Democarcy Now!: Iraqi Oil Workers Fight Privatization and Occupation

[Jack Rabbit]

From Democracy Now!
Broadcast Monday June 13

Iraqi Oil Workers Fight Privatization and Occupation
By Amy Goodman

Though we don't often hear about the labor movement in Iraq, the country has a long history of union activism that dates back to the 1920’s when the British first began exporting oil from the country. Saddam Hussein banned unions for public workers in 1987 because he feared a progressive movement would topple his dictatorship. When the U.S occupation of Iraq began, the U.S authorities refused to repeal that law. Instead in September of 2003, Paul Bremer, the top U.S. official overseeing the Iraqi occupation, issued an order to privatize the country’s state owned industries, which include its oil industry.

But the Iraqi people are speaking out against privatization. At the end of May, a large conference was held in Basra that focused on the threat of privatization of Iraq’s oil fields. Oil workers voiced their opposition to privatization and to selling their oil to foreign companies at discounted prices. They also called for an end to the occupation and a withdrawal of foreign troops.

• Hassan Juma'a Awad al-Asade, president of the General Union of Oil Workers in Iraq. He is touring the U.S. along with five other trade unionists from Iraq. He joins us in our studio in D.C. Mohamed Taam is translating.
• David Bacon, a veteran labor journalist who recently returned from Basra. He has an op-ed piece about Iraqi unions in yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle.

Read more.

[rodeodance]

1. of course Bremner would not want unions--good for the Iraqi people!!

[Jack Rabbit]

2. The war was not about liberation

Neoliberalism is the colonialism department of neoconservatism.
--Granny D, Speech at Hood River, Oregon, August 2003

I think Granny D has it backward. Actually, neoconservatism is the enforcement department of neoliberalism.

Removing Saddam was an attractive idea that could easily be draped in altruistic garb, but the American neoconservatives have no more regard for the Iraqis than did the Baathists.

This is a war against the Iraqi people. They are being mugged for their resources and national assets. As Naomi Klein said about the same time Saddam's statue was being pulled down in Baghdad:

Some argue that it's too simplistic to say this war is about oil. They're right. It's about oil, water, roads, trains, phones, ports and drugs. And if this process isn't halted, "free Iraq" will be the most sold country on earth.

Saddam's den of murderers have been replaced by a den of thieves led by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. The purpose of the war and occupation is impose on Iraq a neoliberal economic model that has been rejected by popular expression in Argentina, Venezuela, Brazil and most emphatically last week in Bolivia. The model has been around long enough for people in developing nations to recognize it for what it is: a way to use debt and so-called free trade agreements as leverage to force developing nation to hand over control of their wealth to transnational corporations based in the west, mainly in the United States. Since voters in developing nations can no longer be hoodwinked into accepting a neoliberal arrangement, it must be forced on them by more direct means.

The Downing Street document shows unequivocally that neoconservative talk of weapons and mass destruction and terrorist ties was just an excuse for the invasion and the actual facts didn't matter. The neocons were willing to call this war anything except what it really is: classic colonial piracy.