Well, this is hardly a surprise. We could have told them this without a poll, and ABC isn’t on the list of favorites for stuff like this right now anyway. At least not after the junk-media so-called ‘debate’ this week.

Anyway, if the economy and the war on Iraq are the two biggest concerns, it’s because the War on Iraq by the neoCON Cabal, and the War on US by the SAME neoCON Cabal are the reasons for the depressed economy and a depressed population, here and a large portion of the rest of the world.

Some excerpts and links below..

Iraq War “Caused Slowdown in the US”
By Peter Wilson
The Australian
Thursday 28 February 2008

The Iraq war has cost the US 50-60 times more than the Bush administration predicted and was a central cause of the sub-prime banking crisis threatening the world economy, according to Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.

The former World Bank vice-president yesterday said the war had, so far, cost the US something like $US 3 trillion ($3.3 trillion) compared with the $US 50-$US 60 billion predicted in 2003.

Australia also faced a real bill much greater than the $2.2billion in military spending reported last week by Australian Defence Force chief Angus Houston, Professor Stiglitz said, pointing to higher oil prices and other indirect costs of the wars.

Professor Stiglitz told the Chatham House think tank in London that the Bush White House was currently estimating the cost of the war at about $US 500 billion, but that figure massively understated things such as the medical and welfare costs of US military servicemen.

The war was now the second-most expensive in US history after World War II and the second-longest after Vietnam, he said.

The spending on Iraq was a hidden cause of the current credit crunch because the US central bank responded to the massive financial drain of the war by flooding the American economy with cheap credit.

Professor Stiglitz, an academic at the Columbia Business School and a former economic adviser to president Bill Clinton, said a further $US 500 billion was going to be spent on the fighting in the next two years and that could have been used more effectively to improve the security and quality of life of Americans and the rest of the world.

Here’s the link to the rest

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/022908T.shtml

And then there’s this…

Too Few Funds to Fight Cancer in US
By Robert Weiner and Patricia Berg
The San Diego Union-Tribune
Friday 18 April 2008

With more than 500,000 cancer deaths in the United States each year, the underlying buzz all around the just concluded San Diego meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, with 17,000 scientists from throughout the nation and the world, was, “Where is the federal government?

Despite fear of the torturous physical slide of cancer - people’s No. 1 health fear - federal funds for research into early diagnosis, treatment and cures are plummeting. The National Institutes of Health has lost 2 percent of its budget to inflation in real dollars every year for the last seven years, a 14 percent decline, points out leukemia researcher Michael Sheard of Childrens Hospital Los Angeles. Ellen Sigal, chairwoman of Friends of Cancer Research in Arlington, Va., and the chair of a forum at AACR on alternative funding mechanisms, confirmed Sheard’s numbers.

When we asked Sigal why there is the drop in federal funds, she responded, “We have a deficit and a war.” If funding potential disease cures is part of the price of Iraq, it is no wonder that 70 percent of Americans oppose the war and want its cost to end in the scheme of priorities.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/041808F.shtml