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The ROIN of Bush's strategy is sub-par at best. Surprising for an MBA predisent.
"In Washington, the independent Congressional Budget Office said the occupation of Iraq could cost up to $200 billion over the next decade depending on its size and length and that in a worst case scenario U.S. troops could be in the country to 2013.
This is the reason income should be taxed at a lower rate than capital. It is the mass equilirium equation that is the highest multiplier: more wealth for everyone...
it is a sign of Bush's tactical failures that this is happening:
"Facing an increasing tide of attacks, American soldiers Friday cordoned off the village where Saddam Hussein was born, suspecting this dusty farming community of being a secret base for funding and planning assaults against coalition forces."
Images of barbed wire around a village...
This is the future. The power of pensions (the people's equity) is growing, as it should.
"The parade of public pension funds pulling billions of dollars from Putnam Investments grew longer on Friday as the fifth-biggest U.S. mutual fund firm continued to hemorrhage business following accusations of civil securities fraud."
Pentagon Whistle Blower: "George Bush Isn't In Control"
'A former Pentagon officer turned whistleblower says a group of hawks in the Bush Administration, including the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, is running a shadow foreign policy, contravening Washington's official line.
'"What these people are doing now makes Iran-Contra [a Reagan administration national security scandal] look like amateur hour. . . it's worse than Iran-Contra, worse than what happened in Vietnam," said Karen Kwiatkowski, a former air force lieutenant-colonel.
'"[President] George Bush isn't in control . . . the country's been hijacked," she said, describing how "key [governmental] areas of neoconservative concern were politically staffed".
'Ms Kwiatkowski, who retired this year after 20 years service, was a Middle East specialist in the office of the Undersecretary of Defence for Policy, headed by Douglas Feith.'
'She described "a subversion of constitutional limits on executive power and a co-optation through deceit of a large segment of the Congress", adding that "in order to take that first step - Iraq - lies had to be told to Congress to bring them on board."'
We have to remember that the Bush administration forgot to include any aide to Afghanistan in its budget. So it is no surprise that the country is now becoming, once again, a breeding ground for terrorism. This is proof positive that George Bush has not learned from 9-11, but instead is using the tragedy for personal political gain. How much more of Bush can we take?
"Opium cultivation is spreading like a "cancer" in Afghanistan, a United Nations survey has found."
"Afghanistan produces three quarters of the world's illicit opium - the raw material for heroin - and two thirds of all opiate users take drugs of Afghan origin, according to a report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime."
"The UN said yesterday that unless the problem was tackled the country could be over-run by violence, corruption and terrorism. High prices for opium had recruited more farmers, spreading poppy cultivation to 28 of Afghanistan's 32 provinces, from 18 four years ago."
"The alarming report by the UN's drugs and crime agency based in Vienna found that Afghan opium farmers and traffickers took home about $2.3bn (£1.4bn), or about half of the country's legitimate GDP in 2003."
"Afghanistan has re-established itself as the world's biggest opium producer after the fall of the Taliban regime, which banned cultivation."
As if this were a surprise:
"Executives, employees and political action committees of the 70 companies that received government contracts for work in either Iraq or Afghanistan contributed slightly more than $500,000 to President Bush's 2000 election campaign, according to a comprehensive study of the contracts released on Tuesday.
"The overwhelming majority of government contracts for billions of dollars of reconstruction work in Iraq and Afghanistan went to companies run by executives who were heavy political contributors to both political parties.
"Though the employees contributed to both parties, their giving favored Republicans by a two-to-one margin. And they gave more money to Mr. Bush than any other politician in the last 12 years."
From the Washington Monthly:
"This subtle distancing of Republicans from Bush has begun to show up, locally and nationally, even among those conservative politicians who spent this administration's first two years hugging the president as if their political future depended solely on the strength of their grip. Rep. Walter B. Jones Jr, (R-N.C.), Jacksonville's man in Congress, has joined other pro-military conservatives in stepping out of line with House leaders and criticizing the administration's policies towards veterans; Jones has said the administration treats vets like "second-class citizens." Conservative Rep. Zach Wamp (R-Tenn.) and Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio) led vocal Republican opposition to the administration's $87 billion supplemental spending bill for Iraq in September, a move which found conservative allies from Sen. Kay Bouley Hutchinson (R-Texas) to Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.). House majority whip Roy Blount (R-Mo.) has taken the administration to task over its troop-rotation policies."
From Slate:
"From the outset, Bushies claimed that lowering marginal rates and cutting taxes on dividends and capital gains, while feverishly boosting government spending, would usher in economic nirvana. Because many of the same folks also argued that President Clinton's 1993 recipe of raising taxes on a few people and closing deficits would usher in depression (that's you, Capitol Hill Republicans, Club for Growth, Wall Street Journal editorial page), it was hard to take the argument seriously. And for much of the Bush administration, they have indeed been wrong."
"Some of the Bush boom is a matter of defining performance. We have yet to see two consecutive quarters of impressive growth. And even if John Snow's prediction of 2 million new jobs in the next 12 months materializes, that is still poor by historical standards. That breaks down to only 166,000 new jobs per month—which barely covers the 150,000 new job-market entrants each month and leaves a mere handful of positions for the millions of jobless who are currently seeking work. Between October 1993 and October 2000, the economy created an average of 2.88 million jobs per year. That's a boom.
"The Bush boom promoters also sidestep the real issue about the third-quarter growth. It would be hard for the economy not to surge when you consider how much money the administration has poured into it in the form of tax cuts and government spending. It remains to be seen whether the economy can produce jobs and growth without continual booster shots, and whether the massive deficits the administration is running will drag down growth for years to come."
We now have an accounting of how much money was at stake in the Cheney-Halliburton market distorting cronyism. And remember, Dick Cheney directly benefits from any improved financial performance at Halliburton:
"The company's engineering and construction unit, KBR, had an 80% jump in revenue to $2.34 billion, while operating income rose fourfold at the unit to $49 million from $12 million last year, mainly due to government services contracts in the Middle East."
"Under a no-bid contract awarded to Halliburton before the Iraq war started, the company was responsible for helping to restore Iraqi oil fields. Halliburton already has secured $1.3 billion worth of work under that contract, and another $1.4 billion for a separate, competitively bid contract to provide support services to troops."
