Headlines : Iraq

Playing Politics With Iraqi Oil Money

Summary:

There really isn’t any other way to put it, Carl Levin has some balls:

“The Iraqi government now has tens of billions of dollars at its disposal to fund large-scale reconstruction projects. It is inexcusable for US taxpayers to continue to foot the bill for projects the Iraqis are fully capable of funding themselves.”

Apparently Levin and company fail to realize that although American tax payers are funding the “reconstruction”, they are paying American war profiteers outrageous prices to do it. Ultimately the billions already spent on reconstruction served to redistribute massive amounts of money from the American tax payer to the beneficiaries of the military industrial complex. Levin really missed the point. The Iraqi people did not ask for the destruction of their entire country’s infrastructure, nor did they ask U.S. corporations to fix the mess. This problem belongs to America.

[Posted By deaner]

By Matt Renner
Republished from TruthOut

Carl Levin and company crack down on Iraqi cheapness

Washington, DC – Republicans and Democrats have been in an uproar over a new report that examines the amount of money the government of Iraq has been taking in and where they have been spending it. However, according to a leading Iraq economy scholar, the report is being misinterpreted and the political fall-out could be extremely harmful.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) report (.pdf), released on Tuesday, shows that the government of Iraq has spent less money than the United States in reconstructing vital infrastructure despite a growing surplus in Iraq’s treasury. Focusing on raw dollar figures, the report estimates that the government of Iraq has spent $3.9 billion since 2005 on security, oil, water and electricity projects.

Because of high oil prices, the government has been taking in more money than it’s spending, accumulating billions of dollars during this same time period. Currently Iraq’s budget surplus is estimated at $29 billion, with a possible surplus of an additional $50 billion in 2008.

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Posted by deaner
Will Dean lives a quiet secluded life out in the country. He enjoys the company of assault rifles and does not plan on going to the camps without a fight. He is an unapologetic atheist with a good sense of spirituality and has been faulted for romanticizing...