While you’re struggling to pay your bills, consider for a moment (although it really will make you sick) just how out of control and reckless the US government is with our cash, your cash, my cash.
I know this story is old, but remember the prior acute phase of all this mess was fall 2008. Like many Americans I naively thought that the invasion of Iraq would produce economic benefits back home. We all knew the whole WMD thing was a lie after all, didn’t we? The real purpose of it all was oil. Then after we secured the oil, the US economy would be greased up and running along, right? Lower energy costs = competitive advantage = rising standard of living…right?
But none of that has come to pass. Instead, we’ve bombed, burned, killed hundreds of thousands of people and reduced two entire countries to rubble. And for what? Freedom? Ha! Democracy! Ha! The word that probably comes closer to the truth is, we killed hundreds of thousands of people for….Haliburton.
The debt ceiling game of Russian Roulette continues (whatever happened to Russia anyway…they kinda slipped off our radar screen)…
But back to Iraq…read the following excerpt from a long, long ago Vanity Fair article:
That transfer of cash to Iraq was the largest one-day shipment of currency in the history of the New York Fed. It was not, however, the first such shipment of cash to Iraq. Beginning soon after the invasion and continuing for more than a year, $12 billion in U.S. currency was airlifted to Baghdad, ostensibly as a stopgap measure to help run the Iraqi government and pay for basic services until a new Iraqi currency could be put into people’s hands. In effect, the entire nation of Iraq needed walking-around money, and Washington mobilized to provide it.
What Washington did not do was mobilize to keep track of it. By all accounts, the New York Fed and the Treasury Department exercised strict surveillance and control over all of this money while it was on American soil. But after the money was delivered to Iraq, oversight and control evaporated. Of the $12 billion in U.S. banknotes delivered to Iraq in 2003 and 2004, at least $9 billion cannot be accounted for. A portion of that money may have been spent wisely and honestly; much of it probably wasn’t. Some of it was stolen.