OMNI $COSTS$ OF WARS
NEWSLETTER #5, December 31, 2012, Compiled by
Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace.
(Newsletter #1 January 14, 2011; #2 April 5, 2011; #3 June 30, 2011; #4
Dec. 6, 2011).
See on human costs of
wars: Consequences of Wars
My blog: War
Department/Peace Department
My Newsletters:
Index:
Visit OMNI’s Library.
Contents #5
Pentagon Budget
Greenwald: Costs of
War Project
Bilmes and Bacevich, Costs of War
Willson, All War Local
New Vets Seek Disability
Development Network
Martin, Peace Action, Move the Money
Here is the link to all OMNI
newsletters: http://www.omnicenter.org/newsletter-archive/ See Newsletters on Consequences of US Wars,
Pentagon
Occu'pie' the Military Budget! Flyers for Tax Day”
War Resisters League
wrl@warresisters.org via uark.edu
to jbennet April 6,
2012
Still Time to Order for Tax Day!
Where Your Income Tax Money
Really Goes
Our 'Pie Chart' flyer for
fiscal year 2013, 'Wall St=War St.
Hand out the 'Pie Chart' at your local Occupy, vigils and
events before and on Tax Day. It's a great conversation starter. Most people in the US
The 99% needs our tax money to work for us, not to enrich
the war profiteers!
COSTS OF WAR CAMPAIGN
Brave New Foundation: Job Announcement: War Costs
Campaign Director [Los Angeles
From JustForeignPolicy May 14, 2012.
How will this spending help secure the Nation?
Dick,
Over the past three years you helped us create and
distribute the Rethink Afghanistan series.
The success of this project is outlined here: Rethink Afghanistan: Study
of Effectiveness and Messaging Success. http://rethinkafghanistan.com/then-and-now.php
We need your support now for a new project to fight the
pervasive, corroding effects of ongoing militarism and endless warfare. Our new
campaign is called War Costs. We will highlight the
Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex that wastes your tax dollars,
encourages more violence and lines the pockets of a defense industry that has
shamelessly profited from a decade of war all while asking for more money.
Please consider donating $25 to help us fight the profiteers
and warmongers. https://warcosts-bravenew.nationbuilder.com/donation25
Your support will allow War Costs to mount a day-in-day-out
assault on a Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex that insists we maintain
5,000 nuclear weapons that cost $54 billion a year total. http://www.ploughshares.org/sites/default/files/resources/What%20We%20Spend%20on%20Nuclear%20Weapons%20092811.pdf Our investigative films are currently in
production. We plan to release the first of these in early next year; that film
will examine how the government’s war on transparency and the whistleblowers
that reveal waste and abuse in the system leads to a curbing of free press and
First Amendment rights.
Donate $25 to help us produce more videos and push this
content to the mainstream media. Your donations will also allow us to continue
our investigations and to create more content holding the Pentagon accountable.
With your help and support, let’s show the profiteers and
warmongers we have the power. As always, we cannot win this fight without you!
Thank you,
Robert Greenwald
“The Costs of War
Project: Linda Bilmes and Andrew
Bacevich,”
Veterans for Peace (Winter 2012).
The
following reports are transcriptions
of
video talks by Professor Linda Bilmes
and
Professor Andrew Bacevich as part of
the
Eisenhower Research Group’s Costs of
War
Project based at Brown
University
Watson
Institute for International Studies
(www.costsofwar.org).
The videos are available
at
http://vimeo.com/27254292 (Professor
Bilmes)
and http://vimeo.com/27457922
(Professor
Bacevich; the transcriptions
are
reproduced here with the permission of
Professor
Bilmes and Professor Bacevich.
Professor
Bilmes’s full research paper is
available
at www.costsofwar.org/article/
caring-us-veterans
The Editor.
When
you look at the costs of the Iraq
and Afghanistan
published
by the government are about
$1.3
trillion, but this is just the tip of the
iceberg
because this is just money that has
already
been spent. There are other costs
yet to come, one of the most significant of
which
is for providing medical care for the
young
Americans who have been deployed
to
Iraq and Afghanistan
2.2
million Americans who have fought in
these
wars, 1.2 million have come home
and
are now veterans. Of these returned
veterans more than 600,000 have been
treated
in veteran hospitals and facilities for
a
wide variety of ailments, ranging from
mental
health disorders, musculoskeletal
disorders,
skin disorders, hearing loss, and
other
injuries that were either sustained or
exacerbated
during their service. These are
costs
that we are just beginning to pay right
now,
but they are costs that will be growing
over
the next 20, 30, 40 years, and they
will add another $600 billion to $1 trillion
in
cost just for caring for our veterans over
and
above what we’ve already spent.
It
is important to look at the full cost of
war
because if you use poor accounting,
which
is what the government uses, you
don’t
get a real sense of what things cost.
For
example, if I sell you a car for $20,000
and when you look at the fine print it costs
$40,000,
you might have second thoughts
about
buying that car. That’s essentially
what
we’ve done with the Iraq and
Afghanistan
conflicts. Congress has voted on
one
quotation of how much it would cost,
but
the real cost is much larger. Particularly
in
the case of the care for our veterans we
haven’t
set aside money to care for them so
we
have incurred a long-term obligation to
provide medical care and disability benefits
for
our wounded veterans without setting
any
provision for how we’re going to
pay
for it. What we need is an accounting
system
that is based on accrual accounting
that
makes transparent the true costs of war.
It’s
only with a fully transparent accounting
system
and budgetary systems that those in
power
can really make decisions because as
of
now they don’t actually have the data to
understand
how much we’re actually paying
on
any military activity. There are two
decisions
that have to be made in regard
to every conflict: one is whether to get involved
in
it; the second is how to pay for it
if
you do. In the case of Iraq
and Afghanistan
we have for the first time in United
States
history since the revolutionary war
borrowed
virtually all of the money that
had been used to pay for these conflicts.
This
has added at least $1.5 trillion to our
national
debt.
At
this point, I think the questions that
we
should be asking are whether if not for
the
decision to invade Iraq
be
mired in Afghanistan
be
what they are?, would the national debt
be as high as it is?, and would the financial
crisis
be as severe as it was? I think arguably
the
answers to all four of these questions
is
no. The Iraq
many
respects but from a purely economic
sense
it has been tragic in that we have
spent
money that we could have invested
in
education, in our infrastructure, paying
off
our debt, and other activities rather than
on activities that have very low benefit economically
speaking
and which have added
a
great deal to our national debt.
Linda
J. Bilmes is the Daniel Patrick
Moynihan
Senior Lecturer in Public Policy
at
Harvard University ’s
Kennedy School
She
is the author with Professor Joseph Stiglitz
of
the book The Three Trillion Dollar
War:
The True Cost of the Iraq
There
is an immense and urgent requirement
to
learn from the experience of the
past
decade, to learn why the global war on
terror
has been such a costly disappointment,
to
learn why the Iraq
results
so radically different from what was
expected,
to learn why the Afghanistan
is
now the longest war in our history. It
is
crucially important to tally up the costs
of
war to properly assess the wisdom or
unwisdom
of the policies that landed us in
war in the first place. At a bare minimum
we’ve
already spent $1 trillion, and there
are
reasonable projections that we will end
up
spending $2 trillion, $3 trillion, perhaps
as much as $6 trillion. This at a time when
the
American economy is not performing
well
and when the debt is going through the
roof.
Not
to be lost of course is the question
of
the human costs paid by non-Americans,
not
simply by our allies but the people of
people
of Pakistan , of Yemen
other
places across the Islamic world. We
know
that there have been something on
the
order of two to two-and-a-half million
Iraqis
who are living in exile; a large
number
of other Iraqis who have been displaced
from
their homes. Were something
like
this to happen in the United
States
would
view it as an catastrophe of historic
magnitude.
The population displaced by
the
global war on terror is, for example,
far
larger than the population displaced by
Hurricane
Katrina.
Wars
create distortions, in our politics,
in
our economy. War concentrates power;
war delivers profit to certain people and
imposes sacrifices on others. I think those
distortions
have happened in the global
war
on terror launched after 9/11. To some
degree,
they have been hidden or concealed;
they’ve
been hidden in part by our
unwillingness
to actually pay for many of
the
costs, at least the economic costs of
the
war. The willingness to simply go ever
deeper
in debt, to shove off the economic
costs
onto future generations, that’s one
of
the things that actually blind us to the
actual
impact of the wars we’ve been conducting.
I would like to see the equivalent of
the
9/11 Commission be undertaken and focus
on what we might call the long war: The
Commission to Study the Long War.
Public
hearings; testimony by officials, participants
both
soldiers and civilians, by people
who
lost loved ones on 9/11, by historians
and
journalists. There should be a comprehensive
effort
to understand what’s
happened since the United States
war against so-called terrorism.
I think
The
Costs of War Project could make an
important
contribution to the larger effort to
divine
the truth.
Andrew
Bacevich is a graduate of West
Point,
a retired US Army Colonel, a Professor
of
History and International Relations
at
Boston University
recently of Washington Rules: America’s Path
to Permanent War.
All War IS Local By S. Brian Willson
September 12, 2012 [Dick:
I read this in VFP, The War Crimes
Times (Winter 2013)].
“A nation that continues year
after year to spend more money on military defense [sic] than on programs of
social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
– Martin Luther King, Jr., “A Time To Break Silence,” April 4,
1967, Riverside Church , New York
Introduction
On a recent visit to my neighborhood library
in SE Portland , Oregon
DIRECT costs are FELT only by a small percentage of the public
The US
wars in Iraq , Afghanistan , Pakistan ,
Yemen , Somalia
A de facto economic draft exists whereby those
unable to find adequate employment in our economically depressed society are
offered a subsidized job track in the military, and trained as combatants or
placed in any number of supportive roles in imperial adventures around the
globe.
But most members of US
INDIRECT costs severely affect the 99 percent
However, even though the direct,
experiential costs of US wars have been largely absent in popular discussion
and politically unaccounted for, the resulting residual costs are enormous. The
national resource base has been so severely drained by war costs that we are in
domestic “austerity” budgeting. An audit of the Federal Reserve has revealed
$16 trillion in secret loans to bail out US American and foreign banks and
businesses during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. That is
equivalent to our National Debt. That amounts to more than $50,000 for every
man, woman and child, enough to revive a healthy main street. Meanwhile four
million homeowners lost their homes to foreclosures due to massive collusion
between Wall Street and banks in granting fraudulent mortgages. Every
foreclosed homeowner could have been publicly refinanced instead.
As of September 11, 2012, the National
Priorities Project (NPP)
estimates the actual cost of US wars since September 2001 in Iraq and
Afghanistan at nearly $1,372 Trillion dollars [also see: Cost of
War.com].
Other studies estimate total war costs will
reach $4.4 Trillion ["Cost
of war at least $3.7 trillion and counting," by Daniel Trotta, Reuters, Jun 29, 2012] or even $6
Trillion ["American Freefall" by Paul Craig Roberts, CounterPunch, July 09,
2012].
These are non-human costs. The human costs in Iraq
and Afghanistan lives, not
to mention public and private military forces and mercenaries from the US Afghanistan Iraq Afghanistan
In the last ten years nearly 2.5 million US soldiers have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan USA Afghanistan
and Iraq
Suicide among soldiers and veterans is
staggering. In 2012 alone, as of early June, 154 active duty soldiers committed
suicide, more than were killed in combat during that same period. [“Suicides
Outpacing War Deaths for Troops,”NYT, June 8, 2012].
The suicide rate is 38 per 100,000 Iraq
and Afghanistan
War IS a local issue
War drains domestic financial and mental
capacity to address critical needs for health care, education, social security,
etc., in every community. The outrageous
amount of money being siphoned into the military industrial complex, with wars
feeding obscene profits to its architects, seriously threatens assurance of
resources for a healthy society. US
Despite the lack of national discourse on
military spending, war is always on our minds. It is promoted in holiday
festivities such as Memorial Day, Armistice Day (now called Veteran’s Day),
Independence Day and Patriots Day. There are fund drives for soldiers,
homecomings, recruitment ads, military band concerts, war video games in every
town and city, army-sponsored race cars, war movies and television shows, and
war toys. Numerous colleges and universities receive millions in funding from
the Department of War (euphemistically called “Defense”) for academic research.
And money for the military and wars totally
dominates the entire national budget which in turn deleteriously impacts every
political jurisdiction and local economy in the country. Ironically, our
extravagant military budget is rarely questioned but cuts for domestic programs
are constantly discussed.
The argument that military spending creates
jobs is a red herring. A report conducted by the Political Economy Research
Institute reveals that every billion dollars of government spending on the
military creates 12,000 jobs. But a choice to create tax cuts for the poor
would stimulate personal consumption and create 15,000 jobs. The same billion
dollars would create 18,000 jobs in assuring health care, 25,000 jobs in
education, 27,700 in mass transit.
In effect, grotesque war spending means less
money for:
1. elementary &
secondary education;
2. grants in aid to
states and localities;
3. home energy
assistance for low Income households;
4. HIV/AIDS;
5. community block
grants;
6. special education and
assistance for the disadvantaged;
7. school improvement;
8. loss of funds for
vocational and adult education;
9. supplemental
nutrition WIC program;
10. children and family
Services;
11. Head Start;
12. rental assistance
vouchers;
13. children served by
childcare assistance;
14. etc.
The National
Priorities Project estimates
of actual cost of recent US
For Portland ,
Oregon Portland Portland Portland
Fifty million US Americans now live in
poverty with one on every seven requiring food stamps to survive each month.
Over 125,000 of Portlanders, or over 20% of the city’s population, are on food
stamps. Over 15,000 people in Portland
The National Debt now stands at nearly $16
Trillion, or $50,000 for every man, woman and child. Each of us is in perpetual
debt.
And the disparity between Haves and
Have-Nots is felt globally as Occupy has protested austerity measures being
felt by much of the world. A study by the Green Party of England discloses that
the same global capitalist economic policies that are polluting the planet
while depleting its finite resources, have allowed a mere 400 billionaires to
acquire assets equal to the combined wealth of 45% of the world’s population.
Immoral and illegal wars created by a corrupt political economy
In addition to direct and indirect costs,
these US-led wars are illegal on their face. They make a mockery of our moral
and legal authority as a nation, and reveal that in fact we are a nation of
(lawless) men, not of law. Over 2,670,000 human beings have been killed or
maimed as the consequences of these recent criminal wars in violation of
international law, staining further our national character.
The illegality and immorality of these wars,
conducted with no accountability or plausible justification, breed a corruption
at the top political levels of society that permeates into every aspect of
society. Our corrupt economic institutions are profiting obscenely from
policies of mass murder.
No war was declared as required by the US
Constitution. The United Nations (UN) Charter to which the US United States , and therefore the US
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2004
publicly declared that the US
invasion of Iraq
In fact they are Nuremberg-type crimes,
meaning they are the worst of the worst in terms of national and political
criminality.
I know a bit about this criminal pattern. In
1969 I was commander of a US Air Force combat security unit in Viet Nam US Southeast Asia peasants.
Additionally, torture and inhumane
treatments have been well documented in US-run prisons in Iraq (Abu Ghraib), Afghanistan
(Bagram) and Guantanamo (located in Cuba
The seven leaked confidential British
Downing Street Memos, dated from March to July 2002, disclose a US Iraq
complicity with international terrorism…There is no credible evidence to link Iraq Iraq Downing
Street Reader: A cheat sheet on the memos behind the scandal,” The Rolling Stone Blog, June 22, 2005].
The US
The citizens of the US
The dramatically increasing disparity between the Haves and the
Have Nots in the US
1. The disparity between
the Haves and Have-Nots, though historically high in the US with 1% owning
40-50% of the wealth, has once again become dramatic trending toward
neofeudalism [G. William
Domhoff, “Wealth, Income, and Power,” Who Rules America (accessed August 4, 2012)].
2. Four hundred US Americans now have more wealth than 155
million U.S.
3. A mere six of the
Walmart heirs themselves have wealth equal to that of the entire bottom 30%. [Joseph Stiglitz, “The 1 Percent's Problem,” Vanity
Fair, May 31, 2012:
“Why won’t America’s 1 percent—such as the six Walmart heirs, whose wealth
equals that of the entire bottom 30 percent—be a bit more . . . selfish?”
Adapted from The Price of Inequality,by Joseph
Stiglitz, to be published in June by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. (U.S.
4. The top 20% control
85% of the wealth. [G. William
Domhoff, “Wealth, Income, and Power,” Who Rules America (accessed August 4, 2012)].
5. The top 10% possess
fully half of all income earned in the US
6. Most astonishing, the
top .1% (one-tenth of 1%, or 310,000 persons), have more combined pre-tax
income than the poorest 120 million people. [G. William
Domhoff, “Wealth, Income, and Power,” Who Rules America (accessed August 4, 2012)].
The impact of inequality on individuals and
society is well established. Social epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson concludes
that, “the quality of social relations in societies is related to the scale of
income inequality –how big the gap is between rich and poor. More unequal
societies tend to have higher rates of violent crime and homicide, and that
people living in them feel more hostility, are less likely to be involved in
community life, and are much less likely to trust each other; in short they
have lower levels of social capital… Inequality is deeply corrosive…Greater
inequality is perhaps the most significant obstacle to the development of an
environmentally sustainable level of economic activity.” [Richard Wilkinson (a
social epidemiologist), The Impact of Inequality, The New
Press, 2005, pp. 24-30].
The Nation is Now Paying the Price; Localities Need to Become
Part of Anti-War Movement
The US Portland US
This is why every political leader, and all citizens in
every jurisdiction – towns, cities, counties and states, and every functional
entity within cities, counties and states such as schools and libraries, need
to become ardent and loud opponents of the national war and military policy
that is enriching the military industrial complex at everyone’s expense. Local
communities desperately seek new funds through bond issues and new taxes as
programs are being cut. The local people are being asked to pay for the war
boondoggles of the rich – private profit, public decay.
Unless everyone gets behind a national
popular movement to end the wars, and to severely restrict the Pentagon budget,
we as a nation will simply keep eroding into what we call a “Third World”
country where a very tiny minoritycontrol the lives of the vast majority. A
neofeudalism, if you will. Fewer and fewer local residents will be able to
afford increased property taxes imposed by bond issues or other local tax
increases to keep local jurisdictions afloat as the war economy sucks the
nation dry.
War is a local issue! If and when people
understand this we the people possess a political opportunity to reclaim our
people’s republic. Short of that, we collapse while on our knees with hardly a
whisper.
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2 Comments
1. 
Bea
Bea
Posted September 15, 2012 at 5:32 am Permalink
Thank you for this
excellent article.
I think it is very
relevant to share this link here:
2. John Keister
John Keister
Posted November 4, 2012 at 7:26 am Permalink
This is one of the
most impressive reads I have ever come across; your knowledge and understanding
of the facts is exceeded only by your courage.I am a christian lay minister and
who also knows the complicit role that religion has played in the problem and
continues to do so. The next step has to be for men and women like yourself to
form the intentional communities made up of people who know the truth and are
of the same mind. That call is the only thing I’ve found missing on this site.
Please let me know if I have missed it; because I would love to participate.
The dollar cost of war is going up.
AP IMPACT: Almost half of new vets seek disability - Yahoo! News
http://news.yahoo.com/ap-impact-almost-half-vets-seek-disability-160656481.html
“Economic Consequences of War
on the US Economy” by Institute for Economics & Peace Feb. 22, 2012 http://www.internationalpeaceandconflict.org/profiles/blog/show?id=780588%3ABlogPost%3A704937&xgs=1&xg_source=msg_share_post
About Peace and Collaborative Development Network
A professional networking site for individuals &
organizations worldwide involved in development, conflict resolution and
related fields.
A fight we can't afford to
lose
Kevin Martin, Peace
Action 12-20-11 to jbennet
peaceact@mail.democracyinaction.org
Dear James,
First, let me thank you for your actions and financial
support over the past year. With your help, the peace movement succeeded at
last in bringing our troops home from Iraq ,
and opposition to the terrible war in Afghanistan is growing stronger.
And, with your support, Peace Action launched Move the Money, our campaign to
build common cause with labor and other economic justice groups to reorder
federal spending priorities, putting our tax dollars to work for jobs, not war.
Together, we’ve made sure our demands to end runaway
military spending can no longer be brushed aside by Tea Party compliant Hawks
simply uttering the words ‘threat to national security.” While not nearly sufficient, Congress did cut
military spending this year. We must now set our sights on making even more
substantial progress in the year ahead.
I hope you will join me in achieving our goals for 2012 with
a year end gift to Peace Action or a tax-deductible gift to Peace Action
Education Fund.
The government we elect next November will likely set the
economic and political agenda for decades to come. Make no mistake, sooner or later they will
make a decision on how to deal with the economy. Will they decide to end the war in
Afghanistan, cut runaway military spending, and make sure the super-rich pay
their fair share, or will they cut Social Security and Medicare and balance the
budget on the backs of working people?
The gridlock and inaction will not last forever.
Our opponents are relentless and well funded. They’ve been
trying for decades to unravel the social safety net and roll back the
regulations that protect the air we breathe, the water we drink and the food we
eat. This challenge, as daunting as it
is, must be met with sufficient grassroots pressure to defeat this agenda and
put our country on a path to a peaceful and just future.
Peace Action’s
campaign to Move the Money will frame our issues on our terms, ensuring our
elected representatives and candidates for office focus on the human and economic costs of the war and the
waste, fraud and abuse in the Pentagon budget. Our Peace Voter activists are already at work
in key states like New Hampshire and North Carolina ,
bird-dogging candidates and posing challenging questions about the corrupting
influence of organized money in politics, an endless war and the $662 billion
Pentagon budget Congress just approved.
This is a fight we cannot afford to lose.
You can support Peace Action’s work for SANE economic
policies using our secure online giving portal.
Thank you again for your attention and work on these
important issues and for your kind consideration of this request.
Humbly for Peace,
Kevin Martin
Executive Director
Peace Action
END COSTS OF WARS NEWSLETTER #5
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