1115.org

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“Economic rents” is the term economists use to describe a situation in which someone is legitimately, in a free market, able to earn abnormal profits. Such a situation might arise, for example, if some resource has a widespread demand, and its supply is controlled by relatively few people or corporations. For example, if the U.S. military and the State Department suddenly developed a huge demand for cooking oil that has been used to fry fries, and companies like McDonald’s cleaned up big-time (till Halliburton and Blackwater could set up their own super-sized factories for producing fried-out cooking oil), McDonald’s would be earning economic rents. (Not as large, certainly, as they could earn if the U.S. military and the State Department bought directly from them instead of through Halliburton and Blackwater. But some things are a given, and all market participants accept such things gracefully. And, a rent is a rent is a rent.)

“Political rents” is a currently undefined term. But it doesn’t have to stay that way.

George Bush has just produced one of his Orwellian double-speak policy documents (let’s not discuss where he pulled it out from). This one deals with Iraq. I guess Georgie-Porgie looked around at the political landscape and said to himself: “Since my Iraq policy is so thoroughly discredited these days that Americans disapprove of it by an overwhelming majority, and since I have successfully conspired to dump the Iraq problem on my successor’s lap, and since I have next to no international standing any more, and the only people I can get to dance to my tune now are the Maliki government and members of my own administration, why don’t I make an extremely stupid attempt to bind my successor to some sort of long-term agreement with Iraq?”

That’s when he must have opened his administration’s double-speak orifice, to emit the “U.S.-Iraq Declaration of Principles for Friendship and Cooperation”. The White House says that the United States now stands committed to several principles. For example, we now have a principled obligation

To support the Iraqi government in training, equipping, and arming the Iraqi Security Forces so they can provide security and stability to all Iraqis; support the Iraqi government in contributing to the international fight against terrorism by confronting terrorists such as al-Qaida, its affiliates, other terrorist groups, as well as all other outlaw groups, such as criminal remnants of the former regime; and to provide security assurances to the Iraqi government to deter any external aggression and to ensure the integrity of Iraq’s territory.

Inasmuch as this appears as the climax of an official White House Fact Sheet, it is now a fact accompli.

Senior Iraqi officials seem to have much better Bush-speak translation skills than anybody in the Bush administration, certainly far far better than the hapless Dana Perino (who continues to serve at the President’s pleasure). And so they have been pleased to condense the administration’s verbiage to: The Iraqi government expects the United States to keep about 50,000 troops in the country over the long term.

If you came into my house uninvited, permanently took over a couple of rooms, clapped me on the shoulder and called me “Friend!” and shook my hand and said that your people would stick around in those rooms for years to come, I may end up having to smile and smile, but I would definitely curse you under my breath in some very unladylike language. And first chance I got down the road I would slap you with a legal notice for years of overdue unpaid rent. (At market rates, of course, to keep everything ideologically pure.)

And when you asked me what the Cheney I was doing, I would smile and smile, and maybe even rub my hands in ostentatious obsequiousness and say: “Political rents is no longer an undefined concept. Friend.”

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I am, of course, despite my irreverent manner, raising this as a serious question. One question, which breaks down to many. Each of which is grounds for enormous amounts of shame in its own right.

How come we don’t pay the sovereign nation of Iraq any rent for the prime properties we occupy all over their country, including vast areas of downtown Baghdad, as well as several palaces?

Haven’t we just been continuously picking the pockets of the very poor people we claim to be helping?

Surely this is not the way we behaved in occupied Germany or occupied Japan?

Doesn’t this constitute a violation of the laws of war, and/or the Geneva conventions?

Is there a statute of limitations for claiming reparations for such acts of occupier-extortion-in-kind?

Is there any estimate of the potential unpaid bill that may well be part of the hidden cost of the war that Bush will be sticking our children with (because he’s too brave and principled to ask us to pay for our own damn war)?