Oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens told Congress on Wednesday that U.S. energy companies are “entitled” to some of Iraq’s crude because of the large number of American troops that lost their lives fighting in the country and the U.S. taxpayer money spent in Iraq. (full article…)

First, you are required to get over your initial disgust that such legislation is even necessary, that such clauses even exist and that the Pentagon is already doing business with such contractors (hi, Halliburton/KBR!), and that there has already been a truly horrible case validating it, wherein a 20-year-old female employee was allegedly gang-raped by contractors, locked in a shipping container, abused every way from Sunday, and found out later she was unable to sue. (full article…)

The slogan on Fiji Water’s website – “And remember this “we saved you a trip to Fiji” – suddenly felt like a dark joke. Every day, more soldiers showed up on the streets. When I called the courthouse, not a single official would give me his name. Even tour guides were running scared – one told me that one of his colleagues had been picked up and beaten for talking politics with tourists. When I later asked Fiji Water spokesman Rob Six what the company thought of all this, he said the policy was not to comment on the government “unless something really affects us.” (more…)

Israel’s second largest bank will be forced to defend itself in court in the coming weeks over claims it is withholding tens of millions of dollars in ‘lost’ accounts belonging to Jews who died in the Nazi death camps. Bank Leumi has denied it holds any such funds despite a parliamentary committee revealing in 2004 that the bank owes at least $75 million to the families of several thousand Holocaust victims. (more…)

The son of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the social activist and poet who was executed by a former military regime in Nigeria, claimed victory against Royal Dutch Shell last night after the company agreed to pay $15.5m (£9.7m) to settle a lawsuit he and others had filed against it in a New York court.

“I think he would be happy with this,” Ken Saro-Wiwa Jr said after terms of the settlement were made public, even though the amount involved amounts to a tiny fraction of Shell’s annual profits and the company insisted that, by making such a payment, it was not admitting to any wrongdoing. (more…)

Assaf Kfoury: The economic crisis is felt acutely in the US, but has now spread to the entire world, even to countries (in South America, for example) that initially thought they would be spared. And the American presidential campaign and elections cannot but concern people everywhere, given the dominant role of the US globally. The simultaneous unfolding of the two — the crisis and the presidential campaign — has naturally elicited considerable discussion outside the US. In the Middle East, in particular, there has been a kind of speculation, perhaps wishful thinking, be it from the left or from the right. Some Arab commentators have speculated that an Obama administration will follow less aggressive policies. Some other Arab commentators want to see the economic crisis as the sign of an imminent American global decline, and warn pro-American governments and parties to stop doing the bidding of a doomed North American hegemon. What is your response to this kind of thinking? More generally, in relation to the Middle East, what direction is US policy likely to take with the coming Obama administration in the wake of the economic crisis?

Noam Chomsky: I think that US hegemony will continue to decline as the world becomes more diverse. That process has been underway for a long time. US power peaked at the end of World War II, when it had literally half the world’s wealth and incomparable military power and security. By 1970, its share of global wealth had declined by about half, and it has remained fairly stable since then. In some important respects, US domination has weakened. One important illustration is Latin America, Washington’s traditional “backyard.” For the first time since European colonization 500 years ago, South America is making significant progress towards integration and independence, and is also establishing South-South relations independent of the US, specifically with China, but elsewhere as well. That is a serious matter for US planners. As it was discussing the transcendent importance of destroying Chilean democracy in 1971, Nixon’s National Security Council warned that if the US cannot control Latin America, it cannot expect “to achieve a successful order elsewhere in the world” — that is, to control the rest of the world. Controlling Latin America has become far more difficult in recent years. (more…)

We were promised a “New Economy” of high-tech tradable services to take the place of the offshored manufacturing economy. Wondering what had become of the “New Economy,” Duke University’s Offshoring Research Network searched for it and located it offshore. Yes, the activities of the “New Economy” are also outsourced offshore.

Call centers, IT operations, back-office operations, and manufacturing have long been moved offshore. Now high-value-added proprietary activities such as research and development, engineering, product development, and analytical services are being sent offshore. All that’s left is finance, and it is crumbling before our eyes.

Independent broker-dealers are disappearing: Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers. These venerable institutions were too thinly capitalized for the risks that they took. Merrill Lynch is now part of the Bank of America, and Lehman Brothers is history. (more…)

When Members of Congress or the Administration or the corporate CEOs or the empirically starved right-wing ideologues start whining about regulation the right-wing echo chamber goes wild. When the absence of adequate regulation lets an industry wreak havoc, Congress and the Administration meekly admit a bit of regulation might have averted disaster. The corporate CEOs, expelled with their lucrative golden parachutes, have “no comment.”

The taxpayers, who are too often the guarantors of last resort and who are stuck with the tab, are asking each other why their public watchdogs were asleep at the switch. The Washington merry-go-round is something to behold.

As the recent headlines note, the Federal Government has taken over the giant companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) is using the legal process of a “conservatorship” to “stabilize” Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Talk about regulation! (more…)