March 24, 2003

The bidding to rebuild Iraq has already begun

/ current events

This New York Times article suggests that Gulf War II isn’t about oil as an end–it’s just a means to an end: to enrich American construction firms like, oh, Halliburton (Dick Cheney’s employer (note that I intentionally left out the word “former”)).

Let’s see if I’ve got this straight. We (for the purposes of this entry, “we” means “they”) declare war on a country and bomb it back to the Stone Age. In a vast ($25 bn+) humanitarian undertaking, we rebuild the country, using Iraq’s oil money to pay for it. Sort of a roundabout way to transfer Iraqi wealth to corporate America.

Some thoughts:

  • Iraq has the world’s second-largest proven oil reserves. I can imagine a scenario where the USA keeps the forthcoming client regime on a short leash, forcing it to keep oil prices low. That will depress oil prices throughout the world (Good for SUV drivers!), and keep Iraq in debt to the USA (or more accurately, corporate American interests) indefinitely, since it won’t be able to pay down its boggling debt quickly.
  • It would have been nice if we could have just concentrated on rebuilding (or building) Afghanistan instead, but they don’t have the oil reserves
  • I sure am glad the bidding process has received all the public scrutiny it deserves.

Lost in La Mancha

/ movies / 4 Comments

Saw Lost in La Mancha on Friday. This is a documentary of the doomed effort to produce Terry Gilliam’s magnum opus, the story of Don Quixote. Gilliam had been working on the idea since 1991, and only managed to start filming in 2001. The undertaking was terribly precarious even before it began, and as soon as it did begin, almost everything that could go wrong did, from big things to little. Floods, fighter jets, illness, and recalcitrant horses.

The documentary made the point that Gilliam himself was somewhat like Don Quixote on a gallant but unrealistic quest, and indeed, there was an amazingly tidy parallelism between the story and the story-in-the-story. But something at the very end of the movie made me think that Don Quixote is the wrong fictional archetype to describe Gilliam. Ahab is more like it.

France fest

/ Austin / 5 Comments

Not sure how I got on this mailing list, but I just received a notice of an upcoming event at Escapist Bookstore called (in an unfortunate apparent confusion of Spanish and French) “Viva la France.” From the message:

Womens of Masse Production bring you Viva la France!, a party honoring French culture in particular and American diversity in general. With food, drink, live music by Dakota Smith, and readings of French literature by local notables. Thumb your nez at wine-dumping, the breaking of windows of French-owned businesses (in Austin, Chez Nous was a recent victim), and other anti-Frenchist stupidity, and celebrate open-mindedness and the human spirit.

The details are:
This Friday: March 2, 6–10 pm

Escapist Bookstore

2209 South 1st St., #D

$3 donation suggested, no one turned away for lack of $

Call 912-1777 or visit www.escapistbookstore.com for more info

In related news, I had lunch at the Fredericksburg Brewery yesterday, where the “French” in “French fries” had been blacked out on the menus.