No Money For Our Schools or Pensions, but Literally Tons of Money Shipped to Iraq

[Nbadan]

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- It weighed 28 tons and took up as much room as 74 washing machines. It was $2.4 billion in $100 bills, and Baghdad needed it as soon as possible.

The initial request from U.S. officials in charge of Iraq required the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to decide whether it could open its vault on a Sunday.

Then, when the shipment date changed, officials had to scramble to line up U.S. Air Force C-130 cargo planes to hold the money. They did, and the $2,401,600,000 was safely delivered to Baghdad on June 22, 2004. It was the largest one-time cash transfer in the history of the New York Fed.

~snip~

Both Republicans and Democrats appeared taken aback by the sheer volume of cash sent to Iraq: nearly $12 billion over the course of the U.S. occupation from March 2003 until June 2004, according to a report by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who had reviewed e-mails and do ents subpoenaed from the bank.

Star Tribune

It’s a literal smourgesbourge of untraceable cash for military and civilian contractors in Iraq...

One single shipment amounted to $2.4 billion -- the largest movement of cash in the bank's history, said Waxman.

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Cash was loaded onto giant pallets for shipment by plane to Iraq, and paid out to contractors who carried it away in duffel bags

but not all the taxpayers money is going to rebuilding Iraq or protecting our troops from harm in Iraq...

...Here is a small sample of who has been getting "reparation" awards from Iraq: Halliburton ($18m), Bechtel ($7m), Mobil ($2.3m), S ($1.6m), Nestlé ($2.6m), Pepsi ($3.8m), Philip Morris ($1.3m), Sheraton ($11m), Kentucky Fried Chicken ($321,000) and Toys R Us ($189,449). In the vast majority of cases, these corporations did not claim that Saddam's forces damaged their property in Kuwait - only that they "lost profits" or, in the case of American Express, experienced a "decline in business" because of the invasion and occupation of Kuwait. One of the biggest winners has been Texaco, which was awarded $505m in 1999. According to a UNCC spokesperson, only 12% of that reparation award has been paid, which means hundreds of millions more will have to come out of the coffers of post-Saddam Iraq.

Guardian

[Clandestino]

do you honestly think they paid these companies in cash?