Privatization & Procurement

Tens of thousands of contractors, hired in unprecedented numbers to avoid the use of more US troops in a variety of tasks, toil quietly in vital and dangerous missions. They are a hidden story of this war, uncounted in the military death toll, unremembered with medals of valor, unwelcome at veterans hospitals, and unassisted in their often difficult re entries home. Read More

This weekend marks the fifth anniversary of the US invasion of Afghanistan. Fariba Nawa, an Afghan-American who returned to her native country to examine the progress of reconstruction, uncovers some examples of where the money has (and hasn't) gone, how the system of international aid works (and doesn't), and what it is really like in the villages and cities where outsiders are rebuilding the war-torn countryside. Click here to download the complete report. An HTML text version of the report is also available. Listen, watch or read an interview with Fariba Nawa on Democracy Now! about reconstruction, security, and life in Afghanistan five years after the invasion. Read More

A damning report on Mittal Steel's acquisition of an impoverished African country's iron ore reserves is published today, accusing the world's largest steelmaker of offering an inequitable "raw deal" that has created an unaccountable "state within a state". Read More

After two years of public hearings, litigation, testimony and negotiations and more than 11,500 letters, phone calls and emails to state decision makers, New Jersey consumers avoided higher electricity rates when Exelon walked away from its takeover bid to buy-out Public Service Enterprise Group, PSEG, a publicly traded energy and energy services company headquartered in New Jersey. Read More

Rich countries must deliver more money directly to poor nations to avert a growing health and sanitation crisis spreading across the southern hemisphere, Oxfam will say today. Read More

Water experts and businesses teamed up on Tuesday to fight corruption feared to be siphoning off billions of dollars from projects to supply drinking water to the Third World. Read More

Disaster profiteers make millions while local companies and laborers in New Orleans and the rest of the Katrina-devastated Gulf Coast region are systematically getting the short end of the stick, according to a major new report from the nonprofit CorpWatch. Click here for the press release, to read the text version or to download the report. Read More

CorpWatch unveils major report on corporate profiteering in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita on the American Gulf Coast. Read More

L-3 Communications, a little-known but gigantic military contractor, provides 300 contract intelligence experts to the Pentagon in Iraq to support operations ranging from interrogation to media analysis. The secretive $426.5 million operation, which is run out of Virginia, may be a recipe for disaster, say critics. Also see related story, A Translator's Tale, by Pratap Chatterjee. Read More

A major Dutch arms manufacturer's bankruptcy revealed a secret deal to supply weapons to General Augusto Pinochet of Chile. The man behind the scheme is now a tax exile who appears to be immune from charges of bribery or tax evasion. Read More