True cost of Iraq War

Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, has calculated the total cost of the first four years of the Bush/Cheney illegal war on Iraq. Their lies and schemes cost American taxpayers $720 million per day. This figure takes into account interest on the war debt and long-term care for the wounded.

The American Friends Service Committee has analyzed what America could buy with only a single day's worth of the money we're spending on this mightmare. For $720 million, we could:

* Provide health coverage for a year for 424,000 children.

* Build 84 brand new schools.

* Buy school lunches for a year for 1.2 million needy kids.

* Provide 6,482 units of affordable housing.

* Pay for a year of renewable-energy electricity in 1.3 million homes.

* Pay the annual salaries of 12,500 new classroom teachers.

* Put 35,000 students through a 4-year state college.

Any of these could be had for just one day of war funding. One week of spending at this rate would pay for every item on this list.

As if the money alone isn’t atrocious enough, as of March 4, 2008 we have lost 3,974 of our brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, aunts and uncles, friends and neighbors so that Bush, Cheney and their cronies in the military industrial complex and the new military intelligence complex could bolster their financial bottom line.

Iraqi citizens, who only pleaded for help in removing Saddam Hussein and his tyrannical family from power, has paid for this ‘service’ with over 38,000 of their fellow neighbors lives. Over 2.5 million have been forced out of neighborhoods that they will never be able to move back into. Jobs and careers have been unalterably changed. The entire social/economic/religious complexion of the entire country and the Middle East has been changed. All because Americans wasteful thirst for more oil and money.

Iraqi citizens are still deprived of adequate water supplies, sewer systems, and electricity in their homes. Do you think maybe they are sorry they ever asked for our help?

All of this is currently going on in a country that never threatened us directly, but since they had oil the U.S. felt ‘obligated’ to move in, ‘just for their own protection’.

I would say that the balance sheet in this ‘we help you, you help us’ scheme is just a bit unbalanced.

How much money are Bush’s buddies making off of us?

From the Boston Globe March 6, 2008

Kellogg Brown & Root, the nation's top Iraq war contractor and until last year a subsidiary of Halliburton Corp., has avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in federal Medicare and Social Security taxes by hiring workers through shell companies based in Cayman Islands. The Defense Department has known since at least 2004 that KBR was avoiding taxes by declaring its American workers as employees of Cayman Islands shell companies, and officials said the move allowed KBR to perform the work more cheaply, saving Defense dollars.

Need more proof that Bush/Cheney look the other way while their buddies siphon money from U.S. citizens while lining their own pockets?

Halliburton has been accused by the Pentagon of overcharges in the amount of $1.4 billion.

Congress has found that $10 billion has been mismanaged and wasted.

$9 billion of U.S. taxpayers money and $549.7 million in spare parts shipped in 2004 to US contractors remains unaccounted for. Also, 190,000 guns, including 110,000 AK-47 rifles.

$1 billion in tractor trailers, tank recovery vehicles, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and other equipment provided to the Iraqi security forces is missing.

Pentagon auditors have determined that of the $20 billion paid to Kellogg Brown & Root to supply U.S. military in Iraq with food, fuel, housing and other items, $3.2 billion is questionable or unsupportable.

Will anything be done to prosecute or even conduct meaningful investigations into this mismanagement, theft, graft, deceit and lies surrounding this illegal war? No!

Need more proof that George W. Bush and company doesn’t give a damn about the welfare of his fellow citizens? His 2009 budget to Congress will give $515 billion to the Pentagon and slash spending on healthcare programs, Center for Disease Control, low-income energy assistance, and family literacy.

Health, education and welfare continues to take a backseat to military funding. Why? Because there isn’t enough money to be made on health, education and welfare. His fellow citizens mean nothing more to him than warm bodies to put in harms way so he and his buddies can reap billions in profits while our nation’s infrastructure falls into disrepair, our social security program remains underfunded, our healthcare system dies a slow death, and the value of our dollar recedes into oblivion.

Bush’s answer to ease our suffering due to his ruinous economic policies is to throw us a meager bone, in the form of a $300 check, with a grin while telling us that we are free to spend it on whatever we want. Gee, thanks George. This brings to mind Marie Antoinette’s famous line ‘Let them eat cake’ when she learned the peasants had no bread to eat.

And what can we spend this surprise windfall on? Products made by foreign governments so that all of this ‘free’ money goes directly to stimulating their economies. Great plan George! Here’s an idea, how about bringing back some of the New Deal economic recovery plans that Franklin D. Roosevelt put into action to help the country through the depression? Oh, but then, you would have to admit that our economy is not as resilient and fundamentally healthy as you and your cohorts proclaim it to be. If you would just view the exercise as ensuring you had healthy young men and women available for your dirty little war, you just might be willing to try it.