When asked by USA Today's pollsters last week, sixty-eight percent of Americans said we worry that the cost of the Afghanistan War hurts our ability to fix problems here in the U.S. This week, we learned just how right we were about that. Friday's terrible jobs report shows that a crushing 9.8 percent of us are unemployed. And, millions of us are about to lose our lifeline because Congress refuses to extend unemployment insurance benefits. We're spending $2 billion per week -- per week! -- in Afghanistan while millions of people face going hungry during the holidays.
Do our elected officials not get it? We're drowning out here, and the administration is throwing money that could put Americans back to work at a failed war on the other side of the planet. In fact, that's where the president was when the jobs report came out this morning -- in Afghanistan, talking about "progress" again.
Now, it's great that the president met with wounded troops. Goodness knows they deserve our attention. Their pictures ought to be on the cover of every newspaper until this war ends. But it would be better if the president stopped sending them to get wounded for no good reason, and it would be even better if the hundreds of billions of dollars we're wasting each year over there were putting people back to work in the U.S.
Here's one way to think about it: just one Hellfire missile fired in Afghanistan costs $58,000.00. That's enough money to provide unemployment insurance benefits for almost 4 people for a full year. For the full cost of the war for one week, about $2 billion, we could extend unemployment insurance for about 6.7 million people for a week. What are the 2 million people who are about to lose their unemployment insurance benefits supposed to think when they hear senators yelling about the cost of keeping them from going hungry, while at the same time those senators shove enough money to keep the benefits going into that money pit of a war?
Do we care more about dropping bombs than we do about putting Americans to work and keeping them from going hungry when they get laid off? Are those the kind of people we're paying to represent us in Washington, D.C.?
If so, we want our money back. And while you're at it, bring back the money being wasted on a war that's not making us safer. We'd like to use it to put people to work again.
If you're fed up with wasting money on war instead of putting people back to work, join Rethink Afghanistan on Facebook and Twitter.
Follow Robert Greenwald and Derrick Crowe on Twitter: www.twitter.com/AfghanistanDocu
We're # 1
in BLOWING $$$$$$$$$$$$$ Billions
for WARS and WMD
and ONLY 68 % of Americans said the cost of the Afghanistan War hurts!
Obviously the remaining 32 % are benefiting from Wars....These must the
EMPLOYED
in the American War Industries.
Those were the GOOD old days when on TV we heard repeatedly:
"It's the ECONOMY Stupid ! "
Where are the TV Personalities such as Glenn Beck (with 34% Followers??!! SHEEPS !!!???)
who should repeat 99 times a day the following:
"It's the WAR Stupid ! "
So if you could get the wars stopped, which is not likely, the Middle Class will still be squeezed out. The Corporatocracy has done pretty well on shutting out all but those who do it bidding. They spent too many years in South and Central America and they like that system real good. The only difference between Chenny and the typical Latin American Dictator was that he was of the Corporatocracy, not just a puppet. (like GWB was)
If you are going to fight them you have to understand them.
questioning if staying there is warranted. So I agree, use the money
at home. At least until the next war.
$2 billion a week for Afghanistan would be $133 a week for the 15 million unemployed. Give that $104 billion to the unemployed for the whole of 2011, the economy will soon be out of this depression.
I will never understand why people continue to vote for the bums who perpetuate these lies
Waging war is a grave and terrible but sometimes necessary choice, conduct to be resorted to as a matter of last resort.
The unnecessary waging of war is a crime against humanity, an obscenity and atrocity, inhumane and inhuman by definition.
The unnecessary dedication of precious resources coincidental to the unnecessary waging of war, especially in the face of such desperate human need at home and around the globe is further obscenity, atrocity and criminality, the combined acts constiting the worst of human conduct and the most egregious of governmental malfeasance.
The American government has committed and is still committing those very obscenities, atrocities and crimes in the name of the American people. This President, this Congress and we Americans are all complicit, right now, in these crimes against humanity. We must bring it to an end, now.
Some local economies are wholly dependent on these industries. People get up in the morning, kiss their wives/husbands/children/pets goodbye and go off to their good-paying job building things that kill people.
If the cost of a Hellfire missle could put bread in the mouth of 4, then not firing it takes the bread out of the mouth of 6, probably more.
We have poisoned our economy. we are all of us covered with blood, all of us entangled in the same machine.
It is patently false to suggest that human beings must, as a matter of choice and policy, kill one another to survive, that an economy can only be successful if it is largely dependent on the manufacture of weapons, that we must murder each other if we are to have jobs. The suggestion is an absurdity and an atrocity.
Yes, it IS a dangerous world out there, but we certainly can live, and better, I submit, with an economy in which the manufacture of weapons occupies a much smaller space on the pie chart.
You're right about the jobs but it IS possible to move a healthy portion of those jobs to other industries. We CAN have an economy in which the manufacture of weapons occupies a smaller piece of. It's only our corrupt government that stands in the way of just that.
problems", EVEN if they are wrong . Then we have pretty well lost the United States of Jefferson and Washington and now we are mearly their slaves because they call the shots. Not us.
God, it was a great country, too.
When I was a kid, we were send men to the moon. Now we can't get the LAST shuttle off the ground.
Nothing left but the legends.