From small things (e.g., bananas, catfish, steel) to big things (e.g., oil, insurance), the power elite take many (military, economic, and diplomatic) actions that benefit some lucky companies at the expense of others. I don't think that there has been, or can be, any imperial venture that would benefit all or even most capitalists in the short term.
As for privatization, it's not a policy innovation -- it's a preferred principle:
***** [Nicole Colson] FOLEY ANNOUNCED announced the list of state enterprises to be sold off. He describes his goal as making Iraq into "a fully thriving capitalist economy." What kind of impact is this privatization having on Iraqi society?
[David Bacon] WELL, IT hasn't happened -- yet. Privatization is something that they're talking about, and they're even holding conferences in London and Washington once or twice a week where they bring in U.S. corporations and basically show them what is potentially available in terms of the assets in Iraq that can be sold off. But, they've also passed new laws that provide a framework for this to take place in. They've issued a new law called Order No. 39, that allows 100 percent foreign ownership and repatriation of profits, and another law that establishes a flat tax of 15 percent -- something that they've never been able to get through the Congress here, but that they can just dictate in Iraq because nobody can tell them no.
But, that's as far as it's gone, for a number of reasons. One is that the security situation is such that I don't think that they can get buyers to come in and buy the stuff yet. So they have to get that settled. Also, they have to have a government in place that can legally sell state enterprises. The occupation authority itself can't legally do that because international law prohibits it. In order to reassure those foreign companies that will come in and buy these assets that they're not going to be challenged 10 years later for having illegally bought something that didn't belong to the sellers, they have to have an Iraqi government in place that's willing and able to do that. And they don't have that yet. So there's still some things that need to take place. . . .
<http://www.isreview.org/issues/33/bacon.shtml> *****
In theory, handing over "sovereignty" to a pro-US "interim" Iraqi government on June 30, 2004 can solve the legal conundrum that Bacon describes, as long as the "interim" government gets legitimated by the United Nations and the like.
The trouble for Washington, however, is that it is (perhaps to its surprise) unable to find or create a social force that is reliably pro-American and can exercise hegemony over the rest of Iraq with a little help from it. -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>