H15387
Headlines : GovernmentThe Age of Disaster Capitalism
What passes for debate is restricted to individual cases of war profiteering and corruption scandals, as well as the usual hand-wringing about the failure of government to adequately oversee private contractors – rarely about the much broader and deeper phenomenon of what it means to be engaged in a fully privatised war built to have no end.
[Posted By ShiftShapers]Republished from Infoshop News
As George Bush and his cabinet took up their posts in January 2001, the need for new sources of growth for US corporations was an urgent matter. With the tech bubble now officially popped and the DowJones tumbling 824 points in their first two and half months in office, they found themselves staring in the face of a serious economic downturn. John Maynard Keynes had argued that governments should spend their way out of recessions, providing economic stimulus with public works. Bush’s solution was for the government to deconstruct itself – hacking off great chunks of the public wealth and feeding them to corporate America, in the form of tax cuts on the one hand and lucrative contracts on the other. Bush’s budget director, the think-tank ideologue Mitch Daniels, pronounced: “The general idea – that the business of government is not to provide services, but to make sure that they are provided – seems self-evident to me.” That assessment included disaster response. Joseph Allbaugh, the Republican party operative whom Bush put in charge of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) – the body responsible for responding to disasters, including terrorist attacks – described his new place of work as “an…
Posted by ShiftShapers
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Posted by stimulator on Friday, September 7th 2007
Billions Over Baghdad
Vanity Fair (October 2007 Issue)
Between April 2003 and June 2004, $12 billion in U.S. currency—much of it belonging to the Iraqi people—was shipped from the Federal Reserve to Baghdad, where it was dispensed by the Coalition Provisional Authority. Some of the cash went to pay for projects and keep ministries afloat, but, incredibly, at least $9 billion has gone missing, unaccounted for, in a frenzy of mismanagement and greed. Following a trail that leads from a safe in one of Saddam’s palaces to a house near San Diego, to a P.O. box in the Bahamas, the authors discover just how little anyone cared about how the money was handled.
See also (if you haven’t already) VIDEO: Iraq’s Missing Billions
Dr Ali Fadhil, a 29 year old Iraqi doctor, investigates what has happened to billions of dollars worth of Iraqi money which was put into the care of the US led coalition to be spent for the benefit of Iraqi people on the reconstruction of their country. He uncovers a shocking story of fraud, incompetence and corruption, unscrupulous foreign contractors who made millions from dodgy contracts, and literally billions of dollars which cannot be properly accounted for