What You Get for $2 Billion a Week

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Bryan Bender reports for the Boston Globe that our little adventure in Iraq is costing us U.S. taxpayers $2 billion every week.

By some coincidence, $2 billion just about what Senator Hillary Clinton is seeking in total to cover health care for 9/11 Ground Zero workers.

Thousands of sick ground zero workers need nearly $2 billion in long-term treatment for ongoing health woes, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton said Wednesday in the U.S. Senate as she offered legislation creating a long-term medical program.

Clinton, D-N.Y., brought an amendment to a ports security bill seeking to create a five-year, $1.9 billion treatment program for those still suffering the after-effects of the toxic dust, debris and fumes they endured at ground zero after the 2001 terror attacks.

“If we don’t take care of these people now and start putting up a system that we can have in place for the next several years, we are going to betray a fundamental responsibility to those who we salute whenever it is convenient, whenever it is political,” said Clinton, speaking on the Senate floor two days after the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Many of those who worked for months to look for bodies and clear the debris of the fallen World Trade Center are sick. Many will be sick for the rest of their lives. Mount Sinai Medical Center released a study showing nearly 7 out of every 10 Ground Zero responders now have lung problems because of it. At least one former New York police officer has died from Ground Zero lung disease.

I don’t know if the Bush Administration has responded directly to Senator Clinton’s proposal. The news story linked above says that the Bush Administration plans to spend $75 million “specifically to treating problems that include lung disease, gastrointestinal disorders and mental disorders.” I infer they haven’t spent it yet. Someone might ask what they are waiting for.

What else does $2 billion buy? The Center for Public Integrity says that

In the 2004 federal races, more than $1.78 billion flowed through a professional corps of consultants whose influence plays an important, though largely unexamined, role in the unrelenting escalation of campaign spending, a groundbreaking Center for Public Integrity study has found.

The money going to these consultants amounted to about half of the total spending by presidential candidates, national party committees, general election candidates for Congress, and so-called “527”s — independent political groups.

Conclusion: Every week we spend more more in Iraq to recruit jihadists than what was paid to consultants for bad political advice in all of 2004. That’s a lot of money.

Among the many U.S.-taxpayer-funded projects in Iraq include the Baghdad Police College. Amit R. Paley writes in today’s Washington Post:

A $75 million project to build the largest police academy in Iraq has been so grossly mismanaged that the campus now poses health risks to recruits and might need to be partially demolished, U.S. investigators have found.

The Baghdad Police College, hailed as crucial to U.S. efforts to prepare Iraqis to take control of the country’s security, was so poorly constructed that feces and urine rained from the ceilings in student barracks. Floors heaved inches off the ground and cracked apart. Water dripped so profusely in one room that it was dubbed “the rain forest.”

“This is the most essential civil security project in the country — and it’s a failure,” said Stuart W. Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, an independent office created by Congress. “The Baghdad police academy is a disaster.”

The contractor that laid this egg is Parsons Corporation. According to the Center for Public Integrity, other Parsons projects in Iraq include:

  • An 89 million contract to help destroy captured enemy weapons.
  • More than $31 million for the renovation of the Tadji military base and the Iraqi Armed Forces recruiting stations.
  • Two contracts with ceilings of respectively $500 million and $900 million from the Program Management Office. These were to renovate, rebuild and construct new “public buildings, hospitals, healthcare clinics, and housing throughout Iraq,” and the other was construction and rehabilitation of security and justice facilities.
  • Up to $800 million to rebuild the oil infrastructure in northern Iraq.

    • Now the taxpayers will get to spent more money checking how well those projects turned out.

    A new poll says “About six in 10 Iraqis say they approve of attacks on U.S.-led forces, and slightly more than that want their government to ask U.S. troops to leave within a year,” according to the Associated Press. They hate to see us waste money, I guess.

    6 thoughts on “What You Get for $2 Billion a Week”

    2. Just for fun: The total cost of WWII estimated at $l,384,900,000,000 would have been sufficient to pay for all of the following: A $16,000 house for every family in the US, Britain, France, Belgium, Spain, and Portugal; A $10,000,000 library for every city of 200,000 inhabitants and over in the US, Great Britain, and Russia; A $50,000,000 university for each of these cities; A $2000 car for every family in the US, Great Britain, France, the Low Countries, Denmark, and Norway; The salaries of 100,000 teachers and an equal number of nurses at $3,000 a year for 100 years; A free college education for every boy and girl in the US from 17 to 21 years of age.

      And that was one war NOT noted for its avaricious merchants of death and their concomitant parasites. Numbers take on a whole different meaning when put in the context of real life.

    3. I would guess that we could have paid Saddam 10 Billion to just go away before “Shock ‘N Awe” and saved a shit load of money and lives.( that’s only 5 weeks worth?) Same with Palestine, just make every Palestinean financially secure and the mid East problems would blow over.
      But in the real world we’d rather pay the weapons makers and the coffin builders.
      Two Billion a week could easily fund Social Security, provide national health care, fund higher education, provide training for people who’s jobs are going away due to outsourcing of corporate greed, but that wouldn’t be right ’cause everyone needs to pull them selves up by their boot straps or get a boot in their ass, it’s the American way….

    4. It’s a trip down memory lane for me. I remember when the nuclear power plant at Shoreham NY was considered the biggest boondoggle in US history. It only cost the rate payers 4 billion dollars to never go on line, and now Bush has squandered 300 billion on a defeat in Iraq. Ah, the good old days of single digit boondoggles brings back such warm memories.

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