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In a perfect world, a list like this would not exist. In a perfect world, businesses would be run with the utmost integrity and competence. But ours is, alas, an imperfect world, and if we must live in one where Enron, Geraldo Rivera, and Cottonelle Fresh Rollwipes exist, the least we can do is catalog the absurdities.

Stanford University Professor Martin Carnoy, explains that while Chile's voucher experiment did little for poor schoolchildren, it was part of a broad trend towards privatizing social services. Originally published in Selling Out our Schools by Rethinking Schools.

Was your Microsoft Windows 95 packed and shrink-wrapped by a Washington State prisoner? According to one prisoner who works for Exmark, a company specializing in product packaging, approximately 90 prisoners at the Twin Rivers Correctional Center (TRCC) in Monroe shrink-wrapped 50,000 units of Windows 95.

By the end of the year, Starbucks will increase its ever-growing empire by opening a coffee shop in Mexico City -- the first Starbucks in Latin America. Ironically, Starbucks will soon be selling gourmet coffee to the very people who are under-paid for harvesting coffee beans. News of the Mexico City shop came as Starbucks was presenting its first Corporate Social Responsibility report at its annual shareholders' meeting in Seattle last month. The report emphasized the company's claimed commitment to doing business in socially, economically and environmentally responsible ways, to benefit the communities around the world where it does business.

When "get tough" voter measures requiring inmates to work for free, undermined the Oregon State Constitution, lawmakers simply amended it. Prison Legal News co-editor and inmate Pens looks at the impacts on prisoner and labor rights.

Alex Friedmann doesn't look like the kind of guy who would incite a prison riot. Slight and bespectacled, Friedmann measures his words carefully and is quick to point out his own biases. So it came as a bit of a surprise a few weeks ago when Corrections Corporation of America, the largest private prison company in the world, abruptly transferred Friedmann from its medium-security lockup in Clifton, Tennessee.

The CMT Blues scandal and the host of human rights and labor issues it raises, is just the tip of the iceberg in a web of interconnected business, government and class interests which critics dub the ''prison industrial complex.''

The co-editor of Prison Legal News, a Washington State prisoner himself, Wright reports on private companies, like Boeing, that are making out like bandits by using prison labor.