"Fiscal Conservatives" Raid The Treasury
It's been my theory all along that this war was started as an excuse to enrich the corporate elite and raid the treasury. This story justifies many of my suspicions.
The auditors have so far referred more than a hundred contracts, involving billions of dollars paid to American personnel and corporations, for investigation and possible criminal prosecution. They have also discovered that $8.8bn that passed through the new Iraqi government ministries in Baghdad while Bremer was in charge is unaccounted for, with little prospect of finding out where it has gone. A further $3.4bn appropriated by Congress for Iraqi development has since been siphoned off to finance "security". .....When the Iraqi Governing Council asked Bremer why a contract to repair the Samarah cement factory was costing $60m rather than the agreed $20m, the American representative reportedly told them that they should be grateful the coalition had saved them from Saddam........Pilfering was rife. Millions of dollars in cash went missing from the Iraqi Central Bank. Between $11m and $26m worth of Iraqi property sequestered by the CPA was unaccounted for. The payroll was padded with hundreds of ghost employees. Millions of dollars were paid to contractors for phantom work. Some $3,379,505 was billed, for example, for "personnel not in the field performing work" and "other improper charges" on just one oil pipeline repair contract. .....At the same time, the IAMB discovered that Iraqi oil exports were unmetered. Neither the Iraqi State Oil Marketing organization nor the American authorities could give a satisfactory explanation for this. "The only reason you wouldn't monitor them is if you don't want anyone else to know how much is going through," one petroleum executive told me.
And this is only a taste. These are the new robber barons. This makes "oil for food" look like sophomoric hijinks. Such hypocrites we have on the right.
posted by Ron at 11:30 PM
3 Comments:
With such policies, increasing fuel prices (which increases the cost of about everything) and the housing bubble the nation's system will have to expand markets even more. It probably won't be able to in a cost effective manner. Sadly, looks like this "son of Herbert" will also be presiding over a hard recession. This will inordinatly effect everyone but the greed-mongers who brought it on, at least the one's who have enough wealth, who are actually a minority; to paraphrase, global corporatism is largely built with non-global corporate hands. So, keep waving the flag, get the Muslims because the Koran will make them do it and no gay marraiges, 'cause i'm proud to be ah amerikun whar at least i no i'm fharee. Have a nice life, if you can.
9.) Corporate Power is Protected
The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.
The Donkey took and edited this material from:
http://www.publiceye.org/tooclose/pop2fasc.html
Distressed middle-class populists in Weimar launched bitter attacks against both the government and big business. This populist surge was later exploited by the Nazis which parasitized the forms and themes of the populists and moved their constituencies far to the right through ideological appeals involving demagoguery, scapegoating, and conspiracism.
==="The Nazis expressed the populist yearnings of middle-class constituents and National Socialists cast themselves as representatives of the commonweal, of an allegedly betrayed and neglected German public breaking social barriers of status and caste, and celebrating at least rhetorically the populist ideal of the people's community..."
This populist rhetoric of the Nazis, focused the pre-existing "resentments of ordinary middle-class Germans against the bourgeois 'establishment' and against economic and political privilege, and by promising the resolution of these resentments in a forward-looking, technologically capable volkisch 'utopia,'"
The populist rhetoric of fascism is selective and illusive:
==="individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the People is a theatrical fiction....There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People....Wherever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell...Fascism."
So the Nazis as a movement appeared to provide for radical social change while actually moving its constituency to the right.
The success of fascist movements in attracting members from reformist populist constituencies is due to many complex overlapping factors, but key factors are certainly the depth of the economic and social crisis and transformation of, and the degree of anger and frustration of those who see their demands not being met. Desperate people turn to desperate solutions.
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