What We Do, and What it Costs.

Here's a link to John Perkins, author of "confessions of an economic hit man", giving a very concise description of his essential point. Worth seeing. Have a look.

Go here

Enjoy

New Outrages from BP

Published on Wednesday, August 11, 2010 by CommonDreams.org

New Outrages Keep Gushing From BP

by Jim Hightower

With BP's well capped and CEO Tony Hayward exiled to Russia, perhaps you thought that surely there will be no additional revelations about BP to enrage you. But now comes this: prison labor.

In its national PR blitz to buff up its image, the oil giant has loudly been boasting that it has hired devastated, out-of-work local people to handle the clean-up. Many have been hired, but the people themselves say not nearly enough. The Nation magazine now reports a big reason for the shortfall - BP has been using inmates to do much of the shoveling and scooping to remove oil from Louisiana beaches.

In the early days of the cleanup, crews suddenly appeared wearing scarlet pants and white t-shirts with bold red letters spelling out, "Inmate Labor." Investigative reporter Abe Louise Young writes that the sight of prison laborers outraged the local community, so they were removed.

Not the inmates, the uniforms. Now they wear BP shirts, jeans and rubber boots with no prison markings, and they are moved to and from the job in unmarked white vans. No officials with BP or the feds could or would tell Young how many inmates are being used or what they're being paid. However, a local sheriff's official told Young, "They're not getting paid - it's part of their sentence."

But guess who is getting paid for this convict labor? BP. It's getting paid by you and me. Under a little-known tax provision passed during the Bush regime, corporations can get a "work opportunity tax credit" of $2,400 for every work release inmate they hire.

And that's not all we're subsidizing. For example, BP, which rented the drilling rig from Transocean Corp., used a special tax break to write off 70 percent of the rent it paid. Seventy percent! This added up to a savings of $225,000 a day for BP.

Also, back in 1999, Transocean deliberately moved its corporate address offshore in order to dodge its tax obligations to our country. It relocated from Houston to the Cayman Islands, then to Switzerland - slick moves that have allowed the giant corporation to avoid paying $1.8 billion it owed in U.S. taxes.

No industry gets the absurd array of subsidies that Big Oil now enjoys - subsidies at every stage of its operations, including the ones used by BP and Transocean to search for oil in our public waters. As one political leader put it in 2005, "With $55 oil, we don't need incentives to the oil and gas companies to explore."

That was George W. Bush talking! Five years later, oil is $80 a barrel and the industry is pocketing record profits - yet the giveaways continue.

Again and again, BP has promised that it would pay all cleanup costs for the mess it made. Now, however, the British-based oil giant has quietly told investors that it expects to get a $10-billion subsidy from Uncle Sugar to help cover the costs.

Say what? Not only did the company's top executives assure us that this whole god-awful mess would be on their dime, but so did our top government officials. As President Obama flatly declared in May, "We will demand they pay for every dime they owe for the damage they have done." Even Rep. Joe Barton - the GOP gooberhead who so obsequiously apologized to BP's CEO for America's insistence that he set up a corporate fund to compensate victims - was forced to backtrack and say that, of course, he expects BP to pay the tab.

So what is this $10 billion hit on us taxpayers? It's another little corporate gotcha that lobbyists quietly got tucked into our tax code, allowing huge firms to grab a credit for up to 35-percent of their losses. The damages and cleanup being paid by BP, says one tax expert, are "just another cost of doing business," so they qualify for all applicable corporate breaks. After all, says another expert, while BP said it would pay the costs of the cleanup, it "never promised that it would not seek any deductions" to recoup those costs from American taxpayers.

Tricky, huh?

© 2010 Creators.com

National radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the book, Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow, Jim Hightower has spent three decades battling the Powers That Be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be - consumers, working families, environmentalists, small businesses, and just-plain-folks.

Published on Monday, August 9, 2010 by Wired.com

U.S. Supersizes Afghan Mega-Base as Withdrawal Date Looms

by Spencer Ackerman

BAGRAM AIR FIELD, Afghanistan - Anyone who thinks the United States is really going to withdraw from Afghanistan in July 2011 needs to come to this giant air base an hour away from Kabul. There's construction everywhere. It's exactly what you wouldn't expect from a transient presence.

Perhaps the most conspicuous change of all: fresh concrete T-walls fortifying the northern and southern faces of the base.

Step off a C-17 cargo plane, as I did very early Friday morning, and you see a flight line packed with planes. When I was last here two years ago, helicopters crowded the runways and fixed-wing aircraft were -- well, if not rare, still a notable sight. Today you've got C-17s, Predators, F-16s, F-15s, MC-12 passenger planes ... I didn't see any of the C-130 cargo craft, but they're here somewhere.

More notable than the overstuffed runways is the over-driven road. Disney Drive, the main thoroughfare that rings the eight-square-mile base, used to feature pedestrians with reflective sashes over their PT uniforms carrying Styrofoam boxes of leftovers out of the mess halls. And those guys are still there.

But now the western part of Disney is a two-lane parking lot of Humvees, flamboyant cargo big-rigs from Pakistan known as jingle trucks, yellow DHL shipping vans, contractor vehicles and mud-caked flatbeds. If the Navy could figure out a way to bring a littoral-combat ship to a landlocked country, it would idle on Disney.

Expect to wait an eternity if you want to pull out onto the road. Cross the street at your own risk.

Then there are all the new facilities. West Disney has a fresh coat of cement -- something that's easy to come by, now that the Turkish firm Yukcel manufactures cement right inside Bagram's walls.

There on the flightline: the skeletons of new hangars. New towers with particleboard for terraces. A skyline of cranes. The omnipresent plastic banner on a girder-and-cement seedling advertising a new project built by cut-rate labor paid by Inglett and Stubbs International.

I haven't been able to learn yet how much it all cost, but Bagram is starting to feel like a dynamic exurb before the housing bubble burst. There was actually a traffic jam this afternoon on the southern side of the base, owing to construction-imposed bottlenecks, something I didn't think possible in late summer 2008.

Perhaps the most conspicuous change of all: fresh concrete T-walls fortifying the northern and southern faces of the base. Insurgents have launched a number of futile attacks on the base recently, mostly inaccurate small-arms fire and the odd rocket-propelled grenade. They've mostly irritated their targets instead of killing them.

But a definite legacy is the abundance of huge barriers at the most-obvious access points to Bagram. Much of the eastern wing remains surrounded by chicken fencing topped with barbed wire, but the more sensitive points of entry are now hardened.

So, apparently, are the sentiments of local Afghans nearby. Troops here told me of shepherd boys scowling their way around Bagram's outskirts, slingshotting off the occasional rock in hopes of braining an American. Again, something else I wouldn't have believed two years ago.

By next year, the detention facility that's spirited away on a far corner of Bagram is supposed to revert to Afghan control. And maybe someday the Afghan National Army will inherit the entire base.

But two years ago there were about 18,000 troops and contractors living here. Now that figure is north of 30,000, all for a logistics hub and command post that the United States didn't ever imagine possessing before 9/11.

In 2011, the U.S. military probably won't be thinking about turning over the keys to a new, huge base. It'll be thinking about how it can finish up the construction contracts it signed months ago -- if not some it's yet to ink.

© 2010 Wired

Posted by Joshua Holland at 1:57 pm
August 3, 2010

21 COMMENTS

Those Freaking Out Over Muslim Community Center Are Spitting on the Graves of 9/11 Victims

Posted by Joshua Holland on @ 1:57 pm

Article printed from speakeasy: http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy

URL to article: http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/08/03/those-freaking-out-over-muslim-community-center-are-spitting-on-the-graves-of-911-victims/

Before its destruction in 2001, the World Trade Center featured a prayer space, where hundreds of Muslims would gather every Friday to practice their faith.

We don’t know the precise number of Muslims who died in the attacks on September 11, but it’s somewhere between 28 and 75. Presumably, every one of them had a family.

Christian, Jewish, Hindu and Buddhist families who lost loved ones that day — and atheists and Wiccans and the rest – faced a horrific trauma, one that they endured with the support and sympathy of the entire nation.

Muslim survivors of the victims of 9/11 faced the same initial shock, and then had to watch as their brothers and sisters were rounded up and detained without charge. They were forced to register with the authorities, like sex offenders. Their houses of worship were infiltrated by police acting without probable cause. Public figures shamelessly attacked their faith and culture(s) in the most disgusting terms, with complete impunity.

For almost ten years, even as they grieved for their lost family members, they’ve had to endure the white-hot, brain-dead hatred of a significant number of their countrymen — the pathetic, small-minded bigots now incensed by the idea that a Muslim cultural center might be built in the same neighborhood as the World Trade Center site. These families lost a person they loved in those brutal attacks, and then had to watch as people like Liz Cheney and Newt Gingrich desecrated their memories, spat on their graves. I don’t see how they could ever heal in such an environment.

The black-hearted demagogues stirring up this outburst of ignorant Islamophobia are truly the worst human beings in the world. They’re monsters, and should be shamed out of the public square. That they’re not — that they’ll continue to be given a platform to spread their noxious bile — is a dark reflection on our entire society.

Prison Labor rather than civilian labor in the gulf spill

BP Hides Use of Black Prison Labor For Oil Gusher Cleanup

Posted by Jan Frel on @ 11:49 am

Article printed from speakeasy: http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy

URL to article: http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/07/23/bp-hides-use-of-black-prison-labor-for-oil-gusher-cleanup/

Fascinating post from DailyKos by Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse:

When the BP oil gusher mess first began, BP hired prison labor in order to reap tax benefits instead of hiring coastal residents whose livelihoods crashed with the explosion of the wellhead. When the community expressed their outrage, BP did not stop the practice of using prison labor. No, apparently BP simply tried to literally cover-up the use of prison labor by changing the clothing worn by the inmates to give the appearance of a civilian workforce. Big surprise.

According to The Nation article, during the first few days of this cleanup, cleanup workers for Louisiana beaches wore “scarlet pants and white t-shirts with the words ‘Inmate Labor’ printed in large red block letters.” This is how coastal residents learned that BP hired prison labor rather than them. After community outrage was expressed at public meetings, the “outfits disappeared overnight.”

However, Abe Louise Young, author of the article in The Nation, was not convinced that BP had actually stopped using prison labor in Grand Isle, Louisiana because “nine out of ten residents are white, [but] the cleanup workers are almost exclusively African-American men.” Ben Jealous, the president of NAACP, also demanded to know “why black people were over-represented in ‘the most physically difficult, lowest paying jobs, with the most significant exposure to toxins.’”

So, was BP still using prison labor? Federal and state officials did not know, but said to Young: “They were all stumped. Were inmates doing shore protection or oil cleanup work? They had no idea. In fact, they said, they’d like to know—would I call them if I found out?”

The answer is yes, BP just changed their work attire to hide the fact of a prison work force:

I got an answer one evening earlier this month, when I drove up the gravel driveway of the Lafourche Parish Work Release Center jail, just off Highway 90, halfway between New Orleans and Houma. Men were returning from a long day of shoveling oil-soaked sand into black trash bags in the sweltering heat. Wearing BP shirts, jeans and rubber boots (nothing identifying them as inmates), they arrived back at the jail in unmarked white vans, looking dog tired.

The inmates really can’t make a voluntary choice to perform dangerous work that might ruin their health. “Although the dangers of mixed oil and dispersant exposure are largely unknown, the chemicals in crude oil can damage every system in the body, as well as cell structures and DNA.” Inmates don’t have the option to “pick and choose their work assignments” and can face repercussions for rejecting a job, including the loss of earned good time. Thus, inmates face the dilemma of protecting their health by refusing this work or staying longer in prison.

When Young tried to find out how many of the 20,000 prisoners “housed outside of state prisons” were performing BP spill work, an official with the Louisiana Department of Corrections (DOC) tried to discourage Young from pursuing this inquiry. Prison officials were also not helpful, one warden refused to discuss the issue, stating: “You want me to lose my job?”

Some government officials did provide confirmation of the prison labor force. “A lieutenant in the Plaquemines Parish Sheriff’s Office told me that three crews of inmates were sandbagging in Buras, Louisiana in case oil hit there.” In early May, Gov. Jindal sent out a press release “heralding the training of eighty inmates for “cleaning of oil-impacted wildlife recovered from coastal areas.” And, a warden with one work release center confirmed that 18 prisoners were “currently assigned to oil spill work.”

Also a member of Critical Resistance New Orleans, Keller says, it is “common knowledge” that prisoners are doing cleanup. “If you talk to anyone working on the beach they’ll tell you, yes, prisoners are working here.” She describes a shipping container that sits at the turn-off for the Venice Boat Harbor, advertising “Jails to Go.” Such containers work as contract labor housing for work release prisoners, with bunks inside, bars on the windows, and deadbolts on the doors.

Naturally, there is a money angle. BP benefits from the use of a cheap labor force that is easily silenced and also the bounty of tax credits and a partial “kickback” of wages paid:

The advantage for private companies is that trustees are covered under Work Opportunity Tax Credit, a holdover from Bush’s Welfare to Work legislation that rewards private-sector employers for hiring risky “target groups.” Businesses earn a tax credit of $2,400 for every work release inmate they hire. On top of that, they can earn back up to 40 percent of the wages they pay annually to “target group workers.”

Yet, who will provide or pay for health care of prisoners now and down the road if the prisoners become ill?:

Prisoners are already subject to well-documented health care deprivations while incarcerated, and are unlikely to have health insurance after release. Work release positions are covered by Worker’s Compensation insurance, but pursuing claims long after exposure could be a Kafkaesque task. Besides, there is currently no system for tracking the medical impact of oil and dispersant exposure in cleanup workers or affected communities.

Jan Frel is AlterNet's senior editor.

The Food Bubble

The financial industry has done with commodities precisely what they did with mortgages. They changed the traditional futures market from one populated by bonafied hedgers (those trading actual wheat) and speculators (who's accounts cleared at the end of the relevant trading cycle), to a system where banks simply bought futures long, and rolled them over adding more futures contracts over time. Nothing cleared. The results were interesting to say the least.

least.

The Crisis of Capitalism

Here's an animation explaining the current financial crisis and suggesting we must go beyond our current popular thinking on the issue of the capitalist economy.

The Animation is here