Bad Deeds for 6-1-2008

Money for Nothing – The Internal Revenue Service is spending $42 million on letters to alert taxpayers to expect rebate checks as part of the economic stimulus plan.

 

Top US Iraq Contractor Skirts US Taxes Offshore – Kellogg Brown & Root, the nation’s top Iraq war contractor and until last year a subsidiary of Halliburton Corp., has avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in federal Medicare and Social Security taxes by hiring workers through shell companies based in the Caymen Islands. More than 21,000 people working for KBR in Iraq – including about 10,500 Americans – are listed as employees of two companies that exist in a computer file on the fourth floor of a building on a palm-studded boulevard in the Caribbean. Neither company has an office or phone number in the Cayman Islands.

 

ESPN Radio Host Hopes for Assassination of Senator Kennedy – At the opening of his show on ESPN last Wednesday, Mark Madden said this about Sen. Kennedy, who days earlier had been diagnosed with brain cancer: “I’m very disappointed to hear that Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts is near death because of a brain tumor. I always hoped Senator Kennedy would live long enough to be assassinated.”

 

Supervisors Covered Up Risky Mortgage Loans – Wall Street investment banks that were packaging mortgages may have known they were selling garbage loans to investors. A wave of litigation is starting against these firms. One former worker whose job was to catch bad loans says her supervisors covered them up.

 

Media Executives Pushed for Positive Coverage of Run-Up to Iraq Invasion – CNN’s congressional correspondent Jessica Yellin, appearing on last night’s Anderson Cooper 360 as a part of a panel discussing Scott McClellan’s new book, What Happened, admitted that during the run-up to war, “the press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war that was presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation and the president’s high approval ratings.”

Regards,
Jim