MEDIA ROOTS- Usually the revolving door between politicians and their corporate profiteering is shielded from the public, and takes a bit of investigative digging to expose. Often times, politicians will invest millions in blind trusts to mask their investments in companies that would reveal an obvious conflict of interest tied to their legislative work. However, Congressman Issa has set a new precedent in exploiting a political standing to blatantly racketeer off the system since his election in 2000.

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NEW YORK TIMES– Even as he has built a reputation as a forceful Congressional advocate for business, Mr. Issa has bought up office buildings, split a holding company into separate multimillion-dollar businesses, started an insurance company, traded hundreds of millions of dollars in securities, invested in overseas funds, retained an interest in his auto-alarm company and built up a family foundation.

As his private wealth and public power have grown, so too has the overlap between his private and business lives, with at least some of the congressman’s government actions helping to make a rich man even richer and raising the potential for conflicts.

He has secured millions of dollars in Congressional earmarks for road work and public works projects that promise improved traffic and other benefits to the many commercial properties he owns here north of San Diego. In one case, more than $800,000 in earmarks he arranged will help widen a busy thoroughfare in front of a medical plaza he bought for $10.3 million.

His constituents cheer the prospect of easing traffic. At the same time, the value of the medical complex and other properties has soared, at least in part because of the government-sponsored road work.

But beyond specific actions that appear to have clearly benefited his businesses, Mr. Issa’s interests are so varied that some of the biggest issues making their way through Congress affect him in some way.

After the forced sale of Merrill Lynch in 2008, for instance, he publicly attacked the Treasury Department’s handling of the deal without mentioning that Merrill had handled hundreds of millions of dollars in investments for him and lent him many millions more.

And in an era when the auto industry’s future has been a big theme of public policy, Mr. Issa has been outspoken on regulatory issues affecting car companies, while maintaining deep ties to the industry through the auto electronics company he founded, DEI Holdings.

He has a seat on its board, and his nonprofit family foundation, which seeks to encourage values like “hard work and selfless philanthropy,” has earned millions from stock in DEI, which bears his initials. Mr. Issa’s fortune, in fact, was built on his car alarm company, and to this day it is his deep voice on Viper alarms that warns potential burglars to “please step away from the car.”

Read more about A Businessman in Congress Helps His District and Himself

© 2011 The New York Times

Photo by Flickr user Congressman Darrell Issa

MEDIA ROOTS- Since the federal government tends to refer to anyone in Afghanistan with a gun as member of the “Taliban”, it’s difficult to take stories from the corporate media about the Taliban at face value. However, the first official US military estimate of how much money the US has paid the Taliban through “reverse money laundering” since the invasion has been disclosed: $360 million.

Considering how any official Pentagon budget has always been the most conservative estimate when compared to independent analysis, it’s safe to say that this number is a gross underestimate of the true amount of funds the US government has paid to the “terrorists” we are supposedly fighting in the region. For more breaking down the logic of why the US funds the opposition to sustain the Afghan war check out MR Original – Afghanistan War: Resources for Endless Control.

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ASSOCIATED PRESS– After examining hundreds of combat support and reconstruction contracts in Afghanistan, the U.S military estimates $360 million in U.S. tax dollars has ended up in the hands of people the American-led coalition has spent nearly a decade battling: the Taliban, criminals and power brokers with ties to both.

In a murky process known as “reverse money laundering,” payments from the U.S. pass through companies hired by the military for transportation, construction, power projects, fuel and other services to businesses and individuals with ties to the insurgency or criminal networks, according to interviews and task force documents obtained by the AP.

“Funds begin as clean monies,” according to one document, then “either through direct payments or through the flow of funds in the subcontractor network, the monies become tainted.”

More than half the losses flowed through a large transportation contract called Host Nation Trucking, the official said. Eight companies served as prime contractors and hired a web of nearly three dozen subcontractors for vehicles and convoy security to ship huge amounts of food, water, fuel and ammunition to American troops stationed at bases across Afghanistan.

The Defense Department announced Monday that it had selected 20 separate contractors for a new transportation contract potentially worth $983.5 million to replace Host Nation Trucking. Officials said the new arrangement will reduce the reliance on subcontractors and diminish the risk of money being lost. Under the new National Afghan Trucking Services contract, the military will be able to choose from a deeper pool of companies competing against one another to offer the best price to move supplies. The new arrangement also gives the U.S. more flexibility in determining whether security is needed for supply convoys and who should provide it, according to a description of the contract.

HEB International Logistics of Dubai, a Host Nation Trucking prime contractor, “made payments directly to malign actors,” one of the task force documents reads. In 2009 and 2010, an HEB subcontractor identified in the document only as “Rohullah” received $1.7 million in payments. A congressional report issued last year said Rohullah – whose name is spelled Ruhallah in that report – is a warlord who controlled the convoy security business along the highway between Kabul and Kandahar, the two largest cities in Afghanistan.

Read more about $360M Lost To Insurgents, Criminals In Afghanistan

© 2011 The Associated Press

Photo by Flickr user azalea

Listen to a killer DJ Media Roots Music Mix, or another radio broadcast about Imperialism, Spying, Self Censorship & Building Communities, another broadcast about US Wars, News Censorship, 9/11 Truth, Be Your Own Leader.

AMG– Award winning documentary filmmaker Rory Kennedy explores the human and political consequences of one of the most bitter scandals of the war in Iraq in this feature. In the 1960’s, a prison was built in Abu Ghraib, an Iraqi city west of Baghdad, and during the regime of Saddam Hussein it became a center of torture and abuse where political dissidents were subjected to agonizing punishment or death.

Following the United States invasion of Iraq in 2003, the prison was taken over by American military authorities, and was used as a holding facility for prisoners of war and suspected terrorists captured by U.S. forces. The prison’s reputation as a site of widespread abuse rose again when journalists discovered photographs of Iraqi prisoners being tortured and humiliated in an ugly variety of ways by American soldiers, a scandal which had a major impact on international thinking about the war. Ghosts of Abu Ghraib offers an in-depth look at the story behind the abuse of Iraqi prisoners, featuring interviews with observers on both sides of the national divide.

HBO Film, Ghosts of Abu Ghraib

© 2007 HBO

MEDIA ROOTS- There has been a lot of talk during the election frenzy about how “extreme” and ultra right-wing Rick Perry is. Multiple news pundits are insisting that people of liberal persuasion must, no matter what, vote for Obama, simply because of how terrifying the other options may be: Rick Perry, Michelle Bachmann (oddly though never Ron Paul).

What is it about Perry’s history that makes his supposed Republican “extremism” hard to believe? Like other opportunistic politicians before him (Joe Lieberman, Arlen Specter), Perry once ran and won elections as a Democrat. The fact that he used to adhere to Democratic principles early on in his political career makes it hard to believe that he is an extremist of any sort. Instead, it appears more likely that he’s a political tool who has been groomed for the last decade to become a PR pawn for Wall St. and the Presidential office of the US.

Followers of the Bilderberg group might remember that Rick Perry attended the Bilderberg meeting in 2007, which usually signifies picks for presidential hopefuls. The Bilderberg group is an uber elite neo-liberal think-tank that meets annually in different locations worldwide. In previous years, John Kerry and John Edwards both attended Bilderberg not long before Kerry won the primary and Edwards was chosen as his running mate. William Jefferson Clinton also appeared on the attendance roster when he was merely the Governor of Arkansas.

In 2008, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were alleged to have both attended the Bilderberg meeting in Virginia. Right before the meeting took place, there was an infamous incident that involved Obama’s press agent whisking the entire crew of mainline press away on an airplane flight across the country, without telling them that the president had taken a separate flight to meet Clinton “in private” at Diane Feinstein’s summer home. To separate the president from his press corp in such an elusive fashion is completely unprecedented.

In the following article, Alexander Cockburn from Counterpunch makes a compelling case for the political grooming of Rick Perry and details the amazing series of lucky incidents while rising up the political ladder.

Written by Robbie Martin

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COUNTERPUNCH reports:

Inside Texas he’s one of the most successful politicians in the entire history of the state. George Bush lost his first congressional race.  In a lifetime career of ten elections since 1984 Perry has never lost one. He has an acute sense of political timing. His defeated opponents readily attest to Perry’s relentless  self-discipline as a campaigner , skills at raising campaign cash. He already has a huge prospective war chest for his first national foray. They all emphasize the fatal consequences of underestimating him. He has a team of campaign advisors, notably, notably Dave Carney,  whose skills – ruthless in the crunch – have elicited admiration from  professionals across the board. Prior to  Perry the Texas governorship  were a notoriously weak post, with decisive power wielded by the legislature and State Comptroller and state commissioners, Railroad Commission etc. Perry has changed all that across his three stints as  governor, previously contentious posts now inhabited by his compliant appointees.

But above all, Rick Perry is one lucky son of a bitch. Not just once or twice, but at almost every decisive twist fork in the road Fate has given him a benign tap on the shoulder. “Give me lucky generals,” Napoleon once exclaimed. Looking at Perry’s CV he’d have made him Grand Marshall of France  on the spot.

Back at the pre-dawn of Perry’s political career Democrats were still the most powerful political party in Texas, and Perry began as a (an extremely conservative) Democrat. Son of tenant farmers (dryland cotton) in Paint Creek, sixty miles north of Abilene, Perry says he never met a Republican till he was 25.  He was elected first as a Democratic state legislator and in 1988 was the Texas campaign chairman for (the extremely conservative) Democrat Al Gore who ultimately lost in the primaries to Michael Dukakis. Seeing scant future for Democrats in Texas Perry’s  showed his aptitude for timing and shifted to the Republican Party, making straight for its conservative wing.

Read more about Rick Perry, One Lucky SOB here.

Photo by flickr user eschipul