"And just maybe, reviewing this appalling history of invoicing orgies and million-dollar boondoggles, it's not so far-fetched to think that this is the way someone up there would like things run all over -- not just in Iraq but in Iowa, too, with the state police working for Corrections Corporation of America, and DHL with the contract to deliver every Christmas card. And why not? What the Bush administration has created in Iraq is a sort of paradise of perverted capitalism, where revenues are forcibly extracted from the customer by the state, and obscene profits are handed out not by the market but by an unaccountable government bureaucracy. This is the triumphant culmination of two centuries of flawed white-people thinking, a preposterous mix of authoritarian socialism and laissez-faire profiteering, with all the worst aspects of both ideologies rolled up into one pointless, supremely idiotic military adventure -- American men and women dying by the thousands, so that Karl Marx and Adam Smith can blow each other in a Middle Eastern glory hole.
It was an awful idea, perhaps the worst America has ever tried on foreign soil. But if you were in on it, it was great work while it lasted."
The full report from Rolling Stone is here.
Okay, now go back & watch Robocop again.
ReplyDeletefrom Robocop:
ReplyDelete"Dick Jones: Suit yourself Clarence... But Delta City begins construction in two months. That's two million workers living trailers, that means drugs, gambling, prostition...
[Clarence backtracks into Jones' office]
Dick Jones: Virgin territory for the man who knows how to open up new markets... One man could control it all, Clarence...
Clarence Boddicker: Well I guess we're gonna be friends after all. *Richard*.
Dick Jones: [tosses Robocop's tracking device to Clarence] Destroy it...
Clarence Boddicker: Gonna need some major firepower. You got access to military weaponry?
Dick Jones: We practically are the military.
If I am not mistaken Cheney was at the helm of Halliburton when Brown and Root, its subsidiary, and Halliburton were inking lucrative contracts to support American military ventures in Somali, Bosnia and other locations. I think these contracts gave them a taste and vision for what kind of money could be made in a large, long term occupation of a country.
ReplyDeleteIt is also interesting that the contractors hire cheap indigenous wokers which can undermine operational security. It happened in Somalia where they used Somalis in locations where they could send information back to the warloards and jepordize operations such as the case of Black Hawk Down, the first of Clinton's political albatrosses.