Three pro-reform activists from the Office to Consolidate Unity have been kidnapped in Iran...,
2003-07-09 17:16:51
| Main |
schrodinger's vote...,
2003-07-11 04:55:18
To the tune of John Ray-esque histrionics:
What do you call it when a military invasion opens access to a foreign market for politically-connected domestic firms, who are granted an exclusive contract that have "no set time limit and no dollar limit and is apparently structured in such a way as to encourage the contract to increase its costs and, consequently, the costs to the taxpayer", where they are escorted as they do their business by military personnel on the tax-payer dime, where local businessmen argue "I can work with any other company to do this job", and where this red-carpet treatment gives the politically-connected domestic firms "a huge head start over potential competitors"?
What's so singularly impossible about laundry mats, truck driving, and hair salons for other firms or Iraqis to manage, anyway?
Do you call this free-trade? Capitalism? Liberation?
I call it crony-socialist imperialism. Put Brezhnev in charge of the East India Company and send them to Iraq. Bush's political benefactors are getting dump-trucks of tax-payer and Iraqi oil money unloaded on them to do things Iraqis could either manage themselves or other firms could competetively bid against with an Iraqi or independent authority to secure competitive contracts. A goddam nomenklatura running our and Iraq's government. I may be some kind of a syndical socialist in the long run, but liberal capitalism is shades of gray lighter than this Bolsheviki Soviet occupation. Hell, they're even got the state censorship and a Stalinist agrarian reform program.
Yee #$&*in haw.
