BS: Cost of the War: Another Perspective...

Subject: BS: Cost of the War: Another Perspective...
From: Bobert
Date: 23 Mar 08 - 12:04 PM

Just a few stats with regards to Cleveland, Ohio and the cost of the Iraq War:

Amount of income taxes from Cleveland residents that goes toward paying for the Iraq War............$479.2M

Families in poverty in Cleveland............22.2%

Child poverty rate..........................41.9%

Unemployment rate...........................16.1%

What could be purchased for the residents of Cleveland with the $479.2M it residents pay for the Iraq War:

*Homes ith Renewable Electricity............48,784

*Children with Health Care..................24,772

*Adults with Healh Care.....................14,601

*Head Start paces for Children...............6,726

*Scholarships to Universities................5,390

*Public Safety Officers......................1,045

*Port Copntainer Inspectors....................899

*Elementary School Teachers....................740

*Music and Art Teachers........................667

*Affordable Housing Units......................406

*New E$elemnetary Schools........................4

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Yes this is what just Cleveland, Ohio could have with just their share of income taxes that their esidents pay that go roward funding the Iraq War...

Just a sidebar:

*Mediaum household income in Cleveland....................$26,500

*Average income of top 20 military contractors CEO's...$9,095,756

*Highest paid military contractor CEO..................$24,399,747

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Just a little food for thought...

Source: Profiteering Institute of Policy Studies

B~

Subject: RE: BS: Cost of the War: Another Perspective...
From: CarolC
Date: 23 Mar 08 - 01:26 PM

Bobert, I Googled the "Profiteering Institute of Policy Studies", and nothing came up in my search. Do you have the URL for a website for these people, or is it possible that you don't have the name exactly right? I'd really like to find out more about this organization.

Subject: RE: BS: Cost of the War: Another Perspective...
From: Lonesome EJ
Date: 23 Mar 08 - 03:22 PM

and the Government of Iraq has over 60 Billion in oil revenue in the till with 40 billion more to be added this year. Why can't that money be used to improve the lot of the people of Iraq, while we use our revenue to rebuild our own crumbling infrastructure?

Subject: RE: BS: Cost of the War: Another Perspective...
From: Don Firth
Date: 23 Mar 08 - 03:34 PM

I can't vouch for it myself, but some years ago, I heard someone reciting figures that demonstrated that for the price of one Trident submarine, Social Security could be bailed out for the next 50 years.

Don Firth

Subject: RE: BS: Cost of the War: Another Perspective...
From: heric
Date: 23 Mar 08 - 03:37 PM

http://www.ips-dc.org/reports/
(Profiteering = Potomac)

Subject: RE: BS: Cost of the War: Another Perspective...
From: CarolC
Date: 24 Mar 08 - 10:04 AM

Thanks, heric.   :-)

Subject: RE: BS: Cost of the War: Another Perspective...
From: Les in Chorlton
Date: 24 Mar 08 - 10:22 AM

The chalenge is to turn Peace into a verb.

Subject: RE: BS: Cost of the War: Another Perspective...
From: GUEST,albert
Date: 24 Mar 08 - 10:24 AM

The cost of the war certainly is not being borne by those at the top of society.They have been deep in the trough for many years with tax changes and exemptions,huge pay increases every year for the past two decades and all kinds of share bonuses and dividends.
The cost of the war is being borne by the workers and those at the margins.Our hospitals are underfunded,our schools in need of repair .We have a lousy public transport system and many are caught up in poor housing or cannot even get on to the housing ladder.
Iraq has been devastated but here in Britain and across the ocean in America we we will be paying the economic cost of the war for many years ahead.
albert

Subject: RE: BS: Cost of the War: Another Perspective...
From: Big Mick
Date: 24 Mar 08 - 10:41 AM

Which is what is driving us ever closer to a revolt of some sort, albert. One cannot sit idly by and watch the devastation of the middle and lower classes, as well as the ever widening gap between the top and the bottom, and not act at some point. Somehow the world has gotten to the point where more and more folks seem to regard profits, often at any cost, to be justifiable. These self same folks are watching their own lifestyles erode, their savings get depleted, their health insurance costs go up. Once, I remember Utah Phillips talking about this. In the capitalist society, the job of assigning blame becomes very important. The big guys love it that we always seem to assign it downward, instead of upward. We bitch and moan about the legal and illegal immigrants (who are doing no more than our very own ancestors did), we pontificate about lazy folks and all they have to do is work hard, and all this other hogwash.....blaming the lowest common denominator....instead of properly assigning the blame on the capitalist corporatocracy that has gobbled up more and more of the assets on systems we don't even need; hijacked our children's future, and sold us out for the emerging marketplaces in China and India. It is no different from what happened at the beginning of the 20th century and at the end of the 19th. Golden parachutes, CEO's that can lose millions of dollars and leave the company with millions in their own buyouts, CEO's in the US that run unprofitable companies and make salaries so out of line with their counterparts in other countries that it is ridiculous.

Time for folks in your country and mine to wake up and smell the coffee. If we don't get a handle on this, at some point a lot of misery and sadness is going to descend on all of us, and more importantly, our children and grandchildren.

All the best,

Mick

Subject: RE: BS: Cost of the War: Another Perspective...
From: Amos
Date: 24 Mar 08 - 12:11 PM

One course of action that might make a difference might be a uniform flat-tax of twenty per cent on corporate profits, backed by very rigid definitions of what constitutes profit.

ANother might be the imposition of legal, public justification for any compensation that is more than 100 times the minimum wage -- requiring complete transparency.

IT seems clear that the age in which one should be allowed to do anything at all in the market place in order to make gain -- misrepresent, manipulate, conspire, make hidden controls on the price structures, buy influence, etc. -- has to come to an end.

The great risk of this is that too heavy a burden on those who produce products and exchange them for profit will dampen the dynamic drive of the market. Thus the abhorred risks of too much socialism.

But the risks at the other extreme -- too little social consciousness -- have also been plainly demonstrated as people involved int he market grow more and kore short sighted. The cost gets paid in bad politicsm, rotting infrastructure, the erosion of the arts, the failure of education, and the loss of spiritual insight, a kind of coarse materialism that breeds irresponsibility and makes heroes out of Alice Coopers, rap hatred, and Grand THeft Auto players.

If a revolution is to be of worth and merit,and not just be another interesting flap, it needs to look plainly at these conflated and collapsed confusions and find ways to balance them.


A

Subject: RE: BS: Cost of the War: Another Perspective...
From: Les in Chorlton
Date: 24 Mar 08 - 12:24 PM

What's that ......... is it the dangerous smell of socialism in the air?

Subject: RE: BS: Cost of the War: Another Perspective...
From: Lonesome EJ
Date: 24 Mar 08 - 01:00 PM

Could be, Les. I'll flip on the exhaust fan.

Subject: RE: BS: Cost of the War: Another Perspective...
From: GUEST,albert
Date: 24 Mar 08 - 02:45 PM

well said Big Mick!!
albert

Subject: RE: BS: Cost of the War: Another Perspective...
From: GUEST,Appaloosa Lady
Date: 24 Mar 08 - 03:04 PM

"Which is what is driving us ever closer to a revolt of some sort, albert. One cannot sit idly by and watch the devastation of the middle and lower classes, as well as the ever widening gap between the top and the bottom, and not act at some point."

Sign me up Mick!

And I'll walk right along side of you too!

WAY OVERDUE!

Subject: RE: BS: Cost of the War: Another Perspective...
From: Amos
Date: 24 Mar 08 - 03:18 PM

We either have a nation, or we do not.

The moment we set a ghroup of principles in place to shelter all of us, as a nation, from random banditry by kings or other thugs, we are establishing social consciousness and social design.

Not all social design is "rank socialism" no matter how hard the fat-cats holler that it is.

Bailing out Chrysler, or bailing out the mortgage industry, as is currently being done, are egregious examples. Having a judiciary system designed to prevent too much rapine (commercial or sexual) is another.

The delicate balance between provate intiative and transactions, and social design, has to be wlel engineered for optimum surivival. "No social design" is very sub-optimum, and so is "all society by design".

WHere you draw the line makes all the difference.

A

Subject: RE: BS: Cost of the War: Another Perspective...
From: Big Mick
Date: 24 Mar 08 - 03:40 PM

And my point, Amos, is that the line needs to be drawn soon. My fear is that I don't see anyone that is making the cogent points as to what is wrong. We see an increasingly larger number of people thrashing about, working their asses off, having their spouses work, sometimes with two jobs, and sinking ever further in the miasma. They know they work hard, but are trapped in the cliche driven definition of what these United States of America stand for i.e. "anyone willing to work hard can make it here", and other such blather that blesses America to the exclusion of other places. We continually kneel in prayer at the altar of laissez-faire capitalism, allow large corporate interests to rape us and destroy the future, rail about government in our lives, carp about any tax rate ..... and do nothing about corporate interests that view taxes as their private enterprise to steal from. We bitch about the condition of roads, and the condition of our education system (blaming the teachers, or unions, or whomever we see first in our thrashing about), and yet fight any attempt to put controls and inspections on the large corporations that continue to plunder the federal, state, and municipal tax coffers to subsidize their own profit margins. We assign blame downward to the folks trying to raise children, and never decry these corporate welfare scams. This country, and others, have allowed our media to be controlled to the point that the news outlets are owned by a small number of corporate interests who use it to advance their own agenda, and keep the populace confused to the point of conflicted actions with regard to their own best interests. Even the Internet is used to dissect our entertainment, shopping, and news interests to the point that they are used to shape what we believe, act on, and how we vote. At some point, in the midst of this chaos which pits self interest against media controlled values foisted on us, the public mind snaps. And I fear it will not be pretty.

I have often said here that I believe it is time for the bards to get a grip on the issues, and act to begin the fight to change perceptions. It will not be easy in this age of information overload, but we must begin.

Mick

Subject: RE: BS: Cost of the War: Another Perspective...
From: Amos
Date: 24 Mar 08 - 03:52 PM

Your point about blaming downward is interesting. It is always easier to erect shields of protection around "winners", because at some level everyone in a competition-drioven society needs to become one. Conversely those down the slope are "losers" and their way of being is to be scorned.

Except that none of this is true. By the standards of pure gelt, the biggest liar and stealer can become the biggest "winner"; and a Quaker of peaceful mien can become a "loser". Is that the measure we want to use of human value? It makes winners out of Bush and Cheney, and losers out of those who balance their greed with integrity and fair-dealing in a thousand thousand small businesses all over the country.

Perhaps, then, we need to get a lot clearer about the game we atre playing, the rules we are playing by, and what makes a winner as distinguished from a cheater. Maybe we have gotten entirely too reasonable about what kinds of cheats and evasions we think are tolerable? THat's often the case when a government becomes too oppressive or burdensome. Folk heros get born who are "winners" because they outsmart the bureaucrats with wits or gall.

I work hard, and my wife and daughter do too, and we manage to get along okay. I work in a small company -- less than 250 people -- which designs and innovates specialized devices used in locating underground cables and pipes and in pipe inspection. We wrestle all day with very complicated technological problems and try to come up with better products and sell them successfully.

I have absolutely no desire to see the corporate interests of this group undermined. I like the poeple who are here earning their keep and who depend on the success of the company to be able to do so.

So when we focus on "corporate interests" as an enemy target, we have to be careful to notice th ebaby lying in the bathwater -- corporations are a good way to bring people together to build mor eefficiently and operate more successfully than individuals could do alone. That's the "baby" part.

That said, they are also breeding grounds of unreason, greed, manipulation, economic domination and soul-killing redundancy.
THat part is the bathwater.

A

Subject: RE: BS: Cost of the War: Another Perspective...
From: Lonesome EJ
Date: 24 Mar 08 - 04:54 PM

If you guys aren't careful, you'll turn this into an intelligent discussion.

Subject: RE: BS: Cost of the War: Another Perspective...
From: Les in Chorlton
Date: 25 Mar 08 - 05:35 AM

America seems to be run for and by the rich. The richest do not run small effective companies they simply invest, take profit and move on. They have a disproportionate amount of economic and probably political power.

Is that what you want?