2003 Naomi Klein. Iraq will emerge to find "that their country has been sold out from under them" [View all]

[madfloridian]

This is a prescient article by Naomi Klein in The Nation 2003.

[link:http://www.thenation.com/article/privatization-disguise|
Privatization in Disguise]

Entirely absent from this debate are the Iraqi people, who might--who knows?--want to hold on to a few of their assets. Iraq will be owed massive reparations after the bombing stops, but without any real democratic process, what is being planned is not reparations, reconstruction or rehabilitation. It is robbery: mass theft disguised as charity; privatization without representation.

A people, starved and sickened by sanctions, then pulverized by war, is going to emerge from this trauma to find that their country has been sold out from under them. They will also discover that their newfound "freedom"--for which so many of their loved ones perished--comes pre-shackled with irreversible economic decisions that were made in boardrooms while the bombs were still falling.

They will then be told to vote for their new leaders, and welcomed to the wonderful world of democracy.

That day when the invasion started with all its shock and awe on TV to impress our nation with how strong and tough we were, I just cried. There was nothing left to do but cry.

What we were doing to another country that was not a threat was shameful.

I lost a lot of faith in my country's leaders then. Hubby and I had never been very political before. We seldom questioned anything our party did. And since more of my family was Republican with strong military ties, I seldom questioned the Republicans either.

George Bush changed all that. I wasn't at DU in 2000, not until 2002. So I even was not that concerned about Gore's loss. Not happy, but not until later did I see how it all actually unfolded.

And wow, I started to remember another article she wrote in 2003 a few months after that. I noticed how they are in our country closing so many public schools, neighborhood schools that bind communities together. They say they are not full enough, but if that is true why are they simultaneously opening many new charter schools? Giving public resources to private companies without our permission.

We should be making the connection by now to what is going on in our own country, though not as viciously, not as physically warlike.

So I thought of Klein's other article.

Downsizing in Disguise

The streets of Baghdad are a swamp of crime and uncollected garbage. Battered local businesses are going bankrupt, unable to compete with cheap imports. Unemployment is soaring and thousands of laid-off state workers are protesting in the streets.

In other words, Iraq looks like every other country that has undergone rapid-fire "structural adjustments" prescribed by Washington, from Russia's infamous "shock therapy" in the early 1990s to Argentina's disastrous "surgery without anesthetic." Except that Iraq's "reconstruction" makes those wrenching reforms look like spa treatments.

...For a few weeks Bremer has been hacking away at Iraq's public sector like former Sunbeam exec "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap in a flak jacket. On May 16 Bremer banned up to 30,000 senior Baath Party officials from government jobs. A week later, he dissolved the army and the information ministry, putting more than 400,000 Iraqis out of work without pensions or re-employment programs.

...As the Bush Administration becomes increasingly open about its plans to privatize Iraq's state industries and parts of the government, Bremer's de-Baathification takes on new meaning. Is he working only to get rid of Baath Party members, or is he also working to shrink the public sector as a whole so that hospitals, schools and even the army are primed for privatization by US firms? Just as reconstruction is the guise for privatization, de-Baathification looks a lot like disguised downsizing.

About a year later in Harper's Magazine, Naomi Klein told us that Iraq was meant to be rebuilt as a global corporate "utopia"

Klein said they wanted to see how giving corporations free rein would work in a way it that it could not work in this country because all us liberals and environmentalists got in the way.

"Iraq was going to change all that. In one place on Earth, the theory would finally be put into practice in its most perfect and uncompromised form. A country of 25 million would not be rebuilt as it was before the war; it would be erased, disappeared. In its place would spring forth a gleaming showroom for laissez-faire economics, a utopia such as the world had never seen. Every policy that liberates multinational corporations to pursue their quest for profit would be put into place: a shrunken state, a flexible workforce, open borders, minimal taxes, no tariffs, no ownership restrictions. The people of Iraq would, of course, have to endure some short-term pain: assets, previously owned by the state, would have to be given up to create new opportunities for growth and investment. Jobs would have to be lost and, as foreign products flooded across the border, local businesses and family farms would, unfortunately, be unable to compete. But to the authors of this plan, these would be small prices to pay for the economic boom that would surely explode once the proper conditions were in place, a boom so powerful the country would practically rebuild itself. "

What a tragedy, what a sad chapter in the history of our country. Jeb Bush recently said out loud in public that the Bush family had no baggage.

They do have baggage, heavy baggage, but the other party shares it also.