Is the $700 Billion TARP bailout really a smokescreen for the cost of the war in Iraq/Afghanistan?

The numbers vary, but the cost of the wars in Iraq and/or Afghanistan seem to hover around $700 Billion spent at the time that Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke asked the U.S. Congress, in September 2008, for $700 Billion to be concealed and spent under the cover of darkness (TARP), no questions asked.

Cost of war to date
costofwar.com...

Paulson Asks For Rest Of $700 Billion TARP Funds
www.huffingtonpost.com...

A $700 billion expenditure on distressed mortgage-related assets would roughly be what the country has spent so far in direct costs on the Iraq war and more than the Pentagon’s total yearly budget appropriation.

www.nytimes.com...

By a nice coincidence, though, the U.S. financial rescue package of $700 billion duplicates a number that was also in the news last week - the Pentagon budget. In the fiscal year just beginning, the U.S. Defense Department will spend $607 billion on normal military costs, and an additional $100 billion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. (As of June 30, 2008, Congress had appropriated $859 billion for the wars; Congressional Budget Office projections assume further costs of $400 billion to $500 billion as the wars wind down). But for the coming year, $700 billion is the Pentagon's nice round number (this includes neither Homeland Security nor intelligence costs).

The $700 billion bailout aims to rescue the world's economy, but that, too, raises questions about the Pentagon's prior effect there. Because America has put military invention at the heart of its enterprise, the exporting of weapons to countries that do not need them and cannot afford them has become a main mode of America's being in the world.

$700 billion for rescue. $700 billion for war.

www.nytimes.com...

In fact, above and beyond the $800 billion-plus the Pentagon will have received by the end of 2008 for the wars, it has also received about $770 billion more than was planned for it in 2000.

www.afji.com...

U.S. military operations, including the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, have cost $904 billion since 2001.

A new study released by the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, or CSBA, said the Iraq conflict's $687 billion price tag alone now exceeds the cost of every past U.S. war except for World War II, when expenditures are adjusted for inflation.

www.reuters.com...

Do we really live under the control of a secret military oligarchy in America?



[edit on 14-6-2009 by In nothing we trust]