Billions over Baghdad

Vanity Fair

The Spoils of War
Billions over Baghdad
Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele

Between April 2003 and June 2004, $12 billion in U.S. currency—much of it belonging to the Iraqi people—was shipped from the Federal Reserve to Baghdad, where it was dispensed by the Coalition Provisional Authority. Some of the cash went to pay for projects and keep ministries afloat, but, incredibly, at least $9 billion has gone missing, unaccounted for, in a frenzy of mismanagement and greed. Following a trail that leads from a safe in one of Saddam's palaces to a house near San Diego, to a P.O. box in the Bahamas, the authors discover just how little anyone cared about how the money was handled.

By Naomi Klein, Henry Holt

AlterNet
Posted on September 14, 2007,

The following is an excerpt from Naomi Klein's new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Henry Holt, 2007) and first appeared in the UK Guardian (read other excerpts here and here). The video to the right is a short documentary explaining the thesis of Klein's book. Read more about the documentary here.

Dear Kansas Kucinich Supporters,

The Kucinich for President National Campaign is in the process of launching a well-organized national field program. We are currently seeking volunteers to serve in coordinating positions in our Kansas campaign organization.

The Great Iraq Swindle

By Matt Taibbi
Rolling Stone

Thursday 23 August 2007

How Bush allowed an army of for-profit contractors to invade the US Treasury.

How is it done? How do you screw the taxpayer for millions, get away with it and then ride off into the sunset with one middle finger extended, the other wrapped around a chilled martini? Ask Earnest O. Robbins - he knows all about being a successful contractor in Iraq.

August 27, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist

A Socialist Plot
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Suppose, for a moment, that the Heritage Foundation were to put out a press release attacking the liberal view that even children whose parents could afford to send them to private school should be entitled to free government-run education.

Jailing Nation: How Did Our Prison System Become Such a Nightmare?

AlterNet

How can you tell when a democracy is dead? When concentration camps spring up and everyone shivers in fear? Or is it when concentration camps spring up and no one shivers in fear because everyone knows they're not for "people like us" (in Woody Allen's marvelous phrase) but for the others, the troublemakers, the ones you can tell are guilty merely by the color of their skin, the shape of their nose or their social class?

Wisconson fact sheet

They call it Healthy Wisconsin and it's passed the State Senate.__They did something interesting.

The Young Invincibles

As an informal litmus test, I recently sent an e-mail to a handful of people in their twenties asking three vague questions: Are you uninsured? Know someone who is? How has it affected your life? Forward it to anyone, I encouraged. I imagined I would get a fair number of replies—one in four New Yorkers is uninsured, so I wasn't exactly shooting in the dark, and as a 27-year-old former young invincible myself, I had an undoubtedly skewed sample—but I was unprepared for the sheer volume of response: more than 100 replies within a couple of days, mostly from people I had never met. There were complaints, conspiracy theories, details of unpaid debts, stories of untreated injuries, shoddy care, one insurance-inspired marriage (he needed surgery), and, in the case of a musician friend, wisdom teeth that should have been pulled years ago. The messages led to interviews with more than 50 uninsured New Yorkers. If there was a dominant theme to these conversations, it was that being uninsured has a distinct way of tweaking one's perception of the city: New York becomes a kind of phobia-forming obstacle course, one navigated with the goal of keeping doctors at bay.

Health Care

The New York Times
July 30, 2007
By PAUL KRUGMAN

When a child is enrolled in the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (Schip), the positive results can be dramatic.

A Sick Way to Prop Up an Ailing Economy

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on July 28, 2007, Printed on July 28, 2007

For the first four years after the dot-com bust in 2001, a weak economy in most sectors was masked by an explosion in real estate sales, rocketing home values and a surge of consumer spending as people taking advantage of super-low interest rates and easy credit grabbed chunks of equity out of their newly high-priced digs and went shopping.