[SustainableTompkins] Workers' Center: "Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers"--Additional Showings Added

Fri Oct 20 12:18:10 PDT 2006

In the realization that the U.S. war against Iraq is so fundamentally about workers' issues (both here and in Iraq), and that there are corporations that are making a "killing" on this war, the Tompkins County Workers' Center, as a fundraiser, will show (Those people outside of Tompkins County should go to http://iraqforsale.org/screenings.php for screenings in your area)

Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers
@ 
Cinemapolis Theater
Center Ithaca, The Commons
Every night from Friday, October 20th 
thru 
Thursday, October 26th
All showings begin at 7:15 p.m
JUST ADDED, ADDITIONAL SHOWINGS: Saturday and Sunday Matinees (10/21 and 10/22) at 2:15 p.m. ($6.00 everyone)
Tickets: $8.00 ($6.50 for over 65/12 and under/students with ID (Tuesday, $6.00 everyone) 
100% Ithaca Hours accepted for all  showings

  Acclaimed director Robert Greenwald  (Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, Outfoxed and Uncovered) takes you inside the lives of soldiers, truck drivers, widows and children who have been changed forever as a result of profiteering in the reconstruction of Iraq. Iraq for Sale uncovers the connections between private corporations making a killing in Iraq and the decision makers who allow them to do so.

Also relating to workers' issues are the constant updating from the National Priorities Project (www.costofwar.com). The Iraq war, to date, has cost U.S. taxpayers $336 billion (as of 10/20/06). It has cost Tompkins County taxpayers $131.5 million; and Ithaca $23 million. Obviously all further blows to workers and people. National Priorites website is very helpful because it also gives concrete figures comparing what this money could have done (nationally, county and city-wide) in terms of: 

   pre-school
   kids' health
   college scholarships
   public housing
   public education

Cosponsored by: Durland Alternatives Library: Ithaca Hours; Office and Professional Employees International Union, Local 277; Tompkins County Bill of Rights Defense Committee: SEIU Local 200United; Kol Haverim: Finger Lakes Community for Humanistic Judaism; Ithaca Democratic Socialists of America; Tompkins County Health Care Task Force; Ithaca Catholic Worker

"Regardless of the war, the administration, or the various sophistries for expending human lives as a matter of government policy, profiteering from it universally offends all citizens, whether they are Republicans, Democrats, Independents, other parties or no shows." 

--Charles Lewis, founder of the Center for Public Integrity
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REVIEW of IRAQ FOR SALE BY KENNETH TURAN, LOS ANGELES TIMES 

Producer-director Robert Greenwald has the soul of an 18th century political pamphleteer. An issue burns a hole in his pocket, and he just has to take it on, the sooner the better. But although someone like Thomas Paine wrote pamphlets such as "Common Sense," Greenwald makes films. As hard-hitting and as fast as he can. 

"Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers" is the sixth of these films Greenwald has produced since 2002. It's also the fourth he's directed, after "Uncovered: The War on Iraq," "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism" and "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price." This is a man who knows how to turn the colon into a weapon of political warfare. 

Like Greenwald's previous films, "Iraq for Sale" is made from a progressive political point of view but spends considerable time talking to regular people who likely voted Republican. And this time he's focused on one of those issues that might unite viewers across all political spectra: unconscionable war profiteering coupled with catastrophic decisions by major American companies. 

Using as its key advertising image a picture of a tank as covered by as many corporate logos as a NASCAR racer, "Iraq for Sale" starts by detailing just how much income the Iraq war has produced for corporations. Halliburton heads the list with $18.5 billion, two other companies top $5 billion and the security firm Blackwater earned $21 million just guarding former U.S. ambassador L. Paul Bremer III. 

Because of a philosophical predisposition that favors the private sector over the government as well as a belief (which this film pretty much destroys) that the private sector is more efficient and does things more economically, the current administration has contracted out a long line of military-related activities to for-profit entities. 

Many of the people interviewed in "Iraq for Sale" are not troubled by the concept of businesses earning a profit. The problem they have is the marked lack of accountability for the actions of corporate folks in Iraq, a lack that results in money wasted and civilians placed in harm's way to beef profits. 

As clips from network newscasts and CNN indicate, much of the information here has been in the media before. What "Iraq for Sale" does is connect all the dots, laying out in a fairly straightforward way what we've been vaguely aware has been going on, including stories behind incidents that made major headlines when they happened. 

No story was bigger than the deaths in Fallouja of four Americans working for Blackwater when their vehicle was attacked and burned and their bodies mutilated. The families of two of the men accuse the company of sending them out into "the most dangerous city on Earth" undermanned and without appropriate armor or weaponry or even a map. "They skimped on the mission," says the brother of one victim. "The almighty dollar is all they cared about." 

Two private companies, Titan and CACI, are implicated in the fiasco at Abu Ghraib prison. We're told that translators hired by the first company often barely knew the English language and that the second company's employees were involved in some of the most questionable interrogation techniques without any kind of supervision, a situation that Janis Karpinski, the former brigadier general at the prison, strongly deplores. 

It's Halliburton and its KBR subsidiary that figure in some of the most troubling incidents. "Iraq for Sale" interviews truck drivers from the American heartland, survivors of a convoy attacked in what has come to be known as the Good Friday Massacre, men who were sent down a road that should have been closed to civilians, all in the name of fulfilling a contract. 

Just as troubling are the implications of Halliburton's cost-plus contracts, which means the more the company spends, the more it gets back. Stories of $100 laundry loads and expensive equipment destroyed rather than repaired are enough to make you agree with the sentiment that the situation in Iraq has become "a legal way of stealing from American citizens." 

Because the firms involved are well-connected in Congress, no one ever has to answer hard questions of accountability, which even the president waffled on when questioned on camera by a student. Also choosing not to comment are the various firms this film indicts, who refused to come on camera to answer the charges. Whatever you might think about the centrality of the profit motive to our society, what's going on in Iraq is going to give you pause. 

Pete Meyers 
Tompkins County Workers' Center
115 E. State Street
Ithaca, NY 14850 
607-269-0409 
607-339-1680
www.TCWorkersCenter.org 
www.TCSwarm.org 

"You can hitch your wagon to the stars, but you can't haul corn or hay in it if its wheels aren't on the ground."--Mordecai Pinkney Horton

"Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral."--Paolo Freire

"A final victory is an accumulation of many short-term encounters. To lightly dismiss a success because it does not usher in a complete order of justice is to fail to comprehend the process of achieving full victory. It underestimates the value of confrontation and dissolves the confidence born of a partial victory by which new efforts are powered."--Martin Luther King, Jr.

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