June 3, 2010

As of May 30, in addition to the 1000th American GI casualty, the National Priorities Project calculates that we have past the one trillion dollar mark on the invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. One TRILLION dollars, with a T. It's a hard number to wrap your mind around, as this Google Sketchup illustration demonstrates. It also begs the question: just what have we bought for all that money and what good could have been done with that money instead?

Brave New Films's ReThink Afghanistan has a new Facebook app that allows you to see other ways that money could have been spent:
1trillion on Facebook_1275520048313 copy_1c30a_0.jpg
You could choose to hire every worker in Afghanistan for a year for
$12 billion or hire 1 million public safety workers for a year for $46.5 billion, and still only have made mere drops in the bucket.

Personally, I opted to pay for four years of college for a million students, fund the clean up of the gulf oil spill, hire one million elementary school teachers and offer health care for 10 million Americans and guess what? I still didn't reach that one trillion mark.

Check out the app. Tell us how you'd spend the money. Then consider sending this to your congresscritter to ask him/her how much more blood and treasure need to be lost in the sands of the Middle East.

Can you help us out?

For nearly 20 years we have been exposing Washington lies and untangling media deceit, but now Facebook is drowning us in an ocean of right wing lies. Please give a one-time or recurring donation, or buy a year's subscription for an ad-free experience. Thank you.

Discussion

We welcome relevant, respectful comments. Any comments that are sexist or in any other way deemed hateful by our staff will be deleted and constitute grounds for a ban from posting on the site. Please refer to our Terms of Service for information on our posting policy.
Mastodon