I have outlined it below in short; further down is the longer version with explanation details for each main and sub-category. It is stated that many of these categories are conservative calculations and that many categories are certain to rise in cost.
Note: $5 trillion dollars is equal to 5 million millions.
Counting the Cost: $5,000,000,000,000 ($5 Trillion)
Launching criminal prosecutions and real investigations is one of the main prerequisites for an economic recovery.
Trust in Government is Necessary for a Stable Economy
A 2005 letter in premier scientific journal Nature reviewed the research on trust and economics:
Trust … plays a key role in economic exchange and politics. In the absence of trust among trading partners, market transactions break down. In the absence of trust in a country’s institutions and leaders, political legitimacy breaks down. Much recent evidence indicates that trust contributes to economic, political and social success.
Forbes wrote an article in 2006 entitled “The Economics of Trust”. The article summarizes the importance of trust in creating a healthy economy: Read the rest of this entry »
For the victim’s families, the costs of the September 11th attacks were incomprehensibly high. There were many other costs apart from precious human lives, however, and people often forget just how much we are all paying on an ongoing basis due to the attacks which originated the “Global War on Terror.”
An organization linked to former CIA director James Woolsey estimated that the damages associated with the attacks were on the order of $2 trillion. Those costs included losses in property damage, lost production of goods and services, and losses on Wall Street. [1] Others have estimated the damages to be much lower, [2] and some have reported that the stock market was largely unaffected by the attacks. [3] The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation was given an amount closer to the lower estimates in order to help rebuild the immediate area.[4]
The current US military costs resulting from the wars that were started in response to the September 11th attacks are over $1 trillion.[5] Of course, other countries have also incurred significant costs to support the US led wars. A few years ago, mainstream media sources were estimating that the Iraq War alone would cost the US more than $3 trillion.[6] If the same logic is applied to the Afghanistan war, using the same rate, that war will cost the US at least $1 trillion. Of course, there is no end in sight for US military operations in either of these occupied countries, so these figures should be seen as minimum estimates. Additionally, these war cost estimates are called incremental costs, meaning that they are above “military salaries, training and support activities, and weapons procurement” as well as military construction.[7]
By Paul Craig Roberts source: Counter Punch March 25, 2010
There was a time when the pen was mightier than the sword. That was a time when people believed in truth and regarded truth as an independent power and not as an auxiliary for government, class, race, ideological, personal, or financial interest.
Today Americans are ruled by propaganda. Americans have little regard for truth, little access to it, and little ability to recognize it.
Truth is an unwelcome entity. It is disturbing. It is off limits. Those who speak it run the risk of being branded “anti-American,” “anti-semite” or “conspiracy theorist.”
Truth is an inconvenience for government and for the interest groups whose campaign contributions control government.
The cynics either do not understand banking or misunderstand the widespread public anger. Dennis Santiago, [influential bank-rating firm, Institutional Risk Analytics'] CEO and managing director, explained that banks compete fiercely for the “core deposits” provided by individual and small business accounts–this stable money is their preferred base for profitable lending. Take away core deposits, and bankers feel immediate balance-sheet stress. Expand the account base for community banks, and they gain greater stability and greater lending power. “Will moving your money have an effect?” Santiago asked. “And by effect, I don’t mean making a momentary political statement. I mean making a structural difference to the country’s financial system. The answer is yes.”
The Nation points out that a wide variety of campaigns to take back power are being launched from diverse sources:
A campaign launched by faith-based community organizations associated with the Industrial Areas Foundation identifies sky-high interest rates on credit cards and other lending as the ancient sin of usury. IAF groups are asking churches, foundations and local governments to withdraw funds from the usurious banks that profit by destroying borrowers. Organized labor, likewise, has launched an aggressive movement to insist on responsible investing values for the pension-fund wealth of working people, urging state treasurers and fund managers to invest for society’s interests as well as good returns.
Timothy Geithner is a rising star within the membership of the Trilateral Commission: He is highly educated, has extensive regulatory experience, and is wiling to bend, break or obscure the rules to favor his global elite bosses.
In November 2008 when Geithner was President of the NY Federal Reserve, just before becoming Obama’s Secretary of the Treasury, recently discovered e-mails reveal that Geithner and the NY Fed pressured the bailed-out AIG into keeping it’s mouth shut about which banks were receiving taxpayer funds in exchange for toxic assets known as “credit swaps.” (This story was made possible by copies of e-mails between Fed and AIG officials that were recently secured by California Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA.))
Furthermore, the NY FED and AIG then conspired to officially hide the event when AIG was required to make a regulatory filing to the SEC on December 24, 2008: The Fed crossed out the reference on its records and AIG excluded the facts on their filing.
California has been particularly hard hit. The latest data show small-business bankruptcies up 81% in the state for the 12 months ended Sept. 30, compared with the previous year. Filings nationwide were up 44%, according to the credit analysis firm Equifax Inc.
The actual number of small businesses in trouble is probably higher, experts said, because many owners file for personal bankruptcy rather than seek protection for the business.
The president has packed his economic team with Wall Street insiders intent on turning the bailout into an all-out giveaway
Barack Obama ran for president as a man of the people, standing up to Wall Street as the global economy melted down in that fateful fall of 2008. He pushed a tax plan to soak the rich, ripped NAFTA for hurting the middle class and tore into John McCain for supporting a bankruptcy bill that sided with wealthy bankers “at the expense of hardworking Americans.”
Obama may not have run to the left of Samuel Gompers or Cesar Chavez, but it’s not like you saw him on the campaign trail flanked by bankers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. What inspired supporters who pushed him to his historic win was the sense that a genuine outsider was finally breaking into an exclusive club, that walls were being torn down, that things were, for lack of a better or more specific term, changing.
Bernanke a ‘key architect of the Bush economy,’ Sanders says
Bunning to Bernanke: You are ‘the definition of moral hazard’
A bipartisan effort to block the confirmation of Ben Bernanke to a second term as chairman of the Federal Reserve means the White House will face tougher obstacles reappointing the man it says is the right person to lead the country’s central bank.
Since last year’s financial collapse, Bernanke has been severely criticized by some as playing an instrumental role in allowing the creation of the asset bubbles that caused investment banks Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers to disappear, and forced a $700-billion bank bailout on taxpayers
NEW YORK – On the eve of what’s expected to be a tough confirmation hearing Thursday, one senator has thrown up a political roadblock intended to stymie Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s second term.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said late Wednesday that he will put a hold on Bernanke’s nomination. A hold is an informal practice in which a senator informs the majority leader that he does not want a measure or nomination to reach the floor for a vote.
“The American people overwhelmingly voted last year for a change in our national priorities to put the interest of ordinary people ahead of the greed of Wall Street and the wealthy few,” said Sanders, one of Bernanke’s sharpest critics, in a statement. “What American people did not bargain for was another four years for one of the key architects of the Bush economy.”
Posted by Brian 
