American Privitization and Neocolonization in Iraq

Check out this Democracy Now! article and please check out the below links; I believe that they are essential in understanding current geopolitical events.

-

Acclaimed author and journalist Naomi Klein spoke about the 'privatization of the state' at a recent talk in New York City. Klein is a widely read columnist for the Nation magazine and the London Guardian and author of the international bestseller, "No Logo." Her forthcoming book is titled "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

-

AMY GOODMAN: As we continue to look at the issue of Iraq and
the US occupation, we turn to the acclaimed author and journalist Naomi
Klein. Naomi Klein is a widely read columnist for The Nation magazine and the London Guardian, author of the best-selling book No Logo, more recently, Fences and Windows.
She came to New York for the launch of Jeremy Scahill's book on
Blackwater and spoke at the Ethical Culture Society on the
privatization of military and the state, putting it in a historical
context.

NAOMI KLEIN: This drive to the privatize every
aspect of the state of government is about a 35-year-old campaign. Many
people date it, many historians date it to the 1973 coup in Chile,
which is something that is interesting in terms of Jeremy’s research,
because he talks about how Blackwater are now hiring Chileans to go to
Iraq, and I’ll let him do that. But the first example of the attempt to
build a fully privatized corporate utopia was in Chile in 1973 after
Pinochet’s coup, when he joined up with a team of economists from the
University of Chicago to engage in that experiment.

It is a different kind of colonial project. In Latin America,
this project, which is often called neoliberalism, is referred to as
neocolonialism. The first stage of colonialism was the opening of the
veins of Latin America, as Eduardo Galeano describes it, the pillaging
of raw resources, the exporting of raw resources. The second stage of
colonialism -- and, of course, that first stage never fully goes away
-- was pillaging the state. What had been constructed in the aftermath
of the Great Depression and during the post-war boom years -- the
construction of healthcare systems, education systems, roadways,
railways -- but this is really what was launched in Chile with the help
of the Chicago boys: the strip mining of the state itself.

The way I imagine this corporate project, this privatization
project, is if we imagine the state as a kind of an octopus with all of
these limbs. And for the past thirty years, and certainly in this
country since Reagan, what the privatization campaign has really been
doing is lopping off the limbs of the state -- the phone system, the
roadways, these sort of non-essential services, if you will. And after
you've chopped off all the limbs, all you have left is the center, is
what they call the core.

And what the Bush administration has really been doing is
going for the core, privatizing those core essential government
services that are so inherently part of what we think of as the state,
that it almost seems impossible to imagine that they could be
privatized, like the government itself, like cutting Social Security
checks, like welfare, like prisons, like the army, which is where
Blackwater fits in.

What's so extraordinary about what has happened in Iraq -- and
Amy mentioned the “Baghdad Year Zero” article -- is that you really
have all of these layers of colonialism and neocolonialism, this quest
for privatization, forming a kind of a perfect storm in that country.
On the one hand, you have sort of old-school colonial pillage, which
is, let's go for the oil. And as many of you know, Iraq has a new oil
law. It’s passed through cabinet, hasn't yet passed through parliament.
But, really, it legalizes pillage. It legalizes pillage. It legalizes
the extraction of 100% of the profits from Iraq's oil industry, which
is precisely the conditions that created the wave of Arab nationalism
and the reclaiming of the resources in the 1950s through the ’70s. So
it’s an undoing of that process and a straight-up resource grab,
old-school colonialism.

Layered on top of that, you have sort of colonialism 2.1,
which is what I was researching when I was in Iraq, which is the
looting of the Iraqi state, what was built up under the banner of Arab
nationalism, the industry, the factories. The kind of rapid-fire, shock
therapy-style strip-mining privatization that we saw in the former
Soviet Union in the ’90s, that was the idea, that was Plan A for Iraq,
that the US would just go in there with Blackwater guarding Paul Bremer
and would sell off all of Iraq’s industries. So you had the old-school
colonial, then you had the new school.

And then you had the post-modern privatization, which was the
idea that the US military was actually going to war, the US Army was
going to war, to loot itself, which is a post-modern kind of
innovation, right? If we remember, Thomas Friedman told us less than a
decade ago that no two countries with a McDonald's have ever gone to
war. Now, we go to war with McDonald's, Taco Bell, Burger King, in tow.
And so, the process of waging war is a form of self-pillage. Not only
is Iraq being pillaged, but the United States coffers of this
government are being pillaged. So we have these three elements, all
converging this perfect storm over this country.

And one of the things that I think is most important for
progressives to challenge is the discourse that everything in Iraq is a
disaster. I think we need to start asking and insisting, disaster for
who, because not everybody is losing. It’s certainly a disaster for the
Iraqi people. It's certainly a disaster for US taxpayers. But what we
have seen -- and it’s extremely clear if we track the numbers -- is
that the worse things get in Iraq, the more privatized this war
becomes, the more profitable this war becomes for companies like
Lockheed Martin, Bechtel, and certainly Blackwater. There is a steady
mission creep in Iraq, where the more countries pull out, the more
contractors move in, which Jeremy has documented so well and will talk
more about. (my emphasis)

The danger. These are the stakes that I think we need to
understand. And I really do want to keep this brief, so that we have a
fruitful discussion afterwards. What are the stakes here? The stakes
could not be higher. What we are losing is the incentive, the economic
incentive, for peace, the economic incentive for stability. When you
can create such a booming economy around war and disaster, around
destruction and reconstruction, over and over and over again, what is
your peace incentive?

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.

(I added the emphasis)

I hope some of you know that many Bushites have stakes in all the aforementioned companies, including top governmental officials like the late Rumsfeld. The point is, many people who are subtly and overtly influencing governmental policy and the media are winning, and the whole rest of the world is losing.

American unilateralism and neocolonialism is at the expense of 99% of the American people (don't forget the rest of the world as well). Do you realize the extent to which our government is transforming into something completely different then everything our democratic republic was founded upon?
Let me list a few things, most of which are less than 5 years old.

Executive signings
Bush is essentially ignoring hundreds of laws and presidential precedent.

Suspension of Habeas Corpus for alien, "unlawful enemy combatants"
Forgot about Abu Ghraib already? So did the media.

Military Commissions Act of 2006
(Our children will call us fascists, and rightly so, for even allowing this document to be passed.)

Project for The New American Century (PNAC)
This is what Bush, Rove, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Forbes, actually think! People wake up!

We haven't signed the Kyoto Protocol. Our administration still hasn't even started strategizing about global warming in a serious manner.

We are ignoring the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
We just allowed India to become a nuclear power, thus undermining the value of the treaty that 169 countries have ratified.

Our neoconservative gov wants to build MORE nuclear weapons that are 'smarter'. We already have about 10,000, according to Wikipedia.

I could go on longer but there are already many links that will take time to digest. I don't know what else to say, but that the richest 2% (who won 50% of the wealth) are becoming exponentially more rich, exponentially more powerful, and expoentially more apathetic about humanity. Educate yourself, stay optimistic, and cultivate spiritual rage. Spiritual rage has the power to speed up the evolution of consciousness. We need that. Otherwise, we are doomed.

There is no Secret.