After an $11 billion accounting scandal sunk the infamous telecommunications conglomerate into bankruptcy, the U.S. General Services Administration banned federal agencies from doing business with WorldCom. So how is a proscribed "company that has demonstrated a flagrant lack of ethics"--the words belong to Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), chairperson of the Senate's Governmental Affairs Committee--poised to land a $900 million Pentagon contract to build a cell phone system for occupied Iraq?
"I was curious about it, because the last time I looked, MCI {division of WorldCom} has never built out a wireless network," comments Len Lauer of Sprint.
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Demonstrating the brand of lightning-quick entrepreneurship traditionally treasured by free-market-loving Americans, Batelco raced into Iraq after the U.S. invasion and installed cell towers throughout Baghdad. With half of land lines out of service and Saddam's 1990 plan to build cell towers stymied by U.N. trade sanctions, Baghdadis welcomed the new service. But the CPA shut down Batelco and threatened to confiscate its $5 million of equipment. Now the CPA(Coalition Provisional Authority) is now prohibiting companies more than 10 percent owned by foreign governments from bidding on civilian cell business in U.S.-occupied Iraq. That eliminates Batelco and most other Middle East-based telecommunications companies and, according to analyst Lars Godell of Forrester Research in Amsterdam, leaves MCI with "a head start."
Ted Rall Yahoo News Aug 20
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This is the era ushered in by Sept. 11, war and repression unleashed not by a single empire, but a global franchise of them. In Indonesia, Israel, Spain, Colombia, the Philippines and China, governments have latched onto to Mr. Bush's deadly WoTtm and are using it to erase their opponents and tighten their grip on power.
Last week, another war was in the news. In Argentina, the senate voted to repeal two laws that granted immunity to the sadistic criminals of the 1976-1983 dictatorship. At the time, the generals called their campaign of extermination a "war on terror," using a series of kidnappings and violent attacks by leftist groups as an excuse to seize power.
The vast majority of the 30,000 people who were disappeared during the dictatorship weren't terrorists; they were union leaders, artists, teachers, psychiatrists. As with all wars on terrorism, terrorism wasn't the target -- it was the excuse to wage the real war on people who dared to dissent.
Naomi Klein Globe and Mail(CA) August 27, 2003/CommonDreams August 28
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{Is it dissent they're afraid of? Maybe. Though I think it's more accurately what that dissent, some of it, points toward. Right living. Moral action. Sacrifice for an open-ended healthy future, for something larger than our own narrow genetic strain.
This is not politics, it's biology. It's biologically driven and its goals are biological results.
Politics is one of the forms the conflict takes. So is war. So is the terrorism of oppression. But so is religious coercion, social manipulation, Pavlovian economics, any of a dozen strategies already in place. Dissent is the wetlands of ideas. The fetid marshes of thought and expression. The same inept villains that have tried so hard to rid the world of swamps are behind the attempts to kill dissent. That is not a co-incidence. Same guys, same goals.}
