Update June 6, 3pm.
Note: original film clips I made of the film WAR,INC. for this post were removed from YouTube
and so are no longer available.
American's in general support Halliburton & KBR and Blackwater & other Private Contractors more than they do the troops.
Profits trump Soldier's safety & health everytime that's the American way-
Welcome to McWar -
Support The Troops - Just a Bumper Sticker - Jingoistic Phony Patriotism-
Soldiers with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder still getting Shafted by Bush & the Bean Counters-
So anyway John Cusack's film War Inc. is a great satire on the Bush Regime & the Privatization of War. It is a must see . It is a strange admixture of funny bits combined with over the top surreal scenes of Tanks with billboards on their side advertising Coca-cola to the Emerald City known as the Green Zone in Iraq where all the important people hide out from the reality of the madness and on going slaughter and destruction in the rest of the country. John Cusack plays a special undercover hit man working for the US government and private enterprise.
see: War Inc at IMDB
John Cusack- on CBC's The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos
John Cusack on his passion for politics, War Inc. and working with friends in Bulgaria.
Category: Entertainment
Trailer
Hilary Duff Arrives in Emerald City
Hilary Duff :Yonica BabyYeah- I Want to Blow You Up
For instance check out article by Jeremy Scahill at Huffington Post John Cusack's War: The Actor Battles to Un-embed Hollywood With His New Film, War, Inc. May 16, 2008
John Cusack began working on his new film War, Inc., which premieres in LA and New York May 23, about a year into the US occupation of Iraq. From the moment US tanks rolled into Baghdad, Cusack was a voracious consumer of news about the war. He took it deadly seriously, regularly calling independent journalists and asking them questions as he sought as much independent information as he could. Watching the insanity of the erection of the Green Zone and the advent of the era of McWar, complete with tens of thousands of "private contractors," Cusack set out to use the medium of film to unveil the madness. He wanted to do on the big screen what independent reporters like Naomi Klein, Nir Rosen and Dahr Jamail did in print. Over these years of war and occupation, Cusack has become one of the most insightful commentators on a far too seldom discussed aspect of the occupation: the corporate dominance of the US war machine.
War, Inc. is a radically different kind of movie. In fact, it really defies genre. It is sort of like this generation's Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange and The Wizard of Oz mixed together with the un-embedded reporting of Naomi Klein, spiced up with a dash of South Park. It is a powerful, visionary response to the cheerleading culture of the corporate media and a pliant Hollywood afraid of its own shadow.
On the surface, War, Inc. appears to be a spoof of the corporatization of the occupation of Iraq. Cusack plays a hit man, named Hauser, deployed to Turaqistan with the mission of killing a Middle Eastern oil baron (named Omar Sharif). Hauser's employer is a secretive for-profit military corporation run by the former US vice president, played by Dan Aykroyd. We first meet Aykroyd's character as he sits, pants down, on a toilet seat during a closed-circuit satellite videoconference call to give Hauser his mission. Hauser arrives in the Turaqi capital and heads for the "Emerald City" (read: the Green Zone), where his cover is director of a trade show for the military corporation, Tamerlane, which is basically running the Turaqi occupation. Hauser soon falls for a progressive journalist, played by Marisa Tomei, who is in Turaqistan to investigate Tamerlane, and what follows is an insane ride through Cusack's interpretation of the radical corporatization of war.
Singer Hilary Duff gives a surprisingly fun performance as a pop star, Yonica Babyyeah, who performs a song in the war zone with the lyrics, "You say you want to invade me, baby/Enslave me, baby." As Duff delivers the song, she caresses a phallic gas nozzle decorated with diamonds while singing, "I want to blow you....up." Obviously Cusack and his co-writers, Mark Leyner and Jeremy Pikser (REDS/Bulworth), sought to tap into the extreme nature of the corporatized war and take it to another level, but anyone who thinks the premise behind War Inc. is "over-the-top" has not been paying attention to real life.
Cusack, Leyner and Pikser are not predicting the future, they are forcefully -- and with dark humor and wit -- branding the present for what it is: the Wal-Mart-ization of life (and death) represented in the new US model for waging war. With 630 corporations like Blackwater and Halliburton on the US government payroll in Iraq getting 40% of the more than $2 billion Washington spends every week on the occupation, Cusack's "futuristic" film is not far from the way things really are. A powerful, for-profit war corporation, run by the former US vice president "owning" the war zone; tanks with NASCAR-like sponsor logos speeding around the streets firing at will; "implanted journalists" watching the war in IMAX theaters in the heavily-fortified "Emerald City" to get "full spectrum sensory reality" while eating popcorn; a secretive "viceroy" running the show from behind a digital curtain are all part of Cusack's battlefield in the fictitious Turaqistan. But how far are they from the realities of the radically privatized corporate war machine Washington has unleashed on the world?
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Too bad that many people will probably not see this film because it might make them think about important issues rather than what their next big consumer purchases are going to be . Even those supporters of the Iraqi War are not interested in the entanglement of private enterprise and the military and government and how this has helped to make the Iraqi Project a failure in political terms and a disaster in American foreign relations. But the Neocons and their wealthy friends are after all may talk about patriotism and such but they are really in for the money.
for more on this read the expose Betraying Our Troops: The Destructive Results of Privatizing War by Dina Rasor and Robert Bauman pub. 2007 which details how privatization has become a nightmare for American Troops and the people of Iraq. This book shows how the profit motive and the goals of the Military and the ostensive goals of the administration i.e. winning hearts and minds are at odds with one another. Further the corporations contracting out have little interest in making sure the troops get all the supplies and such that they need i.e. healthy food and safe water . Corporations are more about cutting corners to save money or inflating bills and costs to increase profits. Yes when it comes to WAR Profit can easily become a dirty word. But War Profiteers these days are seen as heroes and great examples of business savvy even if it leads to unnecessary illnesses and deaths among the troops and civilians. As long as KBR- Kellog Brown and Root as a subsidiary of Halliburton is making progfits for its CEO's like Dick Cheney then all is good .
UPDATE: 6:29 May 16.
More on Support Your Troops as long as it doesn't cost a lot of money !!!
Is Haliburton & KBR more worthy of Americans support than are the troops ???
VA Ordered Not to Diagnose PTSD by Mike Connery, AlterNet May 15, 2008.The VA is ordering its staff not to diagnose veterans with PTSD, short-changing our soldiers and making worse an already under-treated condition.
This is a disgrace. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and VoteVets.org have discovered that the VA is instructing its staff to avoid diagnosing soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with PTSD:
Both CREW and VoteVets have issued spot-on statements on the matter:
Melanie Sloan, executive director of CREW, said today:
It is outrageous that the VA is calling on its employees to deliberately misdiagnose returning veterans in an effort to cut costs. Those who have risked their lives serving our country deserve far better. First and foremost, they have a right to expect that they receive diagnoses and treatment based on their symptoms and not on the VA’s budget. The VA should immediately reverse this and any other similar directives.
Jon Soltz, an Iraq War Veteran and Chairman of VoteVets.org, added:
This is an issue I take personally. I know of many people who received a diagnosis of ‘Adjustment Disorder,’ who strongly felt they had PTSD, many of whom confirmed that suspicion with an independent diagnosis. Many veterans believe that the government just doesn’t want to pay out the disability that comes along with a PTSD diagnosis, and this revelation will not allay their concerns. It is crucial that we quickly get to the bottom of this, and ensure that misdiagnosing veterans is not part of some cost-cutting policy.and from Washington Post May 16:
:
A psychologist who helps lead the post-traumatic stress disorder program at a medical facility for veterans in Texas told staff members to refrain from diagnosing PTSD because so many veterans were seeking government disability payments for the condition.
"Given that we are having more and more compensation seeking veterans, I'd like to suggest that you refrain from giving a diagnosis of PTSD straight out," Norma Perez wrote in a March 20 e-mail to mental-health specialists and social workers at the Department of Veterans Affairs' Olin E. Teague Veterans' Center in Temple, Tex. Instead, she recommended that they "consider a diagnosis of Adjustment Disorder."
VA staff members "really don't . . . have time to do the extensive testing that should be done to determine PTSD," Perez wrote.
Adjustment disorder is a less severe reaction to stress than PTSD and has a shorter duration, usually no longer than six months, said Anthony T. Ng, a psychiatrist and member of Mental Health America, a nonprofit professional association.
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and so it goes,
GORD.
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