Last month the Oakland Ca city council hosted a meeting entitled “What The War Costs Oakland”. Video of this eye opening video presentation is now posted on the official city website OaklandNet.

Amongst the details revealed are that the current expenditures in Iraq cost US taxpayers over $400 billion, about $100,000 per minute, and Oakland’s taxpayer share alone has gone well over $520 million, while wealthier San Francisco’s share is estimated at about $1.4 Billion.

These are truly mind boggling financial statistics, showing approx $14.2 billion bucks sucked out of the Bay Area as a region, while the US as a whole will have spent some $450+ billion by the end of this fiscal year, and what’s even more mind boggling is how little is being done to keep these dollars in check.

Congress has refused to allow the House to vote on Barbara Lee’s amendment for a fully funded, orderly withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of this year. Oakland’s Rep Barbara Lee, who as many know, was villified by the rightwing for refusing to support the war initially, has also linked the war in Iraq as a war on the poor here as well. Lee has noted that since President G.W Bush took office, the number of poor people in America has grown by double digit percentages, recent figures showing up to 56 percent faster in urban areas than the overall poverty population.

Ivan Eland, of the Oakland based think tank “The Independent Institute” recently editorialized last week in a Southern California newspaper

“The already massive U.S. defense budget has increased by 50 percent, and the budget of the recently created Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has doubled. The DHS budget request for fiscal year 2008 is $46.5 billion, much of which goes to fight terrorism. Spending all that money to combat a threat that is as rare as a catastrophic comet hitting the United States makes little sense.”

Is there a link?

For more details on your squandred tax dollars, what your reps in Congress and high profile ciizenary are doing about it, you can read on after the jump…

If you don’t care you may also return to your regularly scheduled distractions

California is a productive state that puts much into the federal government , in fact far more than it gets back in total federal dollars spent. Lee would like to see that change, as would members of Oakland’s city council who must beg for federal dollars, while unbridled no bid contracts are the norm these days in Iraq & DC.

Oakland council member Jean Quan sees money sent overseas to kill perceived enemies that might have better been spent in her district. She imagines 75,000 kids with health Insurance, or tens of thousands of students funded with scholarships, or perhaps money for 800 new cops on the city’s crime infested & blood soaked streets.

The current $26 Billion “surge” Bush has called for could’ve gone to other priorities like fully funding the recommendations of the 911 commision ( $10 billion), or paid health insurance for all the 9 million uninsured children in the U.S.

Rep. Barbara Lee, could not attend the March 19th Oakland “Cost of War” meeting due to her duties in Washington DC but intro’d the presentation via taped remarks. Being one of the few reps sans absenteeism problems, perhaps she was working on legislation such as Lee’s Bill H Res 23, that cuts right to the anti-war chase and disavows President Bush’s doctrine of preemption. Other legislation bills related to the war that she’s introduced includes HR 375, requesting the President and the Secretary of State to provide documents in their possession relating to communications with British officials before Congress granted the President authority go to wage war against Iraq. Lee is a member of the “Out of Iraq Caucus” that includes Democrats Lynn Woolsey of Petaluma and Maxine Waters of Los Angeles.

A few days after the “What The War Costs Oakland”, on March 24th Lee did make it to an event at Oakland’s historic restored Grand Lake Theater. At the town hall meeting called at the Grand Lake Theater, Lee was greeted by standing ovations, applause and chants from hundreds of “Barbara Lee told you so, Bush’s war has got to go !”

“We can’t afford to spend one more dime or lose one more American or Iraqi life on this illegal and unwinnable war,” Lee told the crowd.

Sean Penn’s appearance garnered the most media attention, being he’s already a much derided Hollywood “liberal elitist”, and a former husband to Madonna. Lee introduced the actor/activist and Marin county resident who like the congresswoman has been labeled a traitor for refusing to support the President’s invasion of Iraq. Penn presented his remarks as an open letter to President Bush, Dick Cheney and Condoleeza Rice.

Penn had gained additional notoreity for visiting Iraq and humanizing it’s denizens through dispatches printed in the SF Chronicle prior to Bush’s invasion in 2003. Penn followed up his visit in 2004, in an article that presciently discussed “U.S. policy” that ” is devoid of consideration of long-term goals, human nature and Arab culture and thus could ignite a powder keg.” He noted the US trained Iraqi Civil Defense Corps being deserted by the hundreds when they discovered the $60 a month salary wasn’t worth risking life, limb and family for.

While obviously no “foreign policy expert”, with a mere two days on the street’s of “liberated” Baghdad, Penn wrote,

Many Iraqis I speak to tell me there is no freedom in occupation, nor trust in unilateral intervention. People from all sides of the debate acknowledge that the insurgency movement builds every day in manpower and organizational strength. The insurgents are made up of Saddam loyalists, displaced Sunni elite, resentful victims of U.S. raids, the Fedayeen, foreign terrorist cells and of course many of Hussein’s soldiers, who, as participants in the Baathist regime, were sent home with their weapons and told, “You’ll never work in this town again.”

Amazingly with all the millions spent, green zone embedded experts employed, the Bush admin can’t seem to reach a similar assessment as Penn who’d painted his seemingly accurate post Saddam picture of Iraq within a whirlwind 72 or so hour jaunt…

In the Bay Area, Barbara Lee fits in, but her stands against US military activity in the post 9/11 Congress, were initially unpopular and her name was widely derided by the corporate media’s pedantic punditry. These days obviously more & more national politicians have come to similar position’s as Lee, yet do not face the dangers & derision she did. Lee was among the 1st to introduce legislation calling for the US military to withdraw from Iraq and her views seem strongly aligned with her East Bay constituents. Her basic bravery, in standing up & voting against giving the Bush admin a free pass to attack whomever they deemed fit got her called a traitor by some. But she has carried herself with dignity, and tried not to stoop as low as her detractors so easily have.

The Washington Post quoted Lee in February in an article about the not so sweet vindication that Lee and other’s like her have seen, as the public’s appettite for blood has waned and the war has increasingly been acknowledged as a policy mistake by reps now on both sides of the aisle.

She voted against that resolution — the only member of Congress to do so — and then took the barbs.

“It was a very tough period,” she says. “To call me unpatriotic was the lowest of the low,” especially considering that her father, an Army lieutenant colonel, served for 25 years and saw duty in World War II and Korea.

Now, she says, people are eager to tell her she was right. But “it’s not about feeling vindicated,” she says.

“I want people to understand that this is a very dangerous foreign policy, the administration’s foreign and military policy is very dangerous, that the notion of preemptive war is very dangerous and that we need to support more rational approaches to our foreign and military policy.”

To contact Congress in Washington and let them know how you’d like to see all this money spent, get in touch with ‘em.

Note: This is an external link.

When you call, ask to speak with the congressperson’s aide who handles the issue about which you wish to comment.

Simply state your reasons for your support or opposition to an issue. Your voice can affect change.

To see how the war budget numbers quoted above are calculated, click here embed a war cost calculator on your web page click here