Fannie and Freddie Get a Helping Hand

While individual citizens get shitted on by the government.  The New York Times reports:

Alarmed by the sharply eroding confidence in the nation’s two largest mortgage finance companies, the Bush administration on Sunday asked Congress to approve a sweeping rescue package that would give officials the power to inject billions of federal dollars into the beleaguered companies through investments and loans.

…

While senior Democratic and Republican officials in successive administrations have for many years repeatedly denied that the trillions of dollars of debt the companies issued is guaranteed, the package, if adopted, would bring the Treasury closer than ever to exposing taxpayers to potentially huge new liabilities. The two companies could face significant new losses this year as the wave of housing foreclosures continues.

From Clive Crook’s blog:

Covering the agencies’ losses on their loans and guarantees is going to require an actual outlay, which will fall on taxpayers. You could plausibly call the rest – namely, bringing these “government-sponsored enterprises” explicitly inside the public sector – just a bookkeeping entry. But what an entry! It would surely shake financial markets, raise the government’s cost of funding and put heavy downward pressure on the dollar. Meanwhile, the turmoil impedes or paralyses the GSEs in their crucial life-support role for the housing market.

So we can afford “socialism” for mutli-billion dollar corporations but not the masses?

So we’ve got corporations divesting capital from America and interjecting it into developing countries, further exploited Third World peoples and causing Americans to loose good paying jobs, we’ve got gas ready to hit $6 a gallon within the next half year, and there was a near food riot in Milwaukee plus a 20% increase in demand for food at food banks.

The only reason why most of the American petty-bourgeoisie and proletariat are able to afford certain amenities is through exploiting the labor-power of Third World workers.  We’re all going to hell in a gift-wrapped hand basked made by a young Cambodian child for 5 cents (via Nike).

FISA, Tortoises, Obama

Cross-posted from The Blog and the Bullet.
JanInSanFran blogs on the recent FISA law passed by the House:

Trusting souls we if we look to Democrats to safeguard liberties. They won’t. At root, they don’t believe that any significant number of their base cares enough to make them uncomfortable when they go along to get along. They trust their white skins and their money ensure their privilege. This seems rather stupid, but one of the features of privilege long-enjoyed is stupidity. An animal without predators ceases to be wary like those poor Galapagos tortoises that stick their necks out to meet humans.

Non-Traditional Black & White Scarf = Terrorists Win

The CBC reports:

Dunkin’ Donuts has pulled an online advertisement featuring celebrity chef Rachael Ray after criticism from conservative U.S. bloggers over her choice of scarf.

Ray, while promoting an iced coffee, was wearing a black-and-white scarf, similar to the kaffiyeh, a scarf commonly worn in the Middle East. (Bold mine

Yes, that’s right folks, “similar to the kaffiyeh” not actually a kaffiyeh that folks wear over in the Palestinian region, but similar too.

Holly blogs:

Although I have to say I laughed out loud at the phrase “hate couture.” The thing is, if you look at the scarf Rachael Ray is wearing in that picture, it doesn’t even remotely resemble the pattern traditionally associated with the keffiyeh, which resembles an interlocking net or a chain-link fence. Look, here’s Yasser Arafat wearing one… a fairly iconic and well-known image. But Ray’s scarf doesn’t even have a regular geometric pattern on it.

Fuck Michelle Malkin and the right wing attack machine for attacking Rachel Ray and having their racist egos conflate a black and white scarf as akin to terrorism.  And, while I’m at it; forget Rachel Ray for apprporiating a culture and buying a scarf that “looks exotic and Arabic” but in actuality is just a scarf created by a corporation to mimic a keffiyeh.

I sport the actual PLO keffiyeh.  DOWN WITH ISRAEL!

Oh, and also.  DOWN WITH UPS! UP WITH THE TEAMSTERS! (Cause I’m also wearing my union jacket).

Don’t Trust Dem Corporations

Cross-posted from The Ghost of Tom Joad.

Another reason to go vegan (which I’m not and maybe I should). From the New York Times:

The Department of Agriculture on Sunday announced by far the largest recall of beef in history, calling for the return of 143 million pounds of ground beef from a California slaughterhouse that supplies school lunch programs.

The acknowledgment came after the Humane Society of the United States distributed an undercover video on Jan. 30 that showed workers kicking sick cows and using forklifts and electric shocks to force them to walk.

The video raised questions about the safety of the meat because cows that cannot walk, called downer cows, pose an added risk of mad cow disease. The federal government has banned downer cows from the food supply.

Corporate Misdeed

Just found this article in USA Today:

Last month, a U.S. District Court judge formally accepted a settlement of the charges between the Cincinnati-based company and the Justice Department. After pleading guilty to a felony, Chiquita was fined $25 million and required to institute an ethics program to prevent future violations. The company said that it made more than 100 payments to the paramilitaries, which controlled large swaths of Colombia’s principal banana-growing region, to protect its workers from attacks and that it earlier had paid left-wing guerillas for the same reason. The Justice Department says the armed groups Chiquita paid are responsible for “a staggering loss of life” in Colombia.

“It may be true (that) you could not operate in these areas without paying the AUC. If it were al-Qaeda, that wouldn’t be a defense,” says Terry Collingsworth, an attorney with the International Labor Rights Fund, which has filed lawsuits against several corporations, including Chiquita, over their activities in Colombia.

The controversy over U.S. corporate behavior comes as Congress considers a pending trade agreement with this Latin nation of 44 million people. The Bush administration says the deal will expand U.S. exports and cement stability in a key U.S. ally. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and many other Democrats oppose the accord because of concerns about continuing violence in Colombia and the role of paramilitaries there. Whatever the outcome of the trade debate, fallout from Colombia’s decades-long civil war is landing on multinational corporations that conducted business there amid savage battles between left-wing guerillas and right-wing paramilitaries with government ties.

Report Details Blackwater’s Recklessness

The New York Times reports:

Guards working in Iraq for Blackwater USA have shot innocent Iraqi civilians and have sought to cover up the incidents, sometimes with the help of the State Department, a report to a Congressional committee said today.

The report, based largely on internal Blackwater e-mail messages and State Department documents, depicts the security contractor as being staffed with reckless, shoot-first guards who were not always sober and did not always stop to see who or what was hit by their bullets.

Review: Syriana

I just saw the movie Syriana for the second time in a little over a year last night and it inspired me to write a review for the movie as it deals with many of the subjects I blog about. Particularly foreign policy and religion. Warning though since there will be spoilers about the plot as I will be using them for commentary.

The movie starts off with a merger between two fictional oil companies, Connex and Killen which in turn make them the fifth largest oil company in the world with assets that would make them the 23rd largest country in the world. However the Justice Department gets suspicious and wants to investigate the merger before it is approved. One of the reasons for the investigation is that Connex lost the bidding rights to an oil field in the Middle East (in a country that, to me, represents Saudi Arabia) and was able to somehow pull off a merger with a smaller oil company, Killen, which had just bought the rights for a large vast array of oil fields in the not fully taped oil regions of Kazakhstan.

The story swirls delicately and deftly around four main characters with other slightly smaller, but just as important, main characters. Those characters are CIA operative Bob Barnes (played by George Clooney, very loosely based on Robert Baer, the CIA operative and writer of See No Evil in which the movies politics are loosely based on), an expert in the Middle East and veteran of the Lebanon Civil War in the 1980s. Bennet Holiday (Jeffery Wright), a Black attorney who lives in an upscale part of Washington D.C. and works for Sloan Whiting. Bryan Woodman (Matt Damon), an energy analyst and consultant who works for an energy firm based in Geneva and which is trying to court the Al-Subaai family (similar to the Saudi ruling Saud family) and have them become their clients. And finally there is the Pakistani youth and migrant worker Wasim Ahmed Khan (Mazhar Munir) who is recently laid off from Connex due to the change in ownership of the oil fields and who needs to find a job in a country that will deport him if he doesn’t.

What the movie does so well, and what others have criticized as excessively confusing, is switching between the perspectives of each character and giving the viewer subtle hints of the background, history, and thoughts of each character through subtle shifts of the camera, facial expressions, and body movement. The movie also doesn’t insult the intelligence of the viewer, expecting a certain grasp on U.S. relations to the rest of the world and corporate motivations in the energy sector. There is no one single “smart guy” in the movie who has to explain things such as. “Duh dude. Connex is a large oil company that wants to get its hands on the oil reserves in the Middle East yet also is about protecting U.S. interests…” etc., etc. Instead the viewer is left to piece everything together on their own and it will take two to possibly three viewings to fully grasp everything. But for the patient movie goer this will be quite an enjoyable experience to do.

What I love about this movie is its social and political commentary and its sympathetic treatment of some of the characters you wouldn’t expect to get sympathetic treatment as well as insights into the male dominated and racist world of corporate America. One fine scene is where Holiday is sitting down to lunch with his immediate boss discussing the Connex case they’ve been assigned to audit. In that scene the founder of the law firm they both work for, Dean Whiting (Christopher Plummer), walks in and Holiday’s boss introduces the two to each other as a formality. Holiday gets up to say hello and extends his hand for a shake but Whiting, griping his newspaper and looking a little perturbed, just waves his hand ever so slightly declining the handshake in a manner that is a little bit less than polite. In just a few seconds the director Stephen Gaghan shows Whiting’s racist underside and in turn offers a slight glimpse into the “good ole boy club” style of the American corporate world.

Another aspect of the movie is the exposure of the constant politicking of the CIA bureaucrats, oil men, politicians, and lobbyists. In the opening scene Branes is selling weapons to an Iranian arms dealer. During the deal however the arms dealer hands one of the stinger missile launchers to an Egyptian Islamic fundamentalist. Barnes, obviously concerned, starts writing memos to the CIA leadership but the leadership isn’t very much concerned with a fundamentalist having one stinger missile, they are more concerned with not looking complicit in the assassination of the Iranian arms dealer. After telling the French and British intelligence agencies that they had nothing to do with the assassination they don’t want to in turn tell them they somehow have a missing stinger missile launcher in Iran. Later on Barnes is sent to Lebanon to assassinate Prince Nasir, a reformist prince in the Al-Subaai family who is losing in a power struggle to succeed his father, the king, to his younger brother who is more friendly with the Americans and Connex. During his stint in Beirut Barnes is tortured by an Iranian agent who in turns is telling people that Barnes was an agent for the CIA sent to assassinate Nasir. The CIA further distances itself from Barnes by stating that he undertook a rouge mission without CIA permission.

Other subtle and very apt points the movie shows is a scene where Barnes is talking to a congresswoman about the Iranian being people being “natural allies” of the U.S. and helping the U.S. in “liberating” them from their mullahs. Barnes calls her out on her bullshit which than causes her to introduce a group of white business men and lobbyists whom call themselves The “Committee to Liberate Iran.” This little point in the movie generally exposes the truth behind many groups in Washington that try to influence Congress and the Executive in “liberating” countries. Mostly these groups are rich white business men or expats (such as the members of the Iraqi National Congress) whom are looking to expand their capital into yet untapped countries. The irony is not meant to be missed in that scene and other scenes which include the Committee to Liberate Iran.

Some of the most poingent scenes however are reserved for Wasim Ahmed Khan. Near the beginning of the movie it shows Kahn, his father, and a large group of migrant South Asian workers (mostly from Pakistan and India I presume) being laid off from the Connex oil factory due to “change in ownership” as a Chinese oil company outbid the American Connex. In the repressive and culturally smug society they are staying at (most likely representing Saudi Arabia) they must all find jobs within two weeks or else they will be deported as their visas no longer will be valid. As Khan wonders around to find work and as his father muses about the snow covered peaks of Pakistan he gets drawn into a Wahhabist Islamic school in order to better learn Arabic in order to get a job in the country he’s staying in. From the reports I’ve read on Saudi society and on South Asian migrant workers in general being employed by American, European, and Middle Eastern companies, this movie shows their lives in generally realistic ways; they all live in a company encampment together and as they are jobless and scorned by the racist society they are staying in the youth, including Khan, tend to wander around, get drunk, and talk about any little thing to pass the time. Mazhar Munir plays Khan with a great poise and eloquence as he draws us in into his desperation and the director paints a very sympathetic picture of Khan where a sympathetic picture needs to be taken. You get the sense that it was indeed forces outside his control, mainly corporate and U.S. foreign policy interests as well as the oppressive Saudi (well, a country supposed to represent Saudi Arabia) society he is staying in, that drove him towards the fundamentalist religious school.

The director weaves all of these different factors together: politics, business, religious, cultural, social; near the end of the movie when Khan and his friend decide to take up a suicide mission. Before he leaves his father Khan asks for some money for the bus and then uncharacteristically embraces him in a warm hug. This takes his father aback a little and as he continues to play cricket you can sense he is curious and perhaps worried about the trip his son is about to take, but to where he does not know.

At the inauguration of the Connex-Killen oil facility in that Arab country in question (after Nasir’s brother kicks out the Chinese in favor of Connex) an oil tanker ceremoniously is filled with oil on its first voyage to the west. Khan and his friend are in a boat heading towards that tanker with the armed stinger missile (which doesn’t have a guidance system but is fully armed). As the music plays a contemplative yet soothing melody you see their boat turn towards the tanker and watch until the camera cuts a split second before the explosion. With that the director plays a video taped message from Khan about his wished to be buried while the lives of the other characters are being wrapped up on screne. In it Khan expresses his wishes for the mourners to throw dust on his casket three times and state. “From dust you are created. To dust you return. From dust a new life will be given.”

A U. S. Fortress Rises in Baghdad: Asian Workers Trafficked to Build World’s Largest Embassy

By David Phinney

This was an article that appeared on Oct. 17, 2006 on CorpWatch. David Phinney is a journalist and broadcaster based in Washington D.C. whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and on ABC and PBS.

The views and opinions expressed in this essay do not necessarily reflect those of the creator of this blog and are the sole responsibility of the author. Essays expressing opinions similar to and counter to those of the creator of this blog are strictly for diversity and to start thoughtful and meaningful discussion.

John Owen didn’t realize how different his job would be from his last 27 years in construction until he signed on with First Kuwaiti Trading & Contracting in November 2005. Working as general foreman, he would be overseeing an army of workers building the largest, most expensive and heavily fortified US embassy in the world. Scheduled to open in 2007, the sprawling complex near the Tigris River will equal Vatican City in size.

Then seven months into the job, he quit.

Not one of the five different US embassy sites he had worked on around the world compared to the mess he describes. Armenia, Bulgaria, Angola, Cameroon and Cambodia all had their share of dictators, violence and economic disruption, but the companies building the embassies were always fair and professional, he says. The Kuwait-based company building the $592-million Baghdad project is the exception. Brutal and inhumane, he says “I’ve never seen a project more fucked up. Every US labor law was broken.”

In the resignation letter last June, Owen told First Kuwaiti and US State Department officials that his managers beat their construction workers, demonstrated little regard for worker safety, and routinely breached security.

And it was all happening smack in the middle of the US-controlled Green Zone — right under the nose of the State Department that had quietly awarded the controversial embassy contract in July 2005.

He also complained of poor sanitation, squalid living conditions and medical malpractice in the labor camps where several thousand low-paid migrant workers lived. Those workers, recruited on the global labor market from the Philippines, India, Pakistan and other poor south Asian countries, earned as little as $10 to $30 a day.

As with many US-funded contractors, First Kuwaiti prefers importing labor because it views Iraqi workers as a security headache not worth the trouble.

No Questions Asked

By March 2005, First Kuwaiti’s operation began looking even sketchier to Owen as he boarded a nondescript white jet on his way back to Baghdad following some R&R in Kuwait city. He remembers being surrounded by about 50 First Kuwaiti laborers freshly hired from the Philippines and India. Everyone was holding boarding passes to Dubai – not to Baghdad.

“I thought there was some sort of mix up and I was getting on the wrong plane,” says the 48-year-old Floridian who once worked as a fisherman with his father before moving into the construction business.

He buttonholed a First Kuwaiti manager standing near by and asked what was going on. The manager waved his hand, looked around the terminal and whispered to keep quiet.

“‘If anyone hears we are going to Baghdad, they won’t let us on the plane,’” Owen recalls the manager saying.

The secrecy struck Owen as a little odd, but he grabbed his luggage and moved on. Everyone filed out to the private jet and flew directly to Baghdad. “I figured that they had visas for Kuwait and not Iraq,” Owen offers.

The deception had the appearance of smuggling workers into Iraq, but Owen didn’t know at the time that the Philippines, India, and other countries had banned or restricted their citizens from working in Iraq because of safety concerns and fading support for the war. After 2004, many passports were stamped “Not valid for Iraq.”

Nor did Owen know that both the US State Department and the Pentagon were quietly investigating contractors such as First Kuwaiti for labor trafficking and worker abuse. In fact, the international news media had accused First Kuwaiti repeatedly of coercing workers to take jobs in battle-torn Iraq once they had been lured with safer offers to Kuwait. The company has billed several billion dollars on US contracts since the war began in March 2003 and now has an estimated 7,500 laborers in the theater of war.

Despite numerous emails and phone calls about such allegations, neither First Kuwaiti general manager Wadih Al Absi nor his lawyer Angela Styles, the former top White House contract policy advisor, have responded. After a year of requests, State Department officials involved with the project also have ignored or rejected opportunities for comment.

Your Passports Please

That same March Owen returned to work in Baghdad, Rory Mayberry would witness similar events after he flew to Kuwait from his home in Myrtle Creek, Oregon.

The gravely voiced, easy-going Army veteran had previously worked in Iraq for Halliburton and the private security company, Danubia. Missing the action and the big paychecks US contractors draw Iraq, he snagged a $10,000 a month job with MSDS consulting Company.

MSDS is a two-person minority-owned consulting company that assists US State Department managers in Washington with procurement programming. Never before had the firm offered medical services or worked in Iraq, but First Kuwaiti hired MSDS on the recommendation of Jim Golden, the State Department contract official overseeing the embassy project. Within days, an agreement worth hundreds of thousands of dollars for medical care was signed.

The 45-year-old Mayberry, a former emergency medical technician in the Army who worked as a funeral director in Oregon, responded to a help wanted ad placed by MSDS. The plan was that he would work as a medic attending to the construction crews on the work site in Baghdad.

Mayberry sensed things weren’t right when he boarded a First Kuwaiti flight on March 15 to Baghdad – a different flight from Owen’s.

At the airport in Kuwait City, Mayberry said, he saw a person behind a counter hand First Kuwaiti managers a passenger manifest, an envelope of money and a stack of boarding passes to Dubai. The managers then handed out the boarding passes to Mayberry and 50 or so new First Kuwaiti laborers, mostly Filipinos.

“Everyone was told to tell customs and security that they were flying to Dubai,” Mayberry explains. Once the group passed the guards, they went upstairs and waited by the McDonald’s for First Kuwaiti staff to unlock a door — Gate 26 — that led to an unmarked, white 52-seat jet. It was “an antique piece of shit” Mayberry offers in a casual, blunt manner.

“All the workers had their passports taken away by First Kuwaiti,” Mayberry claims, and while he knew the plane was bound for Baghdad, he’s not so sure the others were aware of their destination. The Asian laborers began asking questions about why they were flying north and the jet wasn’t flying east over the ocean, he says. “I think they thought they were going to work in Dubai.”

One former First Kuwaiti supervisor acknowledges that the company holds passports of many workers in Iraq – a violation of US contracting.

“All of the passports are kept in the offices,” said one company insider who requested anonymity in fear of financial and personal retribution. As for distributing Dubai boarding passes for Baghdad flights, “It’s because of the travel bans,” he explained.

Mayberry believes that migrant workers from the Philippines, India and Nepal are especially vulnerable to employers like First Kuwaiti because their countries have little or no diplomatic presence in Iraq.

“If you don’t have your passport or an embassy to go to, what you do to get out of a bad situation?” he asks. “How can they go to the US State Department for help if First Kuwaiti is building their embassy?”

Deadly ‘Candy Store’ Medicine

Owen had already been working at the embassy site since late November when Mayberry arrived. The two never crossed paths, but both share similar complaints about management of the project and brutal treatment of the laborers that, at times, numbered as many as 2,500. Most are from the Philippines, India, and Pakistan. Others are from Egypt and Turkey.

The number of workers with injuries and ailments stunned Mayberry. He went to work immediately after and stayed busy around the clock for days.

Four days later, First Kuwaiti pulled him off the job after he requested an investigation of two patients who had died before he arrived from what he suspected was medical malpractice. Mayberry also recommended that the health clinics be shut down because of unsanitary conditions and mismanagement.

“There hadn’t been any follow up on medical care. People were walking around intoxicated on pain relievers with unwrapped wounds and there were a lot of infections,” he recalls. “The idea that there was any hygiene seemed ridiculous. I’m not sure they were even bathing.”

In reports made available to the US State Department, the US Army and First Kuwaiti, Mayberry listed dozens of concerns about the clinics, which he found lacking in hot water, disinfectant, hand washing stations, properly supplied ambulances, and communication equipment. Mayberry also complained that workers’ medical records were in total disarray or nonexistent, the beds were dirty, and the support staff hired by First Kuwaiti was poorly trained.

The handling of prescription drugs especially bothered him. Many of the drugs that originated from Iraq and Kuwait were unsecured, disorganized and unintelligibly labeled, he said in one memo. He found that the medical staff frequently misdiagnosed patients. Prescription pain killers were being handed out “like a candy store … and then people were sent back to work.”

Mayberry warned that the practice could cause addiction and safety hazards. “Some were on the construction site climbing scaffolding 30 feet off the ground. I told First Kuwaiti that you don’t give painkillers to people who are running machinery and working on heavy construction and they said ‘that’s how we do it.’”

The sloppy handling of drugs may have led to the two deaths, Mayberry speculates. One worker, age 25, died in his room. The second, in his mid-30s, died at the clinic because of heart failure. Both deaths may be “medical homicide,” Mayberry says — because the patients may have been negligently prescribed improper drug treatment.

If the State Department investigated, Mayberry knows nothing of the outcome. Two State Department officials with project oversight responsibilities did not return phone calls or emails inquiring about Mayberry’s allegations. The reports may have been ignored, not because of his complaints, but because Mayberry is a terrible speller, a problem compounded by an Arabic translation program loaded on his computer, he says.

Accidents Happen

Owen’s account of his seven months on the job paints a similar picture to Mayberry’s. Health and safety measures were essentially non-existent, he says. Not once did he witness a safety meeting. Once an Egyptian worker fell and broke his back and was sent home. No one ever heard from him again. “The accident might not have happened if there was a safety program and he had known how to use a safety harness.”

Owen also says that managers regularly beat workers and that laborers were issued only one work uniform, making it difficult to go to the laundry. “You could never have it washed. Clothing got really bad – full of sweat and dirt.”

And while he often smuggled water to the work crews, medical care was a different issue. When he urged laborers to get medical treatment for rashes and sores, First Kuwaiti managers accused him of spoiling the laborers and allowing them simply to avoid work, he says.

State Department officials supervising the project are aware of many such events, but apparently do nothing, he said. Once when 17 workers climbed the wall of the construction site to escape, a State Department official helped round them up and put them in “virtual lockdown,” Owen said.

Just before he resigned, hundreds of Pakistani workers went on strike in June and beat up a Lebanese manager who they accused of harassing them. Owen estimates that 375 were then sent home.

‘Treated Like Animals’

Recent First Kuwaiti employees agree that the accounts shared by Owen and Mayberry are accurate. One longtime supervisor claims that 50 to 60 percent of the laborers regularly complain that First Kuwaiti “treats them like animals,” and routinely reduces their promised pay with confusing and unexplained deductions.

Another former First Kuwaiti manager, who declines to be named because of possible adverse consequences, says that Owen’s and Mayberry’s complaints only begin “to scratch the surface.”

But scratching the surface is the only view yet available of what may be the most lasting monument to the US liberation and occupation of Iraq. As of now only a handful of authorized State Department managers and contractors, along with First Kuwaiti workers and contractors, are officially allowed inside the project’s walls. No journalist has ever been allowed access to the sprawling 104-acre site with towering construction cranes raising their necks along the skyline.

Even this tight security is a charade, says on former high-level First Kuwaiti manager. First Kuwaiti managers living at the construction site regularly smuggle prostitutes in from the streets of Baghdad outside the Green Zone, he says.

Prostitutes, he explains are viewed as possible spies. “They are a big security risk.”

But the exposure that the US occupation forces and First Kuwaiti may fear most could begin with the contractor itself and the conditions workers are forced to endure at this most obvious symbol of the American democracy project in Iraq.