"This past September, the secretive mercenary company Blackwater USA found its name splashed across front pages throughout the world after the company's shooters gunned down seventeen Iraqi civilians in Baghdad's Nisour Square. But by early 2008, Blackwater had largely receded from the headlines save for the occasional blip on the media radar sparked by Congressman Henry Waxman's ongoing investigations into its activities. Its forces remained deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and business continued to pour in. In the two weeks directly following Nisour Square, Blackwater signed more than $144 million in contracts with the State Department for "protective services" in Iraq and Afghanistan alone and, over the following weeks and months, won millions more in contracts with other federal entities like the Coast Guard, the Navy and the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center.

Blackwater's Iraq contract was extended in April, but the company is by no means betting the house on its long-term presence there. While the firm is quietly maintaining its Iraq work, it is aggressively pursuing other business opportunities. In September it was revealed that Blackwater had been "tapped" by the Pentagon's Counter Narcoterrorism Technology Program Office to compete for a share of a five-year, $15 billion budget 'to fight terrorists with drug-trade ties.' According to the Army Times, the contract "could include antidrug technologies and equipment, special vehicles and aircraft, communications, security training, pilot training, geographic information systems and in-field support." A spokesperson for another company bidding for the work said that "80 percent of the work will be overseas." ...

The massive US security company DynCorp is already deployed in Colombia, Bolivia and other countries as part of the "war on drugs." ...

What could prove to be one of Blackwater's most profitable and enduring enterprises is one of the company's most secretive initiatives -- a move into the world of privatized intelligence services. In April 2006, Prince quietly began building Total Intelligence Solutions, which boasts that it "brings CIA-style" services to the open market for Fortune 500 companies. Among its offerings are 'surveillance and countersurveillance, deployed intelligence collection, and rapid safeguarding of employees or other key assets.'

As the United States finds itself in the midst of the most radical privatization agenda in its history, few areas have seen as dramatic a transformation to privatized services as the world of intelligence. 'This is the magnet now. Everything is being attracted to these private companies in terms of individuals and expertise and functions that were normally done by the intelligence community,' says former CIA division chief and senior analyst Melvin Goodman. 'My major concern is the lack of accountability, the lack of responsibility. The entire industry is essentially out of control. It's outrageous.' ...

Washington spends some $42 billion annually on private intelligence contractors, up from $17.5 billion in 2000. That means 70 percent of the US intelligence budget is going to private companies. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that the head of DNI is Mike McConnell, the former chair of the board of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, the private intelligence industry's trade association."

"A year ago, the biotech companies' grave had been dug. They had failed repeatedly to refute the three principal arguments against deployment: that GM crops enhance corporate power by allowing companies to patent the food chain; that the long-term safety tests to establish whether or not they pose a risk to human health have never been conducted; and that consumers don't want to buy them. ... But, though we have won the argument, we are losing the war. For the GM companies have rediscovered the old way of dealing with reluctant customers: if persuasion doesn't work, use force. ...

Monsanto will never repeat the mistake of seeking to persuade consumers that they might wish to purchase its products. In future, it won't have to. Like the other biotech companies, it has been buying up seed merchants throughout the developing world. In some places farmers must either purchase GM seeds - and the expensive patent herbicides required to grow them - or plant nothing at all. ...

The technology which, we were promised, would broaden consumer choice, is becoming compulsory. This is the free trade which George Bush and Tony Blair have promised to the world. It is the freedom which, they have assured us, will overthrow vested interests, challenge market concentration, enhance competition and empower consumers. It is the freedom we must be forced to swallow.

When protesters against this forced emancipation were arrested by the freedom-loving police in Genoa, some of them were tortured, then shown a photograph of Mussolini. They were obliged to salute it and shout 'Viva il Duce!' Presumably because this enthusiastic defence of market forces is compatible with free trade, neither Tony Blair nor Jack Straw saw fit to complain. "