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    new boss worse than the old boss..., 2007-03-27 09:51:21 | Main | new boss admittedly deadlier than old boss..., 2007-03-28 21:06:45

    new boss tighter wad than old boss:

    zakaria claims that so and so claims that:

    Paul Brinkley, a talented deputy under secretary of Defense, is trying to get the bulk of these state-owned factories up and running. He's already restarted a bus factory in Iskandariyah, south of Baghdad, and the experience has been telling. Hundreds of workers still in the area showed up for work and the machines are now humming busily. There have been no attacks on the factory. "The insurgents attack people working for the police, Army or the Americans. They do not want to alienate locals trying to make ends meet," said one official working on the project.

    Of the original 193 state enterprises, 143 could be restarted soon, says Brinkley. Management and workers are desperate to get jobs. The problem is money. Brinkley points out that his next target, a ceramics factory in Ramadi, is only waiting for two generators before it can reopen. They cost $1 million each. But funds for this purpose are hard to find. Washington has pledged more than $18 billion to fund "reconstruction" in Iraq but will not appropriate a cent to start up state-owned Iraqi companies. The Iraqi government has billions in oil revenue of its own but is so dysfunctional that it cannot move a new project through the system. So the factory is idle. A major global consulting firm has reviewed Iraq's state-owned enterprises and estimated that it would cost $100 million to restart all of them and employ more than 150,000 Iraqis—$100 million. That's as much money as the American military will spend in Iraq in the next 12 hours.

    But that'd be, uh, "socialist", a stage of economic doom and gloom we invaded Iraq to liberate them from. Iraqis are now free to exercise their market preference for idleness, hiding in darkened rooms from the abundant range of consumer preferred gangs of gun toting trolls that have arisen since the invasion due to a surge in the demand for random ultraviolence.


:: posted by buermann @ 2007-03-27 10:53:04 CST | link





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