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=> The Corporate Invasion

Posted by Maggie (Guest) - Tuesday, August 23 2005, 21:20:01 (CEST)
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THE CORPORATE INVASION
Since the invasion of Iraq, the US has imposed sweeping illegal privatization laws, slashed corporate taxes and tried to impose wage cuts on Iraqi workers. At the same time, it has handed out billions of dollars of contracts, for “reconstruction”, to well-connected US and British corporations. While huge profits have been made, Iraq’s impoverished population has seen few, if any, benefits. Medicine and electricity remain in short supply and Iraqi children continue to die from drinking dirty water.

Now the IMF is seeking to cut a deal with Iraq’s new, unelected, government – robbing Iraqis of their future economic freedom and threatening to impoverish them still further…

Between 26-28 April, 2004, representatives from 300 companies - including Shell, Exxon/Mobil, Chevron/Texaco and US arms manufacturer Raytheon – attended a business conference in London entitled 'Iraq Procurement 2004: Meet the Buyers', meeting members of the US occupation authority, the US-installed Iraqi “government” and wealthy Iraqi business-people to discuss ‘the wide range of … opportunities available’ to make a profit out of the increasingly blood-soaked occupation of Iraq.

The conference took place in the context of:

-A series of new laws, passed by the US last September, that ‘effectively
put [Iraq] up for sale’ to foreign investors (Guardian, 22 Sept. 2003)

-A growing body of evidence that the way in which the Bush administration
has been ‘treating [reconstruction] contracts as prizes to be handed to their friends’ has been ‘ delaying Iraq's recovery, with potentially catastrophic consequences’ (economist Paul Krugman, New York Times, 30th Sept. 2003)

-The ongoing repression of workers rights in Iraq (keeping Saddam’s harsh
1987 labor law on the books, trying to impose big wage cuts, raiding union offices, arresting union leaders and refusing to grant the unemployed’s demand for jobs or benefits)

-US attempts to ‘restructure’ – rather than cancel - Iraq’s odious debts, which are likely to ‘rob Iraq of [its] economic freedom, by requiring that it adhere to an IMF structural adjustment program.

-Killing of over 600 people in the US siege of Fallujah, ‘the vast majority of [whom] were women, children and the elderly’ according to the director of the town’s general hospital (Guardian, 12 April, 2003)

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