A truly mesmerizing and blood-chilling find….. While perusing for totally unrelated and apolitical information on the Web, I came upon the site for the National Priorities Project (NPP), a Northampton, Massachusetts-based organization that tracks the impacts of federal tax and spending policies on communities. Part of NPP's mission is to deconstruct policy in order to make it comphrehensible for people who are doing activist legwork at national and grassroots levels.
In April 2003 NPP took over costofwar.com, which offers some perspective on the price of the war in Iraq. Beware: your eyeballs will become arid and possibly roll back into your head while you watch the spinning counter rack up the dollars, second-by-second. By the time you finish reading this, tens of thousands of dollars will have flown out of our collective pocket and right at the war. On the costofwar site, you can also see what price your state has paid, and take a comparative look at the money spent on the Iraq war and how much education, housing or healthcare that money could have purchased.
Next to the counter, NPP posts this salient quote from President Dwight D. Eisenhower:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
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Emily Udell is a writer for Angie’s List Magazine in Indianapolis. In 2009, she finished a stint drinking bourbon and covering breaking news for The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Ky. Her eclectic media career also includes time at the Associated Press, Punk Planet (R.I.P.), The Daily Southtown in southwest Chicago, and Radio Prague in the Czech Republic. She co-hosted and co-produced In These Times’ radio show “Fire on the Prairie” from 2003 to 2006.
