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Saturday 
03 January 2009
Recession is the new Iraq
There’s a video that circulated on the interwebs, around the beginning of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, that still haunts me til this day. It was a clip from a seminar of sorts, exploring the varying business opportunities that could be had as a result of the war, both in terms of war support and reconstruction work.
And, while no amount of Googling helped me find the video clip, I did, in the process, find plenty to reassure me that I hadn’t imagined this sociopathic capitalist opportunism.
The invasion began on March 20th, and this was posted 6 days later on MSN Money:
Who’ll profit from rebuilding Iraq?
Billions will be poured into roads, bridges, schools, hospitals and oil fields, but picking which companies will benefit isn’t all that easy. Here are caveats for investors, plus some stocks with promise…
Less than a month later, this appeared on Entrepreneur.com
Iraq Reconstruction Spells Opportunity
Small businesses are lining up to win contracts for the rebuilding of Iraq. Have you taken a number yet?Though the war in Iraq is still raging in parts of the country, the battle among companies to rebuild the shattered nation has already begun. And while the war riveted the world over a span of several weeks, the rebuilding will take much longer, and cost much more, than the conflict itself. At the same time, since the reconstruction will be an extremely costly and time-consuming affair, it could prove a boon to American companies that secure contracts to rebuild Iraq.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. We all know about Halliburton, Robert Greenwald tells us the gory details about Blackwater, and of course insult to injury: by January 2005 word got out that, “Almost $9bn (£4.7bn) of Iraqi oil revenue is missing from a fund set up to reconstruct the country.”
Some folks have made billions of dollars from our invasion and occupation of a country that was no real threat to us, while the conservative numbers of Iraqi civillian dead courtesy of Iraq Body Count are 90,249 – 98,517. (I say “conservative”, because the number (655, 000) from a study that came out over two years ago, is just so painful to think about, and I don’t want to believe it’s accurate.)
So, 2008 comes around, the U.S. faces it’s latest crisis, this time a financial markets meltdown so huge the country’s not seen anything like it since the Great Depression, and some folks are almost magically in a position to make a killing:
From TPM:
A short while back the Fed announced a new program to buy up to $600 billion worth of mortgage backed securities. Remember, this was what the TARP was originally supposed to do. But then Paulson decided to invest money directly into the banks to recapitalize them. And then the Fed decided on its own to do basically the same thing on its own. They’ve already bought up $100 billion worth and they’ve now hired BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, PIMCO and Wellington Management Company to purchase and manage $500 billion more worth of the stuff.
Why did these four companies get the contract? That’s none of your business. The Fed just decided.
Americans are being fleeced once again by big business.
Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism comes to mind. It’s a must read and explores in much more detail how this sick system is thriving while people suffer and die.
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So what’s Obama going to do about it?
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By the way, is Tim Kaine “change we can believe in”?
http://guerillawomentn.blogspot.com/2009/01/kaine-to-chair-dnc-feel-change.html