The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives approved the provision in adopting a broad measure to authorize funding of U.S. intelligence for the 2009 fiscal year. A related bill awaits action in the Senate.

Passage of the multibillion dollar bill came on a voice vote, indicating broad assent, despite the White House veto threat issued earlier in the day.

In addition to the contractor ban, the White House said it also objected to provisions to force the president to give Congress more sensitive national security information, and to establish an inspector general with authority over all federal intelligence agencies.

Other measures in the bill would increase funding for intelligence agents and to monitor developments in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

The bill contains many provisions “that conflict with the conduct of intelligence activities,” the White House budget office said in a notification to Congress. “If (the bill) were presented to the president, the president’s senior advisors would recommend that he veto the bill.”

CIA Director Michael Hayden has acknowledged that outside contractors were used to conduct some interrogations in the agency’s detention program for suspected terrorists, which has been widely condemned for harsh techniques that critics say amount to torture.

Hayden told Congress in February he believed contractors helped conduct “waterboarding,” the fiercely condemned simulated drowning technique that he acknowledged using on three al Qaeda suspects. 

Critics say the use of outside contractors could allow the CIA to dodge accountability for abuses, but the agency has said contractors are subject to the same laws as agency staffers.

“Our bill will take detention-related activities out of the hands of private contractors and put the responsibility back where it belongs, in the hands of authorized government personnel,” U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, an Illinois Democrat, said shortly before the House Intelligence Committee passed the authorization measure in May.

WHITE HOUSE OBJECTS

But the White House said prohibiting contract interrogators could deprive the program of necessary questioning skills and expertise.

“Such a provision would unduly limit the United States’ ability to obtain intelligence needed to protect Americans from attack,” it said.

The House adopted a Republican-sponsored amendment aimed at preventing federal agencies from barring official use of terms such as “jihadist” or “Islamo-fascism” in discussing counterterrorism efforts.

Some government officials have warned that the use of such terms alienates moderate Muslims, but supporters of the amendment argued that they simply reflect words used by militant Islamist groups.

Lawmakers also approved a provision requiring the government to give prompt updates of any new intelligence on Iran’s nuclear program, reflecting dissatisfaction with a National Intelligence Estimate last year that reported Iran had suspended design work on a nuclear device. 

The Senate Intelligence Committee passed in May its version of the overall bill, which contains a similar ban on CIA interrogation contractors. It also would ban CIA harsh interrogations and require that the Red Cross be granted access to all detainees.

The measure awaits action by the full Senate. Differences between the House and Senate versions would have be resolved before any final measure is passed.

Major funding provisions of the intelligence bill are classified. Last year the the administration bowed to a law ordering disclosure of the annual intelligence budget and said it had spent $43.5 billion in fiscal 2007.

http://in.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idINIndia-34549020080716?pageNumber=3&virtualBrandChannel=0

A series of legal ploys are being used by major companies including Strada, PizzaExpress and Carluccio’s to take a slice of the £4bn a year that diners leave for low-paid staff in tips.

Today, The Independent launches a campaign to improve the treatment of the country’s 231,845 waiters and waitresses – and ensure that customers know where their money is going when they leave a tip.

Most restaurant customers believe staff receive the tips or service charge as a reward for good service. But our investigation has discovered that tips left by diners are being regularly used to pay basic wages, or meet costs.

Among the practices, The Independent found:

*Carluccio’s, Café Rouge, Chez Gerard, Strada and Café Uno all pay their staff less than the minimum wage and use customers’ tips to make up the balance in their employees’ pay;

*PizzaExpress takes an 8 per cent cut of tips left on a credit card;

*One chain of Asian restaurants, Georgetown, takes 100 per cent of tips;

*Staff at one London eatery receive no basic wage at all.

Last night, The Independent’s campaign won the backing of MPs from all parties and the trade union Unite.

Stephen Byers, who introduced the national minimum wage when he was Trade and Industry Secretary, said: “Action is needed now to ensure fairness, so customers know when they leave a tip for good service, it goes to the individual concerned and is not an extra sum of money for the employer or restaurant owner.

“Loopholes in the system are being exploited by unscrupulous restaurant owners. We must close the loopholes so hard-working staff get the rewards their customers want them to have.”

Peter Luff, Conservative chairman of the Business and Enterprise Select Committee, acknowledged there was “exploitation” of workers in the hospitality sector. “Nobody should be paid anything less than the minimum wage. They should not have to depend on charity to get a legal wage,” he said.

Sarah Teather, the Liberal Democrats’ spokeswoman on business and enterprise, added: “It’s great that The Independent is highlighting such an important issue and I wholeheartedly back the campaign.”

In 2006, Britons spend £37.6bn spent on food and drink in restaurants, according to the British Hospitality Association. At 12 per cent, tips for waiting staff should approach £4.7bn a year.

But restaurants are using several loopholes to take a portion of the money. The practices are believed to have intensified with the rise of electronic payments and the introduction of the chip and pin system in 2006. Among the most popular is the exploitation of a loophole in minimum wage legislation. Restaurants have won the right to pay staff below the minimum wage of £5.52 per hour for workers aged 22 years and older. Staff are paid as little as £3 or £4, with the remainder topped up by tips.

In a few cases, such as at Tuttons restaurant in Covent Garden, the staff receive no “pay” at all: their wages are derived entirely from tips left by diners.

Other waiters are forced to pay restaurant chains hundreds of millions of pounds in sales fees for “administering” tips. Other establishments make deductions as a result of breakages or customers leaving without paying.

One waitress at a London restaurant complained: “Some of us work two jobs and you could be on your feet maybe 80 hours a week with no weekends. If you’re earning £5 an hour and tips go to management, there isn’t the incentive to give customers the best service.”

The Independent looked at the practices of 12 chains that operate 1,300 of Britain’s 26,600 restaurants and turn over almost £1bn a year. They include some of the biggest names in the business.

Britain’s second biggest chain the Tragus Group, which runs Strada, Bella Italia, the French bistro chain Café Rouge and the Belgian beer and frites chain Belgo, also dips into tips to reach the minimum wage. Paramount Restaurants also employs the practice at its Café Uno and Chez Gerrard brands.

At the Nobu Japanese restaurant in London, waiters claim they saw nothing of a £150 service charge on a £1,000 bill and an extra tip of £100.

Gondola Holdings, Britain’s largest casual dining giant with annual sales of £228m, deducts an 8 per cent administration charge from tips to staff at PizzaExpress. A waiter at PizzaExpress, Nabil Guirguis, was allegedly dismissed for talking to the media about the practice, which the private equity company insists is fair. The British Hospitality Association, which represents restaurants, denied that its members were mean – and blamed the Inland Revenue for failing to provide a clear lead. Its deputy chief executive, Martin Couchman, said that there were “legitimate” costs involved in distributing service charges and credit card tips.

“It’s perfectly legal to top up to the minimum wage,” he said.

“Evidence from recent controversy is that, overall, people are earning more than the minimum wage. It’s legal and its one of the things that arose from the Inland Revenue interpretation, which was very confused for a long period.”

Restaurateurs also maintain that their use of tips to top up, or replace, their wages incentivises staff. “Our waiters get a salary depending on how good or bad they are,” said Kumar Muthalagappan, the founder and owner of Pearl Hotels and Restaurants Group.

Unite, however, believes that staff should receive all their tips. Len McCluskey, Unite assistant general secretary, argued that low paid workers deserved a better deal on tips. “The Government must take action so that everyone can tip with confidence,” he said. “Customers want to know their tips are going to the hard-working staff who serve them.”

The Independent is urging restaurants to run an equitable and transparent policy on disbursements to staff – and to disclose that policy on menus.

We are also calling on the Government to end the minimum wage loophole, ensuring that staff are automatically paid the minimum wage in full.

Three simple steps for just deserts

Today, The Independent sets out three simple guidelines for fair treatment of waiting staff, asking that the Government introduces legislation to end the widespread unfair tipping practices adopted by many of Britain’s restaurants:

1) All restaurants should operate a fair, clear and transparent policy for distributing service charges and gratuities to its staff.

2) All restaurants should display their policy on service charges and gratuities clearly on all of the menus.

3) All waiting staff should be guaranteed a basic salary of at least the minimum wage, excluding gratuities.

The United States Federal Reserve Bank, or Fed, seems as much a part of America as Coca-Cola or Pizza Hut. But at least one difference has become apparent in recent days. While the pizza chain and soft-drink maker are likely to expand their scope of influence in the age of globalization, the US central bank is finding that its power is shrinking.

No Fed chief in US history has been forced to submit to the kind of humiliation that Ben Bernanke is facing.

This is partly down to circumstances. Inflation is going up and up, and this year’s average will likely top 4 percent. But this time Mr. Dollar is also Mr. Powerless. He can raise interest rates in the fall, or he can pray, which would probably be the better choice. At least prayer would not prevent the US economy from growing, a highly likely outcome if interest rates go up.

After years of growth, the United States is now on the brink of a recession, one that is more likely to be deepened than softened by a tight money policy. Investments will automatically become more expensive, consumer spending will be curbed and economic growth will slow down, immediately affecting unemployment figures and wages.

The textbook conclusion is that this will stabilize the value of money, because no one will dare demand higher wages or higher prices. But the macroeconomics textbooks are no longer worth much in the age of globalization. Modern inflation is driven by the global scarcity of resources. Nowadays purchasing power exceeds purchasing opportunity. Most of all, there is not enough oil, and too few raw materials and food products. These increasingly scarce resources are becoming the focus of disputes among many people and billions of dollars are at stake.

This is why the price of a barrel of crude oil (159 liters) has increased from $25 (€16) in 2002 to $135 (€87) in 2008. And it is also why the price of corn has tripled in the same time period, while that of copper has almost quintupled.

If the inflation introduced in the United States is excluded, a small miracle is revealed, namely something approaching price stability. Adjusted for inflation, prices are in fact rising by only 2.3 percent. If this were the extent of it, the Fed chief could simply blink like an old watchdog and go back to sleep. Instead, he is barking loudly, which is his job. But he has lost his bite, because the Fed’s interest rate policy can do nothing about the scarcity of goods.
Embarrassing Investigation

Some of Bernanke’s personal adversaries are also contributing significantly to his current humiliation. In the past, the chairman of the Federal Reserve was a pope among the priests of the financial elite. But unlike his predecessor Alan Greenspan, Bernanke is finding that his policies are not universally accepted, even within the Fed.

The last seven decisions reached by the Federal Open Market Committee, which sets monetary policy, were accompanied by a growing number of dissenting votes. Bernanke’s critics say that with his policy of cheap money — in other words, recurring rate reductions — he in fact helped fuel the inflation problem he is now trying to combat.

Another problem for Mr. Dollar is that it will be several months before his actions take effect. Officials with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have informed Bernanke about a plan that would have been unheard-of in the past: a general examination of the US financial system. The IMF’s board of directors has ruled that a so-called Financial Sector Assessment Program (FSAP) is to be carried out in the United States. It is nothing less than an X-ray of the entire US financial system.

As part of the assessment, the Fed, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the major investment banks, mortgage banks and hedge funds will be asked to hand over confidential documents to the IMF team. They will be required to answer the questions they are asked during interviews. Their databases will be subjected to so-called stress tests — worst-case scenarios designed to simulate the broader effects of failures of other major financial institutions or a continuing decline of the dollar.

Under its bylaws, the IMF is charged with the supervision of the international monetary system. Roughly two-thirds of IMF members — but never the United States — have already endured this painful procedure.

For seven years, US President George W. Bush refused to allow the IMF to conduct its assessment. Even now, he has only given the IMF board his consent under one important condition. The review can begin in Bush’s last year in office, but it may not be completed until he has left the White House. This is bad news for the Fed chairman.

When the final report on the risks of the US financial system is released in 2010 — and it is likely to cause a stir internationally — only one of the people in positions of responsiblity today will still be in office: Ben Bernanke.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2008

There are good reasons for Lacan’s skeptical view. As French scholars Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello noted in 1999’s The New Spirit of Capitalism, from the ’70s onward, a new form of capitalism emerged.

Capitalism abandoned the hierarchical Fordist structure of the production process — which, named after auto maker Henry Ford, enforced a hierarchical and centralized chain of command — and developed a network-based form of organization that accounted for employee initiative and autonomy in the workplace. As a result, we get networks with a multitude of participants, organizing work in teams or by projects, intent on customer satisfaction and public welfare, or worrying about ecology.

In this way, capitalism usurped the left’s rhetoric of worker self-management, turning it from an anti-capitalist slogan to a capitalist one. It was Socialism that was conservative, hierarchic and administrative.

The anti-capitalist protests of the ’60s supplemented the traditional critique of socioeconomic exploitation with a new cultural critique: alienation of everyday life, commodification of consumption, inauthenticity of a mass society in which we “wear masks” and suffer sexual and other oppressions.

The new capitalism triumphantly appropriated this anti-hierarchical rhetoric of ‘68, presenting itself as a successful libertarian revolt against the oppressive social organizations of corporate capitalism and “really existing” socialism. This new libertarian spirit is epitomized by dressed-down “cool” capitalists such as Microsoft’s Bill Gates and the founders of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.

What survived of the sexual liberation of the ’60s was the tolerant hedonism readily incorporated into our hegemonic ideology. Today, sexual enjoyment is not only permitted, it is ordained — individuals feel guilty if they are not able to enjoy it. The drive to radical forms of enjoyment (through sexual experiments and drugs or other trance-inducing means) arose at a precise political moment: when “the spirit of ‘68″ had exhausted its political potential.

At this critical point in the mid-’70s, we witnessed a direct, brutal push-toward-the-Real, which assumed three main forms: first, the search for extreme forms of sexual enjoyment; second, the turn toward the Real of an inner experience (Oriental mysticism); and, finally, the rise of leftist political terrorism (Red Army Faction in Germany, Red Brigades in Italy, etc.).

Leftist political terror operated under the belief that, in an epoch in which the masses are totally immersed in capitalist ideological sleep, the standard critique of ideology is no longer operative. Only a resort to the raw Real of direct violence could awaken them.

What these three options share is the withdrawal from concrete socio-political engagement, and we feel the consequences of this withdrawal from engagement today.

Autumn 2005’s suburb riots in France saw thousands of cars burning and a major outburst of public violence. But what struck the eye was the absence of any positive utopian vision among protesters. If May ‘68 was a revolt with a utopian vision, the 2005 revolt was an outburst with no pretense to vision.

Here’s proof of the common aphorism that we live in a post-ideological era: The protesters in the Paris suburbs made no particular demands. There was only an insistence on recognition, based on a vague, non-articulated resentment.

The fact that there was no program in the burning of Paris suburbs tells us that we inhabit a universe in which, though it celebrates itself as a society of choice, the only option available to the enforced democratic consensus is the explosion of (self-)destructive violence.

Recall here Lacan’s challenge to the protesting students in ‘68: “As revolutionaries, you are hysterics who demand a new master. You will get one.”

And we did get one — in the guise of the post-modern “permissive” master whose domination is all the stronger for being less visible.

While many undoubtedly positive changes accompanied this passage — such as new freedoms and access to positions of power for women — one should nonetheless raise hard questions: Was this passage from one “spirit of capitalism” to another really all that happened in ‘68? Was all the drunken enthusiasm of freedom just a means to replacing one form of domination with another?

Things are not so simple. While ‘68 was gloriously appropriated by the dominant culture as an explosion of sexual freedom and anti-hierarchic creativity, France’s Nicholas Sarkozy said in his 2007 presidential campaign that his great task is to make France finally get over ‘68.

So, what we have is “their” and “our” May ‘68. In today’s ideological memory, “our” basic idea of the May demonstrations — the link between students’ protests and workers’ strikes — is forgotten.

If we look at our predicament with the eyes of ‘68, we should remember that, at its core, ‘68 was a rejection of the liberal-capitalist system, a “NO” to the totality of it.

It is easy to make fun of political economist Francis Fukuyama’s notion of the “end of history,” of his claim that, in liberal capitalism, we found the best possible social system. But today, the majority is Fukuyamaist. Liberal-democratic capitalism is accepted as the finally found formula for the best of all possible worlds, all that is left to do is render it more just, tolerant, etc.

When Marco Cicala, an Italian journalist, recently used the word “capitalism” in an article for the Italian daily La Repubblica, his editor asked him if the use of this term was necessary and could he not replace it with a synonym like “economy”?

What better proof of capitalism’s triumph in the last three decades than the disappearance of the very term “capitalism”? So, again, the only true question today is: Do we endorse this naturalization of capitalism, or does today’s global capitalism contain contradictions strong enough to prevent its indefinite reproduction?

There are (at least) four such antagonisms: the looming threat of ecological catastrophe; the inappropriateness of private property rights for so-called “intellectual property”; the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments (especially in biogenetics); and, last but not least, new forms of apartheid, in the form of new walls and slums.

The first three antagonisms concern the domains of what political theorists Michael Hardt and Toni Negri call “commons” — the shared substance of our social being whose privatization is a violent act that should be resisted with violent means, if necessary (violence against private property, that is).

The commons of external nature are threatened by pollution and exploitation (from oil to forests and natural habitat itself); the commons of internal nature (the biogenetic inheritance of humanity) are threatened by technological interference; and the commons of culture — the socialized forms of “cognitive” capital, primarily language, our means of communication and education, but also the shared infrastructure of public transport, electricity, post, etc. — are privatized for profit. (If Bill Gates were to be allowed a monopoly, we would have reached the absurd situation in which a private individual would have owned the software texture of our basic network of communication.)

We are gradually becoming aware of the destructive potential, up to the self-annihilation of humanity itself, that could be unleashed if the capitalist logic of enclosing these commons is allowed a free run.

Economist Nicholas Stern rightly characterized the climate crisis as “the greatest market failure in human history.”

There is an increasing awareness that we need global environmental citizenship, a political space to address climate change as a matter of common concern of all humanity.

One should give weight to the terms “global citizenship” and “common concern.” Doesn’t this desire to establish a global political organization and engagement that will neutralize and channel market forces mean that we are in need of a properly communist perspective? The need to protect the “commons” justifies the resuscitation of the notion of Communism: It enables us to see the ongoing “enclosure” of our commons as a process of proletarization of those who are thereby excluded from their own substance.

It is, however, only the antagonism between the Included and the Excluded that properly justifies the term Communism. In slums around the world, we are witnessing the fast growth of a population outside state control, living in conditions outside the law, in terrible need of minimal forms of self-organization. Although marginalized laborers, redundant civil servants and ex-peasants make up this population, they are not simply a redundant surplus: They are incorporated into the global economy, many working as informal wage workers or self-employed entrepreneurs, with no adequate health or social security coverage. (The main source of their rise is the inclusion of the Third World countries in the global economy, with cheap food imports from the First World countries ruining local agriculture.) These new slum dwellers are not an unfortunate accident, but a necessary product of the innermost logic of global capitalism.

Whoever lives in the favelas — or shanty towns — of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, or in Shanghai, China, is not essentially different from someone who lives in the banlieues — or outskirts — of Paris or the ghettos of Chicago.

If the principal task of the 19th century’s emancipatory politics was to break the monopoly of the bourgeois liberals by politicizing the working class, and if the task of the 20th century was to politically awaken the immense rural population of Asia and Africa, the principal task of the 21st century is to politicize — organize and discipline — the “destructured masses” of slum-dwellers.

If we ignore this problem of the Excluded, all other antagonisms lose their subversive edge.

Ecology turns into a problem of sustainable development. Intellectual property turns into a complex legal challenge. Biogenetics becomes an ethical issue. Corporations — like Whole Foods and Starbucks — enjoy favor among liberals even though they engage in anti-union activities; they just sell products with a progressive spin.

You buy coffee made with beans bought at above fair-market value.

You drive a hybrid vehicle.

You buy from companies that provide good benefits for their customers (according to corporation’s standards).

In short, without the antagonism between the Included and the Excluded, we may well find ourselves in a world in which Bill Gates is the greatest humanitarian fighting poverty and diseases, and NewCorp’s Rupert Murdoch the greatest environmentalist mobilizing hundreds of millions through his media empire.

In contrast to the classic image of proletarians who have “nothing to lose but their chains,” we are thus ALL in danger of losing ALL. The risk is that we will be reduced to abstract empty Cartesian subjects deprived of substantial content, dispossessed of symbolic substance, our genetic base manipulated, vegetating in an unlivable environment.

These triple threats to our being make all of us potential proletarians. And the only way to prevent actually becoming one is to act preventively.

The true legacy of ‘68 is best encapsulated in the formula Soyons realistes, demandons l’impossible! (Let’s be realists, demand the impossible.)

Today’s utopia is the belief that the existing global system can reproduce itself indefinitely. The only way to be realistic is to envision what, within the coordinates of this system, cannot but appear as impossible.

“It could be asked whether the 140 dollars per barrel price can be negotiated between OPEC (Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries), the new actor, which is global capital, and the governments of the Group of Eight (industrial powers),” Víctor Poleo, a Venezuelan professor of graduate studies in the oil economy, commented to IPS.

On Thursday, crude oil prices broke through the 140-dollar a barrel barrier for the first time.

The price of oil “can no longer be dictated by OPEC, because a significant portion of the price would seem to obey market laws that are not its own,” said Poleo.

Saudi Arabia perceives “the beginning of a transition stage to a new power order in the world energy system,” he added.

In Poleo’s view, “the global energy system is witnessing the emergence of a new order. In the old one, under OPEC, the level of prices hovered around 70 dollars a barrel; in the new system, the increase is of the same magnitude,” and the decisions taken by Saudi Arabia “form part of the new negotiations.”

The informal Jun. 22 meeting of representatives of governments and the major oil companies in the Saudi Arabian city of Jeddah called for more investment in crude production, as well as greater transparency in oil markets, where futures trading is helping to drive prices up.

Producer and consumer nations and companies will meet again in Madrid next week, at the 19th World Petroleum Congress, and in late 2008 in London.

Spain’s Minister of Trade and Industry Miguel Sebastián said that “after enjoying 15 years of low prices, our economies have become addicted to oil, and the world is not prepared for the challenge of a steady rise in prices.”

“Nature has been generous with the members of OPEC,” said the minister, “but that gift implies responsibility with respect to the global economy,” and they must improve their offer, while industrialised countries “should carry out an in-depth reform of the commodity markets to avoid speculative bubbles.”

OPEC is made up of Algeria, Angola, Ecuador, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Venezuela, which account for over 75 per cent of global proven oil reserves.

Referring to the Jeddah meet, the Caracas newspaper El Nacional pointed out that the “father of OPEC”, Venezuelan lawyer Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, proposed half a century ago the creation of an organisation of producers and consumers that would regulate the world oil market.

The corporations that controlled the oil business, known back then as the “seven sisters”, scorned the proposal, and Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and Venezuela went on to found OPEC in 1960 in Baghdad.

At the time, Venezuela was the world’s leading oil exporter, a position that was taken over and has been held for decades by Saudi Arabia, which sent from Jeddah a message to its fellow OPEC members that it will not favour a rise in prices, as indicated by its unilateral decision to boost output from 9.5 to 9.7 million barrels a day as of July.

Perhaps for that reason, to show that Riyadh is not the only voice within the oil cartel, Algerian Oil Minister and OPEC President Chekib Khelil said in Europe that oil prices were likely to reach 150 to 170 dollars a barrel this summer.

But if, for example, the crisis over Iran’s nuclear programme leads to a suspension of that country’s oil production, which currently stands at 4.4 million barrels a day, there would be serious shortages and prices could climb to 300 or 400 dollars, said Khelil.

Meanwhile, Shokri Ghanem, the head of Libya’s National Oil Corporation, said his country was studying the possibility of cutting output to protest a bill under debate in the U.S. Congress that would empower the Justice Department to sue OPEC members for limiting oil supplies.

“We are studying all the options,” he said. “There are threats from the Congress and they are taking OPEC to court, extending the jurisdiction of the U.S. outside” that country’s borders.

Libya is also fighting a U.S. law that allows the families of victims of state-sponsored terrorism to go to court and seek the seizure, as punitive damages and compensation, of any asset owned by the terrorist-sponsoring country, or of money from those governments that is held by U.S. companies doing business with them.

These remarks pushed prices up to a record high above 142 dollars a barrel by Friday. Although Libya only produces 1.8 million barrels a day, equivalent to two percent of global demand, every barrel matters when it comes to price fluctuations.

OPEC Secretary General Abdalla Salem el-Badri said the organisation planned to invest 160 billion dollars over the next five years to raise production by five million barrels a day.

The members presently pump 32 million barrels a day, while global demand amounts to 86 million barrels.

Venezuelan expert Pablo Hernández Parra says the world will need more than 92 million barrels a day by early next decade, of which OPEC will not be able to provide more than 38 million barrels, while the rest of the world’s producers will provide around 49 million.

OPEC will not be able to fill the shortfall of several million barrels a day, because it has falsified data on its members’ oil reserves and capacity to expand production. “The only solution is a new association aimed at reducing current energy consumption and preserving what is left of the environment,” said Hernández Parra.

U.S. economist Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize for economics, wrote earlier this month that “Only new patterns of consumption and production — a new economic model — can address that most fundamental resource problem.

“Two factors set off today’s crisis: the Iraq war contributed to the run up in oil prices, including through increased instability in the Middle East, the low cost provider of oil, while biofuels have meant that food and energy markets are increasingly integrated,” he added.

“America’s subsidies for corn-based ethanol contribute more to the coffers of ethanol producers than they do to curtailing global warming,” he complained, after arguing that “rich countries must reduce, if not eliminate, distortional agriculture and energy policies, and help those in the poorest countries improve their capacity to produce food.”

For poor countries, the steady rise in oil prices has taken on nightmare proportions. At the start of the Jeddah meeting, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah suggested that OPEC create a one billion dollar fund to compensate poor countries for the rising price of oil.

The situation in Latin America was illustrated by Dominican Finance Minister Vicente Bengoa, who said that “in 2004, the oil bill was covered by the remittances sent home from Dominicans abroad, with 560 million dollars left over, while this year remittances are expected to run to 1.9 billion dollars, compared to an oil bill of 4.5 billion.”

The big oil companies, in the meantime, are raking in tens of billions of dollars each. With these profits, said Poleo, global capital is financing its positioning with regard to the shifts occurring in the global energy scenario.

The price bubble continues to swell, to the benefit of these interests, although analysts like Alexander Green, investment director at the Oxford Club, a private, international network of investors, say oil prices will inevitably come down.

“Yes, speculative fever has gripped the oil market. This bull is likely to end up just like those in the ring in Mexico City. Current oil prices are simply unsustainable,” Green wrote recently.

“That doesn’t mean that oil is going to plunge today or tomorrow. Indeed, it could keep rising for quite some time. After all, you cannot make a rational judgment about when irrational behaviour will end.

But oil prices will come back down. And that will be positive for both the economy and the stock market,” he concludes.

The operation sprang directly from Big Tobacco’s war against science. It has used the same fake experts, the same public relations companies and the same tactics: as I showed in my book Heat, the campaign against action on climate change was partly launched by the tobacco company Philip Morris. But while the tobacco companies’ professional liars were smoked out by a massive class action in the US, the sponsored climate change deniers still have massive influence over public perception. A survey published yesterday by the Observer shows that six out of ten people in Britain agreed that “many scientific experts still question if humans are contributing to climate change.” This is an inaccurate perception, which results from Big Energy’s lobbying.

Almost without exception, the scientists who claim to doubt that manmade climate change is taking place fall into two categories: either they are not qualified in the branch of science they are discussing or they have received money from fossil fuel companies. Of all the self-professed climate “sceptics”, I have been able to find only one – Dr John Christy of the University of Alabama – who has relevant qualifications and who does not appear to have received fees from lobby groups or thinktanks sponsored by the energy companies. But even he has had to admit that the figures on which he based his claims were the results of “errors in the … data”.

The others are the very opposite of sceptics. Many of them are paid to start with a conclusion – that climate change isn’t happening or isn’t important – then to find data and arguments to support it. In most cases, they cherrypick scientific findings; in a few cases, like the fake scientific paper attached to the celebrated Oregon petition, they make them up altogether. But people who don’t understand the difference between a peer-reviewed paper and a pamphlet are taken in. The energy companies’ propaganda campaign is amplified by scientific illiterates in the media, such as Melanie Phillips, Christopher Booker, Nigel Lawson, Alexander Cockburn and the television producer (who made Channel 4’s documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle) Martin Durkin.

I don’t believe that the energy companies should be prosecuted for commissioning the truckload of trash their sponsored experts publish. But their campaign of disinformation must be exposed again and again. Like the tobacco lobbyists, they are not only delaying essential public action; they also create the impression that science is for sale to the highest bidder.

The awful truth is that sometimes it is.

Tiny Camden County — population 9,271 — is one of the most peaceful in North Carolina. In the last 10 years, there have been two murders, three robberies and seven rapes reported. The sheriff has just 19 deputies.

Sheriff Tony Perry said his department has never used the 17 AK-47s outside of shooting practice at Blackwater. None of his 19 deputies are qualified to use the AK-47s, Perry said, and his department’s need for automatic weapons is “very minimal.”

In the summer of 2005, Blackwater CEO Gary Jackson signed two agreements with Maj. Jon Worthington of the Sheriff’s Office. Worthington has worked as a firearms instructor for Blackwater.

“Blackwater has financed the purchase of 17 Romanian AK-47 rifles for the Camden County Sheriff’s Office for use by Sheriff’s Office,” the agreement says. “The Camden County Sheriff’s Office will have unlimited access to these rifles for training and qualification, and state of emergency use.” Worthington and Jackson also signed an agreement for the purchase of 17 Bushmaster XM15 E2S automatic rifles.

Why did Blackwater strike this deal with the Camden County sheriff?

“Because they needed guns, I imagine,” Jackson said.

Jackson said Blackwater was a good corporate citizen that provided equipment and training, often free, to local law enforcement.

Did Camden County need more automatic weapons than deputies?

“They are very well equipped,” Jackson said.

Perry said he can’t remember who came up with the idea for the weapons deal. He said the county was trying to put together a SWAT team at the time.

Not the best choice?

The AK-47 would be a poor choice of weapon for a SWAT team, said John Gnagey, executive director of the National Tactical Officers Association, the national organization of SWAT officers.

As a combat weapon, the AK-47 is too large and powerful for SWAT teams, Gnagey said. It is rugged but relatively inaccurate.

“And there’s the perception problem,” Gnagey said. “Every terrorist attacking the U.S. is armed with AK-47s. ”

Most SWAT teams use the H&K MP5 submachine gun or the Bushmaster M4, he said.

Under federal law, only government agencies — military or law enforcement — are allowed to acquire and possess automatic weapons. There is an exception for automatic weapons purchased before May 1986, when the law went into effect.

Firearms dealers are allowed, under strict conditions, to acquire an automatic weapon if they need to demonstrate the weapon to a police department or other government agency interested in buying the weapon.

Under federal law, it is illegal for a person to receive or possess an automatic weapon that is not registered to that person in the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record. The 34 weapons are registered to the Camden County sheriff. Seventeen AK-47s and five Bushmasters are stored and used at Blackwater. The other 12 Bushmasters are assigned to Camden County deputies, the sheriff said.

Weapons’ use defended

Jackson, the Blackwater CEO, said he was not violating federal firearms law.

“I don’t believe so,” Jackson said. “As long as I have contracts, I can buy fully automatic weapons.”

Jackson and Erik Prince, Blackwater’s owner, said Blackwater used the AK-47s in training to familiarize police officers or members of the military with a foreign weapon that they might come across while making an arrest or on a battlefield.

Blackwater may also use the AK-47s to train military personnel from other countries who come to the United States for anti-terrorism training funded by the State Department, Prince and Jackson said.

“If the contract tells us to, we do it,” Jackson said.

The agreement between Blackwater and the Sheriff’s Office could be an illegal straw purchase, said Richard Myers, a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A straw purchase, Myers said, is when one person fills out the federal firearms registration form to obtain a weapon for another person’s use.

“I prosecuted several when I was with the U.S. attorney,” Myers said. “If I were Blackwater’s attorney, I would be concerned about whether this is a genuine purchase or a straw purchase.”

Sheriff Perry said he did not consult a lawyer about the agreement until recently, when the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the FBI inquired about the arrangement. Last year two former Blackwater employees pleaded guilty to federal firearms violations. They were sentenced to probation on the condition that they assist federal investigators.

Perry said his department was cooperating fully.

“We’re not a target,” Perry said. “We may be a victim in it.”

Corporations are getting rich using federal prisoners as captive labor pools.

By Betty Brink | Unless she’s dying or recovering from surgery, a patient at the Federal Medical Center-Carswell must work. The hospital out on the banks of

Just across the street from the hospital complex is a camp for minimum-security women prisoners who are not ill. They get most of the hot, hard jobs — cleaning boilers, welding, mowing. The pay is a lousy 12 cents an hour with no raises. That’s why a job that many on the outside would take only as a last resort is the most coveted in the compound: Ernestine the telephone operator.

So when you call directory assistance using, say, Excel Telecommunications, chances are good your inquiry might be answered by a federal prisoner. At Carswell, a fifth of the prison workforce — most from the camp but a few from the hospital as well — get to sit in cubicles in an air-conditioned building, start at almost double the pay of the regular prison jobs, and, if they behave and don’t make mistakes, get regular raises until they reach the maximum pay of — hold onto your hat — $1.45 an hour. Of course, they have to work seven and a half years to reach that maximum. And since this center hasn’t been open long enough for anyone to make the maximum, the highest pay at Carswell is $1.15 an hour.

With toothpaste at $5.95 in the prison commissary, inmates who take those calls for Excel have to work between five and 25 hours to earn enough for one tube. But by comparison, they’re lucky: Women who work at other prison jobs have to sweat out 49 hours for the luxury of brushing their teeth.

The math on the other end is even simpler, if grander in scale: Excel, a $2.5 billion global company, comes out the clear winner. If the 19-year-old Irving-based long-distance carrier had to pay no more than minimum wage to non-prison

But the Carswell prisoners are far from the only ones participating in this exercise in government-assisted capitalism.

How many people know that when they dial 411, the operator at the other end of the call is often a federal prisoner? Or that when they call to reserve a camping space at a national park, the person taking their personal information may be sitting in a cubicle in a maximum-security prison? Or that the body armor for the soldiers fighting in Iraq and

In what critics call slave labor and advocates call job training, more than 100 factories and service centers in federal prisons across the United States employ inmates in jobs such as those above and hundreds more, making everything from underwear to military gear to intricate electrical components, all under the umbrella of a near-billion-dollar corporation known as the Federal Prison Industries, Inc., trade name Unicor.

This little-known and wholly owned arm of the BOP has come under fire in recent years from environmentalists, prison reform groups, and congressional investigative committees for, among other things, exposing inmate workers to dangerous levels of lead and other toxins in its computer recycling centers. The company has also been investigated for profiting from sales of tens of thousands of excess Defense Department computers that were supposed to be given free to low-income schools around the country and, what may be worse, failing to remove sensitive data from the computers it resold. Unions and even the U. S. Chamber of Commerce are up in arms over its use of dirt-cheap prison labor to take jobs from the private sector.

The prison workers are just as unhappy. Unicor and the companies it contracts with “are making a killing off of us here,” one of the Carswell workers wrote recently to Fort Worth Weekly. “And then we leave prison and have nothing to fall back on. Just think how beneficial it would be if they paid at least minimum wage, paid into Social Security … so that we would have something when we leave, old and broken down.”

There’s another Carswell prisoner who may be in a better position than most to help shine a spotlight into this dark corner of the federal prison system. “This prison is making huge profits off of nothing more than slave labor and then marking up prices by as much as 50 percent in the commissary, making even more profit off of all us,” Karen Lucchesi Lewis said.

Lewis has been a lot of things in her 42 years. She has known fame as the daughter of legendary Texas Rangers baseball manager Frank Lucchesi. She has owned and managed a multi-million-dollar spa and wellness center. She has been an honored volunteer fund-raiser for charities in her hometown of Colleyville. And, as a sufferer from lupus, she has been a proponent of naturalized medicine. What she never dreamed of becoming was an advocate for women in prison — especially one advocating from inside the walls. But that is exactly what she is these days, turning a shattering life change into a “mission from God,” as she calls it.

For the last three years Lewis has been doing time at Carswell, after getting caught up in a money-laundering sting aimed at the man who at that time handled legal matters for her business and who got off with a light sentence after testifying against her. In court, her criminal lawyer presented a defense so weak that even the sentencing judge commented on it. Still, Federal Judge John McBryde sent her to prison for 78 months.

While her new attorney, her family, and supporters such as North Side businessman Mike Costanza are working to get her conviction overturned, Lewis is on another quest. She wants to expose the injustices that she said she has witnessed since she entered the Carswell compound in 2004 — everything from “terrible medical neglect to women being used as slave labor for the prison to make millions in profits.”

Regardless of whether one believes in her innocence, Lewis is a high-profile inmate who is unafraid to speak out about a culture of abuse at Carswell that has been reported by the Weekly in an ongoing series since 1999. Now, to the prison’s litany of well-documented medical horror stories, rape, and sexual misconduct cases, are added allegations that the inmates are being exploited by a government industry that few citizens have ever heard of — even though it has been around since 1934. Someone’s making millions off the labor of the women at Carswell and thousands like them across the country — but it sure isn’t the inmates.

During the depths of the Great Depression,

Prison industry advocates say the “factories with fences” train inmates for jobs on the outside. They say the work reduces recidivism and boredom and gives inmates a source of income to help pay their court fines, support families, or spend at the commissary. Critics, on the other hand, describe them as Dickensian places where laborers have no workplace protection, are routinely exposed to cancer-causing toxins, and are exempt from federal labor laws, which means they can be forced to accept wages lower than those in

For the last several years, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, labor unions, and prison reform groups such as FedCure have all pushed for legislation that would outlaw Unicor’s preferential treatment and require the corporation to pay minimum wage. Members of Congress from states whose manufacturing businesses have lost millions in government contracts to Unicor have taken up the cause, but to date the corporation has been able to fend off all such efforts.

By 2006 Unicor had come a long way from that initial $4 million. Last year, according to its annual report, the corporation held assets of $730 million in 108 factories and service centers at 79 prisons across the country. Its gross sales were $718 million with profits of $71.2 million. Those profits were produced by more than 21,000 inmate laborers who made, on average, $1,700 for a year’s work. The profits aren’t, as one might suspect, plowed back into the prison system to, say, improve healthcare services at Carswell or reduce the inflated prices for basic personal hygiene supplies at prison commissaries. Instead, it is plowed back into Unicor.

One its harshest critics is U. S. Rep. Pete Hoekstra, a Michigan Republican who has been trying since at least 2000 to get legislation passed that would reform Unicor and force it to compete with private companies. He said that the requirement that federal agencies must buy from Unicor allows it to perpetuate itself without regard to whether that is the best option for agencies and for prisoners themselves.

One congressional aide, who asked for anonymity, said that Hoekstra has found no evidence that those who run the corporation are enriching themselves. But, he said, it’s a “giant Ponzi scheme,” that requires more and more millions to feed its ever-expanding enterprises.

In recent years, Unicor has added to its list of factory-made products what it calls “services”: computer recycling centers, industrial laundry services, printing shops, and call centers — all for sale to private, for-profit companies in spite of the law’s prohibiting language. BOP Director Harry Lappin, who is also head of Unicor, maneuvered around that little obstacle in the law, apparently successfully, when he testified before a congressional committee last year that the corporation’s new offerings are “a service, not a product” and that therefore the law does not apply. Unicor now advertises its call centers on its web page and in its catalogs as “domestic outsourcing at offshore prices.”

Three major national communications networks use the “domestic outsourcing” call center at Carswell for their directory assistance services, according to FPI program director Todd Baldau. Baldau refused to name the clients, citing “proprietary information.” However, two inmates who currently work at the center, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation, said the companies are Excel Telecom, Cricket Communications, and Metro 411. Calls and e-mails to the three companies were not returned. Baldau would not say what the companies pay Unicor for inmate labor for their call centers, but the corporation’s 2006 annual report listed sales of $27.8 million from its 18 service centers, including Carswell, with profits of $2.5 million.

The policy that all prisoners in federal lockups must work, including the less critically ill patients in prison hospitals, is designed to keep prisoners occupied as much as anything, bureau spokesman Mike Truman said in an interview for an earlier story. “Life can get very boring in prison,” he said, and reducing boredom reduces the potential for trouble among inmates.

Working for Unicor “is a privilege for good inmates with a smidgen of education,” said a former Carswell prison employee who asked not to be named. “They are monitored heavily, are lectured frequently, and really do their jobs in fear of losing them if they mess up. … The work is easy, conditions are better [than any other jobs there], and the work is useful on their resumés once they get out. … That’s why jobs with Unicor are coveted.” The call center at Carswell has been open for more than five years. Women sit in a small, guarded, air-conditioned building near the center of the compound, taking directory assistance calls in eight-hour shifts, 24 hours a day.

Sweatier non-Unicor jobs basically cover maintenance work at the prison camp and hospital, including groundskeeping, floor-scrubbing, plumbing, welding, carpentry, and cleaning the boilers that provide hot water and heat for the compound. “They even work on the elevators,” said former inmate Dana Corum. “And that’s a full-time job because those dang elevators were always out.”

Prison officials also refused to discuss details of Unicor pay scales. But one of the inmates who provided the names of the Unicor client companies wrote to the Weekly that the pay starts at 23 cents an hour with incremental raises that top out at $1.15 an hour. She said that after 18 months on the job, the women get an additional 10 cents an hour for “longevity” and another 5 cents an hour for each 18 months after that up to 80 months. At that point, they will have “maxed out” at around $1.45 an hour. “There are a few ‘premium pay’ positions that rate an extra 25 cents an hour … for being extra important to the operations — or the most liked,” she wrote. It takes “political … shit to get these spots.”

The Spokane Area Journal of Business reported last year that regular call center jobs in this country start their workers at more than $11 an hour, plus benefits. Call center personnel in

And since the prison laborers receive no benefits: and no Social Security, the private companies that contract with the prisons save on those substantial costs as well. Average cost to an employer for health insurance for a family of four in 2007 is around $9,000 a year according to Towers Perrin, a global business financial management firm. And then there’s that 9.1 percent matching contribution to Social Security and Medicare for each employee.

Unlike Indian workers, American inmates don’t have to pay for all their living costs from those salaries — but Indian workers, on the other hand, don’t have to pay almost $2 for soap. Inmates are required to buy all personal items, and often meet some dietary needs, from the prison’s commissary.

Most can’t afford just the basic things that are necessary for their health and hygiene, said Lewis, who is one of the few who has a family able to put money into her prison account, to a maximum of $300 a month. A commissary price sheet lists a bar of bath soap at $1.65, deodorant at $2.80, and a box of regular tampons at $5.30. For diabetics, who must buy their own non-sugar products, a 50-count box of Equal packets costs $3.80. Many of the women at Carswell come from poor families. Some have been abandoned by their families, and only a few have loved ones who can send them money for such basic needs.

Corum, a diabetic, spent five years at Carswell, off and on. She was sent to

Even though the women work under strict guidelines, which forbid them to ask callers for personal information or tell them their calls have been routed to a prison, the jobs can be enjoyable and provide some relief from the rigidity of prison life, Corum said. “They had some fun, but the pay is still lousy,” she said, “and the whole thing is a racket that’s making money for the prison and unfairly competing with legitimate businesses.”

Unfair competition with private business is high on the Communications Workers of America’s list of concerns with the federal call centers because of the resulting loss of jobs for its members, said Candice Johnson, a spokeswoman for the national union. “Generally, outsourcing has been the big issue” with American communications workers, she said. “But if those [outsourcing] companies are now bringing back that work to the federal prisons, and still paying the same low wages, that is still an unfair advantage over the other companies that have stayed here and are trying to provide good-paying jobs and good service.” Johnson said the CWA believes the prison jobs do not provide the training that such work requires in order to give good customer service. “Good companies value good customer service,” she said. That was a big problem with the call center jobs that were sent overseas in the first place, she said: Foreign workers read from scripts, and if the customer’s problems didn’t fit the script, the employee was stumped and the customers ended up angry and frustrated. For that reason, she said, companies like AT&T and U. S. Airways are in the process of bringing their call centers back to this country. “People [in prison] need the opportunity to learn skills” but Unicor is not the answer, she said.

The system has its defenders outside the prison system. Journalist Harry Sheff, in an article for a web-based business magazine, wrote in July that “Unicor call centers don’t compete with American jobs — they only take on contracts that were about to be outsourced overseas.”

Other voices of protest are coming from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, whose director of legislative affairs told National Public Radio in September, “We do not believe Federal Prison Industries should continue its unfettered expansion into the commercial marketplace. … The business community is extremely concerned about this.” Future expansion by Unicor is possible because of the enormous increase in the prison population in recent years — an involuntary workforce numbering close to 200,000 now and increasing by about 2.5 percent annually.

Unicor now offers more than 140 products and services for sale to other government agencies, with more than half its output bought by the Department of Defense — by far its largest customer, especially since the beginning of the Iraq war. Like every other defense contractor, Unicor has benefitted from the war and dislikes competition. “While we expect the continuing war effort [to] provide another year of excellent work opportunities for our inmates, that situation will not last indefinitely,” Unicor directors wrote in the 2006 annual report. “We are positioning to a post-war environment.”

Another similarity between Unicor and other military contractors has been its propensity for corruption.

When she was at the Federal Correctional Institution Marianna in

Corum wasn’t exaggerating. In 2000, Rep. Hoekstra, chairman of the House subcommittee on education and the workforce, opened an investigation into the “racket” that Corum had witnessed, albeit a small part of it. The FPI “has been taking tens of thousands of items in excess federal government equipment, especially computer equipment, and using them to fuel an entry of unknown scope into the commercial marketplace,” he said at the opening of the subsequent hearing. In other words, they were selling used government equipment, improperly and in huge quantities.

According to Hoekstra’s office and transcripts of the hearings, Unicor acquired the computers through a process that allows federal agencies that are replacing equipment to pass along outdated but still operable items for use by other agencies. If other federal agencies don’t need the hand-me-downs, the equipment is supposed to be dispersed, free, to nonprofit groups, schools, or state governments. It is never supposed to be sold.

In this case the computers were destined to be sent to poor school districts under a presidential order of Bill Clinton. Somehow, FPI got to them first, hauled them out of the warehouses, and began a huge, illegal, garage sale, Hoekstra said. He noted that at the time the U.S. Department of Justice was conducting a criminal investigation of Unicor. “It is high time,” he said. “FPI has been out of control for years, exceeding its statutory authority and running wild through the marketplace without any Congressional … authority.”

Hoekstra’s evidence showed that during 1999 FPI took almost 60,000 excess items from the Defense Department alone, worth $481 million, and in 2000 added 83,000 more excess items with value estimated at just under $89 million. The company would have topped the $1 billion mark in illegal sales, the chairman said, if not for the “vigilance of a dedicated public servant” who blew the whistle. FPI’s defense was the “dubious claim” Hoekstra said, that it did not break the law governing its existence because selling the equipment was a service and not a product, the same justification echoed by Lappin last year when Congress questioned the call centers.

As a result of his own investigation, Hoekstra introduced legislation that would have reined the corporation in. It didn’t pass that year, but his spokesman said Hoekstra will keep reintroducing the bill for as long as it takes to get it passed.The most recent scandal involved Unicor’s recycling centers. A single personal computer contains a toxic cocktail of cancer-causing chemicals, including up to eight pounds of lead, according to a report by the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. In 2002 SVTC found that prisoners at a maximum-security prison in

By 2005 the BOP had admitted that in at least three of its factories, prison workers had been exposed to higher than safe levels of toxic chemicals — but officials said the problem had been fixed. Not true, said the government’s Office of Special Counsel and called for an investigation by the Justice Department. The investigation is ongoing. In the meantime, Unicor clients such as Dell and the state of

Worker exposure to deadly lead, followed by denials and cover-ups, is not new in the prison agency. The Weekly reported on a similar incident that happened at Carswell in 1999, when three federal maintenance workers and a half-dozen female inmate workers were ordered to dismantle a lead-lined medical radiology room at the hospital. They were given no protective clothing or breathing equipment, even though they were working in a small room and had to crawl into some of the lead-lined cabinets and grind the lead out. Three of the civilian workers suffered such serious and irreparable lead poisoning that they can no longer work, and their doctors have said it will shorten their lives. Even their wives and children had high levels of lead in their blood.

Karen Lucchesi Lewis wishes that the same kind of pressure brought against Dell could be brought against the telephone companies under Unicor contract at Carswell. But she is realistic enough to know that it is unlikely to happen. Women in prison, she said, are forgotten by the public and the Congress — and that includes a woman who ran an $8 million business before her conviction.

Lewis has much more outside support than the average inmate. Nelson Thibodeaux, editor of a Colleyville online newspaper, Localnewsonly.com, has written extensively about her case.

But others from the Colleyville business community and women’s groups she once participated in have abandoned her. She was a major fund-raiser for many charities in Colleyville and North Texas including the Colleyville Woman’s Club, the Christ Haven Shelter for women, the

At Carswell, Lewis was at first put to work mowing the grounds. “They never considered the fact that someone with lupus is supposed to stay out of the sun,” she said. Later she was moved inside to help clean the boilers. She has not applied for work with Unicor, she said. Instead, she has established a health education and exercise class for the women. That takes up “all of my spare time,” she said. Her lupus is currently in remission, she said.

Lucchesi said that her memories of growing up as Frank and Kathy Lucchesi’s youngest child sustain her. “We had a very old-fashioned Italian upbringing,” she wrote in one letter. “I used to love to go to the games to watch Papa on the field and then eat late at night.” But her famous dad, who was manager of the Philadelphia Phillies, the Chicago Cubs, and the Texas Rangers, kept her away from the players he managed, she said. “I was never allowed to date them.” After Frank retired, the whole clan lived near one another in Colleyville.

All of that familial happiness came to a crashing end in 2004 when Karen was taken in handcuffs and leg-irons through the clanging prison gates of Carswell, bringing her to a cramped, four-person cell in the austere prison where she was destined to spend the next six and a half years.

“I was in shock. I couldn’t believe it was really happening,” she said. “I have never even had a traffic ticket.” But in October 2003, a traffic ticket was not the issue. Dirty money was. That month Lewis was found guilty by a federal jury in

Her long-time friend and business attorney Anand “Ani” Alloju had introduced her to a wealthy Mexican citizen and supposed drug dealer allegedly interested in investing in her business. Lewis said she was never told by Alloju that the man was a dealer. In fact, he was an undercover agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration working a sting operation aimed at Alloju. The lawyer, who had access to Lewis’ bank accounts, laundered the $20,000 through those accounts without her knowledge, she said, even forging her signature on some checks.

The DEA agent claimed she was a willing participant. On the stand, Alloju’s testimony about Lewis’ knowledge of the scheme was vague and contradictory. The jury believed the agent. And even though Alloju was the primary target of the sting and admitted in court that he had washed $200,000 in what he clearly understood was illegal drug money through various other phony accounts he set up, he was sentenced to two years and spent only 11 months in prison, getting out early after completing a drug rehab course. By pleading guilty and testifying against Lewis, Alloju got a reduced sentence and a pass for his psychiatrist wife Lisa Alloju, who, according to her husband, deposited the drug money in Lewis’ accounts. Lisa had just completed a probated sentence for drug possession and was never charged in the money-laundering case. The 41-year-old Alloju did not enjoy many days of freedom; he died of unknown causes a little more than a month after his release in 2005.

“Even if you don’t believe [Lewis] was railroaded — and I do — the trial was a farce,” said Costanza. “Then she gets three times the sentence that the slime-bag who set her up got. It makes no sense.” He and other supporters of Lewis think that the undercover agent went after her as a trophy. “A big name gets more print and more glory for the undercover guy,” Costanza said. “Karen wouldn’t be in prison if her name had been Smith.”

The pain her incarceration has caused her close-knit family seems to weigh heaviest on Lewis these days. “When a family member goes to prison, the whole family goes to prison,” she said. “Everyone’s life is put on hold.”

But she seems to have come to terms with her imprisonment. She’s campaigning to let the world know of the injustices she has witnessed there. The most recent, she wrote to the Weekly, was the death of Genevieve Ramirez, 64, who on Aug. 1 fell in her room and hit her head around 1 a.m. Lewis and several other inmates “couldn’t find or get medical help till after 3 a.m.,” she wrote. “She had a brain aneurysm. They took her to [an outside] hospital and she was put on life support for two days, then they pulled the plug.” The BOP has not returned calls requesting information on Ramirez’ death.

Weekly reporters, except in rare instances, have been banned since 1999 from entering the prison to interview women such as Lewis. But she is one of the many who have managed to be the eyes and ears for reporters in keeping tabs on what goes on there. It takes courage. Many who have done so say they have suffered retaliation — including Corum, who suffered such gross medical neglect that when she left two years ago, her kidneys were near failure and her heart was critically damaged. She has had multiple surgeries since she got out. Other women have been sent to solitary on trumped-up charges or transferred to other prisons where they could not get the medical help they needed.

Lewis said that, even when she gets out, she won’t give up on her efforts to help the women at Carswell. And others, including current and retired judges, are working to focus congressional attention on the conditions there.

Congressional attention apparently is what it will take to change anything in

And then there were the women prisoners who also worked in the lead-contaminated rooms at Carswell eight years ago. They, too, showed signs of higher than normal levels of lead in their blood. But they were scattered to other prisons, and the bureau refuses to release information on their whereabouts.

FUEL protesters rarely have difficulty grabbing the headlines or gaining public sympathy. After all, who wouldn’t rather pay less to fill up their car?

It seems quite likely that the Government will again back down from its planned increase in petrol tax this autumn. But the way the price of oil has been going, who is going to notice an extra 2p a litre?

Surely it can’t keep on going up and up? Ten years ago the price of oil was trading at $13 a barrel. Five years ago it had doubled to $25. It hit nearly $140 last week. And we haven’t heard the last of it.

Most forecasters think the price of oil is going to stay high, and some even predict it will reach $200 a barrel by the end of the year.

Of course, it is not just the price of petrol that is affected. Our economy is heavily dependent on oil. The price of gas and the price of steel are all closely linked to the black stuff – so the cost of building and heating homes is going up.

And so too is food. The rising price of our weekly shop is closely linked to the rising price of fertiliser and animal feed – all of which rely on oil for their production. And of course there’s the cost of moving goods around.

Around 95% of our transport system is dependent on oil. We’ve been used to fuel costing the same as mineral water and we have designed our towns and cities around the assumption that we can all hop in the car.

But not everyone can. In communities like Blaenau Gwent and Merthyr, where 35% of families are car-less, many low-income families feel forced to “invest” in a car to access jobs and services. And as the cost of petrol goes up it will be the families on tight budgets that are hit the hardest.

Buying and running a car is already a major cause of people getting into trouble with debts, and those on low wages who do have cars spend nearly a quarter of their income on the cost of motoring.

As seductive as it seems, trying to match increases in oil with tax cuts is a road to nowhere.

We need to wean ourselves off oil or face a serious economic slump – that’s on top of the dramatic threat to our prosperity we face from climate change. Last year’s Stern report on the economic impact of climate change warned that unless we take urgent action on cutting carbon emissions we face a downturn greater than the combined effects of both World Wars and the Great Depression.

What’s to be done? There is a different way forward, which will have a wide range of benefits not just for our economy but also for the stability of our climate. But it’s going to require some decisive leadership to make it happen.

A transport system that’s resilient to rising fuel prices needs to remove our over-dependence on oil. By far the majority of our daily journeys are under three miles long, yet the current built environment makes walking, cycling or catching public transport a challenging, sometimes impossible option. But with a number of small changes accompanied by a big vision for a new approach to transport and the planning system, it’s quite possible to make these active and public travel choices the easier, more pleasant and more direct way to get to our everyday destinations.

Sustainable transport charity Sustrans has been working for 30 years on practical projects to enable anyone to walk and cycle right across the UK. And we know that this vision, of a different, more active way to get around, is what people want too – just six months ago, the public voted in their thousands for the Big Lottery Fund to give Sustrans £50m for “Connect2”, a scheme which will build walking and cycling connections across 79 communities throughout the UK, including 10 schemes in Wales.

What is clear from the rising price of oil is that we cannot carry on building a transport system which assumes everyone can jump in a car. Not only is this likely to be unaffordable but it is contributing to a catastrophic shift in our climate. Change is coming. We can either anticipate it and set Wales up as a leader in sustainable travel, or we can continue in a state of denial and delude ourselves that fuel tax cuts will save the day.

Lee Waters is director of the sustainable transport charity Sustrans Cymru