Antonia Juhasz on The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time

The Iraqi government has resolved a four-month political stalemate with the appointment of a new Prime Minister. Shiite leader Jawad Maliki will replace Ibrahim Jaafari. Jaafari stepped down after a lengthy dispute with Sunni and Kurdish leaders, who refused to back his leadership. Several analysts say the United States also played a pivotal role in replacing Jaafari. Steven Simon, a Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, said: "[The Iraqi government] wouldn"t have consented to it if it weren't for the very heavy pressure that the United States was bringing to bear."

Our guest today is an author who has been tracking the Bush administration's goals in Iraq since the invasion. Antonia Juhasz has written about them in a new book. It's called "The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time." The book tracks the radical neo-liberal economic program the Bush administration has tried to impose on Iraq, which threatens to leave Iraq's economy and oil reserves largely in the hands of multinational corporations. It's an agenda, the book says, that the Bush administration is trying to bring to all corners of the globe.

Antonia Juhasz joins us now in our firehouse studio.

* Antonia Juhasz, visiting scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies. For years, she was Project Director at the International Forum on Globalization.
* Website: TheBushAgenda.org

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http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/25/1343214