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Joanne98 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-13-08 12:31 PM
Original message
The Shock Doctrine: Blowback page 351
Edited on Sun Jan-13-08 12:34 PM by Joanne98


The most widely recognized case of blowback was provoked by Bremer's first major act, the firing of aproximately 500,000 state workers, most of them soldiers, but also doctors, nurses, teachers and engineers. "De-Baathification," as it was called, was supposedly driven by a desire to clean out the government of Saddam loyalists. No doubt that was part of the motivation, but it does not explain the scale of layoffs or how deeply they savaged the public sector as a whole, punishing workers who were not high-level officials.

Bremer made no secret of his antipathy for Iraq's "Stalinist economy," as he described the country's state-run companies and large ministries....

At the same time, bremer's classic Chicago school decision to fling open the borders to unrestricted imports while allowing foreign companies to own 100% of Iraqi assets infuriated Iraq's business class. many responded by funding the resistance with what little revenue they had left. After covering the first year of the Iraqi resistance in the Sunni Triangle, the investigative reporter Patrick Graham wrote in Harper's that Iraqi businessmen "are outraged by the new foreign investment laws, which allow foreign companies to buy up factories for very little. Their revenues have collasped, becuase the country has been flooded with foreign goods...The violence, these business men realize, is their only competitive edge. It is simple business logic: the more problems there are in Iraq, the harder it is for outsiders to get involved."

Like the lifting of all trade restrictions, Bremer's plan to privatize Iraq's two hundred state companies was regarded by many Iraqi's as yet another US act of war. Workers learned that in order to make the companies attractive to foreign investors, as many as two-thirds of them would have to lose their jobs. At one of Iraq's state-owned firms-a compound of seven factories that produced cooking oil, soap, dishwashing liquid and other basics- I heard a story that brought into sharp relief how many new enemies had been created by the privatization announcement. I asked Mahmud what would happen if the plant was sold despite their objections. "There are two choices," he said smiling kindly. Either we will set the factory on fire and let the flames devour it to the ground, or we will blow ourselves up inside it. But it will not be privatized." It was an early warning-one of many-that the bush team had definitely overestimated it's ability to shock Iraqi's into submission.



The Young Republicans



Much has been made of the youth and inexperience of the US political appointees in the CPA-the fact that a handful of twenty-something Republicans were given key roles overseeing Iraq's $13 billion budget. While there's no question that the members of the so-called brat pack were alarmingly young, that was not their greatest liability. These were not just any political cronies; they were frontline warriors from America's counterrevolution against all things Keynesianism, many of them linked to the Heritage Foundation, ground zero of Friedmanism
since it was launched in 1973. So whether they were twenty-two-year-old Dick Cheney interns or sisty-something university presidents, they shared a cultural antipathy to government and governing that, while invaluable for the dismantling of social security and the public education system back home, had little use when the job was actually to build up public institutions that had been destroyed.



In fact, many seemed to believe that the process was unnecessary. James Haveman, in charge of re-building Iraq's health-care system, was so idealogically opposed to free, public health care that, in a country were 70% of child deaths are caused by treatable illnesses such as diarrhea, and incubators are held together with duct tape, he decided that an overarching prioity was to privatize the drug distribution system.


Baghdad orphans starving

Iraqi teenaged prostitutes

The double standards were explosive, as the systematic exclusion of Iraqi's from the plan. Having suffered through the sanctions and the invasion, most Iraqis naturally assumed that they had the right to benefit from the reconstruction of their country-not just from the final product but from the jobs created on the way. When tens of thousands of foreign workers poured across Iraq's borders to take up jobs with foreign contractors, it was seen as an extension of the invasion. Rather than reconstruction, this was destruction in a different gise-the wholesale wiping out of the country's industry, which had been a powerful source of pride, one that cut across sectarian lines. Only fifteen thousand Iraqis were hired to work for the US funded reconstruction during bremer's tenure, a staggeringly low figure. "When the Iraqi people see all these contracts going to foreigners and these people bring in their own security guards and their own engineers, and we're just suppose to watch them, what do you expect?" Nouri Sitto, an Iraqi American, told me when we met in the green Zone. Sitto had moved back to Baghdad to assist the CPA with the reconstruction, but he was tired of being diplomatic. "The economy is the number-one reason for the terrorism and the lack of security."



The catastrophic failure to reconstruct also shared direct responsibility for the most lethal form of blowback-the dangerous rise of religious fundamentalism and sectarian conflict. when the occupation proved unable to provide the most basic services, including security, the mosques and the local militias filled the vacume. The young Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr proved particulary adept at exposing the failures of Bremer's privatized reconstruction by running his own shadow reconstruction in Shia slums from Baghdad to Basra, earning himself a devoted following. Funded through donations to mosques, and perhaps later with help from Iran, the centers dispatched electricians to fix power and phone lines, organized local garbage collection, set up emergency generators, ran blood drives and directed traffic. "I found a vacume, and no one filled the vacume," al-Sadr said in the early days of the occupation, adding "What I can do, I do." He also took the young men who saw no jobs and no hope in Bremer's Iraq, dressed them in black and armed them with Kalashnikovs. The result was the Mahdi Army, now one of the most brutal forces in Iraqi's sectarian battles. These militias are corporatism's legacy too; if the reconstruction had provided jobs, security and services to Iraqis, al-Sadr would have been deprived of both his mission and many of his newfound followers. as it was, corporate America's failures laid the groundwork for al-Sadrs successes.



Iraq under Bremer was the logical conclusion of Chicago School theory: a public sector reduced to a minimal number of employees, mostly contract workers, living in a Halliburton city-state, tasked with signing corporate-friendly laws drafted by KPMG and handing out duffle bags of cash to Western contractors protected by mercenary soldiers, themselves shielded by full legal immunity. All around them were furious people, increasingly turning to religious fundamentalism because it's the only source of power in a hollowed-out state. Like Russia's gangsterism and Bush's cronyism, contemporary Iraq is a creation of a fifty-year crusade to privatize the world. Rather than being disowned by its creators, it deserves to be seen as the purest incarnation yet of the idealogy that gave it birth.



Previous thread... Blood-sucking vampires..
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=2670242&mesg_id=2670242
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sam sarrha Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-13-08 12:35 PM
Response to Original message
1. where do you get the great photos..??
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Joanne98 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-13-08 12:40 PM
Response to Reply #1
3. google images, I just put in words and see what comes up.
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Jim__ Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-13-08 12:39 PM
Response to Original message
2. The American people will be paying for the epic stupidity of the bush admin ...
Edited on Sun Jan-13-08 12:40 PM by Jim__
... for years to come.
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Joanne98 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-13-08 12:42 PM
Response to Reply #2
5. Unless we bring them to justice, which I hope will happen, if we get
Democratic leadership with some balls.
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annabanana Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-13-08 12:40 PM
Response to Original message
4. This is "it" in a nutshell. This ties together all the threads of the
disaster that is Iraq. The morally bankrupt "free-trade radicals" have this as their crowning achievement to show the world. If there was ever an "Ivory Tower, boneheaded fantasy-filled load of pie-in-the-sky ideological claptrap.... trickle down neo-conservatism it "it"...

Ayn would be so proud.

K&R!
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Joanne98 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-13-08 12:48 PM
Response to Reply #4
6. they're trying not to claim it. but we're not going to let that happen
I especially want to see that little brat pack behind bars.
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Joanne98 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-13-08 12:54 PM
Response to Original message
7. kick
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Joanne98 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-13-08 01:48 PM
Response to Original message
8. kick
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applegrove Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-13-08 02:45 PM
Response to Original message
9. Nice presentation of an important book. Each chapter is something
to behold. Thanks for the op.
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Joanne98 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-13-08 03:28 PM
Response to Reply #9
11. You're welcome
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Usrename Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-13-08 03:22 PM
Response to Original message
10. Well done!
It's important to get more people to understand exactly what went on during the Coalition Provisional Authority. It is criminal.

And it's a good promo for the book, too.
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Joanne98 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-13-08 03:30 PM
Response to Reply #10
12. I think it is good promo, since the most important book of the century
is getting ZERO press. I hope she sells a million copies in a hundred languages.
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RuleOfNah Donating Member (603 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-13-08 06:17 PM
Response to Reply #12
15. Her book is my new 'line'.
A line between people that have a clue and people that do not have a clue.

There are people with a clue that have not yet read her book but they tend to be familiar with the themes, if not specific content, so they are honorary line members. :)

Nice photo/prose mashup!
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Joanne98 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-13-08 06:07 PM
Response to Original message
13. KICK!!!!!!!!
:kick:
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HCE SuiGeneris Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-13-08 06:12 PM
Response to Original message
14. Bremer and * and Rummy
A more wasteful trio of incompetence has never before been unleashed in modern times.
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Joanne98 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jan-14-08 06:14 PM
Response to Original message
16. kick
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Joanne98 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Jan-17-08 05:14 PM
Response to Original message
17. kick
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Joanne98 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Jan-18-08 07:00 AM
Response to Original message
18. kick
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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Jan-18-08 09:45 AM
Response to Original message
19. ''I'm sure people view me as a warmonger...''
The truth is we live in a world made from a warmonger's nightmare.



Bush, the Blessed Peacemaker

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Wednesday, January 16, 2008; 1:04 PM

President Bush's self-image continues to amaze. Wrapping up an eight-day Middle East trip, the man who has launched two wars and may be hankering for a third told ABC News yesterday that he is terribly misunderstood in the region.

"I mean, my image : 'Bush wants to fight Muslims.' And, yeah, I'm concerned about it. Not because of me, personally. I'm concerned because I want most people to understand the great generosity and compassion of Americans," Bush told Terry Moran.

"But yeah, look, I'm sure people view me as a warmonger and I view myself as peacemaker."


SNIP...

"The other thing is, if I could be perfectly blunt about it, I think people who say we can be free, but you shouldn't be, are elitist," Bush said.

Apparently forgetting his "I'm a war president" motto of the 2004 campaign, Bush said: "I don't believe democracies, you know, generally lead to war-like governments. You know, 'Please vote for me, I promise you war.' It's not something that tends to win elections."

The latest polls (see yesterday's column) show Bush's approval rating at dismal levels, with 4 out of 5 Americans saying the next president should set the nation in a new direction.

But Bush literally laughed off Moran's question about his poll numbers. "What am I supposed to do, go into a fetal position because of your polls?"

Moran wrapped up the interview with some questions about Bush's sightseeing in the Holy Land: "You went to the Mount of the Beatitudes, where by tradition Jesus is understood to have said 'Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.' And yet a lot of people here -- and back home -- see you as a warmaker."

Bush: "Yeah. Well, we'll see what history says. I happen to believe that the actions I've taken were necessary to protect ourselves and lay the foundation for peace. That's what I believe. But history -- I've often said this -- I don't think the history of my administration is going to be written during your time as a newscaster, or my time on Earth. I believe that it's going to take a while for people to determine whether or not the foundation of peace has truly been laid."

Asked what he was thinking as he looked out on the Sea of Galilee, Bush said: "I reflected on the story in the New Testament about the calm and the rough seas, because it was on those very seas that the Lord was in the boat with the disciples, and they were worried about the waves and the wind, and the sea calmed. That's what I reflected on: the calm you can find in putting your faith in a higher power."

CONTINUED..

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2008/01/16/BL2008011601865.html?hpid=opinionsbox1



Warmonger is not the word for this nutjob. Didn't Pope John-Paul II wonder if Bush was the Antichrist?
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seemslikeadream Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Jan-18-08 12:45 PM
Response to Original message
20. I hope I haven't missed any
Edited on Fri Jan-18-08 12:54 PM by seemslikeadream
The Shock Doctrine: It's not a tsunami, it's an opportunity! (part one)
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=2706641

The Shock Doctrine: It's not a tsunami, it's an opportunity. (part two)
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=2707418

The Shock Doctrine: A Corporatist State (blood-sucking, shape-shifting, vampires)
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=2670242

The Shock Doctrine: Blowback page 351
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=2673866

The Shock Doctrine: A Corporatist State (blood-sucking, shape-shifting, vampires)
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=2670242&mesg_id=2670242

The Shock Doctrine: Erasing Iraq: Hey, Hey the Gangs All Here page 329
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x2669245

The Shock Doctrine: The Love Shack... page 338
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=2612321


The Shock Doctrine: The Looting.. You are No One..
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=2610726

The Shock Doctrine: Fear Up
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=2609615

The Shock Doctrine: Shock and Awe; War as Mass Torture
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=2609103


The Shock Doctrine: The Kurbark Interrogation Manual page 368
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=2568675

The Shock Doctrine: Body Shocks page 365
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=2568367

The Shock Doctrine: Torture as Curing.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=2561149

The Shock Doctrine: The Anti-Marshall Plan page 346
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=2563105

The Shock Doctrine: Dismantling Democracy pg 361
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=2564230&mesg_id=2564265


The Shock Doctrine: The Salvador Option WARNING GRAPHIC PHOTOS!
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=2568489

The Shock Doctrine: The Clintons and the Cheneys
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=2533968

The Shock Doctrine: Clinton and Bosnia page 328
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=2492912

The Shock Doctrine: Setting up South Africa/Screwing Mandela.. chapter 10
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=2523705

The Shock Doctrine: Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=2525753

The Shock Doctrine: Disaster Apartheid/ if they can't pay, let them die!
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=2527827
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Joanne98 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Jan-18-08 07:20 PM
Response to Reply #20
22. You got them all!!!!!!
:toast:
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Joanne98 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Jan-18-08 06:51 PM
Response to Original message
21. kick
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Elspeth Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Jan-18-08 07:33 PM
Response to Original message
23. "a public sector reduced to a minimal number of employees"---Watch carefully folks
That's what they are doing here. Look at Shrub's economic plan from yesterday...
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AzDar Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Jan-18-08 07:40 PM
Response to Original message
24. K & R....
:kick:
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mogster Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-19-08 09:02 AM
Response to Original message
25. Kick!
Great collection! :-)
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