Friday, June 11, 2004 · Last updated 8:25 a.m. PT
SEC probes Nigeria bribery accusations
By KRISTEN HAYS AP BUSINESS WRITER
     HOUSTON -- The Securities and Exchange Commission is formally investigating allegations that a Halliburton Co. subsidiary was involved in paying $180 million in bribes to get a natural gas project contract in Nigeria. Vice President Dick Cheney was head of the oil services conglomerate at the time.
     Halliburton on Friday announced that the SEC has started a formal probe. The SEC's informal investigation of the contract was disclosed in February.
     The SEC isn't alone in examining the contract, in which Halliburton subsidiary KBR, formerly known as Kellogg, Brown & Root, is a 25 percent owner. Nigeria in February ordered an investigation, and a French magistrate has been probing the payments for months. The Justice Department is reviewing documents voluntarily provided by Halliburton.
     The company also has been under fire for allegedly overcharging the government on contracts related to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Halliburton says the company is a political target and denies wrongdoing.

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¶ 11:28 0 comments

Today, as the 2004 election nears:

* More than 43,000 Floridians are on the waiting list to have their rights restored, some of whom first learned in 2000, after voting for years, that they weren't legally entitled to vote. The restoration process can take years, and the list is growing, not shrinking.
* Hundreds of people wrongly removed from voter rolls in 2000, who never committed felonies or whose rights had been restored, may not yet have been put back on the rolls.
* A lawsuit charges that Florida's felon disenfranchisement is unconstitutional and affects up to 600,000 people.
* Despite all this, state officials have just sent elections supervisors in Florida's 67 counties another list of 47,000 names of individuals who may have committed felonies in the past, telling the supervisors to purge their rolls again.
* Some supervisors say they don't have the staff, expertise or money to do the purge without the same kind of errors as in 2000.
* Legally purged voters, meanwhile, won't find out about it until they get a letter from an election supervisor this summer - too late to have their rights restored for this election - or are turned away on Election Day.
* The vast majority of them are black and would be likely to vote Democratic.
* In Miami-Dade County, for example, blacks are 20 percent of the population but make up 65 percent of those on the 2000 felon purge lists.

¶ 09:56 0 comments

"...what representative government is for, to counteract the excesses of the monied interests, as Thomas Jefferson said. Because big business realizes that the main countervailing force against their excesses and abuses is government, their goal has been to take over the government, and they do this with money and politics. They do it by putting their top officials at the Pentagon, Treasury, and Federal Reserve, and they do it by providing job opportunities to retiring members of Congress. They have law firms that draft legislation and think-tanks that provide ready-made speeches. They also do it by threatening to leave the country. The quickest way to bring a member of Congress to his or her knees is by shifting industries abroad.

Concentrated corporate power violates many principles of capitalism. For example, under capitalism, owners control their property. Under multinational corporations, the shareholders don’t control their corporation. Under capitalism, if you can’t make the market respond, you sink. Under big business, you don’t go bankrupt; you go to Washington for a bailout. Under capitalism, there is supposed to be freedom of contract. When was the last time you negotiated a contract with banks or auto dealers? They are all fine-print contracts. The law of contracts has been wiped out for 99 percent of contracts that ordinary consumers sign on to. Capitalism is supposed to be based on law and order. Corporations get away with corporate crime, fraud, and abuse. And finally, capitalism is premised on a level playing field; the most meritorious is supposed to win. Tell that to a small inventor or a small business up against McDonald’s or a software programmer up against Microsoft.

Giant multinational corporations have no allegiance to any country or community other than to control them or abandon them. So what we have now is the merger of big business and big government to further subsidize costs or eliminate risks or guarantee profits by our government."

¶ 09:09 0 comments