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Entergy, one of the largest utilities in the U.S., has enjoyed healthy profits since Hurricane Katrina. Yet its New Orleans subsidiary has filed for bankruptcy, and frightened ratepayers with visions of bills bloated to 140% of their pre-storm size. Now the Fortune 500 company is threatening to pull the plug on New Orleans if it doesn't get a $700 million-plus federal bailout it doesn't actually need.
Through a partnership with a smaller, minority-owned company, a sprawling multinational firm whose federal contract for travel trailers was up for rebidding has landed four new deals that could be worth $400 million, federal records show.
The U.S. military in Iraq has demanded that the passports of all employees of contractors and subcontractors serving the military in Iraq be returned to them by May 1.
KBR, the Halliburton subsidiary recently reprimanded for gross overcharging in its military contracts in Iraq, won a $385 million contract to build large-scale detention centers in case of an "emergency influx" of immigrants.
The incident drew an angry response from Iraqi officials, who often complain private foreign guards kill civilians with impunity
A $243 million program led by the United States Army Corps of Engineers to build 150 health care clinics in Iraq has in some cases produced little more than empty shells of crumbling concrete and shattered bricks cemented together into uneven walls.
Oil and gas production, which fuels Iraq's fragile economy, has yet to return to levels before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.
In Baghdad, the United States is now building a monument to rank with Grand Coulee Dam, the Pentagon, Disney World and the Mall of America. It has elements of all four, plus a 15-foot stone wall and surface-to-air missiles.
A watchdog agency sees poor oversight in a defunct U.S. program to let private firms train Iraqis to guard oil and power infrastructure.
At the request of the U.S. State Department, the agency is providing a petroleum advisor to Iraq from February to June through its contract with BearingPoint, USAID spokesman David Snider told Dow Jones Newswires in an e-mail.
In two weeks seven Fijian men serving as security guards in Iraq have died, leaving behind grieving wives and children with no fathers. But these are the risks they are willing to take, especially when you get to earn between $3000 to $6000 a month.
For most people, the gruesome killings of four private security contractors were the first they had ever heard of Blackwater USA, a small, North Carolina-based private security company. Since the Falluja incident, and also because of it, Blackwater has emerged as one of the most successful and profitable security contractors operating in Iraq.
CorpWatch is set to release our new report on Afghanistan reconstruction next Tuesday. Advance copies are available now upon request.