Numbers this big deserve to be written out, 12 bln doesn't hit home to the average dumb America,
but $12,000,000,000 might......??.....................naw.........they'll just shrug.

The war pigs (who seem to be running the show badly)aint gonna get my "income" tax anymore!

And what's it all for? Nothing but lining the pockets of Bush's corporate whores and to use Iraq as the dashboard for when the warmongering fascists want to steal the rest of the Middle East's oil, so they can control the planet! Whoever controls the oil controls the planet. Sick.

Making Iraq into a budding democracy is just pure bullshit.

Johnny 2bad, you've done well to extrapolate to the hourly cost. Let's do another analysis. Fairly well paid workers in our country may earn $2 million in a lifetime. Divide that into a trillion.
Is there enough apathy in the world to squander 500,000 lifetime earnings in Iraq in addition to 40,000 dead and wounded in addition to the casualties of the shadow armies and the myriads of mercenaries that we employ there to do what was once the work of the military. And of course, we do not give any consideration at all to the hundreds of thousands of Iraquis that we have destroyed deliberately or indirectly. This war is not only a crime against humanity, it is a war against reason and sanity as well! The insatiable oil companies would spend every American Government dollar and the lives of every American citizen and whatever else it takes to get that once free oil that is so easily extracted from the sands of Iraq. It is time to make them pay for this war, and their lucre is not deep enough to do it! It is time for the pigs that ate America to return to us their bad investment!

No worries for the Republicans, the Democrats will be called fiscally irresponsible and big government, big spenders of the tax payers money for trying to spend 100th of the the money spent in Iraq for the benefit of the American people. Some sort of social program that might really help. The giant talking heads will be set loose and saying the focus group tested lines about this is the kind of spending that has gotten us in the situation that we are in now.  The press and the average American will buy it hook line and sinker.

No it isn't cheap, but it is a wonderful profitable business for Dick Cheney to be in. Americans will be paying him and his family for the next 100 years.

Some democrats are joining with republicans to keep troops in Iraq FOREVER, and calling it a "change in direction".

War,.. huh....what is it good for???? War profits, of course.

This is no longer the peoples government, but Cheney's Imperial Government. It isn't enough that he has everything. Everyone else must have nothing.

...and on the backs of the American taxpayer.

How many hospitals could be built with this this huge amount of money? How many schools and libraries could have been financed with this amount of cash? As Noah Shachtman and Steve Benen point out, this is another example of the stupidity of war. Perhaps if those who are so quick to advocate war were to have actually fought in a war, then just perhaps they might not have been so eager to drag this country and its citizens into an event which strips people of their humanity as well as their common sense.

Blue Buddha @ 11:

►Shiva H Vishnu◄ @ 2:

Numbers this big deserve to be written out, 12 bln doesn't hit home to the average dumb America,
but $12,000,000,000 might......??.....................naw.........they'll just shrug.

Give them a paperclip, and put in their hand. Then tell them that one billion paperclips weigh approximately 1,000 metric tons.

Then they'll say, "Metric? What are you? French?" Then they'll call homeland security and report you.

Keep in mind that these costs are structured as debts that are kept off the official Fed. gov't balance sheet until such time as the Fed. gov't can work them off with 'paired gains' using various U.S. bond trading schemes, etc. this works as long as foreign creditors keep playing along and keep buying U.S. treasury bonds - as they have been doing during these recent years of lower interest rates - but no longer. Now that the long term trend for rates around the world is up, the cost of financing America's off-balance sheet debts becomes too much for these foreign creditors to bear so they pull back from buying any more U.S. bonds... Forcing the U.S. gov't itself to make up the difference by putting these off-balance sheet (iraq's 1 trillion dollar cost for example) costs back onto America's balance sheet in the form of a huge, one-time (hopefully) U.S. dollar devaluation... dropping the purchasing power of all Americans cash sharply lower, i.e., gas and other commodities double in price rather quickly.

Well the military industrial complex is happy.

Meanwhile, Inside Defense reports that "top Pentagon budget and program officials have directed the military services to prepare spending proposals to finance Iraq and Afghanistan operations... through fiscal year 2009, which will span the last days of the Bush administration and the early months of the next administration."

Wrecking Iraq: One Million Dead, 2 Million Wounded, 3 Million Displaced
Collateral Genocide By MIKE FERNER

Two elements are necessary to commit the crime of genocide:

1) the mental element, meaning intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, and

2) the physical element, which includes any of the following: killing or causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group's physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births; or forcibly transferring children to another group.

Considering that such clear language comes from a UN treaty which is legally binding on our country, things could start getting a little worrisome -- especially when you realize that since our government declared economic and military warfare on Iraq we've killed well over one million people, fast approaching two.

This summer will be one year since researchers from Johns Hopkins University collected data for a study which concluded 655,000 additional deaths were caused by the military war, and things have only gotten worse since then. Then consider that the economic war killed an additional 500,000 Iraqi kids under the age of five during only the first seven years of sanctions which were in force for a dozen years, according to a 1999 U.N. report.

Based on the Johns Hopkins estimate of Iraqis killed in the war, one could conservatively estimate that another 2.6 million people have been wounded. The U.N. estimates that between 1.5 million and 2 million Iraqis are now "internally displaced" by the fighting and roughly the same number have fled their country, including disproportionate numbers of doctors and other professionals.

Taking on more debt moves the Federal Govt. closer to the Repug goal of bankrupting OUR Government and selling off it assets to their friends and associates.

Radically Moderate @ 28:

Taking on more debt moves the Federal Govt. closer to the Repug goal of bankrupting OUR Government and selling off it assets to their friends and associates.

Rep. Jim Cooper: Bush is Hiding the True National Debt. It's Worse than You've Heard. Much Worse.
Submitted by BuzzFlash on Thu, 09/07/2006 - 5:15am. Alerts

Though the Bush Administration's official budget lists the national debt and deficit as being incredibly high, they are actually far worse than reported, according to Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN). But don’t just take his word for it, even if Cooper is a Rhodes Scholar and Harvard Law graduate. The following figures appear in the official U.S. Financial Report, released by the Treasury Department:

* The true national debt is $49 trillion, not the $8.3 trillion Bush reported
o That's $156,000 for every citizen, or $375,000 for every working American
o This figure has more than doubled in the past five years
o We paid $327 billion last year on interest alone
* The true 2005 deficit was $760 billion, not the $318.5 billion Bush reported
o This is 6.2% of the GDP, not 2.6%
* It's all getting worse

What accounts for the huge discrepancy? Unlike businesses, the government uses "cash" instead of "accrual" accounting. This means that the government does not report future spending promises like Medicare and Social Security, or even future spending guarantees like veterans' benefits and federal employee pensions.

"Cash accounting tells you what's in your bank account. Accrual accounting tells you what's in your bank account and what's on your credit card statement," Cooper told BuzzFlash in an interview. "Whether you're promising to buy a road or something at Target, you need to know what you promised to buy. That should be a binding obligation of the government. We've made a world of promises to folks that we need to keep."

But wait, there's more! The U.S. Financial Report does not mention that if Medicare and Social Security are factored into the equation (which the Treasury Department did not), the true deficit was actually a whopping $3.3 trillion last year, over ten times more than Bush claims. And when Social Security projections are adjusted to reflect current life expectancies instead of the old 75-year mark, Cooper said the true national debt is "probably closer to $65 trillion."

Worried that a new Democratic majority in the House would be blamed for the higher numbers in the future, Cooper has taken it upon himself to make it clear that the problem has already been created by Bush's failed economic policies. "This has to be announced on their watch, using their voice," he said. "There's a great urgency about this: we only have two months left to educate all Americans about how the Bush deficits are literally destroying America's credit." [more]

US debt could trigger dollar collapse, UN warns
Submitted by Desha Priya on Thu, 2007-05-31 16:47.

The United States dollar is facing imminent collapse in the face of an unsustainable debt, the United Nations warned today.

United States debt, which had now deepened to well over $3 trillion, might turn out to be unsustainable in the rest of 2007 or next, putting further downward pressure on the United States dollar, Rob Vos, the Director of the Development Policy and Analysis Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA), told correspondents at a Headquarters press conference.

He pointed out that since its peak in 2002, the dollar had depreciated vis-à-vis the major currencies by some 35 per cent and by 25 per cent against a broader range of other currencies.

Vos made these comments at the launch of the 2007 World Economic Situation and Prospects report midyear update.

With that increased debt the risk of a sharp depreciation of the dollar continued, he warned. If countries willing to invest in United States dollar assets expected further depreciation, they might be less willing to hold dollar assets, triggering a much sharper fall in the United States dollar. The risk of disorderly adjustment and the steep fall of the dollar existed. The policy challenge was how to prevent a hard landing of the United States dollar and forge a benign adjustment of the global imbalance.

“surging” ain’t cheap...but it is profitable.

"The insatiable oil companies would spend every American Government dollar and the lives of every American citizen and whatever else it takes to get that once free oil that is so easily extracted from the sands of Iraq."

Well, let's name some names. Here are the primary beneficiaries of the blood of Pat Tillman and all the other heroic marines and military people who have paid the ultimate price in Iraq. Here are the names of the people who make the most money when we gas, burn, and "pacify" places like Fallujah.

They must feel REALLY GREAT and have TOTALLY CLEAN CONSCIENCES know that they are financially secure no matter how many Americans pay them directly in blood.

You want bad guys? - these are them.

CEOs

Exxon - Lee Raymond

Texaco - Peter I. Bijur

Shell Oil - Steve Miller

BP - John Browne

These are gods to whom George W Bush sacrifices human beings on his altar of delusion.

Write them and let them know you know that the blood of 3500 American soldiers and 500,000 Iraqis (80% of whom are civilians) are their responsibility.

My point has always been THE TRUE COST OF A GALLON OF GAS. I mean we say we're paying like $3.00 a gallon now, but that's just not true when you look at the in-direct costs. The amount of military engagements we must endure to protect our vital interests around this natural resource inlcuding the casualties and financial costs probably raises the cost to well over $100.00 per gallon.

We ALWAYS hear how the big business say it's TOO expensive to make thing energy efficient or change to a alternate fuel source. I always believed it was a short-term investment for LONG-TERM gains. They figure they get around most taxes anyway, and they're chickenhawks who don't have loved one fighting in these military engagements, so those costs never reach their books so they don't care.

It's a shame if you ask me....

This bill is going to have to paid by all of us and the way we will pay is through higher taxes. I only hope when the republicans are finally herded into a political corner from which they can do no more harm that the Democrats stick it down the throats of the corporate fascists who have profited from the last 13 years of GOP rule. I know its asking too much for these wimps to stand up straight and snarl they should:"You complain about the taxes? Why the hell weren't you complaining when your guys were running up the bill? Now you're going to pay for the abuses of power -- fiscal and political -- that you've funded since Newt Gingrich mouthed his fiction about a "contract with America" -- you know, the one that has turned out to be a "contract ON America"?

I say tax the bastards until they have to get in line with the rest of us and sweat over monthly bill payments and how they're going to educate their kids and take care of their health needs. Tax them and or jail them. The CEO's and their second, third, down to the fifth in command -- all of the Bush/Cheney millionaires -- including Bush and Cheney -- who have gotten fat, fatter, fattest off of the giveaways the Bushies have sponsored and legislated.

Maybe that way we can get our country back.

Saddam was a ruthless despost who murdered countless innocents and paid the ultimate price for it. Cheney commits the same crimes, as well as war crimes and as a result more innocents have died then under Saddam's reign yet Cheney doesn't even get impeached let alone have to worry about paying the ultimate price for his killing spree. Such is the benefit of being an unelected despot of the world's only superpower. Who's gonna stop him? The Democrats?

NChomsky @ 7:

Hey, I got an idea President Cheney...why don't we load a plane to the brim with good ol' American cash, and fly it into Iraq and hand it out? How many Iraqis are left alive? I'm sure they'd all stop fighting if we flew in billions and handed it out.

This is actually not a bad idea - to have been considered at the beginning of the war. The cost of a Leveraged Buy Out of Iraq would probably have been less than the 2 trillion u.s. will ultimately spend... without any assurances the u.s. will have access to the oil. plus, the oil would have continued flowing.. and the oil fields there would have started to be developed... so the price would not have spiked as it has these past two years (with $100 oil now in sight). contrast u.s. in iraq to way China has been acquiring oil in africa - spending lots of the money (we send them every month with our purchases at wal-mart) - And what is really interesting is that there is evidence that the insurgents in Iraq, it's been reported, are using weapons that come from China... HAHAHA wouldn't it be incredible if the u.s. faces off with china in iraq who is also interested in oil reserves and who has the weapon of dumping close to 1 trillion in u.s. gov't bonds (they hold in reserve) to crash the u.s. bond market any time they wish...

Re: Cost of Iraq War -

Before the shooting started, Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz told the House Budget Committee that various scenarios would result in a costs which would “range from $10 billion to $100 billion".

This has got to stand as one of the most blunderous, inept as well as decietful calculations of modern times. He will forever be the fool in the eyes of history.

What if.....1/2 that money had been placed buffering up the police and civilian anti-subversive efforts rather than being put into the military, would it had made a difference? But then again, maybe not. Homeland Security is financing security cameras for city parks and waterfronts in Idaho.

Put aside the staggering dollar amounts: We're getting less security despite the expenses, and no better security for the oil. This is making things worse. What a waste of money. Too much money is being spent on not enough troops and nothing to show for it. This is reckless.

Like all the other stats released by this administration the number of US deaths and casualties far exceed what has been reported according to documents obtained by Veterans for Common Sense through the Freedom of Information Act. (FOIA).

Altogether, the report shows that US casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq, between 2001 and June 30, 2007, total 65,278.

There is a difference between the Pentagon's publicized casualty reports and reality of almost 34,000.

In the month of June alone, despite a surge ordered by President Bush last January to crack down on the civil war in Iraq, total US casualties mounted to over 1,660 killed, wounded, and medically evacuated.

Although the piece did not separate the total number of those dead from the wounded it follows the pattern of this administration's penchant for cooking the books.

This is an insult to every soldier lost in this bloody and violent occupation. It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out hiding the caskets arriving at Dover -- now in the dead of night (pun intended) -- forbidding photographs and barring reporters from the area are not done out of respect for the families; it is to hide the numbers of caskets carrying the remains of a wife or husband, father or mother, son or daughter, sister or brother, friend or a beloved to someone, somewhere.

see here for full article:

http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/
5530/1/32/