Cost of War in Iraq & Afghanistan is $1,202,614,324,202 – more details
by Debbie Menon
The $1,202,614,324,202 dollar cost to date and counting, for the wars in Iraq & Afghanistan is the low estimate, or rather the literal cost. This does not include the cost of borrowing that money, or the cost of 5 or 6 decades of medical care and disability pensions for several hundred thousand American soldiers.These figures don’t include the health and education services and other social programs which were robbed to pay for the war, which will probably never be funded again. And most important, the direct costs and the opportunity costs to the Iraqi people and their economy, including the lost income and pain and suffering of more than a million dead and many million Iraqis turned into refugees in an illegal assault on their nation.
Suddenly, life in the U.S.A. doesn’t seem so stable anymore, if you believe half of what you read in the press and there is no reason not to.
Unemployment is as high or higher than it has ever been, and this is reflected in statistics of which enumerating procedure is ever-changing in order to minimize the impression and impact. Those hundreds of thousands of healthy, trained, capable and willing “workers” who are unemployed and looking for work, taking anything they can to earn enough to put something on the table, are probably even greater than they were during The Great Depression in 1929.
The “real” numbers of unemployed, have always been manipulated to hide the hard truths because it is simply impolitic to let the people know how badly off they actually are. It is one thing to worry about not having enough to feed, clothe and house the kids, it is another thing to know that it is endemic, and that there is little hope that things will improve at any time in the foreseeable future.
American Industry, one of the most powerful in the world a hundred years ago, has,with the support of years of American government policy, exported overseas almost all of America’s jobs in the search for ever more profitability at any costs to anyone but the American Corporate elites and the career Government oligarchy who manage the system.
Think of the $25 billion that the US automakers would like to borrow, and have been denied by Congress. That same Congress has agreed to pay that much money, every month for more than 100 months, for the illegal war in Iraq. US automakers lack the chutzpah to ask Congress, which better serves US interests and National Security?
Most Americans have been equally victimized by the Bank and Stock Market manipulators, actually very same people, who seeing the profitable housing mortgage business evaporate along with the loss of employment and subsequent inability of their clients to buy even bigger and more expensive homes in order to keep up with the Joneses and “The American Dream,” reengineered the Housing Mortgage Industry in such a deceitful and illegal manner that it not only preserved their already immense profits, but raised them to heretofore unseemly and unimaginably obscene levels!
All at the cost, of course of not only the default of the mortgages and loss of the homes of thousands of people, but also the loss and bankruptcy of millions of worldwide investors in their Ponzi styled Mortgage and derivatives schemes. It looks to me as if the entire “disaster” was a scam set up to take the American depositor, and someone has stolen, not only his homes, but his savings, and his investments.Under the “new” hate laws, it will be “anti-Semitic” and unlawful to call Bernie Madoff a “thief” or a “crook.” but not unlawful to refer to Muslims collectively as “islamo-fascist terrorists” and Christians who profess that Jesus was actually crucified as “anti-Semitic Jew–baiters.” Read Americans Divided By Hate Crimes Bill.Just how ridiculous can US Law become? “The meat of the hate crimes bill is a $10 million grant for the establishment of a federally funded surveillance center” says Karin.
Guess who will receive all of this money, and be placed in charge…
You got it! Who is in charge of everything else in America?
It is incredible that the one thing that Democrats and Republicans can unite on in Congress is, blind allegiance to the Israel Lobby AIPAC (American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee).
Oh, how I love to quote Israel Shamir who correctly advocates: Hang ‘Em High! Just look at the titans of Wall Street, AIG (Mr. Alan Greenberg), Bernie Madoff, the junk Bond King Michael Milkin, Ivan Boesky. “They were proud that the financial charts of the United States and of the world were drawn up in a small room by Henry Paulson of the Treasury, Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan of the Federal Reserve, by Maurice Greenberg of AIG. They built their world surrounded by Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Marc Rich, Michael Milken, Andrew Fastow, George Soros, et al.
Their exciting new world of Lexus and Nexus was glorified by Tom Friedman of the New York Times. They gave the Nobel prize in Economics to Myron Scholes and Robert C. Merton, proud board of directors of the now infamous Long Term Capital Management hedge fund that was bailed out by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to the tune of $ 3.6 billion. President Bush rewarded them for their unaccountability by releasing them from the burden of taxation.”
I believe Barnum completely understated the situation when he remarked that “…there is a fool born every minute, and two to take him.”
The fools are lining up more frequently, and the lines to take them are even longer.
Not a single banker, CEO, Chairman or major investor of any of the banks which have taken such disastrous hits in this economic “crisis” will move into the “poor house,” or be consigned to Debtor’s Prison. Go figure!
The Taxpayer in the meanwhile, as a diversion from their personal problems while sitting amongst their displaced possessions at the curbs in front of their former homes, worrying about how and what to feed the children, they are being warned of dire and threatening “terrorists” movements who are forever preparing to blow up what little they have left, invade what is left of their country, and destroy the remnants of “The Dream.”
As if they did not have enough problems with housing, work, and those terrorists who envy their high, rich and advanced American Lifestyle, they are at this moment being warned of the threat of Irans’ nuclear program or ambitions, and the devastating effects they will have on the lives, freedoms and lifestyles of each of them, wherever they live in the world!
This threat, of course, provides about the only remaining opportunity for the young, fit, healthy and able young American, to find some means of providing for the fiscal security of the family, to wit, Military Service, in which they are offered fiscal security in exchange for physical risk to their personal survival and well being. Oh well, don’t fret, because you will be told: “But there is another issue here…and that is these people were not drafted. They volunteered…and should have known what they were getting themselves into. Sure, the recruiters focus on the educational and free health care benefits…but when they sign their name on the dotted line they are buying a lotto ticket for death, injury of PTSD.”Sure. Soldiers march off and go to war for many reasons… illusions for the most part, few of which last very long after they arrive in the field. After that, they fight for one or two simple things, to stay alive, and to keep as many of their comrades and other unfortunates-in-arms alive as they possibly can.
I know of Veterans Today in their 6th and 7th decade, who were twenty-year olds when recruited and who have taken a pretty bad beating, physically and emotionally, from the experience. It is men like them who are paying for what America has done, and become today, and who those who sit on their fat asses and holiday in nice places like Hawaii should give thanks, while these men struggle to stay sane, feed their cats and stay alive!
There will be many more of them coming down American streets. They are making them by the thousands, every day.
You are “wounded” only if a piece of foreign military metal tears your flesh and you bleed. To many, that would be the simplest kind of wound. The others are not considered wounded, get no pretty blue ribbons with enameled hearts dangle, treatment, or disability pension with which to feed themselves and their offspring.
Those who survive, sane and in one piece, will survive! Those who do not will be presented with a small medal, a wheelchair and a prosthesis… or a flag, the flowers, the eulogy of heroism, and the small plot of land are free!
Yes, indeed. The American taxpayers are being raked over the fake war coals again and again and are being victimized by those who manage the system more so every day.
It would appear that the American Dream and the Great American Economy were both built on one gigantic and unstable fault line. And the core is trembling!
Read more by Debbie Menon
River to Sea
Uprooted Palestinian
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