Next!

Looks like we built a few (appropriately useless) monuments to ourselves before changing the name of finishing combat operations in Iraq:

A $40 million prison sits in the desert north of Baghdad, empty. A $165 million children's hospital goes unused in the south. A $100 million waste water treatment system in Fallujah has cost three times more than projected, yet sewage still runs through the streets

As the U.S. draws down in Iraq, it is leaving behind hundreds of abandoned or incomplete projects. More than $5 billion in American taxpayer funds has been wasted — more than 10 percent of the some $50 billion the U.S. has spent on reconstruction in Iraq, according to audits from a U.S. watchdog agency.
That amount is likely an underestimate...

Our government seems to thrive on providing pork of questionable value, so Iraq was merely a 'target rich environment.' But don't worry... they've found a NEW drain to pour money down:

As depositors thronged branches of Afghanistan's biggest bank, Mahmoud Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a major shareholder in beleaguered Kabul Bank called on Thursday for intervention by the United States to head off a financial meltdown.

"America should do something," said Karzai in a telephone interview, suggesting that the U.S. Treasury Department guarantee the funds of Kabul Bank's clients, who number about a million and have more than a billion dollars on deposits with the bank.

Kabul Bank handles salary payments for soldiers, police and teachers. It has scores of branches across Afghanistan and holds the accounts of key Afghan government agencies...

So Karzai's brother runs the bank that's the paymaster for the Afghan government. Nah... that won't give him any leverage to demand more Yankee Dollars...

The growing tide of red ink here in the States is testimony to what it takes to subsidize our homegrown corruption AND that of everybody else in the world...