SELLING OFF AMERICA, PIECE BY PIECE

RAW STORY BREAKS PIECE ON HOW DUBAI BASED COMPANY WON LUCRATIVE U.S. SECURITY CONTRACTS

Dubai based company provides security for the unused trailers for Katrina victims in Mississippi. I mentioned the Olive Group firm in a post last week, in which CNN reporters were barred from visiting the premises where the trailers are stored. Reason given: national security. LS

RAW STORY.COM

GOING DEEPER AND DEEPER INTO DEBT

When will we reach a point of no return? I am no financial wizard but the article below from Bloomberg.com (courtesy of Raw Story.com) does not look good. It seems that we have reached our legal borrowing limit so Congress has to leverage pension our
funds. Adios to retirement, America. Our future is to go straight from the work place into the grave. The Bush Administration is squandering every cent it gets. I thought conservatives were supposed to conserve, not fritter everything not nailed down, away. LS

Excerpt:

Since Bush took office in 2001, the federal budget has gone from four years of surpluses, the longest such run since before the Great Depression, to deficits brought on by a recession, tax cuts, the Sept. 11 attacks, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and Gulf Coast hurricane damage.

Bush last month sent Congress a $2.77 trillion budget request for fiscal 2007 that calls for a deficit of $354 billion, compared with a record $423 billion forecast this year. The Bush administration says it expects to shave the deficit to less than 2 percent of gross domestic product by 2009, from 3.2 percent this year.

The Treasury estimates it will borrow $427 billion in fiscal 2006 and $373 billion in fiscal 2007 to fund government operations, the budget showed. The government borrowed $297 billion in 2005, according to the documents.

BLOOMBERG.COM

TIME LINE OF PORT DEAL

Lou Dobbs of CNN put this great piece together.

CNN'S LOU DOBBS ON PORT DEAL

WILL THE DUBAI FIRM RUN YOUR CITY'S PORT?

Ken sent the article listing the ports to be managed by the Dubai firm. Naturally Houston and Galveston are on the hit list. LS

ASSOCIATED PRESS ON PORTS AFFECTED BY PORT DEAL"

THE INDIA BUSH IGNORED

This is a stunning article that reveals the true economic condition in India found on the SF Gate.com (San Francisco Chronicle) via Buzz Flash.com (BUZZ FLASH.COM)Ironically, as with our own country, the richer are getting richer while the poor get even poorer, if that is possible in India. The greatest wealth goes into the pockets of very few. LS

Excerpts:

Contrary to government claims however, the liberated economy -- commonly portrayed as an antidote to poverty among global financial institutions -- has done little for India's poor, say several leading economists, including Jean Dreze, Martin Ravallion and Raghbendra Jha. The most notable outcome of reforms, they say, has been to make inequality and even wider chasm.

As the number of Indian millionaires grew an estimated seven-fold during the 1990s, the number of hungry Indians actually rose, according to the United Nations' Food and Agricultural Organization.

Decades of underinvestment in human development in India, concluded the United Nations in its 2005 human development report, have yielded a grim set of statistics: half of all children remain malnourished, half of women remain illiterate, more than 80 percent of the countryside lacks access to a telephone or a toilet.

There's been a "tremendous lack of responsiveness to the needs and aspirations of the underprivileged," wrote Dreze in the journal Economic and Political Weekly. "Endemic hunger has been passively tolerated, and is barely noticed in public debates and democratic politics."

SF GATE.COM