Letters to the Editor
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I want to thank Hillary Clinton
For lending such a big hand in giving us all this huge tab in the trillions to pay off. She might of looked strong there for half a minute, but in the long run she authorized an insane and unwaranted war. We won't have this war debt paid in yours or your grandchildren's life time.
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We Are So Screwed
This morning, Robert Reich published a passage from a book published in 1951 about the Great Depression. That passage, presented below, did not factor in a $3 trillion war!! We will be lucky not to be wiped off the face of the earth. My hatred and contempt for everyone in the Bush admin and all of the morons who voted for him know no bounds:
"Marriner S. Eccles who served as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Chairman of the Federal Reserve from November, 1934 to February, 1948 gave his view of what caused the Depression in his memoirs, "Beckoning Frontiers" (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1951):
As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth -- not of existing wealth, but of wealth as it is currently produced -- to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nation s economic machinery. Instead of achieving that kind of distribution, a giant suction pump had by 1929-30 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth. This served them as capital accumulations. But by taking purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumers, the savers denied to themselves the kind of effective demand for their products that would justify a reinvestment of their capital accumulations in new plants. In consequence, as in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped.
That is what happened to us in the twenties. We sustained high levels of employment in that period with the aid of an exceptional expansion of debt outside of the banking system. This debt was provided by the large growth of business savings as well as savings by individuals, particularly in the upper-income groups where taxes were relatively low. Private debt outside of the banking system increased about fifty per cent. This debt, which was at high interest rates, largely took the form of mortgage debt on housing, office, and hotel structures, consumer installment debt, brokers' loans, and foreign debt. The stimulation to spending by debt-creation of this sort was short-lived and could not be counted on to sustain high levels of employment for long periods of time. Had there been a better distribution of the current income from the national product -- in other words, had there been less savings by business and the higher-income groups and more income in the lower groups -- we should have had far greater stability in our economy. Had the six billion dollars, for instance, that were loaned by corporations and wealthy individuals for stock-market speculation been distributed to the public as lower prices or higher wages and with less profits to the corporations and the well-to-do, it would have prevented or greatly moderated the economic collapse that began at the end of 1929.
The time came when there were no more poker chips to be loaned on credit. Debtors thereupon were forced to curtail their consumption in an effort to create a margin that could be applied to the reduction of outstanding debts. This naturally reduced the demand for goods of all kinds and brought on what seemed to be overproduction, but was in reality underconsumption when judged in terms of the real world instead of the money world. This, in turn, brought about a fall in prices and employment.
Unemployment further decreased the consumption of goods, which further increased unemployment, thus closing the circle in a continuing decline of prices. Earnings began to disappear, requiring economies of all kinds in the wages, salaries, and time of those employed. And thus again the vicious circle of deflation was closed until one third of the entire working population was unemployed, with our national income reduced by fifty per cent, and with the aggregate debt burden greater than ever before, not in dollars, but measured by current values and income that represented the ability to pay. Fixed charges, such as taxes, railroad and other utility rates, insurance and interest charges, clung close to the 1929 level and required such a portion of the national income to meet them that the amount left for consumption of goods was not sufficient to support the population.
This then, was my reading of what brought on the depression."
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The hot price of cold blood.
Every constituency has its preferred politicians. For war profiteers that would be uber-hawk Republicans like Bush and Cheney. The profits make US soldiers just as disposable as Iraqis, and mass deaths and mass maimings cost them nothing except a little finger-wagging in the press.
Cold-blooded murder for hot profits. Don't take it personally. It's just business. Cha-ching.
Three trillion dollars is $10,000 for every man, woman, and child in the country. Those with a dead or crippled soldier on their hands have, of course, paid more.
Hope it's been worth it to you.
Cheney: "Suckers!"
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Well duh?
Who is stupid enough and naive enough to believe what they have been telling us about anything?
People who will vote for candidates that are in the pockets of the same people who brought us the iraq war.
The next coupe of wars will be real bargains, honest!
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Nobody Worries About the Cost of Success, Only of Failure
Excellent article on what sounds like an interesting book with some arguable quantifications.
The fact that the dollar costs associated with the Iraq Catastrophe are interesting and perhaps important is only because the Iraq ________ is not a War, but is indeed a Catastrophe.
How much did WWII cost in today's dollars? Whatever that number may be, would anyone seriously argue that it was not worth the expense? What did the Revolutionary or Civil Wars cost?
The reason why the expenditures related to Iraq deserve minute scrutiny is because the entire, and on-going, endeavor was ill-conceived, mis-planned, devoid of strategic necessity, mis-managed, mission-redefined countless times, produced paradoxical outcomes (as anticipated by our civilian leadership, and continues after all these years to be a conflict that may last into eternity.
JFK said, "Success has a thousand fathers, but failure is an orphan."
The cost of WWII was staggering, for sure, but those expenditures produced a clear victory against a clear, nightmarish enemy. In Iraq, we have yet to define what a clear victory would look like; and the "nightmarish" enemy our civilian leadership made of Saddam is long since gone, and proved to be nothing more than a paper tiger anyway.
A book like this which puts "hard" dollars amounts on some of the costs of the Iraq Failure is certainly a worthwhile contribution to the debate. But the most significant costs cannot be reduce to money: The needless loss of American, Iraqi, British and other lives, and the stain on the history of the USA transcend numerical calculation.