroll through the hundreds of contracts and grants available to them. Just dip in and grab some cookies, each one worth from $50,000 to more than $80 million. Like the department's color codes, the vast majority of these projects do nothing to make our country safe. Instead, they are make-work studies, silly technologies, and useless systems that essentially serve as mediums for transferring billions of our tax dollars to a few corporate big shots. Ever helpful to its clients, HSD also maintains a private-sector office, headed by an assistant secretary who is not a security expert but a former banker from JP Morgan Chase. This office provides concierge service for cookie grabbers. For example, it recently held a corporate seminar, entitled "The Business of Homeland Security," offering "tips, hints, and directions" on how to grab the latest contracts and grants. Lest you think that patriotism or even national security might be the motivating force behind these government-industry confabs, a Sikorksy Helicopters executive who attended the session bluntly explained why he was there: "To us contractors, money is always a good thing."

Government by Corporation

A monumental shift has quietly and quickly been taking place in the way the public's business is done - and We the People have not even been informed about it, much less been asked to discuss and okay it. Corporations are taking over our government. No longer is it just a matter of big business's lobbyists and campaign donations perverting public policy. Now, politically connected corporations are also seizing day-to-day governmental operations for their own profit.

Since the Carter years, Washington has drifted toward more and more outsourcing of public functions to private contractors, but Bush Incorporated has turned that gradual increase into a fullblown, jet-powered rush to privatization. The shadowy and highly lucrative world of government contracting has boomed under George W, rising 86% since he's been in office and now totaling nearly $400 billion a year. Get this: There are now more people doing federal jobs under corporate contracts than there are people employed directly by the government. In other words, in today's government, corporate servants outnumber civil servants.

Bush likes to claim that he has cut the federal bureaucracy. In fact, he's increased it, but most of the people working in his government wear corporate logos. The New York Times recently reported that contract employees are in practically every agency, not merely doing perfunctory chores, but sitting in on policy sessions and drawing up agency budgets. "Even government's online database for tracking contracts, the Federal Procurement Data System, has been outsourced," says the Times.

This phenomenal change is the product not of managerial rationality, but of nonsensical anti-government ideology. Like the Iraq invasion, which was on the international agenda of the rabid neocons from Day One of Bush's tenure, privatization has long been on the domestic agenda of the laissezfaire ideologues. A January 10, 2001, report from the right-wing Heritage Foundation provided the roadmap. Titled "Taking Charge of Federal Personnel," it showed the Bushites how to storm into office and seize control of every agency. It stressed that they "must make appointment decisions based on loyalty first and expertise second," that "the whole governmental apparatus must be managed from this perspective," and that they should use "contracting out as a management strategy."

The official rationale for this privatization surge is that corporations are inherently more efficient than government and save the taxpayer oodles of money. Nice theory, but they aren't ... and they haven't. Start with this ideological assertion's most obvious flaw: By their very nature, corporations are loyal to their own bottom line, not to the country or to the common good. Any "efficiency" that they produce is derived from paying workers less (hardly a morale booster) and by taking shortcuts on the services or products they deliver. These "savings" are more than eaten up by the high profits, extravagant executive salaries, and other compensation that corporations demand - costs that are not incurred when government does the job.

Another flaw in this privatization push is that Bush & Company are unabashedly running it as a crony program. An analysis by the Times found that more than half of their outsourcing contracts are not open to competition. In essence, the Bushites choose the company and award the money without getting other bids. Prior to Bush, only 21% of federal contracts were awarded on a no-bid basis.

Also, if privatization is so good, why is there no ongoing analysis of the costs and quality of service being delivered? This is an administration that demands a cost-benefit analysis of even the smallest government regulation of business, yet it is throwing trillions of our tax dollars into the coffers of corporate contractors without monitoring whether the outsourcing is costing us more and producing less than if the work were done by government employees.

Meanwhile, as the number of contracts has skyrocketed, the number of contract supervisors in federal agencies has remained the same, which means that the supposed overseers can't keep an eye on the performance of the profiteers. Whenever agencies or members of Congress do try to probe, the corporations simply claim that their financial and performance records are proprietary. While agencies are accountable to the public and subject to the Freedom of Information Act, corporate contractors are not.

Even when it's known in advance that a privatization project will be a rip-off, ideology has trumped integrity. Last fall, for example, Congress rubberstamped a Bush initiative requiring the IRS to outsource the collection of certain taxes to three private debt collectors. The collection agencies will pocket about 24 cents of every dollar they recover. But if the IRS were simply allowed to hire more revenue agents, it could collect these same debts for only 3 cents of every dollar brought in. Over 10 years, the three companies expect to reap $330 million from this deal.

A Corporatized War

As we've learned during the last four-plus years, George W's Iraq war is run by a bumbling triumvirate composed of the White House, the Pentagon, and the Department of Halliburton.

This massive military contractor has done awfully well the past few years, thanks to its old CEO, "Buckshot" Cheney. Since the BushCheney regime took office, Halliburton's government contracts have increased by a stunning 600%, including more than $10 billion in Pentagon contracts - many of them awarded without the fuss and muss of competitive bidding.

In return, Halliburton has delivered gas-price gouging, contaminated food and water, and a consis- These are our "savings" from privatization A 2006 federal audit of $1.7 billion in Pentagon purchases found that taxpayers were soaked for excessive fees from contractors and for tens of millions of dollars in waste. One reason was "poor contracting practices." Such as? The audit reports that 92% of the contracts were awarded without verifying that the contractors provided accurate cost estimates, and 96% of the work was inadequately monitored. 2 Hightower Lowdown June 2007 tent pattern of overcharges. It has been caught hiring Third World laborers to do its grunt work in Iraq, paying them as little as $5 a day, and then billing Uncle Sam more than $50 a day for each worker. In a February analysis of $10 billion in waste and overcharges by various contractors in Iraq, federal investigators found Halliburton responsible for $2.7 billion.

The corporation's 2006 profits were $2,348,000,000, and its overall profits have increased over 368% since the Bushites have been in office. Meanwhile, Halliburton has now outsourced itself, announcing this year that its top executives will move from Houston to palatial new corporate headquarters in Dubai. But don't worry - the executives are keeping enough of a corporate presence in the good ol' USA to qualify for more government contracts.

People see Halliburton as the face of the privatized war in Iraq, but that's hardly the whole story. Indeed, there's a dirty little fact that Washington's warmongers don't tout: Bush has put almost as many private contractors in the Iraq war as U.S. troops.

Prior to Bush's "surge," there were about 140,000 American troops in Iraq and about 100,000 contract employees there. Contrast this to only 9,200 privatized troops sent to the Gulf war by George's daddy in 1991. And the 100,000 number doesn't count subcontractors, which would add an estimated 20,000 to 40,000 more private troops (no one knows for sure, since the Pentagon doesn't keep track of them). In addition, while the surge will put another 22,000 military troops in Iraq, it will also increase the private forces by an untold number.

Outfits like Halliburton, DynCorp, Blackwater, L-3, Titan, Custer Battles, Triple Canopy, and Wackenhut are reaping billions of our tax dollars doing military work that the Bush-Cheney Pentagon has outsourced. Not coincidentally, nearly all of these corporations are big-dollar donors to Republicans and/or are run by executives with tight GOP ties.

In part, corporate Iraq assignments provide support services - laundry, meals, delivery of water and gasoline, etc. But a huge part of the military function itself has been privatized in this war - such things as interrogating prisoners (including in the infamous Abu Ghraib prison), training the Iraqi army, guarding the Green Zone and the Baghdad airport, protecting military convoys, analyzing intelligence, and providing paramilitary security forces.

The personnel performing these tasks are not soldiers but hired hands, most of whom lack the training needed to make proper combat judgments, and they operate independently of the military command. "They shoot people, and someone else has to deal with the aftermath," says a frustrated U.S. officer.

They also get shot, bombed, maimed, and killed. Yet the Bushites, wanting to downplay the negatives, don't count such people in casualty reports. The official number of 3,400 troops killed in Iraq doesn't include any from Bush's contract army. How many of them have died? No one knows the real number, but the Labor Department, which tracks workers compensation claims, has silently recorded 917 contractor deaths. More than 12,000 have been wounded in battle or on the job. These casualties are a hidden toll of this awful war, another measure of its deceit and immorality.

Contractors Galore

Washington is under assault by hordes of corporations that are eagerly dicing up our government into digestible segments and then consuming them through either contracts or outright privatization.

Here are some examples:

* WALL STREET BANKING conglomerates leer lasciviously at our Social Security Fund, eager to grab the hundreds of billions of dollars in fees they could assess for "managing" our accounts in a privatized system.

* BUSH HAS REDUCED FEMA, a onceproud and strong government responder to natural disasters, to a haven for political hacks hurling billions of dollars in no-bid contracts to Halliburton and its ilk for the rescue and rehab of New Orleans - only to see the money disappear and the wreckage remain.

* WHEN THE PENTAGON DECREED a few years ago that the esteemed Walter Reed Army Medical Center was to be substantially privatized, the treatment of wounded vets quickly deteriorated to scandalous levels. The politically connected IAP Worldwide Services company - run by two former Halliburton executives and boasting of having Dan Quayle on its board - was handed a $120 million contract to manage the place (even though IAP had previously botched the delivery of ice to the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina - a job that it was contracted to do by FEMA).

* THE CURRENT COLLEGE-LOAN scandal is not merely a matter of some financial-aid offices at universities taking gifts, consulting fees, and stock from big private lenders. Rather, the entire system is scandalous - it's an artificial, privatized lending structure that adds nothing of value to students but greatly increases the cost and complexity of getting student loans that could be made cheaply, simply, honestly, and directly by the Department of Education.

* FEDEX, UPS and the giant corporate mailers are trying to privatize the U.S. Postal Service piece by piece by deregulating the entire postal market, outsourcing the most lucrative postal functions, and abandoning America's principle of universal service for everyone.

Lurita's Lurid Tale

Lurita Doan, who ran a federal contracting company in Virginia and who has been a six-figure donor to Bush and the GOP, was chosen by George last year to head the General Services Administration (GSA). This agency doles out some $56 billion annually in federal contracts and is in charge of policing the contractors. At her confirmation hearing, Doan said she wanted to prove she can run a federal agency like a business - and she has. She's run GSA like Enron.

Just two months after taking office, Doan made a robust attempt to hand a $20,000 no-bid contract to a friend and former business associate, even going so far as to sign the deal personally. Ultimately, GSA's general counsel had to step in and nix this obvious conflict-ofinterest gaffe.'

But Doan kept playing loose with the people's money. Last year, when a technology contract with Sun Microsystems was up for renewal, two GSA contract officers rejected it on the grounds that the corporation was overcharging taxpayers. Doan personally intervened, suggesting that one of the officers was "stressed." She brought in another officer, who promptly approved the renewal - and got a long-coveted transfer to GSA's Denver office.

Then Doan got paranoid, apparently feeling that the agency's independent inspector general (IG) was foiling her enthusiastic efforts to "streamline" the contract-awarding process and to loosen up audits on corporations getting contracts. She chided the IG and, according to notes taken in a staff meeting, compared him and his staff to terrorists! Doan has now proposed cutting $5 million from the IG's audit budget, which is used to detect corporate fraud and waste, and shifting some of his duties to - are you ready for this? - private contractors.

Coalition of Greed

Why is this happening? Paul Light, a New York University professor and expert on public service, points to a coalition of the greedy fueling the growth of what he calls "the hidden workforce of contractors." The contractors, of course, love privatization. Many corporations have been formed (often by former officials in the military or government) just to sup at the federal trough and many subsist wholly on government contracts. Pentagon contractors have grown especially fat on our tax dollars, with the largest, Lockheed-Martin, now receiving more federal funds than the Department of Justice.

At the same time, a huge lobbying force has been built to keep the cash flowing. Each corporation has its own lobbyists, and the contracting industry as a whole has an additional lobbying group, the Professional Services Council, which pushes for still more corporatization of government.

Then there are the politicos in both parties who're eager to show that they are reigning in big government. They shove public tasks into corporate hands in order to create what Light calls "the illusion that [government] is smaller than it actually is." And, of course, there are the political ideologues who push privatization simply as a matter of faith and political correctness, even though there's no evidence that it is cheaper - much less better.

It's on this last point that corporatization ultimately founders. For contractors, the concept of "better" applies strictly to their bottom lines - not to the country. They are out to get theirs, no matter what happens to the rest of us. This is why they've kept the size and scope of the corporate takeover hidden from us. It's also why there's no accountability, no public scrutiny, no analysis of public benefits built into the privatization push - the contractors know that corporatization is not better for America.

Our government is not meant to be a marketplace. It is intended as a democratic forum where the needs and aspirations of ALL the people are addressed. The corporations' grab-all-you-can, survival-of-the-fattest ethos is about serving their interest, not the public's. This is why We the People must expose, challenge, stop, and reverse the corporatization of our public institutions.

Not only are corporations taking over government functions, they are also moving rapidly to take over our essential public assets - from highways to airports. In next month's newsletter, we'll give you the lowdown on who's selling America to whom ... and why.

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