Frankly, I find it impossible to get my mind around numbers like “72.4 billion.” My brain sort of freezes up, and I think most of us find $3/gal, and a $55 bill at the gas pump easier to grasp than numbers like $72,400,000,000.

I mean.. how long is the beach that contains 72,400,000,000 grains of sand? How many galaxies of stars? My mind needs some sort of ‘visualization aid’ and I’m really groping here to find an analogy.

Your post also helps explain how contracts for ‘defense contractors’ can hide $21,000,000 in “transportation and limo services” (to ferry congressmen to hookers at the Watergate). I guess “little” contracts like $21 billion just make much of a blip on the Congressional radar.

I divided your figure of $72,400,000,000 by that single $21,000,000 contract. Looks like that would underwrite another 3,447 more $21m contracts. Whores galore!

The mind boggles.

This makes contributing to Mr Greenwald’s film project look like one heckuva deal. Let’s hope he can put a very human face on this mess and make these numbers comprehensible.

J.P. Morgan padded his fortune early on by selling defective rifles to the Union Army (a court later absolved him and ordered the government to pay him damages, which may be the first documented instance of the government rewarding a defense contractor for fraud and non-performance).

Despite the laudatory comments about the Truman commission, there were ongoing disagreements about what constituted war profiteering, and the formulae by which the tax on it was supposed to be determined were always in flux to accommodate exceptions to the rules.

It was horribly complicated, but it did serve to put contractors on notice that the government auditors were watching–and that’s clearly not the case today. (Bunnatine Greenhouse’s situation being more or less typical, I would say–one crosses Big Time at one’s peril–it’s crony capitalism at its finest.)

When the Bushies are finally gone from government, the first order of business ought to be the undoing of the legislation and the morass of Executive Orders that created the situation, and the second should be investigations and charges against the contractors engaging in this wholesale theft, because, in this war, that’s what has been happening.

The conclusion I came to a long time ago is that Iraq has become the gift that keeps on giving, to those with the inside track on contracts. War has become just another jobs program, and with spending on the war being done on an “emergency” basis, it’s an off-the-books item that is skewing our economic picture; it’s draining money out of the government and straight into the private sector, and is not being reinvested in areas that are drowning in red ink. If government were being reduced, this might have a positive economic effect, but under this administration, government is booming. It’s having to cut from areas that provide services to the most needy segment of our society, while corporate CEOs and stockholders reap record profits. At what point does our economy become so intrinsically tied to war that to become a nation of peace also means suffering through a recession, or even a depression?

As long as war remains a profit center, there is less of an incentive to avoid it. It was one thing to go the no-bid route when it was thought that Iraq would be a short engagement, but as we settle into Year Four, this needs to change.

Yet another reason to work like dogs to unseat as many Republicans as possible, and to reamin steadfast in building a case for impeachment.