Saturday, July 01, 2006

We're Paying For It

It's a lucrative racket, isn't it? The endless cycle of no - payback loans and grants and outright gifts to foreign interests, then no bid contracts to scum like Halliburton with astronomical cost overruns (think $1000 hammers) to build up the military, then use the bloated military to smash said foreign interests, then more no bid contracts to Halliburton to support the military and build those foreign interests again. Works like a charm. All with little or no oversight. So of course there's the small change that falls between the floorboards, like the $9,000,000,000 or thereabouts in Iraq.

Then there's Israel.
US handouts to that country since WW2 have very conservatively been put at $105 billion. (It's probably several times that figure.) In Occupied Palestine the Israeli military just flattened a power station in the Gaza strip. So you payed for that destruction. (Enron built the thing starting in 1999 so I imagine you somehow payed for it's construction too.)

What the heck, let's complete the cycle.
"United States officials said they expect that U.S. funds will be used to pay for the damages caused by an Israel Air Force strike Tuesday on a Palestinian power station in the Gaza Strip. The power station was insured by a U.S. government agency, according to The Boston Globe."

The 'US government agency" is OPIC, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, which proudly states on it's website "All of OPIC’s guaranty and insurance obligations are backed by OPIC’s own substantial reserves and by the full faith and credit of the U.S. Government."

Meaning your tax dollars yet one more time.
Cost of the War in Iraq
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