Dying for a McDonalds in Iraq (ATimes)

[leftchick]

http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EJ24Ak02.html

Dying for a McDonald's in Iraq
By Herbert Docena

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So who pays?
The amounts to be pledged at this conference could, therefore, be seen as an investment with expected returns. How big or small that investment will depend on what each donor thinks the prospects for profits will be. This in turn depends on how big a piece of the pie the US is willing to give up. Those in Madrid will need to report back to their capitals with an answer to the question: was the donation worth every cent?

What they won't be eager to tell the folks back home, however, is where the money they just donated came from and to whom it is being given. Representatives will beat their chests and package their donations as acts of charity towards those poor and war-ravaged Iraqis.

<snip>

Who profits?
Smiling McDonald's attendants may start ushering in customers to their branch in Iraq next year - but only after Bechtel had switched back the lights, Halliburton had rebuilt the bridges, Flour had paved the roads, MCI had set up the mobile network system, Research Triangle Institute had trained the managers and bureaucrats, Abt Associates had restored the hospitals, the military-industrial complex and the private armies had restored security, and the multinational force had pacified the resistance.

The Iraqis and the taxpayers who are bankrolling the occupation better not know to whom they're being made to give their checks. Bechtel sold chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein back in the 1980s and had been accused of gross overpricing in Massachusetts and Bolivia. MCI was involved in history's biggest accounting scandal and has totally no experience building cell networks. Halliburton had been accused of inflating costs and had even settled a number of fraud charges. Dyncorp had been accused of covering up sex trafficking. Flour faces a multibillion dollar lawsuit for exploiting black workers and making security guards wear Ku Klux Klan robes to attack their workers.

....disgusting!