Iraq (and the USA) for Sale

"Impeachment is off the table." Darn! With those words, new speaker of the house Nancy Pelosi crushed my dreams. Sort of. If Bill Clinton can be impeached for getting a blow job and then lying about it under oath, then I would hope a president who led the nation to war in order to benefit his oily friends could be impeached as well.

But that would just bog the nation down, again, instead of doing something meaningful. So does this mean she has more class? Who knows? Politicians are politicians, so it could be strategy: you impeach Bush, he's gone. You leave him in office, you can pound the crap out of him for the next two years, and further expose his corruption.

And what corruption! I finally got around to watching Iraq For Sale, the grassroots-funded video that takes a highlighter to war-profiteering in Iraq. It was sponsored by individual donations. I wish I had known. Missing the party sucks.

Anyway, I’d like thank all the people who were brave enough to speak out on the video. It was striking just how many of the worker for the war contractors actually spoke out publicly against their employers. This 70 minute video should be seen and discussed by every American. It specifically focuses on Iraq and how profiting from something as obviously life-and-death as war results in a lot more death. The larger, more general issue is the role of corporations and their interaction with the government.

A corporation is an entity that will defend itself against oversight and work to provide as little as possible for as much as possible. That’s not the ideal mentality for any kind of human care, whether it be war, health care or social security retirement funding. Some will argue that the government is wildly inefficient, and that may be true, but I have to think it’s better to be accidentally inefficient with oversight, than cleverly inefficient and maliciously resistant to oversight.

See Iraq For Sale, and help fight against turning every aspect of our lives into commodities.