In a must-read, Dean Baker explains here how the Federal Reserve may have just handed over hundreds of billions of government money to America’s richest banks. He also examines the reasons this is a bad idea, both the obvious and the non-obvious.
This is actually important. It would be nice to live in a country where we were capable of paying attention to important things.
This is an object lesson into why you should not invest yourself so heavily into politicians.
Not to suggest that Hillary or Barack have been sneaking off to brothels, but a lot of people really want to believe that one or the other of them walks on water. Every time one of them is mentioned in a less than favorable light on this blog or in the cartoon, I inevitably receive a flood of angry email from supporters castigating me for my apparent support for the other candidate, whose irredeemable mendacity should surely be obvious to anyone with a few functioning brain cells.
Remember what Kurt Vonnegut said:
There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done … This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.
An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein’s regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden’s al Qaida terrorist network.
The Pentagon-sponsored study, scheduled for release later this week, did confirm that Saddam’s regime provided some support to other terrorist groups, particularly in the Middle East, U.S. officials told McClatchy. However, his security services were directed primarily against Iraqi exiles, Shiite Muslims, Kurds and others he considered enemies of his regime.
What the article doesn’t mention is that apparently they also found no evidence that Saddam’s regime attempted to kill George H.W. Bush in Kuwait in 1993. Nor has there been any mention of such evidence anywhere else since the invasion. All this despite the fact that we can be certain if the administration had found it, they would have let us know loudly and often.
Meanwhile, all of Washington has become discreetly mum about this, even though they were yammering about it constantly from fall, 2002 through spring, 2003. It’s almost as though none of it ever happened.
“In FY2007, DOD’s monthly obligations for contracts and pay averaged about $12.3 billion including about $10.3 billion for Iraq and $2.0 billion for Afghanistan.” [CRS Report, 2/22/08]
2. $10 billion divided by 30 days in a month comes out to $333,333,333 a day. Divided by the number of seconds in a day (86,400) = $3858 a second.
3. Total final cost of war $3 trillion. That estimate comes from “The Three Trillion Dollar War,” which is discussed here. Same source for the figures about Social Security and children’s health care, though one thing that I should have made clearer — the figure regarding children’s health care indicates what could have been done with this sum with plenty left over:
By way of context, Stiglitz and Bilmes list what even one of these trillions could have paid for: 8 million housing units, or 15 million public school teachers, or healthcare for 530 million children for a year, or scholarships to university for 43 million students. Three trillion could have fixed America’s social security problem for half a century. America, says Stiglitz, is currently spending $5bn a year in Africa, and worrying about being outflanked by China there: “Five billion is roughly 10 days’ fighting, so you get a new metric of thinking about everything.”
4. Avg distance to moon = 238,907 miles x 5,280 ft/mi = 1,261,428,960 ft to moon x 12 inches = 15,137,147,520 inches to moon, divided by 6.14 inches (length of dollar) = 2,465,333,472 dollar bills end-to-end to reach the moon one-way
Mulitplied by two: 4,930,666,944 dollar bills end-to-end for a round trip to the moon.
Three trillion divided by 4,930,666,944 = 608 round trips to moon
(This site was extremely helpful in figuring out this last bit.)
Any errors are of course mine alone, and still entirely possible, given that I am a right-brained, math-challenged cartoonist.
I sent out next week’s cartoon with a pretty blatant mistake — I had to make a last-minute revision and in my haste inadvertently dropped three zeroes from the daily cost of the war. Oops. The strip runs in Pittsburgh on Saturdays, so to readers there, all I can say is, my bad. With luck, the corrected version should run everywhere else next week. (If you happen to work somewhere that runs my strip, please point this out to your art director or production manager and make sure you’re not running the earlier version.)
You may have heard the new Esquire article about Admiral William Fallon, head of the U.S. Central Command, presents him as a hero for standing up to Bush’s desire to attack Iran. Chris Floyd points out the portrayal of Fallon’s perspective is actually a little more complicated:
Fallon himself has long denied the story which had him declaring, upon taking over Central Command, that a war on Iran “isn’t going to happen on my watch.” And in fact, the article itself depicts Fallon’s true attitude toward the idea of an attack on Iran right up front, in his own words. After noting Fallon’s concerns about focusing too much on Iran to the exclusion of the other “pots boiling over” in the region, Barnett nevertheless keeps pressing the point the point and asks: “And if it comes to war?” Fallon replies with stark, brutal clarity:
“Get serious,” the admiral says. “These guys are ants. When the time comes, you crush them.”
The article makes clear that Fallon’s main concerns about a war with Iran are, as noted, about tactics and timing: Sure, when the time comes – no shuffling on that point – we’ll crush these subhumans like the insects they are; but we’ve already got a lot on our plate at the moment, so why not hold off as long as we can?
Above is a picture of Nguyen Cao Ky huddling with Lyndon Johnson. Ky was one of our main Vietnamese lackeys during the midsixties, first as Air Marshall and then as Prime Minister.
Therefore, from the perspective of the U.S. media, he was someone to gush over. This CBS News segment appears in an obscure documentary about I.F. Stone
CRONKITE: Air Force Marshall Ky is a dynamic man—at 34, said to be one of the best public speakers in Vietnam. He gets to work around 7:30 in the morning, works late at night. He has broken the habits of siestas, there is none here. He doesn’t even go out to lunch, but like an American businessman, he eats off the corner of his desk. Ky is a hero to the Vietnamese people. We had an opportunity to talk to him today.
KY: People ask me who my heroes are. I have only one—Hitler. I admire Hitler because he pulled his country together when it was in a terrible state.
God damn that god damn liberal media!
In any case, this is why I say that Ahmadinejad’s statements about wiping Israel off the map (whether he said exactly that or not) have nothing to do with our policy toward Iran. All that matters is whether you take orders. If you do, you’re free to say or do anything you want. Grow a Hitler ’stache while eating Hitler-flavored ice cream and screaming “I WANT TO BE THE HITLERIST HITLER OF ALL” and it’s perfectly okay. Knock yourself out.
(The Ky-Hitler quote appears in the documentary, but I was also reminded of it by Rick Perlstein.)
Laura Ingraham has a meltdown because a guest admits she has never heard the show. What’s particularly fascinating about this clip is that it’s taken from some sort of direct feed, and includes Ingraham’s off-air banter, such as:
“You’ve never listened to talk radio? You’re completely out to lunch. She’s out to lunch. Idiot. By the way, really stupid for her to open that door, screw up, she revealed that and I’m gonna friggin’ destroy her. What else can you find out about her?”
Sean Hannity frequently laughs during his radio rants, and by “laughs,” I mean “interjects a weirdly fake-sounding barking noise to demonstrate what a lighthearted, fun loving guy he is.” It is to actual laughter what Fox is to actual news. Anyway, every time I hear him make the “laughter” noise, it tickles some memory just out of reach, reminds me of someone else’s (equally unconvincing) laugh — and I’ve finally just figured it out. Listen for it at about the 11 second mark:
The White House is downplaying published reports of an estimated $50 billion to $60 billion price tag for a war with Iraq, saying it is “impossible” to estimate the cost at this time.
White House Office of Management and Budget Director Mitch Daniels told The New York Times in an interview published Tuesday that such a conflict could cost $50 billion to $60 billion — the price tag of the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
But Trent Duffy, an OMB spokesman, said Daniels did not intend to imply in the Times interview that $50 billion to $60 billion was a hard White House estimate.
“He said it could — could — be $60 billion,” Duffy said. “It is impossible to know what any military campaign would ultimately cost. The only cost estimate we know of in this arena is the Persian Gulf War, and that was a $60 billion event.”
Duffy also was careful to caution that President Bush had not made a decision to use military force against Saddam’s regime.
The war has turned out to be hugely costly in both blood and treasure. We estimate that the total budgetary and economic cost to the United States will turn out to be around $3 trillion, with the cost to the rest of the world perhaps doubling that number again. In one sense, this book is about that $3 trillion - how America will be paying the bill for this war for decades to come, and why it is that the true costs are so much larger than the cost estimates originally provided by the Bush administration.
Current Cost of War in Iraq Is Almost $11 Billion Per Month. “In FY2007, DOD’s monthly obligations for contracts and pay averaged about $12.3 billion including about $10.3 billion for Iraq and $2.0 billion for Afghanistan.” [CRS Report, 2/22/08]
That Amounts to…
* $332,258,064 Per Day
* $13,844,086 Per Hour
* $230,734 Per Minute
* $3,845 Per Second
Penny Pritzker, Obama, and the Massive Housing Crisis
Who is Penny Pritzker?
Pritzker is the national finance chair of Obama’s presidential campaign. She’s from one of America’s richest families, the founders of the Hyatt hotel chain, and is herself the 135th richest person in America.
She also has an ugly history as the former chair of Superior Bank in Illinois, which (1) was created thanks to a giant S&L bailout by the government; (2) then helped invent the securitization of subprime mortgages; and (3) then collapsed in 2001 thanks to massive financial chicanery.
Interestingly, she lives in a fancy Chicago neighborhood just a short stroll away from Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago professor who’s one of Obama’s main economic advisors. It’s really quite wonderful how Goolsbee can maintain his deep admiration for the Free Market while living a few blocks away from billionaires who use massive government power to create and subsidize their businesses.
