Published
by
dano
10 months, 2 weeks ago
in Asides and Current Events
.

The Great Iraq Swindle: How Bush Allowed an Army of For-Profit Contractors to Invade the U.S. Treasury (from Rolling Stone)

In a much-ballyhooed example of favoritism, the White House originally installed a clown named Jim O’Beirne at the relevant evaluation desk in the Department of Defense. O’Beirne proved to be a classic Bush villain, a moron’s moron who judged applicants not on their Arabic skills or their relevant expertise but on their Republican bona fides; he sent a twenty-four-year-old who had never worked in finance to manage the reopening of the Iraqi stock exchange, and appointed a recent graduate of an evangelical university for home-schooled kids who had no accounting experience to manage Iraq’s $13 billion budget. James K. Haveman, who had served as Michigan’s community-health director under a GOP governor, was put in charge of rehabilitating Iraq’s health-care system and decided that what this war-ravaged, malnourished, sanitation-deficient country most urgently needed was . . . an anti-smoking campaign.

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  1. 1 james Showers
    10 months, 2 weeks ago. Quote

    Dear Dan,If the specific examples of these appointments are true - I am still further astonished at the gullibility of the American people. I know it’s not all Americans. But is it that the supporters of this administation (and this ‘culture’) are blinded? And if so, by what? Religion, patriotism, dynasty-worship, a hope for a slice of the fat cake, too many irradiated burgers?
    In Europe we simply do not understand such blindness, and think of you’all as stupid - which is only partly true, I feel; is it that Mom and apple pie values extend to all authority, perhaps?
    From this side of the issue, the self serving, corrupting and amoral actions of your government are a disaster for a civilised world.
    And so we are guilty of writing off (by being unable to understand) a people whose heart is in the right place, but whose spokespeople have almost no ability to think about or understand a world outside the USA.
    It must be painful for you to see the issues and know they continue unchecked, mainatining America’s position as the most hated nation in the world since Nazi Germany.
    There was a wonderful New Yorker cartoon years ago of a whole line of cars pulling off the highway to go to a fast food restuarant called ‘Burger on a String’. In the parking lot the punters are all quite bewildered by the patties and relishes and pickles dropping out of their string-suspended burgers onto the tarmac. That says it all about US mass culture.
    Keep saying no, my friend. I like what you are doing. You cannot be alone over ther.

    Warm good wishes

    James

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