Paul Bremer's promulgated Order 39 (a "capitalist dream")

[donsu]

http://www.counterpunch.com/


Chapter 39, Order 39
Torture and Neo-Liberalism with Sycorax in Iraq


a large -snip-


On 19 September 2003 Paul Bremer promulgated Order 39, a "capitalist dream," according to The Economist. Two hundred state companies would be privatized, foreign firms can retain 100% ownership of Iraqi banks, mines, and factories, and 100% of the profits can be removed from Iraq. This was the charter of privatization ­ public companies became private, contracts were private, and all was up for sale. Order 39 promoted both privatization and globalization because foreign companies were now permitted to buy and invest in Iraq companies, repatriating 100% of their profits. The moment of invasion and occupation was accompanied by putting Iraq up for sale. The brutal actions designed to 'free a sovereign country' submitted it forthwith to the ravages of globalization. It is not the corruption that is the principle of exploitation; it is the policy of expropriation.

The neo-liberal project, or capitalism unrestrained, or the universal application of buying and selling was established in Iraq by Order 39. At the same time Abu Ghraib prisoners were degraded, abused, and tortured in violation of Chapter 39 of Magna Carta. The coincidence is curious, and it becomes curiouser. The Structural Adjustment Policies of the International Monetary Fund, or SAPs, were the principle instrument by which global capital enforced neo-liberalism on exploited nations. At the same time the Pentagon's secret man-hunting and torturing outfit was also called an SAP, or, special-access program, responsible for out-sourcing victims to torture chambers in Singapore, Thailand, and Pakistan (Hersh, p.16). Indeed, I remember during the full hey day of JFK in 1961, my father, the U.S. Embassy political counselor, returning home for lunch, pale and aghast, from a tour of the Karachi police headquarters. At the table he was unable to swallow food, barely able even to speak, but willing at least to tell us the truth of what had passed before his eyes. This must explain surely why they make up these absurd euphemisms, as they could not stomach the tortures otherwise. (A Bureau of Imperial Nomenclature?)

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The regime prevailing in the U.S.A. is lawless, cruel, and inhuman, and though it will plead that its atrocities are 'accidents,' or that they should be exculpated having been motivated in 'good faith,' such excuses scarcely scratch the surface of its crimes, because its deepest purposes and strategic goals are the very primitive accumulation and endless dominion which characterized its beginnings in the Age of Plunder. 'Structural adjustment' and 'special access' are but new names for an old crime. That they were encouraged by order 39 must remind us of chapter 39 of the Charter of Liberty which must be dusted off from the shelf in the cabinet of quaint curios and become once again one of the politically potent potions for Sycorax and Iraq.
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[annabanana]

1. ............it is not an empowering feeling

to be faced with this scope of perfidy. (the spitballs in the arsenal are ours)

[Fovea]

2. The wrong people are in Gitmo

IMO.
What are the chances the Bremer will die in his bed of old age?
Or any of the corporate buccaneers of Hallibrutin or KKKBR, for that matter, what will their billions gain them, if the have to live in constant fear? No gate can stop the blowback, and they will end up as prisoners of their own obscene excess.

[hangloose]

3. Yes, well how does this if into the espoused propaganda that

were on Iraqi soil to free the Iraqi people from a madman? To an unbiased witness of the events unfolding in Iraq it would appear the USA is on a path of depopulation and subjugation of the population to allow the unfettered implementation of chapter 39. Here's to the new world order, give them a false sense that they control their destiny and at the same time strip them of their future.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

4. But..but..It's not about money..it's about "democracy"..isn't it?

The same kind we have here in 'Murka. Politicians bought and paid for with the hard earned money of CEOs. Neo-colonialists? Not us.