The Washington Post is reporting on Tuesday that Charles Rangel, chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, is

soliciting donations from corporations with business interests before his panel, hoping to raise $30 million for a new academic center that will house his papers when he retires.

These papers will be housed at City College of New York in a center to be called the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service.

In my last post in my "Quotes for Discussion" series, I posted quotes from both 19th Century and current anarchists.  In response, both andgarden and Meteor Blades brought up the issues of private firefighters and private police forces.

While I didn’t mention it at the time, of course there are many private police forces.  And not simply mercenaries like Blackwater; anyone visiting a bank, a shopping mall, or a gated community is familiar with private security guards.  But I didn’t think there were private firefighters out there.  Naturally, I was wrong.  

The corrupted USA-based insurer is AIG.  UAE is going to realize a profit through their ownership of DP World, which currently holds the USA port operations contracts in question.

The sale from DP World to a US-based business - which was primarily "forced" by the enabling will of an unusually resistant Republican Congress to President Bush's desired deal - is reportedly worth over $1B.

The reason I specifically mention UAE in this diary is due to the evolving and swirling controversies related to their association with DP World when reports of this relatively silent deal came to light earlier in the year - it seemed a significant aspect of interest to many folks in the blogosphere at the time, so I desired to explicitly note their involvement within the context of this deal . . . and the resulting irony of their making a profit from the whole ports affair.

So, all that prior speculation and debate being kept in context, I suppose this might just come down to the following observation of Bush Republican politics:

Step 1: Create controversy
Step 2: . . .
Step 3: Profit

Cross-posted from The Tortellini

New York Times columnist Floyd Norris has a great post on his blog about the money behind the blue-ribbon Committee on Capital Markets Regulation that's pushing to relax corporate governance regulations. Turns out that the panel's biggest funder is none other than Hank Greenberg, the former and longtime CEO of the world's largest liability insurer, AIG.