usual suspects d'plutarch Bush "tax reform" budget 4.17.01   A. Huffington Contra Costa Times

new drugs spooks crooks ethics curriculum failure dukes Regina armorers local FSC contra audit lottery links R.Grossman Paulson Committee East India Co. muscle corp. cult causes kid crime FPS new mandarins leviathan's primer protection backdated options Comverse Infosys Halliburton RIO Nigerian 419 Argyll Equities white collar sentencing Mary Grillo energy Exec. order 13303 nature brownwash Hessians censuslessness Davy Crockett Soil and Soul John Hively Patricia O'Toole David Cay Johnston ibid

corporate welfare   institutional hence legitimate corruption ª

Private-sector military : Auctioning soldiers' pay   more re mercenaries & PMCs

A Deadly Dearth of Drugs   L.J. Davis Jan/Feb 2000 Public funding of private gain pays double for intl enforcement of prescription extortion While pharmaceutical industry & VP Gore played politics, South African AIDS patients paid with their lives South Africa is a multiracial, multiparty parliamentary democracy, one of only two on the African continent. It also, like other nations of sub-Saharan Africa, happens to be caught in the grips of an epidemic. More than 13% percent of its population is infected with HIV; among some select population groups, such as army troops, the infection rate approaches 50%. And South Africa has already suffered an estimated one million AIDS deaths, nearly double the number of people who have died in the U.S.

San Diegan wins Nobel Prize 10.11.01   Erik Anderson KPBS SAN DIEGO   … "The best drug, the lowest cost, the quickest, the most carefully searched out in terms of it's structure activity relationship. that's what's missing from the medicinal chemistry world and no one seems to notice it." Sharpless says he's in pursuit of a solution that fix that problem. … Sharpless is sharing this year's $943K award with 2 other researchers. He gets half. The other half is being split between 84-year-old William Knowles of St. Louis, and Ryoji Noyori, of Nagoya University in Japan. … Sharpless later indicated he may use part of the cash award to buy some expensive chemicals for his lab work.

South African officials know that the drugs now prevalent in the West could slow the epidemic. The U.S. could have made those drugs available several years ago, but that would have upset the pharmaceutical industry, which has been a generous contributor to both Clinton-Gore campaigns, as well as to Al Gore's own presidential bid.
The AIDS crisis came late to South Africa, but when it hit, it hit hard. The standard 2 & 3 drug therapies used in the West, which can cost more than $12,000 a year at market prices, are not an option for the vast majority of South Africans, whose annual income averages less than $3,000. And so in 1997, faced with a rapidly growing emergency, the South African govt passed an amendment to its Medicines & Related Substances Act, under which the Ministry of Health could begin compulsory licensing and "parallel importation" of affordable drugs. And that's when the pharmaceutical industry sprang into action.
Parallel importing would allow South Africa to import desperately needed medicines from countries where they were available for less, sometimes far less, than a drug company would charge in S. Africa. With parallel importing, South Africa could go abroad and buy Western-made drugs in bulk at great savings.
Under compulsory licensing, South Africa could compel a drug company to authorize local manufacturers to produce generic versions of drugs. Compulsory licensing can reduce the price of drugs by as much as 90 percent. Among the first drugs South Africa tried to manufacture was Taxol, a cancer fighter also sold by Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) to treat the AIDS-related Kaposi's sarcoma. The reaction to South Africa's effort to bring lifesaving drugs to its people was swift. More than 40 major drug companies jointly filed suit in South Africa's Constitutional Court, barring the amendment from taking effect by claiming it infringed on their rights. "Compulsory licensing and parallel imports expropriate our patent rights," David Warr, associate director of tax and trade policy at BMS, told one newspaper.

But in fact, the Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement, supervised by the World Trade Organization, allows both parallel importing and compulsory licensing by countries faced with a national emergency. Such a country must simply pay a reasonable royalty to the holder of the patent or marketing rights. And S. Africa's health minister had said repeatedly that South Africa would abide by intl law. "What drug companies are concerned about," James Love, executive director of the Consumer Project on Technology, testified before Congress, "is the embarrassment of seeing a drug like fluconazole selling for $23.50 in Italy but only 95 cents in India. In this sense, it is a public relations issue. But how many millions should literally die of this embarrassment?"

Yet that's not all. Bristol-Myers Squibb, which earned more than $1 billion in 1998 from Taxol sales, doesn't hold the patent for the drug. Nor did BMS pay to develop Taxol. The drug was developed by the National Institutes of Health, which then gave BMS an exclusive marketing agreement. The same is true of ddI, ddC, and many other AIDS drugs. They were developed with taxpayer dollars, but the marketing rights were assigned to private firms, allowing the fortunate recipients to make large sums of money from medications they did not invent.
American law is clear on the subject of govt-developed drugs: The U.S. govt is permitted to share with other countries the drugs it invents. In other words, in the case of AIDS-related drugs and South Africa, the issue of intellectual property rights was moot. At any time, the Clinton administration could have made generic AIDS drugs available in South Africa swiftly and easily. It did not. Instead, the administration did what it could to prevent South Africa from exercising its rights under TRIPS.
In October 1998, Congress temporarily cut off foreign aid to South Africa in an effort to precipitate action from that country. Charlene Barshefsky, the U.S. trade representative, denied South Africa certain tariff breaks and placed the country on a "watch list," pending review and possible further action. Commerce Secretary William Daley pushed the American position in Pretoria, the U.S. Embassy lobbied the South African parliament, and the Clinton administration tried to kill a World Health Organization resolution that urged member nations to "ensure that public health interests are paramount in pharmaceutical and health policies."

According to 2.5.99 report to Congress from the office of the U.S. Trade Representative, "All relevant agencies of the U.S. govt have been engaged in an assiduous, concerted campaign" to get South Africa to capitulate.
Since 1994, Al Gore has been co-chairman of the U.S./South Africa Binational Commission, a body that discusses trade issues of mutual concern. On at least two occasions, in 1998 and again in early 1999, Gore made the Medicines Act amendment the focus of his talks with Thabo Mbeki, now South Africa's president. According to Gore spokesman Tom Rosshirt, Gore was attempting to mediate between the two govts "because the govts were not able to resolve [the issue] at the cabinet level." Gore's position, Rosshirt says, was that South Africa should assure U.S. that it would not violate intl law.
It was predictable that Gore would weigh in on the issue. It was far less predictable that he would take the side of the drug industry. But the explanation may lie in the connections that the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), a Washington, D.C.-based watchdog group, discovered between the pharmaceutical industry and several people close to the vice president.

Anthony Podesta, who is the brother of White House Chief of Staff John Podesta and is reportedly close to Gore, was a lobbyist for the pharmaceutical giant Genentech. In 1997/98, his lobbying firm received $360,000 from Genentech and another $220,000 from the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the industry's principal trade organization. For his work for PhRMA, Podesta listed one of his specialties as "Copyright/Patent/Trademark." As recently as 1998, David Beier, now Gore's chief domestic-policy adviser, had been Genentech's in-house lobbyist, with copyright and patent issues also among his specialties.
Former Congressman Tom Downey, another close Gore friend, was a lobbyist for Merck, which paid his firm $80,000 in 1997-98. Peter Knight, a longtime Gore aide and an adviser to his presidential campaign, was yet another lobbyist with drug industry clients; his firm took home $180,000 from Schering- Plough in 1998. Gore spokesman Rosshirt insists that any link between Gore's actions and his advisers' connections to the pharmaceutical industry is "absurdly circumstantial. Absurd and irrelevant."
The pharmaceutical industry, it should be noted, has traditionally made its biggest donations to Republicans. As a senator, Gore got only crumbs from the industry. Still, lobbyists are nothing if not smart enough to spot a winner.
So Glaxo-Wellcome, BMS, Pfizer, and PhRMA gave $582,945 to the Clinton-Gore campaigns of 1992 and 1996, according to figures compiled by CRP, and big drug companies gave or lent another $250,000 to pay for the 1993 inaugural. The generosity has continued in recent years. In 1997 and 1998, the industry gave $51,000 to Leadership '98, Gore's launching-pad PAC, and contributed another $276,850 to the Democratic Party. In early 1999, lobbyists for PhRMA, Pfizer, BMS, Genentech, and Glaxo-Wellcome kicked in an additional $11,000 to Gore 2000. According to the watchdog group Public Campaign, most of the money arrived in late March, after "consumer and AIDS activists began putting pressure on Gore's office to change his South Africa trade policies."

Gore had already ignored a pointed letter on the subject from Ralph Nader and criticism from Nader's Consumer Project on Technology. "It's the triumph of corporatism," says Nader of the vice president's position on South Africa. "Gore's not the man he was when he was senator." The criticism continued as Gore officially began his run for the nomination. When he announced his candidacy on June 16, AIDS activists disrupted his speech, and they showed up at successive campaign events. Stories and commentary began to appear in the mainstream press, describing the trade dispute and Gore's role in it. The problem clearly was not going away.
On June 25, Gore wrote a letter to Rep. James Clyburn, the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus. In it, the vice president wrote, "I support South Africa's efforts to provide AIDS drugs" through parallel importation and compulsory licensing "so long as they are carried out in a way that is consistent with intl agreements." Overlooked in Gore's statement was the fact that South Africa had given repeated assurances that it would do just that.
And then a curious sequence of events ensued. On September 9, drug industry leaders suddenly announced they had suspended their suit against South Africa. "We acknowledge that there is a procedure for compulsory licensing," says Jeff Trewhitt, a spokesman for PhRMA. Eight days later, U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky announced that all was now well between the United States and South Africa because Pretoria had agreed to abide by intl law.
In essence, the drug industry, the Clinton administration, and Al Gore had declared that two years of pressure on South Africa had all been about nothing. During those two years, an estimated 300,000 South Africans died of AIDS.

NoLogo Naomi Klein   Village Voice book review

Co. convicted of fraud still get fed. contracts 7.24.00   J. Solomon & K. Pflegler AP from AJC Atlanta Washington Hundreds of companies prosecuted or sued on charges of defrauding the govt still can get federal business, and many have gotten new contracts, because agencies have chosen not to ban them, a computer analysis shows. The companies range from a Texas contractor convicted of selling faulty Coast Guard windshields to an environmental cleanup company convicted of bribery. Vice President Al Gore wants to expand the federal debarment program to include businesses with troublesome labor or worker safety records, even though the program is not debarring many of those already convicted of or sued on fraud charges. The computer analysis by The Associated Press found many companies with a history of fraud got new federal contracts, even though there were multiple court cases against them. 102 yr old Saybolt Inc. ( convict #61), a petroleum products inspection company based in Houston, pleaded guilty in 1998 to submitting false lab analyses to the Environmental Protection Agency. The company also admitted arranging a $50,000 bribe to Panama's govt. At the time of the plea, govt officials spared few words for a company they said "betrayed the public's trust and cheated all of us." But the agency did not ban the company from future business, even though the judge who fined the company $4.9 million suggested that as a possible punishment. EPA and company officials said Saybolt was given another chance because it was taken over by new management and implemented state-of-the-art technology to make sure future tests are not rigged. "The govt does set a high standard when they don't debar a company, and that is rightfully so," Saybolt general counsel John Denson said. "We were fortunate as new management of Saybolt to demonstrate our commitment to those high standards." The AP identified 1,020 companies that were sued or prosecuted on fraud charges over the past 5 years. The companies were identified using court records, news stories, govt documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and reports by the inspector general. AP checked those companies against a master list of contractors barred from federal business. The analysis found 737 companies out of the 1,020 remained eligible for future contracts. "There is a continuing pattern of fraud and abuse in some of our largest contractors. The American people have every right to be outraged at this," said Sen. Tom Harkin (D Iowa), who has fought the problem for a decade. The govt's list of banned contractors: epls.arnet.gov/ Wages of sin     profiteers & pork Why lawbreakers still win govt contracts 5.13.02   Christopher H. Schmitt U.S. News&World Rpt In the mid-1970s, Lockheed Aircraft Corp. was center stage in bribery scandal. Millions in secret payments were slipped to public officials & political parties around the globe, to curry favor & win govt contracts. Stung by the blowback, the company promised stringent reforms. 2 decades later, Lockheed was again in the spotlight, pleading guilty to paying off an Egyptian official to win a deal for C-130 cargo planes. Once more, the company was contrite. Standing before a federal judge in 1995, a top executive pledged Lockheed's "commitment to the highest ethical standards of conduct." In the years since, however, Lockheed's troubles have only grown. The company has been named in at least 33 more cases covering overcharges on govt contracts, improper technology transfer to China, falsifying results of nuclear safety tests, job discrimination, environmental pollution, and more. These cases, some of which were in motion before the 1995 conviction, have produced at least $145.3 million in penalties, settlements, and restitution. And at least 13 more cases are pending. Lockheed Martin, as the company is known today, says it has a vigorous ethics & compliance program. That promise is good enough for the Pentagon. Last Oct. despite the company's record, the federal govt awarded Lockheed the richest military contract in history, a deal to build the nation's next-generation jet. The project, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, could be worth as much as $200 billion over several decades. Lockheed Martin is not the only big federal contractor that continues to do business with Washington despite repeated contract difficulties and other legal & regulatory trouble. In the past dozen years, 30 of the 43 largest federal contractors have racked up more than 400 enforcement cases, resulting in at least 28 criminal convictions, 286 civil settlements, and 88 administrative settlements, mostly involving their govt contracts, according to data from Wash.D.C. nonprofit Project on Govt Oversight, that investigates govt activities, and additional research by U.S. News. The companies have breached environmental, labor, and securities regulations as well. For their difficulties, the analysis shows, they have paid at least $3.4 billion in fines, penalties, and restitution. The cases cover a wide swath, including price fixing, bogus testing, polluting, overcharging, hiding product defects, violating export laws, and withholding financial data from govt. They also represent more than accounting quibbles: Co. workers have been killed & seriously injured and national security potentially put at risk. Yet, together, these firms have corralled more than 4 of every 10 federal procurement dollars. "If it was a food-stamp recipient, they'd go to jail," says Rep. Peter DeFazio D-OR, who complains about repeat offenders. "If it was a student-loan recipient who wasn't paying, they'd have their wages garnisheed. It's an extraordinary double standard." The govt has a process for cutting off wayward contractors from future work, but in practice, purchasing officers focus on getting projects done, not holding firms accountable for past behavior. Other officials responsible for barring firms can't legally use punishment as a motive, says Robert Meunier, head of a committee of those officials. "We're here to protect the govt's business interest," he says. Even if a current contractor is prevented from doing future business, the company could continue to do billions of dollars' worth of govt work under existing agreements. As best as can be determined, the govt has cut off only one of the 30 big contractors with problems, General Electric Co., and, even then, suspended the company for just a few days. If federal agencies wanted to crack down on offending contractors, they couldn't. The U.S. govt is the biggest shopper on the planet, buying some $235 billion worth of goods & services last year, everything from military hardware to management of nuclear laboratories to food for school lunches. But for reasons of cost, bureaucracy, and plain indifference, it doesn't keep tabs on the behavior of its vendors. Contracting officers don't know, for instance, if a company has already agreed with other agencies to clean up its act, and several agencies, incl the General Services Administration, can't produce a list of whom they have suspended or barred from further contracts. In effect, contractors have no official history when they line up for govt work. The military tops the govt's buying list with contracts for $156.5 billion last year. Not surprisingly, some of the worst offenders are military contractors. But while the govt may be reluctant to move against its biggest suppliers, federal agencies don't have the same qualms about cracking down on small firms. Officials maintain that federal rules are written evenhandedly, but they acknowledge that larger companies can navigate them more successfully. Take Houston-area researcher James Verlander who in the early 1990s got tangled up in Operation Lightning Strike, a federal sting operation targeting NASA suppliers. Federal agents drew Verlander & several others into a scheme revolving around a bogus medical device that supposedly could improve monitoring of space- station astronauts. Threatened with a heavy prison sentence, he pleaded guilty to having accepted $2,000 as part of an effort to win approval & funding for the device, says his atty, Charles Portz. Barred from govt work ever since, Verlander suffered a nervous breakdown and has since become a medical technician. By contrast, 2 big contractors that came under scrutiny in the affair, Martin Marietta & General Electric, settled their involvement by paying $1 million to defray the govt's expenses. "They didn't want to make arrests of the higher-up people because it would damage the space program," says Portz, "so they busted a bunch of little people." Small fry get nailed more often because it's more likely that senior executives were involved in any wrongdoing, say those familiar with the issue. And large contractors have more financial juice to make a case go away, to hire pricey legal talent, create compliance programs, or pay settlements. "They're pretty willing to settle it to stay in business," says former undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology, and logistics Jacques Gansler, now professor of public affairs at the Univ. of Maryland. Oversight of military & other federal spending has been kneecapped in recent years through budget cuts and under the banner of streamlining regulation. New proposals would weaken it further. Reflecting those developments and changing priorities, federal prosecution of contract fraud has fallen sharply in recent years, as have attempts by federal agencies themselves to rein in abuse, according to govt data obtained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse Univ. Many expect enforcement efforts to suffer further still as homeland defense comes to the fore. Justice Dept. officials did not respond to requests for comment. Even in extreme situations, the biggest firms don't face contracting's version of the death penalty. Take behemoth General Electric. In the early 1990s, problems including bribery & mispricing became so pervasive that the Pentagon's Defense Contract Management Agency took the unusual step of setting up a special investigations office just for GE. The office produced 22 criminal indictments of the company, its subcontractors, and employees, and recovered $221.7 million. Although individuals were booted from future govt work, the company was not, despite recommendations from frustrated investigators. Not barring the firm "is clearly a disincentive to forcing a major contractor to institute [change]," they said at the time. "Other remedial actions, including criminal prosecutions, did not seem to be effective." Since then, GE has been named in new cases, involving both its military & civilian businesses. GE spokesman Gary Sheffer says that the earlier cases involved a small number of people and that the company used the experience to tighten an already strong compliance program. The takeover trend sweeping military contractors shows why it will be harder still for govt to get tough with wayward contractors. In 1999, 2 units of Litton Industries, S.California electronics & shipbuilding firm, agreed to pay $18.5 million after pleading guilty to federal fraud charges. In one of the biggest cases of its kind, Litton had paid more than $16 million in illegal commissions to "consultants" in Taiwan & Greece for help in winning military contracts, then falsified its books and tried to lead investigators astray. Last June, Litton was acquired by Northrop Grumman Corp., itself the product of a 1994 megadeal. Fair or not, size matters. "If you need a nuclear submarine, you've only got 2 people left to buy it from," says Geo.Washington Univ. associate prof. Steven Schooner, former official in Office of Federal Procurement Policy. Northrop Grumman did not return calls for comment. In some cases, misspent tax dollars are the least of the story. In 2000, a federal jury said United Technology Corp.'s Sikorsky Aircraft unit was negligent when it failed to warn the Army that unbalanced fuel loads could make its Black Hawk chopper uncontrollable. It awarded $22.9 million to the families of 4 servicemen killed and 2 seriously burned in a crash during night maneuvers near Fort Chaffee, AR. In Louisiana in 1999, the federal Occupational Safety & Health Administration cited shipbuilder Avondale Industries, unit of Litton, for accidents & safety problems, incl 3 cases in which workers fell to their deaths; overall, there have been 9 deaths in recent years, incl a worker impaled on a post and another crushed by a 4,800 lb bulkhead. In its waning days, the Clinton administration issued new rules aimed at holding contractors more accountable by requiring contracting officers to consider not only a company's ability to do the job but also its overall record in complying with tax, labor, employment, environmental, antitrust, and consumer protection laws. The rules would have considered incidents like the 1997 deaths of 2 grain-bin workers at a plant run by Cargill Inc., top Agriculture Dept. contractor. The workers were buried alive by grain while unplugging a clog in a huge storage bin. Neither was wearing required safety belts, and OSHA judged the incident a violation of the highest gravity. Cargill maintains it was never cited. Whatever the case, the incident has no bearing on future contracts: In one of its first acts, the Bush administration suspended, then later revoked, the Clinton-era rules. Current rules provide the potential to consider a contractor's total compliance record, by requiring that firms have "a satisfactory record of integrity & business ethics." But the rules are ill-defined, and buying officials rarely seize the opportunity, Schooner says. For starters, any attempt to deny a company a contract will quickly draw a lawsuit, he says. On top of that, federal agencies, needing everything from bullets to office supplies, don't much like their buying plans upset. So purchasing officials think, " ' Why would I touch that with a 10-foot pole?' " Schooner says. The issue of contractors' repeat offenses hasn't attracted a wide following, but concerns are bipartisan. "To me, I'd say, 'One strike and you're out,' " says Rep. Bob Barr R-GA on House Govt Reform Committee. "The govt should not do business with corporations that are unethical." Rep. Carolyn Maloney D-NY also on the reform committee, says she'll introduce legislation requiring tracking of contractor problems, a system she battled to create while a NYC city council member. "There's no reason to be giving a contract to a repeat violator," she says. Officials from the Pentagon, the Bush administration, and the General Services Administration declined or did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Although the largest contractors still regularly get into trouble, these firms, esp. military contractors, have made improvements in their compliance programs. Companywide ethics training is not uncommon, and executives say that flouting the rules can be a firing offense. Some of the govt's cases result from voluntary disclosure by the firms themselves, although companies sometimes confess to protect their own interests. Still, human nature, coupled with pressure to meet aggressive financial goals, makes it impossible to root out all problems, maintain company executives & govt regulators. Lockheed Martin policy, for instance, says it is essential for employees to speak out without fear of retribution. Yet in 1999, the Energy Dept ruled Lockheed Martin fired a worker in retaliation for disclosing safety problems. "No program is any more perfect than the people responsible to make the program work," says Lockheed Martin spokesman James Fetig. Those who urge getting tougher with habitual offenders say it's possible to do more, even with concerns about national security or the limited number of suppliers. Rather than letting offending contractors pay a penalty and move on, for instance, the govt could require firms to agree in advance to give up future business following any new violation. Putting more sting in penalties for pollution or safety violations could spur better compliance in areas not directly related to govt contracts. A public repository of enforcement actions could bring pressure for change, just as publicizing toxic emissions has spurred companies to cut back on pollution. But unless someone lights a fire, history suggests any change will be a while in coming. Consider, for instance, new regulations that federal officials expect to finish this fall, aimed at improving oversight in nonprocurement areas such as govt grants & loans. Work on the rule began under President Bush, Sr. White House OK's mall development 3.21.99 & 12.14.97   Bergen County Record OnLine NJ Washington (AP)   VP Al Gore's presidential campaign received thousands of dollars in donations from a developer days after the White House endorsed that company's plans to build a shopping mall on environmentally sensitive wetlands in New Jersy, according to a published report. Mills Corp. wanted to build an upscale shopping complex in Carlstadt New Jersey. but environmentalists opposed it for years because the construction would mean filling more than 90 acres of marshland where rare wildlife can be found. Because the 8000 or so acres of the New Jersey Meadowlands, once the site of unfettered development and garbage dumps, are primarily wetlands, federal agencies must approve any new development there. And although the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service originally opposed Mills project, it gave its support after intervention from the White House. The federal Environmental Protection Agency and other state and federal offices gave preliminary endorsement to the project April 22. About a week after the endorsement, Mills executives and their relatives gave at least $31,000 to Gore's campaign, the Philadelphia Enquirer reported in Saturday's editions. Mills executives and Gore have denied any connection. But Jeff Tittle, director of the New Jersey chapter of the Sierra Club, isn't convinced. Another environmental group, Friends of the Earth Political Action Committee, earlier this year reported that executives, contractors & family members of the Mills Corp. had given Gore $43,000 for his campaign. The environmental group reported those numbers after the Clinton-Gore administration expressed support for a mall by the same company on 500 acres of wetlands in the Meadowlands. It's not clear if that report is related to The Inquirer's report on the site in Carlstadt. Gore's spokesman, Jim Kennedy, denied that the donation reported in The Inquirer influenced policy. Kennedy said the White House Council on Environmental Quality, which is closely affiliated with Gore, tried to resolve the dispute by working to strike a balance between private property and open space rights. District audit finds illegal, wasteful contracting 7.29.00   Carol D. Leonnig Wash.Post pA1 The District awarded $50 million in welfare-to-work job training contracts last year that were illegal, paid hundreds of thousands of dollars more than necessary for school security & trash collection, and gave $4 million in advance payments to companies that failed to finish jobs, a just-released audit found. A review by D.C. Inspector General Charles C. Maddox of a sampling of District contracts found that the agencies purchasing some of the most expensive and crucial human services, the D.C. public schools and the Departments of Health and Human Services, do not always strive for the best deal for taxpayers. Officials have sometimes neglected to seek the lowest price, skirted contract rules and failed to check whether contractors did the work. "This is a dysfunctional system," said D.C. Council member Kathy Patterson (D-Ward 3), who this year led her own investigation of city contract failures. "If city lawyers are telling you the contract isn't legally sufficient, you should take that seriously." Top aides to Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) said the administration has been handicapped by District employees who fail to write specific contracts that ensure the best deal for taxpayers. Deputy Mayor Norman S. Dong said the Williams administration has sometimes opted for an imperfect contract to deliver results, and he cited the $50 million in welfare-to-work contracts. In the city's effort to find jobs for women leaving welfare, the mayor's top aides and the D.C. financial control board met in February 1999 and knowingly pushed through six contracts despite their legal problems, according to the audit. "It was the early days of this administration, and we accept responsibility if anything was done incorrectly. . . . But we erred on the side of getting services to the people," Dong said. "We're not going to intentionally break the law, but we're not going to let perfect be the enemy of good." D.C. schools spokeswoman Devonya Smith said yesterday that the Superintendent's office had not received a copy of the report and could not comment. The audit, which looks at contracts in the three agencies from spring 1998 to spring 1999, highlights a web of unresolved problems in how the District purchases about $1 billion a year in goods and services--from garbage trucks to pencils, from computer consultants to nursing aides. Agency employees write vague requests for services or submit them late, according to city leaders. Then the D.C. Office of Contracting and Procurement often rejects flawed requests, which means grass isn't cut in the parks until June and instructors aren't hired on time for summer job training. Finally, the audit noted, agencies don't follow up to ensure that vendors have done the job. The costs of bad contracts add up. The audit found: The school system paid a higher rate for trash collection than the same vendor charged the city, costing the schools $500,000 more than was necessary. The trash vendor also continued to bill for picking up trash at several schools that were closed. A school security contractor increased its annual contract from $7.8 million to $9.1 million without justification. Human Services Dept could have saved at least $750,000 if it had allowed job training contractors to compete on price. In some of the cases reviewed, the Department of Health skirted city contracting rules and split million-dollar contracts to house the mentally retarded into smaller contracts. That meant that the smaller contracts avoided review by the council and control board, which must approve contracts of more than $1 million. Former chief procurement officer Richard P. Fite said in an interview that he forbade such "parceled" contracts but that some slipped through. He said agencies often submitted requests for crucial contracts too late and tried to break up the contract amount because they didn't have several weeks to wait for council approval. In the welfare job-placement contracts, city lawyers ruled that the contracts didn't comply with the law, in large part because they didn't require vendors to compete on price. Fite said he also had objected to the contracts, raising concerns that G&S Associates, a company run by dentist Arthur Stubbs, had no experience in job placement or working with welfare clients. But District leaders moved ahead, fearful of losing federal grants for helping women find jobs before their benefits ran out. "The difficulty was we had a ticking clock," said Francis S. Smith, executive director of the D.C. financial control board. "It was a judgment call." The audit also questioned why the District continued giving contractors advance payments totaling $3.9 million when they had completed only $507,000 worth of work. That included a $1 million advance to Lockheed Martin, a multibillion-dollar corporation, for job-placement services. "This was tantamount to giving the corporation an interest-free million-dollar loan," the audit said. The District provided G&S Associates with a $550,000 advance for its work. In February 1999, when the company had performed less than 3 percent of the job, the district provided an addtl $449,000. The city terminated the contract late last year, citing lack of performance. "The District stands to lose nearly the entire $999,999 advance," the audit said. Fite said he didn't think the contracts were "egregious," but he said his worries about G&S were borne out. City officials acknowledge that the results of the placement contracts are disappointing and have sought new vendors to do the work. "Taxpayers get short shrift when we're not spending money wisely," Patterson said. "The women who need the training are the real victims here when we don't have good contracts in place and they're not carefully monitored." Also, despite spending $14 million since 1998, the Office of Contracting and Procurement does not have a workable tracking system to monitor thousands of city contracts. Elliott B. Branch, acting director of contracting and procurement, said he is reviewing the proposed system and will decide in Sept. whether to proceed in deploying it. The inspector general recommended that the District put its proposed contract tracking system in place, certify that contracts of more than $1 million are legally sufficient before sending them for approval, and better train staff in procurement regulations. The audit report also recommended that agencies check up on contractors' work and recover excessive advance payments. Memo: start revolution   Will we ever do anything about privileged elite in this country? 6.17.02   Allen Wastler, managing ed. CNN/Money NY   I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore. Yeah, I pulled a little Howard Beale ("Network," 1976) act last week. It started out as a little televised update on the SEC consideration of a "CEO autograph" rule. The next thing I know, I'm screaming at the CNNfn anchors about the need to tear down the pampered elite from their Babylonian heights. Well, the whole SEC proceeding is kind of ludicrous. The agency is considering a rule that would essentially require CEOs to certify that the information in their co. annual reports is, as far as they know, correct. So that means up until now they have been allowed to lie?! You need a rule to make sure corporate leaders tell the truth?!!! Shouldn't this be a given in the first place???!!! WHY DO WE NEED A SPECIAL RULE TO ENFORCE WHAT SHOULD BE PLAIN TO BEGIN WITH?????!!!!! Sorry. Did it again. It's hard not to these days with all the corruption & mismanagement seeping out of today's business headlines. But you see, my blood gets boiling not so much because someone did something wrong, which is bad, but because it is indicative of a development in our society that is worse. Sometime while our back was turned, probably while we were busy counting our fat 401(k)s & bulging portfolios, America became an aristocracy. Not sure? Close your eyes. Picture 17th cent. France. Use the movie "The Three Musketeers" if you need a reference. Now, replace the castles & gardens with skyscrapers & corporate campuses. Put Brooks Brothers suits & Vera Wang dresses in place of the frilly, lacey Louis XIV stuff. Where people say "King" put "CEO." And those musketeers, make 'em lawyers. Voila, our modern world. Disagree? C'mon. You've been reading the stories about CEOs, some under fire, some not. Think about the lavish company perks like city apartments and limos and jets, perks paid for with shareholder money. Ex-Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski, for example, is being investigated for using co. money to buy art & homes for himself & other top corporate cronies. Similar accusations about personal use of Adelphia money are being made against the Rigas family as well. You've read the tales of their contracts guaranteeing them millions of dollars, even if they run their co. into the ground. Kenneth Lay, for example, reportedly got $67.4 million from Enron before it went down. How does that happen? Well, corporate board members, the ones who review these contracts, are typically members of the same privileged class. Hey, we're a democracy … well, more technically, a democratic republic. But dammit, not an aristocracy. How dare we let it happen? Theoretically our by-the-people, for-the-people govt should guard against it, but it doesn't. Money talks and lobbyists spread a lot of it. The accounting industry has spent over $4 million on the 2002 election cycle. Seen any accounting industry reform come out of Congress? No, of course not. Well, Congress better do something about this aristocracy or we'll vote them out next fall, right? No. Remember another movie, "Memento" (2000)? The guy in it has this problem: he can't make any memories. Anything he learns or encounters, even if it upsets him, just fades away. Well, that's the American public's problem too. And like the guy in the movie, there may be a psychological reason for it. We all wish, some overtly and some secretly, we could be a part of that aristocracy. Maybe the desire to be something means you can't be mad at it for long. Or maybe it's just easy to get mad, but harder to remember. Whatever. I'm writing myself a note: "Stay mad as hell. Start revolution." Palace angst over finances Wild guesses over royal prospects 9.27.02   Martin Wainwright The Guardian The most comprehensive attempt ever made to sort out Britain's royal finances is revealed today in a catalogue of disagreement & miscalculation which the public record office has held under wraps for 30 years. Efforts to get the national subsidy for the Queen & her family on an even keel incl wildly inaccurate guess that the Queen Mother would die in 1975 and that both Prince Andrew & Prince Edward would be married before they were 26. The problem taxed Edward Heath's Conservative govt in secret for its first 2 years, after preparatory work by sr civil service & palace staff towards the end of Harold Wilson's second term in 1970. Pressure was intense from royal officials, with the lord chamberlain, Lord Cobbold, complaining to Heath in a letter from St. James's palace in June 1970, just after the Tories' election vistory, about "the continuing rise in costs". This triggered prompt action from the new prime minister and within a fortnight, secret actuarial calculations from the Treasury were sent to 10 Downing St. These suggested proposing a civil list figure based on inflation & interest rate trends at the time and "assuming that the Duke of Gloucester dies in 1972, the Queen Mother in 1975, and Prince Andrew & Prince Edward each get married when they are 25". The civil servants involved excluded Prince Charles, because of his self-sufficient income from the Duchy of Cornwall. But they claimed that their guesses would give the politicians "at least some idea" of the appropriate annual sum for the royals. The palace was meanwhile doing some rather more astute guessing, arguing against the idea of further major reviews of the civil list for tactical reasons. Secret civil service advice to Heath says: "They are worried lest the Queen's popularity should diminish in her later middle age and that a review might fall just when her popularity was at its nadir." The ensuing debate ranged vigorously through the rival options of index-linking (the palace favourite) to simple annual votes by parliament, which govt favoured. This was ultimately dropped in favour of the mixed system still in use, after the royals made it clear that a potential yearly fuss about their income would be unwelcome. Among disgruntled notes is one from the sr civil servant at No 10, Robert Armstrong (later Lord Armstrong), complaining that Lord Cobbold was "still hankering" after index-linking, even though he had been told that it was a non-starter. Financial appendices detail every item of royal spending. The documents also show concern within both the Wilson & Heath govts that royal finances should be treated with discretion and as little public discussion as possible. A key memo from civil servants on alternative ways of financing the civil list praises the way that the existing system "has served to minimise the extent to which the finances of the royal family have been drawn into the area of political & public discussion". The document adds: "The price of greater flexibility would necessarily be more frequent exposure to public scrutiny of household expenditure, and potentially more embarrassment to the royal family and to the govt... but some greater degree of openness would be in accordance with the spirit of the times." The ultimate conclusion, inflation-proofing some of the list and wrapping it in a package of other spending approved annually by parliament, was a compromise, but the govt cannot be accused of failing to think the unthinkable. Another memo from Robert Armstrong, marked "secret" on every page, discusses pros & cons of charging income tax on the Queen's private fortune.	detailed DoD insider fraud procedure Fraud for lunch at Redstone Arsenal Al Martin SEC to impose penalties on officers more 2.15.02   Marcy Gordon AP WASHINGTON   The regulators investigating Enron & its accounting have been increasing penalties on other companies' officers and directors for violations of securities laws, an enforcement official said Friday. At the same time, complaints are mushrooming from investors and company employees to the Securities and Exchange Commission about possible violations. Last month, for example, the SEC's Enforcement Complaint Center received an average 525 e-mails per day, up 45 percent from a year earlier. "Keep those cards and letters, not to mention e-mails, coming," SEC Enforcement Dir. Stephen Cutler urged in a speech at a securities law conference in Hallandale, Fla. Copies of his speech were released in Washington. Besides ordering stiffer penalties for violations, the SEC also "will be more willing than ever to seek civil penalties against public companies that drag their feet during the course of an investigation," Cutler said. The Enron case, which exposed accounting improprieties that hid more than $1 billion in debt from investors, and other company irregularities have shaken confidence in the way corporate America works, he suggested. "Practically overnight, a system we'd all come to believe in has been exposed as plagued with weaknesses," he said. Some policy-makers have said a crisis of confidence among ordinary investors has been hampering the stock market. Stocks rebounded last week from a monthlong selloff prompted partly by doubts about the accuracy of companies' financial reporting. Pointing to officials and directors of companies whose stock is publicly traded, Cutler said in his speech, "It is essential that the (SEC) find ways to deter wrongdoing by individuals who hold these positions of public trust. Investors frequently cannot detect from publicly available information whether a company is experiencing difficulties." The SEC, unlike the Justice Dept, has only civil powers and cannot put people in jail; its attorneys often work with federal prosecutors and the FBI on big securities fraud cases. The SEC can impose civil fines, sometimes running into tens of millions of dollars, on companies & individuals. "There has been a concerted effort to ratchet up the penalties we seek from corporate wrongdoers," Cutler said. Last June, for example, big accounting firm Arthur Andersen LLP agreed to pay a $7 million fine to settle the SEC's allegations it issued false and misleading audit reports that inflated Waste Management's earnings by more than $1 billion. Andersen also was Enron's longtime auditor until it was fired last month. Significant accounting problems also have occurred in recent years at other major companies, and the SEC has pursued a series of cases. The SEC and the Justice Dept are investigating Enron, which entered the biggest bankruptcy in U.S. history, and Andersen, which has acknowledged destruction by its employees of Enron-related documents. Because companies' officers and directors often have their SEC fines paid out of company insurance policies or may be so wealthy the fines don't hurt them badly, Cutler said, the SEC also is expanding its use of the power to bar officers and directors from working for public corporations. He noted a traditional reluctance on the part of the SEC to fine corporations in financial fraud cases, on the theory that the cost would be passed along to shareholders who already had suffered. When company managers attempt to impede an investigation, Cutler said, "I believe we would be justified in seeking penalties."   Are big businessman crooks?   Sherman   Antitrust Act & penalties imposed on big business   11.61   Leland Hazard Atlantic Monthly v208 n5 p42-45 Early in 1961 big business drew down on itself some scathing headlines. Some corporate officials of high rank, close to the top, spent 30 days (less good-behavior time) in jail for conspiring to fix prices and allocate orders among their companies. Honored names were involved, among them Westinghouse & General Electric. This was the first time in seventy years any American big businessman was incarcerated for violation of the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act. The conspiracy was admitted in court. Some aspects of it were unusual, not to say ludicrous. The conspirators used assumed names, met not in exclusive New York & Pittsburgh clubs, but in motels, in the North Woods, and in other places frequently associated with activities more interesting than business conspiracy. The purposes of the crimes, confessed by 7 individuals & 29 corporations, were to fix prices to which all would adhere and to allocate among the conspirators the available orders, including orders for the heavy electrical equipt usually purchased by public utilities & municipalities. The violations were of the most elementary antitrust kind. The cases did not involve circumstantial evidence or mere inferences of guilt. One of the conspirators, called before a grand jury, informed others that he would have to tell the truth. From then on a chain reaction of admissions put some of our foremost individual & corporate business names in the criminal category. That the crimes were committed, there is not a scintilla of doubt. Under the law there were no extenuating circumstances. The guilt was stark. According to most of the editorial writers, the sentences said to businessmen: Compete or go to jail. Judge J. Cullen Ganey, in the Philadelphia federal court, said, "What is really at stake here is the survival of the kind of economy under which this country has grown great, the free-enterprise system." That was it, our system had been betrayed. The GE conspirators, some of them with 6 figure incomes, have resigned under pressure from GE; the Westinghouse conspirators are back in their jobs, having been punished "enough," according to Westinghouse Pres. Mark A. Cresap, Jr. But a paradox haunts the scene. The crimes seem horrendous. Yet the Attorneys General of the U.S. & the American courts waited almost #190; of a century to impose on big businessmen the criminal sanctions which have been in the Sherman Antitrust Act since 1890. This fact must give us some pause. There are 2 famous sections of the act. The first enjoins conspiracy in restraint of trade, and the second forbids monopoly. These basic provisions have remained unaltered since the day in President Harrison's administration when the law, with a minimum of debate, was first passed. These are the sections under which Theodore Roosevelt, through his AttyGen., induced the Supreme Court, in 1904, to break up J. P. Morgan's Northern Securities Co., a railroad empire; under which John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Co. of NJ, in 1911, was fragmented; and under which the Aluminum Co. of America, in 1945, was held, despite the absence of predatory activity, to be an unlawful monopoly, and its stockholders ordered, in 1950, to sell their holdings either in Alcoa or in Canadian Aluminium. In these & many other great cases, the object has been to restore or create competition. To enforce competition the Sherman Act gives the govt a 2 edged sword: one, the injunction, which can reach into the most time-honored practices to assert the law's will; the other, criminal punishment for the offense of noncompetition or monopoly, which the Sherman Act designates a misdemeanor, providing up to a year's imprisonment or a fine (originally $5000, recently raised to $50,000) or both. The facts in Mr. Morgan's case, in Mr. Rockefeller's, and in Alcoa's could have been used by the govt to press for the criminal penalty as well as for the civil injunction. John D. Rockefeller, one of America's greatest philanthropists ($550 million in charitable contributions), could have gone to jail. But the ultimate punishment was not imposed until just now. It was not that the act had become a blue law. Far from it. In the first 70 years of the Sherman Act, there were 1580 antitrust cases, two thirds of them since 1940. Often the govt has used the criminal (grand jury) process to get facts, only to seek injunction on the civil side. Often the govt has pressed criminal cases through to a fine. (Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis once fined Standard Oil Co. of Indiana $29,240,000. The case was reversed on appeal.) But 7 decades rolled away before 7 highly placed business executives served time in a federal penitentiary. IF there is something about competition so vital to our welfare that the men who serve the free-enterprise system must go to jail for not competing, we must examine the premise. Wm James said: "The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events: its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself. … " Our American philosophy bids us test every dogma by its results, the dogma of competition no less than any other. The term "free enterprise" embraces an economic system which was first comprehensively articulated by the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, 1776. Competition lies at the heart of Smith's analysis. In his economic scheme he assumes an aggressive, predatory, selfish nature in man. But, he explains, man's aggressions are neutralized in a marvelous mechanism called the market place, where the consumer bestows the favor of purchase upon the most competitive seller; or the worker, the favor of his services upon the highest bidder for labor. Competition does the trick. If prices of goods are high, the urge for profit will bring in more producers, and competition will bring the prices down. If wages are high, the ensuing well-being of the workers will increase population, and competition for jobs will bring wages down. Everybody pursues avidly his own selfish interests, but the self-regulating market place forestalls the evils of individual success. Hence, a good society ensues from the selfish pursuits of individual men. Even Adam Smith applied a mystical term to his market place: "the hidden hand." But his thesis, product of the age of reason, had great appeal. Men long intimidated by taboos, priesthoods, fear of hell felt themselves emancipated. To pursue one's own selfish interest and at the same time, thanks to the market place, serve society well, this was a new idea. Americans liked it. It fitted the pattern of escape from too much rulership, too much dogma, too much ecclesiasticism. America was through with revealed truth; it was ready to accept what would work in the market place. Adam Smith never put it this way, but actually he had substituted the market place for God, in so far as God cares about social well-being. So, if the market place had become the god of social well-being it must be sacrosanct. John D. Rockefeller, a great business manager by any standards, past or present, was the first American to tamper with the market place so successfully as to create alarm in the American people. From the day in 1859 when E. L. Drake drilled the first artesian oil well in America, the oil regions 100 miles north of Pittsburgh, PA, were a bedlam of competition. There was a rush for the black gold as there had been in California in 1849. And the market in crude oil, dragged by wagon barge, steamer, and finally by railroad out of the wilderness, down the Allegheny & Ohio valleys to Pittsburgh & Cleveland, was as disorderly as unregulated competition could make it. Ida M. Tarbell reports that oil which had sold at twenty dollars a barrel in January, 1860, brought ten cents a barrel at the close of 1861. And the historian Allan Nevins, writing of 1866 & 1867, speaks of a "calamitous price fall" and calls the oil regions "half boom & half broke." In the refining end of the oil business, high profits attracted new capital and enhanced competition exactly in accordance with the system as Adam Smith had described it 100 years earlier. Exactly, until John D. Rockefeller, first consolidating the Cleveland refineries, then using that buying & shipping power to secure railroad rebates, not only on the combine's shipments but also on the shipments of the combine's competitors, gained control over the refining industry and monopoly power over the crude-oil producers. Whether the Rockefeller goals, implacably pursued by him & his associates for almost half a century were essentially benign or essentially different from the goals of the oil industry today is not the question. Tarbell quotes Rockefeller's respected philanthropist son: "The American Beauty Rose can be produced in its splendor & fragrance only by sacrificing the early buds which grow up around it." But in 1881 Henry D. Lloyd had a different idea in his attack on the Standard Oil Co. 9 years later Congress expressed itself in the Sherman Antitrust Act in favor of competition. 43 years later, another Congress, anguished by the Great Depression, suspended the antitrust laws pro tanto and invited competitors, whose lower & lower prices were producing less & less business, to agree, under the aegis of N.R.A., to codes of business conduct which fixed practices and sometimes prices. In our country's darkest economic hour we abandoned competition. Franklin Roosevelt in a fireside chat castigated "chiselers" (competitors). Frederick Lewis Allen, writing in The Big Change, put it bluntly: "In short, while the New Deal did not abolish the market place as the determiner of values & rewards, it rigged the market plenty." The Supreme Court voided N.R.A., not because the act abandoned competition but because it constituted an unlawful delegation of legislative power to the executive branch of the govt. We have been abandoning competition bit by bit in America for a long time. In 2 world wars & in the Korean War, our govt fixed prices & allocated materials, an obvious necessity, an interference with the market place which even Adam Smith might approve. But he would not approve minimum wage & hour laws, farm price supports, tariffs, or subsidies, even health & safety laws for factories, or child labor laws, or laws establishing minimum working conditions for women. In Smith's philosophy these would impede the market place in its benign work. Adam Smith did not foresee powerful labor unions or social welfare or heavy technology. He marveled at the productivity attained by division of labor in the making of pins. He knew nothing about single electric-current circuit breakers big as a house. Although accumulation of capital from profit & its reinvestment in productive equipt were cornerstones of his philosophy, the scale of investment required for the subsequent technological advances was beyond his ken. Amusingly, he saw no future for the corporation, because, in his opinion, such an artificial body could not marshal the selfish, driving search for profit so fundamental to his system. Adam Smith taught Americans a faith in competition which persists despite heavy impingements by govt, by big technology, and by social welfare upon the freewheeling, bazaarlike market place, in which Smith, 2 centuries past, saw competition as the benign hidden hand. But the faith is compromised. On the domestic scene the federal antitrust laws are modified to forbid different prices among buyers of commodities of like grade & quality. Manufacturers of branded products are permitted, by amendment of the antitrust laws, to fix resale prices under state fair-trade laws. These & other amendments of the antitrust laws are said to establish "soft competition." The more rigorous antitrusters deplore these compromises, but Congress does not agree. ANTITRUST doctrine forbids certain forms of "hard competition." For example, General Motors would hesitate to price its cars as low as its efficiency might permit, for fear of driving Chrysler, American Motors, even Ford to the wall. As critics put it, businessmen must compete, but no one may win the competition. It is this aspect of antitrust which creates 2 standards, one for big business, another for small business. No matter how vicious the competition of the little fellow, the big fellow must not countercompete too hard. Abroad, cartels of all types have long been pillars of trade in Europe & in the British Isles. In the 1930s it was popular to attribute the declining state of European industry to cartelization. But now that vitality & prosperity prevail in all of western Europe, we must wonder whether the earlier analysis confused causation with concomitance. In the East the greatest industrial nation is Japan. Let Arthur Koestler, writing in The Lotus & the Robot, speak of competition in that society. "In Japan, there was no comparable [to our competitive economy] organic development; when the country was suddenly thrown open, the very idea of 'competition' was strange to them, and when Western economic writings were first translated into Japanese, it was necessary to make a new word for it. It was a combination of the Japanese words for 'race' & 'fight.'" And yet, as all manufacturers know, the Japanese, if not competitive at home, are nevertheless potent factors in all markets abroad. The Japanese economy waxes strong on something other than domestic competition, as does the British. For example, for more than 100 years one British family has preserved a monopoly in glass. To this very day, much of the world pays royalties for the glassmaking innovations of this British company, which, by our doctrine, ought to have died on the technological vine years ago, for lack of competition. In Communist Russia & China, competition is certainly not the way of economic life. State planning, bureaucratic decisions, the dictates of the commissars shape the pattern of economic activity. The decentralization & fragmentation of decision making, which we prize in our competitive economy, are to Russia & China just so much capitalistic foolishness. Now, after almost half a century of Communism, we must concede its growth both in Russia & abroad. And as the first generation of Chinese Communism passes, we are baffled by its unexpected successes. The answer to the obvious question, Why did it take such a long time before we resorted to incarceration for failure to compete?, may lie here. Russian commissars have been liquidated, at the worst, or sent to Siberia, at the least, for deviation from Communist doctrine, or even for simply failing to achieve a planned production quota. The Communist system could not be wrong; only men could be wrong. And so in America we increased the severity of punishment for deviation from capitalistic doctrine, for failure to compete. We too must prove that the system cannot be wrong, only men can be wrong. I do not like this explanation any more than I like our dancing to the Russian tune in foreign & military policy. But a lethal force is loose in the world, and America is frequently on the defensive. Robert A. Bicks, a brilliant young NY atty who was nominated by Pres.Eisenhower to be in charge of the Antitrust Division, put our American embarrassment quite simply: "These men & companies have in a true sense mocked the image of that economic system which we profess to the world." But one of the 8 conspiracies was a quarter of a century old, according to Fortune magazine (April, May, 1961), others had endured for more than a decade. One suspects that the Russians caught their doctrinal deviates much more quickly. Does this mean that for all of our protests in & out of govt we are less sure of our doctrine than we admit? Even Teddy Roosevelt was charged with ambivalence by Finley Peter Dunne's Mr. Dooley. He summarizes Mr. Roosevelt on trusts: "Th' trusts," says he, "are heejous monsthers built up be th' inlightened intherprise iv th' men that have done so much to advance progress in our beloved counthry," he says. "On wan hand I wud stamp thim undher fut; on th' other hand not so fast." There are 2 parts to free enterprise: one is competition; the other is profit. Men compete because there are profits. This is straight out of Adam Smith. The profit part of the system has never been repealed. The system does not work on losses. That way has been tried, and the records of the bankruptcy courts attest the unsatisfactory results of that deviation. Therefore, however enlightened a corporate head may be, however socially conscious his pronouncements, whatsoever the corporate charities, profit is the sine qua non. A top executive may say that there is more to modern business than profit making, but before the applause has died away he will have some vice president, division head, or dept manager on the carpet for unsatisfactory profits. This does not mean that the talk is double. It simply means that without the profit the stuff for humanitarianism is not there.   [ rationally & grammatically expressed, it is not here, but is by no means logically precluded under all circumstances by profit's absence. Hence, the problem is the use of profit as sole or even primary gauge. Gain has many forms; the greater the number of people needing to be served (e.g. the more remote the frontiers of civilization), the less need for profit as definition of gain and the less rational the use of profit as measure of progress in resource utilization. ] When competition does not yield profits, as it often does not, in the eyes of the businessman, half of the system fails. It is then that the front-line soldiers of the system feel a desperate need to alter conditions. Price wars are deadly to the system, even though price fixing may be anathema to consumers. Herein lies a conflict, inexorable and as yet unresolved in our society. I have spent 40 years advising clients to respect & obey the antitrust laws. But I would be far less than honest if I did not concede that the conflict is there. TO the businessman, a social philosophy constructed in an economy in which pin making was a marvel (1776) is not necessarily adequate for an economy of electric generators & nuclear reactors. To those who labor in the system, a philosophy which makes the good society depend upon blind competition carried on in ignorance of market facts and in disregard of the profit which, and which alone, can give the business institution permanence, such a philosophy seems irresponsible. Such men find themselves pressed on the one hand by the dogma, Compete yourself out of profits. On the other hand, they are pressed to conserve the business, to make it grow, to keep it ready for every change, from peace to war, from old styles to new styles, from obsolete technology to advanced technology. The businessman does not understand why his quest for certainty is wrong, why the dogma of competition should be pressed so far as to make a guessing game of the system. I do not extol business or businessmen. That is not my purpose. I point rather to a failure of our business actors to understand our business theorists, a failure of such major proportions that we must examine the theory. It is not enough just to condemn & punish. We have never faced up to a frank & exhaustive examination of our system. In 1953, AttyGen Herbert Brownell, Jr., appointed a distinguished committee of antitrust lawyers, law teachers, economists, and govt officials to make "a thoughtful & comprehensive study of our antitrust laws." There was not one practicing businessman on the committee of 60. The committee produced a scholarly compendium of comment on the antitrust laws but made no significant recommendations. The report makes no reference to the problem of profits versus competition. The economist may regard profit as only a transitory agent for producing equilibrium. In his book, profit serves not as a reward but as an inducement to competitors to enter the market and take the profit away, from enterpriser after enterpriser. But to the businessman, this is just so much academic nonsense. To him, the profit is the reward for good management, and the loss is the unpardonable business sin. Practicing antitrust lawyers & govt antitrust lawyers are a kind of priesthood spinning ever more gossamer refinements of the antitrust commandments. Businessmen are excluded from the councils in the legal temple. Between the govt & businessmen there is a cops-&-robbers atmosphere. This is bad. It is doubtful whether America can long afford such immature attitudes. When Roosevelt moved in the courts against Northern Securities Co., Morgan asked why the President could not have come to him as one gentleman to another and made known the govt's wishes. I think Morgan had a point. For some reason, gentlemanly relations were never established. Businessmen move at their peril while the law waits in ambush. In the electrical cases the record shows that the guilty individuals & companies alternated between fierce, quarterless competition and unabashed price fixing. There were times when the price cutting reached as high as 60% of the going price. Suppose a study were made to determine the reasonableness of the average prices over the whole period in which the conspiracies were on & off. The antitrust doctrine is that reasonableness does not matter. Very well. But are we afraid even to look? Are we, like medieval doctors, unwilling to test the dogma; like them, unwilling for Galileo to drop the balls? Suppose Congress should provide an amnesty, forgiving all companies & individuals who would make full disclosures of past infractions of antitrust law. The investigators, turned scientists from prosecutors, would develop a kind of economic Kinsey Report. Then economists, psychologists, sociologists, and people from other relevant professions, having access to all the facts, might evaluate the doctrine and measure the harm, if any, which has ensued from the deviations. When police methods fail, for example, in curbing juvenile delinquency. We apply investigatory & analytical techniques. Often the detection of the causes of antisocial activity results in social change. If doctrine & dogma on the one hand and business & businessmen on the other will submit to exhaustive fact finding and an uninhibited critique, we may discover the common ground for competition & profit, the way to a more stable economy, and an end to internecine distrust. Our hard-pressed country can no longer afford sadism in govt & paranoia in business. A less ambitious program, but one quite worth while, would be an amendment of the Sherman Act which would require the govt to employ the noncriminal remedies of the act before invoking the criminal penalties. In the civil proceedings, the courts' equity powers to order cessation of practices and to require new practices are almost without limit. After having heard a given case, the court might then decide whether civil remedies were enough or whether to authorize the AttyGen to proceed for recriminatory criminal penalties. Such an amendment would take some of the gaming out of antitrust enforcement. It would give a partial answer to Mr. Morgan's reasonable question, Why couldn't the govt make known its wishes rather than suing as if he were a "common crook"? There are those who still say that the men of the electrical conspiracy are common crooks. But the case is not that simple. It is necessary to differentiate. The men whose jail terms must make us think are more like those who violated Prohibition than those who burgle a house. A society which has not resolved the periodic incompatibility between competition & profits, has not cured its business cycles, is not able to explain fully its economics, such a society does not have the right to cast first stones at those who must work its imperfect system. The men were guilty, but guilty in a system which is itself not w/o blame. Business profs rethinking ethics classes 6.16.06   Catherine Tsai AP Last fall, Bentley College management prof. Tony Buono taught a class on corporate scandals with colleagues pitching in from finance, accounting and even the philosophy department. The 4 picked through the cases of Enron, WorldCom, Tyco and Shell. At the end of the semester, the number of students in a simulated trading room who were caught in misconduct or misusing information for insider trading was significantly higher than at the beginning. The students said, "You taught us how to do it," Buono recalled. "For those of us who've spent our careers teaching this, it's been a disappointing time," said Buono, who has taught at the Waltham MA college for 27 years. "Some of the most renowned names in the corporate world are now jokes at cocktail parties. And they were led by graduates of our business programs. "That made a lot of us sit up and rethink the approach of what we're doing." Scandals at Enron Corp., WorldCom Inc. and other companies led to convictions for top officials, giving business professors plenty of classroom examples of executives slipping up. 4 years after the scandals exploded, academics are pushing the need to promote moral examples, too. "Students need to be inspired of the possibilities of not doing harm," said University of Northern Iowa prof. Donna Wood, founder of Intl Assn for Business & Society and one of about 200 people in Boulder recently for a University of Colorado business ethics education conference. Efforts to integrate ethics into core courses in financing, accounting and marketing are gaining steam, and ethics courses are as popular as ever, professors said. The scandals have spawned new positions at some companies, legal & ethics compliance officers. University of Denver's Daniels College of Business has a new class this fall called "Ethics & Compliance in a Post-WorldCom World," formed in part after professors saw the job demand. University of Denver business prof. John Holcomb said stockholder activism and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act targeting corporate fraud have given ethics professors a springboard in persuading colleagues in finance, accounting and other core fields to incorporate ethics into their lessons. Assn to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business is the accrediting agency for business schools. It requires that ethics be included in the curriculum without requiring a specific course, a stance that has drawn both praise and frustration from ethics professors who see it as either a step in the right direction or not enough. AACSB typically offers guidelines without mandating specific courses. "The recent corporate scandals indicate, sometimes ethics issues don't fit into a nice neat framework," said George Washington Univ. Susan Phillips, who led AACSB task force on ethics education. "Sometimes ethics issues related to marketing are different from ethics issues related to finance. So the best place to discuss issues related to marketing is in marketing class." Even knowing what is right & wrong doesn't always mean someone will have the courage to do what's right. Southern Utah Univ. researchers spent 2 semesters studying accounting students who had been exposed to stories of those who acted with moral courage. Early results on a student survey including questions such as whether they'd challenge a teacher who was doing something wrong suggests their resolve to have moral courage increased after such exposure, accounting dept chair David Christensen said. Bentley prof. Buono suspects the students in his class who got caught misbehaving in the mock trading room considered it a game. "We're trying to tell the students there is no reset button in real life," he said. Several professors said more ethics classes might not have spared fallen leaders of major corporations from prison sentences. "It's a big mistake to think if only we taught more business ethics classes, we would have fewer business scandals," Wood said. Yet that hasn't stopped professors from promoting ideas like fostering civic engagement, where students might be required to build a house for Habitat for Humanity or help hurricane victims. "The key is to open students' eyes to the possibilities," said Univ. of Colorado Leeds School of Business junior Marc Simons. "There are people in business who are thinking of people other than themselves." Senate cracks down on corporate America 5.16.03   Mary Dalrymple AP Wash.D.C.   Senators used a tax bill to firmly scold corporate America for the excesses & misconduct of the stock market's boom years, voting to crack down on shelters and curb executive misdeeds. Businesses still reeling from a wave of scandals have been unfairly targeted, said U.S. Chamber of Commerce lobbyist Bruce Josten. Out of 17,000 publicly traded companies in the nation, "we probably couldn't come up with more than 30 companies in that whole abuse, scandal thing," Josten said. The lawmaker who wrote most of the corporate crackdown measures into the tax bill passed late Thursday night, Senate Finance committee chair Charles Grassley R-IA sees it differently. "We have seen in Enron-type corporation scandals that there is no end to the cleverness of con artists in the corporate world," he said. The items in the tax bill reflect continuing outrage in Congress over the accounting and tax maneuvers of Enron, WorldCom and other companies that inflated their earnings and misled shareholders. The bill includes few tax breaks for the nation's largest corporations; instead, small businesses get breaks from a reduction of the top income tax rate and increased equipt purchase write-offs. That reflects Grassley's philosophy that small businesses create most of the nation's new jobs. "I had jobs because of small entrepreneurs investing & creating a job for me," he said. The bill also collects corporate reforms that lawmakers have been debating since the wave of scandals started. Companies would no longer use creative accounting maneuvers that only decrease their tax bill and serve no other business purpose, or risk paying penalties. "Doing it in the sunshine will reduce the problem," said tax lawyer Chris Rizek, corporate tax procedure expert. "People won't be able to play the audit lottery with these questionable transactions." Lawmakers require CEOs to sign their companies' tax returns "on penalty of perjury." Business leaders point out that the IRS can already fine & jail executives for filing false returns. Corporations would no longer deduct settlement payments from their tax liability, whether or not they admit guilt. That item stems from an investigation into 10 of Wall St's biggest firms for conflicts of interest in stock research; some co. had planned to deduct part of the $1.4 billion settlement from their taxes. Corporations that inflate their earnings would not apply for a refund from the IRS. Executives with deferred compensation agreements could not pull money out on short-term notice, effectively blocking executives from taking their future pay just before a company goes bankrupt. Corporate lobbyists say the items amount to tax increases in a bill where big business gets no breaks. "There are laws on the books against all this stuff," Josten said. "Why weren't they enforced?" Grassley, during debate over the legislation, said the items put little burden on the corporate world. "I was amused to read some press reports about how K St lobbyists & Fortune 500 have reservations about this Finance Committee bill before us, he said. "There were too many revenue raisers, too many loophole closers, too much to ask from big business."
Alan Greenspan to be knighted 8.7.02   BBC The UK is to award US Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan honorary knighthood. The honour, which was approved by the Queen, is to recognise Mr Greenspan's "contribution to global economic stability", the UK Treasury said. Mr Greenspan, who makes crucial decisions about raising or cutting US interest rates, will receive the award when he next visits the UK, possibly in the early autumn. "The award is in recognition of … the benefit that the UK has received from the wisdom & skill," a Treasury spokesman added. Mr Greenspan, sometimes referred to as the most powerful man in the world because of his control over the US economy, is also famous for his ability to keep the markets & the politicians guessing. He once famously said: "If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said." As chairman of the Fed, he is required to go before Congress at least twice a year to give his assessment of the US economic situation. In his most recent testimony, he told the Senate that the US economy was set to recover despite recent stock market volatility. "With profitable opportunities for malfeasance markedly diminished, far fewer questionable practices are likely to be initiated in the immediate future," he said. His accounts of the economy have traditionally been cryptic & closely watched. Mr Greenspan, 76, was born the son of a stockbroker and showed a gift for figures at a early age. In the 1950s, he left academia to become a professional economist. During the 1970s he was President Gerald Ford's top economic adviser, and took up chairmanship of the Fed just before the stock market crash of 1987. His fourth four-year term as Fed chairman ends in 2004, when he is widely expected to retire. Because Mr Greenspan is not British, he will not be able to call himself Sir Alan, but he will be able to use the letters KBE after his name.
[ Knighthood is usually the last honor given to the best henchmen before they leave office for good or take an office in which they will sign their own death warrant like Wm Casey. Greenspan doesn't matter out of office. Armitage, more than any other individual, is the fulcrum for the public planning for private profit to perfidy. ]	Corporate America is fighting regulations Two industry groups draft business-protection plans 10.29.06   Stephen Labaton NY TImes Wash.D.C.   Frustrated with laws and regulations that have made companies and accounting firms more open to lawsuits from investors and govt, corporate America, with the encouragement of the Bush administration, is preparing to fight back.

Now that corruption cases such as Enron and WorldCom are falling out of the news, 2 influential industry groups with close ties to administration officials are hoping to swing the regulatory pendulum in the opposite direction. The groups are drafting proposals to provide broad new protections to corporations and accounting firms from criminal cases brought by federal and state prosecutors as well as a stronger shield against civil lawsuits from investors.

Although the details are being worked out, the groups' proposals aim to limit the liability of accounting firms for the work they do on behalf of clients, to force prosecutors to target individual wrongdoers rather than entire companies, and to scale back shareholder lawsuits.
The groups also hope to reduce what they see as some burdens imposed by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, landmark post-Enron legislation adopted in 2002. The law, which placed significant new auditing and governance requirements on companies, gave the SEC broad discretion for interpretation.
The groups also are interested in rolling back rules and policies that have been on the books for decades. To alleviate concerns that the new Congress may not adopt the proposals, regardless of which party holds legislative power next year, many are being tailored so that they could be adopted through rule making by the SEC and enforcement policy changes at the Justice Dept.

The proposals will begin to be laid out in public shortly after Election Day, members of the groups said in recent interviews. One of the committees was formed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and until recently was headed by Robert Steel. Steel was sworn in 10.10.06 as Treasury undersecretary for domestic finance, sr dept official formulating its views on the issues being studied by the 2 groups.
The second committee was formed by Harvard Law prof. Hal Scott with former GWBush Council of Economic Advisers chair Glenn Hubbard and former Goldman Sachs pres. John Thornton, where he worked with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.

That group has colloquially become known around Washington as the Paulson Committee because the relatively new Treasury secretary issued an encouraging statement when it was formed last month. Administration officials said Friday that he was not playing a role in the group's deliberations.
Its members include Donald Evans, a former Commerce Secretary who remains a close friend of Bush's; Samuel DiPiazza Jr., chief executive of accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers; Robert Glauber, former chairman and chief executive of the National Association of Securities Dealers, the private group that oversees the securities industry; and the chief executives of DuPont, Office Depot and the CIT Group.
Treasury Dept spokeswoman Jennifer Zuccarelli said Friday that no decision had been made about which recommendations would be supported by the administration.
“While the department always wants to hear new ideas from academic and industry thought leaders, especially to encourage the strength of the U.S. capital markets, Treasury is not a member of these committees and is not collaborating on any findings,” Zuccarelli said.

Another official and committee members noted that Paulson recently had pressed the groups in private discussions to complete their work so it could be rolled out quickly after the 11.7.06 election to achieve greater political impact.
Moreover, committee members say that they expect that many of the recommendations will be used as part of an overall administration effort to limit what they see as overzealous state prosecutions by such figures as NY Atty General Elliot Spitzer and abusive class-action lawsuits by investors. The groups also will attempt to lower what they see as the excessive costs associated with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

Their critics say the effort is part of a plan to cater to the most well-heeled constituents of the administration and to insulate politically connected companies, including the accounting industry, from prosecution at the expense of investors.
One consideration in drafting the proposals has been the chain of events at Arthur Andersen, the accounting firm that was convicted in 2002 of obstruction of justice for shredding Enron-related documents; the conviction was overturned in 2005 by the Supreme Court.

The proposals being drafted would aim to limit the liability of auditing firms and include an enforcement policy shift to make it harder for prosecutors to bring cases against individuals and companies. Even though Arthur Andersen played a prominent role in the scandals at Enron and elsewhere, some business and legal experts have criticized the decision by the Bush administration to bring a criminal case that had the effect of shutting down the firm before a verdict was reached.
The proposed policies would emphasize the prosecution of culpable executives and accountants rather than corporations and auditing firms. That shift could prove difficult for prosecutors, because it is often harder to find sufficient evidence to show that specific people at a co. were the ones who knowingly violated a law

One proposal would recommend that the Justice Dept sharply curtail its policy of forcing companies under investigation to withhold paying the legal fees of executives suspected of violating the law. Another proposal under consideration would require some investor lawsuits to be handled by arbitration panels, which are traditionally friendlier to defendants.
In an interview last week with Bloomberg News Service, Paulson repeated his criticism of Sarbanes-Oxley. While it had done some good, he said, it had contributed to “an atmosphere that has made it more burdensome for companies to operate.”
Paulson also repeated a line from his first speech, given at Columbia Business School last August, where he said, “Often the pendulum swings too far and we need to go through a period of readjustment.”

Some experts see Paulson's complaint as a step backward.
“This is an escalation of the culture war against regulation,” said Duke Law School securities & corporate law prof. James Cox. He said many of the proposals, if adopted, “would be a dark day for investors.”

Bush & GOP don't think you are worth much 12.06.01   liberaleagle post re NYTimes Senate takes up a measure that would add $7.5 billion to the budget for items like airport security & defense against germ warfare, Republican leaders will be trying to block it. The appropriation is tacked onto an emergency military spending bill that no one opposes. … administration & Congress settled on a ceiling of $686 billion in so-called discretionary spending for the current fiscal year. After 9.11.01 Bush & Congress agreed to add $40 billion to deal with the terrorist attacks, half of which was supposed to be set aside for New York. The money has been used up quickly. About $20 billion is going to the military to prosecute the war in Afghanistan. Only $10 billion may go to New York. Only $8.5 billion is set aside for homeland defenses. … Bush's budget dir. Mitchell Daniels has cited new deficit projections as evidence that Congress needs to keep spending down. But the administration has found room to expand the separate economic stimulus package to incl huge giveaways to corporations & the wealthy. About $25 billion in the Republican stimulus bill would go to help the biggest corporations in America avoid taxes altogether. cited counterclaim top 2% pay 40% of taxes & top 10% pay 90% of taxes. Tie bailout for airlines to CEO pay 9.21.01   Don Bauder SD UT In considering an airline bailout, Congress must: 1) Be very circumspect; and 2) Tell the airlines that if they are going to accept govt funds, they should reduce top executive pay. Capitalism's 2 biggest cancers today are corporate welfare and obscenely excessive chief executive pay. Without question, support for the airlines falls into the category of corporate welfare, although it is somewhat different from the garden variety. In the case of the airlines, there is real need. Airlines are near bankruptcy. In the case of most corporate welfare, the motivation is greed, not need. Fat cats are lining up for the largesse. The airlines are asking for two things that are quite reasonable. Aviation security, at which the airlines have failed disgracefully, should be shifted to the federal govt. Security personnel should get respectable pay, sound training and good equipt, financed by taxpayers. Airlines should be protected from the wave of lawsuits that will come from the Sept. 11 tragedy. Although the airlines may have been guilty of laxity, the cost of paying off victims would financially break the carriers. It is proper for the govt to pick up much or all of the tab. Beyond that, caution should prevail. Last night, congressional leaders and the White House neared an agreement on a nearly $15 billion bailout, including $5 billion in direct assistance and $10 billion in loan guarantees. There are several perils in any bailout. One is that we will repeat the gross mistake of Japan: saving obsolete industries with govt handouts. With the length of time needed for increased security and with the public queasy about flying, it is clear that the airline industry will shrink. Let the market do most of that. Some carriers will survive, some won't. Some routes will have to be shelved. Many short-haul ones are already serviced by train and can be reached by car. Possibly, some small-and medium-sized cities will lose flights; they will have to adjust. Another risk: Other industries will line up at the trough. Indeed, insurers, travel agencies and hotels are already asking for govt relief. How long will it be before Boeing and related firms hold out the tin cup? If the airline situation is so bad that the govt feels it must chip in, then it should demand something in return, stock options in the enterprise. If loan guarantees succeed, and the stocks recover, the govt can call in some of its chips. If the govt is going to help in any way, it should demand that chief executive pay be reduced. According to Bloomberg News columnist Graef Crystal, airline CEOs don't get egregiously high pay, but "it's a valid question: If you're laying off employees, what are you doing to your own pay?" According to compilations by Forbes magazine, here is what chief executives of airlines brought in last year: AMR (American), $6.1 million; Continental, $12.1 million; Delta, $2.4 million; UAL (United), $2.8 million, and US Airways, $11.1 million. It seems there is almost an inverse correlation: The best have the lowest pay, and the worst the highest. Generally, the disease of excessive CEO pay should not be a govt matter. But if the industry is asking for handouts, it could be. I called two airlines on the question. AMR did not call back and UAL refused comment.

U.S. to give airlines $2 billion more in aid 10.26.01   Jonathan D. Salant AP Wash. D.C.   The Transportation Dept said it plans to distribute almost $2 billion more to the nation's airlines to help compensate them for their financial losses after last month's terrorist attacks. The money will be allocated based on each carrier's market share or its actual losses as a result of the terrorist attacks, the department said yesterday. Airlines have 14 days to apply. The Dept has given $2.4 billion in taxpayer funds to 111 carriers, including $391 million to United, $359.4 million to American and $327 million to Delta. The money is part of the $5 billion package that Congress allocated to the airlines. The remainder will be allocated at a later date, with guidelines to be determined. The General Accounting Office, investigative arm of Congress, reported earlier this month that the airline industry would lose between $6.5 billion and $10.5 billion because of the attacks. The GAO report noted that awarding the money solely on the basis of an airline's share of the market may not adequately compensate some carriers for their losses, while giving others extra money. Transportation Dept officials said they are making the payments in stages to make sure no airline is overpaid. An addtl $10 billion in loan guarantees is to be awarded by a 4 member Air Transportation Stabilization Board, consisting of Transportation Sec. Norman Mineta, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, Treasury Sec. Paul O'Neill and Comptroller General David Walker, or their designees. The guarantees make the federal govt a co- signer on a loan, agreeing to pay it off if the airline fails. The airline industry contributed $6.8 million to federal candidates during the 2000 elections, and an additional $1.3 million since Jan. 1, according to nonpartisan research group Ctr for Responsive Politics. United Airlines' top executive quits 10.29.01   David Carpenter AP CHICAGO   United Airlines chief executive James Goodwin resigned yesterday, saying it was time "for a new leader to guide the organization" which has struggled financially and laid off a fifth of its work force since 9.11.01. The company's board of directors unanimously elected John W. Creighton as Goodwin's replacement. Creighton, who has been a member of UAL's board of directors since 1998, served as president & CEO of Weyerhaeuser Co. 1991-97. "Our immediate goal is to restore United's financial stability," Creighton said. "We intend to work hand-in-hand with our employees and unions to accomplish this task." Goodwin's resignation came 2 weeks after a letter he wrote to employees was made public. In it, he predicted the troubled airline could perish unless its fortunes were reversed. 2 unions representing United employees had called for Goodwin's resignation. Union leaders accused Goodwin of panicking customers and workers unjustifiably with the letter. They claimed his remarks were made to get contracted employees to agree to lower wages, gain negotiating leverage or get more govt assistance. In a statement released yesterday, Goodwin said he was "proud to have contributed to the tremendous growth of United during my 34 years . . . United is a great company and it is the right time for a new leader to guide the organization through the challenges that lie ahead." United already was in deep trouble before 9.11.01, suffering severely from the downturn in business travel, which it depends on more heavily than other airlines. Adding to its woes were the highest costs of any major U.S. carrier, including steep labor expenses. The airline has laid off about 20,000 of its 100,000 employees since 9.11.01. Beginning Wed., it also is trimming its daily schedule to 1,654 flights , a reduction of about 30% since the attacks. United, based in Elk Grove Village IL, lost more than $700 million in the first half of the year incl as much as $116 million from the failed merger with US Airways that was proposed by Goodwin last year. It was surpassed by American Airlines this year as the biggest U.S. airline. United parent UAL Corp. is expected to post operating losses of $500 million to $600 million for the third quarter when it reports results Thu.

In-Q-Tel   privatizing the secret police ² ³ Å
7.00 & Eileen Gunn UPSIDE magazine p126

Spying for free trade with Echelon, first brought to public attention in 1980s by British investigative journalist Duncan Campbell.

media & communications FCC Elizabeth Fetter's Northpoint Communications redux Phone carriers may get fewer rules on fast web connections, FCC says 2.15.02   Jonathan Cox Bloomberg News WASHINGTON   Verizon Communications Inc. and other phone carriers should have few regulations on the fast Internet services they provide to spur deployment of the links to homes and businesses, U.S. regulators said. The Federal Communications Commission took a step toward revamping rules governing such companies, asking for public comment on a tentative conclusion about the high-speed Web market and seeking advice on actions it should take. U.S. policy makers want to spur more high-speed networks, or broadband, to increase spending by telecommunications companies, boost the economy and create new services for consumers such as digital movies that can be accessed on line. Phone companies, especially the dominant carriers such as Verizon and BellSouth Corp., say their investment has been crimped by govt rules. "We will clarify and simplify the regulatory framework for these promising services," FCC Chairman Michael Powell said at a public meeting. "This is not the time for timidity." The FCC, though, may stop short of removing all requirements for the regional carriers to share network space with rivals. The agency's conclusions are preliminary and decisions about which rules to change will be made after reviewing public reaction. In December, the FCC began 2 related proceedings. The combined processes will let regulators identify and eliminate unnecessary regulations, an effort that should show progress by year's end, Powell said.

FBI Makes Case for Net Wiretaps 7.25.00 John Schwartz WashPost Federal law enforcement officials defended "Carnivore" – the FBI's controversial Internet wiretap system – through more than 2 acrimonious hours of grilling by Democratic and Republican lawmakers yesterday, painting a chilling picture of an Internet that would become a safe haven for crooks and terrorists without proper surveillance. "Criminals use computers to send child pornography to each other using anonymous, encrypted communications," FBI Assistant Director Donald M. Kerr told the House Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution. "Hackers break into financial service companies' systems and steal customers' home addresses and credit-card numbers, criminals use the Internet's inexpensive and easy communications to commit large-scale fraud on victims all over the world, and terrorist bombers plan their strikes using the Internet." Many of the lawmakers seemed just as concerned with the actions of the law enforcement officials. "The potential for abuse here is tremendous," said Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL). "What you're saying is 'Trust us.'" Carnivore is a modified version of a common network-maintenance program known as a "packet sniffer." Carnivore offers great specificity – the ability to quickly collect just the "to" and "from" information in e-mail messages, for example, and not online banking transactions. That gives law enforcement the equivalent of the telephone world's "pen register" and "trap and trace" data – the origin and destination of all calls related to the subject. Civil liberties groups and Internet service providers say the system raises troubling questions about what constitutes a reasonable search and seizure of electronic data. In sniffing out potential criminal conduct, they note, the new technology also could scan private information about legal activities, taking in vast amounts of information from innocent people as well as the suspect.

The critics also note that past experience has shown that law enforcement has overstepped its wiretap authority numerous times in the past. ACLU assoc. dir. Barry Steinhardt said in his testimony, "Carnivore is roughly equivalent to a wiretap capable of accessing the contents of the conversations of all the phone company's customers, with the 'assurance' that the FBI will record only conversations of the specified target."
Officials of Internet service providers who oppose the technology say they are wary of putting equipt designed by others on their networks. They want the FBI to publish information on the software used so that ISPs can be sure that it does what the agency says. The law enforcement officials pledged to present the system to a neutral third party for review but said they cannot release so much information about the system that it will become a target for evasion and hacking.
They insisted the Carnivore system actually provides greater privacy than previous methods of gathering electronic information because it can fine-tune what the machine hands over to investigators. The FBI's Kerr also argued that agents won't "risk their integrity, their jobs and their futures" by abusing the law.

The toughest questioning came from Reps. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) and Robert L. Barr Jr. (R-Ga.), 2 congressmen rarely on the same side of an issue. Nadler peppered the officials with a series of questions that underscored the point that Carnivore, under the laws that govern pen-register surveillance, could be used without the difficult showing of "probable cause" required in a telephone wiretap. Barr cited the investigation of missing White House e-mail and scornfully said the Clinton administration asserts that "we don't even know how to keep track of our own e-mail" while "now we see a very sophisticated system for keeping track of other people's e-mails!"
After the hearing, House Majority Leader Richard K. Armey issued a statement saying members of both parties showed "strong concerns that the administration is infringing on Americans' basic constitutional protection against unwarranted search and seizure. "Until these concerns are addressed," he concluded, "Carnivore should be shut down."

Global Crossing was major player
2.15.02   Mark Sherman AP

The company, based in Bermuda but run out of offices in California & New Jersey, has needed govt approval for its undersea cables and its rapid acquisition of other telecommunications companies. The company also has won contracts with several agencies, foreign govts, even NATO. "Telecommunications is a heavily regulated area," said Larry Makinson, the Center for Responsive Politics' executive director. "If you're trying to do new things in that area, you're going to need some green lights from the federal govt to fulfill your business plan." Global Crossing's campaign contributions have come in large chunks, unregulated soft money to both parties, favoring Democrats but not to the extent that Enron directed its money to Republicans. Lawmakers on key committees have been a focus.

One of those panels, the House Energy and Commerce Committee, has begun to examine Global's decline, said Ken Johnson, spokesman for chairman Billy Tauzin, R-La. Tauzin has received $2,000 from Global. "We're in the very early stages of gathering information and facts," Johnson said. "We're not turning a deaf ear. But obviously, most of our resources are committed to the ongoing Enron investigation." A second House committee may look at Global employees' retirement accounts, which were frozen as company stock took its last, steep plunge. Even as Global's stock price was hovering just above $1 a share in December, the company's political action committee was giving $2,500 apiece to Sen. Tom Harkin D-IA and Carl Levin D-MI and $500 to Rep. Robt Ehrlich, R-MD. Those contributions capped a year in which Global gave campaigns more than $700,000, most of it in soft money. In late March, Global sent $100,000 in soft money to the National Republican Congressional Committee, the campaign organization for House Republicans. A week later, the Democrats' Senate campaign fund got $25,000. In June, Democrats received $75,000 while the GOP took in $110,000. During the presidential campaign, GW. Bush received $68,950 in Global contributions.

What did Global Crossing expect for its money? Nothing, said co. spokeswoman Rebecca Yeamans. "We share a strong commitment to being corporate citizens and part of that is being part of the political process," Yeamans said. No one in Congress has gotten more from the company than Sen. John McCain, R-AZ., formerly the chairman & now ranking Republican on Senate Commerce Committee. McCain collected $31,000 from Global Crossing employees for his presidential campaign in March 1999. That same month, McCain, at the company's urging, asked the Federal Communications Commission to encourage the development of undersea cables for transmitting telecommunications signals. McCain did not respond to requests for an interview this week. The centerpiece of his presidential campaign, changing campaign finance law, passed the House this week, and its supporters said accounts of Enron's Washington largess helped sway wavering lawmakers.

The company's largest payout to a lobbyist was the $2.5 million it paid former antitrust official in the Clinton administration Anne Bingaman, wife of Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-NM, who said she dealt with the FCC and executive branch agencies on issues related to Global's core business: undersea fiber optic cables. "I did not make presentations to nor lobby any members of Congress or staff," she said. Global paid Bingaman in cash & stock options, she said. When she sold most of her company stock in Jan. 2000, she posted a profit of more than $1 million, according to her husband's financial disclosure report.

Global is bidding on a defense communications contract that was initially awarded to the company and then rescinded last year amid complaints from competitors that the company may lack the ability to provide secure and fast Internet services and, in any event, should be ineligible because it is based in Bermuda. Yeamans would not describe specific lobbying efforts, but Global hired a Washington law firm to lobby on defense issues. It also added Cohen to its board last year. And Levin, who received the December campaign contribution, is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Company founder Gary Winnick has golfed with President Clinton, an outing arranged by Terry McAuliffe, a political fund-raiser who now is chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Winnick offered McAuliffe a chance to invest in the company early. McAuliffe invested $100,000, which blossomed into a nearly $18 million profit when he sold his stock in 1999 on the recommendation of his broker, said Jennifer Palmieri, McAuliffe's spokeswoman at the DNC. "Winnick came to Terry through a guy they both know as a business associate. Terry just invested his money and did nothing else," Palmieri said. "To try to compare it as a political analogy to Enron is just ridiculous."

The company's other co-chairman, Lodwrick Cook, a former oil company executive, is a longtime friend and supporter of 2 ex-presidents, Ronald Reagan and George Bush. Bush received a reported $80,000 worth of Global stock options for a speech he made in Tokyo in 1997. At one point, that holding was worth $14.4 million, according to The Wall Street Journal. It is not known whether Bush sold the stock.

What mythological confusion is this? Since when has Mars been god of commerce & Mercury god of war ? Viennese ed. Karl Kraus auth. & publ. "Die Fackel" (The Torch) 1899-1936	The last days of mankind a tragedy in 5 acts   auth. Karl Kraus "a play to be performed on Mars" compiled from Vienna newspaper articles, official bulletins, and overheard conversations during WWI re wartime reporting as popular entertainment. Performed excerpts during the war. "Only fools & profiteers ask for war, Gabriel; centaurs are neither." Xena, Warrior Princess   re false flag provocation	Marcellus a Horatio   (1.1.70)   Good now, sit down, and tell me, he that knows, Why this same strict and most observant watch So nightly toils the subject of the land, And why such daily cast of brazen cannon, And foreign mart for implements of war; Why such impress of shipwrights, whose sore task Does not divide the Sunday from the week; What might be toward, that this sweaty haste Doth make the night joint-labourer with the day: Who is't that can inform me?
armorers   SSA SAIC IMN budget 1.23.02 shellgame Military contractors FPS Ptech Accenture ADCS InQTel Lockheed Martin weapon pimps Titan Corp. RIO Mark Thatcher Simon Mann Victor Bouts CEO contras Bechtel rebuilds Baghdad rubber bullets al Iraq CCP Junius pamphlet Shrub war profiteering conflict speculation Iraq for Sale 'Lock & download' Military contractors thrive as Pentagon pay for high-tech weapons' speedy delivery 10.22.01   Keith Naughton Newsweek

Terrorists scored a direct hit on the American economy, sending it spiraling into recession. The nation's defense contractors are a rare bright spot, with the stocks of many soaring by nearly 30% in the past month. Analysts are predicting that the defense budget will increase 66% to $500 billion by 2005. But the military build-up won't follow the old formula of cranking up production of tanks & battleships. In the war against terrorists, it's software engineers who are the architects of the Arsenal of Democracy. In a flurry of phone calls since the attacks, military procurement officers are asking contractors to accelerate delivery of high- tech spy devices, deadly satellite-guided weapons & sophisticated communications systems. Military suppliers call it "network-centric warfare." The goal: to provide equipt that can find & destroy the enemy in a matter of minutes, rather than hours or days. And the companies that provide such technologies will ultimately win the most defense dollars. Some are smaller players, like L-3 Communications, which makes secure telephone equipt & navigation systems. But old warriors like Raytheon, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman are also changing with the times and going digital. "It's not Rosie the Riveter anymore," says Merrill Lynch defense analyst Byron Callan. "It's Suzie the Software Engineer." Indeed, refugees from the dot-com meltdown are seeking a haven in the military economy. Boeing & Raytheon have hired thousands of programmers in the past few years. Even the humble helmet, largely unchanged since the Battle of Troy, is going high tech. It's now part of the "Land Warrior" system, which comes complete with built-in video camera, night-vision goggles and a microphone for voice communications. The helmet is also linked to a Global Positioning satellite which displays a soldier's location, as well as the whereabouts of other American troops, and suspected enemy positions. The information is all beamed back to battlefield computers, allowing commanders to monitor troops and see what they are seeing simultaneously. To keep costs down, the components of the Land Warrior pgm run on standard Intel Pentium processors and Microsoft Windows software. Even the Land Warrior's rifle is equipped with special sensors that see through smoke, foliage and darkness. This gear, still in the prototype phase, is expected to be used by the Special Forces ground troops in Afghanistan. "We will use highly trained Special Forces with digital capabilities for knowing where the enemy is," says Jon Kutler, a former Navy officer who is now a defense analyst with Quarterdeck Investment Partners. Smarter smart bombs Much of the existing arsenal is getting 21st-century re-engineering. The smart bombs of the gulf war are being upgraded to "brilliant weapons" that fly faster than a bullet and hit a target within 10 ft. Raytheon, maker of the Tomahawks now being fired on Afghanistan, is retrofitting 624 of the cruise missiles with satellite-guidance systems. An even more advanced Tactical Tomahawk coming in two years will be able to change course in midflight and even "loiter" over targets, doing lazy figure-eights in the sky, while it waits for exact coordinates. Big old iron "dumb bombs" are also getting smarter by having satellite-guidance systems clipped to their tails. It's not just the weapons that are being overhauled. The defense industry has remade itself in the last decade. When the cold war ended and the Clinton administration slashed defense spending, the industry began a massive consolidation that continues today. General Dynamics, best known as a maker of tanks & submarines, recently acquired GTE's & Motorola's wireless defense systems, which allow unmanned spy planes to instantly beam information to the ground. Northrop Grumman transformed itself from a free-spending defense contractor into a high-tech company specializing in information technology, precision-guided weapons and the maker of futuristic unmanned spy planes like the Global Hawk. "That is the direction the world is going," Northrop Grumman CEO Kent Kresa told NEWSWEEK. "The computer chip will be a dominant factor in future warfare." In fact, the Pentagon's new battle cry seems to be "Lock & download." 2 Democrats call for scrutiny of bidding to reconstruct Iraq 4.8.03   Elizabeth Becker NY Times Wash.D.C.   2 senior Democratic lawmakers asked today for an investigation into how the Bush admin awards contracts for Iraq reconstruction, with special attention to contracts already given to a subsidiary of Halliburton, co. once headed by VP Cheney. Rep. Waxman D-CA & John D. Dingell D-MI, asked the General Accounting Office, investigative arm of Congress, to examine the bidding process at U.S. Agency for Intl Development, which will award at least $1.6 billion in contracts to rebuild Iraq, and at the Pentagon, which will award tens of millions of dollars of contracts. No one in the White House was available to comment on the request. A spokesman at the development agency said officials had briefed Congress on the contracts and "had answered each & every question in this regard." "We have followed the same expedited procurement procedures under federal law allowing us to limit the number of competing firms in order to shorten the decision time," said agency's deputy asst administrator for public affairs Jeffrey Grieco. "These procedures have been used by U.S. govt in previous conflicts and are completely consistent with the federal acquisition rules." The administration has been accused of bias since it restricted the competition for the major contract to reconstruct Iraq to a handful of companies. The winner would then have a toehold in one of the most lucrative building programs in decades, a task expected to cost up to $100 billion. The administration has said that time constraints and the need for security clearances led it to restrict the bidding. Companies selected are among the most politically connected in the country incl Bechtel Group, which has emerged as one of the top 2 contenders, Louis Berger Group, Fluor and Parsons Corp. The lawmakers wrote to acct office comptroller general David M. Walker that "because the administration has released few, if any, details about these contracts, little is known about the authority to enter into the contracts, or whether proper procurement procedures were followed." Lawmakers questioned the contracts awarded by the Pentagon without competitive bidding to Kellogg Brown & Root, subsidiary of Halliburton. After noting problems with recent Brown & Root contracts incl questionable cost controls for work in the Balkans and $2 million in fines to resolve claims of fraud for work at a military base, the lawmakers asked why the administration had given it "a string of lucrative contracts over the last 2 years. Ties between the vice president & Halliburton have raised concerns about whether the co. has received favorable treatment from the administration," the 2 lawmakers said in the letter. Mr. Cheney was Halliburton's chief executive 1995 to 2000. The method of awarding the postwar reconstruction contracts has angered allies, esp. the British, who say that their companies have been cut out even though their service members are fighting alongside U.S. troops. Experts have questioned whether the restricted bidding violates intl trade rules, because the procurement agreement of the World Trade Organization requires an open & transparent bidding process. The aid agency awarded 2 of its 8 contracts for postwar Iraq. Stevedoring Services of America was awarded a $4.8 million contract to operate the port of Umm Qasr. Intl Resources Group won a $7.1 million contract to provide support for planning, monitoring, coordination, management and reporting on reconstruction & rehabilitation activities. House GOP leaders said today that they might restore President Bush's ability to choose which agency supervises the reconstruction, a decision that could allow the Pentagon to take charge of an effort that would normally be handled by the State Dept. Last week, House & Senate passed bills to pay for the war in Iraq that would require rebuilding money to be spent mostly by the State Dept & other civilian agencies. The White House, which had asked for flexibility to choose which agency ran the rebuilding effort, and had indicated it preferred military control, had asked congressional leaders to rethink their position. Auditors take aim at Halliburton in Iraq 6.15.04   Reuters Wash.D.C.   Pentagon auditors took aim at VP Cheney's old (sic) co. Halliburton Tuesday and said they found "significant deficiencies" in its handling of billions of dollars of work in Iraq. In testimony at a hearing on Iraq contracts on Capitol Hill, the Pentagon's audit agency head cited problems with the TX based firm's billing system & sub-contracts and potential over-charging for meals served to troops. Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root has the potential to earn more than $18 billion under 2 major contracts in Iraq, one to handle logistics for U.S. troops and another to restore Iraq's oil infrastructure. "DCAA has identified significant deficiencies in KBR's estimating practices related to the award of subcontract costs," said Defense Contract Audit Agency dir. Wm Reed in prepared testimony. He said these deficiencies led to potential overpricing at dining halls in Kuwait & Iraq for U.S. troops and that the military was holding back on paying $186 million for meals. The company's own internal analysis found KBR probably over-estimated meal charges by about 19% but military auditors said this could be as high as 36%, Reed told the House of Representatives Committee on Govt Reform. Halliburton, being investigated by several govt depts for its contracts in Iraq, has vigorously defended its work there. The co. is a popular target of criticism by Democrats during this presidential election year, a focus the Republicans say is driven by a bid to damage the credibility of the Vice President, who ran Halliburton from 1995-2000. Rep. Henry Waxman D-CA told Cheney in a letter last weekend that Cheney key staffer Lewis Libby, and other sr admin officials were briefed about Defense Dept plan to award Iraq deals to Halliburton. Cheney's office denies any wrongdoing and says the vice president did nothing improper and played no role in getting his former co. lucrative Iraq business. Waxman was expected at Tuesday's hearing to blast committee chair Rep. Tom Davis R-VA for not allowing former Halliburton employees to give testimony about alleged co. overspending & waste in Iraq. A GAO report presented at the hearing found some problems with the use of Halliburton's logistics contract to do work in Iraq. "We found the use of the LOGCAP contract in Kuwait & Iraq was not adequately planned, nor was it planned in accordance with applicable Army guidance," said GAO comptroller general David Walker. He said work plans, or task orders, were frequently revised which made oversight difficult. For example, a task order supporting troops in Iraq was revised 7 times in less than a year. Another for logistical support for troops in Kuwait was changed 18 times between Sept 2002 & Dec. 2003. Auditors also found problems with other contracts in Iraq incl billing issues in a $420 million deal given to San Diego CA based Titan Corp to provide translators. One Titan's employee & a subcontractor were named in a prison abuse scandal in Iraq and Reed said the co. told govt it would "adjust" previously billed work done by these people amounting to over $178,000. Auditors are also looking at a contract held by CACI Intl, which provided interrogators for Iraq and which has been named in the prison abuse scandal.

Dynamite truck overturns in Hall County 10.28.02   Mike Morris Atlanta Journal-Constitution 2 Hall County roads were closed this morning after a truck loaded with dynamite overturned. Sheriff's dispatchers said the wreck occurred about 7:45 a.m. at the intersection of Tanners Mill & McEver Lake roads. The truck was filled with dynamite, blasting caps, blasting cap boosters and 8,000 pounds of a liquid gel explosive known as Apex Gold. There were no explosions. The liquid explosive leaked onto the highway, and hazardous materials workers created a dike to contain the spill, said Hall County fire chief & emergency management dir. Mike Satterfield. The other explosive materials were secured, he added. The truck driver suffered minor injuries and was taken to a Gainesville hospital, Satterfield said. The wreck occurred in a residential area, and officials evacuated homes within a quarter-mile of the crash site, said state Transportation Dept spokesman Bert Brantley. Both Tanners Mill, also known as GA 211, and McEver Lake roads were closed a half-mile in each direction from the accident site, which is in the eastern part of the county near the Jackson County line. Big overruns plague spy sat pgm Technical problems and cost run-up could lead to restructuring of Boeing's contract. 12.17.02   Peter Pae L.A. Times ¹ • A new generation of spy satellites being developed by Boeing Co. is under intense scrutiny from Congress, which raised concerns that the supersecret program faces significant cost overruns and delays, Capitol Hill sources said Monday. The potential problems with the nation's largest intelligence project, most of it under development at Boeing facilities in Seal Beach & El Segundo, could lead Congress to call for a major restructuring of the effort, a source familiar with the discussions said. The satellite project has been estimated to cost more than $25 billion over the next 2 decades. Still, the overruns, which could hit $600 million to $900 million in 2003 alone, are unlikely to force Congress to cancel the program or to seek another contractor to handle the work, a congressional source said. "We're extremely concerned about where it is going, particularly from a cost perspective," the source said. "But it's not a showstopper. It's too late for that."   [ Ed Teller's bright pebbles ] In 1999, Boeing beat out Lockheed Martin Co. to develop the spy satellites, primarily because it promised to deliver the satellites with a radical new design. The contract represented a stunning blow to Lockheed, which had been building spy satellites for 40 years. The project, known as Future Imagery Architecture, calls for creating a constellation of satellites equipped with powerful telescopes & radar to gather clear & frequent images of enemy troops in darkness or through cloud cover. Boeing's work is being overseen by the Pentagon's National Reconnaissance Office, which operates satellites that take pictures of military compounds around the world. Much of the work is centered at half a dozen facilities in S.California. Boeing's partners incl Raytheon Co., Harris Corp. and Eastman Kodak Co. Because of the project's top-secret status, it's unknown how many people are working on the program, although analysts believe that it involves more than 5,000 engineers and possibly an additional 5,000 local support personnel. Virtually everything about the spy program, its dollar amount, the number of satellites to be built and the capabilities of the craft, is secret. Even the duration of the contract is classified. Pentagon officials & industry analysts say in general terms that the program has been plagued by technical troubles, mainly because of the sheer complexity of developing the system and because the Pentagon asked for additional capabilities after last year's terrorist attacks. "It appears that there are 2 main problems," said military think tank Lexington Institute analyst Loren Thompson. "Boeing bid quite aggressively on the satellite contract and is having difficulty with execution, and the govt underestimated the complexity of its own requirements." He estimated that the satellites may not be ready for deployment until 2008, or 2 years behind schedule, and the total cost of the system could nearly double to $17 billion by 2010 from an initial projection of $9 billion. Nonetheless, said Thompson, "the Pentagon is over a barrel. It doesn't have the time to start over because existing satellites are getting old." Aerospace research firm Teal Group sr space analyst Marco A. Caceres said the Pentagon has been looking to launch new satellites that not only would be a fraction of cost & size of the current generation but also have more capabilities. "You're not only trying to develop new stuff but trying to put it in a smaller spacecraft," he said. The half-dozen U.S. spy satellites orbiting the Earth cost $1 billion to $1.5 billion each, according to Caceres. Officials at Boeing & the Pentagon would not talk about the satellite program, citing its classified nature. Boeing's Integrated Defense Systems unit pres. James Albaugh, overseeing development of the satellite network, said in April that the program was on schedule & within budget. The program passed a preliminary design review this year. Boeing's shares rose 52¢ to $31.92 on NYSE. Halliburton unit expands war-repair role 7.10.03   Stephen J. Glain & Robert Schlesinger Globe Staff Baghdad   They travel like foreign dignitaries, their SUVs escorted by 2 US Army Humvees & security detail led by a master sgt. No Iraqi official is too busy to meet them and when it comes to Iraq's most precious resource, oil, they are granted total & instant access. Officials from Kellogg, Brown & Root Services, a subsidiary of oil-services giant Halliburton Co., are using a broadly worded contract to evaluate & repair Iraq's petroleum infrastructure, ''as directed'' by the U.S. govt, to gain a huge head start over potential competitors in redeveloping the country's vast, outdated oil industry. With much of Iraqi reconstruction bogged down by sabotage, chronic looting, and bureaucracy, KBR, which also is supposed to repair war-damaged oil wells and provide general logistical support to the U.S. Army, has expanded its role to include everything from gasoline imports to laundry services. Some Iraqi oil officials say KBR is using what appears to be an open-ended mandate to effectively corner a market coveted by its rivals and to win business Iraqis can do themselves. ''We don't need KBR,'' says Baghdad's Daura Refinery Co. general manager Dathar Al Khashab, which, like Iraq's other refineries, badly needs new equipt after a generation of sanctions. ''I can work with any other company to do this job.'' KBR's work in Iraq comes under 2 different contracts. In 2001 the company was awarded a 10-year contract under the Army Logistics Civil Augmentation Program, known as Logcap, that calls for the co. to provide a wide range of logistical services to the U.S. Army. By the end of May, KBR had received $425 million under that contract, according to correspondence between Rep. Henry A. Waxman D-CA, House Govt Reform Committee ranking Democrat, and Dept of the Army. Through that contract, KBR had prepositioned personnel & equipt in the Iraq region, deployments that in the Army's eyes made the co. the logical choice for an oil infrastructure contract that was awarded soon after the war in Iraq began. That KBR contract, according to Waxman, who is investigating the deal, has ''no set time limit and no dollar limit and is apparently structured in such a way as to encourage the contract to increase its costs and, consequently, the costs to the taxpayer.'' It took Waxman's investigation to uncover key details of the KBR contract, which was awarded by the Army Corps of Engineers as part of a secret process by U.S. govt agencies charged with rebuilding postwar Iraq. Several of the companies involved in the closed-door bidding, allowed in times of a national crisis under federal procurement laws, have close ties to the White House or were major contributors to the Bush presidential campaign. In addition to KBR, the winning bidders included San Francisco-based Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff, which was awarded a $780 million contract to supervise Iraqi reconstruction. Bechtel, together with Halliburton, donated more than $2 million in campaign contributions, primarily to GOP candidates, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. From 1995 to 2000, Halliburton was headed by now VP Cheney. KBR, according to an Army Corp of Engineers official responding in early April to Waxman's written queries, was awarded a 2 year, $7 billion contract to put out oil well fires and evaluate the state of petroleum fields in postwar Iraq. By early July, 5 ''task orders'' had been issued under the infrastructure contract worth more than $282 million, according to a Army Corps of Engineers website. The orders incl training & advice for safely shutting down equipt & assessing damage, repairing facilities, building base camp facilities, and bringing oil into Iraq while indigenous distribution systems are still being repaired. The contract was designed to cover a ''worst-case estimate'' of possible damage, wrote Lt Gen Robert Flowers, and ''those services necessary to support the mission in the near term.'' Flowers gave Waxman his written assurance that ''no other contractor could satisfy the mission requirements.'' That's not how many Iraqis see it. They say KBR's preponderant role in postwar reconstruction reinforces local suspicion that the invasion of Iraq was more about promoting American corporate interests than removing Saddam Hussein. At a time when U.S. officials in Iraq have been criticized for employing American companies to do what Iraqis are capable of doing on their own, KBR manages laundry services and a hair salon at U.S. occupation HQ. ''KBR is performing tasks as directed by our clients to provide for the continuity of operations of the Iraqi oil infrastructure, as well as the logistical support services required as part of the Logcap contract,'' wrote KBR public & community relations manager Cathy Gist in response to e-mailed queries. Iraqi & U.S. officials offer different interpretations of KBR's core business in Iraq. U.S. adviser to the Iraqi oil ministry Philip Carroll says the terms of KBR's contract limits the co. to a survey of war-related damage and recommendations on how to fix it. The survey should not cover equipt damaged or worn out during the 13-year-old UN embargo imposed on Iraq after Baghdad's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, he said. By year's end, according to Carroll, KBR will submit its report for evaluation by the oil ministry, which will use it as a blueprint for the repair of Iraq's oil infrastructure. ''When they come up with a plan they will submit it to the ministry, and we will review it and compare it with the terms of their contract,'' he said. To hear Iraqi oil officials tell it, the rebuilding process has already begun, with KBR as both consultant & supplier. Daura refinery's Khashab said there is little war damage to evaluate, because the facility survived the war unscathed. ''We can go straight'' into rebuilding, he said. ''The refinery is very old, and KBR is happy to help us. We're sitting down with them, and they're working to get what we need.'' Khashab says he & KBR are discussing ways to upgrade Daura's capacity to develop light-oil products, such as lubricating oil. It is a procurement job Khashab says he is perfectly capable of doing without KBR's help. ''But since KBR is here,'' he said, ''why not work with them?''

KBR's Gist said that the co. is conducting ''emergency repairs'' of the infrastructure. ''KBR personnel continue to assess the situations and inspect the oil infrastructure, performing repairs as directed by the Corps of Engineers,'' she wrote. ''However these assessments & reviews are not complete, and it is too early to speculate on an overall condition or course of action.''
Waxman, when informed of the scope of the co. activities in Iraq, expressed reservations about KBR's expanding role. ''It's important that we provide essential services to our servicemen & women, but some of the services Halliburton is providing go beyond that and certainly give the appearance of a `Full Halliburton Employment Act,' '' Waxman said. ''There may be good reasons why taxpayers are paying a multinational corp. like Halliburton to cut hair and wash shirts, but it would be helpful to know why.''

KBR has also been tasked to arrange overland shipments of gasoline to ease fuel shortages following waves of postwar looting that crippled Iraqi oil production. Thousands of tanker trucks are entering Iraq each week from Syria, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Jordan, nearly all of which are fixed by KBR agents. It is a business with which the Iraqis have years of experience; since the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq provided Jordan with discounted oil in return for Amman's support of Baghdad's invasion of Kuwait.
Those shipments ended with the coalition assault in March, and Iraqi truckers have been out of work since then. KBR agents have hired foreign truckers, not Iraqi ones, say Iraqi transport companies. ''We have enough trucks to do this ourselves,'' says local truckers' union member Shahab Ahmed Hamid. ''We were promised subcontracts from the Americans, but no Iraqi trucks have been employed.''

DOT: MARAD must improve oversight of Title XI 3.31.03   R.G. Edmonson Journal Of Commerce Online Wash.D.C.   The Maritime Administration must tighten its financial oversight & controls when administering the Title XI shipbuilding loan guarantee pgm, according to Transportation Dept inspector general's report. The report, which was released Monday, calls on Marad to review loan applications more effectively, exercise more rigorous financial oversight of borrowers during the term of the loan, and provide better monitoring of vessels and shipyards under a loan guarantee. Marad agreed with many of the changes, incl the use of an external financial advisor to review applications. The Title XI program provides govt loan guarantees for new ship construction at U.S. yards, and renovation of U.S. yards. It is a popular program among the U.S. maritime industry, and has been strongly supported on Capitol Hill. Since 2001 Bush admin has attempted to "zero out" the program with $4 million budget requests that would allow Marad only to administer existing loans. However, Title XI supporters, incl Sen. Trent Lott, R-MS & Sen. John Breaux, D-LA, persuaded Congress to add $32 million to Marad's 2003 budget for the program. However, the program has had some serious setbacks in recent years. In 2001, American Classic Voyages filed for bankruptcy, leaving Marad with $367 million in bad loans on two cruise ships under construction. Sen. John McCain, R-AZ, longtime Title XI opponent, and Rep. Frank Wolf, R-VA requested the inspector general's investigation after American Classic Voyages' default. 22-year-old Pentagon arms dealer also marketed to civilians 3.28.08   Nick Juliano Raw Story The 22-year-old Florida man who allegedly provided old, substandard Chinese-manufactured ammunition to troops in Afghanistan as part of a nearly $300 million Pentagon contract also started a private company that specialized in selling foreign munitions to civilian gun enthusiasts, according to public documents, . Efraim E. Diveroli, 22, could face federal fraud charges after he tried to pass off the Chinese ammo as manufactured in Hungary. His company, AEY Inc., was banned from doing future business with the Defense Dept after the NY Times revealed the shady circumstances surrounding a $298 million contract he received in January 2007. In addition to the Miami-based AEY, Diveroli started a separate company, AmmoWorks, which advertised products such as Lithuanian GGG .308 Ammunition, MP-5 Magazines and an RPK40 magazine. A toll-free phone number listed on AmmoWorks Web site rings directly to AEY's Miami headquarters. The company's Web site was taken down after RAW STORY began asking questions. A company representative refused to comment on the connection between the two companies. "I really wouldn't be the person to speak to about that. I don't have anything to say. Thank you," Boz Kramer, who was listed as the director of AmmoWorks' commercial division, told RAW STORY Wednesday. Unlike AEY, AmmoWorks did not receive any lucrative govt contracts, according to several database searches. But the two companies apparently shared office space and support staff in Miami, and Florida public documents list Diveroli as AmmoWorks' sole officer. AEY apparently did the bulk of its business supplying weapons and ammunition to Afghan security forces, and it received govt contracts for other agencies dating back at least 2004. The company is now suspected of fraud for misidentifying where it purchased munitions abroad, the Times reported Friday. Like AEY, AmmoWorks also specialized in re-selling foreign ammo, and the company boasted of its govt contracts on its Web site. "Ammoworks has produced hundreds of millions of dollars worth of firearms, ammo, and tactical gear among other things for our special forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ammoworks is a huge supporter of our troops and does everything in its power to not only insure a quality product but a product that functions extremely well in battle situations. In 2006 Ammoworks began to import extra goods that were produced for Government contract in Eastern Europe and Asia. We started as a wholesaler but in 2008 we will be branching out to incorporate a full scale retail web site. All goods are insured by our company and certified from the manufacturer. Everything we sell is backed by our money back guarantee. We are able to offer the best prices because we are the importer and are direct with the factories in production of goods overseas." After RAW STORY contacted AmmoWorks Thursday to inquire about its connection to Diveroli and AEY, the company's Web site was taken down. According to a domain registry Diveroli started AmmoWorks.org in December 2007. The following flyer, which was removed from the site, was recovered from a search engine's cache: A Florida Certificate of Domestication, signed by Diveroli, shows that AmmoWorks was incorporated in Florida March 6. AmmoWorks apparently grew from another company, Manchester Property Corporation, which Diveroli incorporated in Nevada on Aug. 6, 2004. By the time Diveroli incorporated AmmoWorks in Florida three weeks ago, he must have known the New York Times was investigating AEY's suspicious defense contract. The paper published the results of its months long investigation Thursday; the article referred to a conversation a reporter had with Diveroli late last year. One of the biggest mysteries surrounding AEY remains how the company run by a few inexperienced 20-somethings managed to procure hundreds of millions of dollars worth of govt contracts; the House Oversight Committee is planning an investigation. AEY's vice president was 25-year-old David Packouz, who is a licensed masseur. Another 25-year-old, Levi Meyer, briefly served as a general manager. Myer told the Times, "I'm not involved in that mess anymore." Florida filings also list a Yeshaya Diveroli as secretary of AEY. Despite the Diveroli connection and shared phone line, none of the known AEY employees were listed on AmmoWorks now-defunct Web site, which listed eight sales representatives. Kramer apparently is the point of contact for this Craigslist classified ad seeking an AEY administrative assistant. It's not clear how many employees AmmoWorks still has. At least one sales rep listed on AmmoWorks site said when RAW STORY reached him Thursday that he was no longer with the company. AmmoWorks primarily advertised its products on online forums catering to gun enthusiasts. "We are a major distributor for this .308 ammo and we are distributing quite a bit to various online retailers and we are still running an exclusive to everyone who can purchase a min pallet purchase," Kramer wrote on one forum last August. "Please act fast because our stock is dwindling and once its gone its gone."

House to investigate defense contract to firm that shipped Chinese-made ammo to Afghanistan 3.27.08   Nick Juliano Raw Story A lengthy investigation published Thursday reveals that the Pentagon gave an inexperienced 22-year-old a $300 million contract to provide ammunition to Afghanistan. The shady deal resulted in decades old, substandard munitions being delivered to US and Afghan troops fighting on the front lines of the war on terror. Following publication of a lengthy New York Times article, the House Oversight Committee announced it would investigate AEY Inc., a fledgling company that thrived after 2003 as the US government began handing out billions of dollars to private defense contractors. Chairman Henry Waxman invited company officials as well as representatives of the State and Defense departments to testify at a hearing next month, according to a news release. The results of that investigation, which sent seven reporters across three continents, were published Thursday. But to arm the Afghan forces that it hopes will lead this fight, the American military has relied since early last year on a fledgling company led by a 22-year-old man whose vice president was a licensed masseur. With the award last January of a federal contract worth as much as nearly $300 million, the company, AEY Inc., which operates out of an unmarked office in Miami Beach, became the main supplier of munitions to Afghanistan’s army and police forces. Since then, the company has provided ammunition that is more than 40 years old and in decomposing packaging, according to an examination of the munitions by The New York Times and interviews with American and Afghan officials. Much of the ammunition comes from the aging stockpiles of the old Communist bloc, including stockpiles that the State Dept and NATO have determined to be unreliable and obsolete, and have spent millions of dollars to have destroyed. In purchasing munitions, the contractor has also worked with middlemen and a shell company on a federal list of entities suspected of illegal arms trafficking. The company's president was 22-year-old Efraim E. Diveroli, who ran the company with a 25-year-old from Miami Beach, Florida. Waxman has requested that Diveroli testify, along with company vice president David M. Packouz and Levi Meyer its general manager. On his MySpace page, Diveroli claims that "problems in high school" forced him to work through most of his teenage years, but that "of course im (sic) a super nice guy!!!" "I finally got a decent apartment and im (sic) content for the moment," he writes on the page, "however i (sic) definately (sic) have the desire to be very successful in my business and this does take up alot (sic) of my time. After the Times began asking questions about the suspicious contract, the Army suspended the company from future contract efforts. The Associated Press confirms that the company's contracts have been suspended because it shipped Chinese-made ammunition "in violation of its contract and US law." AEY is apparently still in business, and it is hiring, according to this Craigslist ad. When asked about the report, a woman who answered the phone at the number listed told RAW STORY, "I'm sorry, I'm not at liberty to comment on that. Have a nice day." She immediately hung up. Ammo provided by AEY included some manufactured in China more than 40 years ago, and other munitions provided by the company were in such bad shape, the Army decided not to use it, according to the Times. Diveroli apparently had little experience in arms procurement, and the Times article suggests his dealings with the Albanian government were corrupt. An audio recording of Diveroli, mentioned in the article, was discovered on this YouTube site apparently based in Hong Kong. A transcript is availablehere.. The company and the Army would not divulge where the ammunition AEY provided came from, but the Times reports that interviews and records from several sources show the company "shopped from stocks in the old Eastern bloc, including Albania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Montenegro, Romania and Slovakia." In the audio recording, Diveroli is speaking to Kosta Trebicka, an Albanian businessman, about Ylli Pinari, director of an Albanian agency in charge of arms exports. Diveroli says he "can't play monkey business with the mafia ... and all those fucking guys in Albania" because his contract is with the US govt and "everyone is watching me." Trebicka, who was acting as a middle man for the deal, said "Pinari and his mafia guys ... will create lots of problems," but he tried to calm the young AEY president. "Probably I will be invited in Washington DC from the CIA guys and from my friends over there," Trebicka tells Diveroli in the conversation recorded June 11, 2007. "Two weeks from now I will come to Florida to shake hands with you and discuss future deals." Diveroli stresses to Trebicka the need to push a Pinari to go through with a a sale of material, according to the recording. "Call him up, beg him, kiss him, whatever..." Diveroli tells his Albanian contact. "Send one of your girls to fuck him... Let's get him happy. Maybe he gives you one more chance to do the job. No?" The Times says Diveroli was entering a shady and lightly regulated world. The international arms business operates partly in the light and partly in shadows, and is littered with short-lived shell companies, middlemen and official corruption. Governments have tried to regulate it more closely for years, with limited success. As Mr. Diveroli began to fill the Army’s huge orders, he was entering a shadowy world, and in his brief interview he suggested that he was aware that corruption could intrude on his dealings in Albania. “What goes on in the Albanian Ministry of Defense?” he said. “Who’s clean? Who’s dirty? Don’t want to know about it.” The way AEY’s business was structured, Mr. Diveroli, at least officially, did not deal directly with Albanian officials. Instead, a middleman company registered in Cyprus, Evdin Ltd., bought the ammunition and sold it to his company. The local packager involved in the deal, Mr. Trebicka, said that he suspected that Evdin’s purpose was to divert money to Albanian officials. Albanian political observers say the Times story just begins to scratch the surface of corruption there.

gnawing hollow bones No "foreclosure" 4.4.03   Alan L. Maki MN for Peace & Social Justice Eveleth MN small mining community in Iron Range   Janet Johnson & her 2 children face foreclosure & eviction from their family's life-long home. Janet's father, a Range miner his entire life, built their family home high on the hill overlooking the Range in Eveleth at 1001 Jones St in 1948. The family, his wife Shirley, better known in the community as the "baby nurse", and their 5 children moved in before the house was completed. Tomi continued working on the house after his shift in the mine and on holidays. Meantime, the family raised over 12 foster children. Tomi & family spent leisure time at area lakes & walking through the woods. Tomi & Shirley spent some of their leisure time socializing and dancing with progressive Finns at Mesaba Park, even during those dark years when some people were afraid to go to Mesaba Park. Tomi worked on the family home as he could afford to purchase the building supplies needed. Building the home this way, it was paid for by the time it was completed in 1978. Tomi owned his home. He didn't owe the Miners Bank. He always paid his property taxes on time. Tomi was an active United Steelworkers of America member. After a lifetime working in the mines, beginning at Lake Mine, then Erie, later to become LTV, he "retired." Tomi became terminally ill with pancreatic cancer, not uncommon among miners. While dying he would lovingly play with his grandchildren and do a little work on the family home; there were still "finishing touches" & repairs. Tomi also worked in a forestry program for seniors after his retirement until his illness prevented his participation. … Tomi didn't know anything about Wills & Estate Planning. Mine owners repeatedly used "eminent domain" powers to steal homes on the Range from miners as companies needed to dig bigger & deeper pits to extract ore for profits to far off bank accounts, a policy that has left Iron Range, one of the richest regions of the world, impoverished today, not unlike Appalachia. After Tomi died, wife Shirley was struck suddenly with Alzheimer's disease. There was no Will, no Estate Planning. Janet and her small son Josh and now a small daughter, Crystal, had been living at home with her parents on and off, often to help out, other times out of economic necessity. The family assumed Janet would continue living in the family home. After all, it was what her mother & father had wanted for her & the kids. The hospital demanded the family home be sold to cover huge medical bills accumulated for Shirley's care & treatment of Alzheimer's. Between working, trying to care for her mother, and taking care of her young children Janet never thought she'd lose her home. Lawyers for the hospital … offered to do her a "favor". They arranged for a "friend", a real-estate speculator named Douglas Ahlgren Sr who made a fortune from miners' lost jobs due to mine closure since the early 80's, to take title to the property as the only way she could stay in her home. They explained to Janet that her home would be sold for over $40,000.00 on the open market and there was no way she could afford that because no one was going to give her credit because she had no credit; but there was a loophole. they told her. If she signed the deed to Ahlgren for $23K payable to the hospital and other medical facilities, Janet could then purchase her home back from Ahlgren for $40K plus interest. … After 3 years of trying to keep her children, making payments to buy her own home back from Ahlgren of over $11K to date, Janet has been served with foreclosure papers because she missed a couple payments while she unemployed, w/ less than $150.00 a week in unemployment compensation. Trying desperately to search for work with a car that has taken most of her money for repairs, Janet turned to welfare to ask for help. The only help she could get was about $90 a month in food stamps, on condition she fulfill requirements of searching for work that cost her more than the money she gets in food stamps! Welfare insists she comply with this job search, though well aware the job situation on the Range is zilch to non-existent. Janet had been working for Sykes. Sykes' dirty deed in Eveleth, tax-free status, poverty wages paid for stressful work, leaving an expensive building behind and hundreds of workers unemployed. Mrs. Ahlgren called Janet to tell her how bad she felt that they had to foreclose on her. The Ahlgrens have done this to miners & their families repeatedly. … Writing another sad chapter of Iron Range history 5.9.03   Linda Tyssen Mesabi Daily News Another mine closing, another sad chapter in the history of the Iron Range, where job loss has become a way of life. Then maybe it's been a way of life here all along, as mines close and reopen and close again, and men and women are left to wonder who will be next. So it is with yet another in May 2003. On an otherwise beautiful spring afternoon, life as they knew it was changing for the men and women of EVTAC Mining. They were gathered at a town hall to start over, to learn how hard-rock miners, some nearly ready for retirement, others still raising young families, can put themselves back on the job market. The rug had been pulled out, just as it was at LTV and Reserve and Butler Taconite. The survivors are dwindling, and every time there's bad news about the iron & steel industry, mine workers across the Range wonder if they're to be the next victims. The parking lot outside the hall was filled with the stuff of American steel, Ford pickups and Chevys and Dodge Rams. "Unions - We Build America,'' read one bumper sticker, now bitterly ironic. There's nothing certain anymore, the workers were saying. All the years they've worked toward a decent retirement could be gone, as corporate executives play out a scene common across America. They'll file Chapt. 11, they'll declare bankruptcy, they'll be off the hook. Let the workers worry about the golden years on their own, never mind they have pensions coming to them. There are programs to help and counselors, victims of other layoffs at other mines, to guide them through the troubles that lie ahead. There are instructions on life after EVTAC. Don't get discouraged, don't argue with the family, don't overspend, don't use your credit cards, don't leave the lights on or the water running, don't do foolish things. Learn to dress for success, learn to sell the skills you have. Don't just say you ran a bulldozer, the counselor says; tell the job market you know how to fix the dozer and check the fluid levels, tell the job market you can weld and fit pipes and grind valves, tell the job market you know electronics and blasting and tire pressures and truck driving and accounting and most of all, tell the job market you know how to run a computer and file a job application on-line. Then start over at age 57 when your kids are grown and you're ready to enjoy the fruits of your labors. Start over at 30 with kids just starting school, or at 45 w/ college, weddings and you're just getting caught up. … American workers dug iron ore out of the ground and shipped it across the Great Lakes to furnaces in the east where workers turned it into American steel for American cars, trucks, refrigerators, and airplanes. The world hasn't lost its need for iron ore and steel, nor should it have abandoned the American worker the way it has done. Experts say American workers must adapt to changing times, global economy of jobs going where labor is cheaper. They say the American worker must learn computers and how to do insurance claims over the phone and how to make a living selling tourism. LTV folded, Reserve Mining closed; in 1985 Butler Taconite shut down and they turned the plant into scrap metal. Mine pits & dumps around them have been part of the Iron Range landscape for a reason.This Iron Range should survive because we have an iron ore resource like no other on the planet and we have workers who are second to none. The American way should not be anything less.

Abandoned by Sykes   Rural community paid millions in incentives for call ctr 3 years ago. Soon, vacant bldg might be all that's left 11.24.02   S.Barancik, K.Bennett St.Petersburg Times Eveleth MN   Eveleth pop. 3,865, rugged blip of a town 60 miles north of Duluth means snap snow chains on the car and drive east on Grant Avenue. The world's largest hockey stick, a 107-foot-long replica carved from aspen and aimed at a 700 lb puck, is on the left. A little farther are remnants of the region's past: an office of the United Steelworkers' union and Evtac, a troubled mining operation that's extracting what's left of local iron deposits. Just past U.S. 53 sits the dashed hope for Eveleth's future: Progress Park, 240 acre clearing designed to lure high- tech businesses. Its first tenant, refurbisher of Motorola cell phones & other electronics, recently laid off more than half its staff. Sykes Enterprises Inc., the other tenant, is telling its 200-plus employees it will lay them off 12.7.02. The Tampa co. opened its 432-seat call center here scarcely 2 years ago after receiving millions of dollars in govt incentives. Founder & CEO John Sykes says changing client needs & global economic forces left the co. no choice. If anything, he says, Sykes was too compassionate. For the good of shareholders, certain languishing call centers, including Eveleth's, should have been closed earlier. Customer service technician Karl Oberstar Jr. was in his cubicle at Sykes when he heard the bad news. It would be his second pink slip in 2 years. Oberstar, 51, lost his $20-an-hour job and a chunk of his pension when LTV Steel Mining Co. fired 1,400 local workers. Now, his $7.25-an-hour excursion into the Information Age was ending, too. But what really burns Oberstar, who also serves as mayor of nearby Gilbert (pop. 1,847), was how much it cost to bring Sykes to town: $3-million in cash from state & local govts, nearly $1-million of construction work to prepare the site, and 22 acres of land, enough property for a second call center. That's a significant commitment in a place like Eveleth, where the annual city budget totals $6 million. In return, Sykes invested millions but promised nothing: no minimum number of hires, no particular wage, not even to stay. So now Sykes is abandoning its operation at the corner of Sykes Blvd & Progress Parkway, and moving on to places that offer cheaper labor, Philippines or India. "They're thieves in the night," says weekly Eveleth Scene & Gilbert Herald publ. Jim Krause. Eveleth's big bet on Sykes is an example of the lengths some communities will go in the effort to land new jobs. It's also the very formula that Sykes, co. that answers customer calls for clients such as computer hardware & software makers, phone co. SBC Communications Inc., Delta Air Lines and credit card issuer Providian Financial Corp., has exploited to grow into a $500-million technical-support powerhouse. Find a small college town that's eager to land good jobs for its young adults. Demand a standard package of free land, millions in cash, a waiver of building permit fees and a street named Sykes Boulevard. If local leaders balk, tip your hat, walk out the door, and call back 2 or 3 years later. That's what happened when Sykes talked with local leaders here in 1996. Some of them began questioning details of the package. Chief executive Sykes was wary anyway, given the community's strong unions and relatively high wages. "It was just kind of, 'Here's the deal, take it or leave it,"' says Iron Range Resources & Rehabilitation Agency superv. loan officer Matt Sjoberg, which footed most of the bill for the Eveleth deal. "'If you don't want to deal with us, we'll find someone else that will.'" Though communities from Missoula MT to Ocala rejected Sykes' package, many couldn't resist. From 1992 to 1999, Sykes extended its reach from a lone call center in Sterling, CO to facilities in 15 U.S. communities. The co. returned to sign the Eveleth deal on its own terms Nov. 1999. By Jan. 2000, Sykes' stock was selling for $50 per share. But faltering U.S. economy forced change. Demand for Sykes' technical support declined along with computer hardware & software sales. Cash-strapped clients began looking to Sykes' competitors for cheaper options overseas, where laid-off software developers were lining up for call center jobs. By the end of 2000, its stock had fallen below $4 a share. It closed Friday at $2.91, up 9#162;. After a decade of rapid growth, Sykes' U.S. call centers were increasingly idle. Meanwhile, work poured into centers in India, Costa Rica and the Philippines, where as many as 6 highly educated workers can be had for the cost of one U.S. high school graduate. As recently as 9.30.02, co. overseas call centers were operating at more than 90% capacity, versus a co.wide average of 68%. To survive, Sykes has undertaken a dual campaign of feverish growth overseas and quiet U.S. contraction. Rural call centers in Bismarck ND & Greeley CO. closed earlier this year; centers in Scottsbluff NE and Eveleth will soon follow, as may others. Co. officials say they intended to stay in Eveleth. But when a large client, reportedly SBC's high-speed Internet division, asked Sykes to consolidate its agents into certain call centers, Eveleth lost out. "The only obligation we had was to open the doors," CFO Mike Kipphut says. Adds CEO Sykes: "If you are not a global co. today, you are not going to be in business tomorrow." For Oberstar & other local officials, loss of Sykes sparked both anger and a scramble to line up another employer at the call center, an effort Sykes is supporting. Neighboring Virginia (pop. 9,157) mayor Carolyn Gentilini says she & other officials were probably "outrageously foolish" to accept Sykes' terms. But pressure to fill the void left by mine closures was strong. Local leaders also were soothed by co. "commitment to rural America communities," as then-chief executive David Grimes put it. "They were very convincing," Gentilini says, "and we were very needy." Before Sen. Paul Wellstone's plane crashed 2 miles short of the airport here last month, few Americans had heard of Eveleth. Tourism here focused on skiing, fishing and other outdoor activities. "Take Advantage of Our Good Nature" is the area's trademarked slogan. American steelmakers & their customers have relied on mining communities of the Iron Range, as region is called, for more than a century. European & Scandinavian immigrants flocked here in the late 19th century after iron deposits were discovered in the rocky, often frozen soil. The iron was so valuable 100 years ago that when deposits were discovered beneath Eveleth, the fledgling city was relocated. The success that meant economic dependence on iron also led to depletion of the highest-quality deposits. In 1941, state & local officials created the Iron Range Resources & Rehabilitation Agency to diversify the economy. Companies began experimenting with less valuable taconite, a rock containing roughly 25% iron that can be ground into dust, split by magnets, rolled into pellets and superheated for use by steel mills. Taconite mines remain the area's biggest & best-paying employers. Future of metal mining here is bleak, however. Bankruptcy & consolidation have trimmed domestic steel industry production capacity. Iron subsidized by foreign govts is cheaper than what nonsubsidized, union mines in northeastern Minnesota produce. LTV's mine closure last year devastated the local economy. It may not be the last. Evtac, Eveleth mining co., recently laid off 37 workers and may shut down entirely in early 2003, taking more than 400 jobs with it. Against this backdrop, call centers & out-of-state employers have been invited. When Sykes put its take-it-or-leave-it deal back on the table in 1999, Virginia mayor Gentilini worried that $7.25 an hour was "not really a living wage." But she considered Sykes a foot in the door to the high-tech world. An editorial in the Mesabi Daily News called the economic incentive package "a wise investment." Oberstar & others with little or no computer experience would become New Economy experts. Early developments seemed to prove the optimists right. Not long after Sykes signed on, Delta Dental Plan of Minnesota and Blue Cross & Blue Shield of MN opened claims processing centers in the Range, offering significantly higher wages. Economic development official Sjoberg thinks Sykes' presence boosted the community's credibility. But the Sykes operation was troubled from its start, construction of the call center.

incentives   $3million cash   $1million construction to prepare site   22 acres land

payoff   Temporary work for local construction crews   $10million wages to local employees   Transferable skills   $150,000 in property taxes

Despite promising to try to hire a local general contractor & local crews, Sjoberg says, Sykes brought in a general contractor from Oklahoma. The contractor, in turn, awarded jobs to low-bidding, out-of-state crews it had worked with on previous Sykes call centers. Vandals responded, spray painting "Rat Rat Go Home" on the construction site trailer and slashing the tires of the project supervisor, who fled with his wife back to Oklahoma.

Construction resumed several months later with local workers, but only after Sjoberg's group agreed to cough up an additional $210,000. Sykes also had a difficult time finding & keeping qualified staff. Despite job fairs and a certificate program created for the co. by the local community college, nearest 4 year college is 60 miles away, the co. struggled to fill seats. It never employed more than 300 workers, and the annual turnover rate was about 100%. Sykes even convened a group of local leaders for a brainstorming session.
"We talked about all kinds of different things that could be done, but bottom line, the thing we kept coming back to was the pay's got to be higher," says Mesabi Range Community & Technical College provost JeriAnn Jurkovich. "There were other jobs in the community, retail jobs, that probably paid as much as Sykes did."

Sykes also encountered unexpected competition from newcomers Delta Dental & Blue Cross. While Sykes pays $7.25 an hour and offers free medical & dental insurance to each employee, Delta Dental pays $10.50 an hour and provides free insurance for the employee's entire family. Delta human resources director Mary Stacke says she has hired away a number of Sykes employees.
Few breadwinners have taken jobs at Sykes, Sjoberg says. Most employees are high school or community college students, the spouses of miners, or people in need of a second or third job. Rachael DeGroote was a 17 year old Eveleth-Gilbert High School senior when she joined Sykes. It was her first job. "Their training is based for, like, housewives that don't know anything about computers," she says. "It was pretty easy, I thought." She quit because she didn't have enough time for homework.

Dori Hill came to Sykes with no computer experience. A former maid, she says she quit after one month. She now works as a cashier at a gas station on U.S. 53. "They didn't give me the proper tools that I needed," she says. A recent state survey of 87 Sykes employees in Eveleth found that fewer than 5% had a 4 year college degree. CEO Sykes says 99% of the workers at his Costa Rica, India and Philippines call centers finished college, and 35 to 40% have master's degrees.
"They consider a call center job a career," he said.

3 years after Sykes began building the Eveleth call center, the co. concluded it no longer makes economic sense to keep it open. Sykes expects to save $8-million to $10-million per year from its current round of call-center closures and restructuring efforts around the world. Legally, Sykes owe Eveleth & its neighbors nothing.
Economic incentives the co. received were pledged with no strings attached. As required by federal law, Sykes notified its employees & local officials about the shutdown 60 days in advance. It is cooperating with state officials who seek to provide job referrals & advice to the workers.

Though local officials acknowledge they have no legal recourse, they hold out hope that Sykes will find another client soon, or, failing that, deed the land or the building or both to the community. Not a chance, John Sykes says. The co. will try to sell the center to another employer, a move he says serves both parties' interests.
If local citizens are angry, it's about what they perceive as arrogance on Sykes' part. Some are still rankled by the co. failure to send a representative to the 1999 meeting where local officials approved economic incentives. Others point to the flap over construction labor, or co. failure to issue a public apology for its decision to close up shop. Says Gentilini, "As far as they're concerned, we never existed, I guess."

Most involved in bringing Sykes to Eveleth blame themselves for being too trusting & desperate. All pledge never again to give away money without conditions. They also cite the benefits of Sykes' short stay: tax dollars, 2 plus years of wages, construction jobs, a state-of-the-art call center building and transferable skills. Oberstar will be unemployed again soon, but he is likely more marketable after 8 months at Sykes than he was when LTV laid him off. But no one seems to be hiring.
Minnesota's state-operated job bank website, with nearly 10,000 job listings, shows just 49 full-time jobs within 25 miles of the Sykes call center. Blue Cross and Delta Dental have no openings. "There are no jobs here anymore," Oberstar says. 8,000 miles away in Manila, it's business as usual at Sykes, says co. Asia managing dir. Michael Henderson in 9.23.02 Computerworld Philippines. "Sykes is in this business in the Philippines for the long haul."

links   local Corporate Window Jas. Ling & LTV Corp.Accountability Corporate-Insiders.com Eat the State Environmental Issues Environmental Health & Safety Online funeralgate Public Campaign Jack Abramoff Ouch.org Santa Clara blues geoism [ corporate tax avoidance ] The 50 year swindle   ¹ April 2002   Ben Bagdikian The Progressive At recent Geneva meeting, WTO said the extent of tax havens for American corporations is so huge that global firms like GE, GM, Microsoft and Boeing escaped more than $4 billion in taxes. According to NYTimes, WTO said it amounted to illegal govt subsidy to those corps. The action was affirmed by EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy. It has become largest trade case in history. U.S. govt is so eager to forgive corporate taxes, we depend on the WTO, group of global bankers & financiers, to prosecute & hold accountable U.S. based transnationals. Reclaim Democracy Boulder CO Through corruption of govt & courts, corporations subverted their intended role and acquired the legal status of "natural persons." This subversion was institutionalized in an 1886 Supreme Court decision of which Justice William O. Douglas would later write, "There was no history, logic, or reason given to support that view." Thus corporations gained Bill of Rights protections and more, even before women and minorities. Essential Information   founded 1982 by Ralph Nader. Monthly magazine, books & reports, sponsors investigative journalism conferences, provides writers with grants to pursue investigations & operate clearing houses which disseminate information. Progressive Review   contra "false consensus created by the pornography of propaganda" Corporate Predators by Mokhiber & Weissman   from Common Courage Press. Chomsky fodder 1995 Fed. Acquisition Reform Act would eliminate foreign arms sales fee req. by law to recover tax funded R&D. For rent One principality, Liechtenstein, with alpine charm 3.25.03   Sarah Lyall NY Times Vaduz, Liechtenstein   It seems patently absurd to Sigvard Wohlwend that the entire country of Liechtenstein, all 62 sq miles of it, could be for rent, as if it were some sort of oversized alpine cottage. "I'm not for lease!" radio reporter & pro-democracy campaigner Wohlwend declared indignantly as he tried to explain his deep objections to Liechtenstein's unconventional "rent a state" tourism initiative. "This whole thing has a very bad taste for me because it shows that we are not taking ourselves seriously as a country." Sandwiched between Austria & Switzerland, Liechtenstein is one of the lesser-known of Europe's anachronistic microstates. Its recently amended constitution, which gives extensive powers to the ruling prince, has been denounced as dangerously retrograde by 2 committees in the Council of Europe. Some people mistake it for Luxembourg. With tourism down, businesses cutting back on frivolous expenses and the worldwide economy in flux, the "rent a state" program is intended to draw attention to Liechtenstein's "Heidi"- esque charms and its advantages as a destination for conventions, corporate retreats and the like. Participating organizations would pay 300 to 500 euros a day per person for groups up to 1,200 people for access to the country's hotels, restaurants, meeting places and sports facilities. Companies will also be able, temporarily, to "brand" buildings and institutions with their own logos. Xnet chief exec. Karl Schwarzler, co. in charge of the project, said, "Liechtenstein's location is very interesting, and the country offers things from shopping to mountain biking. There is skiing, paragliding, and we are bordered by the Rhine River. You could even have a whole football stadium for an event." Balzars, one of Liechtenstein's villages (there are no cities), also has Gutenberg Castle, "which was once owned by an American actress," Schwarzler said, demurring on specifics, and would make an ideal part of any rent-a-state weekend package. Participants would be allowed to partake from the wine cellar of the current prince, Hans-Adam II, although they would not be able to rent the prince himself. Tourism officials said there had been some serious inquiries from interested companies, though they would not give details. In parliament, in response to a worried question from a legislator, a govt spokesman said rumors that the Liechtenstein govt would be required to hand over the key to the country to renters are unfounded. Up in Vaduz Castle (which is not part of the rental agreement), Florian Krenkel, spokesman for Prince Hans-Adam, pronounced the plan a terrific idea and said it vindicated the recent landslide victory for the prince's proposed constitutional changes. The prince had warned that if his proposals were rejected, he would leave the country and settle in Austria. Krenkel pointed out that Liechtenstein's tourism slogan is "Princely Moments" and said Hans-Adam might be enticed to meet some of the corporate renters, if they seemed "interesting enough." "They are calling it 'rent a principality,' " Krenkel said, "and how could you do it without a prince?"

[ abolish corporate indenture of govt of & for all ] Richard Grossman interview March 2002   Ruth Conniff The Progressive Richard Grossman from NH was on Ralph Nader campaign trail through New England. Nader brought him on visit to state capitol, introducing him to lawmakers as "the preeminent historian of corporations" and a "treasure" right there in their home state. Grossman co-directs Program on Corporations, Law, and Democracy, with mission as "instigating democratic conversations & actions that contest authority of corporations to govern." The group came together in early 90s when a dozen activists decided that something more had to be done. We did not set out to become experts on the corporation," he says. "but to discover why so much activist work for many decades had not brought changes hoped for. After years of many groups fighting toxic chemicals & winning, passing laws, and closing dumps, every day more toxic chemicals are produced than the day before. Power is concentrated more in corporate boardrooms. Ideal of democracy moves further from reach. By objective criteria, wealth gap, public health, the environment, workers' rights get worse." Recent book Defying Corporations, Defining Democracy (Apex Press, 2001), Grossman & colleagues argue corporate power has grown unchecked. "Following the Civil War and into twentieth century, appointed judges gave privilege to corporations" One of worst early cases was 1886 Supreme Court decision Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co., which ruled a corporation was a "person" under the Constitution, sheltered by 14th Amendment. This legal doctrine spawned modern corporations with rights of real people & immortality. The Court killed future efforts by states & local govt to constrain corporate behavior. Q   Enron is mass consciousness-raising exercise? Dick Cheney refusing to release the list of corporations that helped shape energy policy because has chilling effect on shaping future policy. Grossman   Who's going to be surprised at Dick Cheney's list of corporate executives who participated in the energy plan? We've seen the plan. We know what it's about, we know whose values are represented there, whose ideas. It's not a big question. The real issue is that Enron's DNA was to do what it did. Enron created a new market that wasn't goods or services people need; it was for making money. Executives figured where they wanted to go, what laws they had to change, how to reframe debate about energy. Within ten or twelve years they accomplished what they set out to do, not because they were brilliant people, but because they had the tools they needed. Enron took advantage of a process going on for 200 years which made it easy for them. They the law, regulatory agencies, and Supreme Court doctrine that money is a form of speech. They give money to Congress, state legislators, think tanks, the press, all the places where ideas are influenced. Most they did was legal. All money they gave to elected officials was legal, lobbying Federal Trade Commission was legal. Enron executives said "we must go to state legislatures and persuade that existing state-regulated energy system is inefficient & wrong, to throw it out. We go to federal govt, get changes, and create federal grid for more effective gain." Q   Illegalities or particular political scandal aren't the point of Enron? Grossman   What comes depends on how issues are framed. The job of political movement, of activists, is to think in different way, to use what's happening to help people see underlying questions: What is a corporation? Where does it come from? How can elected officials create & enable Enron to take decision- making authority in democracy of people? Q   How is democratic decision-making usurped? Grossman   Corporations are chartered in the states. At moment of conception, corporate form is endowed with rights & privileges. They can shape elections, shape development of ideas, write laws, and shape public debate. They transform thinking at federal level about energy, and shut people up and out at state & local level. Next, people in communities, municipalities, and states believe they can't pass laws that ban corporations from spending any money on election campaigns, that they can't pass laws that ban particular products of corporations from communities. If a community says "within our jurisdiction, no genetically modified food is allowed to enter," or passed law banning corporate contribution to public discussion of ideas or referenda, corporations' lawyers go straight to federal court to throw laws out, claiming constitutional rights & privileges of corporation dating back to Commerce Clause, the First Amendment, and the Fourteenth Amendment. Q   Sounds conspiratorial to say corporations shape how we think. How ? Grossman   A wealthy corporate class with power of law dominates how issues are framed. Did majority of Americans over last 25 years want major transition in energy to efficiency &solar, want universal health care, didn't want pig genes in fish? Despite books & practical experience on these issues, dominant view from energy to corporate agriculture is that big technology, chemicals, and the most complex energy systems possible best. Where do these ideas come from, and how are they sustained? They're not ideas people believe make communities more harmonious & democratic. Q   What's picture aren't we getting? Grossman   It was easy for GM & Firestone in 1940s to buy electric trolley systems all over the nation. Destroy tracks, destroy trains, and set nation's transportation policy as highways and autos & trucks. Hearings & trials in the end fined $5,000. Policy of federal govt was to put public wealth into highways, not rapid transit.

Same with agriculture. Public wealth & resources since beginning of 20th century accepted largest farms were most efficient farms. As with Enron, private entities created by the state, enabled with powers & privilege, and given authority to make governing decisions using coercive force of courts, the police, the regulatory agencies. Naive to believe legal or societal transformation will come without uprising.

Q   You say it's important how Enron is framed. What is a helpful short summary?
Grossman   Many people work towards the bumper-sticker message. In general it's about history of this country, laws & culture that govern us today. People in previous generations were much more aware how structure from the beginning disadvantaged the majority of people. Lack of real democracy from the beginning, law & the Constitution used to privilege first a propertied class then a corporate class while teaching corporations are the only vehicle we can rely on for jobs, goods, services, to be globally "competitive". Elected officials don't have to be bought to believe that. They don't see any alternative. They believe they have to turn to giant corporations.

State legislators don't know the extent to which they have authority to write the state corporate codes in ways that make corporations subordinate. Many don't know that history. Example, Enron schematic of the 3,500 corporate entities: Where are they chartered? Off shore, in Texas & Oregon and other states. Attorneys general & state governors give certificate authority for a corporation to do business in a state. They have the authority & responsibility to prevent these corporations. Attorneys general should seize Enron assets, revoke charters, fight.

Q   Do you see the battle against corporate power as something akin to the civil rights movement where there's a big defining struggle taking place in the courts?
Grossman   No, the big defining struggle will take place in the culture. The courts will come last. Brown v. Board of Education wasn't worth much until the civil rights struggle moved into the culture in a significant way, forced by extraordinary grassroots-based, multigenerational civil rights movement. It took another 20 years of grassroots mobilizing, agitation in the culture. In Seattle or demonstrations outside both parties' conventions or in New York at World Economic Forum. Visible aspects of growing ferment in community after community.
Ideas form & shape and takes root or not. It's not pure chance. Social movements try to inject new ideas into culture. It takes generations. Desegregation took much to move that idea through society, still not totally accepted in this society.

Q   Is this the same case for what you're trying to do? It's going to take generations?
Grossman   I think so. It's more complicated because it's not a single, tangible issue. It's not about the rights of a single class of people. It's about how people become self-governing. How do almost 300 million people come together in all these different jurisdictions to make the rules and live as harmoniously as possible? If the ideal in this country has always been that the people rule, how are we going to do that? Can we do that if the Constitution and the law prevent us from doing it because few are enable and many disabled?

If govt had been neutral on slavery, if slave owners could not rely on the fugitive slave clause in the Constitution to return runaway slaves or indentured servants, and militia couldn't be called out to put down slave rebellions, then it was just slave owners against the slaves. Then slavery would have been gone very quickly. Same is true of segregation. If police wouldn't have come to enforced Jim Crow laws, segregation would not have lasted.

What we have now is a system where coercive govt force and culture that goes along with it enable a few people through the law and through their institutions called corporations to dominate governing this country. Many people don't want to acknowledge that. To do something about it means to change this country in very significant ways. If this is really a country of democratic self-governance where the people actually were the source of all political & legal authority, it would be a very different country. People who govern today wouldn't govern. The class that governs today wouldn't govern.

Q   What can people do right now?
Grossman   Compared to 5 or 6 years ago there's so much more going on. Activists are investing their energies beyond regulatory proceedings, beyond reform laws that basically choose paper or plastic. In Pennsylvania, 9 townships passed laws banning corporate ownership of farms. The issue was big corporate hog farms coming in. People decided there that they weren't going to do regulations about hog manure, and how many hogs per square feet, which activists are doing in N.Carolina & many other states. They're saying, "In our jurisdiction, no corporations can own farms."

So that issue is being totally reframed. It's not about science of hog odor & manure. It's about municipalities exercising their authority to define what goes on within their jurisdictions. That's the kind of confrontation that needs to take place in communities around the country, and at the state level, in order to drive this movement eventually into national struggles over who gets to decide and who sets values in this country. People behind the shield of giant corporations empowered by our elected officials or the public through directly elected officials not chosen by the corporate class? On a couple levels, it's working. So far, no corporate hog farms have come into those communities. Agribusiness corps & the Farm Bureau launched the anticipated lawsuit. They are suing one townships, and the lawsuit is very clear. It says, "This township does not have the legal & constitutional authority to pass such a law." That infuriated folks. Every time the PA Farm Bureau head writes an article saying he's trying to talk about efficiency and the consumer, more people get involved with the issue through neighbors & friends to see it as absolute nonsense. You don't have to read too carefully in a 400-word article where the main themes are the corporations know best. The Constitution says corporations have these rights, and you people have no rights. It drives these folks to be stronger & more determined.

Lesson for activists around the country. If you frame the issue about who's in charge, about power, and not around six or eight parts per million or how many kilowatts here versus kilowatts there, that's what arouses people. That's what educates people. That's what pushes people on their own to say, "I didn't know any of this history, let's check it out."

Q   What's the ultimate goal?
Grossman   Abolitionists eventually had to take their struggle into the Constitution and write the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments because ownership of humans as property and denial of human rights had been imbedded in the Constitution. Women's suffrage movement also had to go into the Constitution. Eventually, when culture changes, when there's been enough contesting, revealing, and educating, these issues will either be driven into the Constitution or they won't. Eventually, the fundamental law of the land will change or it won't. Our job and the next generation's is not to be diverted into paper versus plastic, but to keep our focus on that fundamental work.

§ite map courtesy of FreeFind

presented by §

OCIAL JUSTICE