Suppose the US decided it wanted to invest $6 billion or so in the economy by paying people to fix stuff and rebuild the infrastructure of a destroyed economy. How would you do it?

Well, supposedly the people who understand these things would start with an account in an established, honest bank. Let’s call it the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The US Treasury would direct the Feds to credit that account with the $6 billion or so, and then disburse money from the account as directed.

The Fed would then follow the instructions it was given, with electronic transfers accomplished through recorded debits here and credits to the accounts of the bank of the intended recipients, or those authorized to make the dispersants. There would be electronic records to account for every dollar. None of this would require a single actual dollar or hundred dollar bill to be created, deposited or transferred. That is not how it’s supposed to work in this millenium.

As the recipient bank received instructions for disbursements, it would in turn credit the accounts of the ultimate recipients, who could then use those credited accounts to pay the workers and providers of ultimate goods and services. The workers would have their own bank accounts, and their paychecks could even be credited to them directly, still with no actual dollar bills being required and all transactions fully recorded and traceable.

But that’s not how the Bush Administration did things in Iraq. Instead, they had the NY Fed literally stack up cash, $6.6 billion of it, into several truckloads of $100 bills, haul them to an AF base, where these huge bundles of cash were loaded onto AF planes and flown to Iraq. Once there, the bundles were thrown in sacks and distributed somehow to. . . . Uh, we have no clue. We can’t find the money and have no idea where it went.

This is mostly old news, but good grief!! It is as though they deliberately designed a plot to make it easy to steal $6.6 billion. And everyone who had anything to do with planning or approving this mindless action turned scandal should be named, shamed, and banned from any government position, forever. Many should be under arrest, or held as material witnesses to possibly the most reckless plan or egregious bank heist in history, at least until the 2008 bailouts.

What is the matter with these people?