The sum, excluding the extra money for Iraq and Afghanistan, is almost 20 billion dollars higher that the 2006 defense budget, but is still 4 billion dollars short of the White House had wanted.

House Majority Leader John Boehner said the bill underscores the House's commitment to supporting U.S. soldiers and "making sure they have every available resource at their disposal" during the fight on terror.

The bill also includes an extra 500 million dollars for equipment for the National Guard, a 2.2 percent military pay rise and 1.5 billion dollars for new jammers designed to protect U.S. servicemen from attacks using improvised explosive devices in Iraq.

While applications are available to process credit and store loyalty card transactions by fingerprint, this one is limited to processing only debit account transactions.

"People either love it or think it's a sign of the coming apocalypse,'' said Amer Hawatmeh, owner of the new convenience store at 110 E Bearss Ave. who signed up a few hundred customers for Pay By Touch. "But to me, it's the wave of the future.''

Pay By Touch is one of several speedier payment technologies racing to build enough retailer acceptance to ace out rivals and overcome consumers' rising concerns over identity theft.

It's all on the road to payment gurus' vision of a cashier-free future, in which customers just walk out the door while their transaction is automatically processed.

The big credit card companies, for instance, are deploying a card reader developed by MasterCard International that picks up a radio signal to record a transaction when a card is merely tapped on or waved around a reader at the checkout stand. Other wireless systems in use in other countries use built-in payment system prompts broadcast to and from a cell phone to activate vending machines.

Pay By Touch is a closely held San Francisco startup that uses finger-scan technology to authenticate payment account holders. Backed by $130-million in venture capital money, Pay By Touch recently paid $82-million to acquire BioPay LLC, its biggest finger-scan competitor that has won a following in Europe big enough to authenticate $7-billion worth of transactions to date.

Pay By Touch now has tests under way with several convenience stores, gas stations and supermarket chains around the United States, including Harris Teeter in the Carolinas, Farm Fresh in Virginia and Jewel Osco in Chicago.

"Finger scanning is new, so we want to get people used to it by building acceptance at high-frequency, high-traffic retail locations such as gas stations and grocery stores,'' said Leslie Connelly, spokeswoman for Pay By Touch. "We're also going into places where people who don't have a banking relationship cash paychecks.''

The company is a bit puzzled by customer privacy fears. After all, they say, how can using a unique fingerprint for identification be riskier to theft than a plastic card, key chain token or account number that's tapped into a computer or spoken over the phone?

The company pledges not to sell or rent personal information, or access to it. The fingerprint image recorded is not the same as those collected by the federal government or law enforcement.

It's similar to the finger-scan technology used at theme park gates. Those systems take measurements of patrons' hands and fingers and link them to a multi-day pass to prevent several people from using one person's pass.

The Pay By Touch computer records a multitude of point-to-point measurements and stores them in an encrypted form in an IBM data center. Images of both index fingers are kept in case a shopper's trigger finger is hidden by a bandage.

To create an account, you must let the store get a fix on you and your bank account by scanning in a sample check and a driver's license. You can also apply online and be assigned a PIN number. The number is keyed in the first time you buy something to link your fingerprint to the personal account information.

The shopper needs neither a card nor a PIN number after that. Just place a finger on the scanner.

Retailers are paying a minimal amount to test the system. But many retailers such as Coast to Coast are drawn to Pay By Touch because it can process debit account payments or eChecks, an Internet version of a paper check, without subjecting the store to interchange fees that cost the retailers 2 to 3 percent of the transaction.

Not only did capitalism give birth to the idea of corporations, it endowed them, by very questionable means, with all of the rights of personhood and none of the social responsibility of real persons. The idea of corporate personhood has to be one of the most twisted and bizarre creations ever produced by the human imagination. Like Frankenstein's fictional monster, it is sociopathic and evil, and it has wrecked havoc wherever its monstrous tread has touched the earth.

By freedom Bush and company mean corporate freedom. They are speaking about the freedom of corporations to operate with impunity in all parts of the world without regulation of any kind. Simply stated, they are talking about corporations ruling the world backed by the strong arm of the U.S. military. They are covertly advocating the oppression of the world's people's, the plunder of the earth, the destruction of culture and language, the exportation of jobs to the cheapest, least regulated and most exploitable pools of labor. That is what they mean by freedom-the freedom for Plutocrats to rule the world; Poppy Bush's New World Order; the global domination of the working class by the ruling Plutocrats.

They go about their grim business with religious fervor, like the Puritans who set about methodically destroying the American wilderness and slaughtering the Indians. I call it predatory capitalism and it is not limited to just the Bush clan. It is equally championed by Congress, the major presidential candidates, all of whom are in the pockets of their corporate funders; and it is preached in our educational institutions as economic gospel. Congress sold us out long ago but we continue to believe that reform is possible by exercising our right to vote and exchanging one Plutocrat for another. It is a wonder that any of them can keep a straight face. It is like taking candy from a baby-no challenge at all.

Understanding requires little more than a willingness to connect the dots and to comprehend the patterns of history from the working people's perspective. It is literally that simple.

The core idea of predatory capitalism is to rule by force, to subdue the earth and her inhabitants to the will of the world's wealthiest men. Under this model, less than five percent of the global elite will lord power over the remaining ninety-five percent of the population. This philosophy is embodied by the Bilderbergs and the Carlyle Group (do a Google search to learn more).

The U.S. military is an appendage of the corporations that have hijacked the government from the people. The Pentagon is the iron fist of oppression that smashes the face of resistance to Pax Americana and absolute corporate rule. Only in the perverted language of capitalism is the military a force for freedom-corporate freedom to rule the world by sheer force. If those in control of the government succeed in executing their agenda, ninety-five percent of the world's people will become the property of the wealthiest five percent or less.

So we must understand what predatory capitalists mean when they use the word freedom. As conceived by the people running the government, the world is one vast resource ripe for the stealing. This includes the raw materials necessary for industrial production and human beings as an inexpensive or, ideally, a free exploitable source of labor. By freedom the capitalists mean the private ownership of everything and everyone. Such are the twisted dreams of the American Plutocracy. The rich man's dream is the poor man's nightmare.

While political reformists continue to be fooled into choosing between political parties, both of them the servants of the same corporations, the way is being prepared for the final solution. Anyone opposed to Pax Americana are terrorists in the minds of the ruling elite. That is why Bush is using the NSA, FBI, CIA and the Pentagon against law abiding U.S. citizens. These cryptogamous organizations are monitoring the resistance and planning a pre-emptive strike against any democracy that shows signs of sprouting and organizing itself into a populist movement. The pitiless iron boot of capitalism stands ready to snuff it out like a smoldering cigarette butt on a city sidewalk.

So profitable are the spoils of war that the capitalists have created a permanent war time economy. War is the cash cow that keeps the money flowing from our pockets into theirs'. They have no intention of relinquishing power through the electoral process or by any other means. They are creating a world-size gulag; a labor concentration camp of global proportions in which there will be two classes: master and servant.

According to Donald Rumsfeld (Foreign Affairs, 2002), "Wars in the twenty-first century will increasingly require all elements of national power: economic, diplomatic, financial, law enforcement, intelligence, and both overt and covert military operations." Rumsfeld has thus defined the core of the Bush agenda: Economics as a weapon against democracy.

Therefore, any nation, individual, or group of people that resists Pax Americana is an enemy of the state-the corporate state. Any efforts to divert a nation's wealth from the multi-national corporations to social programs for the public good will be summarily abolished by the strong arm of the U.S. military. The respective governments of Venezuela and Bolivia are prime examples. The CIA's economic hit men are already on the ground in Latin America and it is a safe bet that the death squads have already formed. If these attempts to decapitate Democratic Socialism fail, a full scale military invasion will be launched. That has been the pattern of history.

The unapologetic corporate media is already fervently portraying two of the most popular democratically elected leaders in the world, Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales, as terrorists. This is the writing on the wall and it is finger painted in human blood.

If we treasure anything above our own selfish comfort; if we believe in the ideals of freedom and democracy for people; if we believe in peace and justice, we must not sit by idly and allow these good men to be overthrown or assassinated by illegitimate Plutocratic henchmen. We must take our country back and give it to the people.

Author's note: The concepts discussed in this essay are fully explored and chronicled in great detail in "The Bush Agenda: Invading the World One Economy at a Time ", authored by Antonia Juhasz. They are also detailed in Steven Kinzer's book Overthrow .

World oil production today stands at more than twice the 15-billion a-year maximum projected by Shell Oil in 1956 -- and reserves are climbing at a faster clip yet. That leaves the question, Why this war?

Did Dick Cheney send us in to seize the last dwindling supplies? Unlikely. Our world's petroleum reserves have doubled in just twenty-five years -- and it is in Shell's and the rest of the industry's interest that this doubling doesn't happen again.

The neo-cons were hell-bent on raising Iraq's oil production.

Big Oil's interest was in suppressing production, that is, keeping Iraq to its OPEC quota or less.

This raises the question, did the petroleum industry, which had a direct, if hidden, hand, in promoting invasion, cheerlead for a takeover of Iraq to prevent overproduction

It wouldn't be the first time.

If oil is what we're looking for, there are, indeed, extra helpings in Iraq. On paper, Iraq, at 112 billion proven barrels, has the second largest reserves in OPEC after Saudi Arabia. That does not make Saudi Arabia happy.

Even more important is that Iraq has fewer than three thousand operating wells... compared to one million in Texas.

That makes the Saudis even unhappier.

It would take a decade or more, but start drilling in Iraq and its reserves will about double, bringing it within gallons of Saudi Arabia's own gargantuan pool. Should Iraq drill on that scale, the total, when combined with the Saudis', will drown the oil market.

That wouldn't make the Texans too happy either.

So Fadhil Chalabi's plan for Iraq to pump 12 million barrels a day, a million more than Saudi Arabia, is not, to use Bob Ebel's (Center fro Strategic and International Studies) terminology, "ridiculous" from a raw resource view, it is ridiculous politically.

It would never be permitted.

An international industry policy of suppressing Iraqi oil production has been in place since 1927. We need again to visit that imp called "history."

It began with a character known as "Mr. 5%"-- Calouste Gulbenkian -- who, in 1925, slicked King Faisal, neophyte ruler of the country recently created by Churchill, into giving Gulbenkian's "Iraq Petroleum Company" (IPC) exclusive rights to all of Iraq's oil. Gulbenkian flipped 95% of his concession to a combine of western oil giants: Anglo-Persian, Royal Dutch Shell, CFP of France, and the Standard Oil trust companies (now ExxonMobil and its "sisters.") The remaining slice Calouste kept for himself -- hence, "Mr. 5%."

The oil majors had a better use for Iraq's oil than drilling it -- not drilling it.

The oil bigs had bought Iraq's concession to seal it up and keep it off the market.

To please his buyers' wishes, Mr. 5% spread out a big map of the Middle East on the floor of a hotel room in Belgium and drew a thick red line around the gulf oil fields, centered on Iraq. All the oil company executives, gathered in the hotel room, signed their name on the red line -- vowing not to drill, except as a group, within the red-lined zone. No one, therefore, had an incentive to cheat and take red-lined oil.

All of Iraq's oil, sequestered by all, was locked in, and all signers would enjoy a lift in worldwide prices. Anglo-Persian Company, now British Petroleum (BP), would pump almost all its oil, reasonably, from Persia (Iran). Later, the Standard Oil combine, renamed the Arabian-American Oil Company (Aramco), would limit almost all its drilling to Saudi Arabia. Anglo-Persian (BP) had begun pulling oil from Kirkuk, Iraq, in 1927 and, in accordance with the Red-Line Agreement, shared its Kirkuk and Basra fields with its IPC group -- and drilled no more.

The following was written three decades ago:

Although its original concession of March 14, 1925, covered all of Iraq, the Iraq Petroleum Co., under the ownership of BP (23.75%), Shell (23.75%), CFP (of France) (23.75%), Exxon (11.85%), Mobil (11.85%), and Gulbenkian (5.0%), limited its production to fields constituting only one-half of 1 percent of the country's total area. During the Great Depression, the world was awash with oil and greater output from Iraq would simply have driven the price down to even lower levels.

Plus ça change...

When the British Foreign Office fretted that locking up oil would stoke local nationalist anger, BP-IPC agreed privately to pretend to drill lots of wells, but make them absurdly shallow and place them where, wrote a company manager, "there was no danger of striking oil."

This systematic suppression of Iraq's production, begun in 1927, has never ceased.

In the early 1960s, Iraq's frustration with the British-led oil consortium's failure to pump pushed the nation to cancel the BP-Shell-Exxon concession and seize the oil fields. Britain was ready to strangle Baghdad, but a cooler, wiser man in the White House, John F. Kennedy, told the Brits to back off. President Kennedy refused to call Iraq's seizure an "expropriation" akin to Castro's seizure of U.S.-owned banana plantations. Kennedy's view was that Anglo-American companies had it coming to them because they had refused to honor their legal commitment to drill.

But the freedom Kennedy offered the Iraqis to drill their own oil to the maximum was swiftly taken away from them by their Arab brethren.

The OPEC cartel, controlled by Saudi Arabia, capped Iraq's production at a sum equal to Iran's, though the Iranian reserves are far smaller than Iraq's. The excuse for this quota equality between Iraq and Iran was to prevent war between them. It didn't. To keep Iraq's Ba'athists from complaining about the limits, Saudi Arabia simply bought off the leaders by funding Saddam's war against Iran and giving the dictator $7 billion for his "Islamic bomb" program.

In 1974, a U.S. politician broke the omerta over the suppression of Iraq's oil production. It was during the Arab oil embargo that Senator Edmund Muskie revealed a secret intelligence report of "fantastic" reserves of oil in Iraq undeveloped because U.S. oil companies refused to add pipeline capacity.

Muskie, who'd just lost a bid for the Presidency, was dubbed a "loser" and ignored. The Iranian bombing of the Basra fields (1980-88) put a new kink in Iraq's oil production. Iraq's frustration under production limits explodes periodically.

In August 1990, Kuwait's craven siphoning of borderland oil fields jointly owned with Iraq gave Saddam the excuse to take Kuwait's share. Here was Saddam's opportunity to increase Iraq's OPEC quota by taking Kuwait's (most assuredly not approved by the U.S.).

Saddam's plan backfired. The Basra oil fields not crippled by Iran were demolished in 1991 by American B-52s. Saddam's petro-military overreach into Kuwait gave the West the authority for a more direct oil suppression method called the "Sanctions" program, later changed to "Oil for Food." Now we get to the real reason for the U.N. embargo on Iraqi oil exports. According to the official U.S. position:

Sanctions were critical to preventing Iraq from acquiring equipment that could be used to reconstitute banned weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs.

How odd. If cutting Saddam's allowance was the purpose, then sanctions, limiting oil exports, was a very suspect method indeed. The nature of the oil market (a cartel) is such that the elimination of two million barrels a day increased Saddam's revenue. One might conclude that sanctions were less about WMD and more about EPS (earnings per share) of oil sellers.

In other words, there is nothing new under the desert sun.

Today's fight over how much of Iraq's oil to produce (or suppress) simply extends into this century the last century's pump-or-control battles.

In sum, Big Oil, whether in European or Arab-OPEC dress, has done its damned best to keep Iraq's oil buried deep in the ground to keep prices high in the air. Iraq has 74 known fields and only 15 in production; 526 known "structures" (oil-speak for "pools of oil"), only 125 drilled.

And they won't be drilled, not unless Iraq says, "Mother, may I?" to Saudi Arabia, or, as the James Baker/Council on Foreign Relations paper says, "Saudi Arabia may punish Iraq."

And believe me, Iraq wouldn't want that.

The decision to expand production has, for now, been kept out of Iraqi's hands by the latest method of suppressing Iraq's oil flow -- the 2003 invasion and resistance to invasion.

And it has been darn effective.

Iraq's output in 2003, 2004 and 2005 was less than produced under the restrictive Oil-for-Food Program.

Whether by design or happenstance, this decline in output has resulted in tripling the profits of the five U.S. oil majors to $89 billion for a single year, 2005, compared to pre-invasion 2002.

That suggests an interesting arithmetic equation. Big Oil's profits are up $89 billion a year in the same period the oil industry boosted contributions to Mr. Bush's reelection campaign to roughly $40 million.

That would make our president "Mr. 0.05%."

The World Wealth Report, published annually by the investment bank Merrill Lynch and the consultancy firm Capgemini, examines the growth and spread of individuals around the world who have liquid assets of more than $1m (£540,000), excluding their primary residence and consumables. At the end of 2005, it said, there were 8.7 million HNWIs worldwide - 6.5% more than a year before. Their wealth had grown by 8% to $33 trillion.

There was an even bigger jump in the number of "ultra high net-worth individuals" - those with financial assets of more than $30m. This exclusive club now has 85,400 members worldwide, an increase of more than 10%. Together, these individuals, who represent 1% of the richest 1% in the world, control 24% of global wealth.

The report suggests that the world's wealthiest are also able to get more for their money. What the report calls the "cost of living extremely well" - in effect, the cost of luxury items from jets and yachts to five-star hotel rooms and spa treatments - has not kept pace with the increase in wealth.

In Britain, the growth in the wealthy population was modest compared with the developing world. The number of HNWIs grew by 7% to just under 450,000, compared with a jump of nearly 9% in 2004. The authors of the report say this was probably because of a slowdown in the growth of the UK's gross domestic product (GDP) and a weaker stock market performance.

However, the rise in the number of rich individuals in Britain remained above the rate of GDP growth and compared well with that of other western European countries, such as France and Germany, reflecting the attractiveness of the UK as a home for the European rich. Overall in Europe, there was a 4.5% increase in the number of HNWIs, compared with 6.8% in the US. Despite slowing GDP growth, eastern European countries, such as the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, also saw sharp increases in the number of HNWIs on the back of surges in the values of stocks in those countries.

In Britain, the main source of the wealth was owning businesses or selling a business or stocks. In the US, by contrast, 32% of HNWIs' wealth was derived from income, compared with 13% in Europe. The authors of the report attribute the continued increase in the number of HNWIs in Britain in 2005 to profits derived from the increase in oil prices. Some 18% of British HNWIs' wealth is inherited.

The report also suggests the world's super-rich are starting to move their money out of the United States. Although it remains the world's most popular region for investment, an increasing number of HNWIs are transferring assets to emerging markets such as Asia-Pacific and Latin America. There was also a shift away from hedge funds to "alternative investments", in particular private equity, which is now more popular than at any time since the dotcom boom.

Jason McLean, one of the report's authors, said: "The world's wealthiest individuals are not only becoming more sophisticated investors, they are also more determined than ever to achieve returns comparable to those experienced in 2003 and 2004."

The report also highlights an ongoing shift in the lifestyles of the world's richest people. As well as being spread around the globe, they are increasingly global in their tastes. For example, over a quarter have residences and financial advisers abroad and a fifth of them have children who live abroad. That shift presents a challenge to companies such as Merrill Lynch, which are having to create global teams to manage the wealth of individuals or families.

However, despite the continued growth in their numbers and wealth, the super-rich in the west are facing a crisis. As the baby-boomers, who make up a significant proportion of the world's wealthiest individuals, reach retirement age, they are having to work out how to pass on their wealth - whether to the next generation of the family or though philanthropy - without being hit by inheritance taxes. According to the report, 61% of HNWIs around the world are over 56 years old, compared with just 15% of the world's population as a whole. This will soon create what the authors call "the largest wealth transfer in history".

"All HNWIs will have to review their inheritance plans," said Nick Tucker, the head of Merrill Lynch's UK private client business.

While 2005 was a good year for the world's super-rich, this year may see more troubled times. Volatility in global markets in the first six months of this year threatens to cancel some of the gains they made last year. Given their relatively large exposure to investment in oil, the wealth of British high net-worth individuals (HNWIs) may also depend to a large extent on whether crude prices continue to rise as they did in 2005. In the long-term, however, the authors of the World Wealth Report expect current upward trends to continue and HNWIs' wealth to grow over the next few years at an annual rate of 6%. They predict that by 2010, the total wealth of the world's super-rich to have reached $44.6 trillion (£24 trillion). They expect HNWIs to continue to reduce their investments in North America and Europe as they seek higher returns in emerging markets, and to move funds to shares and alternative investments. Although HNWIs tended to hold on to their investments in property in 2005, they are expected to reduce the amount invested in the sector this year.