Great article touching on important stories as well as the outlines of our Corporate Imperialism. Sadly must snip it here, so that it barely makes sense, but you can just follow the link!
My choice of headline could have also read:
IRAQI PARLIAMENT SET TO RATIFY FINAL OIL GRAB BY WESTERN CORPS
http://counterpunch.org/werther01082007.htmlJanuary 8, 2007
Parable of the Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone
Why We Fight
By WERTHER
(...)
As is our habit, we are wont to read The Washington Post, bulletin board of the Beltway illuminati, in Pravda fashion, from back to front, concentrating on subject matter mentioned three quarters of the way through the article. Let us take the Wednesday, 27 December edition of the Meyer-Graham newsletter as an example.
(...)
How is it that so many wars have an act of U.S. complicity in their origin? Is it merely the law of unintended consequences, or is there another logic at work? Perhaps the crucial mechanism in Mogadishu, and Kabul, and Baghdad is best described by that hoary Pentagon slang phrase, "the self-licking ice cream cone." <3>
(...)
"The BearingPoint employees, who work out of offices in the State Department, arrange the meetings, set the agendas, take notes and provide summaries of the discussions, the official said. They also maintain the Web site of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad."
As any veteran of bureaucratic wars surely knows, whoever arranges meetings, sets agendas, and takes the official notes determines the policy, regardless of who is nominally in charge. But who is BearingPoint, and what interest do they have in Iraq? The media watchdog Sourcewatch.org provides the following:
In July of 2003, BearingPoint was awarded a contract by USAID worth $79.5 million to facilitate Iraq's economic recovery with a two-year option worth a total of $240,162,688. Responsibilities in this contract include:
1. Creating Iraq's budget.
2. Writing business law.
3. Setting up tax collection.
4. Laying out trade and customs rules.
5. Privatize state-owned enterprises by auctioning them off or issuing Iraqis shares in the enterprises.
6. Reopen banks and jump-start the private sector by making small loans of $100 to $10,000.
7. Wean Iraqis from the U.N. oil-for-food program, the main source of food for 60% of the population.
8. Issue a new currency and set exchange rates.
One is surprised that BearingPoint is not charged with rewriting Iraq's national anthem and choosing the members of its Olympic team. But, again, who is BearingPoint? That is hardly a name that rolls off the tongue like Microsoft, or Morgan Guaranty Trust.
(snip: discovery of how Bearing Point is KPMG successor, which acquired the Arthur Andersen network after its liquidation...)
Bingo. The firm responsible for the corrupt accounting that papered over the Enron scandal, the greatest corporate failure in U.S. history, lives on, assimilated by BearingPoint. And it steers U.S. policy on Iraq as the government blindly lurches towards escalation, a policy ostensibly supported by only 11 percent of the U.S. population. <5>
(...)
As a Texas plutocrat marinated in petroleum, Bush is merely acting out his destiny, and that of his class. Should the reader need reminding, one can always turn to the more iconoclastic foreign press. While the great American dailies are debating whether "we" need 20,000 additional troops or 40,000, or are limning the Napoleonic qualities of the new Iraq commander, General David Petraeus, the London Independent reveals the following:
"Iraq's massive oil reserves, the third-largest in the world, are about to be thrown open for large-scale exploitation by Western oil companies under a controversial law which is expected to come before the Iraqi parliament within days.
(...)
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