Klein in 2003: Iraq will find "Their country has been sold out from under them."

Naomi Klein in The Nation in 2003: Iraq will find "Their country has been sold out from under them."

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.

Privatization in disguise

California Republican Congressman Darrel Issa has introduced a bill that would require the Defense Department to build a CDMA cell-phone system in postwar Iraq in order to benefit "US patent holders." As Farhad Manjoo noted in Salon, CDMA is the system used in the United States, not Europe, and was developed by Qualcomm, one of Issa's most generous donors.

And then there's oil. The Bush Administration knows it can't talk openly about selling off Iraq's oil resources to ExxonMobil and Shell. It leaves that to Fadhil Chalabi, a former Iraq petroleum ministry official. "We need to have a huge amount of money coming into the country," Chalabi says. "The only way is to partially privatize the industry."

...."Some argue that it's too simplistic to say this war is about oil. They're right. It's about oil, water, roads, trains, phones, ports and drugs. And if this process isn't halted, "free Iraq" will be the most sold country on earth.

It goes back to too many of our leaders and their pacts with the big money.

Too many of our leaders have made a devil's bargain with corporate and wealthy interests"

"Too many of our leaders have made a devil's bargain with corporate and wealthy interests, saying 'I'll keep you in power if you keep me in power.'"

"Over the last thirty years, we have allowed multinational corporations and other special interests to use our nation's government to undermine our nation's promise."

....""There is something about human beings that corporations can't deal with and that's our soul, our spirituality, who we are. We need to find a way in this country to understand--and to help each other understand--that there is a tremendous price to be paid for the supposed efficiency of big corporations. The price is losing the sense of who we are as human beings."

Really began with corporations. Without them, Cheney would be just a starving hunter and * would be a homeless alcoholic.

From the article:

"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."

Who cares what the Iraqis think anyway. They just think it is their country. :shrug:

Here is the video.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph...

Here is the transcript:

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Amy_Goodman/NKlein_Ir...

"There was a phrase that came out of the Davos conference this year. Every year, there's always a big idea to emerge from the World Economic Summit in Davos. This year, the big idea was the Davos dilemma. Now, what is the Davos dilemma? The Davos dilemma is this: for decades, it's been conventional wisdom that generalized mayhem was a drain on the global economy, that you could have an individual shock or a crisis or a war that could be exploited for privatization, but on the whole -- and this was the Thomas Friedman thesis -- there needed to be stability in order to have steady economic growth; the Davos dilemma is that it's no longer true. You can have generalized mayhem, you can have wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, threats of nuclear war with Iran, a worsening of the Israeli occupation, a deepening of violence against Palestinians, you can have a terror in the face of global warming, you could have increased blowback from resource wars, you can have soaring oil prices, but, lo and behold, the stock market just goes up and up and up.

In fact, there's an index called the Guns-to-Caviar index, which for seventeen years has been measuring an inverse relationship between the sale of fighter jets and executive luxury jets. And for seventeen years, this index, the Guns-to-Caviar index -- the guns are the fighter jets, the caviar are the executive jets -- has found that when fighter jets go up, executive jets go down. When executive jets go up, fighter jets go down. But all of a sudden, they're both going up, which means that there's a lot of guns being sold, enough guns to buy a hell of a lot of caviar. And Blackwater is, of course, at the center of this economy.

The only way to combat an economy that has eliminated the peace incentive, of course, is to take away their opportunities for growth. And their opportunities for growth are ongoing climate instability and ongoing geopolitical instability. Their threats -- the only thing that can challenge their economy is relative geopolitical and climatic peace and stability, so I suppose we have our work cut out for us to fight the war profiteers.

... for this mess and end Corporate Personhood altogether!
That is one of the most important factors in all of this, and something we desperately need to address. Corporate Personhood and the privatization of The Commons are going to be THE big issues in the next decade. Corporate Persons are by their very nature, quite insane, and should not be allowed to run our society. Of course, there is a non-political way to kill them.

STOP BUYING STUFF FROM THEM!!!

Stop buying stuff from them! It's the ONLY power we have left!

It would be the biggest battle we've ever engaged in, because they (corporations) have virtually all the money and they control nearly all the media.

Nevertheless, it's time to start. Corporations are not friends of democracy and "good corporate citizen" is an oxymoron.

The Selling Out Of America	lligrd	Jul-06-07 02:35 AM	#1
Privatization without representation.	madfloridian	Jul-06-07 11:41 AM	#2
Video of Naomi Klein....about privatization.	madfloridian	Jul-06-07 12:19 PM	#3
Transcript of the video of Klein on privatization...thd "Davos dilemma"	madfloridian	Jul-07-07 12:13 PM	#4
Execute the Corporate Persons responsible...	The_Commonist	Jul-10-07 08:39 AM	#5
That's right - that's what it's all about!	getmeouttahere	Jul-11-07 02:27 AM	#8
edit. Thanks... Kick, too late for the recommend. n/t	slipslidingaway	Jul-10-07 10:17 AM	#6
There must be a movement to take away corporate personhood...	truth2power	Jul-10-07 03:56 PM	#7