{"id":1432,"date":"2007-01-08T15:21:53","date_gmt":"2007-01-08T20:21:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.virushead.net\/vhrandom\/2007\/01\/08\/us-money-drain\/"},"modified":"2007-01-08T15:37:56","modified_gmt":"2007-01-08T20:37:56","slug":"us-money-drain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.virushead.net\/vhrandom\/2007\/01\/us-money-drain\/","title":{"rendered":"US Money Drain"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/Iraq\/Story\/0,,1983863,00.html\">must-read<\/a> article by Terry Jones (of Python fame). Yes, they have &#8220;made a killing.&#8221;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Early this year the Bush administration is to ask Congress to approve an additional $100bn for the onerous task of making life intolerable for the Iraqis. This will bring the total spent on the White House&#8217;s current obsession with war to almost $500bn &#8211; enough to have given every US citizen $1,600 each. I wonder which the voters would have gone for if given the choice: shall we (a) give every American $1,600 or (b) spend the money on bombing a country in the Middle East that doesn&#8217;t use lavatory paper?<\/p>\n<p>Of course, there&#8217;s another thing that George Bush could have done with the money: he could have given every Iraqi $18,700. I imagine that would have reduced the threat of international terrorism somewhat. Call me old-fashioned, but I can&#8217;t help thinking that giving someone $18,700 brings them round to your side more quickly than bombing the hell out of them. They could certainly buy a lot of lavatory paper with it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Who are the winners? The ones who walk away with our money. <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>No competitive bidding for contracts in Iraq<\/li>\n<li>Rampant overcharging<\/li>\n<li>Payment for unfinished jobs<\/li>\n<li>Accounting oversight stripped from the Iraq spending bill.<\/li>\n<li>No provision to penalize war profiteers who defraud US taxpayers<\/li>\n<li>Executive protections and interventions for war profiteers<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A must-read article by Terry Jones (of Python fame). Yes, they have &#8220;made a killing.&#8221; Early this year the Bush administration is to ask Congress to approve an additional $100bn for the onerous task of making life intolerable for the Iraqis. This will bring the total spent on the White House&#8217;s current obsession with war to almost $500bn &#8211; enough to have given every US citizen $1,600 each. I wonder which the voters would have gone for if given the&#8230;<\/p>\n<p class=\"read-more\"><a class=\"btn btn-default\" href=\"https:\/\/www.virushead.net\/vhrandom\/2007\/01\/us-money-drain\/\"> Read More<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">  Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,5,3],"tags":[3356,347,556,1222,284,99,2928,398,3357],"class_list":["post-1432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-armchair-activism","category-culture","category-politics","tag-competitive-bidding","tag-corruption","tag-economy","tag-executive-powers","tag-george-w-bush","tag-iraq","tag-oversight","tag-terry-jones","tag-war-profiteers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.virushead.net\/vhrandom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.virushead.net\/vhrandom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.virushead.net\/vhrandom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.virushead.net\/vhrandom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.virushead.net\/vhrandom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1432"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.virushead.net\/vhrandom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1432\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.virushead.net\/vhrandom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.virushead.net\/vhrandom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.virushead.net\/vhrandom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}