Paying For the Oil War With Your Job

by pessimist

Remember that vote for the $87 Billion to cover the costs of the Crusade For Oil that Bu$hCo kept bashing Kery with? Care to see what you're getting for your tax dollars?

Iraq War Topping $5.8 Billion A Month

The Pentagon is spending more than $5.8 billion a month on the war in Iraq, according to the military's top generals. That is nearly a 50 percent increase above the $4 billion-a-month benchmark the Pentagon has used to estimate the cost of the war so far. The Army alone is spending $4.7 billion a month while the Air Force is spending $800 million a month transporting soldiers and flying combat missions. The Marine Corps is spending $300 million a month, the four service chiefs told the House Armed Services Committee Wednesday.

Since 2003, the Pentagon has received some $160 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in supplemental funding -- that is, in addition to its annual budget. It will be requesting another multibillion-dollar supplement early next year to cover the continuing cost of the war.

Now - here's what your hard-earned tax dollars - something that Bu$h likes to remind us 'is our money' - has accomplished.

Iraq Assessments: Insurgents Not Giving Up

The recapture of Fallujah has not broken the insurgents' will to fight and may not pay the big dividend U.S. planners had hoped — to improve security enough to hold national elections in Sunni Muslim areas of central Iraq, according to U.S. and Iraqi assessments.

Instead, the battle for control of the Sunni city 40 miles west of Baghdad has sharpened divisions among Iraq's major ethnic and religious groups, fueled anti-American sentiment and stoked the 18-month-old Sunni insurgency.

Those grim assessments, expressed privately by some U.S. military officials and by some private experts on Iraq, raise doubts as to whether the January election will produce a government with sufficient legitimacy, especially in the eyes of the country's powerful Sunni Muslim minority.

Why should the government of Iraq be seen as legitimate if its daddy - the government of the US - isn't?

The Associated Press has learned that U.S. military officials in Iraq concluded the population of Anbar province, which includes Fallujah, Ramadi, has been intimidated by the guerrillas and that the provincial security forces are nonfunctioning and their ranks infiltrated by guerrilla sympathizers.

Before the attack on Fallujah began last week, Prime Minister Ayad Allawi formally dissolved the city's police and security forces, which had fallen under control of the radical Sunni clerics who ran the city.

"They will greet us as liberators"

Since the Fallujah offensive, there has already been a marked spike in insurgent attacks across other Sunni areas, notably Mosul where about 1,200 U.S. troops launched an operation this week to reclaim police stations abandoned after insurgent raids. U.S. officials say only 20 percent of the city's 5,000 police had returned to duty as of Wednesday.

So who is going to pay for this spectacular Triumph of the Neocon Will? Why, the hard workers of the 99%, that's who! With their jobs!

Outsourcing of jobs is accelerating in U.S

Job movement overseas "is absolutely accelerating, and it's changing in its nature," said Kate Bronfenbrenner, a professor in Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations, who prepared the report for the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. "Whereas in 2001 it was almost all in manufacturing, now we see an increase in information technology, communications, financial services, and white-collar work, from research and design to back office."

These were the few jobs left that paid something besides survival wages.

Greater ease in Internet and phone transmission, spiraling health care costs to cover U.S. employees, and more experience employing people abroad are fueling overseas hiring for jobs that once would have remained in the United States. The most compelling incentive remains the disparity between wages earned in the United States and in less-developed countries. In India, a computer programmer with a college degree and two or three years of experience earns about $20,000 a year, according to companies that employ workers there.

Some economists cite growing numbers of U.S. jobs transplanted overseas as the main reason for slow employment growth during the current economy recovery. Another 400,000 jobs added to the total 1.8 million jobs created in the United States in 2004 would be "a big deal," Stephen Roach, chief economist at Morgan Stanley, said. But Shang-Jin Wei of the International Monetary Fund said that when a company employs people overseas, lower costs and high profits enable it to hire elsewhere in the organization. "We create one job for every job lost," he estimated.

One job with good wages and benefits replaced with a job at Wal-Mart.

Such a deal!

Some of you wrong-wingers out there might think that this is all a buch of liberal BS. Well, let's get the opinion of the man whho convinced Lyndon Johnson that he would be defeated if he ran for reelection in 1968, The Most Trusted Man In America, Walter Cronkite:

Cronkite rips Bush's record

What America needs right now, legendary TV anchor Walter Cronkite said Thursday, is a new election -- and, he warned a laughing press conference full of reporters, he wasn't kidding.

"That's not entirely a joke," Cronkite said solemnly, arguing that the Bush administration has spent itself into ruin while embroiling the country in a war that will eventually make public revulsion to the war in Vietnam look "like peanuts."

"I think you journalists today have a great four years ahead of you," Cronkite observed dryly. "It's going to be a great story to cover."

"You want to get down to the nub of how this democracy is going to defend itself," Cronkite said. "We've got to have an intelligent electorate and we're not going to have it because our education system is in a shambles right now."

"We have a war that is tearing us apart," he said. But, he added, the administration's deficit spending is a close second, creating "a debt that will have to be paid by our great-grandchildren, and maybe beyond that. In the meantime, we do not have the money to do the things that we ought to -- have to -- do here at home," Cronkite said.

Go Tell It On The Mountain, Walter! Shout it out LOUD! Maybe then these good Bu$h $upporter$ that used to have real jobs might get the message.

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NOTE: Last link was intended to be satirical.