87 Bil
The big news lately has been the 87 billion dollars the Bush administration has requested for the ongoing involvement in Iraq.
I'm not even going to go into how staggering this number is. Nor am I going to give much mention to the fact that this is an amount higher than the federal government's education budget.
I do, however, want you to think about where this money is going. Is it going to Iraq? There are 24,683,313 people in Iraq, according to the last figures from the CIA World Fact Book. Are we giving each of them $3500? That figure, by the way, is $1100 more than the per capita GDP of Iraq, again according to the CIA World Fact Book. Are we going to be paying our soldiers $87 billion over the next several years? Hey, I totally support every single serviceman and servicewoman who is putting their life at risk in a foreign land right now. If it were up to me, they'd be getting a huge raise at the very least. But is that where the money is going to go?
No. Of course not. Let's not delude ourselves here. This money isn't for Iraq, or its people. It's not for our soldiers either. The largest portion of this incredible amount of our tax dollars is going to go directly into the pockets of the wealthy American businessmen who run the companies that the military-industrial contracts will go to.
If you are an American taxpayer and not a major shareholder or owner of a military-industrial contractor, you are being raped by your government. Wake up to this, please. And stop it. Remove these bigots from power. And if you are a major shareholder or owner of a military-industrial contractor, you should be ashamed of yourself. You war-mongering opportunists. You should all be tried for crimes against humanity.