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homeland security industry, which barely existed before 9/11, has exploded to a size that is now significantly larger than either Hollywood or the music business.
unprecedented convergence of unchecked police powers and unchecked capitalism,
government on a holy mission to ramp up information gathering and you have an information technology industry desperate for new markets.”
big business and big government combining their formidable powers to regulate and control the citizenry.
$60,000 in finessing fees hardly seemed out of proportion.11 Rumsfeld’s adamant refusal to stop making money from disaster while in the top security post in the country affected his job performance in several concrete ways. For much of his first year in office, while he looked to off-load his holdings, Rumsfeld had to recuse himself from an alarming range of crucial policy decisions: according to the Associated Press,
In the Bush administration, the war profiteers aren’t just clamoring to get access to government, they are the government; there is no distinction between the two.
stay in government just long enough to get an impressive title in a department handing out big contracts and to collect inside information on what will sell, then quit and sell access to your former colleagues. Public service is reduced to little more than a reconnaissance mission for future work in the disaster capitalism complex.
project themselves as egghead intellectuals or hawkish realists, driven by ideology and big ideas, not anything so worldly as profit.
endless war abroad, and a security state at home—from the interests of the disaster capitalism complex,
conquered Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia, the Arab world called out as its final frontier.
freedom for Western multinationals to feed off freshly privatized states—that
before the sanctions strangled the country, Iraq had the best education system in the region, with the highest literacy rates in the Arab world—in 1985, 89 percent of Iraqis were literate. By contrast, in Agresto’s home state of New Mexico, 46 percent of the population is functionally illiterate, and 20 percent are unable do “basic math to determine the total on a sales receipt.”
present “free trade” as something other than an imperial project were abandoned.
it treated postwar Iraq as if it was an exciting IPO, brimming with free-wheeling, quick-profit potential. So while Bremer may have stepped on plenty of toes,
that ran at least a thousand missions throughout the country—at a time when 50 percent of the people still lacked drinking water, the traffic lights weren’t working and crime was rampant.
the Iraq experiment entered bold new terrain was that it transformed the invasion, occupation and reconstruction into an exciting, fully privatized new market. This market was created, just as the homeland security complex was, with a huge pot of public money.
tax bases capable of funding domestic social services—the
Where the post-Second World War plan had barred foreign firms from investing, to avoid the perception that they were taking advantage of countries in a weakened state, this scheme did everything possible to entice corporate America (with a few bones tossed to corporations
It was this theft of Iraq’s reconstruction funds from Iraqis, justified by unquestioned, racist assumptions about U.S. superiority and Iraqi inferiority—and not merely the generic demons of “corruption”
Even Iraqis’ low-wage labor wasn’t required for the assembly process because the major U.S. contractors such as Halliburton, Bechtel and the California-based engineering giant Parsons preferred to import foreign workers whom they felt confident they could control.
fully outsourced, hollow government.
Iraq once had one of the most sophisticated industrial economies in the region; now its largest firms couldn’t even get a subsubsubcontract in their own country’s reconstruction.
modernized form of pillage,
sectarian divisions and religious extremism engulfing Iraq cannot be neatly detached from the invasion and the occupation.
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.
privatize Iraq’s two hundred state companies was regarded by many Iraqis as yet another U.S. act of war.
If you believe that what you are called upon to do is wrong, you are unlikely to do it very well.” He adds, “As a way of governing, conservatism is another name for disaster.”
role of government in a corporatist state—to act as conveyor belt for getting public money into private hands, a job for which ideological commitment is far more relevant than elaborate field experience.
never, never become competitive.”33 He appeared to be impervious to the irony that Halliburton, Bechtel, Parsons, KPMG, RTI, Blackwater and all the other U.S. corporations that were in Iraq to take advantage of the reconstruction were part of a vast protectionist racket whereby the U.S. government had created their markets with war, barred their competitors from even entering the race, then paid them to do the work, while guaranteeing them a profit to boot—all at taxpayer expense.
No investment, no accountability, astronomical profits. The double standards
The Bush administration could easily have stipulated that any company receiving U.S. tax dollars had to staff its projects with Iraqis. It could also have contracted for many jobs directly with Iraqi firms. Such simple, common-sense measures did not happen for years because
Freed of all regulations, largely protected from criminal prosecution and on contracts that guaranteed their costs would be covered, plus a profit, many foreign corporations did something entirely predictable: they scammed wildly.
dangerous rise of religious fundamentalism and sectarian conflict. When the occupation proved unable to provide the most basic services, including security, the mosques and local militias filled the vacuum.
furious people, increasingly turning to religious fundamentalism because it’s the only source of power in a hollowed-out
Iraq’s first “sovereign” government would be appointed, not elected.
two of the war’s main goals: access to Iraq for U.S. military bases and full access to Iraq for U.S. multinationals.
Within his first six months in the job, he had canceled a constituent assembly, nixed the idea of electing the drafters of the constitution, annulled and called off dozens of local and provincial elections and then vanquished the beast of national elections—hardly the actions of an idealistic democrat.
“The first devastating attacks on the foreign presence in Iraq, for example, came soon after the United States selected in July 2003 the first Iraqi leadership body, the Iraqi Governing Council:
The private security companies padded their ranks with veterans of the dirty wars in Colombia, South Africa and Nepal.
warden of the Guantánamo Bay prison, was brought to Iraq on his mission to “Gitmoize” the Abu Ghraib prison.17 Two weeks after that, on September 14, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, top commander in Iraq, authorized a wide range of new interrogation procedures based on the Guantánamo model, including deliberate humiliation (called “pride and ego down”), “exploit[ing] Arab fear of dogs,” sensory deprivation (called “light control”), sensory overload (yelling, loud music) and “stress positions.”
The Red Cross has said that U.S. military officials have admitted that somewhere between 70 and 90 percent of the detentions in Iraq were “mistakes.”
If torture was to recede in post-Saddam Iraq, it would have required a focused effort to repudiate such tactics on the part of a new government. Instead, the U.S. embraced torture for its own purposes, setting a degraded standard at
Terrorism in the Grip of Justice is a widely watched TV show on the U.S.-funded Al Iraqiya network. The series is produced in conjunction with the Salvadorized Iraqi commandos.
173 Iraqis were discovered in an Interior Ministry dungeon, some tortured so badly that their skin was falling off, others with drill marks in their skulls and teeth and toenails removed.
Bremer was sent to Iraq to build a corporate utopia; instead, Iraq became a ghoulish dystopia where going to a simple business meeting
their own country is more efficient than hiring lumbering multinationals who don’t know the country or the language, surround themselves with $900-a-day mercenaries and spend as much as 55 percent of their contract budgets on overhead.
sentence to perpetual poverty in a country where 95 percent of government revenues come from oil.42 This was a proposal so wildly unpopular that even Paul Bremer had not dared make it in the first year of occupation.
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.
new breed of contractor that acts as a temp agency for the federal government—it has ongoing, loosely worded contracts and keeps large numbers of potential workers on call, ready to fill whatever positions come up. Calling CACI, whose workers did not need to meet the rigorous training and security clearances required of government
A year and half into the Iraq occupation, the U.S. State Department launched a new branch: the Office of Reconstruction and Stabilization. On any given day, it is paying private contractors to draw up detailed plans to reconstruct twenty-five different countries that may, for one reason or another, find themselves the target of U.S.-sponsored destruction, from Venezuela to
