Falling Off the $1 Trillion Cliff

[one...two...tree 2,762]

by Robert Greenwald

We're headed for an ugly cliff this Sunday. At 10 a.m. on May 30, all of those little cost of war counters that have been furiously spinning away on countless websites will cross the $1 trillion mark. No alarm will sound. No bell will ring. But, on the day before Memorial Day, the cost of the wars in cold, hard cash will follow the human cost of the Afghanistan war into a new order of magnitude.

Just how much is $1 trillion? Let's put it into real-world terms. For that amount of money, you could do fantastic, life-changing things like:

• Provide jobs for 1 million music/arts teachers for a year, and
• Provide health care for 1 million children for one year.

And then, just for fun, you could also:

• Buy Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

If you did all three of these things, you'd still have $925 billion to spare.

These wars aren't making us safer. They aren't worth the cost, and we don't need them. What people do need are jobs and help when they don't have enough work or any work at all. But instead of leading on the jobs issue, they're delaying and dissembling about the cost–while spending trillions on war! For example, the Senate just skipped town instead of staying in session long enough to pass an unemployment insurance extension. HuffPost Hill spells out what that means:

On June 1, several programs, including extended unemployment benefits, will expire. By the end of the week, 19,400 people will prematurely stop receiving checks, according to data from the Department of Labor. …By the end of the following week, the number of premature unemployment exhaustions will climb to 323,400. The week after that, 903,000. By the end of the month, 1.2 million.

HuffPo's Ryan Grim and Arthur Delaney put that in even more context:

It will be the third time this year that lawmakers have allowed extended unemployment benefits to lapse, and the second time they've decided to leave town for recess fully knowing the lapse would cause panic and confusion among blameless layoff victims — not to mention what Katz calls a "huge" administrative burden on state workforce agencies.

This is a disaster. People are losing jobs or have already been unemployed long-term. And while Congress is "nickel-and-diming" people who are suffering, those cost of war counters keep spinning.

Help us get the word out: check out our new Facebook app and show us how you'd spend the $1 trillion wasted on war, and share it with your friends.

Then, if you haven't yet, join Rethink Afghanistan on Facebook.

link

[ready4ONE 5,400]

For better or worse, we are linked in to both wars, with Afghanistan showing no signs of an easy out. Iraq slightly more so, but still no quick way totally out of Iraq either.

It might be wiser to pick on dead beats with none or piss poor jobs, bad or no health insurance, or illegals. That seems to satisfy the scapegoating needs of many around these here parts. Picking on unfunded wars just doesn't seem to have the same cache. Besides you would have to look back at W and of course that would raise a howl!

[Obama 2012 1,714]

by Robert Greenwald

These wars aren't making us safer. They aren't worth the cost, and we don't need them. What people do need are jobs and help when they don't have enough work or any work at all. But instead of leading on the jobs issue, they're delaying and dissembling about the cost–while spending trillions on war! For example, the Senate just skipped town instead of staying in session long enough to pass an unemployment insurance extension. HuffPost Hill spells out what that means:

I'm not for the wars over there, but to say they aren't worth it and to say we don't need them is somewhat misunderstood.

We need to be there doing what were doing as a matter of our economic future and the economic future of the UK. If you understand anything about that region, it's neighbors and what they do for Europe, then you'll understand that we're not necessarily there for our well being initially (though it does effect us greatly), we're there for a magnitude of reasons for our allies.

[spookyturtle 9,466]

We need to stop the oil leak in the Gulf too.

[lostinblue 1,989]

For a trillion you could round up a lot of undocumented workers and send them home and put the people on unemployment to work by filling the jobs that were stolen from americans.

[Hilarious Clinton 452]

We need to stop the oil leak in the Gulf too.

STOP THIS ENDLESS LEAK

[SuperDuper! 230]

A trillion here, a trillion there. Before too long, you are talking about a lot of money.

Obama needs to don a wet suit, and dive down there and plug that nasty oil leak.

Don't worry. Our worst fears are rarely realized. Just enjoy yourself.