Re: "Socialist command type economy in Iraq"????

[k hanly <khanly@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Here is part of what is involved. I will have to find the agreement that
Milosevic was asked to sign but refused to sign. It demanded that the
economy be made a capitalist market economy or are you talking about Iraq
only?

http://www.michaelparenti.org/yugoslavia.html

While professing to having been discomforted by the aerial destruction of
Yugoslavia, many liberals and progressives were convinced that "this time"
the U.S. national security state was really fighting the good fight. "Yes,
the bombings don't work. The bombings are stupid!" they said at the time,
"but we have to do something." In fact, the bombings were other than stupid:
they were profoundly immoral. And in fact they did work; they destroyed much
of what was left of Yugoslavia, turning it into a privatized,
deindustrialized, recolonized, beggar-poor country of cheap labor,
defenseless against capital penetration, so battered that it will never rise
again, so shattered that it will never reunite, not even as a viable
bourgeois country.

When the productive social capital of any part of the world is obliterated,
the potential value of private capital elsewhere is enhanced -- especially
when the crisis faced today by western capitalism is one of overcapacity.
Every agricultural base destroyed by western aerial attacks (as in Iraq) or
by NAFTA and GATT (as in Mexico and elsewhere), diminishes the potential
competition and increases the market opportunities for multinational
corporate agribusiness. To destroy publicly-run Yugoslav factories that
produced auto parts, appliances, or fertilizer -- or a publicly financed
Sudanese plant that produced pharmaceuticals at prices substantially below
their western competitors -- is to enhance the investment value of western
producers. And every television or radio station closed down by NATO troops
or blown up by NATO bombs extends the monopolizing dominance of the western
media cartels. The aerial destruction of Yugoslavia's social capital served
that purpose.

In Iraq oil resources are nationalised and although it certainly was not
socialist there was certainly considerable public ownership and planning not
based upon market considerations but upon political policy command type
features. The US will privatise all of this and make everything open to
private investment and "competition"
among crony capitalists. That is what I meant by remnants of a socialist
command type economy. Perhaps publicly owned and non-market, non-capitalist
elements would be less provocative. I didnt mean to suggest that Iraq was
ever basically socialist.

Cheers, Ken Hanly....

http://www.antiwar.com/nagle/n112902.html


In 1968 the Baath came to power in a coup that overthrew the military junta,
and the next year Saddam became vice chairman of the Revolutionary Command
Council, the highest executive body in Iraq. According to an article from
the Online NewsHour:

As vice chairman, he oversaw the nationalization of the oil industry and
advocated a national infrastructure campaign that built roads, schools and
hospitals. The once illiterate Saddam ordered a mandatory literacy program.
Those who did not participate risked three years in jail, but hundreds of
thousands learned to read. Iraq, at this time, created one of the best
public-health systems in the Middle East - a feat that earned Saddam an
award from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization [UNESCO].






----- Original Message -----
From: "Hari Kumar" <hari.kumar@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <PEN-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, May 29, 2003 6:11 PM
Subject: "Socialist command type economy in Iraq"????


> Re: free to market and plunder"; by k hanly:
> "A point not often made is that as in Yugoslavia one aim of regime
> change was to remove whatever elements of a socialist economy that
> remained. This was explicit in the agreement that Milosevic refused to
> sign. Now it is clear that any remnants of  socialist command type
> economy in Iraq that might ration goods other than by dollars is to be
> destroyed."
> Comment:
> Come again? Coudl you specify such pelase?
> Thanks,
> Hari