On Tuesday, October 18, 2005 4:41 PM [PDT], Carrol Cox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Leigh Meyers wrote: >> >> Adbusters ran a piece of graffitti as image a while back, it said: >> >> "I'd rather our boys die in the desert than I should turn down my >> thermostat & drive less." >> >> Cold(sic) but true underpinnings of the average American's >> subconscious thought process in regard to energy issues. > > Sheer buffoonery. If and when we stop the killing and dying in Iraq it > will be through activity including millions, probably 10s of millions > of > those who are not willing to turn their thermostat down. The attitude > expressed in that graffitti was the essence of bourgeois evil: > splitting > the world up into isolated individuals and charging them all in their > isolation to act with Kantian purity of motive. > > Carrol That's what's happening... Isolated individuals, as in fleeing a hurricane by going a mllion different ways in a million different SUVs... Just one example. We're already there. That graffitti is a slap in the face, and is intended to be, as in "WAKE UP!". BTW, what's inherently wrong with bufoonery? Even IF this IS that. Is it ok if it doesn't make anyone we know uncomfortable? This little bit of buffoonery that follows won't matter if that's the case. After all, WE have running water. So did Bagdhad's residents before we showed up and that is, in my estimation, the "...essence of bourgeois evil", not writing slogans offensive to some. To quote C. Wright Mills: "Class consciousness is not equally characteristic of all levels of American society: it is most apparent in the upper class." --The Power Elite. Contributors: C. Wright Mills - author. Publisher: Oxford University Press. Place of Publication: Oxford. Publication Year: 2000. Page Number: 30. In other words, you, Carrol, care about "the essence of bourgeois evil", being a slap in the face to some social group or another, and the graffitti artist could give a flying.... >From the article that follows: "Some projects - including those to provide clean water for Iraqis - have been cancelled as a result." As long as I don't have to drive less or turn down my thermostat... Courtesy of San Jose Mercury-News http://www.mercurynews.com Tue, Oct. 18, 2005 Billions of dollars short, U.S. must scale back Iraq reconstruction BY SETH BORENSTEIN Knight Ridder Newspapers http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/politics/12935546.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp WASHINGTON - The Bush administration cannot fulfill all its grand promises to rebuild Iraq because soaring security costs, mismanagement and poor planning have cost billons of dollars, federal auditors said Tuesday. Some projects - including those to provide clean water for Iraqis - have been cancelled as a result. In one case, security costs for a U.S. Agency for International Development program on economic reform increased from $894,000 to $37 million, an auditor told Congress. And hundreds of millions of dollars is being diverted to pay for training for Iraqis and for the maintenance of new facilities - expenses overlooked in the initial U.S. planning for the reconstruction, auditors said. Add to that the rising prices for materials, cost overruns and delays, and there's far less money to rebuild Iraq as the Bush administration envisioned, said Stuart Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction. He called the shortfall "the reconstruction gap." "Though the causes may be numerous and valid, the existence of the gap simply means that the completion of the U.S.-funded portion of Iraq's reconstruction will leave many planned projects on the drawing board," Bowen told the House Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations. Bowen said he'd know how big the reconstruction gap is in two weeks. A 2003 World Bank estimate said it would cost $56 billion to rebuild Iraq's aging and war-damaged infrastructure while the U.S. government committed to spend $29 billion, Bowen said. But he added that the estimate didn't take into account rising security costs or "losses from mismanagement, corruption and general inefficiency." The Bush administration expected Iraqi oil revenues to help foot the bill. Instead, Iraq is spending $300 million a month to import refined gasoline because it doesn't have enough refineries, Bowen said. One potential pot of money - the $30 billion United Nations Iraqi oil-for-food program - is about $8 billion short because of thievery and poor recordkeeping, he said. Fixing Iraq's oil infrastructure will cost $30 billion more than originally thought, said Joseph Christoff, the director of international affairs for the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress. Security costs continue to be a major problem. In July 2005, 34 percent of reconstruction spending went to pay for security, up from 23 percent a year earlier, Christoff said. Two power generation programs - worth about $15 million - were cut, and sewer repairs in central Iraq were stopped for four months because of security cost overruns, according to the GAO. The U.S. government has scaled back spending to provide clean water from $4 billion to $1.2 billion, Bowen said. Three of the four major clean-water projects were cancelled. The Bush administration also didn't plan or budget money for maintenance or for training Iraqis on the new high-tech equipment the United States bought, Bowen and Christoff said. In June, more than a quarter of the large new sanitation projects - worth $52 million - weren't working because of a lack of training and maintenance, Christoff said. More than $350 million has been diverted from reconstruction to maintenance, and that's merely a start, Bowen said. "What we hand over has to endure for democracy to endure," Bowen said. In a related development, congressmen from both parties blasted the Department of Defense's acting inspector general, Thomas Gimble, because his agency quietly pulled all its auditors and criminal investigators out of Iraq a year ago, a fact Knight Ridder reported on Monday. Subcommittee Chairman Christopher Shays, R-Conn., called it "a bad decision." "You're not fulfilling your responsibilities," Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, told Gimble. "You're not doing what you're supposed to be doing in protecting the troops. You're not doing what you ought to do to protect U.S. taxpayers." Gimble said much of the work is done in Washington and by other agencies, including Bowen's office and the GAO. Rep. Charlie Dent, R-Pa., said that when he visited Iraq, he found too many auditors, saying "there seems to be inspectors general just about everywhere." He said there was one auditor for every 1.5 contracting official. Bowen said the actual ratio was 16 to 1, with 44 auditors and 715 contracting officials. Dent, he said, was repeating "a myth surfaced by the companies that would rather not have oversight." #33# Leigh
