Reconstruction Looting

[RickSp]

US audit finds 'spectacular' waste of funds in Iraq
"Spectacular misuse of tens of millions of dollars."

That is what The Australian says an audit by the the US Special Inspector-General for Iraq Reconstruction of the former Coalition Provisional Authority office in Hilla, Iraq, has uncovered. The newspaper says the report details bundles of money stashed in filing cabinets, a US soldier who gambled away thousands of dollars, and stacks of newly minted notes distributed without receipts. The findings come almost a year after Stuart Bowen, the Inspector-General, found that more than $9 billion of Iraq's oil revenues, which was disbursed in 2004 by the then US-led CPA, could not be accounted for. The audit, released on Wednesday ... describes a country in the months after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein awash with US dollars and a "wild west" atmosphere where even multi-million-dollar contracts were paid for in cash ... The huge sums in cash were paid out with little or no supervision and often without any paperwork, the reconstruction spending audit found. The report found problems with almost 2000 contracts worth $US88.1 million. The New York Times reports that the new audit found problems "in an area that includes half the land mass in Iraq, with new findings in the southern and central provinces of Anbar, Karbala, Najaf, Wasit, Babil, and Qadisiya."

I am beginning to understand when conservatives claim that we are "liberators" not "occupiers".

liberate(v) -(Am)<slang>to steal; to rip off.

[Osborn F Enready]

A great example of Bush's idea of Liberation below, as referring to the idea of liberation as described by Rick above....

Clippet from: http://www.newstatesman.com/200412130016.htm
Today, we can see the East India Company as the first "imperial corporation", the very design of which drove it to market domination, speculative excess and the evasion of justice. Like the modern multinational, it was eager to avoid the mere interplay of supply and demand. It jealously guarded its chartered monopoly of imports from Asia. But it also wanted to control the sources of supply by breaking the power of local rulers in India and eliminating competition so that it could force down its purchase prices.

By controlling both ends of the chain, the company could buy cheap and sell dear. This meant organising coups against local rulers and placing puppets on the throne. By the middle of the 18th century, the company was deliberately breaching the terms of its commercial concessions in Bengal by trading in prohibited domestic goods and selling its duty-free passes to local merchants. Combining economic muscle with extensive bribery and the deployment of its small but effective private army, the company engineered a series of "revolutions" that gave it territorial as well as economic control.

After Robert Clive's victory at the Battle of Palashi in 1757, the company literally looted Bengal's treasury. It loaded the country's gold and silver on to a fleet of more than a hundred boats and sent it downriver to Calcutta. In one stroke, Clive netted a cool £2.5m (more than £200m today) for the company, and £234,000 (£20m) for himself. Historical convention views Palashi as the first step in the creation of the British empire in India. It is perhaps better understood as the company's most successful business deal.

It was the unrivalled quality and cheapness of textiles that had lured the East India Company to Bengal, and it would be Bengal's weavers who felt the full force of the company's new-found market power. Never rich, the weavers nevertheless had a better standard of living than their counterparts in 18th-century England. At a time when the British state was intervening on the side of the employer - for example, to set maximum levels for wages - India's weavers were able to act collectively, aiding their ability to negotiate favourable prices. But the East India Company eliminated the weavers' freedom to sell to other merchants, and so crushed their limited but important market autonomy. It imposed prices 40 per cent below the market rate, and enforced them with violence and imprisonment. Many weavers were driven to despair. One account reports that, among the winders of raw silk, "instances have been known of their cutting off their thumbs to prevent their being forced to wind silk".

As the company transformed itself from a modest trading venture into a powerful corporate machine, so its systems of governance completely failed to cope with the new responsibilities that it faced. As Philip Francis, one of its leading critics, put it, in- stead of seeking "moderate but permanent profit", the company had recklessly pursued "immediate and excessive returns". Corruption assumed epidemic proportions and speculation overtook its shares, stoked up by insider trading led by Clive and other executives.

In the history of financial crises, the South Sea Bubble is often regarded as the only premodern crash worthy of note. But the East India Company also engineered its own stock-market boom, ending in a share-price slump that rocked the world. The company's share price doubled in the decade following Palashi, stoked by ever more extraordinary acquisitions, such as the takeover of Bengal's entire tax system in 1765. In London, the company's management and shareholders fought for control of a money machine they believed would yield unlimited returns. A swarm of "bulls" and "bears" descended on the company's shares, with shareholders voting for a doubling of the annual dividend from 6 to 12 per cent in order to cash in on the new-found wealth. This upward spiral of "infectious greed" - to use a phrase employed by Alan Greenspan, chairman of the US Federal Reserve, more than two centuries later - came to an end in May 1769 when news of renewed conflict in India reached the London markets. The share price fell 16 per cent in a single month, and would continue a downward course for the next 15 years, reaching the depths in July 1784 after a fall of 55 per cent.

Yet the human tragedy was just beginning. In Bengal, the annual monsoon rains had failed. But what turned a manageable natural disaster into a catastrophe was the manipulation of local grain markets by East India speculators, driving up the price of food beyond the reach of the poor. "As soon as the dryness of the season foretold the approaching dearness of rice," went one eyewitness account, "our Gentlemen in the Company's service were as early as possible in buying up all they could lay hold of." The situation was compounded by the company's decision to increase the rate of tax to ensure that revenue levels remained stable. Estimates vary, but up to ten million people may have died of starvation. When the full story became known in Britain, there was fury at the firm's negligence. As Horace Walpole wrote at the time: "We have murdered, deposed, plundered, usurped - nay, what think you of the famine in Bengal, in which millions perished, being caused by a monopoly of provisions by the servants of the East Indies."

The company's fortunes had now turned sharply downwards. By the end of 1772 it was, in effect, bankrupt. A final slump in its shares precipitated a Europe-wide financial crisis, and forced the company, begging for a bailout, into the arms of the government. But not only was the East India Company the mother of the modern multinational corporation, it also stimulated one of the first movements for corporate reform.

Well-versed in the history of the Roman Republic, Britain's elite feared that, just as the proceeds of Rome's conquest of Asia (western Anatolia) had been used to subvert its ancient freedoms, so the company's takeover of Bengal would bring despotism back home. If left unchecked, argued one editorial, the company could "repeat the same cruelties in this island which have disgraced humanity and deluged with native and innocent blood the plains of India". Prior to his conservative turn during the French revolution, Edmund Burke pressed repeatedly for the company to be made accountable to parliament and for its system of exploitation to be ended. "Every rupee of profit made by an Englishman is lost for ever to India," he concluded, a judgement that would probably be echoed today by millions of people working at the wrong end of the multinational bargain.

East India Company, Halliburton, they are all the same. The Neocon fascination with Corporatism is staggering.

[RickSp]

Bush may talk of "free trade" but by his actions it is clear that he is a mercantilist, no different than King George III.

What this latest audit suggests is that the Bush administration's incompetence exceeds even its arrogance, which is impressive.