by dbeach » Sat Aug 05, 2006 9:59 pm
Kean has his fingers in lots of pies including peddlin food to prisons and colleges...and was also sellin food at WTC..<br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramark">en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramark</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br><br>"Part of Aramark's business involves prison catering and prison shops. The group "Campaign Against Prison Slavery" alleges that while serving this "captive market," Aramark billed Ohio's prisons as if had served 4,462,649 meals instead of the 2,803,722 meals actually served. The difference could represent an over-billing of some $2.08 million. Aramark subsequently lost the contract in 2000 when State employees put in a bid that was one million dollars lower than the company's bid.[3]<br><br>In addition to prisons, Aramark supplies catering services to many universities and colleges across North America. In this capacity they have been criticized for entering into secret, exclusive contracts with administrations without the consult or input of student organizations. Many schools have adopted mandatory Aramark "meal plan" requirements for living in on-campus residence halls, including the University of Alberta's Lister Center Residence and Brandeis University. Aramark school contracts are typically restrictive to the point where they require that the university use the company's services to provide all food on campus. Students have been required to ask Aramark for permission before baking their own snacks for social events, and barred from buying food items at grocery stores for use at student meetings because of university contractual obligations with Aramark.[4]<br><br>Aramark has a lengthy history of employee abuses, including an insistence on paying only minimum wage, denial of seniority and job security, denial of consistent hours and scheduling, and insufficient health coverage. Maria Garcia, a representative of a student group dedicated to protecting employee rights at the Claremont Colleges, claims that Aramark uses a "divide and conquer" method to control its employees, turning the few well-paid employees against their lower-paid co-workers.[5]<br><br>Although in the past it was fairly common for college dining to be handled in-house, or by smaller companies serving small geographic markets, the university food services industry could today be described as an oligopoly, increasingly dominated by just three giants: Aramark, Sodexho, and Compass Group. Former food service business owner T.J. MacDermott described the situation<br><br>"I would say that 90 percent of all contractors at colleges use the Big Three, [and] it's intensifying. It's reached a point now that when contracts are negotiated they'll offer a no-strings attachment, which includes a $50,000 to $150,000 cash payment that goes to the college's treasury. It's as good as being a star second baseman. We think that it's money for nothing. There's no repayment requirement. It's like a gift. The financial competition among the Big Three essentially freezes out the smaller independents."[6] "<br><br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://killtown.911review.org/buffett.html">killtown.911review.org/buffett.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br><br>"► President Bush named former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean, a moderate Republican with a record of bipartisan cooperation, to replace Henry Kissinger as head of the panel investigating the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks.<br>He serves on several corporate boards, including those of the international petroleum company Amerada Hess Corp., the Pepsi Bottling Group and Aramark Corp., which manages food and support services at office buildings, sports arenas and other facilities.<br>Aramark ran the food court on top of 2 World Trade Center as well as concessions and tours of the observation deck. Several of its employees died in the tower. Also, Kean has long served as director of Fiduciary Trust Co., a financial company that lost 87 employees in the World Trade Center.<br>Kristen Breitweiser, whose husband died in the trade center Sept. 11 while working for Fiduciary Trust and who is a leader of September 11th Advocates, said about Kean, "Assuming he has no conflicts, I hope he can do the job that needs to be done."<br>Breitweiser noted that Fiduciary was a leaseholder of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which would be part of the investigation. -USA Today (12/16/02)"<br><br><br><br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.325collective.com/prisons_aramark.html">www.325collective.com/pri...amark.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>"Aramark - The Prison Service’s Company Store<br><br>In the 19th century, Irish immigrants in Argentina, who fled there to escape poverty and starvation, were lured to huge and remote estancias [ranches] with the promise of work. Here, isolated and vulnerable, they were rapidly forced into debt by the over-inflated prices of the company store, and many were compelled to sign away their very freedom and become company slaves. A “lucky” few escaped, but still far from home they were forced to live a desperate life, searching for discarded food in the bins of Buenos Aires or selling their bodies for a crust of bread, many eventually succumbing to starvation, and dying in gutters far away from their native land. Similar scenarios were played out elsewhere. The company store is a cornerstone of freebooting capitalism, earning it a special place in the pantheon of working-class hatred. It features in literature and song. With this and the workhouse there’s little wonder that to this day most working class people still have an all-pervading fear of debt.<br><br>Company stores undoubtedly still exist to exploit workers on the wild frontiers of capitalism, and it’s not all that long ago that British pit-villages were subject to this enforced monopoly. When it comes to actual enslavement though, modern first-world capitalism is generally more subtle, seducing us into a lifetime of wage slavery by the creation and manipulation of desires for an ever-growing range of commodities. However, there’s one place in the world where slavery is still regarded as entirely acceptable, indeed where it is flourishing as never before, led like so many things by the ubiquitous forces of American capital. Having plundered the third world with impunity for so long, first-world capitalism has now turned its attention to the incarcerated working class in its own prisons, potentially a rich source of exploitable labour.<br><br>For all the talk of the liberties supposedly enshrined in the European Convention of Human Rights and the domestic Human Rights Act, many of them evaporate in the fine print, and prisoners are given few rights at all. Even forced labour is considered entirely acceptable.<br><br>As in prisons elsewhere, compulsory work has long been an intrinsic part of the British penal experience, but the prisoncrats have rarely had the audacity to imagine they could turn a profit from a belligerent workforce. All that has changed with the establishment of a Prison Industrial Complex based upon the American blueprint, a model of repression being taken up across Europe and beyond. For much of the past decade, British prisoners have been subdued and manipulated, coerced and tricked into a compliant state, not least through the Incentives and Earned Privileges (IEP) Scheme, one of the state’s more subtle and ingenious methods of subjugation. Prisoners are now ripe for exploitation by private capital.<br><br>The private prison companies are making profits as never before; they have a big investment in New Labour’s Draconian penal policies in every sense, initially subsidising a massive prison building programme, while reaping enormous profits in return. Group 4’s Altcourse Prison, for example, has paid for itself in only 3 years, with the next 22 years of its contract being pure profit for the company.<br><br>Increasingly, these companies are also able to make a fast buck from forced prison labour, doubly exploiting those they incarcerate. Last year prison labour made £52.9 million for private companies and for the State."<br><br><br><br> <p></p><i></i>
