Raised on Robbery: The Neocon Conspiracy

In the wake of an analysis by a Nobel Prize-winning economist that the war in Iraq is costing America a million dollars every two minutes, President Bush has announced he will veto a bill to expand a proven children's health program, just passed by the House.

The war is costing some $720 million a day, according to the study by economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and public finance expert Linda J. Bilmes, issued last week by the American Friends Service Committee. That one day's spending could buy health care for nearly a half million children. It could buy homes for 6,500 families and provide 1.27 million homes with renewable electricity, according to the analysis. It adds direct long term costs resulting from the war(such as health care for soldiers) to current spending, but not indirect future costs, like higher oil prices, lost productivity and trade.

The expansion of the children's health program amounts to $35 billion, which would pay for about 40 days of the Iraq war, according to these figures. Yet Republicans in Congress as well as the White House complain that this constitutes excessive government spending, among other specious arguments.

But any standards of accountability let alone wise use of resources don't apply to their war for profit in Iraq. According to a spokesperson for the American Enterprise Institute, the organization most responsible for the Bushite neoconservative agenda, " If you think national security won't be harmed by withdrawing from Iraq, of course you would want to see that money spent elsewhere. I myself think that belief, on a certain level, is absurd, so the question of focusing on how much money we are spending there is irrelevant."

There are several insulting fallacies here, but the most serious is that the Iraq war is necessary for U.S. national security, which nobody but the neocons believe, and the vast majority of Americans clearly don't accept. But it is certainly the excuse used by Bushite big spenders (some of whom may believe it, but I doubt that all really do) for their no-bid contracts worth billions given to their corporate cronies, not to mention the unaccounted for billions, the clearly wasted billions, and the stolen billions. This of course is the work of the party that's against Big Government, at least when it comes to children's medical care.

The truth of the matter I am convinced is closer to what Naomi Klein writes in The Shock Doctrine: to Bushite neocons "the acceptable role of government in a corporatist state - [is] to act as a conveyor belt for getting public money into private hands." Certain private hands, like Halliburton's. That's one big reason why there are more contractors than soldiers in Iraq, and why the cost of this war is nearly three quarters of a billion dollars a day--the most outrageous robbery in history, and one that future generations will long be paying.

And that's why government can't support health care for poor children and children of families who can't otherwise afford it, in America, but any limit on pouring money down the drain of Iraq is irrelevant. If this keeps up, there really won't be any money for anything else, for a long time. Which is exactly what some neocons intend.

In many essential ways it's all elaborate dressing for extreme pigginess by a few. So let's all bow down to the unitary executive of Pig Brother.

UPDATE: The Shock Doctrine is getting a lot of good attention, including a video interview of author Naomi Klein by actor John Cusak. If you really want to understand what this book is about and what is has to say about all this, in a succinct 17 minutes, don't read my review, watch this interview. You can also find it on Huffington Post.