Carlyle Group: A bunch of Sleazy Corporatist Fucks. That includes Bill Clinton

If it seems like Carlyle is doing a new deal every other day, that's not far off the mark. Last month, Carlyle and two private-equity partners bought Home Depot's supply arm for $10.3 billion. That was followed a week later by the purchase of Allison Transmission from General Motors for $5.6 billion. The day after that, Carlyle bought a building in Trieste, Italy.

On July 2, Carlyle disclosed that it was taking nursing-home chain Manor Care private for $6.3 billion. On July 5, it agreed to buy Annapolis-based ARINC, a communications company serving the military and the passenger airline industry. The next day, Carlyle announced its first real estate investment in Finland.

Where does Carlyle get all that money?

"It's called 300 days a year on a plane with 18 full-time fundraisers," said Daniel A. D'Aniello, a Carlyle managing director and one of the firm's three co-founders.

Led by David Rubenstein, another managing director and co-founder, Carlyle has an investor relations team traveling the world, pitching the company to public and private pension funds, universities, endowments and wealthy individuals.

The company has roughly $58.5 billion under management, and it anticipates the total will grow to $88 billion by the end of the year. "Under management" refers to the amount that investors, have given -- or contracted to give -- a firm to invest.

"The money comes from corporate and public pension funds, which means teachers, firemen, union members," D'Aniello said in a telephone interview yesterday.

Lockheed Given another billion dollars of taxpayer money to privatize military

Oil Industry Wages Economic Terrorism

A push from Congress and the White House for huge increases in biofuels, such as ethanol, is prompting the oil industry to scale back its plans for refinery expansions. That could keep gasoline prices high, possibly for years to come.

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Amazon toxic waste case may set a legal precedent

According to Amazon Watch, an environmental and human rights organisation based in San Francisco, “of 45 oil production sites inspected by court-appointed technical experts, many of which were part of an earlier remediation, several show concentrations of carcinogenic chemicals at hundreds and sometimes thousands of times higher than US norms.”
In November 1993, a class-action lawsuit on behalf of residents of the rain forest area known as ‘Oriente’ was launched in a US District Court in New York.
Although the plaintiffs wanted the case to be tried in New York, a federal appeals court in New York ruled that it should be conducted in Ecuador. But in a significant decision, the court also stated that any judgment against the oil company would be enforced in the US.
US courts will also reassert jurisdiction if Chevron refuses to co-operate with the litigation in Ecuador.
The suit charges that Texaco dumped nearly 70mn liters of toxic waste into hundreds of unlined open pits, and from there the waste seeped into estuaries and rivers thus exposing residents to carcinogenic pollutants.

The FSS Mess, Privatization and the Lack of Personal Responsibility

Somewhere, somehow, Marion Blakey and her Administration seem to have lost sight of their mandate to provide for the safety of American citizens who travel by air. Perhaps it was when she made the decision to get rid of those pesky general aviation aircraft by starting the user-fee juggernaut. Perhaps it was earlier, when someone saw that one of the portions of the FAA, the Flight Service Station system, was carrying out its designated function rapidly, accurately, safely, and generally working in a nearly flawless manner. Naturally the reaction was that such a situation was intolerable. Because ongoing competence in the field of safe aviation could not be allowed to continue, the FAA went through a grueling and expensive process to fix it. In October of 2005, ostensibly to save the taxpayers money, it entered into a $1.7 billion contract to "privatize" (is that really a verb?) a portion of the FAA that worked well. I know, children ... one would think that if private industry could do a government function better than the government, then the FAA would have privatized one of the parts of the FAA that doesn't work. Children, such a thought would require us to apply that evil concept, logic, to the operation of political machinery. Children, you know very well that logic should never be used when traveling through the looking glass into privatization land.

The $1.7 billion contract with Lockheed-Martin was to save 20% off the cost of having the work done by FAA personnel, who apparently were evil, money-grubbing government employees who had committed the mortal sin of competence. Of course, there were those sticks-in-the-mud who felt that the numbers didn't add up. After all, you have to pay enough to hire the kind of talent needed to staff the Flight Service Stations, located where the briefers could have detailed local knowledge of the prevailing weather patterns, and equip them with the latest computers, and finally allow for the kind of profit that shareholders will demand (on the order of 8-15%). How can Lockheed-Martin do this for less than the folks who have been doing it so very well for so many years without the cost of a return to the stockholding mutual funds?

Well, those who were skeptical were told to close their eyes, click their heels together and get with the program. Even when the FAA's own internal investigative folks looked at the contract and pronounced that there were grave doubts as to whether Lockheed-Martin could pull it off, Marion Blakey and her friends decided that such talk was defeatist and shouldn't be considered. Besides, Lockheed-Martin contributed nicely to the appropriate politicians, so a politically appointed sort doesn't want to make waves, even if she is in a job involving air safety. Nevertheless, for people whose sole purpose in employment is air safety, to shrug off an objective report by one's own agency that indicates that a critical safety function is imperiled is, at least in my opinion, reckless and irresponsible in handling our money. If someone dies as a result, it may become criminal.

Greed Driven Cheats Who Run Phone Companies Want a Piece of Lucrative Cable TV Market in Illinois

The measure hammered out by state lawmakers and the attorney general's office would try to make it easier for telephone giants AT&T and Verizon to compete with cable kings Comcast Corp. and Insight Communications for consumers' phone, Internet and cable needs.

It cleared the House 113-0 two weeks ago and awaits expected approval in the Senate.

That's a long way from just a few weeks ago, when opposition from city mayors, public access channels and powerful cable companies seemed to have doomed the idea.

But protections included in the negotiations prompted opponents to drop their opposition, although Verizon criticizes the proposal as making it more difficult to enter Illinois' market. Even the cable companies are officially neutral on the measure and say they're willing to see if it works.

"It obviously didn't please everybody," said Gary Mack, spokesman for the Illinois Cable Television and Communications Association. "There are elements of it that nobody's completely happy with."

The new measure eases concerns about the loss of public access channels, known as PEGs, by protecting funding and potentially creating channels in places that don't have them now.

PEG advocates say that's a vast improvement over what's happened elsewhere.

"In a number of states, PEG access is dead," said Barbara Popovic of Keep Us Connected, a coalition of cities, nonprofit groups and public access channels. "This really does give PEG access a new hope."

Communities still will get their franchise fees. They'll also have the final say over permits for cable equipment and some enforcement power if service is flawed. Mayors throughout the state had warned that stripping them of franchising power could jeopardize customer service and cause a revenue shortfall in local government.

Twenty Things You Should Know About Corporate Crime

America, the Undeveloping Nation

Several times a day, Roger Thacker hauls 5-gallon buckets of water about 50 yards uphill to his mobile home so his family can bathe and do laundry.

It's a grueling daily chore that keeps local families like Thacker's trapped in a 19th century time warp, years after the rest of the country stopped considering running water a modern convenience.

About 85 households along an 8-mile stretch called Ridgeline Road have electricity and phone lines but lack running water. The wells many once relied on for clean water are no longer usable, local residents say, because they have dried up or been contaminated by nearby coal mining.

ndia escapes U.S. list of worst human traffickers

The annual Trafficking in Persons report, released Tuesday, says that as many as 800,000 people -- largely women and children -- are trafficked across borders each year. Many are forced into prostitution, sweatshops, domestic labor, farming and child armies. (Watch why India isn't on Tier 3 )

U.S. officials told CNN the question of India's ranking caused a heated debate between Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte.

Negroponte wanted India listed as a Tier 3 country, or worst offender. Rice overruled him out of concern about alienating the Indian government. India is on the Tier 2 watch list.

US To Set Up Military Command In Africa