(reposted from my blog http://www.americanpolitik.com which has additional links in the post)The Value of LifeI guess it came as no surprise to me this past week when I found out that not only was our government calculating the dollar amount each of our lives were worth but also that since Bush took office our lives lost nearly $1 million in said value.
After all I can’t think of very many Americans outside of well connected rich people (see: Oil company executives) and the Bushies themselves who haven’t felt that we just lost close to a decade of our lives (or set our children back 20-30 years in progress and debt).
What a wasted opportunity after all. We ended the year 2000 with a budget surplus, gas prices were still fairly low, we hadn’t started a war of choice with an enemy that had nothing to do with an attack on us and FEMA still existed as a way to help citizens rather than to murder them and steal their property.
Our environment wasn’t exactly on a full path to green energy but we might have President Gore there to make that a reality.
Instead we have had eight years of the biggest disaster ever to hit America. Sure, 9/11 was bad, Katrina was horrible but none of them top the totality of Dubya.
After all had he not been President there is certainly a case to be made that 9/11 might never have happened because we are fairly certain President Gore wouldn’t have ignored that August 6, 2001 PDB nor would he have told the agents that briefed him that they had “covered their ass” in attempts to shoo them away out of annoyance.
Katrina would have still happened. It was an act of nature after all. But President Gore was far more likely to approve the funding needed to repair those levies. And even if that had not happened he sure as hell wouldn’t have left them to die in the Superdome, cutting residents off from any form of escape and then after waiting days to do nothing offered short term trailers that poisoned the people that stayed in there. Not even to mention, his FEMA would not have allowed these trailers to be used since the agency knew they were poisoned.
Of course the woulda, coulda, shouldas count for nothing at this point.
However you have to wonder, since they’re putting a price tag on us, how much are Iraqi lives worth?
You could try to count the deaths (suppressed or uncounted by our Defense Department) and take our current spending on the war and divide it up but that brings up two issues.
1. Since the death count is going up daily and we aren’t given legitimate numbers how do we even know these numbers are legitimate? Oh yeah and we’re still not done throwing money at this war so those numbers will change too.
2. That money is going to Halliburton, GE, Blackwater, etc. Not to Iraqi people. We’re paying them regardless of whether or not they fulfill the contract. This money has no relation to the Iraqi citizens. In fact if it were not the Iraq War, Bush would most certainly find another way to launder this money to them. See the $2-3 trillion that is missing from the Pentagon. No accountability = theft of your tax dollars.
So when I try to put in context how much the Iraqi life is worth I think the foremost expert of life worth evaluation, Babs herself said it best.
''Why should we hear about body bags and deaths and how many, what day it's gonna happen?'' Mrs. Bush declared. ''It's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?''And why should she? Her beautiful mind sees the biggest fucking lemons you have ever seen and she makes lemonade with it!
When speaking about Hurricane refugees that were staying at the Astrodome in Houston she said:
''What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them."I know Barbara Bush doesn’t make policy but her equally uncaring son does. We now have proof that Bush was going into Iraq no matter what evidence steered them away from 9/11 wrongdoing.
Bush didn't care who died. He wanted his War glory and he wanted Saddam as his trophy. When you consider that and how those contracts would have been given to those companies, if not for Iraq then for something else, the answer is clear. Iraqi lives are worth zero (well at least according to our current Government). If they're not worth being counted correctly or worth protecting by not invading nor pulling out then Bush obviously sees these people as expendable.
And if Iraqi lives are worth zero while being set up as a corporate power grab for his buddies, Afghanistani people must be worth even less than that. Especially when you consider that we invaded there to capture Bin Laden and then let him go and just stopped caring or thinking about him at all. They died for nothing and weren’t even worth the corporate hullabaloo that Iraq was.
And hey you can make conflicting cases for the value of American lives either going up or down.
On one hand the value of the dollar is less thanks to Bush tanking our economy with deregulation of housing and energy markets so it’s only natural our lives would be worth less with that devaluation.
On the other there are more of us dead thanks to two wars, 9/11, countless disasters where the government didn’t care about acting and a completely broken health care system that only rewards drug and insurance companies. So by that theory there should be more American money to spread to fewer people right?
Oh wait, Bush has sold America to Chinese debt basically so there actually is less value to each of us… well at least in American Dollars.
The point of this that through the past eight years we have seen the value of human life actually be defined. Although it’s not in dollars as the EPA’s report says.
Human life is something you put a price tag on when you are evaluating whether or not to protect people through regulatory laws (aka how does protecting people hurt my rich corporate friends?)
And Human life is also a valuable political football… red meat to throw at the Christian Right when you play the abortion card. Of course nobody mentions that the GOP and Bush owned Congress for 6 years and they could have passed something to end Roe v. Wade or seriously restrict or possibly even end legalized abortion. They know better. They don’t really care about it until it’s campaign time when they can sucker you in with all of those extreme photos of “botched abortions” and all the dead fetuses (which again are incredibly dishonest since most abortions look nothing like this and occur well before the baby has developed into anything even close to that large).
Once these mothers to be give birth though, Republicans again don’t care about life. They cut programs like Food Stamps, Medical Assistance, Energy Assistance, WIC, AFDC, School Lunch Programs, public education funding, etc. They make it impossible to get help in raising the baby they insist you have.
The combination of that complete lack of caring about young children. Their usual eagerness to support torture and the death penalty. Their incredibly stupid plans for perpetual war. Their aggressive attempts to build more nukes to destroy the world. Their smash and grab style of theft to people who suffer through natural disasters as their Government leaves them to die. Their attempts to edit, censor and re-write EPA reports that prove that our planet is in peril thanks to our energy habits. Their lack of willingness to take care of 9/11 first responders or to veterans returning from these wars.
Forget that EPA report. You, just like the Iraqis are worth nothing. Zero. Zip. Nada.
It’s their world. Only the ultra rich are worth anything and they use lobbyists, their owned media outlets and basic propaganda to keep you blaming yourself.
It’s the stupid people who lived in New Orleans that didn’t leave that deserved to die. Not the Government who forced many to stay.
It’s the lazy people that don’t work that abuse welfare and steal your hard earned tax dollars but it’s not the corporations fault if they require billions more than social welfare could ever cost you in corporate welfare to make sure they make bigger profits and those CEOs can make $20-200 million.
It’s the idiots that didn’t understand home loans and took ones they couldn’t afford that made the housing market bust, not the mortgage lenders who purposely schemed to rip these people off with conveniently confusing loans that changed terms easily.
Blame the victim. And why not? They’re worthless anyway.
Rp
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