AlterNet: Dahr Jamail - "Business Is The Next Big Casualty In Iraq"

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/45068/

Business Is the Next Big Casualty in Iraq
By Dahr Jamail and Ali Al-Fadhily, IPS News
Posted on December 4, 2006, Printed on December 4, 2006

"Iraq got the foreign investment rules long sought by U.S. corporations," says Antonia Juhasz, a visiting scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington.

Juhasz said the new laws, which were a part of the 100 'Bremer Orders' instituted by former U.S. administrator Paul Bremer when he headed the Coalition Provisional Authority during the first year of the occupation, provided a flood of benefits for U.S. companies.

These included "100 percent repatriation of profits earned in Iraq by foreign companies; 100 percent foreign ownership of Iraqi businesses, including banks; privatisation of Iraq's state owned enterprises; 100 percent immunity for U.S. contractors and soldiers from Iraq's laws; and 'national treatment' which allowed for Iraqis to be all but excluded from the reconstruction for years while the U.S. government paid 50 billion dollars to some 150 U.S. corporations for work in Iraq."

What followed was "a U.S. corporate invasion of Iraq," says Juhasz. "Many companies had their sights set on privatisation in Iraq, also made possible by Bremer, which helps explain their interest in 'major overhauls' rather than getting the systems up and running."

In contrast, there was much state support for businesses under the previous regime, which followed a socialist system under which the government allowed Iraqis to establish their own factories and workshops, and supported them in many ways.

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