What's with the larger than Normal High Level Resignations, lately?

NEW:  BBC General Director George Entwistle resigns over elitist child sex ring allegations

CIA director David Petraeus resigns in wake of extramarital affair:
[link to www.thestar.com] 

Hillary Clinton stepping down:
[link to theweek.com] 

Eric Holder (Attorney General):
[link to washington.cbslocal.com] 

Frank Stronach steps down from Magna board chairmanship:
[link to www.theglobeandmail.com] 

Roger Ortiz’ resignation official, Cameron Co. searches for replace…
[link to www.valleycentral.com] 

Lockheed Martin’s incoming CEO resigns; replacement named:
[link to www.latimes.com] 

PetroShale Announces Resignation of Director:
[link to www.stockhouse.com] 

And at least 6 high level resignations in Canada alone.

FBI to launch nationwide facial recognition service

By Aliya Sternstein 10/07/2011

The FBI by mid-January will activate a nationwide facial recognition service in select states that will allow local police to identify unknown subjects in photos, bureau officials told Nextgov.

The federal government is embarking on a multiyear, $1 billion dollar overhaul of the FBI's existing fingerprint database to more quickly and accurately identify suspects, partly through applying other biometric markers, such as iris scans and voice recordings.

Often law enforcement authorities will "have a photo of a person and for whatever reason they just don't know who it is [but they know] this is clearly the missing link to our case," said Nick Megna, a unit chief at the FBI's criminal justice information services division. The new facial recognition service can help provide that missing link by retrieving a list of mug shots ranked in order of similarity to the features of the subject in the photo.

Today, an agent would have to already know the name of an individual to pull up the suspect's mug shot from among the 10 million shots stored in the bureau's existing Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System. Using the new Next-Generation Identification system that is under development, law enforcement analysts will be able to upload a photo of an unknown person; choose a desired number of results from two to 50 mug shots; and, within 15 minutes, receive identified mugs to inspect for potential matches.
Users typically will request 20 candidates, Megna said. The service does not provide a direct match.

Michigan, Washington, Florida and North Carolina will participate in a test of the new search tool this winter before it is offered to criminal justice professionals across the country in 2014 as part of NGI. The project, which was awarded to Lockheed Martin Corp. in 2008, already has upgraded the FBI's fingerprint matching service.

Local authorities have the choice to file mug shots with the FBI as part of the booking process. The bureau expects its collection of shots to rival its repository of 70 million fingerprints once more officers are aware of the facial search's capabilities.

Thomas E. Bush III, who helped develop NGI's system requirements when he served as assistant director of the CJIS division between 2005 and 2009, said, "The idea was to be able to plug and play with these identifiers and biometrics." Law enforcement personnel saw value in facial recognition and the technology was maturing, said the 33-year FBI veteran who now serves as a private consultant.

NGI's incremental construction seems to align with the White House's push to deploy new information technology in phases so features can be scrapped if they don't meet expectations or run over budget.

But immigrant rights groups have raised concerns that the Homeland Security Department, which exchanges digital prints with the FBI, will abuse the new facial recognition component. Currently, a controversial DHS immigrant fingerprinting program called Secure Communities runs FBI prints from booked offenders against the department's IDENT biometric database to check whether they are in the country illegally. Homeland Security officials say they extradite only the most dangerous aliens, including convicted murderers and rapists. But critics say the FBI-DHS print swapping ensnares as many foreigners as possible, including those whose charges are minor or are ultimately dismissed.

Megna said Homeland Security is not part of the facial recognition pilot. But, Bush said in the future NGI's data, including the photos, will be accessible by Homeland Security's IDENT.

The planned addition of facial searches worries Sunita Patel, a staff attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, who said, "Any database of personal identity information is bound to have mistakes. And with the most personal immutable traits like our facial features and fingerprints, the public can't afford a mistake."

In addition, Patel said she is concerned about the involvement of local police in information sharing for federal immigration enforcement purposes. "The federal government is using local cops to create a massive surveillance system," she said.

Bush said, "We do have the capability to search against each other's systems," but added, "if you don't come to the attention of law enforcement you don't have anything to fear from these systems."

Other civil liberties advocates questioned whether the facial recognition application would retrieve mug shots of those who have simply been arrested. "It might be appropriate to have nonconvicted people out of that system," said Jim Harper, director of information policy at the libertarian Cato Institute. FBI officials declined to comment on the recommendation.

Harper also noted large-scale searches may generate a lot of false positives, or incorrect matches. Facial recognition "is more accurate with a Google or a Facebook, because they will have anywhere from a half-dozen to a dozen pictures of an individual, whereas I imagine the FBI has one or two mug shots," he said.

FBI officials would not disclose the name of the search product or the vendor, but said they gained insights on the technique's accuracy by studying research from the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

In responding to concerns about the creation of a Big Brother database for tracking innocent Americans, Megna said the system will not alter the FBI's authorities or the way it conducts business. "This doesn't change or create any new exchanges of data," he said. "It only provides [law enforcement] with a new service to determine what photos are of interest to them."

In 2008, the FBI released a privacy impact assessment summarizing its appraisal of controls in place to ensure compliance with federal privacy regulations. Megna said that, during meetings with the CJIS Advisory Policy Board and the National Crime Prevention and Privacy Compact Council, "we haven't gotten a whole lot of pushback on the photo capability."

The FBI has an elaborate system of checks and balances to guard fingerprints, palm prints, mug shots and all manner of criminal history data, he said.

"This is not something where we want to collect a bunch of surveillance film" and enter it in the system, Megna said. "That would be useless to us. It would be useless to our users."

Noticing Our Own Slavery

Lock Heed
By DAVID Ker THOMSON

The left fears corporations and the right fears the government and the far right feareth the Lord, but the distinction between the three is nominal.

We teach our children that democracy is good because we were taught thus. We were taught by our parents to send our power away from our own neighborhoods and watersheds to distant city halls and to even more distant, violent watersheds along the Ottawa or in the Chesapeake, because we were taught not only that democracy is good but that we must never, ever, under any circumstances think about democracy. We progressives are the Margaret Thatchers of democracyland, programmed to respond to the notion of alternatives to democracy by saying, “there is no alternative.”

The propaganda we give our children is that the vote is the important feature of democracy and the corporate lobbyist an inessential that can be overcome by more strategic voting. Good luck with that.

The truth of democracyland is that the corporate vicar is the first among equals, world without end. This is a constitutive, not contingent, feature of democracy. Corporations are slavers, they thrive in slave cultures like ours—did you really not notice how many black men we have enslaved in our gulags at this very moment? Democracies arise in slave nations and their bills of rights are drafted by slave owners. Do you really think that by chanting “constitutional rights” and “the rule of law” you can get around the fact that the very warp and woof of the rule of law is the enslavement of others? Warp. Woof. Growl.

Twelve thousand police marched this week in Toronto for a fallen comrade, and the press licked and licked at the boots of the marchers, getting their tongue right in to the smallest fissures and sucking the tanning chemicals from the leather, because the press is democratic—it loves the boot, the display of power, the feeling that someone somewhere is in charge, that it isn’t just us and our hori hori knives and a few acres giving peas a chance. No such honors will be forthcoming for the victims of the police, for the same reason—the press is democratic and loves only the boot.

We tell our children this nonsense about voting, that the Franchise will save us, because we are raised so thoroughly inside a slaving nation we cannot hear our own fictions, even as they tumble from our lips onto our children. In slavocracies like ours here in N’Am, all things tend to Lockheed, but will we heed our own locks?

Just for curiosity, would you call the “Lockheed Martin tax” of $260 per American household a government tax or a corporation tax? If Lockheed Martin’s clients are the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy and the Department of Agriculture and more than two dozen other government departments and agencies, according to William Hartung’s reckoning, who is the shadow and who is the government? And since Lockheed Martin not only receives the tax but acts as the tax collector and as the spy in the bedroom who oversees both tax and collector, in what significant sense is Lockheed Martin not God?

The point is to repudiate not just gods, but God. We must do this not out of hubris but in humility, in an awareness that with anything less we fail to mature as humans. We must learn to submit to the necessity of our own freedom.

The wise woman knows that no “leader” can help us. We cannot learn independence by studying dependence. Democracy is not an answer to anything. It is the problem itself. An addiction cannot be cured with more vigorous application of the drug. Do you think that if you abdicate your responsibility to some green party “leader” who after years of kowtowing to democracy manages to reduce the Lockheed tax from $260 to $240 that you will have done something worth doing? What you will have done, then, is to own with your own blood $240 of your own binding and subjugation, and you will have squandered the years you might have spent resisting evil. Was there some part of the fact that democracies arise in slave states that you failed to understand? Do you think Lockheed Martin and its shadows are some docile beast you can placate with a vote?

The beast wants to rape your sons and marry your dotage to an imbecilic old age and divorce your reason from sense and squeeze every drop of blood from the angels of your better nature.

I am writing in the anus of a new asshole I’ve ripped in the body politic, but the hole is a loophole for white boys of a certain sort and it is closing, while you’re over there fiddling with your democracy. Spend a few moments at the shrine, USdebtclock.org in real time, watching the red pulse in the veins of the infinite beast pumped up on the blood of the martyrs, and tell me your vote is going to do anything but provide more succulent flesh for the beast.

Embedded in the midst of tar nation, we’re only ever a flash mob away from remembering we will never again need a leader. What? What? We’re the what in tar nation. Our life is right here to hand, gardening, fucking, overwintering, gleaning, parkouring, dancing, quelling tar nation with our absolute ungovernability, our skill at going to ground.

In a world where everyone loves the boot, you don’t have to make a lot of points. One good one will do. This is it:

The smaller the point, the sharper the nail. Sole food.

Big 'Corporate' Brother: Is Lockheed Martin Shadowing You?

How a Giant Weapons Maker Became the New Big Brother
Tuesday, January 11, 2011 by TomDispatch.com
by William Hartung

Have you noticed that Lockheed Martin, the giant weapons corporation, is shadowing you? No? Then you haven't been paying much attention. Let me put it this way: If you have a life, Lockheed Martin is likely a part of it.

True, Lockheed Martin doesn't actually run the U.S. government, but sometimes it seems as if it might as well. After all, it received $36 billion in government contracts in 2008 alone, more than any company in history. It now does work for more than two dozen government agencies from the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy to the Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency. It's involved in surveillance and information processing for the CIA, the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the National Security Agency (NSA), the Pentagon, the Census Bureau, and the Postal Service.

Oh, and Lockheed Martin has even helped train those friendly Transportation Security Administration agents who pat you down at the airport. Naturally, the company produces cluster bombs, designs nuclear weapons, and makes the F-35 Lightning (an overpriced, behind-schedule, underperforming combat aircraft that is slated to be bought by customers in more than a dozen countries) -- and when it comes to weaponry, that's just the start of a long list. In recent times, though, it's moved beyond anything usually associated with a weapons corporation and has been virtually running its own foreign policy, doing everything from hiring interrogators for U.S. overseas prisons (including at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and Abu Ghraib in Iraq) to managing a private intelligence network in Pakistan and helping write the Afghan constitution.
A For-Profit Government-in-the-Making

If you want to feel a tad more intimidated, consider Lockheed Martin's sheer size for a moment. After all, the company receives one of every 14 dollars doled out by the Pentagon. In fact, its government contracts, thought about another way, amount to a "Lockheed Martin tax" of $260 per taxpaying household in the United States, and no weapons contractor has more power or money to wield to defend its turf. It spent $12 million on congressional lobbying and campaign contributions in 2009 alone. Not surprisingly, it's the top contributor to the incoming House Armed Services Committee chairman, Republican Howard P. "Buck" McKeon of California, giving more than $50,000 in the most recent election cycle. It also tops the list of donors to Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-HI), the powerful chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and the self-described "#1 earmarks guy in the U.S. Congress."

Add to all that its 140,000 employees and its claim to have facilities in 46 states, and the scale of its clout starts to become clearer. While the bulk of its influence-peddling activities may be perfectly legal, the company also has quite a track record when it comes to law-breaking: it ranks number one on the "contractor misconduct" database maintained by the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington-DC-based watchdog group.

How in the world did Lockheed Martin become more than just a military contractor? Its first significant foray outside the world of weaponry came in the early 1990s when plain old Lockheed (not yet merged with Martin Marietta) bought Datacom Inc., a company specializing in providing services for state and city governments, and turned it into the foundation for a new business unit called Lockheed Information Management Services (IMS). In turn, IMS managed to win contracts in 44 states and several foreign countries for tasks ranging from collecting parking fines and tolls to tracking down "deadbeat dads" and running "welfare to work" job-training programs. The result was a number of high profile failures, but hey, you can't do everything right, can you?

Under pressure from Wall Street to concentrate on its core business -- implements of destruction -- Lockheed Martin sold IMS in 2001. By then, however, it had developed a taste for non-weapons work, especially when it came to data collection and processing. So it turned to the federal government where it promptly racked up deals with the IRS, the Census Bureau, and the U.S. Postal Service, among other agencies.

As a result, Lockheed Martin is now involved in nearly every interaction you have with the government. Paying your taxes? Lockheed Martin is all over it. The company is even creating a system that provides comprehensive data on every contact taxpayers have with the IRS from phone calls to face-to-face meetings.

Want to stand up and be counted by the U.S. Census? Lockheed Martin will take care of it. The company runs three centers -- in Baltimore, Phoenix, and Jeffersonville, Indiana -- that processed up to 18 tractor-trailers full of mail per day at the height of the 2010 Census count. For $500 million it is developing the Decennial Response Information Service (DRIS), which will collect and analyze information gathered from any source, from phone calls or the Internet to personal visits. According to Preston Waite, associate director of the Census, the DRIS will be a "big catch net, catching all the data that comes in no matter where it comes from."

Need to get a package across the country? Lockheed Martin cameras will scan bar codes and recognize addresses, so your package can be sorted "without human intervention," as the company's web site puts it.

Plan on committing a crime? Think twice. Lockheed Martin is in charge of the FBI's Integrated Automatic Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS), a database of 55 million sets of fingerprints. The company also produces biometric identification devices that will know who you are by scanning your iris, recognizing your face, or coming up with novel ways of collecting your fingerprints or DNA. As the company likes to say, it's in the business of making everyone's lives (and so personal data) an "open book," which is, of course, of great benefit to us all. "Thanks to biometric technology," the company proclaims, "people don't have to worry about forgetting a password or bringing multiple forms of identification. Things just got a little easier."

Are you a New York City resident concerned about a "suspicious package" finding its way onto the subway platform? Lockheed Martin tried to do something about that, too, thanks to a contract from the city's Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) to install 3,000 security cameras and motion sensors that would spot such packages, as well as the people carrying them, and notify the authorities. Only problem: the cameras didn't work as advertised and the MTA axed Lockheed Martin and cancelled the $212 million contract.

Collecting Intelligence on You

If it seems a little creepy to you that the same company making ballistic missiles is also processing your taxes, accessing your fingerprints, scanning your packages, ensuring that it's easier than ever to collect your DNA, and counting you for the census, rest assured: Lockheed Martin's interest in getting inside your private life via intelligence collection and surveillance has remained remarkably undiminished in the twenty-first century.

Tim Shorrock, author of the seminal book Spies for Hire, has described Lockheed Martin as "the largest defense contractor and private intelligence force in the world." As far back as 2002, the company plunged into the "Total Information Awareness" (TIA) program that was former National Security Advisor Admiral John Poindexter's pet project. A giant database to collect telephone numbers, credit cards, and reams of other personal data from U.S. citizens in the name of fighting terrorism, the program was de-funded by Congress the following year, but concerns remain that the National Security Agency is now running a similar secret program.

In the meantime, since at least 2004, Lockheed Martin has been involved in the Pentagon's Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), which collected personal data on American citizens for storage in a database known as "Threat and Local Observation Notice" (and far more dramatically by the acronym TALON). While Congress shut down the domestic spying aspect of the program in 2007 (assuming, that is, that the Pentagon followed orders), CIFA itself continues to operate. In 2005, Washington Post military and intelligence expert William Arkin revealed that, while the database was theoretically being used to track anyone suspected of terrorism, drug trafficking, or espionage, "some military gumshoe or overzealous commander just has to decide someone is a ‘threat to the military'" for it to be brought into play. Among the "threatening" citizens actually tracked by CIFA were members of antiwar groups. As part of its role in CIFA, Lockheed Martin was not only monitoring intelligence, but also "estimating future threats." (Not exactly inconvenient for a giant weapons outfit that might see antiwar activism as a threat!)

Lockheed Martin is also intimately bound up in the workings of the National Security Agency, America's largest spy outfit. In addition to producing spy satellites for the NSA, the company is in charge of "Project Groundbreaker," a $5 billion, 10-year effort to upgrade the agency's internal telephone and computer networks.

While Lockheed Martin may well be watching you at home -- it's my personal nominee for twenty-first-century "Big Brother" -- it has also been involved in questionable activities abroad that go well beyond supplying weapons to regions in conflict. There were, of course, those interrogators it recruited for America's offshore prison system from Guantanamo Bay to Afghanistan (and the charges of abuses that so naturally went with them), but the real scandal the company has been embroiled in involves overseeing an assassination program in Pakistan. Initially, it was billed as an information gathering operation using private companies to generate data the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies allegedly could not get on their own. Instead, the companies turned out to be supplying targeting information used by U.S. Army Special Forces troops to locate and kill suspected Taliban leaders.

The private firms involved were managed by Lockheed Martin under a $22 million contract from the U.S. Army. As Mark Mazetti of the New York Times has reported, there were just two small problems with the effort: "The American military is largely prohibited from operating in Pakistan. And under Pentagon rules, the army is not allowed to hire contractors for spying." Much as in the Iran/Contra scandal of the 1980s, when Oliver North set up a network of shell companies to evade the laws against arming right-wing paramilitaries in Nicaragua, the Army used Lockheed Martin to do an end run around rules limiting U.S. military and intelligence activities in Pakistan. It should not, then, be too surprising that one of the people involved in the Lockheed-Martin-managed network was Duane "Dewey" Claridge, an ex-CIA man who had once been knee deep in the Iran/Contra affair.

A Twenty-First Century Big Brother

There has also been a softer side to Lockheed Martin's foreign policy efforts. It has involved contracts for services that range from recruiting election monitors for Bosnia and the Ukraine and attempting to reform Liberia's justice system to providing personnel involved in drafting the Afghan constitution. Most of these projects have been carried out by the company's PAE unit, the successor to a formerly independent firm, Pacific Architects and Engineers, that made its fortune building and maintaining military bases during the Vietnam War.

However, the "soft power" side of Lockheed Martin's operations (as described on its web site) may soon diminish substantially as the company has put PAE up for sale. Still, the revenues garnered from these activities will undoubtedly be more than offset by a new $5 billion, multi-year contract awarded by the U.S. Army to provide logistics support for U.S. Special Forces in dozens of countries.

Consider all this but a Lockheed Martin précis. A full accounting of its "shadow government" would fill volumes. After all, it's the number-one contractor not only for the Pentagon, but also for the Department of Energy. It ranks number two for the Department of State, number three for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and number four for the Departments of Justice and Housing and Urban Development. Even listing the government and quasi-governmental agencies the company has contracts with is a daunting task, but here's just a partial run-down: the Department of Agriculture, the Bureau of Land Management, the Census Bureau, the Coast Guard, the Department of Defense (including the Army, the Navy, the Marines, the Air Force and the Missile Defense Agency), the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Federal Technology Department, the Food and Drug Administration, the General Services Administration, the Geological Survey, the Department of Homeland Security, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Internal Revenue Service, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of State, the Social Security Administration, the U.S. Customs Service, the U.S. Postal Service, the Department of Transportation, the Transportation Security Agency, and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

When President Eisenhower warned 50 years ago this month of the dangers of "unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex," he could never have dreamed that one for-profit weapons outfit would so fully insinuate itself into so many aspects of American life. Lockheed Martin has helped turn Eisenhower's dismal mid-twentieth-century vision into a for-profit military-industrial-surveillance complex fit for the twenty-first century, one in which no governmental activity is now beyond its reach.

I feel safer already.

The 10 Biggest Corporate Campaign Contributors in U.S. Politics

(Thanks to my Google Buzz friend Jessica for the share)

***

by Bruce Watson  10/13/10

As the midterm elections slowly draw nearer, we're taking a look at the companies whose deep pockets help keep America's political campaigns rolling along. With the help from data compiled by the nonpartisan folks at the Center for Responsive Politics, we've combined a list of the top 10 corporate campaign contributors, offering a a view of the candidates they support, the issues that concern them and their lobbying habits.

Here are 10 companies that give America the best elections that money can buy, arranged in ascending order by campaign dollars contributed between 1989 and 2010.

10. Lockheed Martin (LMT) -- $19.3 million  (Defense contractor/war profiteer)

Military contracts are lucrative, and Lockheed Martin -- the country's top defense contractor -- has landed a passel of them. But big-ticket deals like the Joint Strike Fighter don't come cheap, and Lockheed has spent over $19 million in political races since 1989. Meanwhile, its yearly lobbying expenditure ranges between $7 million and $15 million. Thus far in 2010, it has spread $6.7 million around the halls of Congress.

Lockheed's support goes to Congressmen and Senators on both sides of the ideological divide. This year, two of its top five congressional vassals are Republicans Howard McKeon (Calif.) and Kay Granger (Texas). The other three are Democrats Charles Schumer (N.Y.), Ike Skelton (Mo.) and Daniel Inouye (Hawaii).

9. Morgan Stanley (MS) -- $19.8 million  (Wall St. banksters)

When it comes to campaign fund-raising, the financial industry is far and away the biggest contributor, and its continuous lobbying over the past 20 years has borne considerable fruit. Morgan Stanley, one of the U.S.'s top investment banks, was among the biggest supporters of securities industry deregulation and Social Security privatization. To that end, it has poured almost $20 million into political contests since 1989. Not surprisingly, it was also a major beneficiary of bailout money in 2008.

For most of the past decade, Morgan Stanley has steadily increased its lobbying expenditures, from just over $1 million in 2001 to almost $3 million in 2009. Republicans and Democrats both benefit from its campaign largesse: In this election cycle, the company's top contributions have been to Republican Carly Fiorina (Calif.), and its second-biggest gift has been to Democrat Kiersten Gillibrand (N.Y.). Democrats Harry Reid (Nev.) and Reshma Saujani (N.Y.) join Republican Richard Shelby (Ala.) in rounding out the company's five favorite politicos.

8. Time Warner (TWX) -- $20 million  (Major Player in the Net Neutrality debate)

A media colossus with fingers in dozens of pies, Time Warner's interests extend from baseball to periodicals, books to movies, and its lobbying is similarly wide-ranging. Between 1989 and 2010, the company gave some $20 million to candidates, the vast majority of whom were Democrats. Currently, the company's top five contribution recipients are Patrick Leahy (Vt.), Barbara Boxer (Calif.), Howard Berman (Calif.), Harry Reid (Nev), and Charles Schumer (N.Y.). All are Democrats.

Time Warner also pays a lot of money to lobbyists. Since 2003, it has averaged between $4 million and $6 million per year, with an $8 million spike in 2008. Thus far in 2010, it has paid out over $1.7 million to more than 300 lobbyists.


7. JPMorgan (JPM) -- $20.3 million  (Another bankster from Wall St.)

Another top financial services firm, JPMorgan Chase has contributed over $20 million to political campaigns since 1989. Its favorites are split evenly between Democrats and Republicans, and its donations influence contests around the country. Currently, the company's top five beneficiaries include New York Democrats Kirsten Gillibrand and Scott Murphy, as well as Arkansas Democrat Blanche Lincoln, Alabama Republican Richard Shelby, and Illinois Republican Mark Kirk.

JPMorgan also spends heavily on lobbying. For most of the 2000s, its yearly contribution to K Street coffers has ranged between $4 million and $6 million. Thus far in 2010, it has spent just over $3 million. As with most other banks and financial services companies, Morgan's money has gone to influence banking deregulation and bankruptcy reform rules. Morgan, too, was a major beneficiary of government bailout money.

6. Microsoft (MSFT) -- $21 million  (Net Neutrality, smart phones, suffered many an anti-trust suit)

A relatively late arrival to the political contribution game, Microsoft was quick to learn the lessons of Beltway power-peddling. Following its antitrust trial in 1998, the company set up a lobbying office in D.C. and made it clear that it was open for business. Since 2000, it has poured over $2 million into each election cycle, hitting its height in 2000 and 2002, when its contributions topped $4 million. At the same time, Microsoft has also funneled a fortune into lobbying, sending more than $6 million per year to K Street since 2000 and more than $8 million per year from 2003 to 2008.

For the most part, Microsoft's money has gone to Democrat candidates from the Pacific Northwest. This year, it has poured over $110,000 each into the candidacies of Suzan DelBene and Patty Murray, and has also liberally funded Jay R. Inslee and Republican Dave Reichert, all of Washington. Over the last few years, however, Microsoft's political giving has slowly trended downward as the memories of its 2008 inquisition have faded.

5. Altria (MO) -- $24.3 million  (Largest food processor in the world)


Formerly known as Philip Morris, Altria is the top tobacco company in the world, as well as a major shareholder (and former owner) of Kraft Foods (KFT). Much of the $24 million that Altria spent between 1989 and 2010 went toward protecting the company against devastating legislation and lawsuits. Recently, however, Altria recently shifted its position, publicly endorsing a move by the Food and Drug Administration to regulate nicotine as a drug. This has placed it in opposition to many of its fellow tobacco companies. At the same time, the roughly $2.7 million in "soft money" that Altria spent in each election cycle from 1996-2002 has dried up.

Still, Altria remains a major player in the realm of government influencing. With yearly lobbying expenditures of more than $10 million, it's keeping its D.C. friends very close. In the 2010 election cycle, Altria's donations have largely gone to Republican congressional and senatorial candidates, especially Mitch McConnell (Kent.), Richard Burr (N.C.), Roy Blunt (Mo.) and Eric Cantor (Va.). One Democrat, Virginia's James Webb, rounds out the top five candidates drawing Altria support.

4. United Parcel Service (UPS) -- $24.9 million

For decades, UPS and Fed Ex (FDX) (which would be No. 13 on the list) have poured money into government lobbying, each seeking to gain a strategic business advantage over the other. But their similarities may outweigh their differences: Both have fought legislation that would make it easier for the U.S. Postal Service to sell valuable overnight and second-day air services. Similarly, both strongly support free-trade agreements because these deals encourage greater overseas shipping.

UPS's political contributions -- totaling almost $25 million between 1989 and 2010 -- skew toward Republican candidates. They have also remained remarkably consistent, hovering around $2.6 million through the last four election cycles. This year, the delivery company's top five campaign contributions are fairly closely split, with just under $28,000 going to Democrats Steny Hoyer (Md.) and Blanche Lincoln (Ark.), while $32,250 is going to Republicans Aaron Schock (Ill.), Todd Tiahrt (Kan.) and Roy Blunt (Mo.).

3. Citigroup (C) -- $27.5 million  (Bankster extraordinaire!)

The second-biggest campaign contributor from the financial services sector, Citigroup has given more than $27 million to a fairly even slate of Democrat and Republican candidates. Its spending spiked in the 2008 election cycle, when it contributed almost $5 million to various candidates. Today, its contributions are way down.

Citi's lobbying efforts are also declining from a high of more than $8 million in 2007. Thus far in 2010, it has spent just over $3 million. It has also spent locally. In 2010, three of its top five candidates were New York Democrats: Senators Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand and Representative Joseph Crowley.

2. Goldman Sachs (GS) -- $36.7 million  (King of all Wall St. bankster criminals)

One of Wall Street's largest -- and most notorious -- banks, Goldman Sachs is also the biggest political contributor from the financial services arena. Between 1989 and 2010, it gave more than $36.7 million to political candidates and spent roughly $1 million per year on lobbying through most of the early 2000s. Starting in 2004, however, its political spending went through the roof. Its budget for the 2004 election cycle was 45% higher than four years earlier. While its contributions dropped off slightly in 2008, they still represented a 36% jump over 2000's expenditures.

Goldman's impressive lobbying effort leaped into overdrive in 2006, when its payouts to politicos more than doubled. Since then, the bank has kept up its heavy lobbying payments, which topped $3 million in 2008. At the same time, it has benefited greatly from financial deregulation -- which it strongly supports -- and government bailouts, which it accepted in 2008. In the 2009/2010 election season, most of its money has gone to Democrat candidates, including Nevada's Harry Reid and New York Representative Michael McMahon, although it has also contributed mightily to Republican Roy Blunt of Missouri.

1. AT&T (T) -- $45.6 million  (Net Neutrality player, complicit in NSA spying on US citizens)

Between 1989 and 2010, AT&T gave more than $45 million in campaign donations to both Republican and Democrat candidates. In the 2009-2010 cycle, its biggest contribution was $30,000 to the campaign of Nevada Senator Harry Reid, but three Republican congressmen -- Joe Wilson of South Carolina, Pete Olson of Texas and Roy Blunt of Missouri -- were among its top five. While impressive, however, these contributions were dwarfed by AT&T's lobbying expenses, which topped $25 million in 2006 alone.


It isn't hard to see why the phone company is willing to open its wallet for Congress. After its early-1980s antitrust breakup, Ma Bell has spent the last few decades putting itself back together again. Today, it's the largest land-based phone carrier, the largest cellular carrier and the 13th-largest company in the U.S. In 2006, as AT&T's political giving reached its apex, the company bought Bell South, a major piece of the post-breakup puzzle. Coincidence?

The Real Merchants of Death

The Global Arms Trade
By CONN HALLINAN

Accused Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout is a centerpiece for the book Merchant of Death and the model for the Hollywood movie The Lord of War. Washington apparently traded military hardware to the Thais in order to get him extradited from a Bangkok jail.

Major actor in the international arms trade, or a penny ante operator who can’t hold a candle to the real “merchants of death”?—the U.S., Russia, Britain, France, Italy, and immense corporations like Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, General Dynamics, Dassault Aviation, Finmeccanica, Boeing, Rosoboronexport, and Northrop Grumman?

The global arms trade is a $60 billion yearly business, of which the U.S. controls nearly 40 percent, and a political and economic juggernaut that defends its turf with the ferocity of a junkyard dog.

Bout is like the guy you buy a Saturday night special from in a back alley. If you want something that will flatten a village you need a Massive Ordinance Penetrator from Boeing, or a General Atomics “Reaper” drone armed with Lockheed Martin “Hellfire” missiles.

The charges against him create an interesting juxtaposition.

The former Russian naval officer is accused of running guns to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the Taliban, and anti-government insurgents in Somalia. The U.S. has sent some $5 billion in military aid to the Colombian government to fight the FARC, has spent over $300 billion trying to defeat the Taliban, and props up the current Somali government.

There are arms dealers out there, but they are not sitting in a Bangkok prison. The 10 biggest arms exporters are—in order—the United States, Russia, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Spain, China, Israel, the Netherlands, and Italy. Sweden and Switzerland are close behind. This order shifts from year to year, but one thing never changes: the U.S. is always number one.

According to the Congressional Research Service, due to the current economic downturn, world arms sales dipped 8.5 percent in 2009. But “dipped” is a relative term. The price tag was still $57.5 billion, of which the U.S.’s 39 percent share came to $22.6 billion. Russia was second at $10.4, and France third with $7.4 billion in sales. Other countries split the rest.

Most of the trade—$45.1 billion—focuses on developing nations. Of the top seven arms purchasers in 2008, four of them—India, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Algeria—are countries that can ill afford to put money into weapons systems.

Brazil, Venezuela, Egypt, and Vietnam were also among the bigger arms buyers in 2009, and Iraq is planning to purchase $13 billion in U.S. weaponry. All are countries struggling with poverty.

The U.S. overwhelmingly dominates arms sales to the developing world. In 2008 it cornered 68.4 percent of such sales, and 45.1 percent in 2009. (10) It is currently negotiating a $60 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia that will probably cost $120 billion when parts and maintenance is added in.

Arms sales many times parallel the foreign policy of the suppliers. When the U.S. sells arms to Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Colombia, Japan, and South Korea, it is arming its allies against regional antagonists, like Iran, Syria, China and Venezuela. Arms sales to places like Yemen and Somalia support U.S. allies caught up in civil wars.

But the arms trade is also an enormously profitable enterprise for the companies involved, and any effort to curb that trade brings on an assault of lobbyists and political action committees. Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest arms producer, spent over $20 million to lobby Congress in 2009.

The companies have carefully spread their operations to scores of states, so that when an effort is made to cutback or eliminate certain weapons, some local congress member will rise to defend jobs in his or her district.

When a move was made to cut the B-2 stealth bomber—an almost useless aircraft that cost $2.1 billion apiece—its manufacturer, Northrop Grumman, mobilized 383 congressional districts in 46 states to successfully save the plane.

In reality, military spending doesn’t create jobs, it kills them. According to a study by the Center for Economic and Political Research, military spending actually has a negative impact on economic growth. A one percent increase in defense spending—U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ current proposal—would, over 20 years, reduce GDP by 0.6 percent. That translates into approximately 700,000 jobs, with construction and manufacturing particularly hard hit.

While Gates talks about “efficiencies,” he is not proposing to cut the military budget, just trim things like health care and bureaucracy and shift those savings to support troops in the field.

“The long-term impact of our increased defense spending will be a reduction in GDP of 1.8 percent,” says economist Dean Baker. “The projected job loss from this increase in defense spending would be close to two million [jobs].”

The result of PACs and lobbying efforts by the arms companies is not only continued spending, but also expensive weapons systems that don’t work or are simply unneeded. The U.S. currently has 11 aircraft carriers in spite of the fact that no other nation possesses even one carrier that can match the huge $6.2 billion Nimitz-class vessels in the U.S. fleet.

Lockheed Martin’s taxpayer funded F-35 Joint Strike Fighter—at $184 million apiece, the most expensive weapons system ever built—is, according to arms analysts Pierre Sprey and Winslow Wheeler, an overweight, underpowered turkey that is so complex it will likely spend most of its time in the repair shop. Lockheed Martin is already taking orders from foreign buyers.

Many companies have responded to the recession by buying up enterprises specializing in defense electronics, cyber security, and the hottest new thing: killer robots.

Countries all over the world are clamoring to buy General Atomics’ Predators and Reapers, BAE’s Tiranis, and Israel’s Harpy and Heron, the latter a mega beast the size of a commercial airliner and capable of carrying a wide range of weapons. Predators run $4.5 million apiece and the larger, more muscular Reaper, $10.5 million.

The international arms trade will not even notice if Viktor Bout ends up behind bars. Men like Bout are shadowy actors that play on the margins. To have a real impact on the global arms enterprise will require confronting powerful corporations, with their lobbies and their PACs, as well as an immense military establishment.

But according to Frida Berrigan of the Arms and Security Project of the New American Foundation, the Obama Administration is “investigating” how to make the selling of military technology easier.

A number of NGOs, including Amnesty International, the International Network on Small Arms, and Oxfam, are working on an arms trade treaty that would try to keep weapons out of the hands of human rights abusers.

But “human rights abusers” is a slippery term. For the U.S., Venezuela is a human rights abuser and can’t buy U.S. arms, while Honduras and Colombia are okay, even though regimes in both of the latter countries have been accused of working with death squads. The most Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez can be accused of is a certain love of bombast and strong opposition to Washington’s policies in the region.

A United Nations conference on drawing up an arms trade treaty is set for 2012, although there have been no serious negotiations to date. But such a treaty will need to do more than just get a handle on some of the more odious practices currently underway, it most restrict and then move toward an eventual ban on the trade itself.