War is always good for business.

It is even better when the government is an active player in the main game. The Bush administration is well and truly on side, it has ensured that Cheney's old company Halliburton and its ilk can plunder Iraq with impunity. In May 2003, President Bush signed an executive order that provides oil industry companies -- and only oil companies -- unprecedented immunity against contractual disputes or lawsuits resulting from discrimination, labour law abuses, environmental disasters, and human rights violations. In terms of legal liability," says Tom Devine, legal director of the Government Accountability Project, ‘the executive order cancels the concept of corporate accountability and abandons the rule of law. It is a blank check for corporate anarchy, potentially rob­bing Iraqis of both their rights and their resources.

Things don't get any better than that folks, and that's not all, there's more.

The Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root overcharged the Army $61 million for gasoline it was providing in Iraq. Within a week of the exposure Halliburton was again ripping off American taxpayers, while President Bush announced that no Iraqi contracts would go to France, Russia, Canada, Germany, Those were reserved for the Bush campaign contributors.

It goes without saying that such corporate indulgences bring uncomfortable questions. Not even Corporate America can get away with such rackets for long; people do get restless don't they? Hence just 45 days after the September 11 attacks, with virtually no debate, Congress passed the draconian 342 page USAPATRIOT Act (an acronym only an American could dream up: Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism), a piece of government legislation that would fit comfortably in Germany under the Nazis or Fascist Italy than a nation claiming to the homeland of freedom and democracy.

After decades complaining that the communists in East Germany had turned neighbour against neighbour by recruitment of government spies. The Department of Homeland Security intends to turn the whole American nation into a Stasi like totalitarian state, enlisting the ever watchful eyes and ears of postmen, gas and electricity meter readers, caretakers and odd job men to report on unusual or suspicious behaviour.

In today's America the word on the street is that aliens, gay's and fornicators of all descriptions better watch out, they are out to get you.

According to Amnesty International between September 11, 2001, and September 30, 2003, the US government racially profiled Middle Eastern, Muslim and South Asians, forcing 177,260 men and boys to register with federal officials. While 2,870 were detained after registration (23 remain in custody) and 13,799 people face deportation, none have been charged with terrorism-related offences.

For those not toeing the line there is always the American private prisons system, a $50 billion a year business, but even here the there is unevenness, the Federal Government pays county jails $35 a day for murders, rapists, and white colour thieves, but the jails get from $75 to $100 a day for immigration detainees, and this is not because the immigrant prisoners are getting more services, they don't eat more. But we hardly have cause for surprise governments are always generous when it comes to handouts for their friends.                                   

By the first Gulf War Westinghouse and General Electric, two of the major nuclear weapons manufactures owned two of the major media networks, as well as most of the parts for many of the weapons in the Persian Gulf. The evidence and extent to which these and other American corporations were involved in arming repressive regimes such as Saddam's Iraq were no doubt contained within the 8,500 pages the Bush administration expunged from the Iraq report to the United Nations in December 2002.

But we all knew they were up to no good. So why didn't the media report it? Answer, because the media bosses and their compliant journalists were beneficiaries, sweethearts soon to be embedded, in a real live computer game war where journalists were temporally able to play soldiers, enthusiastically they report sanitized news, self censored and purposely approved by the military. All this from inside armoured vehicle or alongside a smoking gun, what could be more real and exciting, ecstasy upon ecstasy, its fun being embedded with the military.

In America today a free media is an oxymoron.  In Stalinist Russia the media was divorced from the people, under state ownership it became an organ of state power. In America large corporations privately own the media and the public are excluded. Unless we naively believe there is no connection between government and the corporations, we are entitled to ask, what is the difference; free speech is absent in both systems.

There has to be a better way, there has to be a democratic media, to argue the first amendment of free speech whilst corporate America owns and controls the means by which free speech can be disseminated is a contradiction in terms.

The big question is how did America become the way it is?

Our enquiry must go back to the early 1970's when Corporations started employing a combination of well-funded marketing techniques more so­phisticated than the old-fashioned vote buying of Tammany Hall.

But first let us see what the grand old man of free markets, Adam Smith has to say in his 1776 book, The Wealth Of Nations, and I quote "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices,” one could also add raising prices would not be all they conspired against the public, they also conspire against their own kind.

Prior to the 1970's business interests were represented by industry groupings such as the National Coal Association, the American Petroleum Institute and the Beer Institute to name a few, however as corporations grew in both size and influence a refining process was underway. Within the boardrooms of the multinational corporations men, overwhelmingly white men, of power were employing a combination of so­phisticated marketing techniques and well funded think tanks and foundations employing ideologically aligned intellectuals to expand their markets at the expense of smaller businesses and the public.

Adam Smith was right. This is precisely what happened. They established a program that enlarged the rights and reduced the responsibilities of corporations at the expense of consumers.

Programs to beautify and clean up Australia, making country towns tidy became a top priority for, the canning and package industry, and bottling companies as they sort to ‘buy' a green image by funding antilitter campaigns, while those same sponsors ac­tively fight mandatory recycling legislation. The strategy is to convince the public that litter is the responsibility of consumers not the pack­aging industry.

There are many examples of similar attempts at sanitizing the dirty image of international corporations, the Heritage Foundation, the Institute of Public Affairs the mass of ‘Institute's' and others regularly offer ‘independent authorities' for interviews under the guise of so-called balance. The sole reason for their existence is to convince the pub­lic that the corporate interest is the public interest.

Those who fund the foundations are to be found among the Fortune 500 listings. For their efforts they revive lethargic pro-­establishment opinions that are said to return a tenfold increase in its budget. In 1970, only a handful of the Fortune 500 companies had public affairs offices in Washington, these days there are more lobbyists in Washington than politicians. Together they represent a frontal assault on our freedoms as they advance the ideological agenda of the corporations.

Under the George W Bush administration the number of registered Lobbyists in Washington D.C. has doubled to 35,000, each pressing the government to favour their own special interests.

That's a free society folks.

There is an army of public-relations people out there manipulating news, public opinion, and public policy to serve the interests of powerful corporations who are paying the bills.

And they all sound so convincing, such nice people. Don't be fooled folks. They are paid to convince us that ‘what's good for the corporation is also good for us'. The PR industry now employs more journalists than the media and is growing fast; a more appropriate term might be ‘spreading like a cancer'.