"For U.S. citizens performing certain work outside the United States," we're informed that "federal law requires only American employers to pay unemployment taxes; foreign subsidiaries are not defined as American employers under the law."
Therefore if a worker is "let go," the enterprising grifter is off the hook for unemployment payments. Pretty neat trick, eh!
Flying the Friendly Skies " With the CIA!
What do these studies tell us? It pays to have friends in high places! Let's take a peek at just two of the 29 firms profiled in GAO's 2010 report as well as their earlier 2008 investigation.
The Boeing Company (Boeing): Washington Technology lists Boeing as No. 2 on their Top 100 list of federal contractors with $10,838,231,984 in overall revenue.
Primary government contracts include projects for NASA, the Navy, Air Force, Army, Marine Corps, the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department. One subsidiary, and contract, which the giant firm isn't too keen on publicizing is Jeppesen International Trip Planning, the booking agent for CIA torture flights.
As Antifascist Calling previously reported, the firm is being sued by victims of the Bush administration's illegal practice of "rendering" (kidnapping) so-called "terrorists" into the hands of torture-friendly regimes or to CIA "black sites" in Europe and the Middle East.
The ACLU's landmark litigation on behalf of the victims, Mohamed et al. v. Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc. seeks to hold the Boeing subsidiary accountable for planning and providing logistical support for CIA "ghost flights." The Obama administration, like their Bushist predecessors oppose the suit on grounds that "vital state secrets" will be disclosed.
On February 10, the British High Court ordered Britain's secret state to release documents disclosing MI5's collaboration in Binyam Mohamed's torture. Mohamed is a litigant in the ACLU's suit against Jeppesen.
The Guardian reported that "MI5 faced an unprecedented and damaging crisis tonight after one of the country's most senior judges found that the Security Service had failed to respect human rights, deliberately misled parliament, and had a "culture of suppression' that undermined government assurances about its conduct."
In response to the release of previously classified documents by the British government, as promised, the U.S. Government has threatened that the disclosure "would cloud future intelligence relations with Britain," The Wall Street Journal reported.
Meanwhile back in the heimat, Boeing and Jeppesen's corporate officers continue to hold get-out-of-jail-free cards from the Obama administration.
As investigative journalist Jane Mayer revealed in The New Yorker back in 2006, Bob Overby, the managing director of Jeppesen International Trip Planning, said during a breakfast for new hires in San Jose, Calif., "We do all of the extraordinary rendition flightsyou know, the torture flights. Let's face it, some of these flights end up that way."
Technical writer Sean Belcher blew the whistle on the firm and told Mayer that Overby, extemporaneously extolling the virtues for the corporatist bottom line, said: "It certainly pays well. They"the CIA"spare no expense. They have absolutely no worry about cost. What they have to get done, they get done."
But facilitating CIA torture flights wasn't the only, or even the most lucrative, enterprise driving Boeing's close collaboration with the National Security State.
Little known outside the security industry, Boeing's Defense, Space and Security division (DSS, formerly Integrated Defense Systems or IDS) is the firm's intelligence unit.
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