At the Doura power station, a large oil-fired plant that supplies much of Baghdad's electricity, a single engineer is working with an acetylene torch to repair a much-patched heat exchanger.
The site is strewn with rusted pipes, broken gauges and refuse. Only two of its four turbines are in working order. An aged Fiat gas turbine wheezes along on low-pressure natural gas.
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Well, it isn't just Iraq. For decades the US corporate state has specialized in eliminating technical labor and so naturally there is very little or none within immediate reach for rebuilding Iraq.
We are supposed to live in a post-industrial economy remember? If that is even close to accurate, how is such a US based corporate sector supposed to re-build another country's public utilities and industrial base? We've just spent the last twenty to thirty years of class warfare rotting our own public utilities and industrial base for the sake of neoliberal capital's world hegemony.
Chuck Grimes