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"People from poorer places and poorer countries have to call upon their compassion not to be angry with ordinary people in America."
- Arundhati Roy
More than half (53.3%) of US tax dollars go to a criminal enterprise known as the US Department of Defense (sic), a.k.a. the worst polluter on the planet. We hear about tax cuts this and budget that and all kinds of other bullshit from the US government and the corporations that own it"but the reality remains: Roughly one million tax dollars per minute are spent to fund the largest military machine (read: global terrorist operation) the world has ever known.
What do we get for all that money? To follow, is but one tiny example that mostly slipped through the cracks earlier this year.
On July 23, 2010, Tom Eley at Global Research wrote:
"According to the authors of a new study, 'Cancer, Infant Mortality and Birth Sex-Ratio in Fallujah, Iraq 2005-"2009,' the people of Fallujah are experiencing higher rates of cancer, leukemia, infant mortality, and sexual mutations than those recorded among survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the years after those Japanese cities were incinerated by US atomic bomb strikes in 1945."
For those unfamiliar with the US attacks on Fallujah, first of all: You should be f*ckin' ashamed of yourselves. Secondly, here's Patrick Cockburn's basic description:
"US Marines first besieged and bombarded Fallujah, 30 miles west of Baghdad, in April 2004 after four employees of the American security company Blackwater were killed and their bodies burned. After an eight-month stand-off, the Marines stormed the city in November using artillery and aerial bombing against rebel positions. US forces later admitted that they had employed white phosphorus as well as other munitions. In the assault US commanders largely treated Fallujah as a free-fire zone to try to reduce casualties among their own troops. British officers were appalled by the lack of concern for civilian casualties."
Of crucial importance is this: A high proportion of the weaponry used by the US in the assault contained depleted uranium (DU).
And you and I paid for it all.
The aforementioned study found that the cancer rate "had increased fourfold since before the US attack" and that the forms of cancer in Fallujah are "similar to those found among the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb survivors, who were exposed to intense fallout radiation."
Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Yeah, Americans paid for those bombs, too.
In September 2009, Fallujah General Hospital had 170 newborn babies:
- 24 percent were dead within the first seven days
- 75 percent of the dead babies were classified as deformed
Cockburn writes of a "12-fold increase in childhood cancer in under-14s. Infant mortality in the city is more than four times higher than in neighboring Jordan and eight times higher than in Kuwait."
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