So it's true, as filmmaker Michael Moore once warned us, the Carlyle Group is Big Brother. That's the $176 billion private equity firm that once employed former President George H W Bush, his Secretary of State James A Baker III and a host of political luminaries that would put any other list of America's ruling elite to shame. Plenty of Democrats too, including former President Bill Clinton's Chief of Staff Mack McLarty and Arthur Levitt, the man Clinton appointed to head the SEC during the creation of the housing bust.
It is also the firm that owns Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., which, thanks to the revelations of one of its employees, whistleblower Edward Snowden, we now know collects and stores much of the government's immense PRISM database spying on the lives of this nation's citizenry. This is systematic snooping through the telephone and Internet records of hundreds of millions of Americans conducted by Snowden and others in Booz Allen's employ who had the highest access to our most private personal data while working at a for-profit company.
