October 5, 2006 at 07:36:43

Thom Hartmann; Governing for We The People

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And it's not just the Iraqi people who've gotten screwed. The American taxpayers have footed most of the bill for this failed con demonstration project.

For example, from January 2004 to December 2005, Bechtel earned $1.8 billion in Iraq for assessing and repairing selected power, municipal water, and sewage systems; dredging, repairing, and upgrading the Port of Umm Qasr; rehabilitating selected schools, clinics, and fire stations; reconstructing three key bridges; constructing a key rail line; restoring telephone service to more than 200,000 Baghdad subscribers; and restoring Iraq's main 2,000-kilometer, north-south fiber-optic communications backbone. And yet Iraqis still have unreliable phone service and insufficient clinics.

Fluor Corporation, along with partner AMEC, won a $1.1 billion contract to repair Iraqi water systems in 2003 and has since won further contracts to repair electrical systems. Yet the electrical systems in Iraq are still worse than they were under Saddam.

But the big winner was Vice President Dick Cheney's former company, Halliburton, which has earned $13.6 billion in revenue for providing security to American troops and Iraqi oil installations; its stock price has tripled since the war began, from $20 to $63 per share.

Bush's war in Iraq was a huge success for corporate America. It redistributed wealth from American taxpayers to multinational corporations at an astonishing pace while leaving the Iraqi people literally in the dark.

But as a demonstration project proving that Truman's Marshall Plan was either wrong or a fluke, Iraq has failed the cons. True believers to the end, though, they now say they're going do the same to America. They assure us that once public assistance for health care is privatized (by doing away with Medicare and Medicaid), Social Security is privatized, the unions are finally put out of business, public schools are privatized, and religion is funded by the government to take care of any remaining social needs (Bush gave churches more than $1.4 billion by executive order without an act of Congress during election year 2004), everything, they say, will become a paradise.

Sure, and that's why things are going so well in New Orleans, where the cons have given almost all of the $18 billion allocated so far in reconstruction money to the same big corporations that benefited in Iraq: Halliburton, Bechtel, and Fluor. After one year all that was fixed in New Orleans was the tourist business-which means big dollars for the hotel conglomerates. Most New Orleaneans were still homeless, and most small businesses were still down. As in Iraq the dollars that poured into New Orleans are part of the biggest redistribution of wealth in our country's history, a redistribution from taxpayers to the corporate elite.

Every time such a social and economic structure has been tried in the past, it's led to the hellish world Charles Dickens characterized so well in his many books. And as we head into the third decade of the cons' economic and trade policies being imposed on America, it's becoming increasingly clear that all their talk about domestic privatization plans amount to little more than an undeclared war on the middle class.

What We Can Do
We don't have to sit back and allow the cons to take over. We have a model that works. It's the model Harry Truman used in Europe and Franklin Roosevelt used here to create the Golden Age of the middle class. It's based on the principles the Founders used to create democracy in this country.

Government must be of, by and for We the People. That means government institutions like the military, the prisons, and the electoral process must be publicly controlled, not in the hands of corporations or wealthy individuals. In a democracy We the People must be informed enough to make decisions about our society, which means that education in particular must be both free and public.

Democracy requires that government work for We the People. Its primary function is to define the rules of the game of business in a way that protects working people and allows a middle class to emerge. This includes regulating large predatory companies so that entrepreneurs can survive, providing a strong social safety net and national health care to make us competitive with other nations offering their citizens the same (and because it's necessary for a middle class), and protecting domestic industries (and jobs) by instituting tariffs-import taxes-on goods coming in from cheap-labor countries.

Finally, instead of the cons' "trickle-down" program, we need to return to a commonsense, classical economy that makes sure the people have a solid middle-class income and that trusts the people to spend it wisely. That means we need progressive taxation, pro-labor policies, and a living wage.

Iraqis faced one of the cons' undeclared wars and lost. The American middle class is facing another undeclared war. We can do something about it.

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http://www.thomhartmann.com

Thom Hartmann is a Project Censored Award-winning New York Times best-selling author, and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk program on the Air America Radio Network, live noon-3 PM ET. more...)

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