While some Iowans lined up to pay Uncle Sam on National Tax Day, others lined up to voice their concern about how their taxes are being spent. Veterans, military families and community leaders joined other concerned Iowans gathered outside the downtown Des Moines Post Office Tuesday to urge Rep. Tom Latham, Sen. Chuck Grassley and the rest of Iowa’s congressional delegation: ‘Invest in America, Not Endless War in Iraq.’
"As thousands of Iowans head to the post office today to file their taxes, many of us want answers from our Congressional delegation about how much longer we will continue to spend over $10 billion a month of our national treasure in Iraq while shortchanging critical priorities here at home, like education and housing for our families,” Kathleen McQuillen, Iowa program coordinator for American Friends Service Committee, said in a statement. “For what we spend in just one day in Iraq, nearly 35,000 four-year university scholarships could be funded. For what we spend in just one day in Iraq, we can help nearly 6,500 families with housing.”
“With the war in Iraq now in its 6th costly and bloody year, with over a half a trillion dollars spent, over 4,000 U.S. troops lost, and nearly 30,000 others wounded – an enormous human and financial toll has already been paid by the American people and our troops on the ground,” James Mowrer, Iraq war veteran and Iowa director of VoteVets.org, said in a statement. “It makes no sense to continue spending billions of our hard earned dollars each week in Iraq keeping our troops stuck in the crosshairs of a religious, sectarian civil war with no realistic and comprehensive plan to redeploy. But most importantly, we must never forget the sacred obligation that we owe to our veterans.”
The war in Iraq could end up costing $3 trillion when factoring in combat and other long-term related costs, according to Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, who argues in his new book, "The Three Trillion Dollar War" that the Iraq war has contributed to the U.S. economic slowdown and is impeding an economic recovery.
“A new CBS News-New York Times poll found that 89% Americans believe the war Iraq has contributed to the economic downturn here at home, yet Rep. Latham and presidential candidate Sen. John McCain are still 100% behind same failed Bush policies that led to both the downward economic spiral and the endless, costly War in Iraq,” Don Brown, vice president of South Central Iowa Federation of Labor AFL-CIO, said in a statement.
“Meanwhile, healthcare for our children, veterans, and seniors is being neglected,” Brown said. “For what is spent during one week in Iraq, 800,000 children could get health insurance for an entire year. It’s time to offer our troops and their families the best kind of support: bring them home safe.”
The effort to urge the Iowa congressional delegation to reprioritize tax expenditures was organized by Americans United for Change, which released the following video on the economic impact of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Cost of War (produced by Americans United for Change)
Related Commentary: “Lest We Forget…It’s the War, Stupid!”
Showing posts with label "The Three Trillion Dollar War". Show all posts
Showing posts with label "The Three Trillion Dollar War". Show all posts
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Commentary: Lest We Forget … It’s the War, Stupid!
In case you didn’t already know, last week marked the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war. If you didn’t, don’t feel too bad, for you are in good company. A Pew Research Center poll recently found that only 28 percent of American adults surveyed were able to say that approximately 4,000 Americans have died in the Iraq war. The same survey found that 84 percent of Americans are aware that Oprah Winfrey endorsed Sen. Barack Obama for president.
In cased you missed it, the Pentagon reported that four U.S. soldiers were killed by a bomb blast in southern Baghdad late Sunday, raising the death toll for American forces since the start of the war to an even 4,000 casualties, thus officially marking a new milestone.
As the American public’s attention span continues to shrink and shift away form the seemingly endless war in Iraq, so does the press. According to the News Content Index conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, the percentage of news stories devoted to the war has sharply declined since last year, dropping from an average of 15 percent of the news hole in July to just 3 percent in February.
Moreover, a Pew's News Interest Index survey found that Iraq was the public's most closely followed news story in all but five weeks during the first half of 2007. However, it was a much less dominant story between July 2007 and February 2008, not to mention the Iraq war has not been the public's top weekly story since October 2007.
Maybe if Oprah broadcast her show live from the Green Zone in Baghdad for a week or two, her global presence would ignite a surge of media coverage and Americans would tune into the war more.
Until then, who is to blame for the current surge of sound-bite news coverage of the war in Iraq? The mainstream media? The American public?
Answer: both.
While the corporate media is driven by quarterly profit margins and prey upon its viewers’ psychological vulnerabilities, it is the media consumer who ultimately decides what the media reports and does not report. Although the laws of supply and demand do come into play in this profit-driven context, journalists have a higher calling and obligation to reporting the truth and what people need to know, in lieu of what people want to know.
Nonetheless, as Greg Mitchell’s new book, “So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits — and the President — Failed on Iraq,” suggests, the mainstream media has blood on its hands when it comes to its flawed coverage leading up to the war in Iraq and the five years since it began.
Since former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards first announced his bid for the Democrat nomination in January 2007 in Des Moines, the American public has been consumed by the presidential race, which has helped feed the mainstream media’s obsession with covering the political horse race. Meanwhile nearly 1000 soldiers have been killed in Iraq since Edwards announced his candidacy.
While coverage of the presidential race receives top billing in the media, exit polls from many of the states that have already held their primaries and caucuses indicate that the economy is the top concern among voters, trumping health-care costs and the war in Iraq. The loss of jobs to overseas companies and the recent subprime lender meltdown have helped contribute to voters’ fears about the economy.
But rarely does the mainstream media hold the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan accountable for the impending or not impending economic recession. Newscasters and political pundits keep asking the million-dollar question, “Are we in a recession?” and pawn this off a if it was news in and of itself. Meanwhile our government keeps dropping an estimated $10 billion to $12 billion a month into the bottomless money pits of Iraq and Afghanistan. And this is only the front-end cost of the war.
Oftentimes economic experts have argued that the best way to revive an economy is by going to war, but ironically. President Bush’s decision to invade and indefinitely occupy Iraq is what has helped push our economy to the brink of a recession.
It’s the War, Stupid
I sensed the political winds changing during the Michigan primary, or nonprimary as far as the Democratic race goes, when the GOP focused on the economy as a means of shoring up support. This makes sense, given the industrial make-up of Michigan’s job market. Ever since then, the economy has been the top issue polled among likely voters, but the Democratic candidates only serve to shoot themselves in the foot if they ignore the $3 trillion white elephant in the room: the Iraq war.
Obama has made an attempt to connect the dots, but he hasn’t been vigilant enough about framing this argument in the minds of voters. It doesn’t help that the mainstream media has stoked a new fire in the Obama camp, fanning the flames of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s controversial comments.
On the other hand, his opponent, Sen. Hillary Clinton, has had to spend time putting out small fires on the campaign trail, oftentimes ignited by her very own high-level surrogates such as adviser James Carville and her husband, former President Bill Clinton.
Meanwhile, the inferno in Iraq rages on.
Not only have the front-end costs of financing the Iraq war helped cripple our economy, but it’s the back-end costs that will keep the economy bed-ridden for years to come. In their new book, “The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Costs of the Iraq Conflict,” Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz argue that Americans will spend decades treating the physical and psychological wounds of Iraq veterans, and when the economic consequences of the invasion are taken into account, the costs will surpass the $3 trillion benchmark, nearly a third of the current debt the Bush administration has already helped accrue since its 2001 takeover.
Not only did the Bush administration not have an exit strategy for ending the war, but it had yet to implement a budget plan for paying for the strategy not have. Sounds like something straight out off Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22,” only more tragic, for the true cost of the war is the loss of human lives. These costs cannot be measured, nor can they be absorbed or paid back.
According to the National Priorities Project, the government has already spent more than $500 billion on the war in Iraq and estimates that Iowa taxpayers have paid $3.5 billion for the cost of the Iraq war through 2007. For the same amount of money, the group estimates that health care for 1,033,512 Iowans could have been provided, or 562,896 scholarships for university students could have been awarded, or 77,321 elementary students could have been hired.
This year, while Iowa lawmakers struggle to find funding to provide children with health care coverage or turn to the lottery as a means of replenishing funding for veterans and their families, try and remember one thing and one thing only:
It’s the war, stupid!
And you don’t need Oprah to tell you this to make it so.
Originally posted on the "Iowa Independent"
In cased you missed it, the Pentagon reported that four U.S. soldiers were killed by a bomb blast in southern Baghdad late Sunday, raising the death toll for American forces since the start of the war to an even 4,000 casualties, thus officially marking a new milestone.
As the American public’s attention span continues to shrink and shift away form the seemingly endless war in Iraq, so does the press. According to the News Content Index conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, the percentage of news stories devoted to the war has sharply declined since last year, dropping from an average of 15 percent of the news hole in July to just 3 percent in February.
Moreover, a Pew's News Interest Index survey found that Iraq was the public's most closely followed news story in all but five weeks during the first half of 2007. However, it was a much less dominant story between July 2007 and February 2008, not to mention the Iraq war has not been the public's top weekly story since October 2007.
Maybe if Oprah broadcast her show live from the Green Zone in Baghdad for a week or two, her global presence would ignite a surge of media coverage and Americans would tune into the war more.
Until then, who is to blame for the current surge of sound-bite news coverage of the war in Iraq? The mainstream media? The American public?
Answer: both.
While the corporate media is driven by quarterly profit margins and prey upon its viewers’ psychological vulnerabilities, it is the media consumer who ultimately decides what the media reports and does not report. Although the laws of supply and demand do come into play in this profit-driven context, journalists have a higher calling and obligation to reporting the truth and what people need to know, in lieu of what people want to know.
Nonetheless, as Greg Mitchell’s new book, “So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits — and the President — Failed on Iraq,” suggests, the mainstream media has blood on its hands when it comes to its flawed coverage leading up to the war in Iraq and the five years since it began.
Since former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards first announced his bid for the Democrat nomination in January 2007 in Des Moines, the American public has been consumed by the presidential race, which has helped feed the mainstream media’s obsession with covering the political horse race. Meanwhile nearly 1000 soldiers have been killed in Iraq since Edwards announced his candidacy.
While coverage of the presidential race receives top billing in the media, exit polls from many of the states that have already held their primaries and caucuses indicate that the economy is the top concern among voters, trumping health-care costs and the war in Iraq. The loss of jobs to overseas companies and the recent subprime lender meltdown have helped contribute to voters’ fears about the economy.
But rarely does the mainstream media hold the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan accountable for the impending or not impending economic recession. Newscasters and political pundits keep asking the million-dollar question, “Are we in a recession?” and pawn this off a if it was news in and of itself. Meanwhile our government keeps dropping an estimated $10 billion to $12 billion a month into the bottomless money pits of Iraq and Afghanistan. And this is only the front-end cost of the war.
Oftentimes economic experts have argued that the best way to revive an economy is by going to war, but ironically. President Bush’s decision to invade and indefinitely occupy Iraq is what has helped push our economy to the brink of a recession.
It’s the War, Stupid
I sensed the political winds changing during the Michigan primary, or nonprimary as far as the Democratic race goes, when the GOP focused on the economy as a means of shoring up support. This makes sense, given the industrial make-up of Michigan’s job market. Ever since then, the economy has been the top issue polled among likely voters, but the Democratic candidates only serve to shoot themselves in the foot if they ignore the $3 trillion white elephant in the room: the Iraq war.
Obama has made an attempt to connect the dots, but he hasn’t been vigilant enough about framing this argument in the minds of voters. It doesn’t help that the mainstream media has stoked a new fire in the Obama camp, fanning the flames of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s controversial comments.
On the other hand, his opponent, Sen. Hillary Clinton, has had to spend time putting out small fires on the campaign trail, oftentimes ignited by her very own high-level surrogates such as adviser James Carville and her husband, former President Bill Clinton.
Meanwhile, the inferno in Iraq rages on.
Not only have the front-end costs of financing the Iraq war helped cripple our economy, but it’s the back-end costs that will keep the economy bed-ridden for years to come. In their new book, “The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Costs of the Iraq Conflict,” Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz argue that Americans will spend decades treating the physical and psychological wounds of Iraq veterans, and when the economic consequences of the invasion are taken into account, the costs will surpass the $3 trillion benchmark, nearly a third of the current debt the Bush administration has already helped accrue since its 2001 takeover.
Not only did the Bush administration not have an exit strategy for ending the war, but it had yet to implement a budget plan for paying for the strategy not have. Sounds like something straight out off Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22,” only more tragic, for the true cost of the war is the loss of human lives. These costs cannot be measured, nor can they be absorbed or paid back.
According to the National Priorities Project, the government has already spent more than $500 billion on the war in Iraq and estimates that Iowa taxpayers have paid $3.5 billion for the cost of the Iraq war through 2007. For the same amount of money, the group estimates that health care for 1,033,512 Iowans could have been provided, or 562,896 scholarships for university students could have been awarded, or 77,321 elementary students could have been hired.
This year, while Iowa lawmakers struggle to find funding to provide children with health care coverage or turn to the lottery as a means of replenishing funding for veterans and their families, try and remember one thing and one thing only:
It’s the war, stupid!
And you don’t need Oprah to tell you this to make it so.
Originally posted on the "Iowa Independent"
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