via scheerpost.com
|
|
By Lee Camp / Substack
President Trump and Elon Musk will tell you they’re saving money for the US government and thereby the US taxpayer. The DOGE team have claimed that they have already cut out $65 billion of waste and fraud – equaling savings for the American people. Incredible! (I’m going to invest my cut of that money in an up-and-coming fad called “fidget spinners”.)
Oh, I forgot to mention – Everything Musk has said is utterly false. “…some of the biggest errors in savings [announced by DOGE] are, as CBS first reported, a USAID contract for $650 million that was listed three times, as The Intercept first reported, a Social Security contract listed as $232 million, instead of $560,000, and an ICE contract that DOGE listed as $8 billion, when, in reality, it was $8 million.” (But confusing millions and billions is an easy mistake to make — Especially by the agency ostensibly tasked with making our government run better.)
Yet we can’t scoff at all the money Elon Musk has grabbed for you and me. “If you did distribute …that $2 billion or so in savings across taxpayers in America, which is what Elon Musk has said he would like to do, it would basically come to $2.42 per person…”
BOOM! TWO DOLLARS! And who says having a white supremacist bobblehead with a breeding fetish as de facto ruler of the country doesn’t have benefits?
The truth is Elon Musk and Donald Trump don’t care about saving money any more than the Real Housewives of New Jersey care about Doctors without Borders. What Elon and Donny are up to is just a charade to shred the social safety net, public education, and a bunch of other things. If they – or anyone – actually wanted to save money for the US taxpayer, there is one place they would turn — The US military, which has a nearly $1 Trillion a year budget and accounts for around 50% of all discretionary spending. And Trump recently announced the Pentagon budget would exceed $1 Trillion soon.
What I’m trying to say is – there’s no sign he’s heavily cutting the Pentagon budget. “The Senate Budget Committee’s resolution calls for a $150 billion increase in defense spending…” over the next decade while the House calls for $100 Billion more.
But maybe that trillion dollars a year is going to good use. For example according to the Intercept, “Right now, the U.S. military is looking to pour money into the renovation of 35 golf course sand traps at the Woodlawn Golf Course at Ramstein Air Base in Germany.”
Okay, so they have some golf courses. Big whoop. I see nothing wrong with cutting school lunches for poor children while the Pentagon has three or so golf courses.
“The Intercept counted about 145 golf courses, although this is something of an understatement.”
ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY-FIVE GOLF COURSES?! HOLY MOTHER OF GEORGE FOREMAN! But not to fear, DOGE is not avoiding all military cuts. They’ve been cutting some military personnel. There are “…calls from [DOGE] to cut as many as 80,000 jobs from the Department of Veterans Affairs — [while] the U.S military’s golf habit is not on the chopping block.” Yes, PTSD now stands for “Good Luck Getting Medical Treatment!” (I know it has completely different letters, but the younger soldiers don’t know that because we’ve gutted our public schools.)
I can’t believe Trump puts up with this garbage from the military. Why wouldn’t Trump say, “Hey dickhead, no more taxpayer money for golf!”
Oh, right — “President Donald Trump reportedly played at least 289 rounds of golf, at a cost to taxpayers of at least $150 million for travel and security, during his first term.” Dude loves spending taxpayer money to stand on a hill and swing at a little tiny ball.
But the truth is, I’m burying the lead. The main story here has been for years the $21 Trillion of unaccounted-for financial adjustments at the Pentagon and Housing and Urban Development.
As Forbes reported a few years ago, “[Economist] Mark Skidmore and Catherine Austin Fitts, former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, conducted a search of government websites and found similar reports dating back to 1998. While the documents are incomplete, original government sources indicate $21 trillion in unsupported adjustments have been reported for the Department of Defense and the Department of Housing and Urban Development for the years 1998-2015.”
That includes $6.5 Trillion in one year alone. And that number is much higher today than it was in 2015. There is more than enough in the Pentagon to do anything the American people want.
But let’s take a quick moment to try to understand a trillion dollars. I’ll quote some two-bit hack named Lee Camp who wrote an article about this awhile back: “Picture a stack of money. Now imagine that that stack of dollars is all $1,000 bills. Each bill says ‘$1,000’ on it. How high do you imagine that stack of dollars would be if it were $1 trillion? …It would be 63 miles high.”
Sixty-three fucking miles high. That’s higher than Snoop Dogg riding on Alex Honnold’s back. And to get to 21 trillion, we’re talking a stack 1,323 MILES high.
This is the single greatest money-laundering scheme ever created and yet it’s a smaller story than “How a TikTok Cook Spends Her Sundays”. (That was on the front page of the New York Times this week.) Trillions of dollars lost at the Pentagon? Not important.
In one of the only in-depth pieces written on the $21 trillion, Dave Lindorff reported in the Nation magazine: “For decades, the DoD’s leaders and accountants have been perpetrating a gigantic, unconstitutional accounting fraud, deliberately cooking the books to mislead the Congress and drive the DoD’s budgets ever higher. … DoD has literally been making up numbers in its annual financial reports to Congress—representing trillions of dollars’ worth of seemingly nonexistent transactions … according to government records and interviews with current and former DoD officials, congressional sources, and independent experts.”
When this story started gaining traction in 2018, some garbage mainstream media outlets tried to run coverage by saying it’s not fraud, it’s just accounting errors. Those poor Pentagon generals were just making loads of accounting mistakes. …Um, NO. This is not an accident. One mistake – fine. Trillions of mistakes — that’s a plan. It’s like saying you had sex with 21,000 wild donkeys because you accidentally tripped and fell. (Two or three donkeys, sure. But you over a dozen – you have some explainin’ to do.)
Even the Forbes article on the $21 trillion said, “Let’s recall that this is not simply a matter of boring accounting. Trillions in unaccounted outlays, if that’s what’s involved here, is trillions of our tax dollars being spent without our knowledge. If that’s the case, we’re talking about the biggest government financial deception in the history of the country.”
You know how else you can tell when a massive fraud is intentional? When there’s a cover-up.
“So is there a cover-up?”
“I’m glad you asked, Lee!”
“Indeed, more than 16,000 records that might reveal either the source or the destination of some of that $6.5 trillion (in a single year) had been ‘removed,’ the inspector general’s office reported.”
And much like the Lord of Rings prequels, sequels, requels, and Nyquills, it only gets even worse. The Pentagon has failed all 7 of their audits. And when they fail these massive audits, sometimes they tell the public something useful. For example, at the last one the Pentagon admitted they can’t account for 63% of nearly $4 trillion in assets. They can’t account for 63% of their shit?? I have a drunk uncle like that but he runs an adult toy store. (Losing track of a box of nipple clamps is a little different than losing Blackhawk helicopters.)
And I know what you smarties out there are thinking right now. “Lee, the Pentagon is not missing real things. These are unaccounted-for financial adjustments. It’s not a lost helicopter or things in a warehouse.” Um, yes it is. In fact, sometimes it’s the whole warehouse. [In 2019] “the Navy located a warehouse that was mysteriously absent from its property records. Inside the warehouse, the Navy found $126 million worth of spare parts for P-8 Poseidon, the P-3 Orion, and the F-14 Tomcat — the latter of which the Navy retired in 2006 (over a decade previous).”
And other times the military just loses literal pallets of money. During the Iraq War they sent $12 billion of shrink-wrapped cash to Iraq and never saw it again. (I wonder if they tried putting lost money posters on lamp posts? “Have you seen this bundle of cash? Answers to the name Shnookims. Please bring it back to us.”)
Why does the mainstream media almost never cover this unbelievable fraud committed by the Pentagon? Well, maybe it’s because they have smaller balls than the game of golf. They’re afraid to reveal the truth. I wrote one of the most viral articles about it and not long after that I became one of the most suppressed and censored comedians in America.
After doing his excellent investigation for the Nation magazine, journalist Dave Lindorff found himself pulled aside for special screening at Heathrow airport. This happened more than once. “When he got home, Lindorff called the Department of Homeland Security to speak with a press representative, who said that it sounded like he had been put on one of three or four federal terrorist watch lists.”
So, investigate Pentagon fraud and waste and you might be declared a terrorist by the US government.
But don’t worry, Elon Musk says cutting social security for your 90 year-old grandma will make us all happier by saving us loads of money. And that way the Pentagon gets to keep their 145 golf courses (112 of which they can actually account for).
Please share this story and help us grow our network!
Editor’s Note: At a moment when the once vaunted model of responsible journalism is overwhelmingly the play thing of self-serving billionaires and their corporate scribes, alternatives of integrity are desperately needed, and ScheerPost is one of them. Please support our independent journalism by contributing to our online donation platform, Network for Good, or send a check to our new PO Box. We can’t thank you enough, and promise to keep bringing you this kind of vital news.
You can also make a donation to our PayPal or subscribe to our Patreon.
Lee Camp
Lee Camp is a comedian, author, host, producer, and journalist. You can currently watch Lee’s livestream four days a week on Rumble. Lee was formerly the head writer and host of the national TV show Redacted Tonight with Lee Camp on RT America. He’s a former contributor to The Onion, former staff humor writer for the Huffington Post, and his web series “Moment of Clarity” has been viewed by millions. He’s toured the country and the world with his fierce brand of standup comedy, and George Carlin’s daughter, Kelly, said Lee is one of the few comics keeping her father’s torch lit. Bill Hicks’ brother, Steve, said Lee is one of only a handful with Bill’s “message and passion.”
No comments:
Post a Comment
One of the objects if this blog is to elevate civil discourse. Please do your part by presenting arguments rather than attacks or unfounded accusations.