The news, however, is not altogether grim. While times are especially tough for teenagers (22.7 percent jobless rate) and blacks (14.9 percent jobless rate), one group is doing remarkably well. I’m talking about former members of the Bush administration who are taking up prestigious academic posts, inking lucrative book deals, signing up with speakers bureaus, joining big-time law firms and top public relations agencies and grabbing spots on corporate boards of directors. While their high-priced wars, ruinous economic policies and shredding of economic safety nets have proved disastrous for so many, for them the economic outlook remains bright and jobs are seemingly plentiful. In fact, many of them have performed the eye-opening feat of securing two or more potentially lucrative revenue streams at once during these tough financial times.
While it would likely take a small book to catalog the fates of all former “loyal Bushies,” a look at just a few of these fortunate folks indicates that not everybody was harmed by the Bush era.

The memoirists

Many of the top figures of the Bush years are joining the ranks of (or reaffirming their credentials as) men and women of letters. Following in the footsteps of 2003-2006 White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, who wrote the tell-some exposé “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception,” is former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (2001-2006). Now penning his life story for Sentinel, a conservative imprint of the Penguin Group, he has announced that he is forgoing an advance and donating all proceeds to charity. Similarly, 2006-2009 Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is reportedly donating the “author’s profits” from his forthcoming “insider’s account of [his] experiences as Treasury Secretary.” Many other former colleagues are, however, apparently intent on cashing in on their public service.

Last month, the New York Times reported that Rumsfeld’s long-time pal, former Vice President Dick Cheney, “is actively shopping a memoir about his life in politics and service in four presidential administrations” and seeking multimillions. In the same way, back in 2007, Bush’s right-hand man Karl Rove, aka his “brain,” agreed, for a reported seven figures, to write a memoir for Simon & Schuster’s conservative imprint Threshold. Earlier this year, Bush’s first-term national security advisor and second-term secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, signed a gaudy three-book deal, reportedly worth at least $2.5 million, with Random House’s Crown imprint.

Following her to Crown (also the publisher of Barack Obama’s “Dreams from My Father” and “The Audacity of Hope”) was former President Bush himself. His book, tentatively titled “Decision Points,” will reportedly recount “a dozen of the most interesting and important decisions in the former president’s personal and political life” for a cool $7 million. Former First Lady Laura Bush has already inked a book deal with Scribner reportedly worth $3.5-$5 million.

Only one prominent Bush loyalist who cared to try appears to have been unable to cash in. In late 2008, the Wall Street Journal’s Evan Perez reported that Alberto Gonzales, former White House counsel (2001-2005) and attorney general (2005-2007), “said he is writing a book to set the record straight about his controversial tenure as a senior official in the Bush administration,” but could interest no publisher in the manuscript. This followed an earlier report in the New York Times that Gonzales had been “unable to interest law firms in adding his name to their roster …”

Law and orders

One Bush administration lawyer who did land a job with a law firm was Gonzales’ successor, Attorney General Michael Mukasey (2007-2009), who became a partner at Debevoise & Plimpton, a firm “offering sophisticated legal services” which “places the highest value on collaboration and interdisciplinary cooperation in order to provide clients with seamless representation across practice areas and across continents.”

Tommy Thompson, Bush’s Secretary of Health and Human Services from 2001-2005, is now a partner with Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, where he “focuses on developing solutions for clients in the health care industry, as well as for companies doing business in the public sector.” Michael Chertoff, secretary of Homeland Security from 2005–2009, is serving as “senior of counsel” and a “member of the White Collar Defense and Investigations practice group” at the firm of Covington & Burling.

Meanwhile, Harriet Miers, who served Bush from 2001-2007 as staff secretary, deputy chief of staff, and counsel to the president — and whose Supreme Court bid crashed and burned in 2005 — returned to Locke, Lord, Bissell & Liddell in May 2007 to serve as a member of the law firm’s “Litigation and Public Policy sections.” That firm is also home to Karin Torgerson, a partner who served as special assistant to President George W. Bush, one of several White House positions she held from 2003-2005.

Speak easy

In addition to his book-writing duties, former President Bush recently signed on with the Washington Speakers Bureau, which already represents his wife. The Bureau is to arrange lucrative speeches for him worldwide. In fact, just last month, the New York Times reported that the former president had “earned more than an estimated $150,000″ to “discuss national and international policy” alongside fellow former President Bill Clinton at the Metro Toronto Convention Center.

Together the Bushes joined a speakers’ roster of former administration heavyweights, including Richard Armitage (deputy secretary of state, 2001-2005), John Bolton (U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, 2005-2006), Andrew Card (White House chief of staff, 2001-2006), Ari Fleischer (White House press secretary, 2001-2003), Michael Mukasey, Colin Powell (secretary of state, 2001-2005), Condoleezza Rice, Tom Ridge (secretary of Homeland Security, 2003-2005), Donald Rumsfeld, and John Snow (secretary of the treasury, 2003-2006), as well as Bush family consigliere James Baker III.

Meanwhile, at Leading Authorities, another top-of-the-line speakers bureau, the list of ex-Bush loyalists includes Dan Bartlett (counselor to the president, 2002-2007), Christopher Cox (chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, 2005-2009), Ed Gillespie (counselor to the president, 2007-2009), Porter Goss (director of the Central Intelligence Agency, 2005-2006), Stephen Hadley (national security advisor, 2005-2009), Michael Hayden (director of the Central Intelligence Agency, 2006-2009), Keith Hennessey (director of the National Economic Council, 2007-2009), Dana Perino (White House press secretary, 2007-2009) and Margaret Spellings (secretary of education, 2005-2009).

A third lecturers’ stable, the Leigh Bureau, boasts John Negroponte, who served Bush as ambassador to the United Nations, ambassador to Iraq, director of National Intelligence, and deputy secretary of state.

Talking heads and lobbyists

Some Bush loyalists have nabbed other sorts of speaking gigs. Karl Rove, for one, took a job as an analyst for Fox News. (He also writes a weekly op-ed for the Wall Street Journal and, in 2007, signed a two-year deal to be a columnist for Newsweek magazine.)

Ari Fleischer was hired as a media consultant to the Green Bay Packers in 2008 and serves as the president of Ari Fleischer Communications, which bills itself as a “unique media training and consultancy company [that] brings to the world of sports the lessons of how to successfully handle the toughest situations with the most aggressive reporters.” (Clients reportedly include Major League Baseball, the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association, and “several other leading sports figures.”)

Many more Bush loyalists, however, are involved in another lucrative form of communication. For example, Michael Chertoff quickly launched the Chertoff Group, a consulting firm that “will advise clients on a range of security concerns, including cyber security, terrorism, fraud, border protection and supply-chain security.” Tom Ridge, when not serving as a keynote-speaker-for-hire (as he did recently at the 2009 CoBank Energy Directors Conference in Colorado Springs, Colo.) is now a security and crisis-management consultant for his own firm, Ridge Global, whose self-professed “expertise encompasses risk management and global trade security, leadership guidance and strategic business generation, event security, crisis management and communications, campus security, technology innovation and integration and more.”

In fact, a recent analysis by USA Today found that “more than one in four members of President George W. Bush’s Cabinet have landed jobs with consulting or lobbying firms in which they can help clients navigate the departments they once oversaw.” And it’s not just heads of executive departments like Homeland Security who are cashing in.

John Ashcroft (attorney general, 2001-2005) co-founded the Ashcroft Group, a strategic consulting firm that advises and invests “in companies in the security and law enforcement marketplaces.” Not surprisingly, the firm has become a home for Bush loyalists like Juleanna Glover, who served on the senior staffs of then President-elect George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, and was then “the registered U.S. government affairs advisor for Iraq’s first post-Saddam Hussein ambassador to the United States.”

Recently, according to the Quad City Times, Jim Nussle, Bush’s director of the White House Office of Management and Budget (2007-2009) “formed a company that will offer consulting, government relations and lobbying services.” The Nussle Group, its Web site proclaims, “specializes in recruiting a talented team and developing creative solutions to assist clients in navigating the complicated and challenging intersections of public policy, government relations, public relations, international relations and politics.”

According to his company bio, the senior policy director at lobbying powerhouse Dutko Worldwide, Gene Hickok, “joined the George W. Bush Administration as Under Secretary of Education. He became Deputy Secretary in 2003 [and] was an architect of the No Child Left Behind Act.” And he isn’t alone. Kent Sholars, a senior associate at Dutko, “was a political appointee during both terms of the administration of George W. Bush, serving as the Confidential Assistant to the Controller for the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in Washington, DC,” while Karen Yeager, a Dutko vice president, “serve[d] in the White House for President Bush in 2001.”

Spin-mistresses

Karen Hughes helped George W. Bush get elected in 2000 and, for the first two years of his first term, served him as a “counselor.” In 2002, she left the White House to spend more time with her family in Texas. In 2004, however, she was back at work on Bush’s campaign and then, in 2005, signed on as an undersecretary of state. In 2007, she left again, the White House said, “to spend more time with her family.” Nonetheless, in 2008, she was in an office yet again, this time as global vice chair at public relations giant Burson-Marsteller. In 2009, she was joined there by former White House Press Secretary Dana Perino, who now serves as chief issues counselor for the company in the U.S.

Here, too, Michael Chertoff has gotten into the act. The announcement of the formation of the Chertoff Group, wrote the Wall Street Journal, “was made by the communications firm Burson-Marsteller, which said it formed an alliance with Mr. Chertoff.”

Board members

Bush Administration officials have also been popping up on various boards of directors. Richard Armitage is perhaps typical. He sits on the board at military-corporate complex member ManTech International. He also serves on the boards of oil giant ConocoPhillips, “pharmaceutical and cosmeceutical” company Transcu Ltd., and his own firm, Armitage International, which, according to its Web site, provides “multinational clients with critical support in the areas of international business development, strategic planning, and problem-solving.”

In April, chemical giant DuPont announced that Samuel Bodman, secretary of energy from 2005-2009 (and before that, deputy secretary of the Treasury, 2004-2005, and deputy secretary of the Department of Commerce, 2001-2004) had been elected to its board of directors.

That same month, former CIA chief Michael Hayden became a member of the board of directors of the National Interest Security Company, an “information technology, information management, and management technology consulting services” provider serving the U.S. Intelligence Community and the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, and Energy. There, Hayden joined fellow former administration cronies Henry A. Crumpton (coordinator for counterterrorism at the State Department, 2005-2007) and Donald Kerr (principal deputy director of National Intelligence, 2007-2009).

Meanwhile, Andrew Card not only serves on the board of directors of railroad giant Union Pacific but has also turned up on the board of directors of the George W. Bush Presidential Library Foundation.

In the (think) tank

If you can’t get a gig at a law firm, a PR agency, or on a corporate board of directors, there are always the nation’s think tanks to fall back into — and they’ve become a shelter for more than a few Bush administration refugees in the Obama era. For example, after serving as a deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security advisor in the Bush administration, Elliott Abrams has now joined the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) as senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies.

Alongside Abrams at CFR are a number of officials who served during the Bush years, including Evan Feigenbaum, former deputy assistant secretary of state for India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, and the Maldives; Paul Lettow, former senior advisor to the under secretary of state for Democracy and Global Affairs and the senior director for Strategic Planning and Institutional Reform on the National Security Council staff; and Dan Senor, an administration foreign policy advisor and senior advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.

Meanwhile, the conservative Heritage Foundation is not surprisingly housing a large contingent of Bush loyalists, including Becky Norton Dunlop, who served as the chairperson of the Federal Services Impasse Panel (which handles disputes between government agencies and labor unions); Kim R. Holmes, assistant secretary of state for International Organization Affairs; Terry Miller, ambassador to the United Nations Economic and Social Council; Peter Brookes, deputy assistant defense secretary for Asian and Pacific Affairs; and Mike Gonzalez, who, in 2005, left the Wall Street Journal to join the Bush administration where, according to his Heritage Foundation bio, he “wrote speeches for Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox, then moved to the State Department in 2006 as communications adviser and speechwriter on European and Eurasian affairs” and even “helped craft an op-ed column … which appeared throughout Europe under the bylines of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.”

Ivory towers

While Gates stayed on to work for President Barack Obama, Rice is pursuing many different career paths. In addition to the lucrative book contracts and the speakers bureau gigs, she inked a deal for the William Morris Agency to represent her for “business initiatives in media, sports and communications.” Rice also returned, as a professor of political science, to her old stomping grounds at Stanford University, where she had long taught and also, from 1993-1999, served as provost. Presumably in her spare time, she serves as the Thomas and Barbara Stephenson senior fellow on public policy at Stanford’s conservative Hoover Institution.

Rice is actually following in the footsteps of Rumsfeld, who served a stint, beginning in 2007, as “a distinguished visiting fellow” at the Hoover Institution. But Stanford is hardly the only academic bastion of former Bush-ites. For example, this year, John Negroponte headed back to his old alma mater, Yale University, to become the “Brady-Johnson Distinguished Senior Research Fellow in Grand Strategy and Lecturer in International Affairs at the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies.”

“Torture memo” author John Yoo, who served as deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice from 2001-2003, is, of course, a professor of law at the School of Law of that bastion of leftist radicalism, the University of California at Berkeley. (As Liliana Segura of AlterNet recently reported, he also just landed a gig as a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer.)

Hope on the horizon

Last year, for many Americans, Barack Obama became synonymous with hope. (And last year, Obama’s “The Audacity of Hope” as well as his “Dreams from My Father” earned him an eye-popping $2.4 million in royalties.) This year, for struggling job-hunters nationwide, it’s former Bush administration officials who offer a glimmer of hope in tough economic times. Their ease in finding gainful employment suggests that, even if your prior work has been judged ruinous by many and been roundly repudiated, there’s still hope for you on the job front.

Even former Vice President Cheney, a man about whom 55 percent of Americans hold an unfavorable opinion, has realistic prospects of receiving a multimillion dollar book deal.

With only former Attorney General Gonzales still out of work, grant the men and women of the Bush administration one thing: the best unemployment rate in the land. In but a few short months, they’ve managed to prove that no matter how spectacularly you fail, you can always fail upwards.

Food bank representatives agree on one thing: The need for their services is spiking in a way none of them can recall. Again and again, they emphasize that lines at food pantries are growing longer, seemingly by the month, and that those in line are younger and often more middle class than ever before.

Families who just months ago didn’t even know what a food bank was and would never have considered visiting a food pantry now have far more intimate knowledge of both. Embarrassed to approach institutions that they previously identified with the poor and indigent, many, say food bank officials, are also waiting far too long to seek aid. Other formerly middle-class Americans who have never dealt with, or even thought about, food insecurity before simply don’t know whom to call or where to turn.

These points echo a December 2008 survey conducted by Feeding America, a national hunger-relief charity. Its network of more than 200 food banks in all 50 states distributes more than 2 billion pounds of donated groceries annually to 63,000 local charitable agencies. Its survey found that, of 160 food banks, 99.4 percent of them reported seeing more first-time users in 2008.

For America’s food banks this has meant one thing: That they, too, are needier. They need ever more fresh food, non-perishable food, and non-food items like cleaning products and toiletries from wholesalers, retailers, food distributors, corporations, charities, government agencies, local farms and individual donors. They need ever more storage and freezer space. They need ever more volunteers. They need ever more food that can be made available on appointed distribution days at food pantries. And they need ever more emergency food supplies, available on demand for people who suddenly realize that they are hungry and out of options, possibly for the first time in their lives.

The face of hunger today

“Hunger does not discriminate, but the face of the hungry is growing younger,” says Stanley Bray of the St. Louis Area Foodbank, which distributes food to more than 500 agencies, including food pantries, soup kitchens, shelters and emergency food programs in 14 counties in eastern Missouri and 12 counties in southwestern Illinois. Bray’s organization has seen a 15 percent  increase in need just since October 2008. Thirty to forty percent of that 15 percent, he says, are first-time clients. “Typically, those who would have volunteered at the Foodbank are now recipients of food at local pantries,” he notes.

Even as Americans who once might have donated food or money now find themselves in need, people still have the urge to help as best they can. At one West Coast food bank, a representative told of a man who recently came in with a proposition. He needed six weeks of food assistance while he was putting together the money to travel across country and move back in with his parents. Until then, he suggested, he would work for the food bank to pay his way.

“I must say that we are amazed and touched by the attitude of our community. From large local financial services [wealth management] companies, to the local Rotaries, schools, small businesses, and countless individuals — everybody seems to be sharing what they can,” notes Iris Valanti of the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank. “Unlike the squabbling going on in Washington, people out here in real life are trying to pull together and do what they can.”

But that communal spirit can only take food banks so far, given the troubling trends on the horizon. According to Valanti, large foundations are reviewing their “decimated portfolios” and trimming donations, leaving organizations like hers wondering what the future will bring. In fact, the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank’s subsidiaries are already struggling to obtain needed grants to secure new freezers to store food for the increasing number of nouveau needy. At the same time, she points out, food donations are actually down in her area, while the organization’s food purchases have increased by an astonishing 560 percent in the last two years.

Valanti spelled out the enormity of the problem: “Fall quarter 2008 saw a 44 percent decrease in donated product we get through our national network partner Feeding America … The other trend was skyrocketing food prices. Our wholesale cost for a case of pasta, for instance, has risen 88 percent since 2006.”

According to Cindy Stevens of the Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma, demand for assistance began its current upswing after a major ice storm knocked out power in much of the area in December 2007. Food in refrigerators spoiled and many Oklahomans in the area were prevented from working, and thus from receiving paychecks. That led to the first “slight increase” in need, followed by a major jump when gas prices soared in the summer of 2008. Even though gas prices have fallen since, the economy has melted down with them.

“Our agencies report as much as a 40 percent increase in the number of people coming to them for assistance,” she notes. Like other food assistance providers nationwide, her food bank has observed a clear shift in demographics. “Our agencies are reporting a change in clientele. Many of the people who are coming to them have never had to seek assistance before. Many of them have jobs or have just lost a job.”

West Coast woes

The San Diego Food Bank, which distributes groceries to 300 soup kitchens, senior centers, food pantries, churches and other allied nonprofits in sprawling San Diego County, is facing similar marked increases in need. From December 2007 to December 2008, the number of people served by its USDA-funded Emergency Food Assistance Program, which aids low-income people via 91 distribution sites, jumped from 37,302 to 65,663 — a 76 percent increase. “It’s unprecedented,” says the Food Bank’s Chris Carter. “We’re seeing many more middle-class families coming in. I met a couple at one of our distributions, they have a mortgage and two car payments. They’ve both been laid off. The first thing to go is the food budget.”

It can take several months for food stamps to kick in after they’ve been applied for, and, as Carter points out, “a lot of people don’t have a couple of months. They need food immediately, so they’re coming directly to us. We’re seeing a dramatic increase in demand for food assistance across the board.”

In some places, people need to wait for specific distribution days to get help from a food pantry. In San Diego, the needy don’t have that worry; neither do people in Oakland, Calif., where the Alameda County Community Food Bank operates an Emergency Food Helpline. With just a phone call, those in dire need can receive food at a local pantry on the very day they dial. In 13 years, the Bank’s help line had received more than 1,500 calls a month only twice. In 2008, every month topped the 1,500 mark. For the last six months, the average has been more than 2,000 a month and is soon expected to break the 2,500-call barrier.

In the last three months of 2008, according to Brian Higgins, the Food Bank’s communications manager, “We saw a 45 percent spike over the exact same period in 2007, which was, in itself, a record-breaking year.” Add those numbers to the 40,000 people fed each week by the organization, which distributes about 15 million pounds of food per year, while keeping in mind that we’re only talking about one city, and you begin to get a sense of the enormity of the crisis bearing down on the country.

Oakland is a poor city and many there have long experienced privation. Not surprisingly, the current economic crisis has hit its population hard. In East Oakland, the city’s neediest area, people line up each Friday at the Columbian Gardens food pantry in anticipation of a regular delivery of groceries from the county food bank. “Those lines have gotten longer and longer and longer,” says Higgins. Phone calls for emergency food are increasing exponentially as well. Two years ago, the staff at Columbian Gardens used to distribute four to five emergency bags of staples, including canned goods and pasta, each day. Now, on a normal day, it’s 25 to 30 bags.

Nor is the pain confined to perennially hard-hit East Oakland. The whole city is suffering. Next door to the Alameda County Community Food Bank, for example, a brand new $35 million Toyota dealership — the largest in all of Northern California — was built from scratch on an empty lot. “It was open about eight weeks before it closed,” comments Higgins — and it’s just one of numerous local businesses shutting down.

As a result, Oakland, historically saddled with the most impoverished senior population in all of California, is seeing new trends that the Food Bank’s workers find chilling. Higgins notes that the population they serve now includes “more and more young people and working families. We’re seeing people who made really decent money a couple years ago in real estate and other commission fields, who are down to nothing. They’re having to make that call for first time.”

Unfortunately, many put off calling for assistance for as long as possible. “People who work on our emergency food help lines,” he continues, “say there’s a universal embarrassment about the calls they’re getting now.” Phone operators reassure clients that the food bank is there for that very reason, but shame and stigma have led to increased privation. “It really delays people calling.”

At the Food Bank of Contra Costa and Solano, California, Lisa Sherrill has noted the same kind of spike in need. “Overall, we are serving 20 percent more people over two years ago,” she wrote in a recent e-mail. At some of its 29 Food Assistance Program sites, where boxes of fresh produce, bread and other staples are handed out, demand is increasing by 5 to 10 percent a month.

Donated funds are on the rise, but they can’t fully compensate for the surge in new assistance seekers. “There are many people in our Food Assistance lines that have never had to ask for food before,” notes Sherrill. “Last week at a site in Antioch, we spoke with a man who has a master’s [degree] in engineering, lost his job and is having a hard time finding work because there aren’t many opportunities, and what he can find he is being told he is overqualified for.”

Alaska has fared better than many states. Lacking massive waves of home foreclosures and a startlingly high unemployment rate, it has been buffered from the worst of the hardships seen elsewhere. Still, the arrival of tough economic times was plainly visible last fall at Thanksgiving Blessing, an annual holiday grocery distribution program spearheaded by the Food Bank of Alaska and held at eight locations in Anchorage.

In 2008, according to Marleah LaBelle, communications manager for the food bank, 5,900 families turned out for Thanksgiving Blessing, a 42.7 percent increase over the previous year. “If you factor the 5,900 families, with an average family size of four, and the total population of Anchorage is 260,283 — that is roughly 10 percent of the population, or one in ten families,” LaBelle notes. A similar December program, Neighborhood GIFT (which also includes toy distribution), saw a 30 percent spike in turnout compared with 2007. “I saw people that I knew personally at both of the holiday food distributions, and they are people I had not previously considered to be ‘low income,’” she adds.

Unfortunately, the holiday season spike proved no aberration in Anchorage. The food bank’s affiliates have been reporting, across the board, 30 to 50 percent increases in people visiting their soup kitchens and food pantries. For instance, the number of clients at the Valley Open Bible Fellowship food pantry in Big Lake, Alaska, has doubled recently.

As elsewhere, monetary donations have also increased for the Food Bank of Alaska, but ever less retail food is now being donated — a worrisome trend nationally in light of increased need. “Something that has been striking to nearly everyone at Food Bank of Alaska is how quickly the food comes off the shelves in the warehouse. As soon as donated food gets sorted, it almost instantly gets picked up,” LaBelle wrote in a recent e-mail.

What’s ahead for the nouveau needy?

Tens of millions of Americans were already suffering from hunger and food insecurity before the current depression. In fact, in 2006, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated that 35.5 million Americans were “food insecure.” Now, however, those numbers are bound to swell, thanks to the growing ranks of America’s nouveau needy. “It’s the new face of hunger for us. Before we primarily served the low-income population, the working poor, as people call them,” says the San Diego Food Bank’s Chris Carter. “Now middle-class families who were in retail jobs, construction, the real estate industry … are finding themselves in our lines. Some of these people are those who would have donated food to us before, who would never dream they’d be in one of our food lines, and now they need help.”

From his conversations with clients at the food bank’s distribution sites, Carter sees bleak times ahead, especially for the staggering number of people who have, as a last resort, been maxing out their credit cards. “We’ve seen the credit crunch on Wall Street and the ripple effect that it’s had on more vulnerable industries across the country. I think there’s going to be a credit tightening at the consumer level. When that happens we’re going to see a huge surge in demand,” he said recently. “This is going to get worse before it gets better.”

Such prospects will spell trouble in the years ahead. The federal government is now pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into bailing out broken banks. If hunger and need continue to skyrocket, food banks may be the next banks to break. Who will bail them out?

Once upon a time, the military-industrial complex was loaded with household-name companies like General Motors, Ford and Dow Chemical that produced weapons systems and what arms expert Eric Prokosch has called “the technology of killing.” Over the years, for economic as well as public relations reasons, many of these firms got out of the business of creating lethal technologies, even while remaining Department of Defense (DoD) contractors.

The military-corporate complex of today is still filled with familiar names from our consumer culture, including defense contractors like iPod-maker Apple, cocoa giant Nestle, ketchup producer Heinz, and chocolate bar maker Hershey, not to speak of Tyson Foods, Procter & Gamble, and the Walt Disney Co. But while they may provide the everyday products that allow the military to function, make war, and carry out foreign occupations, most such civilian firms no longer dabble in actual arms manufacture.

Whirlpool: Then and now

Take the Whirlpool Corp., which bills itself as “the world’s leading manufacturer and marketer of major home appliances” and boasts annual sales of more than $19 billion to consumers in more than 170 countries. Whirlpool was recently recognized as “one of the World’s Most Ethical Companies by the Ethisphere Institute.” The company also professes a “strong” belief in “ethical values” that dates back almost 100 years to founders who believed “there is no right way to do a wrong thing.”

In the middle of the last century, however — as Prokosch has documented — Whirlpool was engaged in what many might deem a wrong thing. In 1957, Whirlpool took over work on flechettes — razor-sharp darts with fins at the blunt end — for the U.S. military. While International Harvester, the prior Pentagon contractor producing them, had managed to pack only 6,265 of these deadly darts into a 90mm canister round, Whirlpool set to work figuring out a way to cram almost 10,000 flechettes into the same delivery vehicle. Its goal: to “improve the lethality of the canisters.” (In addition, Whirlpool also reportedly worked on “Sting Ray” — an Army project involving a projectile filled with flechettes coated in a still-undisclosed chemical agent.)

In 1967, an Associated Press report noted that U.S. troops were using new flechette artillery rounds to “spray thousands of dart-shaped steel shafts over broad areas of the jungle or open territory” in Vietnam. “I’ve seen reports of enemy soldiers actually being nailed to trees by these things,” commented one Army officer.

On a recent trip to Vietnam, I spoke to a Vietnamese witness who had seen such “pin bullets” employed by U.S. forces many times in those years. In one case, Bui Van Bac recalled that a woman from his village, spotted by U.S. aircraft while she was walking in a rice paddy, was gravely wounded by them. Local guerillas came to the woman’s aid and brought her to a hospital where a surgeon found a number of extremely sharp, 3-centimeters-long “pins” inside her body. Medically, it was all but hopeless and the woman died.

A top player in lethal technologies back then, Whirlpool is now among the tiniest defense contractors. While, in recent years, the company has ignored requests for information from TomDispatch.com on its dealings with the Pentagon, records indicate that last year, for example, it received just over $105,000 from the Department of Defense, most of which apparently went toward the purchase of kitchen appliances and household furnishings.

Similarly, Whirlpool’s predecessor in the flechette game, International Harvester, is now Navistar International Corporation. Navistar Defense, a division of the company, remains one of the Pentagon’s stealth “billion dollar babies.” But while it did more than $1 billion in business with the DoD last year, Navistar appears to have been building vehicles for the Pentagon, not creating anti-personnel weaponry. There are, however, companies that can’t seem to say goodbye to lethal technologies.

National Presto Industries

National Presto Industries traces its history to the 1905 founding of the Northwestern Iron and Steel Works in Eau Claire, Wis., according to the Business & Company Resource Center. By 1908, the company was making industrial steam pressure cookers and, in 1915, began making models for home use. On the eve of the U.S. entry into World War II, the company entered the arms game when it scored a multimillion-dollar contract to produce artillery fuses. Even with that deal in hand, it was reportedly on the verge of bankruptcy when its new president, Lewis Phillips, landed a series of other lucrative military contracts.

In the early years of the Cold War, about the time Whirlpool was getting into the flechette business, National Presto Industries had just introduced “a revolutionary new concept in electric cooking … a complete line of fully immersible electric cooking appliances employing a removable heat control” — and was about to launch “the world’s first automatic, submersible stainless steel coffee maker.” The company was also still churning out war materiel.

In 1953, National Presto announced plans to build a multimillion-dollar plant to produce 105mm artillery shells. In 1955, it was awarded millions to make howitzer shells for the Army, and the next year, millions from the Air Force for fighter-bomber parts. By 1958, company president Lewis Phillips would declare, “The future of this company in Eau Claire and hence the security of our jobs here is now almost wholly dependent upon defense contracts awarded by the U.S. Government.” When the Army canceled its contracts with Presto in 1959, Phillips lamented, “With little or no notice, this Government decision has forced us completely out of the manufacturing business here in Eau Claire.”

The tough times didn’t last. Soon enough, National Presto returned to the fray, benefiting from the disastrous American war in Vietnam. From 1966 to 1975, the company manufactured more than 2 million 8-inch howitzer shells and more than 92 million 105mm artillery shells. In Vietnam, 105mm shells would kill or maim untold numbers of civilians, but it was a boom time for National Presto, which took in at least $163 million in Pentagon contracts in 1970-’71 alone for artillery shell parts. Finally shuttered in 1980, the company defense plant was kept on government “stand-by” into the 1990s, a sweetheart deal that earned Presto $2.5 million annually for producing nothing at all.

As the Vietnam War wound down, National Presto turned back to the civilian market with a series of new kitchen gadgets: in 1974, the PrestoBurger, an electric, single-serving fast broiler for hamburgers; in 1975, the Hot Dogger; and in 1976, the Fry Baby deep fat fryer. In 1988, the company introduced its wildly popular SaladShooter, followed in 1991 by its Tater Twister potato peeler. When sales of its SaladShooters, corn poppers, pressure cookers, deep fryers, and griddles became sluggish, however, weaponry again proved a savior.

In 2001, National Presto decided to get back into the arms game. Months before 9/11, the company’s chairman Melvin Cohen expressed fears that a future war might mean ruin for the company’s kitchen appliance business. As a result, Presto purchased munitions manufacturer Amtec. In the years since, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings, Presto has also “made other complementary acquisitions in the defense industry.” These have included Amron, a manufacturer of medium caliber ammunition (20-40mm) cartridge cases, and Spectra Technologies, which is “engaged in the manufacture, distribution, and delivery of munitions and ordnance-related products for the DOD and DOD prime contractors.” Such types of ammunition are extremely versatile and are fired from ground vehicles, naval ships and various types of aircraft — both helicopters and fixed-wing models.

Additionally, in the months after 9/11, National Presto entered the diapers trade, setting up that business in its old munitions plant. In 2004, with Melvin Cohen’s daughter MaryJo now at the helm, the company further expanded into the business of adult-incontinence products. “I spent a couple of days wearing them,” the younger Cohen told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel at the time. “They’re very comfortable.”

In 2005, Presto’s Amtec was awarded a five-year deal by the Pentagon for its 40mm family of ammunition rounds. By the end of last year, it had already received $454 million and was expecting the sum to top out, at contract’s end, above $550 million.

Just as 105mm shells of the sort produced by Presto were a nightmare for the people of Vietnam, so too has 40mm ammunition spelled doom for civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. Earlier this year, the BBC reported on a typical joint U.S./U.K. attack on a home in Iraq in which insurgents had taken shelter. After exchanging ground fire, coalition forces called in an airstrike. According to the BBC, “The aircraft fired 40mm cannon rounds at the two houses, finally dropping a bomb on one of them. It collapsed. The other house was set on fire. The two insurgents in the house were buried but so were a number of women and children.” Similarly, in August, news reports tell us, U.S. troops called in an airstrike by an AC-130 — which packs 40mm cannons — that helped kill approximately 90 civilians in the village of Azizabad in Afghanistan, according to investigations by the Afghan government and the United Nations.

As in the past, wartime has been a boom-time for Presto. In 2000, before the start of the Global War on Terror, National Presto’s annual sales clocked in at $116.6 million. In 2007, they totaled $420.7 million, with more than 50 percent of that coming from arms manufacturing. Earlier this year, Presto nabbed another 40mm ammunition contract (a $97.5 million supplemental award) set to be delivered in 2009 and 2010. According to official DoD figures, from 2001 through 2008 National Presto received more than $531 million, while Amtec has taken home another $171 million-plus. Their combined grand total, while hardly putting Presto in the top tier of Pentagon weapons contractors, is still a relatively staggering $702.8 million — not bad for a company known for slicing and dicing vegetables.

Death is our business and business is good

These days, most civilian defense contractors aren’t like Presto. General Tire and Rubber Co., for example, once lorded it over a business empire that produced not only car tires, but antipersonnel mines and deadly cluster bombs. Today, the company seems to have left its days of supplying the U.S. military with lethal technologies behind.

Dow Chemical classically drew ire from protestors during the Vietnam War for making the incendiary agent napalm that clung to and burned off the flesh of Vietnamese victims. Dow got out of the napalm business long before the war ended, but, due to widespread protests at the time, the company is still living down the legacy today.

At a 2006 Ethics and Compliance Conference, Dow’s president, CEO and chairman, Andrew Liveris, recalled, “Believe me, we have had our share of ethical challenges, most of them very public … starting with the manufacture of Napalm during the Vietnam War … when suddenly we went from being a company that made Saran Wrap to keep food fresh to a kind of war machine … at least, according the characterizations of the time.” While Dow is still a defense contractor, its DoD contracts appear not to include the manufacture of weapons of any type. Instead, such companies have largely ceded the field to dedicated “merchants of death” — weapons-industry giants like Alliant Techsystems (ATK), Lockheed Martin, and Boeing.

Right now, National Presto Industries may look like a throwback to an earlier era when companies regularly made both innocuous household items and heavy weapons. In a new hard-times economy, however, in which taxpayer dollars are likely to continue to pour into the Pentagon, could it instead be a harbinger of the future? Having proved that outfitting real shooters is even more lucrative than making SaladShooters, Presto has gotten rich in the Bush war years. It has, in fact, greatly outperformed the big guns of the weapons business. While the stocks of top defense contractors Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman have all lost significant value in the last year — down 29.3 percent, 55.3 percent, and 50.1 percent, respectively — National Presto’s stock price was up 28.1 percent as of mid-December.

It isn’t hard to imagine more civilian firms, especially ones that are already Pentagon contractors, getting into (or back into) the weapons game. After all, when the Big Three Detroit automakers were scrounging around for a bailout just a few weeks ago, they used America’s persistent involvement in armed conflict as one argument in their favor. For example, Robert Nardelli, Chrysler’s chief executive, told the Senate that the failure of the auto industry “would undermine our nation’s ability to respond to military challenges and would threaten our national security.” While that argument was roundly dismissed by retired Army Lt. Gen. John Caldwell, chairman of the National Defense Industrial Association’s combat vehicles division, it probably wouldn’t have been if the automakers made more weapons systems.

Will Presto be the back-to-the-future model for Pentagon contractors in the lean times ahead? Only time will tell. At the very least, it seems that, as long as Americans allow the country to wage wars abroad, require their salads to be shot, and have bladder issues, National Presto Industries has a future.

The fallout from the current subprime mortgage debacle and the economic one that followed has thrown lives into turmoil across the country. In recent days, the Associated Press, ABC News, and others have begun to address the burgeoning body count, especially suicides attributed to the financial crisis. (Note that, months ago, Barbara Ehrenreich raised the issue in the Nation.)

Suicide is, however, just one type of extreme act for which the financial meltdown has seemingly been the catalyst. Since the beginning of the year, stories of resistance to eviction, armed self-defense, canicide, arson, self-inflicted injury, murder, as well as suicide, especially in response to the foreclosure crisis, have bubbled up into the local news, although most reports have gone unnoticed nationally — as has any pattern to these events.

While it’s impossible to know what factors, including deeply personal ones, contribute to such extreme acts, violent or otherwise, many do seem undeniably linked to the present crisis. This is hardly surprising. Rates of stress, depression, and suicide invariably climb in times of economic turmoil. As Kathleen Hall, founder and CEO of the Stress Institute in Atlanta, told USA Today’s Stephanie Armour earlier this year, “Suicides are very much tied to the economy.”

With predictions of a long and deep recession now commonplace, it’s not too soon to begin looking for these patterns among the human tragedies already sprouting amid the financial ruins. Troubling trends are to be expected in the years ahead, especially as hundreds of thousands of veterans of the Iraq and Afghan Wars, their families often already under enormous stress, are coming home to scenarios of joblessness and, in some cases, homelessness. Consider this, then, an attempt to look for early anecdotal signs of the fallout from hard times, the results, in this case, of a review of local press reports from across the nation, some tiny but potentially indicative of larger American tragedies, and all suggesting a pattern that is likely to grow more pronounced.

Extreme evictions

In February, when a sheriff’s deputy went to serve an eviction notice on a homeowner in Greeley, Colorado, he found the man had slashed his wrists and was lying in a pool of blood. Rushed to a nearby hospital, the man survived, while the sheriff’s office tried to downplay economic reasons for the incident, saying, according to the Denver Post, that “it wasn’t linking the suicide attempt to the eviction because the man had known for a week that he was to be kicked out.”

In March Ocala, Florida, resident Roland Gore killed his dog and his wife, set fire to his home which was in foreclosure, and then killed himself.

In April, Robert McGuinness, a 24-year-old process server, arrived at the Marion County, Florida, doorstep of Frank W. Conrad. According to an article in the local Star Banner, the 82-year-old Conrad was reportedly “cordial” at first. When McGuinness produced the foreclosure notice, however, Conrad got angry and left the room. He returned with a .38 caliber pistol and announced, “You have two seconds to get off my property or you will go to the hospital.” Marion County sheriff’s deputies later arrested Conrad.

On June 3, agents of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) set out to inform New Orleans resident Eric Minshew that he would be evicted from his “Katrina” trailer. After Minshew threatened them, the FEMA employees called the police. When they arrived, Minshew allegedly threatened them as well and “locked himself in his partially gutted home, adjacent to his trailer.” A SWAT team was called in and tear-gassed the man. Interviewed by the Times-Picayune, local resident Tiffany Flores said, “Some SWAT members told my husband they had never seen anyone withstand that much tear gas.” The standoff went on for hours before “an assault team of tactical officers” invaded the home. Though Minshew opened fire, they eventually cornered him on the upper floor. When — they claimed — he refused to drop his weapon, they gunned him down.

That same day, in Multnomah County, Oregon, sheriff’s deputies served an eviction notice on a desperate tenant. According to Deputy Travis Gullberg, the Multnomah County sheriff’s public information officer, the evictee promptly pulled a gun from his pocket and pointed it at his head before being disarmed by the deputies.

Hard times

Recently, according to the Los Angeles Times, Rich Paul, a vice president at ValueOptions, which handles mental health referrals, said that over the last year stress-related calls arising from foreclosures or financial hardship had gone up 200 percent in California. Similarly, Dr. Mason Turner, chief of psychiatry at Kaiser Permanente’s San Francisco Medical Center, reported “a fourfold increase in psychiatric admissions at his hospital during August, with roughly 60 percent of patients saying financial stress contributed to their problems.”

Of course, many victims of the linked economic crises never receive treatment. In July, Sacramento County Sheriff’s Deputy Mark Habecker told the Sacramento Bee that twice this year “homeowners about to be evicted have committed suicide as he approached to do a lockout.” In another case, he said, “a fellow Sacramento deputy found a note in the home that told him where to find the foreclosed homeowner’s body.” The Bee reported that such cases “received no publicity when they happened,” which raises the question of just how many similar suicides have gone unreported nationwide.

In July, when police delivered an eviction notice at the Middleburg, Florida, home of George and Bonnie Mangum, the couple barricaded themselves inside. Eventually, George Mangum was talked into surrendering and was arrested. “He did the only thing he knew to do, protect his family, all he did was sit on the other side of the door and say I have a gun, I have a gun and that’s why he’s going to jail because he threatened the police,” said Bonnie. The couple’s daughter Robin added, “This is my home, this is all our home and I don’t think it’s right. My dad was a Green Beret, he’s sick, how are you going to kick him out?”

Pinellas Park, Florida, resident Dallas Dwayne Carter was a 44-year-old disabled single dad who lost his job, fell into debt and was faced with eviction. “He always talked about needing help — financially and help with the kids,” neighbor Kevin Luster told the St. Petersburg Times. On July 19th, Carter apparently called the police to say he was armed and disturbed. When they arrived, Carter fired his pistol and rifle inside the apartment, before emerging and pointing his weapons at the officers on the scene. Police say they ordered him to drop them. When he didn’t, they killed him in a 10-round fusillade.

On July 23, about 90 minutes before her foreclosed Taunton, Massachusetts, home was scheduled to be sold at auction, Carlene Balderrama faxed a letter to her mortgage company, letting them know that by the time they foreclosed on the house today she’d be dead. She continued, “I hope you’re more compassionate with my husband and son than you were with me.” After that, she took a high-powered rifle and, according to the Boston Globe, shot herself. In an interview with the Associated Press, Balderrama’s husband John said, “I had no clue.” His wife handled the finances and had been intercepting letters from the mortgage company for months. “She put in her suicide note that it got overwhelming for her,” he said. In the letter, she wrote, “take the [life] insurance money and pay for the house.”

The day after Balderrama took her life, 50 miles away in Worcester, Massachusetts, a 64-year-old man who had already been evicted barricaded himself inside his former home. Police were called to the scene to find him reportedly prepared to ignite four propane tanks. “His intention was to burn the house down with him in it,” Sgt. Christopher J. George told the Telegram & Gazette. With the man becoming “even more despondent” as “a moving van arrived on the street,” police stormed the house to find him “holding a foot-long knife to his own chest” as a piece of paper burned near the propane. The man was disarmed and the fire extinguished.

That very same day, in Visalia, California, a Tulare County sheriff’s deputy tried to serve an eviction notice to Melvin Nicks, 50. Nicks responded by stabbing the deputy with a knife and barricading himself in the house for several hours. He later surrendered.

No way out

Bay City, Michigan, residents David and Sharron Hetzel, both 56, “lost their home to foreclosure and filed for bankruptcy protection. But they did not follow through with the Chapter 13 proceedings.” On August 1, say police reports, David Hetzel mailed a letter of apology to his family members. Later that night, according to the local police, he attacked his sleeping wife, striking her in the head with a golf club and repeatedly stabbing her with a kitchen knife. After that, he began setting fires throughout the house before crawling into bed beside his wife and killing himself with “a single, fatal wound to his torso.”

On August 12, sheriff’s deputies arrived at the Saddlebrook, New Jersey, home of 88-year-old Beatrice Brennan, another victim of the mortgage crisis, who had refinanced her home and fallen behind on payments. Refusing to stand idly by while his mother was put out on the street, her 60-year-old son John pulled a .22 caliber handgun on the lawmen. That sent the movers, waiting for a court-imposed 10 a.m. deadline, scurrying for their van. Brennan was able to delay the eviction briefly before a SWAT team arrested him and his mother lost her home. “I’m heartbroken over this,” Vincent Carabello, a longtime neighbor, told the local paper, the Record. “How could this happen?”

Roseville, Minnesota, resident Sylvia Sieferman was under a great deal of stress and beset by financial difficulties. She worried about how she would care for her two 11-year-old daughters. On August 21, according to police reports, Sieferman “repeatedly stabbed the girls and herself.” “She reached her limit,” her friend Carrie Micko told the Star Tribune. “She couldn’t cope anymore … she felt that her daughters were suffering because she was failing to provide for them.” As Micko further explained, “After a series of financial mishaps, she just couldn’t see her way through. She was under extreme financial, emotional and spiritual distress and didn’t want to fail them.”

By any means necessary

The Boston Globe reported that, on September 5, “[f]our protesters trying to prevent the eviction of a Roxbury woman from her home were arrested … after they chained themselves to the steps of her back porch.” As 40 protesters chanted in the street, officials from Bank of America ordered Paula Taylor out of her house. “This is our eighth blockade and the first time there have been arrests,” said Soledad Lawrence, an organizer with City Life, a nonprofit organization seeking to halt the large numbers of foreclosures and evictions in Boston neighborhoods. “They can be more aggressive and we’ll be more aggressive,” she added.

On September 25, as politicians in Washington tried to hash out a massive bailout package for financial institutions, six Boston police officers confronted about 40 City Life activists in front of the home of Ana Esquivel, a public school employee, and her husband Raul, a construction worker, both in their 50s. The Globe reported that four protesters were arrested as police shoved their way through in order to allow a locksmith into the house to bar the Esquivels from their home. “We’ve been destroyed by the bank,” Ana Esquivel said, sobbing. “The bank is too big for us.” While the Esquivel blockade failed, Steven Meacham, a City Life organizer, told a Globe reporter that “the protests have helped to stop about nine evictions. In the successful blockades, the homeowners were given additional time by their mortgage holders to negotiate alternatives to foreclosure.”

Two days earlier, Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies came to the Monrovia home of 53-year-old Joanne Carter and her 67-year-old husband John to serve an eviction notice. Joanne Carter refused to accept it. According to “Monrovia spokesman” Dick Singer, as reported in the Pasadena Star-News, she “told deputies she had guns in the house and showed them a shotgun.” The next day, Monrovia police officers showed up at the home after being informed that the woman “may have made threats to a workers compensation agency.” Police Lieutenant Michael Lee said that Carter told them if they “tried to come in, she would defend her house at any means necessary.” She and her husband then reportedly barricaded themselves inside, after which a shotgun was fired. Police from other local departments were called in. Following an hours-long standoff, the Carters surrendered and were arrested.

That same day, in northern California, Cliff Kendall, Petaluma’s chief building official, shot himself with a rifle. A week earlier, Kendall had learned that he was being laid off. “He was afraid we’d lose our home, and we probably will because I can’t afford to keep it,” his wife Patricia, who is on disability with a back injury, told the Press Democrat. “He was extremely upset about it and hurt.”

On October 3, the day before Karthik Rajaram’s mass murder/suicide in Los Angeles, 90-year-old Addie Polk was driven to extremes by the financial crisis. With sheriff’s deputies at the door, Polk evidently took the only measure she felt was left to her to avoid eviction from her foreclosed home. She tried to kill herself. Her neighbor Robert Dillon, hearing loud noises from her home, used a ladder to enter the second floor window. He found Polk lying on her bed. “Then she kind of moved toward me a little and I saw that blood, and I said, ‘Oh, no. Miss Polk musta done shot herself.’” While she was in the hospital recovering from two self-inflicted gunshot wounds, Fannie Mae spokesman Brian Faith announced the mortgage association had decided to forgive her outstanding debt and give her the house “outright.”

On October 6, in Sevier County, Tennessee, sheriff’s deputies, with police in tow, arrived to evict Jimmy and Pamela Ross from their home. They heard a shot and entered the home to find 57-year-old Pamela dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest. Neighbor Ruth Blakey told WVLT-TV, “I know she really hated to leave that house. She did not want to leave that house.”

Wanda Dunn told neighbors she would rather die than leave her home. On October 13, the day she was to be evicted, the 53-year-old Pasadena, California, native apparently set fire to the home “where her family had lived for generations” before shooting herself in the head. “We knew it was going to happen,” neighbor Steve Brooks told the Los Angeles Times. “It was nobody’s fault; it was everybody’s fault.”

Outsourcing suicide

In September, readers at Slate’s “Explainer” column asked the following question: If the financial crisis was so dire, “how come we aren’t hearing about executives jumping out of windows?” Writer Nina Shen Rastogi dutifully answered:

“Because the current situation hasn’t had nearly as devastating an effect on people’s personal finances. The Great Crash of 1929 — and, to a lesser extent, the crash of 1987 — did lead some people to commit suicide. But in nearly all of those cases, the deceased had suffered a major loss when the market collapsed. Now, due in large part to those earlier experiences, investors tend to keep their portfolios far more diversified, so as to avoid having their entire fortunes wiped out when stocks take a downturn.”

Perhaps this is true. So far, at least, Wall Street’s suicides seem to have been outsourced to places that its executives have probably never heard of. There, on the proverbial main streets of America, the Street’s financial meltdown is beginning to be measured not only in dollars and cents, but in blood.

Right now, there are no real counts of the many extreme acts born of the financial crisis, but assuredly other murders, suicides, self- inflicted injuries and acts of arson and of armed self-defense have simply gone unnoticed outside of economically hard-hit neighborhoods in cities and small towns across America. With no end in sight for either the foreclosures or the economic turmoil, Americans may have to brace themselves for many more casualties on the home front. Unless extreme economic steps, like mortgage- and debt-forgiveness, are implemented, the number of desperate acts and the ultimate body count may be far more extreme than anyone yet wants to contemplate.

This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch.com.

The news caused a minor stir, as other newspapers picked up and advanced the story and the mainstream media, only a few years late, began to seriously consider the significance of oil to the occupation of Iraq.

As always happens when, for whatever reason, you come late to a major story and find yourself playing catch-up on the run, there are a few corrections and blind spots in the current coverage that might be worth addressing before another five years pass. In the spirit of collegiality, I offer the following leads for the mainstream media to consider as they change gears from no comment to hot pursuit when it comes to the story of Iraq’s most sought after commodity. I’m talking, of course, about that “sea of oil” on which, as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz pointed out way back in May 2003, the month after Baghdad fell, Iraq “floats.”

All the News That’s Fit to Print Department

In a June 30 follow-up piece, the Times’ Kramer cited U.S. officials (again unnamed) as acknowledging the following: “A group of American advisers led by a small State Department team played an integral part in drawing up contracts between the Iraqi government and five major Western oil companies …”

In addition, he asserted, this “disclosure … is the first confirmation of direct involvement by the Bush administration in deals to open Iraq’s oil to commercial development and is likely to stoke criticism.” This scoop, however, reflected none of the evidence — long available — of the direct involvement of Bush administration and U.S. occupation officials in Iraq’s oil industry. In fact, since the taking of Baghdad in April 2003, the name of the game has been facilitating relationships between Iraq and U.S.-based and allied Western energy firms when it came to what President Bush used to delicately call Iraq’s “patrimony” of “natural resources.”

For instance, almost a year ago, the Washington Post’s Walter Pincus drew attention to a call by Bush’s Commerce Department for “an international legal adviser who is fluent in Arabic ‘to provide expert input, when requested’ to ‘U.S. government agencies or to Iraqi authorities as they draft the laws and regulations that will govern Iraq’s oil and gas sector.’” The document went on to state that, “as part of a U.S. government inter-agency process, the U.S. Department of Commerce” would be “providing technical assistance to Iraq to create a legal and tax environment conducive to domestic and foreign investment in Iraq’s key economic sectors, starting with the mineral resources sector.”

This was no aberration. Back in March 2006, for instance, the U.S. Army issued a solicitation for a two-year contract “to allow any organization or entity to support IRMO [Iraq Reconstruction Management Office] (U.S. Embassy Baghdad) to deliver an effective capacity development program utilizing predominantly U.S. and European firms, universities, institutes and professional organizations for personnel within the Iraqi Ministry of Oil …..” This was to include participation in “development programs” offered by “private companies,” long-term development through “commercial training entities in the United States and Europe for Oil and Gas specialists from the Ministry of Oil,” and the implementation of “joint government-industry activities.” Translated out of bureaucratic contract-ese, this meant that the U.S. would pay for programs to, among other things, enhance relationships between the Iraq Oil Ministry and … you guessed it … foreign firms.

In October 2006, the Department of Commerce (DOC) put out a call for experts that was nearly identical to the later solicitation discovered by Pincus. They were to aid a program facilitating “the creation of a legal and tax environment conducive to domestic and foreign investment in Iraqs [sic] key economic sectors, starting with the mineral resources sector” and provide “expertise to DOC, to other [U.S. government] agencies, or to Iraqi authorities on creating a legal and tax environment conducive to domestic and foreign investment in Iraqs [sic] oil and gas sector.” Such an individual would, in fact, act “as a liaison between [the DOC's technical assistance arm] and key stakeholders in Iraq (such as Iraq’s Ministry of Oil, or the oil authorities in Kurdistan).”

In fact, the U.S. Trade and Development Agency notes that, in 2006 and 2007, it funded a “$2.5 million multifaceted training program for the Iraqi Ministry of Oil” to “provide critical knowledge transfer and establish long-term relationships between the U.S. and Iraqi oil and gas industry public and private sector representatives.”

It’s worth recalling that Iraq’s oil bureaucrats, about to receive such “critical knowledge” and “expertise,” were not exactly neophytes in the world of oil management. They had effectively managed the Iraqi oil industry from the time the five oil majors now slated to receive those “service contracts” were tossed out of Iraq, when its industry was nationalized in 1972, until the invasion of 2003. They had kept the country’s oil infrastructure going even after the disaster of the first Gulf War of 1990-1991, even through all the desperate final years of sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s regime.

The Pentagon-Petroleum Partnership

Another connection, long ignored in the mainstream, that reporters like Kramer might consider pursuing when it comes to the complex ties among Iraqi officials, the Bush administration, the Department of Defense (DoD) and Big Oil is the overt Pentagon connection. The DoD is, as national security expert Noah Shachtman notes, “the world’s largest energy consumer.” And, when it comes to Pentagon gas-guzzling, its post-9/11 wars and occupations, especially in Iraq, have been a boon. While the Bush administration has been working overtime to clear the path for Big Oil’s return to Iraq, the Pentagon has been paying out staggering amounts of U.S. taxpayer dollars to the very oil majors now negotiating with Iraq’s Ministry of Oil.

According to recent reports, the proposed Iraqi service contracts, which may be paid off in cash or crude oil, will be worth $500 million each. That is roughly what the Pentagon paid out on June 18 alone — the day before the Times broke its story about Big Oil’s return to Iraq — for natural gas and aviation fuel. Over half the total amount, in excess of $268 million, was handed over to one of the oil giants set to benefit from the Iraq deal: BP (formerly British Petroleum). Only days earlier, two of the other majors from the coterie of potential no-bid contractors, Exxon Mobil and Chevron, nabbed contracts from the DoD — in Exxon Mobil’s case, a $73 million deal for gasoline and fuel oil; in Chevron’s, a $16 million contract for aviation fuel.

Keep in mind, however, that — although you won’t learn this in your daily paper — this has long been standard operating procedure. Each of the oil giants named in the original New York Times piece — Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total, BP and Chevron — regularly show up on the Pentagon’s payroll. In fact, last year, Iraq’s new fave five took home more than $4.1 billion from the DoD — with Shell leading the way with $2.1 billion.

It’s no secret that the Pentagon relies on vast quantities of oil to power the ships, planes, helicopters, heavy armor and other ground vehicles essential to its occupation of Iraq, nor that it regularly pays out vast sums of taxpayer dollars to the very companies that U.S. advisors have aided in working out oil deals with the Iraq Oil Ministry. Despite ample evidence of the Pentagon connection, this circular and mutually reinforcing relationship has been almost totally ignored in the mainstream media. But think of it this way: Your tax dollars have given the Pentagon the opportunity to use up oil — bought from the oil majors, in prodigious quantities — in order to create a situation in Iraq in which those same majors will soon receive no-bid contracts to make money off the Iraqi oil industry and, if all goes well, get far better, longer-term deals in the near future.

One Big, Happy, Oily Family

It turns out that, despite that story the Times broke as if something totally new were on the horizon, the Bush administration has been facilitating ties between the Iraqi government and foreign oil companies for years, and the same companies now likely to nab a no-bid toehold in Iraq’s oilfields are intimately tied in to the Pentagon to the tune of billions of dollars annually. It’s worth noting that most of these firms have also been closely connected to Vice President Dick Cheney from the early days of the Bush administration. In fact, executives from Exxon Mobil, Shell and BP met behind closed doors with Cheney’s energy task force in 2001, when the administration was pounding out its energy policies, according to a White House document obtained by the Washington Post. The Government Accountability Office also found that Chevron was just one of several companies that “gave detailed energy policy recommendations” to the task force.

It’s almost impossible to tease out all the interconnections between Big Oil, the White House, the Pentagon, and the Iraqi Ministry of Oil, since they are tied together in a web of contracts and mutually supporting relationships built up over many years. However, just in case the Times wants to set its staff loose on the recent past, there is no mistaking the many ties that exist. (A small tip for Times researchers: Skip the Times archives. They will be of little help.)

Should further evidence be necessary, when it comes to those U.S. advisors at work in Iraq, mainstream reporters need look no further than the solicitations sent out by the Iraqi Ministry of Oil itself. Consider, for instance, a recent “tender” for a contractor to drill “two deep exploration wells” in the South Rumaila and Luhais oil fields in the Basra District of southern Iraq. Not only does the solicitation (the deadline for which is July 27, 2008) contain special instructions for “Companies outside Iraq,” but it asks potential contractors to send their bids to the Ministry of Oil not in Arabic, but “in the English language.”