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Tuesday, June 14, 2011

All that tea party outrage against immigrants who might get medical care, but NO outrage about this
Posted by Jill | 5:34 AM
The teabaggers have never uttered one peep about this squandering of American tax dollars:

After the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the George W. Bush administration flooded the conquered country with so much cash to pay for reconstruction and other projects in the first year that a new unit of measurement was born.

Pentagon officials determined that one giant C-130 Hercules cargo plane could carry $2.4 billion in shrink-wrapped bricks of $100 bills. They sent an initial full planeload of cash, followed by 20 other flights to Iraq by May 2004 in a $12-billion haul that U.S. officials believe to be the biggest international cash airlift of all time.

This month, the Pentagon and the Iraqi government are finally closing the books on the program that handled all those Benjamins. But despite years of audits and investigations, U.S. Defense officials still cannot say what happened to $6.6 billion in cash — enough to run the Los Angeles Unified School District or the Chicago Public Schools for a year, among many other things.

For the first time, federal auditors are suggesting that some or all of the cash may have been stolen, not just mislaid in an accounting error. Stuart Bowen, special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, an office created by Congress, said the missing $6.6 billion may be "the largest theft of funds in national history."

The outright theft of billions, billions more given in no-bid contracts to Halliburton and KBR, the wholesale squandering of the entire Clinton-era surplus to pay for George W. Bush's wars -- wars without end that Barack Obama feels somehow obliged to continue.

When I draw the verbal picture of billionaires pointing our attention at the poor while they're lifting the last few bucks out of our wallets while we're distracted, this is exactly what I'm talking about.

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4 Comments:
Blogger PurpleGirl said...
I've been writing this comment for years:

About two years into the Iraq debacle, the Bead Society of Greater New York had a presentation from an officer with the Army Civilian Relations office (not sure of exact unit name). Anyway he described the way they kept open pallets of cash in the office and that they took money to any meeting with a local leader. They kept no logs of the the amount and who they gave the money to, no accounting was done. They just took some money on the way out the door. Yeah the money went down a rabbit hole.

(The officer was thanking the Bead Society for beads we had donated to a program which worked with young girls; the beads were for making jewelry with them.)
6/14/11, 9:02 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...
Oh, brother. There are plenty of things in the world for EVERYONE to be outraged these days. So what if someone or a group of someones chooses to be outraged about one or two or three things, out of the many available?

By the way, does it occur to you that illegal immigration and the graft you describe are ALL part and parcel of a GENERAL PATTERN OF CORRUPTION, NONE OF WHICH SHOULD BE TOLERATED?

And for the record, I'm a lifelong Labor Democrat, and am not even sure what the Teaparty is.
6/14/11, 10:58 AM  
Anonymous BNJ said...
I dunno. I look at the days in which squandered government funds was measured in billions rather than trillions and I become wistfully nostalgic.
6/14/11, 11:19 AM  
Blogger Pangolin said...
Crickets.

The actual fact is that they are completely full of crap on almost every issue. They don't give a crap about anything resembling actual facts or consistency.

Eight years of spending like a 18 year old boy with a credit card on a Thai vacation and suddenly they start screaming about the deficit when Obama is elected? Not an accident.

They are fully and completely the servants of Mammon.
6/14/11, 1:44 PM  
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