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As we all know, poverty is an everyday way of life for many of us. Losing your job or getting ill so you are not able to work. Money seems to be on every body’s mind day and night. The never endless questions about how are you going to pay your bills or if you become homeless since you can not pay your mortgage or rent. Besides that, the increasing gas prices sure don’t help anyone neither. The cost of food is rising dramatically, so even if you do get food stamps, you need to shop around and look for deals here and there. I personally do shop at different stores in one day for the best prices on food. But even then, if you are on a strict budget, you are screwed. I used to shop at Wally World allot. But that has also stopped. The only items I buy there now are my dog and cat food, which the prices for that are going up too. Sure does not help when you have to feed eight hungry dogs and two cats who don’t believe in catching a mouse for you. America has come a long way. But what way are we headed now? Snaps. Stop supporting the Terrorists. Help out our own people. Just like this article I have looked up, it is a shame what happened to all the money. Gee, print some money, you can do it, give it to the needy,duh.

America. A land filled with opportunities pain hunger and suffering!

US Congress incredulous at $4bn cash sent to Iraq on pallets

Published Date: 09 February 2007

By JEREMY PELOFSKY IN WASHINGTON

GIANT pallets loaded with cash amounting to more than $4 billion (£2 billion) and weighing a total of 363 tons were sent to Baghdad aboard military planes shortly before the United States gave control back to Iraqis, it has been revealed to Congress.
The money, which had been held by the United States, came from Iraqi oil exports, surplus dollars from the UN-run oil-for-food programme and frozen assets belonging to the ousted Saddam Hussein regime.

The notes were loaded on to military aircraft in the largest cash shipments ever made by the Federal Reserve, said Representative Henry Waxman, the chairman of the House of Representatives committee on oversight and government reform.

“Who in their right mind would send 363 tons of cash into a war zone? But that’s exactly what our government did,” the California Democrat said during a hearing reviewing possible waste, fraud and abuse of funds in Iraq.

On 12 December, 2003, $1.5 billion was shipped to Iraq, initially “the largest pay-out of US currency in Fed history,” according to an e-mail cited by committee members.

It was followed by more than $2.4 billion on 22 June, 2004, and $1.6 billion three days later. The CPA turned over sovereignty on 28 June.

Paul Bremer, who as the administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority ran Iraq after initial combat operations ended, said the enormous shipments were made at the request of the Iraqi minister of finance.

“He said, ‘I am concerned that I will not have the money to support the Iraqi government expenses for the first couple of months after we are sovereign. We won’t have the mechanisms in place, I won’t know how to get the money here,'” Mr Bremer said. “So these shipments were made at the explicit request of the Iraqi minister of finance to forward fund government expenses, a perfectly, seems to me, legitimate use of his money,” Mr Bremer told Congress.

Democrats led by Mr Waxman also questioned whether the lack of oversight of $12 billion in Iraqi money that was disbursed by Mr Bremer and the CPA somehow enabled insurgents to get their hands on the funds, possibly through falsifying names on the government payroll.

“I have no knowledge of monies being diverted. I would certainly be concerned if I thought they were,” Mr Bremer said. He pointed out that the problem of fake names on the payroll existed before the US invasion.

The special inspector general for Iraqi reconstruction, Stuart Bowen, said in a January 2005 report that $8.8 billion was unaccounted for after being given to the Iraqi ministries.

“We were in the middle of a war, working in very difficult conditions, and we had to move quickly to get this Iraqi money working for the Iraqi people,” Mr Bremer said. He said there was no banking system and it would have been impossible to apply modern accounting standards in the midst of a war.

“I acknowledge that I made mistakes and that, with the benefit of hindsight, I would have made some decisions differently,” Mr Bremer said.

Republicans argued that Mr Bremer and the CPA staff did the best they could under the circumstances and accused Democrats of trying to score political points over the increasingly unpopular Iraq war.

“We are in a war against terrorists; to have a blame meeting isn’t, in my opinion, constructive,” said Representative Dan Burton, an Indiana Republican.