The Black Commentator - Radio BC: Transcontinental Theft: From Baghdad to New Orleans

The Bush regime claims it wants to get out of Iraq as soon as possible. But that's a lie. In fact, they get deeper and deeper into Iraq with every passing month – a fact that can be proven by the numbers. According to a report by the Congressional Research Service, the Bush gang will spend 44 percent more on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in the coming year, than they did last year: an astronomical 9.8 billion dollars per month. To understand what a bite that takes out of the federal government as a whole, the budget for the Department of Housing and Urban Development was just over $46 billion in 2004. The Bush men plan to spend that much money in only about five months in their wars. They are destroying the American social and physical infrastructure at breakneck speed, in pursuit of their geopolitical, pirate enterprise.

The war budget is far bigger than anything that was ever considered to repair the human and infrastructural damage to the Gulf states, from Hurricane Katrina. But these two multi-billion dollar budgets have something in common. Neither is designed to help the people of either the United States, Afghanistan, or Iraq. They are corporate and military industrial complex boondoggles – theft, on a massive scale. The people of Iraq are robbed of their national sovereignty; the people of New Orleans are robbed of the right to return and rebuild, while the corporate beneficiaries cash in unheard of piles of mega-bucks.

The Bush men have established a "pattern and practice" of criminality and theft that dwarfs every criminal gang that has ever existed on the planet.

he term, "The Big Lie" has been out there for a long time. But these guys lie all of the time, as a matter of policy, and with a sheer volume that boggles the mind. They claim to be working towards a withdrawal from Iraq, when the conditions are right. But you can be sure that a huge chunk of the almost $10 billion a month spent on the war is going to harden and make more permanent U.S. bases in that country. Guess who is the primary contractor in such enterprises: Halliburton, "shotgun" Dick Cheney's turf.

The corporate media pretend that these permanent bases do not exist. They are part of a conspiracy of silence. However, there are as many as 14 U.S. bases in Iraq that look very much like military bases in Georgia or Texas – that is, permanent. As David Swanson reports in the Downing Street Memo web site, the corporate media have ignored not only the existence of those bases on the ground in Iraq, but efforts on Capitol Hill to keep them from becoming permanent. Black San Francisco Congresswoman Barbara Lee introduced an amendment to the humongous spending measure, to bar permanent U.S. bases in Iraq. The Republicans cleverly allowed it to pass on a voice vote, so there would be no debate. But the bases keep going up, with their own shopping malls and bowling alleys. When there are liars and thieves at the top of the government and the media, real conspiracies come into being. That's not paranoia, that's a fact. For Radio BC, I'm Glen Ford.

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