War & Disaster Profiteering

As more and more revelations about contract abuse in Iraq by Halliburton come out regularly, activists in Houston are working with national groups, including Democracy Rising, to highlight corporate contract abuse by Halliburton when they hold their shareholders meeting this May 18. Read More

Aware of it or not, the B.C. provincial government is actively involved in underwriting the illegal U.S. occupation of Iraq. Pension fund investments are include stock holdings in 39 of the top 100 Pentagon contractors, including the seven largest: Lockheed, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrup Grumman, General Dynamics, United Technologies and General Electric. Read More

Sudan on Tuesday said its ABCO corporation -- in which Swiss company Cliveden owns 37 percent -- had begun drilling for oil in Darfur, where preliminary studies showed there were "abundant" quantities of oil. "The Sudanese people have never benefited from these (oil) discoveries," said Ahmed Hussein, the London-based spokesman for the Justice and Equality Movement. "The oil must wait until a final peace deal is signed." Read More

While the Iraqi army seems to be getting up to speed, the training of the 142,000-member police force is moving more slowly and fraught with bigger problems than reports by U.S. officials might suggest. The eventual goal is to have Iraqis training all of their security forces, but private contractors expect to continue working well into 2006. One small but revealing reason says one trainer: students suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. "They are the main targets of insurgents," he says. "It makes it difficult to maintain their attention span." Read More

Billing disputes with contractors in Iraq have sparked major questions about Pentagon reforms of the 1990s that streamlined acquisition programs but also cut down on oversight of performance and billing. Read More

Fittingly, a government devoted to perpetual pre-emptive deconstruction now has a standing office of perpetual pre-emptive reconstruction. Gone are the days of waiting for wars to break out and drawing up plans to pick up the pieces. The White House now has an office that keeps "high risk" countries on a "watch list" and assembles teams made up of private companies, NGOs and members of thinktanks - some will have "pre-completed" contracts to rebuild countries that are not yet broken. Read More

Appearing in federal court, David B. Chalmers Jr., head of Houston-based BayOil (USA), and his business associate Ludmil Dionissiev pleaded innocent to charges they fixed oil prices and paid illegal surcharges as part of a scheme to ingratiate themselves with Saddam Hussein's regime and thereby profit from Iraqi oil sales. Read More

Demand for private security services are expected to skyrocket in the wake of the mounting unrest in Thailand's three southernmost provinces and the recent bombings in Hat Yai. Read More

There is no doubt that there are profits to be made in the reconstruction business. There are massive engineering and supplies contracts; "democracy building" has exploded into a $2 billion industry; and times have never been better for public-sector consultants - the private firms that advise governments on selling off their assets, often running government services themselves as subcontractors. Read More

For the third time in nine months, the Bush administration has redrafted its project to rebuild Iraq, The need for the reallocation of money grew not only from unanticipated security costs but also from what many experts said were flawed assumptions by Pentagon planners and Congress when they set out to pepper Iraq with large infrastructure projects built by American companies. Read More