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Friday, November 30
Iraq Overthrow
by
mammon
on Fri 30 Nov 2007 08:00 AM AKST
Overthrow Series
Iraq [Overthrow by Stephen Kinzer, 2006]
Iraq-Iran War
In the 1980s, Iraq was engaged in a horrific eight-year was with Iran. Bitterly anti-American militants had recently seized power in Iran, and President Reagan was eager to ensure that they did not win this was. Reagan sent Donald Rumsfeld, his special Middle East envoy, to meet Saddam and ask him what the United States could do to help his cause. Soon afterward, American intelligence agencies began sending Saddam reports about Iranian troop movements that allowed him to fend off what might have been abject defeat.
Over the next seven years, the United States sold Saddam $200 million worth of weaponry, as well as a fleet of helicopters. Washington also gave him $5 billion in agricultural credits and a $684 million loan to build an oil pipeline to Jordan, a project he awarded to the California based Bechtel Corporation.
Saddam Invades Kuwait
The Americans had not objected when Saddam attacked Iran nearly a decade before, and he wanted to be sure they would not object this time either. Glaspie told him what he wanted to hear. “We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait,” she told Saddam.
Eight days later, Saddam sent his army into Kuwait, easily subdued it, and announced that it had become Iraq’s nineteenth province. To his great surprise, President Bush reacted with outrage. Kuwait was a key supplier of oil to the United States, and Bush vowed that the Iraqi occupation would “not stand.” By invading Kuwait, evidently under the mistaken impression that the United States would approve, Saddam turned himself into a pariah in the eyes of Washington.
On January 16, 1991, the American-led coalition launched a bombing campaign against Iraq and Iraqi positions in Kuwait. It followed with a land invasion, not only chasing the Iraqi army out of Kuwait but pursuing it most of the way back to Baghdad. Some urged Bush to press on to the capital itself and depose Saddam, but he prudently declined.
Saddam Survives – U.S. Plots Unfinished Business
Saddam survived all these assaults. Some powerful Americans, especially several who had held important posts in past Republican administrations, found his resilience unbearable. They harbored a deep sense that Saddam had gotten the better of them, and developed a passionate determination to crush him.
When Bush’s son assumed the presidency at the beginning of 2001, several of these men found themselves back in power. Among them were Cheney, who had been the father’s secretary of defense and was the son’s vice president; Wolfowitz, who had been a senior defense department official under the father and became the department’s second-ranking figure in the son’s administration; and Rumsfeld, who had been President Gerald Ford’s defense secretary In the 1970s, took that post for a second time in 2001.
They returned to office determined to complete what they saw as unfinished business in Iraq. Beneath them lay an intense desire for vindication, for final victory over an adversary who had taunted the United States – and the Bush family – for more than a decade.
Drumbeat for War -- WMDs and Axis of Evil
The public drumbeat for war intensified steadily during 2002. On January 29, in his State of the Union address, President Bush named Iraq, along with Iran and North Korea, as part of an “axis of evil” that posed “a grave and growing danger” to the United States and the rest of the world. He called the Iraqi regime on of the most dangerous on earth, and asserted that it was developing, or actively seeking to develop, nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons.
Most of Bush’s advisors, recognizing that he had made up his mind to dispose Saddam, embraced the idea and urged him on. CIA director George Tenet was among the most enthusiastic. His analyst had found clues suggesting that Saddam might be concealing forbidden weapons, but no hard proof.
“The worst thing that could happen,” Bush said, “would be to allow a nation like Iraq, run by Saddam Hussein, to develop weapons of mass destruction, and then team up with terrorist organizations so they can blackmail the world.” No one could disagree with that. For the world to stand idly by while a brutal dictator built weapons of mass destruction and passed them on to terrorists would be not just irresponsible but suicidal.
Bush decided it was time for Secretary of State Powell to address the Security Council, present the evidence against Saddam, and demand a resolution endorsing military action against him. In the autumn of 2002, the United States Senate and House of Representatives voted by large margins to authorize President Bush to use force in Iraq if he deemed it necessary.
The United States had massed 130,000 solders in Kuwait and tens of thousands more nearby. Britain, the only other super power that supported Operation Iraqi Freedom, had 25,000 there, and there were small, symbolic contingents from Poland and Australia. At midday on March 19, the first American to advance teams crossed into Iraq.
Some of history’s greatest conquerors have paused near Baghdad before assaulting it. None ever assembled as overwhelming a force as the United States Army massed around the ancient city in the spring of 2004. Its commanders had a simple plan. They encircled Baghdad with tanks to prevent defenders from fleeing, and then sent troops in to capture palaces, military bases, and other keystones of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship.
Colonel David Perkins, the commander of a mechanized infantry brigade, smashed his way to the center of Baghdad in an audacious “Thunder Run,” using only his own men, a total of fewer than one thousand. They would take this city of five million, he promised, in a single day.
Mission Accomplished
Bush appeared on television to tell the world that the American-led invasion of Iraq had begun, twenty-four hours earlier than originally planned. He said bombs were falling on selected targets of military importance and that these strikes were “the opening stages of what will be a broad and concerted campaign.”
Iraqi soldiers by the thousands ripped off their uniforms and melted into the countryside as American columns charged northward. The invading force faced no sustained resistance on the ground, no aerial bombardment, and no chemical or biological attacks.
On May 1, forty-three days after the war began, he stepped out of a fighter jet onto the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, anchored a few miles off the coast of California. Dressed in a pilot’s flight suit, he strode across the deck like a proud conqueror. Then, in a speech to hundreds of soldiers and sailors and airmen on board, he declared that “major combat operations” in Iraq had ended. Behind him hung a giant banner that summarized his speech in two words: “Mission Accomplished.”
In the most spectacular misjudgment of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Bush and his aides convinced themselves that there would be no serious problems after the invasion. They dismissed those who warned otherwise as whining doubters.
Mission Not Accomplished
Trouble began just hours after Saddam Hussein’s regime collapsed, as looters raged through Baghdad and criminals ran amok. Then, six weeks later, the Americans decreed the dissolution not simply of Saddam’s secret police and elite Republican Guard but of the entire Iraqi army. That left more than 300,000 young men, all armed and trained in military tactics, without work and seething with anger against the occupier. Within a few months, enemies of the occupation built the most potent insurgent force the United States had faced since its misadventure in Vietnam.
The other shock that awaited Americans after they deposed Saddam was that he had, in fact, been telling the truth when he claimed not to have any biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons.
The war turned Iraq into a cauldron of violent anarchy and a magnet for fanatics from around the world. It set off a global wave of anti-American passion that had no precedent in history. Worst of all, it consumed enormous resources that might have been used in the war against Al Qaeda and other terror groups. The Iraq war allowed them to continue their worldwide jihad, launching deadly attacks in Indonesia, Spain, Britain, and elsewhere.
Military occupations are by their nature oppressive, and although the abusive tactics that American soldiers used in Iraq may have seemed defensible from the army’s perspective, they angered many Iraqis and countless others around the world. This anger rose to a fever pitch when graphic photographs emerged showing that American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison, near Baghdad, had treated prisoners in shocking ways.
Thursday, November 29
Missed Opportunity
by
mammon
on Thu 29 Nov 2007 02:00 PM AKST
The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, 2007, Edited Excerpts
In the summer after Iraq’s invasion, there was so much pent-up hunger for political participation that Baghdad, for all its daily hardships, displayed an almost carnival-like atmosphere. There was anger at Bremer’s layoffs, and frustration with the blackouts and the foreign contractors, but for months that anger was primarily expressed through outbursts or unregulated, exuberant free speech.
Most exciting of all, there were spontaneous elections breaking out in cities, towns and provinces across the country. Finally free of Saddam’s iron grip, neighbors were convening town hall meetings and electing leaders to represent them in this new era. In many cases, U.S. forces, believing their president when he said the army had been sent to Iraq to spread democracy, played a facilitating role, helping to organize the elections, even building ballot boxes.
The democratic enthusiasm, combined with the clear rejection of Bremer’s economic program, put the Bush administration in an extremely difficult position. It had made bold promises to hand over power to an elected Iraqi government in a matter of months and to include Iraqi in decision making right away. But that first summer left no doubt that any relinquishing of power would mean abandoning the dream of turning Iraq into a model privatized economy dotted with sprawling U.S. military bases; economic nationalism was far too deeply ingrained in the populace, particularly when it came to the national oil reserves, the greatest prize of all.
If Iraqis were allowed to freely elect the next government, and if the government had real power, Washington would have to give up on two of the war’s main goals: access to Iraq for U.S. military bases and full access to Iraq for U.S. multinationals. So Washington abandoned its democratic promises and instead ordered increases in the shock levels in the hope that a higher dosage would finally do the trick.
At that point, Iraqis were still expecting Washington to make good on its promise to organize national election and hand over power directly to a government elected by the majority of citizens. In November 2003, Bremer canceled local elections. When he returned to Baghdad, he announced that general elections were off the table. Iraq’s first “sovereign” government would be appointed, not elected. Bremer sent word that all local leaders were to be appointed by the occupation.
Bremer’s canceling of national elections was a bitter betrayal for Iraq’s Shia. As the largest ethnic group, they were certain to dominate an elected government after decades of subjugation. At first, Shia resistance took form of massive peaceful demonstrations: 100,000 protesters in Baghdad, 30,000 in Basra. Their unified chant was “Yes, yes, election. No, no selections.”
Had the Bush administration kept its promise to hand over power quickly to an elected Iraqi government, there is every chance that the resistance would have remained small and containable, rather than becoming a countrywide rebellion. But keeping that promise would have meant sacrificing the economic agenda behind the war, something that was never going to happen.
Wednesday, November 28
Ideological Blowback
by
mammon
on Wed 28 Nov 2007 08:00 AM AKST
Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, 2007, Edited Excerpts
Iraqis did not see the corporate construction as “a gift”; most saw it as a modernize form of pillage, and U.S. corporations didn’t wow anyone with their speed and efficiency; instead they have managed to turn the word “reconstruction” into a joke than nobody laughs at.
Bremer made no secret of his antipathy for Iraq’s “Stalinist economy,” as he described the country’s state-run companies and large ministries, and he had no appreciation of the specialized skills and the years of accumulated knowledge possessed by Iraq’s engineers, doctors, electricians, and road builders. He did not consider how the sudden amputation of Iraq’s professional class would make it impossible for the Iraqi state to function and therefore hinder his own work.
If within six months of the invasion, Iraqis had found themselves drinking clean water from Bechtel pipes, their homes illuminated by GE lights, their infirm treated in sanitary Parsons-built hospitals, their streets patrolled by competent DynCorp-trained police, many citizens would probably have overcome their anger at being excluded from the reconstruction process. But none of this happened, and well before Iraq resistances forces began systematically targeting reconstruction sites it was clear that applying laissez-faire principles to such a huge government task had been a disaster.
The most widely recognized case of blowback was provoked by Bremer’s first major act, the firing of approximately 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 up the government of Saddam loyalists. That ideological blindness had three concrete effects: it damaged the possibility of reconstruction by removing skilled people from their posts, it weakened the voice of secular Iraqis, and it fed the resistance with angry people.
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 the fifty-year crusade to privatize the world.
Tuesday, November 27
Privatizing Iraq
by
mammon
on Tue 27 Nov 2007 08:00 AM AKST
Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, 2007, Edited Excerpts
In the original Washington plan, Iraq was going to become a frontier just as Russia had been in the early nineties, but this time it would be U.S. firms - not local ones or European, Russian or Chinese – that would be first in line for the easy billions. In Iraq, Washington cut out the middlemen: the IMF and the World Bank were regulated to supporting roles, and the U.S. was front and center.
Paul Bremer was the government. Paul Bremer received trade and investment laws by email for the Department of Defense, printing them out, signing them and imposing them by fiat on the Iraqi people. Peter McPherson, the senior economic advisor to Paul Bremer, his job, as Iraq’s top economic shock therapist, was to radically downsize the state and privatize its assets.
Bremer spent his first four months in Iraq almost exclusively focused on economic transformation, passing a series of laws that together make up a classic Chicago School shock therapy program. Before the invasion, Iraq’s economy had been anchored by its national oil company and bytwo hundred state owned companies, which produced the staples of the Iraqi diet and the raw materials of its industry, everything from cement to paper and cooking oil. The month after he arrived at his new job, Bremer announced that the two hundred firms were going to be privatized immediately. “Getting inefficient state enterprises into private hands,” Bremer said, “is essential for Iraq’s economic recovery.”
One law lowered Iraq’s corporate tax rate from roughly 45 percent to a flat 15 percent. Even better, investors could take 10 percent of the profits they made in Iraq out of the country; they would not be required to reinvest, and they would not be taxed.
The White House was so focused on unveiling a shiny new Iraq economy that it launched a brand-new currency. Bills were delivered in fleets of planes and distributed in armored vehicles and trucks that ran at least a thousand missions throughout the country. Within a few months, there was talk of a McDonald’s opening in downtown Baghdad, the ultimate symbol of Iraq joining the global economy.
The model pioneered by Cheney for Halliburton in the Balkans, where bases were transformed into mini Halliburton towns, was adopted on a vastly larger scale. In addition to Halliburton’s construction and management of military bases across the country, the Green Zone was, from the start, a Halliburton-run city-state, with the company in charge of everything from road maintenance to pest control to movie and disco nights.
Even the job of building “local democracy” was privatized, given to the North Carolina-based Research Triangle Institute in a contract worth up to $66 million, though it’s not clear what qualified RTI to bring democracy to a Muslim country. The leadership of the company’s Iraq operation was dominated by high-level Mormons – people like James Mayfield, who told his mission back in Houston that he thought Muslims could be persuaded to embrace the Book of Mormon as compatible with the teachings of the prophet Muhammad.
Privatizing Iraq’s Oil
In December 2006, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group fronted by James Baker issued its long awaited report, It called for the U.S. to “assist Iraqi leaders to reorganize the national oil industry as a commercial enterprise” and to “encourage investment in Iraq’s oil sector by the international community and by international energy companies.
Washington’s timing was extremely revealing. At the point when the law was pushed forward, Iraq was facing its most profound crisis to date: the country was being torn apart by sectarian conflict with an average of one thousand Iraqis killed every week. Saddam Hussein had just been put to death in a depraved and provocative episode. Simultaneously, Bush was unleashing his surge of troops in Iraq, operating with less restricted rules of engagement. Iraq in this period was fat too volatile for the oil giants to make major investments, so there was no pressing need for a new law – except use the chaos to bypass public debate on the most contentious issue facing the country.
Iraq’s main labor unions declared the “the privatization of oil is a red line that may not be crossed” and condemned the law as an attempt to seize Iraq’s “energy resources at a time when the Iraqi people are seeking to determine their own future while still under conditions of occupation.” The law that was finally adopted by Iraq’s cabinet in February 2007 was even worse than anticipated. The law called for Iraq’s publicly owned oil reserves, the country’s main source of revenues, to be exempted from democratic control and run instead by a powerful, wealthy oil dictatorship, which would exist along Iraq’s broken and ineffective government.
It’s hard to overstate the disgrace of this attempted resource grab. Iraq’s oil profits are the country’s only hope of financing its own reconstruction when some semblance of peace returns. To lay claim to that future wealth in a moment of national disintegration was disaster capitalism at its most shameless.
Monday, November 26
Iraq Shock and Awe
by
mammon
on Mon 26 Nov 2007 08:00 AM AKST
Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, 2007, Edited Excerpts
Saddam did not pose a threat to U.S. security, but he did pose a threat to U.S. energy companies, since he had recently signed contracts with a Russian oil giant and was in negotiations with France’s Total, leaving U.S. and British oil firms with nothing; the third-largest proven oil reserves in the world were slipping out of the Anglo-American grasp.
The war was a rational policy choice, the architects of the invasion had unleashed ferocious violence because they could not crack open the closed economies of the Middle East by peaceful means, and the level of terror was proportional to what was at stake.
Extreme violence has a way of preventing us from seeing the interests it serves. That was Washington’s game plan for Iraq: shock and terrorize the entire country, deliberately ruin its infrastructure, do nothing while its culture and history are ransacked, then make it all okay with an unlimited supply of cheap household appliances and imported junk food. In Iraq, this cycle of culture erasing and culture replacing was not theoretical; it all unfolded in a matter of a few weeks. Shock and Awe is often presented as merely a strategy of overwhelming firepower, but it is much more than that: it is a sophisticated psychological blueprint aimed “directly at the public will of the adversary to resist.”
Many of the key players in Iraq’s invasion and occupation were veterans of the original team in Washington that had demanded shock therapy in Russia: Dick Cheney was defense secretary when George Bush Sr. crafted his post-soviet Russian policy, and Paul Wolfowitz was Cheney’s deputy, while Condoleeza rice served as Bush Sr.’s chief adviser on Russia’s transition. For all these top players, and dozens of lesser ones, Russia’s experience in the nineties, despite its abysmal results for ordinary people, was often evoked, without irony, as the model for Iraq to emulate in its transition.
Rumsfeld’s marshalling of his tech and media know-how from the business world put the marketing of fear at the center of U.S. military doctrine. As the day of the invasion of Iraq drew closer, U.S. news media outlets were conscripted by the Pentagon to “fear up” Iraq. Iraqis who picked up the terrifying reports on contraband satellites or in phone calls from relatives abroad spent months imagining the horrors of Shock and Awe. The phrase itself became a potent psychological weapon.
When the war began, the residents of Baghdad were subjected to sensory deprivation on a mass scale. One by one, the city’s sensory inputs were cut off; the ears were the first to go. On the night of March 28, 2003, as U.S. troops drew closer to Baghdad, the ministry of communication was bombed and set ablaze, as were Baghdad telephone exchanges, with massive bunker-busters, cutting off millions of phones across the city. Many Iraqis say that the shredding of their phone system was the most psychologically wrenching part of the air attack. The combination of hearing and feeling bombs going off everywhere while being unable to call a few blocks away to find out if loved ones were alive, or to reassure terrified relatives living abroad, was pure torment. Next to go were the eyes. In an instant, an entire city of 5 million people was plunged into an awful, endless night.
Iraqis went through this unmaking process collectively, as they watched their most important institutions desecrated, their history loaded onto trucks and disappeared. The bombings badly injured Iraq, but it was the looting, unchecked by occupying troops, that did the most to erase the heart of the country that was. The hundreds of looters who smashed ancient ceramics, stripped display cases and pocketed gold and other antiquities from the National Museum of Iraq pillaged nothing less than records of the first human society. As the war planners were quick to point out, the looting was done by Iraqis, not foreign troops. And it’s true that Rumsfeld did not plan for Iraq to be sacked – but he did not take measures to prevent it from happening either, or to stop it once it had begun. These were failures that cannot be dismissed as mere oversights.
Sunday, November 25
Argentina
by
mammon
on Sun 25 Nov 2007 08:00 AM AKST
Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, 2007, Edited Excerpts
In Argentina 1976, a junta seized power from Isabel Peron. That meant that Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Brazil were now all run by U.S.-backed military governments and were living laboratories of Chicago School economics. The Chicago Boys had been working with the military before the coup even took place, and the economic transformation began on the day the junta took power.
By the sixties and early seventies in Latin America, the left was the dominant mass culture – it was the poetry of Pablo Neruda, the folk music of Victor Jara and Mercedes Sosa, the liberation theology of the Third World Priests, the emancipatory theater of Augusto Boal, the radical pedagogy of Paulo Freire, the revolutionary journalism of Eduardo Galeano and Walsh himself. It was legendary heroes and martyrs of past and recent history from Jose Gervasio Artigas to Simon Bolivar to Che Guevara. The juntas were a declaration of war against this entire culture.
The legendary singer Victor Jara was among those taken. First the soldiers broke both his hands so he could not play the guitar, then they shot him forty-four times. To make sure he could not inspire from beyond the grave, the regime ordered his master recordings destroyed. Mercedes Sosa, a fellow musician, was forced into exile from Argentina, the revolutionary dramatist Augusto Boal was tortured and exiled from Brazil, Eduardo Galeano was driven from Uruguay and Walsh was murdered in the streets of Buenos Aires. A culture was being deliberately exterminated.
In Argentina, Ford supplied cars to the military, and the green Ford Falcon sedan was the vehicle used for thousands of kidnappings and disappearances. The junta provided Ford with a service of its own – ridding the assembly lines of troublesome trade unionists. Before the coup, Ford had been forced to make significant concessions to its workers. Soldiers prowled the facility, grabbing and hooding the most active union members.
Particularly brutal throughout the region were the attacks on farmers who had been involved in the struggle for land reform. Leaders of the Argentine Agrarian Leagues were hunted down and tortured, often out in the fields they worked, in full view of the community.
The pattern of these disappearances was clear: while the shock therapists were trying to remove all relics of collectivism from the economy, the shock troops were removing the representatives of that ethos from the streets, the universities and the factory floors.
Galerias Pacifico is the crown jewel of the Buenos Aires’ shopping district. For Argentines who know their history, the mall stands as a chilling reminder that the Chicago School Project was quite literally built on the secret torture camps where thousands of people who believed in a different country disappeared.
Friedman claimed that Pinochet’s entire reign – seventeen years of dictatorship and tens of thousands tortured – was not a violent unmaking of democracy but its opposite. “The really important thing about the Chilean business is that free markets did work their way in bringing about a free society.” Friedman said.
Argentina Debt
In 1983, when the junta collapsed after the Falkland War, Argentines elected Raul Alfonsin as their new president. Washington insisted that the new government agree to pay off the debts amassed by the generals. During junta rule, Argentina’s external debt had ballooned from $7.9 billion the year before the coup to $45 billion at the time of the handover – debts owed to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the U.S. Export-Import Bank and private banks based in the U.S.
The remainder of the national debt was mostly spent on interest payments, as well as shady bailouts for private firms. In 1982, just before Argentina’s dictatorship collapsed, the junta did one last favor for the corporate sector. Argentina’s central bank announced that the state would absorb the debts of large multinational and domestic firms. Among the companies to receive this generous treatment were Ford Motor Argentina, Chase Manhattan, Citibank, IBM and Mercedes-Benz.
It was these odious debts that Washington insisted Argentina’s new democratic government had to repay. Powerful arguments were made, both moral and legal, that these debts were “odious” and that newly liberated people should not be forced to pay the bills of their oppressors and tormentors.
Tuesday, November 20
Prison System Costly and Harmful - Report
by
mammon
on Tue 20 Nov 2007 08:00 AM AKST
US prison system 'costly failure'
19 November 2007
The prison population has risen eight-fold since 1970, with little impact on crime but at great cost to the taxpayer, researchers say. The Unlocking America report, which was published on Monday, also advocated changing terms of parole and finding alternatives to prison as part of a major overhaul of the US justice system. Its recommendations run counter to the Bush administration's policy of longer, harsher sentences, which the government says has contributed to falling violent crime and murder figures.
There are more than 1.5 million people in US state and federal jails. The JFA researchers found that women represented the fastest-growing sector of the US prison population.
Prison System a Costly and Harmful Failure: Report
November 19, 2007
The report was produced by the JFA Institute, a Washington criminal-justice research group, and its authors included eight criminologists from major U.S. public universities. It was funded by the Rosenbaum Foundation and financier George Soros’s Open Society Institute. Its recommendations run counter to broad U.S. public support for getting tough on criminals through longer, harsher sentences and to the Bush administration’s anti-drug stance.
Overview of the Prison Industry
Monday, November 19
Supermodel, Rapper, and Iran Now Dissing the Dollar
by
mammon
on Mon 19 Nov 2007 03:15 PM AKST
Iran leader dismisses US currency
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7101050.stm
18 November 2007
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has suggested an end to the trading of oil in US dollars, calling the currency "a worthless piece of paper".
Rapper Jay-Z dissing the dollar
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7097736.stm
November 16, 2007
Other more conventional market-watchers have also been snubbing the dollar, including the billionaire investor Warren Buffett. There have been no suggestions that Jay-Z's fellow rapper 50 Cent could be considering a move into a different currency.
Supermodel 'rejects dollar pay'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7078612.stm
6 November 2007
The world's richest model has reportedly reacted in her own way to the sliding value of the US dollar - by refusing to be paid in the currency. Gisele Bündchen is said to be keen to avoid the US currency because of uncertainty over its strength.
Friday, November 16
Money by Jesca Hoop
by
mammon
on Fri 16 Nov 2007 08:00 AM AKST
Money by Jesca Hoop
http://www.jescahoop.com/
Money money makes the world go round
Money money'll make you change your sound
If the price is right
If the price is right
If you want paper
If you want gold and silver
Learn now not later
People pay for what's familiar
No need to know yourself too well
You can trade in that saga you tell
For the song you know will sell
If you want cheddar
If you want smoke and roll better
Take off your sweater
To earn your varsity letter
It's a virgin feast for all
See how gracefully they fall
Into the mirrors on the wall
'Cause if you want to belong you write a sing-a-long
Money money makes the world go round
Money money'll make you change your sound
If the price is right
You forfeit your style without a fight
Who will be your beacon
The dark of night
Should have been truly bright
Where do we go
The freaks
On the fringe
When the edges are all rounded out
We just dangle out in space
You can call us when you need to find out
We go
The misfits
On the fringe
When the edges are all rounded out
We just dangle out in space
You can call us when you need to find out
What the real stars are all about
Time has turned and the scenery has changed
And all the books have
Burned
But the lyrics remain
Let the motherfucker burn let's change the refrain
Nobody needs history
Repeatin’ tin tin tin tin
Money money makes the world go round
Money money'll make you change your sound
If the price is right
If the price is right
If you want skrilla
If you're a cheddar gorilla
Stack up your bills as
You sign away your free will
There's no need to represent
The truth of self has been well spent
Moving from mortgage out of rent
‘Cause if you want to belong you write a sing-a-long
Money money makes the world go round
Money money'll make you change your sound
If the price is right
You forfeit your style without a fight
Who will be your beacon
The dark of night
Should have been truly bright
Money – Songs and Poems Selection
Saturday, November 10
Operation Corporate - The Falkland War
by
mammon
on Sat 10 Nov 2007 08:00 AM AKST
The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, 2007, Edited Excerpts
Thatcher was attempting an English version of Friedmanism by championing what has become known as “the ownership society.” Thatcher’s catastrophic first term seemed to further confirm the lessons of the Nixon years: that the radical and highly profitable policies of the Chicago School couldn’t survive in a democratic system. It seemed clear that the successful imposition of economic shock therapy required some other sort of shock.
Falkland War
The British military’s counter-invasion of the Falklands was code-named Operation Corporate, and though it was an odd name for a military campaign, it proved prescient. From a military standpoint, the eleven-week battle appears to have almost no historic significance. Overlooked, however, was the war’s impact on the free-market project, which was enormous: it was the Falklands War that gave Thatcher the political cover she needed to bring a program of radical capitalist transformation to a Western liberal democracy for the first time.
After the Falklands victory, which took the lives of 255 British soldiers and 655 Argentines, the prime minister was heralded as a war hero, her moniker “Iron Lady” transformed from insult to high praise. Her poll numbers were similarly transformed. Thatcher used the enormous popularity afforded her by the victory to launch the very corporatist revolution that was impossible before the war.
The coal miners went on strike in 1984. Thatcher unleashed the full force of the state on the strikers, including, in a single confrontation, eight thousand truncheon-wielding riot police, many on horseback, to storm a plant picket line, leading to roughly seven hundred injuries. Over the course of the long strike, the number of injuries reached into the thousands.
By 1985, Thatcher had won this war too: workers were going hungry and couldn’t hold out; in the end 966 people were fired. It was a devastating setback for Britain’s most powerful union, and it sent a clear message to the others: if Thatcher was willing to go to the wall to break the coal miners, on whom the country depended for its lights and warmth, it would be suicide for weaker unions producing less crucial products and services t take on her new economic order.
Thatcher used her war to launch the first mass privatization auction in a Western democracy. This was the real Operation Corporate, one with historic implications. She had proved that with a large enough political crisis to rally around, a limited version of shock therapy could be imposed in a democracy. Between 1984 and 1988, the government privatized, among others, British Telecom, British Gas, British Airways, British Airport Authority and British Steel, while it sold its shares in British Petroleum.
Friday, November 9
Pinochet and The Brick -- Chile
by
mammon
on Fri 09 Nov 2007 08:00 AM AKST
The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, 2007, Edited Excerpts
Sept 11, 1973 Pinochet overthrow.
Pinochet had a knack for authoritarian rule, but he knew next to nothing about economics. With the economy in a tailspin, Pinochet had a full-fledged crisis on his hands. It was the Chicago Boys’ vision of a total country overhaul that appealed to his newly unleashed ambition, and he named several Chicago grads as senior economic advisors, including Sergio de Castro, the movement’s de facto leader and the main author of “The Brick.” Sergio de Castro, Pinochet’s Chicago Boy economics minister who oversaw the implementation of shock treatment, said he could never have done it without Pinochet’s iron fist backing him up. He also observed that an “authoritarian government” is best to safeguarding economic freedom because of its “impersonal” use of power.
Their five-hundred-page bible – a detailed economic program that would guide the junta from its earliest days – came to be known in Chile as “The Brick.” According to a later U.S. Senate Committee, “CIA collaborators were involved in preparing an initial overall economic plan which has served as the basis for the Junta’s most important economic decisions.” Eight of the ten principal authors of “The Brick” had studied economics at the University of Chicago. Milton Friedman was the intellectual architect and unofficial advisor for the team of economists now running the Chilean economy and shared responsibility for Pinochet’s crimes.
To make sure that the terror extended beyond the capital city, Pinochet sent his most ruthless commander, General Stark, on a helicopter mission to the northern provinces to visit a string of prisons where “subversives” were being held. At each city and town, Stark and his roving death squad singled out the highest-profile prisoners, as many as twenty-six at a time, who were subsequently executed. The trail of blood left behind over those four days came to be known as the Caravan of Death. In short order, the entire country had gotten the message: resistance is deadly.
In 1975, Milton Friedman flew to Santiago at the invitation of a major bank to help save the experiment. Friedman was greeted by the junta-controlled press as something of a rock star, the guru of the new order. Each of his pronouncements made headlines, his academic lectures were broadcast on national television and he had the most important audience of all; a private meeting with General Pinochet.
Thursday, November 8
Chile Overthrow
by
mammon
on Thu 08 Nov 2007 08:00 AM AKST
Overthrow Series
Chile [Overthrow by Stephen Kinzer, 2006, Excerpts]
Chile has suffered through less anarchy, civil war, and repression than almost any other country in the hemisphere. In the 139 years after its first constitution took effect in 1833, its democratic order was interrupted only three times. Two-thirds of the way through the twentieth century, Chile was well on its way to modernity, with a high literacy rate, a relatively large middle class, and a strong civil society. The democratic approach to life and politics was as deeply woven into the national psyche as anywhere in Latin America.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, American business became interested in Chilean copper. In 1905 the Braden Copper Company, which would later be absorbed into Kennecott Copper Corporation, began mining at El Teniente, a mountain of ore set in the Andes about one hundred miles southeast of Santiago, Seven years later a forerunner of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company began operations at Chuquicamata, in the northern desert.
These two American-owned companies, Kennecott and Anaconda, grew into the twin titans of the world copper business. By mid-century, El Teniente was the largest underground copper mine in the world, and Chuquicamata was the largest open-pit mine.
The United States also intensified its long effort to cultivate friends in the Chilean military. Between 1950 and 1969, nearly four thousand Chilean officers were trained at American military bases, most at the U.S. Army School of the Americas in the Panama Canal Zone, where students learned a rigorous counterinsurgency doctrine that equated Marxism with treason.
In the early 1960s, the CIA concentrated its support on the center-left Christian Democratic Party, whose leader, Eduardo Frei, was an ebullient reformer in exactly the right mold to fit Washington’s fancy. His good looks and media-conscious style even led reporters and columnists to call him the “Chilean Kennedy.” The CIA covertly spent $3million, more than half the cost of his campaign, to ensure that Frei would win the 1964 election and defeat Allende. Frei won easily.
Allende
Allende was the classic bourgeois revolutionary. Although born into privilege, he was a passionate advocate of radical social change. His militancy grew from a combination of Marist gospel and the realities of life he saw around him. Despite Chile’s relatively prosperous position among South American nations, millions of its people lived in desperate poverty, and this genuinely moved Allende. Equally outrageous to him was the fact that foreign companies controlled his country’s all-important copper industry. He was also a third-generation Mason – not common for Marxists – and mixed easily with the Chilean elite.
In 1970, Allende ran for president as the candidate of a leftist coalition called Popular Unity. The challenge of keeping him out of power came to obsess the American embassy in Santiago. Early in 1970, Ambassador Korry and his CIA station chief, Henry Heckser, asked the Nixon administration for permission to embark on a covert “spoiling” campaign to block him. David Rockefeller, whose Chase Manhattan Bank had multibillion-dollar interests in South America, urged Nixon to press ahead with the spoiling campaign.
The Spoiling
Phillips, who had run the highly successful “Voice of Liberation” radio campaign during the 1954 coup against President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala, became co director of the CIA’s newly formed Chile Task Force to use three tools – economic warfare, political warfare, and psychological warfare – to create a coup climate and a pretext or flash point for action.
Newspapers and radio stations, including several the CIA was subsidizing, denounced Allende and warned graphically of the horrors his government would surely bring. American banks stopped granting short-term credits to Chilean businesses; agents spread rumors of impending food rationing, bank collapses, and nonexistent plans by Allende to seize private homes.
The 1970 Election
On September 4, 1970, Chilean voters went to the polls and gave Allende his victory by plurality. Such outcomes were not unusual in Chile’s multiparty system, and Congress had a long-established tradition of choosing the first-place finisher as president. Under Chilean law, Congress had to certify Allende’s election within fifty days after the election. Nixon wanted that somehow to be prevented.
It is a tribute to the Chilean political system that despite all the CIA’s efforts, neither President Frei nor members of Congress could be persuaded that the threat Allende posed was great enough to require a break with Chile’s democratic tradition. Congress met on October 24 and, by a vote of 153 to 24, certified his election. He was inaugurated on November 4.
Orchestrated Overthrow
When Allende won the presidential election on September 4, 1970, he set off panic in the corridors of American power. He was a lifelong anti-imperialist and admirer of Fidel Castro who had vowed to nationalize the American owned companies that dominated his country. On November 6, 1970, just two days after Allende donned the presidential sash in Santiago, President Nixon convened the National Security Council to discuss ways of disposing him.
The Americans needed to push Chile toward chaos. Kissinger set out to do so, using all of the considerable resources at his command. Kissinger would be more directly responsible for what happened in Chile than any other American, with the possible exception of Nixon himself
Agustin Edwards, one of Chile’s richest men and owner of its largest newspaper, El Mecurio, was personally, professionally, and ideologically close to most of the leading American executives with interests in Chile. Through them, he had access to the highest circles of the Nixon administration. President Nixon had repeatedly declared his determination to protect American business interests abroad and fight communism.
Kissinger asked Helms to meet with Edwards to glean “whatever insight he might have” on ways of stopping Allende. Kissinger met with another powerful figure eager to protect large interests in Chile, his friend and patron David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan Bank.
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