As U.S. cities and states closing or selling off parks (here and here) or suspending basic services, another report has confirmed billions of new hospitals and facilities were built in Iraq and then left to rot.
The article below details such things as a $40 million prison, a $165 million children’s hospital and a $100 million waste water treatment system that have gone to waste in Iraq. Previously, reports found that billions have simply disappeared. “More than $5 billion in American taxpayer funds has been wasted — more than 10 percent of the some $50 billion the U.S. has spent on reconstruction in Iraq.”
This estimate is viewed as a highly conservative estimate with the actual amount of theft and waste likely to be much higher.
Source: Yahoo
Right. That faux nostalgia politics is precisely what Gil Scott Heron sung about. “The good old days. A time when the buck stopped somewhere and you could still buy something with it.” Harking back to the impossible.
Faux Nostalgia Politics.
It’s what’s for dinner.
If you also long for the good old days before antiseptic surgery and women having the vote.
Just maybe Mill said what he did about conservatives because by any sociological definition “conservative” means “somebody who longs for a bygone era impossible to return to” which is a pretty stupid notion.
Just what are the “successful” policies of yesteryear that you have in mind Jeepers?
Union busting, deindustrialization of the economy via outsourcing, unprecedented transfrerence of wealth from the poorest 1/5th of society to the richest 1/5th of society over the last 30 years, planetary despoilation in pursuit of superprofits, perpetual war for perpetual peace, the creation of unprecedented incarceration rates & its corollary, the Prison Insustrial Complex, the allowing of corporatios to have the same legal standing as a human beings, and categorizing catsup as a food group in public schools may well be considered “successful” policies in Wall Street board rooms but for the rest of us here on earth success & failure are terms loaded with class antagonisms.
Just point out some conservative minded “success” stories since Senator McCarthy’s days Jeepers and see if they actually withstand scrutiny.
I think it is clear.
Jeepers,
Why do I get the feeling that you don’t really care about the meaning of what you say, as long as it gets a response? For instance: “to bad he said that before conservatives were conservatives in the common vernacular of today. Today’s progressives want to “progress” backward to the failed policies of yesteryear.”
You start off good, the words are actually assembled in a way that makes sense and has meaning. It’s even true, if misleading (most of Mill’s views are shared by “the left” of this country). Seriously, he favored progressive taxes, held the view that women were equal to men, was an early environmentalists, etc. etc.
Then you sort of wander into vague and shapeless rhetoric. What do you mean (and please try and be list specifics and back up your claims with evidence) by that last sentence?
“Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative.” John Stuart Mill
to bad he said that before conservatives were conservatives in the common vernacular of today. Today’s progressives want to “progress” backward to the failed policies of yesteryear.
“Congressional Budget Office numbers show that the total cost of the eight-year war was less than the stimulus bill passed by the Democratic-led Congress in 2009. According to CBO numbers in its Budget and Economic Outlook published this month, the cost of Operation Iraqi Freedom was $709 billion for military and related activities, including training of Iraqi forces and diplomatic operations. The projected cost of the stimulus, which passed in February 2009, and is expected to have a shelf life of two years, was $862 billion. The U.S. deficit for fiscal year 2010 is expected to be $1.3 trillion, according to CBO. That compares to a 2007 deficit of $160.7 billion and a 2008 deficit of $458.6 billion, according to data provided by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget. In 2007 and 2008, the deficit as a percentage of gross domestic product was 1.2 percent and 3.2 percent, respectively. “Relative to the size of the economy, this year’s deficit is expected to be the second largest shortfall in the past 65 years; 9.1 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), exceeded only by last year’s deficit of 9.9 percent of GDP,” CBO wrote. The CBO figures show that the most expensive year of the Iraq war was in 2008, the year when the surge proposed by Gen. David Petraeus and approved by President Bush was in full swing and the turning point in the war. The total cost of Iraq operations in 2008 was $140 billion. In 2007, the cost of Iraq operations was $124 billion. According to an analysis by the American Thinker’s Randall Hoven, the cost of the Iraq war from 2003-2008 — when Bush was in office — was $20 billion less than the cost of education spending and less than a quarter of the cost of Medicare spending during that same period.””
eniobob:
The article was indeed great, thank you for posting it. Interesting site as well. I particularly enjoyed reading one of the commentors who admitted that they’re now ashamed to have voted for Obama, although it’s not like the supposedly greatest democracy on earth left her many options, however, I love unearthing the endless evidence that the notion of voting for “the lesser of 2 evils” is utterly bankrupt.
The number it showed of dead Iraqis, 1.3 million killed, is actually almost double insofaras Bush Sr. started the war against Iraq, which never ended under Clinton who imposed such brutal sanctions that over a million children & old people died during the 90’s from lack of medicine, malnutrition, and easily preventable diseases.
Remember at the outset of the 1st Gulf War those peacenik liberals who divided the antiwar movement by crying “Give sanctions a chance!” They got their wish. Sanctions, which is war by other means, worked their evil magic for a decade. Turns out it would have actually been more humane to just bomb those million vulnerable Iraqis to death rather than let them slowly starve & rot like scurvy dogs in the desert sun.
Those same peaceniks then voted for Clinton. Amazing how many Democrats hark back to Clinton with fondness, especially women. They forget the guy’s very first official act was to lob 4 cruise missiles randomly into Bagdad in retaliation for the alleged plot on Bush Sr’s life in Kuwait during his disgusting victory parade/speech. One of those 4 missiles smacked into & destroyed an entire apartment building, vaporizing the woman who just won the Nobel Peace Prize for poetry while she was quietly sipping her morning tea.
Then the guy slaughtered the residents of the compound in Waco, mostly unarmed Black gradeschoolers as it turned out. The retaliation for Clinton’s perfidy by McVeigh was then used to create such draconian anti-terrorist laws that Dubya literally only needed to add a few lines to ram through the Patriot Act, another marvel of bipartisanship.
Turned out the real war crminal in Yugolslavia was Clinton, not Milosevich. The real motive was not to stop so-called “ethnic cleansing.” No, that was just a phoney pretext typical of Uncle Sam’s belligerent modus operandi. The real aim, according to a CIA spokesperson on McNeil-Lehrer in the lates 90’s, was to “eliminate the last vestiges of socialized property and planned economy on the Continent.” You see, a economy that put people before profits was not to be tolerated moving forward into a new century. It was like a bad apple that threatened the entire barrell, you know, like Cuba is vis-a-vis latin America. You don’t want to give poor & working people any dumb ideas that might undermine Milton Friedman’s austerity schemes because those never help the World Bank’s bottom line.
Ideas like free health care, free education through college, cradle to grave social security, subsidized food & housing, to say nothing of atheist education and nationalized banks & energy companies, these antiquated soviet-style social structures run counter to “freedom & democracy” doncha know.
Regarding conservatives, Yissil also makes a good point above about the 360 tons of dollar bills shrink wrapped and palleted as military cargo to Iraq. It vaporized like a Shia conscript hukered down in the sand under B52 assault during Desert Storm. But why aren’t conservatives howling over that instead of thwarting the extension of unemployemnt benefits? The question, of course, answers itself.
“Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative.” John Stuart Mill
Karl Friedrich:
You should enjoy this.
The Dumbing Down of America
By Manuel Valenzuela
10/12/06 “Information Clearing House”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15280.htm
Surely we can’t leave now, we gotta get our money back so we can bribe some more Afghans, or cut taxes on the wealthy.
In the first year of the occupation the US shipped $12 billion in cash into the green zone. About 360 tons of paper money if I recall correctly. It was shrinkwrapped and flown in on wooden pallets.
It just sort of evaporated.
Right, rcampell. Conservatism never withstands scrutiny as a consistent ideology, a fact which the commercial press never scrutinizes thoroughly enough, despite its alleged “liberal bias”, because liberalism is really conservatism turned inside out. The fact is America’s foreign policy has ALWAYS been Liberalism, that is, the enforcement of formal democracy with bayonets, which is why there’s always bipartisan complicity in these criminally inspired imperialist wars against defenceless brown people.
How I fear & loathe that word “bipartisan.” Every time I hear it I instinctively grab my wallet for historically everything “bipartisan” costs society enormously, which is why the public’s always against it insofaras they they sense in their bones it’s a completely corporate inspired swindle of unparallelled proportions. NAFTA is just one modern example. When the public’s against it bipartisanship always shoves it down our throats & saves the day for the soulless corporate giants that own & control everything that matters to ordinary people.
Both Gulf Wars 1 & 2, prosecuted by the Bush monarchy at great benefit to their odious klan, were initially rejected by the public but bipartisan democracy saved the day & the green light for those perfidious adventures that left not only billions in debts but so many corpses stacked like cordwood that even Nazis like Goebbels would have been proud.
For whatever his faults & like him or not, it’s not for nothing that probably the single most influential individual to affect the political trajectory of the 20th century, V.I. Lenin, remarked more than once that “democracy never prevented a single war.” How much has really changed in the century since he documented in a little pamphlet how Imperialism was the Highest Stage of Capitalism, meaning, any sytem dominated by Finance Capital (like ours today) was inherently predatory and therfore organically militaristic.
There’s really nothing conservative about conservatism except for maybe a perverse puritanical notion of sexuality which they try unsuccessfully to repress only to look like Larry Craig-style hypocritical fools with their wide stances and rancid reactionary bullshit.
Conservatives don’t conserve treasure or human life because they spend more than drunken sailors on outlandish weaponry and wars to test it on.
Conservatives don’t conserve the environment but rather encourage private entities to ruthlessly despoil it at the public’s expense.
Conservatives don’t conserve civil liberties because they relentlessly undermine the constitution by always & everywhere encourage more cops, more prisons, and more military, which are just cops sent abroad, typically in the role of mercenary strike breakers, or as old Lenin used to say: “armed gangs defending property.” Remember, folks, foreign policy is always an extension of domestic policy.
Since Reagan, conservatives have been guilty of the worst deficit spending in human history. Ironic but sad too that rural farmers voted unanimously for Reagan — yet under that 3rd rate actor’s 8 year regime more family farms went paws up then in the entire previous 200 years of American agriculture so that now over 80% of America’s aerable land is owned by 7 agribusinesses.
The abject greed of today’s ruling class, really a kleptocracy, is matched only by the spinelessness of American politicians, demonstrating conclusively the utter bankruptcy of American-style democracy, where Diebold levers are pulled & brainwashed zombies get a vague sense of civic duty.
It’s like were we’re living in a B-movie, and a bad one at that. For those of you who’ve never heard a live vesrion of an underrated American prophet’s poetry & music please turn on your speakers & enjoy:
Karl Friedrich’s post above is spot one, but even he missed an overarching reality check. These wasted dollars make up a significant chuck of the huge national debt the Bushies ran up by financing this misadventure on credit. I don’t think the Bush administration even cared how or whether projects were completed in Iraq. Completeion was never the goal, only spending. I continue to maintain that the outrageous explosion of debt was a deliberate move by the Bush administration to achieve the “starve the beast” goal set out by the Reagan regime. And then the GOP have the unmitigated gall to blame the current adminstration. This is just one example of why I do not respect conservatives or the patently failed conservative world view. They will do whatever necessary to assist and protect corporate interests at the expense of middle class and average American workers. Watching the teabaggers being used as shills by these corporate interests would be amusing if it weren’t so cynical and insidious.
Don’t worry. Gates is going to cut outside contractors by a whopping 10% per annum. Also he’s getting rid of all the excess generals and admirals, except they are putting up a hell of a fight.
Anomalously, after announcing the “cut backs” Gates said that overall there would be no reduction in the total amount of defense spending. He was just shifting the line items around. Whew, that’s a relief.
That’s only half the story. Military waste is analogous to an iceberg. This story just documents the visible waste. The hidden waste is far more enormous.
Just as corporate crime has far more social cost than typical property crimes (how do you calculate the social cost of Wall Street looting a pension fund?) these predatory wars for empire exact a tremendous hidden social cost, particularly in the form of mending the physical & psychological wounds of some 30,000 or so maimed soldiers and their families.
For example, it’s a mind-boggling but little known fact sometime in the 90’s more Vietnam vets had committed suicide than were actually killed in that war. There’s also a loose correlation between berzerk lone gunman mass murderers and militarism. With returning Gulf & AfPak war vets averaging one suicide per weekday just imagine how many more Luby’s Cafeteria-style gunmen in military towns like Killeen, Texas are in store for America’s future.
The true meaning of “shock and awe”.
Karl Friedrich on yesterday’s CIA thread has an excellent post concerning this matter.
infrastructure…whose now is more important.