...civilian back from Iraq ... Says situation getting worse

[MaineDem]

After returning from a five-month stint as a construction manager for Halliburton subsidiary KBR at the coalition's Al Hillah base, Hafey sat on the porch of his log home off Route 3 in Augusta recently, overlooking a tranquil pond and surrounded by his wife, kids and dogs.

Even though the money was good, it's easy to see why Hafey decided he's not going back to Iraq.

"Things have gotten really touchy. It's just not a good situation," the 48-year-old Augusta resident said. "You can make good money over there. But if you're not around to spend it, it's no good."

/snip/
He said an American can make "in the ballpark" of $80,000 to $100,000 for a year reconstructing Iraq.

The Iraqi workers were paid around $15 a day -- not much by U.S. standards, but a good wage compared to the $2 or $3 a day they could make elsewhere, Hafey said.

http://www.onlinesentinel.com/news/local/602980.shtml

Something about that pay discrepancy bothers me.

[leftchick]

1. I am sure the pay discrepancy bothers...

a LOT of Iraqis too!

[MaineDem]

2. Exactly! (nt)

[berry]

22. Yes, Iraqis ARE angry about this.

At least, I saw one news segment in the last few days where a group of Iraqis at a power plant were saying that they could do ALL the work themselves.

Interestingly, the segment didn't mention American contractors. And probably didn't mean to make the point that contracting the work to expensive foreign labor doesn't make a lot of sense. The story was about Russia pulling out all its workers (or all that wanted to go--a very few, 2 I think, did choose to stay on at that plant).

Sorry I can't give a link on this.

[greatauntoftriplets]

3. The pay discrepancy made me think of....

...the same situation between men and women in the corporate world. Inequality is virtually institutionalized in this society.

[Q]

4. "...but a good wage compared to..."

- Besides war profiteering for Friends of Bush*...is there any other reason Iraqis are not being paid to repair their OWN country?

[indepat]

6. Is war profiteering for FOB job #1?

[Dark]

7. I thought that the reconstruction jobs were

all going to foriegners, even the grunt work. This is kind of good, I guess.

[ShaneGR]

5. the pay bothers you?

Should we cut their pay?

[PA Democrat]

10. We should be giving those jobs to Iraqis

The massive unemployment of Iraqi citizens is fueling violence and unrest. For the price of one contractor, 20 Iraqis could be put to work, and the overall job of rebuilding Iraq could be done at huge savings to the US taxpayer.

Iraqis are well-educated, after all they had the skills to BUILD in the first place what we are now paying contractors to rebuild.

What a pathetic state of affairs when Americans will risk their lives because the only well-paying jobs available are in Iraq. Bush has created jobs in Iraq by paying 20 times more than he needs to. Wouldn't a better idea be to let the Iraqis rebuild their own country and use the money saved to create jobs here in the US?

[MaineDem]

14. My thoughts exactly (nt)

[edison1958]

8. Spoke to a military colleague....

earlier this week who is home from Baghdad for a few days....he says things aren't actually all that bad, except for the last couple of weeks. They've had to change convoy tactics when they go out of the Green Zone....but otherwise not that different than they had seen earlier. Just an observation.........

[anarchy1999]

9. You might not be in the right place right now.

just an observation. ........

[edison1958]

11. ...then again....maybe so....just another observation..........

[oneighty]

15. How did your military colleague manage to

get home for a few days? Seventy two hour pass?

180

[greatauntoftriplets]

16. Snarf.

Good question, oneighty.

[edison1958]

19. He came back with....

....a contingent of Iraqis doing reconstruction work. They are headed to Boston to learn about transportation issues (rail I think)....and he flies back from Dulles on Sunday morning.

[oneighty]

20. And he is Active Duty?

Sounds like a cushy job for a warrior.

180

[edison1958]

21. Don't think I'd agree w/you....

....they're working 18 hour days, pretty much 6 1/2-7 days/week. Also, of course, far from home.......

[frylock]

23. oh, i'm sure things are just fine..

welcome to the DU.

[thebigidea]

26. yeah, there's a lot of great things we're not hearing about on tv...

like um, schools opening... and uh - bridges, uh... being built... or something. And peanut butter! There is plenty of peanut butter for the people of Iraq, freedom in gooey, creamy form!

[MSgt213]

12. Just appearance makes the pay look really bad. The Iraqis know

the difference between them working for slave wages and us working for large sums.

[qb]

13. Speaking of pay discrepancies...

Mercenary in Iraq: $1500/day
American GI in Iraq: $1500/month

[anarchy1999]

17. Read all from Riverbend

http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/

Go back through the archives.

Pay Discrepancy........

She tells a story about a relative hired to rebuild a bridge. We have to give Iraq back to Iraqis'. Our coalition is nothing but a scam, war profiteers and carpet baggers. Did we not end this after our Civil War? And just what is a "Civil War"?

[greatauntoftriplets]

18. Spoils of War.

http://marketplace.publicradio.org/features/iraq/index.html

[JohnyCanuck]

24. Whose Chaos Is This Anyway?

Whose Chaos Is This Anyway?
By Mark LeVine

The voice on the other end of the phone was as sweet and reassuring as I remembered from our brief time together in Baghdad. It belonged to an Italian peace activist who has spent much of the last year in Iraq working with a group of European and Iraqi comrades to monitor and resist the U.S. occupation of the country. Now she was being forced to leave. The intensifying violence in central and southern Iraq has turned even foreign peace activists into targets, despite the fact that some of them were risking their lives ferrying the wounded and medical supplies between Baghdad, Falluja, and other cities.

What struck me upon hearing Francesca's voice -- the names in this story have been changed -- were her first words upon recognizing me: "Ah, Mark, è un casinoi," she said, her voice filled with sadness tinged with desperation. In Italian, this phrase usually means something like "it's crazy" or "it's overwhelming." (Mothers of young children use it a lot when you ask them how they're doing.) But it has a darker meaning when said by an Italian in Baghdad these days. There, it means something closer to "total chaos and violence," while also evoking images of the prostitution and perversion that accompany the wholesale breakdown of a social order.

With the burst of intense violence of the last few weeks the world press has decided that Iraq is descending into chaos. In fact, the descent has been longer and steeper than most people imagine. The last night of my trip to Iraq, I had dinner with Francesca, along with other Italian, French, and Filipino activists who for a year have been resisting the occupation as best they could -- by building bridges with Iraqis on the grass-roots level, risking their lives to find out the myriad ugly truths about the occupation, and bringing that information to the international public. The increase in chaos was palpable during my almost two weeks there in the latter half of March, with suicide bombings (including the big one at the Jebal Lubnan Hotel that blew out the first three stories' worth of its windows), not to speak of the nightly missile/RPG strikes and battles with U.S. troops on the city's streets.

<snip>

Watching a similar dynamic at work for over a decade in the Occupied Territories, I had grown ever more frustrated with Palestinian society for not being able to build a nonviolent means of resisting an occupation that only digs in deeper in response to the violent resistance it breeds. But seeing the dynamic evolve before my eyes in Iraq has given me a better understanding of why it's so difficult for Palestinians, or Iraqis, to build such a movement. What Colgate University Professor Nancy Ries calls the "planned chaos" of an occupation, coupled with the economic "structural adjustment" that is a euphemism for the harsh imposition of a market economy controlled by corporate giants on "socialist" systems, steamrolls over any attempts at resistance through the kinds of tactics favored by Gandhi or Martin Luther King.


www.nationinstitute.org/tomdispatch/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=1396

[anarchy1999]

25. Oh my god.

The only words I am left with.