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Seen the estimate on the cost of war?


ehellerMar 13, 10:37am
Kind of new here - cool group - I hope everyone's heard about Stiglitz - the Nobel economist - and his take on the war's true cost. 3 trillion freaking dollars (conservatively; it could be 5 trillion). Not that I want to put a dollar value on a war's impact but this is an enormous amount. Imagine what it could be used for....And thanks to Bush it has been paid for with borrowed money. Debt. While he lowered taxes on the wealthiest Americans.

Apparently it's going to take decades to pay for. Generations. And it could impact the economy in ways not seen since the Great Depression.

I mean when will this madness end.

I think there's a lot of war fatigue out there, along with Bush fatigue, too. 2009 seems like it's around the corner. It's not. So please remind your friends that impeachment remains a feasible option. And the next someone tells you that they "want a president they could share a beer with" please find clever words to shut 'em up.

Eric

JosseyMar 23, 12:28pm
The Bank of Crooks and Criminals International
If you consider the key players and follow the money trail, you will see that from a foreign policy perspective, Bush's his connection to bin Laden's banker, Mahfouz, is far more interesting than Bill Clinton's imbroglio with Monika Lewinsky.
Firstly, consider the fact that Mafouz's Saudi National Commercial Bank was affiliated with the InterMaritime bank, whose president, Bruce Rappaport, was deeply implicated in the BCCI Affair. That was the 1992 scandal of the infamous Mahfouz-dominated Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) involving secret accounts for illegal arms sales to Iran. To accomplish that task secretly, Rappaport partnered with Oliver North, who was in charge of the National Security Council during the Reagan-Bush administration. The BCCI affair was documented in the 1992 Senate Kerry Committee report.
With numerous branches in dozens of countries, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International was also the drug-money laundering bank for the Pakistani generals, simultaneously essential long term bin Laden supporters, nuclear proliferators and American allies. Paradoxically, Robert Gates, the CIA director under former President George Bush Sr., referred to BCCI as the "Bank of Crooks and Criminals International" in Senate testimony.
Most important, consider Dr. Alfred Hartmann, the multi-site executive, who was both the InterMaritime Bank's Vice President and no less than the chief financial officer of Mahfouz's BCCI Holdings of Luxembourg. Simultaneously, Dr. Hartmann was also the managing director of a subsidiary of BCCI, the Banque de Commerce et de Placements (BCP) in Geneva. It was BCP that helped to finance the business for the vice-president's son, George W. Bush.
whale.to/b/rivers.html [whale.to/b/rivers.html]

Nearly 4000 innocent American G.I.'s have died... over 29,000 American G.I.'s have been wounded and maimed... and over a million Iraqis have been slaughtered, wounded or maimed in the Bush Administration/PNAC/NeoilCon's "War In Iraq"...which was started in order to stop Saddam Hussein, with the help of the French, the Germans, the Russians and the Chinese, from extracting Iraq's oil and marketing it outside of the control of OPEC and America's "Big Oil" Companies.
US Treasury has been ransacked...our National Debt has rocketed sky high...and the ordinary citizen is paying for this "Iraq War" and the War on Terrorism... while America's millionaires and America's Big Corporations are raking it in, enjoying their low taxes and stuffing their pockets.

Exxon shatters profit records: Oil giant makes corporate history by booking $11.7 billion in quarterly profit; earns $1,300 a second in 2007.
snipurl.com/1ys6v [snipurl.com/1ys6v]
Chevron 4th-Quarter Profit Rises on Record Oil Prices : Fourth-quarter revenue climbed 29 percent to $61.4 billion, Chevron said. Price gains more than made up for a 1.6 percent decline in oil and natural-gas production.
snipurl.com/1ys6y [snipurl.com/1ys6y]
Shell Rakes in $8.5 Billion in Three Months: Royal Dutch Shell, the world's second-largest publicly traded oil company, today reported net income up 60 percent last quarter to a record $8.47 billion
snipurl.com/1ys70 [snipurl.com/1ys70]
pennyronning.wordpress.com/2008/02/03/corporate-profits-iraq-war-and [pennyronning.wordpress.com/2008/02/03/corporate-profits-iraq-war-and]-
george-bush/

Bush Family War Profiteering
Its nearly impossible to estimate the number of deaths of civilians in Iraq, but the Herald reports that at least 47 people were killed or found dead in violence on Easter Sunday, including 17 execution victims dumped in the capital.

Budgetary Assessments in Washington, says that, starting with the anti-terrorism appropriation a week after the 9/11 attacks, he estimates the US has spent $400 billion fighting terrorism through fiscal 2006, which ended on September 30, 2006.
In January 2007, Marine Corps spokeswoman, Lt Col Roseann Lynch, told Reuters that the war in Iraq is costing about $4.5 billion a month for military "operating costs," which did not include new weapons or equipment.
Since this war on terror was declared following 9/11, the pay levels for the CEOs of the top 34 defense contractors have doubled. The average compensation rose from $3.6 million during the period of 1998-2001, to $7.2 million during the period of 2002-2005, according to an August 2006, report entitled, "Executive Excess 2006," by the Washington-based, Institute for Policy Studies, and the Boston-based, United for a Fair Economy.
This study found that since 9/11, the 34 defense CEOs have pocketed a combined total of $984 million, or enough, the report says, to cover the wages for more than a million Iraqis for a year. In 2005, the average total compensation for the CEOs of large US corporations was only 6% above 2001 figures, while defense CEOs pay was 108% higher.
But the last name of one family, which is literally amassing a fortune over the backs of our dead heroes, matches that of the man holding the purse strings in the White House. On December 11, 2003, the Financial Times reported that three people had told the Times that they had seen letters written by Neil Bush that recommended business ventures in the Middle East, promoted by New Bridges Strategies, a firm set up by President Bush's former campaign manager, who quit his Bush appointed government job as the head of FEMA, three weeks before the war in Iraq began.
Neil Bush was paid an annual fee to "help companies secure contracts in Iraq," the Times said.
But Neil Bush is by no means the only Bush profiting from the war on terror. The first President Bush is so entangled with entities that have profited greatly that it's difficult to even know where to begin. Bush joined the Carlyle Group in 1993, and became a member of the firm's Asian Advisory Board.
The Carlyle Group was best known for buying defense companies and doubling or tripling their value and was already heavily supported by defense contracts. But in 2002, the firm received $677 million in government contracts, and by 2003, its contracts were worth $2.1 billion.
Prior to 9/11, some Carlyle companies were not doing so well. For instance, the future of Vought Aircraft looked dismal when the company laid off 20% of its employees. But business was booming shortly after the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began, and the company received over $1 billion in defense contracts.
The Bush family's connections to the Osama bin Laden's family seem almost surreal. On September 28, 2001, two weeks after 9/11, the Wall Street Journal reported that, "George H.W. Bush, the father of President Bush, works for the bin Laden family business in Saudi Arabia through the Carlyle Group, an international consulting firm."
As a representative of Carlyle, one of the investors that Bush brought to Carlyle was the Bin Laden Group, a construction company owned by Osama's family..more counterpunch.org/pringle04122007.html [counterpunch.org/pringle04122007.html]
GrouchooApr 11, 10:14am
Wankers (see above).


Seen the estimate on the cost of war?

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