War Monger At Work

Well, by now we could have parked a shiny new EV in everybody's garage, and installed solar panels on the garage roof to charge it...and STILL had money left over to offer up a bit of health care for folks who need it. But no. Alternative energy isn't important enough to spend money on.

We hold bake sales at my daughter's school so we can afford basic sports equipment for recess, some books for the library, and a few computers for the "lab". We will always have unlimited funds for "war" but have enough for elementary schools? I don't think so!

All about priorities. I mean... what do we need smart, happy, healthy kids for?

Sigh. Now you've got me all ticked off too! Thanks for sharing! :angry:

 

I happen to hear these remarks almost on daily basis from all walks of life:

"Yeah, war is GOOD man", "we gotta kill THEM all out there", "pacifism is EVIL", "we gotta kill those rag-heads", "someone's gotta die so I can get a job", "all these people over there are terrorists"
"nuke 'em everywhere where the sand is", "evil people over there gotta be taken care of", "man gas is up, we have to nuke those ....ing arabs", "we gotta shoot the leftos man", "heads gotta roll", "peace is for the pussies", "it's because of all these weak ...ing libs"

blah blah blah.

SURREAL !

 

Yep. With the money we spend on war, we could solve most of our society's social ills, and give away enough stuff to make the rest of the world love us.

Our government has a blank check for death and an empty pocket for life.

However, this is nothing new and George W. hasn't changed anything. Amerika was founded on death, destruction, and slavery, and throughout its history has turned to war as its first resort in times of crisis or when the government of the day needed a popularity boost.

And, hey out there: it's our fault because we keep electing these clowns!

 

What's depressing is reading all this liberal cr*p on an otherwise fine board. Yeah, all conservatives want to do is kill people. Yep. Sure describes the 50% of the country I belong do. Oh, and keep the children uneducated and stupid. Yep. That's good for business.

If people would stop demonizing the opposition we might just make some progress on issues. The views I read here do not encourage any middle ground. Either you're a oil-loving, death-loving, life-hating conservative facist or you're a human being. That seems to be the only choice here.

This is why I never read FHOP.

 

Oops. Something seems to have gone wrong with your plan.

For what it is worth (since you brought the stupid kids up, I can only assume that you're wrapped me up into your convenient little anti-conservative package) - my comments have nothing to do with who or why we're doing what we're doing. The Democrats voted for it too! I just don't want it happening. I don't care who is in power, or who spear-heads it.

The fact remains: We don't have enough money for our schools, or health, or social security or alternative energy research... but we have UNLIMITED funds for what we're doing in Iraq. Wth? Don't try to dismiss it by saying I'm a liberal who hates conservatives. I'm an American who hates spending money on stuff that makes the world worse.

If smart kids are good for big business - and thus America... why are we giving kids the short end of the stick year after year (regardless of president)? Makes me sick.

 

Shit man, so you just write in the FHOP without reading?

 

OK, I just snorted so loud that my daughter had 911 on the phone.

 

well, what can I say, that's what happens when the lunatics come out. I hope the fire dept. didn't show up

 

It is fortunate that my family has been through this drill many times before. Order has been restored, and the monitor has been wiped clean.

 

Yes, we should give away enough stuff to make the rest of the world love us. Let's give our technology to any country that wants it; nuclear, weapons, food, shelter, let's build their homes for them, give them free money, free medical coverage, etc. Had we done this long ago, I'm absolutely sure Sadam and Ben Laden would have loved us and would have never promoted terrorism against our country or had gone against the United Nations security council mandates.

Let's just make sure when we implement this policy, we don't give ourselves anything more than we give them, because if we do, they may become jealous and hate us for being so selfish; and then they might use all that free technology and wealth against us. By doing this, everyone in this country will love the government and our president and everyone in the world will love this country... Peace.. utopia, forever. Sounds like a great plan. It also sounds like an ideal plan for Hillary to implement. Go for it. It should be very low risk. After all, everyone knows that if their needs are taken care of by their government (or by another country), they will never rebel as long as distribution of everything is fair. We might want to consider everyone work for the government to assure the even distribution of wealth is done properly, therefore private enterprise would need to be eliminated. I certainly will do my part to work as hard as I always have, even though my paycheck will go to the government and be redistributed by the government to all. I'm sure everyone here will also do their part too and trust this new government along with our new found friends in the world.

Rick S

 

I think you're over playing daniel's reply, the core issue is the RAMPANT SPENDING, far beyond our financial capabilities. What happens when our country would have to confront other rouge states? Where will the expanses come from and from how many future generations to support it? Would you like to take tax burden that may reach 50%-70% of your income to support just the wars? If we can't handle Iraq with such expenditure so far, how do you envision for us to confront China, Iran, Russia or other states, or many combined states in some kind of treaty (Arab League states combined).

I know we can always resort to the NUKES!

 

I totally agree. My point was that it's NEVER as simple as some liberals make it out to be. There are always tradeoffs and limits to deal with. I too am tired of all the government, Bush and republican bashing and name calling on this site, with very little constructive discussion of actual policy issues and suggestions on how to improve our situation. Although I'm more on the conservative side, I'm always open to anyone who wants to change my point of view through arguments and analysis to back up their point of view. My impression of most liberals is that they tend to be angry, emotional and reactive, tend to generalize about everything and don't always present facts or any alternative plans when trying to argue their point of view. I hope I'm wrong. I truly feel a strong country has at least two strong parties that are able to make a good case for their opposing points of view. This helps all of us to clearly see the pros and cons of every important decision our country/government needs to make, resulting in a much higher quality result.

By the way, thanks for talking about "issues"

Rick S

 

Correction. The dude wasn't elected. He lost the popular vote in 2000. He, his brother's and cronies rigged the Florida & Texas elections big time. In the 2004 election, Diebold won the election for him with no paper trail votes. Most major exit polls showed him losing in important states.

 

Rick S, wholeheartedly agree on divisionist attitude that surrounds us, everything is focused on either conservative stance or liberal stance of the issue. Without re-focusing to the universal benefits of the nation, we'll spiral downward inevitably.

Interesting how we're also facilitating the squandering of others people money, not only of our own. I think we live in the era of complete ineptitude.

Here:

At the beginning of the Iraq war, the UN entrusted $23bn of Iraqi money to the US-led coalition to redevelop the country. With the infrastructure of the country still in ruins, where has all that money gone? Callum Macrae and Ali Fadhil on one of the greatest financial scandals of all time

Monday March 20, 2006
The Guardian


In a dilapidated maternity and paediatric hospital in Diwaniyah, 100 miles south of Baghdad, Zahara and Abbas, premature twins just two days old, lie desperately ill. The hospital has neither the equipment nor the drugs that could save their lives. On the other side of the world, in a federal courthouse in Virginia, US, two men - one a former CIA agent and Republican candidate for Congress, the other a former army ranger - are found guilty of fraudulently obtaining $3m (£1.7m) intended for the reconstruction of Iraq. These two events have no direct link, but they are none the less products of the same thing: a financial scandal that in terms of sheer scale must rank as one of the greatest in history.
At the start of the Iraq war, around $23bn-worth of Iraqi money was placed in the trusteeship of the US-led coalition by the UN. The money, known as the Development Fund for Iraq and consisting of the proceeds of oil sales, frozen Iraqi bank accounts and seized Iraqi assets, was to be used in a "transparent manner", specified the UN, for "purposes benefiting the people of Iraq".

For the past few months we have been working on a Guardian Films investigation into what happened to that money. What we discovered was that a great deal of it has been wasted, stolen or frittered away. For the coalition, it has been a catastrophe of its own making. For the Iraqi people, it has been a tragedy. But it is also a financial and political scandal that runs right to the heart of the nightmare that is engulfing Iraq today.

Diwaniyah is a sprawling and neglected city with just one small state paediatric and maternity hospital to serve its one million people. Years of war, corruption under Saddam and western sanctions have reduced the hospital to penury, so when last year the Americans promised total refurbishment, the staff were elated. But the renovation has been partial and the work often shoddy, and where it really matters - funding frontline health care - there appears to have been little change at all.

In the corridor, an anxious father who has been told his son may have meningitis is berating the staff. "I want a good hospital, not a terrible hospital that makes my child worse," he says. But then he calms down. "I'm not blaming you, we are the same class. I'm talking about important people. Those controlling all those millions and the oil. They didn't come here to save us from Saddam, they came here for the oil, and so now the oil is stolen and we got nothing from it." Beside him another parent, a woman, agrees: "If the people who run the country are stealing the money, what can we do?" For these ordinary Iraqis, it is clear that the country's wealth is being managed in much the same way as it ever was. How did it all go so wrong?

When the coalition troops arrived in Iraq, they were received with remarkable goodwill by significant sections of the population. The coalition had control up to a point and, perhaps more importantly, it had the money to consolidate that goodwill by rebuilding Iraq, or at least make a significant start. Best of all for the US and its allies, the money came from the Iraqis themselves.

Because the Iraqi banking system was in tatters, the funds were placed in an account with the Federal Reserve in New York. From there, most of the money was flown in cash to Baghdad. Over the first 14 months of the occupation, 363 tonnes of new $100 bills were shipped in - $12bn, in cash. And that is where it all began to go wrong.

"Iraq was awash in cash - in dollar bills. Piles and piles of money," says Frank Willis, a former senior official with the governing Coalition Provisional Authority. "We played football with some of the bricks of $100 bills before delivery. It was a wild-west crazy atmosphere, the likes of which none of us had ever experienced."

The environment created by the coalition positively encouraged corruption. "American law was suspended, Iraqi law was suspended, and Iraq basically became a free fraud zone," says Alan Grayson, a Florida-based attorney who represents whistleblowers now trying to expose the corruption. "In a free fire zone you can shoot at anybody you want. In a free fraud zone you can steal anything you like. And that was what they did."

A good example was the the Iraqi currency exchange programme (Ice). An early priority was to devote enormous resources to replacing every single Iraqi dinar showing Saddam's face with new ones that didn't. The contract to help distribute the new currency was won by Custer Battles, a small American security company set up by Scott Custer and former Republican Congressional candidate Mike Battles. Under the terms of the contract, they would invoice the coalition for their costs and charge 25% on top as profit. But Custer Battles also set up fake companies to produce inflated invoices, which were then passed on to the Americans. They might have got away with it, had they not left a copy of an internal spreadsheet behind after a meeting with coalition officials.

The spreadsheet showed the company's actual costs in one column and their invoiced costs in another; it revealed, in one instance, that it had charged $176,000 to build a helipad that actually cost $96,000. In fact, there was no end to Custer Battles' ingenuity. For example, when the firm found abandoned Iraqi Airways fork-lifts sitting in Baghdad airport, it resprayed them and rented them to the coalition for thousands of dollars. In total, in return for $3m of actual expenditure, Custer Battles invoiced for $10m. Perhaps more remarkable is that the US government, once it knew about the scam, took no legal action to recover the money. It has been left to private individuals to pursue the case, the first stage of which concluded two weeks ago when Custer Battles was ordered to pay more than $10m in damages and penalties.

But this is just one story among many. From one US controlled vault in a former Saddam palace, $750,000 was stolen. In another, a safe was left open. In one case, two American agents left Iraq without accounting for nearly $1.5m.

Perhaps most puzzling of all is what happened as the day approached for the handover of power (and the remaining funds) to the incoming Iraqi interim government. Instead of carefully conserving the Iraqi money for the new government, the Coalition Provisional Authority went on an extraordinary spending spree. Some $5bn was committed or spent in the last month alone, very little of it adequately accounted for.

One CPA official was given nearly $7m and told to spend it in seven days. "He told our auditors that he felt that there was more emphasis on the speed of spending the money than on the accountability for that money," says Ginger Cruz, the deputy inspector general for Iraqi reconstruction. Not all coalition officials were so honest. Last month Robert Stein Jr, employed as a CPA comptroller in south central Iraq, despite a previous conviction for fraud, pleaded guilty to conspiring to steal more than $2m and taking kickbacks in the form of cars, jewellery, cash and sexual favours. It seems certain he is only the tip of the iceberg. There are a further 50 criminal investigations under way.

Back in Diwaniyah it is a story about failure and incompetence, rather than fraud and corruption. Zahara and Abbas, born one and a half months premature, are suffering from respiratory distress syndrome and are desperately ill. The hospital has just 14 ancient incubators, held together by tape and wire.

Zahara is in a particularly bad way. She needs a ventilator and drugs to help her breathe, but the hospital has virtually nothing. Her father has gone into town to buy vitamin K on the black market, which he has been told his children will need. Zahara starts to deteriorate and in desperation the doctor holds a tube pumping unregulated oxygen against the child's nostrils. "This treatment is worse than primitive," he says. "It's not even medicine." Despite his efforts, the little girl dies; the next day her brother also dies. Yet with the right equipment and the right drugs, they could have survived.

How is it possible that after three years of occupation and billions of dollars of spending, hospitals are still short of basic supplies? Part of the cause is ideological tunnel-vision. For months before the war the US state department had been drawing up plans for the postwar reconstruction, but those plans were junked when the Pentagon took over.

To supervise the reconstruction of the Iraqi health service, the Pentagon appointed James Haveman, a former health administrator from Michigan. He was also a loyal Bush supporter, who had campaigned for Jeb Bush, and a committed evangelical Christian. But he had virtually no experience in international health work.

The coalition's health programme was by any standards a failure. Basic equipment and drugs should have been distributed within months - the coalition wouldn't even have had to pay for it. But they missed that chance, not just in health, but in every other area of life in Iraq. As disgruntled Iraqis will often point out, despite far greater devastation and crushing sanctions, Saddam did more to rebuild Iraq in six months after the first Gulf war than the coalition has managed in three years.

Kees Reitfield, a health professional with 20 years' experience in post-conflict health care from Kosovo to Somalia, was in Iraq from the very beginning of the war and looked on in astonishment at the US management in its aftermath. "Everybody in Iraq was ready for three months' chaos," he says. "They had water for three months, they had food for three months, they were ready to wait for three months. I said, we've got until early August to show an improvement, some drugs in the health centres, some improvement of electricity in the grid, some fuel prices going down. Failure to deliver will mean civil unrest." He was right.

Of course, no one can say that if the Americans had got the reconstruction right it would have been enough. There were too many other mistakes as well, such as a policy of crude "deBa'athification" that saw Iraqi expertise marginalised, the creation of a sectarian government and the Americans attempting to foster friendship with Iraqis who themselves had no friends among other Iraqis.

Another experienced health worker, Mary Patterson - who was eventually asked to leave Iraq by James Haveman - characterises the Coalition's approach thus: "I believe it had a lot to do with showing that the US was in control," she says. "I believe that it had to do with rewarding people that were politically loyal. So rather than being a technical agenda, I believe it was largely a politically motivated reward-and-punishment kind of agenda."

Which sounds like the way Saddam used to run the country. "If you were to interview Iraqis today about what they see day to day," she says, "I think they will tell you that they don't see a lot of difference".

· Dispatches: Iraq's Missing Billions produced by GuardianFilms is broadcast tonight on Channel4 at 8pm.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1734939,00.html

 

"I think we live in the era of complete ineptitude."

It was bad enough when the U.S. was just a plutocracy. Now that it has become a kakistocracy it is intolerable.

 

Now THIS is real drivel. We have been throwing money at "societies ills" ever since the 1930's. I still see ills. It is because MONEY cannot solve our ills. All that money has done is create a sense of entitlement in thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people and a host of "new" ills.

We have the richest poor people in the world. And giving away stuff to make the world LOVE us?????? That's CRAZY talk and has ben disproven throughout History!

 

Man O' Man...Hey...did ya miss the news....three MAJOR papers did an actual count of the ballots and George WON everytime. Of course, I read it on page 26 DDDD in our local rag.

 

The real issue in the 2000 election was never the chads. The real issue was the 5,000 voters illegally turned away from the polls by the Secretary of State of Florida (the person who runs the election) who was also Bush's campaign chair for the state!

However, Bush does not act in a vacuum. He needs Congress or he can do nothing. And the Democrats supported his illegal war and his assaults on Constitutional liberties almost as much as the Republicans did. Electoral fraud has always been a part of the American political reality, but 90% of those clowns have actually been elected, and the other 10% don't turn the tables.

I am an equal-opportunity basher. I bash both parties because both parties are corrupt and self-serving. Both parties are willing to drop bombs on children in the name of our "national interests." (War is truly non-partisam in the U.S., and I unlike any of the liberals I know am a pacifist.)

With all the arguments about how nasty the "bad guys" are, my question for Bush and the rest of them (of both parties) is: how many children are you willing to kill to keep Amerika rich? And if you are a Christian (as most of our leaders, and many of their supporters claim to be) How many children would Jesus kill to maintain Amerikan dominance over the world? I kinda think the answer is none at all. And although I am not a Christian, the answer for me is none at all, too.