Iraq gets bitch slapped by IMF

In one of the bigger unreported stories that the mainstream media likes to ignore, the International Monetary Fund is directly responsible for additional misery for the Iraqi people.

As our Gentle Readers are probably aware, there have been riots – with the rioters being shot by government troops - and general feelings of dissatisfaction with the Iraqi government recently over the reduction of subsidies that have kept the price of oil products in Iraq low and affordable. Previous to the price hikes, Iraqis paid about 5c per gallon for gasoline, and comparable prices for fuel oil (kerosene, etc.) for lamps and generators and the like. As the average wage in Iraq (for those with jobs) is about $100 a month, this is already expensive oil for the typical Iraqi customer.

However, as a condition of a $685 million dollar loan from the International Monetary Fund, as reported recently by The Los Angeles Times, the government was forced to raise the price of gasoline to 65c a gallon, an exorbinate price for the working stiffs in Iraq, with additional raises due shortly that will bring the consumer’s cost to about $1 a gallon, in line with costs in neighboring countries like Dubai and Saudi Arabia, where the average income is much higher.

While this doesn’t seem like a big deal here in America, where we get pissed about gas hikes, but don’t usually riot over it, this price hike is on the order of a 400 per cent increase, comparable to raising gas prices here at home from $2.15 per gallon to $18.49. That’s $221.28 to fill up the tank in a Honda Civic.

That just might cause some riots here in LA, for starters, and I wouldn’t blame the rioters.

On the whole, this is a terrible blow to the Iraqi economy, putting them in a Catch-22 situation. The fiscal tightening that the IMF is mandating is a fiscal bitchslap in the face, as the economy that the IMF is supposed to be rescuing is crashed because of the freaking war that was started by the IMF’s primary backer, the United States.

How’s that for a lesson in bringing freedom and democracy to the benighted Arab?

It was a very bad year

New Year's Eve - Kazumi Honda



This was such a lousy year that I don’t even know where to begin. Okay, let’s go with Congressional interference in a family matter about pulling the plug on a brain-dead woman (her brain was determined during the autopsy to be basically a puddle of Jell-O), to a Congressional give-away to usurious credit card companies obliterating the ability of their victims to get relief in bankruptcy court, to over 2,100 dead American soldiers in Iraq. 2005 was a year for the record books.

Wounded American soldiers in military hospitals were charged for their meals. The Veterans Administration had over a billion dollars slashed from its budget while the cost of the Iraq war went over 200 billion dollars.

In Iraq, rigged elections left and right prepared the Middle East for the resurrection of the Persian Empire; wingnuts adopted the phrase - and endlessly repeated it - “Islamo-fascism” - an absurdist oxymoron that is meaningless, except to cretins. The US military was revealed to have used nerve gas (white phosphorus) on civilians as well as “enemy combatants” in Iraq, not to mention incendiary bombs.

In fact, stupidity was rampant this year on every front, from the President on down to the citizen in the street. Confronted by in-your-face evidence that the 9/11 Commission’s report – the so-called Kean-Zelikow Report – was bogus and a whitewash and a massive cover up, as evidenced by literally hundreds of Internet websites flaying the report and publishing the actual facts of the September attack with pictures and circles and arrows, the American public yawned.

This was a bad year for the nation’s flagship newspapers: The New York Times was forced to apologize for Judith Miller while sitting on information that revealed the PeRezident to be guilty as hell of illegal wiretapping while continuing to publish the myopic op-eds of Tom Friedman. The LA Times still carries the slop of Max Boot while firing everybody else in sight. Woodward was revealed to be sleeping with the enemy and so what. White chicks dominated the news, both domestically and in fair Aruba, but President of the Senate Dick Cheney neglected to emerge from his undisclosed location to cast a deadlock-breaking vote, so we continued to be inundated with non-news, including the pederast trial of a robo-entertainer and breathless reports of assorted actors’ possible pregnancies or on-again, off-again divorce proceedings.

The LA Times published at least three of John “Torture Is Good and the President Is Above the Constitution” Yoo’s op-ed pieces, all of them certifiable moonbat drivel. This person got tenure as a professor of law at UC Berkeley, and the public yawned.

The Republican dominated Congress – with the advice and consent of the Congressional Democrats – took the American taxpayers to the cleaners, and the public yawned. Hurricane Katrina barreled through the Gulf states, killing hundreds and leaving half the populace homeless and the PeRezident told the man in charge, “Brownie, you’re doing a helluva job.” Congress suspended the prevailing-wage act in the Gulf states and the public yawned.

Not only is the NSA illegally tapping your overseas phone calls, they (and at least 23 other government agencies) have been placing persistent cookies on the computers of visitors to their websites as well, allowing them to track your web-surfing habits. The CIA, under instructions from the PeRezident, continues to maintain a fleet of rent-a-jets overseas for those extra-special rendition trips, shunting between atolls on the torture archipelago. And the legal whiz kids in government employ still maintain that the PreZ can do anything he wants in the GWOT because there has never been terrorism in the world before and this is a new kind of war and Congress said he can use any kind of force he wants and fuck you, Concerned American Citizens, and screw his oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, he has a “homeland” to protect.

In the blogosphere (yes, we know: skippy invented that phrase), comment email spam arrived. My computer crashed; twice. I switched to Linux Xandros. It crashed. I went back to Windows. My computer is hanging in there, barely. John Hindracker – of Powerline infamy – endlessly appeared on radio talk shows where he endlessly droned on about George Bush’s “unrecognized genius”; David Corn’s fall from grace in aligning himself with the Pajamas Media project and the incredible stupidity of the Pajamas Media project’s “borrowing” of the Open Source trademark, which even a simpleton would know better than to do. The sheer fact of Michelle Malkin’s existence. Blame Bush failed to receive Humor Blog of the Year award. Liberal Larry blames Bush for that, as do I.

There were a couple of bright moments; I could tell you about them, but you’d just yawn.Not that I’m paranoid or anything, but Sitemeter reports that this website got two separate hits from a “blocked referrer” using a “generic crawler” in Ashburn, Maryland, just after the publishing of my article on the possibility of dropping jumbo jets on Goat Boy’s head. I’m thinking to myself, who or what is in Ashburn, Virginia? Upon tracking down same, it is revealed that Ashburn is home to George Washington University (YAY!) and also the National Transportation Safety Board. (Hmm). Another fine example of your tax dollars at work?
Happy Freakin’ New Year.

It ain't a rainbow, but -

The Republican monolithic facade is beginning to crack at the foundations, weakened by the slow but steady drip of leaks coming from within its own house. The foundations are crumbling, and the once-might monolith of the party of the Contract With America is beginning to list. There is little apprehension on the part of this writer that it will actually crash, but it is apparent that some of its walls have been breached, the party is seriously weakened, and some rats are making their escape already.

Neocons may have been blinded by those gleaming promises of global hegemony, but they aren’t stupid. Earlier this summer, having seen some of the light of harsh reality dawning where all was gleaming wonderfulness before, a couple of leading neocons - William Krystal of The Standard, and Tom Donnely of The American Enterprise Institute - stabbed Donald Rumsfeld in the back, preparatory to fleeing the edifice before all was lost for good. In an op-ed in his rag The Standard, Krystal said that “... Rumsfeld has fouled up everything in Iraq and ought to be fired for his failures...,” thus beginning to distance himself and the rest of his neocon buddies from their ill-conceived and badly executed attempt at global hegemony beginning with the war in Iraq.

Republicans with consciences, and there are some,showed a return to ethical behavior ...

Senate Republicans with consciences – and there are some – showed some return to ethical behavior in the final dash to the congressional holiday break when they sided with Democrats in their refusal to endorse the full reauthorization of the grotesquely named USA Patriot Act, in the face of the threats and ire of Republican Senate leader Bill Frist.

Connecticut Senator Lincoln Chaffe deserves some kind of medal for siding with the Dems in the ongoing battle to block drilling in the ANWAR, which ended in success for environmentalists everywhere.

But the most glaring sign of the times, from no less than the editorial mouthpiece of corporate America (in the final analysis, the only people with juice that really count), is a recent editorial in this month’s Barron’s magazine, a part of the Wall Street Journal’s capitalist propaganda machine. It was written by Thomas G. Donlan, hardly a free-thinking liberal. In their carefully worded piece, they make the case that the Congress ought to investigate this matter and seriously consider either changing the law or report a bill to impeach the president for his patently illegal wire-tapping.

I don’t know about you, but my first New Year’s resolution is that every Republican in Congress immediately takes out a subscription to Barron’s magazine.