Our Tax Dollars Hard At Work

I guess Bush and his minions are desperate to prove that they are the best at something. Of course, it's not education, health care, foreign policy... no, of course not. No, they get to hang their hats on the fact that this is the single most corrupt Administration in the history of the United States. Let's all give them a big round of applause for that, huh? I must say, that's quite an achievement.

The full depth of the corruption may never be known, but we're getting a clearer and clearer picture of just how rampant it is. Congressman Henry Waxman (D-Ca), new chairman of the House Government Reform committee has been conducting hearings, finally digging into the corruption, waste and fraud of the Bush Administration. And what he's turned up so far has been utterly astonishing.

We now know that the Bush Administration had ordered the disbursement of billions of dollars to Iraq with no record keeping and no oversight. Shortly before Viceroy L. Paul Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) handed control of the country back to the Iraqis, Bush ordered the Federal Reserve to issue 4 billion dollars. That cash was packed onto pallets, loaded onto military transports and sent to Iraq. Amazing, isn't it? Huge bundles of money, 363 tons of cold, hard cash, just strapped to cargo pallets and shipped on out.

"Who in their right mind would send 363 tons of cash into a war zone? But that's exactly what our government did," said Waxman.

Once the money planes landed in Iraq, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of meticulous record keeping detailing where that money went or how it was disbursed. I don't know about you, but I'm thinking that a lot of it was disbursed to private accounts in Switzerland and the Grand Caymans. To date, there is still more than 9 billion dollars completely unaccounted for and billions more wasted or handed out as bribes. In his defense, Bremer told the Congressional Committee that it would have been impossible to apply modern accounting standards in the midst of a war.

"We were in the middle of a war, working in very difficult conditions, and we had to move quickly to get this Iraqi money working for the Iraqi people," said
Bremer.

The stink has gotten so bad that even true conservatives are beginning to hold their noses. According to the American Conservative, the waste and fraud is rampant and far reaching.

At least $20 billion that belonged to the Iraqi people has been wasted, together with hundreds of millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars. Exactly how many billions of additional dollars were squandered, stolen, given away, or simply lost will never be known because the deliberate decision by the CPA not to meter oil exports means that no one will ever know how much revenue was generated during 2003 and 2004.

This is utterly amazing. They're taking our tax dollars and quite literally handing it out of the back of trucks. There is no oversight, there is no record keeping and in some cases, it seems that they don't even know who they're handing money to!

From the American Conservative:

Money also disappeared in truckloads and by helicopter. The CPA reportedly distributed funds to contractors in bags off the back of a truck. In one notorious incident in April 2004, $1.5 billion in cash that had just been delivered by three Blackhawk helicopters was handed over to a courier in Erbil, in the Kurdish region, never to be seen again. Afterwards, no one was able to recall the courier’s name or provide a good description of him.

And this:

Paul Bremer, meanwhile, had a slush fund in cash of more than $600 million in his office for which there was no paperwork. One U.S. contractor received $2 million in a duffel bag. Three-quarters of a million dollars was stolen from an office safe, and a U.S. official was given $7 million in cash in the waning days of the CPA and told to spend it “before the Iraqis take over.” Nearly $5 billion was shipped from New York in the last month of the CPA.

And all of this waste, fraud and corruption isn't even taking the American contractors like Halliburton, KBR and Blackwater doing "work" on behalf of the government into account. That list of waste and corruption is far more than I want to even go into at the moment.

It certainly seems that a lot of money is just disappearing like a puff of smoke over there. I would venture to guess that there are a lot of people getting rich as well. Can you even imagine the good that could have been done in this country with those countless billions that have been stolen or wasted in Iraq? With all of that money, we could have fed countless millions of homeless men, women and children. We could have given health care to the uninsured. We could have vastly improved our education system nationwide. We could have, you know, rebuilt New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. There are so many good things that could have been done with that amount of money here in this country. But no, the robber barons of the Bush Administration are more interested in fattening up their own bank accounts rather than do good works on behalf of this country and our people.

Hundreds of billions of our tax dollars have already gone to fund Bush's immoral war of choice in Iraq. In the budget he just sent to Congress, Bush is earmarking nearly a trillion dollars more. And this is the money that's accounted for. How many more billions of our tax dollars are going to vanish into thin air?

I urge everybody to write to their Congresscritter and Senators and urge them to pull the plug on the funding for this war. Fu*k these non-binding resolutions everybody and their dog is trying to debate and pass. That's nothing but a circle-jerk and we the people all playing the catcher. The only recourse we have left open to us is the power of the purse. The only way to stop this war, to stop the needless slaughter of our troops and Iraqi civilians and to stop this corruption and waste is for Congress to pull those pursestrings shut. Write your Congresscritters and your Senators. Tell them it's past time to shut down the war machine.

~Kevin S.