CORP-WATCH: All the bad things big business is doing around the world

In the wake of the September 11th attacks, the U.S. government invoked national security to sweep up and jail an unprecedented number of immigrants. Companies like Corrections Corporation of America and Wackenhut, have reaped the benefits.

Almost four years after the toppling of Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s healthcare system is still a shambles. While most hospitals lack basic supplies, dozens of incomplete clinics and warehoused high-technology equipment remain as a testament to the failed U.S. experiment to reconstruct of Iraq. First in a series of CorpWatch articles.

Global Horizons is one of the biggest companies in the business of importing temporary foreign workers to do jobs in the U.S. ranging from agriculture to nursing. Their workers sometimes endure worse conditions, and enjoy less rights than undocumented workers.

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Workers accuse the Kuwait contractor building the US embassy in Baghdad of smuggling low-paid South Asians into Iraq and labor trafficking. Still, the US State Department casts a blind eye on the complaints as it rushes to complete its most ambitious project ever.

This weekend marks the fifth anniversary of the US invasion of Afghanistan. Fariba Nawa, an Afghan-American who returned to her native country to examine the progress of reconstruction, uncovers some examples of where the money has (and hasn’t) gone, how the system of international aid works (and doesn’t), and what it is really like in the villages and cities where outsiders are rebuilding the war-torn countryside.

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Listen, watch or read an interview with Fariba Nawa on Democracy Now! about reconstruction, security, and life in Afghanistan five years after the invasion.

In order to influence the new laws that encompass the 25 countries of the European Union, now the world's largest single economy, some 15,000 lobbyists have flocked to Brussels, its political heart. The public relations firm Burson-Mastellar is one of the most active among them.

Fishing communities in the Caribbean island of Trinidad are protesting a $US1.5 billion aluminum smelter that will process raw material from Brazil, Jamaica and Surinam. Cedros Peninsula United, a local organization, says that the factory uses technology that has had serious environmental impacts in countries from China to Iceland and the U.S.