Incredible, just fucking incredible! We have slaves from the Philippines, India and Pakistan building our palatial embassy in the Green Zone.
As we endeavor to win Iraqi hearts and minds in the midst of our fiasco of a war, you’d think it would be a good idea to find the hordes of unemployed in Baghdad good paying jobs. You know, the kind of work that would give men and women the pride of putting food on the table and incentive not to kill Americans or their fellow Iraqis. Is such a jobs program just some liberal gobbledygook? Hell no. No less a Neanderthal than Newt Gingrich agrees. Yesterday, on "Meet the Press" (a.k.a., "Meet Pigman & the Neocons") Gingrich said:
I believe a Franklin Delano Roosevelt civil conversation corps designed to mop up every young Iraqi male who’s unemployed would be as big a strategic step in Iraq towards victory as whether you have more troops or fewer troops. The fact you have 60 percent unemployment among young males in Iraq is a disaster.
Flip...
However, according to CorpWatch, the evil ninnies who run things in America pay a contractor to ship in slave labor from Asia to construct our new Vatican-sized American embassy in Iraq...
The Kuwait-based company building the $592-million Baghdad project is the exception. Brutal and inhumane, [project foreman John Owen] says "I’ve never seen a project more fucked up. Every US labor law was broken."
In the resignation letter last June, Owen told First Kuwaiti and US State Department officials that his managers beat their construction workers, demonstrated little regard for worker safety, and routinely breached security.
And it was all happening smack in the middle of the US-controlled Green Zone -- right under the nose of the State Department that had quietly awarded the controversial embassy contract in July 2005.
The only thing that surprises me about this vomit-worthy, immoral Embassy mess is that Halliburton isn’t behind it. Oh just wait a g*ddamned minute, because they ARE involved. In Iraqi projects beyond the sickening imperial U.S. embassy project, Halliburton’s KBR unit is exploiting labor from Asia. And making the United States enemies beyond Iraq’s borders. From the New York Times, a story of Indian workers enslaved by Halliburton.
They mortgaged a relative's house and land, paid the fee and flew to Kuwait in August with two of their friends. What they say they encountered when they got there landed on the front pages of Indian newspapers this week, with one headline declaring "Indians Abused in Iraq" in "U.S. Slave Camps."
Within days, the brothers said, they and their friends found themselves on an American military base in northern Iraq working for a Saudi subcontractor of Kellogg, Brown & Root, or KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton. They said their supervisor, who had taken their passports in Kuwait, told them they were obligated to work on the base for six months and could not leave.
Working alongside 200 other laborers, from India, the Philippines and Sri Lanka, they first cleaned American latrines and then washed American dishes, the brothers said. Their pay was roughly $150 a month, they said, less than half of what the recruiter had promised.
"We were in hell," said Shahjahan, who returned here with his brother last week. "I told my wife over the phone, `If God wills us, we will meet again.' "
Can you believe my MS Word spell check actually corrects my misspelling of "Haliburton" [sic]? I wonder if the program’s thesaurus can correctly come up with Halliburton synonyms "evil," "malicious," "destructive," and "rapacious."
Anyhoo, we were talking about Slaves. You k now, the kind of foreign, brown-skinned people that apparently do not count as valuable human life, judging by the actions of BushCo and their many-tentacled war profiteering boosters. According to a 2004 piece in the Washington Post...
South Korean engineers working on Iraq's power grid have complained they did not get the flak jackets and helmets issued to U.S. co-workers. Some Filipino cleaners and other support workers have said they were given others' spoiled food to eat. And some of the Indian workers said they were brought in on buses with only gauze curtains to hide them from insurgents while many other contractors come into the country on chartered planes or in convoys with military escorts.
"They were working under threat and fear of death," said S. Sreejith, superintendent of police for Kollam, where the workers' complaints were first filed. American companies "are making money off of cheating our people."
How I wish the Democrats were not about to become complicit in war and slavery by continuing funding of the Iraq fiasco! But our tax money – which the honest-to-goodness Democrats of old might have used to fund healthcare, education, jobs and New Orleans reconstruction here in the USA – will go to Iraq’s American-spawned slavers, killers, and other assorted characters of death and blight. Yes, friends, we are complicit in this because not only do we dutifully pay our taxes, but we in the bloggosphere helped elect these enablers of Bush. Are not the apathetic the real patriots? Those who do not vote, who do nothing, at least do not risk sullying themselves with Iraq War slime the way we do when we allow our voices and votes to bring to power those who would fund this sh*t! Nonetheless, here we are, fellow Democrats, fellow progressives...
Following the release of the Iraq Study Group’s report last week, leading Congressional Democrats made clear they intend to continue funding the disastrous war in Iraq to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.
According to a recent AP-Ipsos poll, a record 71 percent of the US population disapprove of George W. Bush’s handling of the Iraq war, 60 percent favor withdrawal of US forces in 2007 (immediate withdrawal was not offered as an option) and only 9 percent believe in an American victory. [...]
As Tom Curry of MSNBC commented bluntly, "Incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had a message Tuesday for voters who elected a Democratic Congress last month hoping it would force President Bush to bring US troops home from Iraq. ‘We will not cut off funding for the troops,’ Pelosi said. ‘Absolutely not,’ she said. [...]
She went on, "Let me remove all doubt in anyone’s mind; as long as our troops are in harm’s way, Democrats will be there to support them, but ... we will have oversight over that funding."
The new Democratic majority leader, Steny Hoyer of Maryland, declared, "None of us want to fail; none of us want to see Iraq as a failure."
Incoming Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada has already signaled his willingness to go along with Bush’s next massive supplemental-budget request expected to amount to $160 billion. "We’ll see if there’s any fluff in it and make sure there’s no pet projects," he said recently. "But if it’s legitimate, I think we’ll have to go along with it."
Legitimate? How could anything connected with this illegal war be legitimate, Mr. Reid? Ms. Pelosi, if you cut off funding for the troops in harm’s way, you can fund their homecoming. Mr. Hoyer, Iraq is a failure. There is no turnaround. We went in with bad strategy and bad motives. There can be no good result.