question about Iraq
On his radio show yesterday, satirist Harry Shearer said that the British GUARDIAN reported that the US was going to end the UN food program in Iraq in January. Is there any truth to this? Jim Subject: [PEN-L] Quote du Jour: Paul Bremer on economic justice I have to say that it is curious to me to have a country [like Iraq - JB] whose per capita income, GDP, is about $800 ... that a county that poor should be required to pay reparations to countries whose per capita GDP is a factor of 10 times that for a war which all of the Iraqis who are now in government opposed - Paul Bremer (in reply to a question whether, given Iraq's weakened economic condition, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia would accept a delay in the compensation payments related to Hussein's invasion - the external debt of Iraq is currently estimated at US$100 billion)
Re: question about Iraq
I am out of town right now using remote access, so I will only give a limited reply - yes. This was first established by the big Security Council Resolution at the end of the war. The readiness of the French et. el. to withdraw the embargo and turn the UN role to the U.S. was a major and unacknowledged (in the US press) concession (or cave-in, if one is less generous). The second shoe dropped when the US announced the import role of the UN program (the program actually covered food and all other imports)would actually be taken over by JP Morgan and a consortia of Banks from (mostly) the other coalition countries (I believe I posted the announcement). Nomi Prims has pointed out that each of these banks has specialized in exotic ways to turn assets (read petroleum reserves and future income streams) into current debts. It is not expected that this phase will be discussed before the non-US donors are pressed to announce pledges from their development funds at the upcoming Madrid Donors Conference next week. Paul Original Message: On his radio show yesterday, satirist Harry Shearer said that the British GUARDIAN reported that the US was going to end the UN food program in Iraq in January. Is there any truth to this? Jim mail2web - Check your email from the web at http://mail2web.com/ .
Re: question about Iraq
On his radio show yesterday, satirist Harry Shearer said that the British GUARDIAN reported that the US was going to end the UN food program in Iraq in January. Is there any truth to this? Jim * New York Times October 12, 2003 CULTURE OF DEPENDENCY Another Challenge in Iraq: Giving Up Food Rations By JOHN TIERNEY BAGHDAD, Iraq - The overhaul of welfare in America may seem complicated, but it has been simple compared with the challenge in Iraq. In the United States, the people who relied on public assistance were defined as the underclass. In Iraq, they're the entire nation. To Saddam Hussein, a culture of dependency was not a social problem but a political plus. Father Saddam, as he liked to be called, provided citizens with subsidized homes, cheap energy and, most important, free food. After international sanctions were imposed on Iraq in 1990, he started a program that now uses 300 government warehouses and more than 60,000 workers to deliver a billion pounds of groceries every month - a basket of rations guaranteed to every citizen, rich or poor. American and Iraqi authorities are now struggling to get out of the grocery-delivery business without letting anyone go hungry. They're trying to find a politically practical way of replacing the rations with cash payments or some version of food stamps. Planners would ultimately like to see the aid given only to the needy, but for starters they would simply like to get all Iraqis accustomed to shopping for themselves. We need to replace the food program and attack the dependency culture created by Saddam Hussein, said Barham Salih, the prime minister of a Kurdish section of northern Iraq, which also receives the rations. This culture has become one of the biggest obstacles to rebuilding Iraq. Everybody expects the U.S. to turn on its supercomputer and make all of our problems go away, but we should be learning to do things by ourselves. You can get a sense of the challenge facing reformers by visiting Zayuna, one of Baghdad's most affluent neighborhoods. While many Iraqis - 60 percent of the population, by some estimates - depend heavily on the food rations, the residents of Zayuna generally do not. In fact, many of them disdain the items in the basket, which includes rice, flour, beans, sugar, oil, salt, powdered milk, tea, soap and laundry detergent. But most residents still make sure to collect - or have their servants collect - their monthly rations from the program's agent operating in their neighborhood. Then they take the items they don't want and drive to a roadside kiosk at the nearby Thulatha market, where vendors are legally allowed to buy the rationed groceries and resell them to less picky consumers. After the citizens sell their government-issued groceries, they either pocket the cash or apply the proceeds toward the purchase of better products available at the market, like olive oil to replace the cheaper soy oil. To an outsider watching people make these exchanges, it might seem odd for people in Mercedeses and BMW's to be profiting from government food aid, especially since the original justification for the aid has vanished. The program began as an emergency response to United Nations trade sanctions, and was later supplemented with provisions from the separate oil-for-food program of the United Nations. Even though the sanctions have ended, the program is still considered indispensable. It would be a disaster if the program ended, said Haidar Hassan, one of the vendors at the market, and he was not merely speaking of his own business as a middleman. If the government did not give out all this rice, there would be a shortage of rice in the market. He predicted the price of a kilogram (about two pounds) would quadruple from its current price of 10 cents. His clientele was similarly alarmed. My economic situation is good, but even I could not afford the new higher prices if they stopped the program, said Thaeir Ezadden, a police captain whose salary had recently more than quintupled, to $150 per month, thanks to the new pay scales instituted by American authorities. Mr. Ezadden said he might be willing to go along with one change currently being considered - giving everyone cash payments instead of rations - but only if it was accompanied by more central planning. If they gave out money instead of food, he said, the Americans would have to establish an office in the Ministry of Trade to control all the food prices. Otherwise businessmen would import food and make a profit with high prices. The Americans should also give jobs to everyone who needs one. Economists, while acknowledging the need for protecting consumers during the transition, say that a market economy would provide food much more cheaply and efficiently than the current government-run system. But the American and Iraqi officials in charge of the program know that economists' arguments are not going to assuage the fears of citizens who have forgotten how the market
Re: question about Iraq
This is fucking priceless: (sorry Yoshie -- polite speech eludes me more and more) Economists, while acknowledging the need for protecting consumers during the transition, say that a market economy would provide food much more cheaply and efficiently than the current government-run system. But the American and Iraqi officials in charge of the program know that economists' arguments are not going to assuage the fears of citizens who have forgotten how the market works. So, if I go to the pickup point and get free food, this is inefficient. But if I got to the pickup point and get money and then take the money to the market and get what I need, then that's efficient. Joanna
Re: question about Iraq - the theoretical significance of prostitution economics
Basically the banks are arguing your love gimme such a thrill, but your love don't pay my bills, so gimme money, that's what I want. (actually John Lennon was sick in the plane prior to performing this song at the Live Peace in Toronto concert in 1969). Suppose that you are or feel dependent for your survival on monetary income from the market. Then you are bound to argue that there has to be a market and there has to be private property, because there is no other way to survive. What economics adds to this, as you imply, is an ideological justification: it's efficient, and results in a better form of civilisation. Or, if we become a little more dogmatic, we could say that it is inconceivable (untheorisable) to run an economy without markets and bourgeois private property, and the United Nations just haven't understood Milton Friedman. Neo-liberalism (sic.) takes this idea further, and says there exist only markets and only bourgeois private property, public ownership, commonly held goods, sharing and co-operation are a fiction, outside of private consumption in households and outside private enterprise. Neo-conservatism (sic.) is just a tack more cautious and defensive in this, because it admits there are some areas of public assets in the world which could be still be privatised, for example to pay off debts, but, all the same, christian fundamentalism basically admits only private property, only Jesus Christ is permitted to do things like sharing out loaves and fishes and stuff and he is in heaven now, and no longer available to do it except through the hidden hand of the market. The conceptual issue here is how we deal with the historical evidence, because for most of human history there was no monetary economy at all and for a very long time monetary economy played only a very small role in economic life. This issue can ultimately be resolved only by the theorem that God (sic.) created the market and God created money for us to use one day to allocate his bountiful resources (a creationist theory), or else simply by ignoring this sticky issue (history is bunk theory). Now suppose that in a market economy, you already have assets, resources, wherewithal of life etc. then you can still in principle exchange without using money, receive stuff, give away stuff, share stuff, own stuff in common, because of the freedom with the market provides, which is the basis for a lingering socialist evil (sic.). But this creates a problem at the very frontiers of bourgeois economic (sic.) thinking, namely: how do we prevent people from giving stuff away instead of selling, receiving without buying, sharing things, and owning things in common ? What do we need here ? Armies ? Police ? Security staff ? Brainwashing ? In other words, how do we move the privatisation process forward and thus expand the market ? At the most theoretically advanced level, neo-liberalism resolves this through prostitution economics, because if we model prostitution, we can obtain the data necessary to devise institutions in which all observable transfers of economic resources between people can take the form of a monetary transaction, and then we can phase this program in, and remove all outstanding impediments to the market. The theoretical objection to this is, that the model shows, that there is still a problem with pricing and costing, because observable interactions between economic agents (the negotiation process, the bargaining process) involve a significant number of unknowns, and the very act of observing a buyer or seller, may change prices. To overcome the volatility problem, christian fundamentalism provides an answer: prayers and faith in the hidden hand of God, because if we all have faith, then the market will work well, and economic behaviour of economic agents will become more consistent, regulated and predictable. Churches should therefore be theorised as essential market instruments. As I implied at the start, love cannot be the theoretical foundation of bourgeois economics, and it is not surprising therefore that Marx discovered that bourgeois economics is actually a highly contradictory enterprise. References: Karl Marx, Economics and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 Note also: http://www.yakupkucukkale.com/nobel/GunnarMyrdal.htm J.
Re: question about Iraq
[EMAIL PROTECTED] 10/13/03 8:16 PM Planners are considering gradually replacing some groceries with cash welfare payments or some version of food stamps that could be redeemed at local markets. Besides giving shoppers more choices, the change would also help Iraqi merchants and farmers, because consumers would presumably buy more local fruits and vegetables instead of relying on the many imported foods in their rations. Yoshie re. iraqi grown fruits and vegetables, isn't percentage of country's irrigated land damaged by salinization one of highest in world (on order of about 1/3rd)... michael hoover
