Nur Posted July 18, 2006 SOL Economists Can anyone of you enlighten us of how much is the cost ( In real terms) of the Arab-Isreali Conflict to date? Of special interest to me : 1. Cost of Wars Since (1949-1956-1973-1982-) 2. Cost Of Regional Arms spending Since 1949 ( By Arabs and Isreal) 3. Cost of Human Loss ( Lives lost on both sides) 4. Cost of Lost Opportunities for Development ( Capital Migration Out flow Due to Risk Factor) 5. Cost of Quality of Life, Travel, etc.( GNP,GDP) 6. Cost of Security Measures ( Loss of Productivity due to conflict) 7. Cost of stolen or usurped wealth to finance the wars( Oil) 8. Cost of lost rights ( Privacy-etc, very difficult to measure, but try anyway) 9. Cost of indirect global conflicts that it triggered (From Munich to 9/11) 10. Cost of Environmental Deterioration in region ( Is the Middle East a healthy place to live anymore? if not, how much does it cost to stasy healthy in the region?) Total in Trillions of Dollars:........................................................................................ Total Land involved in Dispute ( Square Feet) ( Square Meters)..................................................... Cost Of Disputed Lands ( Dollars/Square Foot or Dollars /Square Meter )....................................................................................... Nur Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Nur Posted July 19, 2006 War, The American Tsunami By Charles E. Carlson 09/30/05 "ICH" -- -- Don't be too quick to blame the administration for its slow response to Katrina. With his popularity dropping, there is nothing the President wants more than to look like humanitarians and peacemakers. Mr. Bush just doesn't know how! The American Tsunami took Washington by surprise because Washington is on a wartime footing and doesn't know how to carry out a friendly rescue. Remember when the Indonesian tsunami came along? Bush made himself look foolish by leaving a couple of zeros off on his first offer of help. Our President offered something like one dollar per victim, making America an incredible cheapskate when compared to other, poorer countries. Maybe he just couldn't bring himself to say "sorry, we're spending all our money for war." If politicians and those who groom, elect, and control them could cause natural disasters like this one, wars would be unnecessary. They would just respond to the disasters with photo-ops showing them holding babies or passing out food and be reelected for life. The complete destruction of a city is the most valuable event that could happen for the Warmakers who control our President. It beats war all to pieces as a control mechanism; for they can smile all the while they impose more restrictions on us and dilute our money. Have you noticed that while gas prices spiked to as high as $6.00 per gallon the stock market is standing firm? Wall Street smells a mainline injection of adrenaline on the way from Washington. Disasters, like wars, have their fans! For openers, President Bush has just asked Congress for $62.3 Billion just to get the "clean up" started(later estimates are up to $200 billion for Katrina alone). You are making a contribution, but most of it will land in the pockets of contractors. $63 billion is about $210.00 for every American man woman and child, $1000.00 for the already dilution pressed family of five. The Superdome says it needs a cool $100 million just to fix its roof. Who do you think will pay for it? This is in addition to the private aid. Who would dare to deny the needs of the tsunami or Katrina victims? What if it does cost the taxpayers a bit of dilution in lieu of taxes, who can object? But wait until you see the results on our way of life! Already there are people being dragged from their homes to make way for the giant corporate occupation of New Orleans while Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) makes huge contracts with their business contacts. The Washington Post recently described FEMA as "burning" 500 million a day in contracts for temporary housing. The single most important goal of American political leaders (or any politician) is to keep job levels up and to create the illusion of rising prosperity. This is done by diluting the currency--the result of spending money on " vitally necessary" causes that are, in fact, usually worthless and destructive, like the occupations of Iraq and Palestine, which are also paid for by American taxpayers. Some call this "inflation," which is the act of paying for jobs that don't produce anything. It is not easy to produce a valuable product that does not exist beforehand, such as a quart of milk or a pound of oatmeal. Ask any farmer. No government we know of has ever been as successful in doing this as a farmer, and that includes the state of Israel. But it is easy to pay broken people, like those in New Orleans, to pick up garbage or clean up flood-destroyed homes. Non-productive work is an art form perfected by the government. Spending deflationary dollars for questionable causes is the essence of controlling people at every level, whether it's for war or for relief of suffering. Before I go further, tell me readers, do you really believe the poor people in the Gulf coast cites will every get enough of the billions that will be spent, to replace their homes? Fat chance... that's not how the system works. The aid goes for corporate welfare, for the Halliburton's of the world, just like it's doing in Baghdad! The result will be cheap jobs, not cheap homes. When New Orleans is cleared and reclaimed some few years from now, and the dykes again declared to be safe, most of the land will belong to entirely different people than those who now own the little parcels covered with salt water. The owners will have long since defaulted on their mortgages or taxes and lost the land. The only way for Americans to avoid the dollar dilution that will eventually destroy the commerce of the country (including the stock market and the real estate market) as surely as if we were all under water in New Orleans, is for organized, educated, involved citizens to demand that the federal government stay out. The American Tsunami is succeeding Iraq as the current excuse for runaway government. President Bush was grim-faced and tight-fisted when he learned about the disaster, because his administration had not been choreographed to respond to Katrina. Instead he was focused on keeping wars going, which requires him to swagger, sneer and strut. Not so with a rescuing operation. Saving 200,000 mostly poor people requires the President to be humble, to cry at times, and to love the unlovable. Saving people, while taking their homes is a little different from saving them after you have bombed them. The transition can take a little time. Our president was carefully coached by the Neo-cons to be arrogantly defiant. "Bring them on" was his answer to resistance in Iraq, and he is still defiant after 1800 Americans have died there. His handlers will fix his image, but it takes a few weeks to teach the President anything so complex. Our military also must change. They are away in Iraq, being trained to kill Muslims, who they are told are subhuman . They're trained to control and jail people, not to save and rebuild. The military reaction time is not fast when asked to save people from rooftops. Notice that people have already been shot in New Orleans. And also notice that most of the help is being done by private agencies, not FEMA or Homeland Security, who act like they are in Iraq. We must also realize that in the carnage of Katrina, thieves, thugs and hate-filled racists, deprived drug addicts, and the criminal by nature are all mixed in with the hungry, sick, and homeless. Some of the latter are justifiably angry, because they feel they were lured to spend their life savings to live in a swamp and are now forgotten by everyone when the long-predicted American tsunami finally arrived. Their insurance is also non-existent, and the smart ones know they will never be allowed to salvage a home in the swamp, even after it is made secure from the sea. Governments, including Mr. Bush, always dilute the dollar for war, but they quickly adjust to the advantages of natural disasters. Our military and its commander-in-Chief, George W. Bush, have been trained for Baghdad, not New Orleans, but notice the similarity between Baghdad and New Orleans. From the standpoint of government, both destructions accomplish the same end. Both create miserable clean-up jobs, helpless people who have to be manipulated and controlled, and financial opportunities to be grabbed. War is only a substitute for a natural disaster in the eyes of the people who control presidents. Mr. Bush did not immediately understand, it seems, but he will learn. "War is a Racket", a book written by Marine General Smedley Butler, is about the business of war. General Butler meant a racket for businesses like Halliburton today. For every politician, war is a substitute for natural disasters. It is his path to full employment and unlimited spending-power. He who is in a position to spend has power. The flooding of New Orleans was not unpredictable. Craig E. Colten had written about it in An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans From Nature. But no politician can anticipate when such a disaster will come, and they cannot wait for it to happen, so they create their own disasters to solve, called "wars." Each war takes people out of the economy where they might actually, like the farmers, be producing something valuable and alters their function into various kinds of destroyers. The military cook may seem to produce food, but in fact, he only consumes food in the process of feeding those who are destroying other producers. Look at any military textbook, be it by Ulysses S. Grant or Dwight David Eisenhower. In the case of Iraq, the President has destroyed the producing capacity of a country that has more oil under it than all others, except Saudi Arabia. Now that the production is gone, we are not supposed to notice that the cost to fill some SUV's gas tank is up to $100.00--more if you have a Hummer. This hidden cost of war is what We Hold These Truths calls "dilution". It is the way in which we citizens are forced to pay for the war. It is the same method that will be used to replace New Orleans, spend and dilute. War and natural disasters have something else in common: the reconstruction done in Baghdad (which is a pretense) and that to be done in New Orleans does not compete with domestic business. The flood has already wiped out the competition, so government is free to grant, sublet, contract and hire at will. Who will complain? Most little people lose their land because they have mortgages, or tax bills to pay. By cleaning up, FEMA creates jobs as fast as the mechanism can be organized to feed, employ and house the now homeless victims. But those dollar grants, including the $2000.00 vouchers given to evacuees, buys less every day. Where does the money come from for all these billions for New Orleans? From you, the earner, you will find your dollars diluted by the new ones printed for cleaning up. This writer is not unsympathetic with the people of New Orleans; but I am equally sympathetic with the people of Iraq who are in the same condition. In both there are homes with no water, no electricity, no food and less freedom in sight. The U.S. mercenary military occupies Baghdad, and it will soon occupy New Orleans. It is important to acknowledge that we all make decisions and have to live with them. Most of those who will be called on to pay the half trillion dollars (I would expect this cost in the next 10 years) did not build their homes in a swamp. How many remember the story of the three pigs: one built of straw, one of sticks and one of bricks. The moral was that each is responsible for his own house. Does anyone really think the corporate welfare system will provide ownership of houses to the New Orleans' poor? No, it will provide tenements and cheap jobs mucking up the mess, and most of the dollars will stick to the ribs of the corporate insiders, as it has in Iraq with Halliburton and Blackwater security. When the smoke clears, the effect on our money is the same as if our Government had destroyed New Orleans with a bomb and then rebuilt it. In Baghdad, our leaders have, at least for now, confiscated the oil from Iraq, which switches the cost burden to the Iraqi people who are first bombed and then made to pay for their own destruction. Is it any wonder they are angry? We hear of looting, violence, killing and bitterness in Iraq. The Iraqi citizen is paying 20 times more for his fuel than before the war. We have also heard of suicides in New Orleans, so why were we surprised by human bombers in Iraq? We also see violence among the Katrina victims. Some recognize they are being forced to leave and not come back. Some don't want to leave their dogs; some don't want to leave family members behind and are being forced to do so. Homeland Security is domestic occupation. The government taxes and spends to destroy and then taxes and spends to rebuild. The total economic value of a war comes from the jobs created by the munitions industry and related war efforts and in employing some unemployable persons in military jobs. The Mideast wars are political caviar because there is a liquid resource to be stolen there, oil! No wonder war on Islam is so politically popular. There is oil to steal in almost every Muslim country. CONCLUSION: Don't be too quick to blame George W. Bush for being slow in responding to Katrina, but be prepared to blame him for his wanton spending yet to come In fact, the US Corps of Engineers calculated and knew the dikes were not high enough to withstand a category 4 hurricane. One was quoted as saying it was not "cost effective" to plan for a 4 or 5 event. Now it will be. Dirt moving is one of the cheapest of operations today, and 5% of the billions we are now asked to pay would have probably have saved New Orleans if it was spent piling more dirt on the dykes instead of bombing Baghdad. Mr. Bush is just not accustomed to fixing things. His training is to destroy them. Had he been asked to bomb New Orleans because a terrorist cell was alleged to be hanging out in the French Quarter, he might well have launched a 5000-pound missile in a banker's minute. Do not waste valuable time and money blaming Mr. Bush; he is only hired help for the Warmakers. No doubt Bush's replacement will be a Democrat. But remember, if no natural disaster comes along to keep the unemployed off the street, you can depend upon a Democrat to make war, too. Did not Bill Clinton bomb four countries and preside over the rape of Bosnia? The direction of this commentary is that we cannot prevent natural disasters, but wars are preventable when those that God has called to be Peacemakers (in this country they are called "Christians") do what they are supposed to do. If we had not made war on the Islamic world we could afford the cost of the American Tsunami. The cocaine like effect of the massive American Tsunami rescue will likely keep the stock and real estate markets bubbling for a little longer. But now, piled on top of $200 billion spent in Iraq, it will surly be the last straw that destroys the dollar in the growing competition of the world currencies market. It is foolish to blame politicians, international bankers or business contractors for the immorality that is native to their professions, and should be expected of them. There is one undeniable reason America is the war bully of the world, and that we are leaving bankruptcy as a legacy to our children. It is because the fact that the Christians in churches will not stand up to protect the war victims upon whom they know in advance the bombs are about to fall. The churches, especially the Christian-Zionist churches, have put us in the mess we are in by supporting war for three generations, instead of seeking peace as Christ commanded them to do. They forgot the commandment, "thou shall not kill." We wonder if these same church leaders will remember the commandment, "thou shall not steal" in the upcoming dilution of our currency for rebuilding the Gulf Coast? Info-Cl-House Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Nur Posted July 20, 2006 Here is a cost calculator I found at the Information Clearance House See better ways US government could have spent the 300 Billion dollars it spent on Iraq http://costofwar.com/index-college-scholarships.html Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
