America tearing down the world economy

In 2006 U.S. President George W Bush approved a 700-mile border fence (one-third of the 2,100-mile or 3,360-kilometer U.S. border with Mexico), but missing from the legislation was a means to pay for it.

Earlier this year (in March) presenting a paper on the real cost of the war, which was a forerunner to their book on the same gist, Joseph Stiglitz, a Columbia University professor who won the Nobel prize for economics in 2001, and Linda Bilmes, a Harvard budget expert, said the Iraq war had cost the US economy $700 billion and the true final cost was estimated to top 3 trillion taxpayer dollars (if huge back-end costs like disability payments are factored in).

The Dow Jones fell 700 points yesterday – a day dubbed ‘The Real Black Monday’.

With America on the edge of the cliff – threatening to push every other economy to the edge – why is no one talking about the cost of the war?

The Bush administration estimated the total cost of the Iraq war at 50-70 billion taxpayer dollars.  They were wrong! So far its ten times over the upper estimate and counting. Are they wrong about the bailout package as well?

Prominent U.S. bloggers Tom Engelhardt and Chalmers Johnson point out on TomDispatch.com that the “money we've poured and are continuing to pour down the bottomless pit of Iraq, to the tune of $10 billion a month, could have bailed us out many times over.”

Ironically, President Bush’s military planners have managed to wheedle an extra year's time for the much demanded withdrawal of American combat troops from Iraq – extending the proposed date from 2010 to 2011 even though the cost of the war is now reaching the millions – this is the American logic, the American economic logic.

America is taking down every major economy with it, and the US Congress is passing every major “economic mistake” of the Bush administration.

Maybe those proponents of the Zimbabwe Democracy Recovery Act (Zidera) of 2001 will now start to feel how we have felt for the last 7 years and experience the popular revolt form the populace necessitated by global economic mismanagement and ill-advised foreign and domestic policy initiatives.

Those politicians in Africa and elsewhere in the developing and developed countries looking to the stewardship of Britain and the U.S. in delivering economic prosperity will have to start exploring the alternatives. The Washington Consensus is now in tatters!

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