January 12, 2020
Eric Zuesse for The Saker
Blog
This article from 21 July 2017 is here updated and expanded to the present; and
the dead links in it have been replaced by functional (this time, archived —
and thus more permanent) links:
Before documenting that many
trillions of dollars in U.S. Government military spending have been and are
unaccounted-for, and that by far the most corrupt U.S. federal Department is
the ‘Defense’ Department, it is important to document here, by means of the
links that will be provided in this article, that, at least after the 9/11
event, the most respected institution in America has been and is the military,
and so there exists in the United States a profoundly deceived public, which is
a reflection of America’s having also a thoroughly corrupt national press or
‘news’-media, a U.S. press that is controlled by the same group of individuals
who control the ‘defense’ contractors such as Lockheed Martin — the firms that
derive all or almost all of their incomes from sales to the U.S. Government and
to its allied governments. In other words: the U.S. is controlled by a racket,
and is not (in any other than the formal
sense — e.g., its Constitution) a democracy. Consequently, this article will document in its
links, that the publicized and widespread view that the U.S. is a democracy
instead of a dictatorship is false and results from the dictatorship’s control
over America’s press, with support from also the press in countries that are
allied with and vassals of America’s dictatorship.
Now, and for
the past two decades, as is shown in annual Gallup polls taken since 1973, the American public has displayed far higher
confidence and trust in “The Military” than in any other “Institution”
(including than churches, schools, the Presidency, the police, courts — any).
This enormous public respect
for, basically, America’s Military-Industrial Complex or MIC, didn’t even exist
before 9/11. This overwhelmingly militarized American mentality is specifically
in the 21st century, and existed virtually not at all in the 20th century. In
fact, back in 1973 (the year Gallup first polled this), the most-respected
institution was “The Medical System,” which then was 80%
respected, and now is only 36% respected. Ever since 2002 (right after 9/11), “The Military”
has been respected more than 70% (around twice as much as “The Medical System”
now is), and it’s the only “Institution” that is consistently above 70%. Only
“Small Business” comes close, in the upper 60s. Next down is “Police” in the
lower 50s. Then, everything else is in the 30s or lower. Maybe the Government’s
two responses to 9/11 (first, the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, which caused
respect for the military to leap up 13% in 2002 but produced total failure; and, then, the other alleged 9/11 response, the 2003
invasion of Iraq, raised the figure yet another 3%) were the best things that
ever happened for the owners of America’s giant weapons-manufacturers. This
permanently militarized America, which exists ever since 9/11, enriches them
enormously. The U.S. Government has served these corporate owners superbly,
while the rest of the population pays the tab for it (via their taxes, and via
their soldiers’ corpses — not even to mention the far more numerous corpses of
residents in the invaded countries, such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria,
and Yemen).
So, there is this steady
high American respect for the MIC. The U.S. public trust it more than anything
else. And yet — according to the Inspector General (IG) of the U.S. Department
of Defense (DOD) — many billions, and sometimes even trillions, of dollars, in
the Department’s periodic financial reports, are not documented. What has
happened to this money from U.S. taxpayers is unknown — it’s gone missing
(alleged to have been spent, but to payees unidentified). That’s the
exact opposite of trustworthy.
According to the DOD’s IG,
this vast chasm of financial darkness continues year-after-year (yet without at all
reducing Americans’ trust in “The Military”). Apparently, Americans, as a lot, are gluttons for
punishment — or else our ‘news’-media haven’t sufficiently reported the “waste,
fraud, and abuse” that “The Military” (the most-respected U.S. institution) are
doing to the American public. (And those media covered-up for the regime and
uncritically spread its lies — such as about ‘Saddam’s WMD’ in 2002 — as if
those allegations by the corrupt Government were instead facts, and so
America’s press are themselves part of the regime; they’re only fakes as ‘journalists’,
and so they certainly share in this Government’s guilt.) Either way, there is
this extraordinarily high public confidence in the military, ongoing
year-after-year, though the U.S. DOD continues to be the only
unauditable federal Department, and though expenditures amounting (over the
years) into trillions of dollars still remain unaccounted-for. But here, as
will be documented in this article, will be the American ‘news’-media’s chance
to call the public’s attention to this discrepancy between the military’s
reality, versus the public’s perceptions of that reality, by their publishing
this documentation (if they finally decide to do it — which they’ve never
yet done):
On July 14th, Catherine
Austin Fitts posted to her website links to some of the key relevant federal
documents. Her site is linked-to below, and some of the documents that refer to
trillions of dollars unaccounted-for are also linked-to below, and are then
quoted from, so that a reader can obtain — even without clicking onto the links
— a sense both of the enormity of the corruption, and also of the
authoritativeness of the official statements that are being made in these
documents, regarding the extent of that corruption.
I am using here the word
“corruption” because whenever an official finding by a U.S. government agency
is reporting trillions of dollars of taxpayer money that have been spent for
purposes and recipients which are unknown, I call it “corruption,” on the basis
that: regardless of whether or not the matter is intended or is instead
sloppiness, even mere sloppiness is heinous if it ranges into trillions of
dollars of taxpayer-money missing or wrongly spent. Even sloppiness, of that
magnitude, in the expenditure of taxpayer funds, reflects corruption, if it
continues on for years, or especially (as it is shown to do here) for decades,
and still has not been stopped.
In fact, the most
recent such IG report makes
clear (on page 7 of 74) that “Army and Defense Finance and Accounting
Service Indianapolis personnel did not adequately support $2.8 trillion in
third quarter adjustments and $6.5 trillion in yearend adjustments made to Army
General Fund data during FY 2015 financial statement compilation.” These
“adjustments” — a total of $9.3 trillion over the half-year period examined —
had been made to prior unacceptable reports, but were still failing
to explain where the money had gone. Here is the main site (solari,
of Catherine Austin Fitts), and excerpts from the main documents, which
excerpts are posted immediately below it:
——
“DOD and HUD Missing Money: Supporting
Documentation for $21 Trillion of Undocumentable Adjustments”
2 October 2017, Catherine
Austin Fitts, News & Commentary
“Dr. Skidmore and his team
have now reviewed additional documentation and undocumented adjustments at DOD
and HUD now total $21 trillion – more than the outstanding debt on the US
government balance sheet.”
——
“We determined that 236,
totaling $2 trillion, of the 263 third quarter JV adjustments in our sample,
and 170, totaling $2.1 trillion, of the 194 yearend JV adjustments in our
sample, were in fact unsupported.”
“OASA(FM&C) and DFAS
Indianapolis personnel did not adequately document or support adjustments made
to AGF data during FY 2015 financial statement compilation. Specifically,
OASA(FM&C) and DFAS Indianapolis personnel did not adequately support $2.8
trillion in JV adjustments for third quarter and $6.5 trillion in JV
adjustments for yearend.17”
——
23 September 2011 “Testimony
of the [DOD] Deputy Inspector General for Auditing”
“We found the Department’s
review process included less than half of the fiscal year 2010 first quarter
gross outlays.10 … Comptroller officials stated that the $167.5 billion in
outlays the Department did not examine for improper payments included internal
and intragovernmental transfers. Those outlays were not subject to the OMB
reporting requirements since the payments did not leave the Government.
However, we later determined that Comptroller officials did not perform a
reconciliation to determine whether these outlays were internal or
intragovernmental transfers. A complete reconciliation is still needed to
demonstrate that all outlays are being examined for overpayments and in order
to accurately report the extent of the overpayments. Specifically, DoD did not
review approximately $167.5 billion of the $303.7 billion in gross outlays for
high dollar overpayments. Additionally, some overpayments that we or the
Department identified were not reported, and the First Quarter FY 2010 High
Dollar Overpayments Report did not include sufficient information about
recoveries and corrective actions.”
“Unless DoD improves its
methodology to review all its disbursements, it will continue to understate its
estimate of overpayments and will likely miss opportunities to collect
additional improper payments.”
“We are concerned with
the accuracy and reliability of the Department’s estimation process. Without a
reliable process to review all expenditures and identify the full extent of
improper payments, the Department will not be able to improve internal controls
aimed at reducing improper payments. 12 The Department’s financial management
processes are not always adequate to prevent or detect improper payments. For
example, in our recent audit of a contract supporting Broad Area Maritime
Surveillance, we found DoD personnel did not validate that the contractor was
entitled to $329.3 million it received as of January 12, 2010. These are costs
paid to contractors that Defense Contract Audit Agency questioned because they
do not comply with rules, regulations, laws and/or contract terms which meets
the definition of an improper payment. These improper payments the audit agency
identified are greater than the $1.3 billion of improper payments the
Department identified during 2004 to 2010.”
——
“The audits of the FY 1999
DoD financial statements indicated that $7.6 trillion of accounting entries
were made to compile them. This startling number is perhaps the most graphic
available indicator of just how poor the existing systems are. The magnitude of
the problem is further demonstrated by the fact that, of $5.8 trillion of those
adjustments that we audited this year, $2.3 trillion were unsupported by
reliable explanatory information and audit trails or were made to invalid
general ledger accounts. About $602.7 billion of accounting entries were made
to correct errors in feeder reports.”
——
THE MAJOR RECIPIENTS OF
FEDERAL FUNDS:
Here, from the list of the
100 largest U.S. federal Government contractors, are the 20 largest recipients
of U.S. federal government money:
The following is a list of
the Top-100 U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Prime Contractors in Fiscal Year
(FY) 2015 ranked by total contract funds awarded [and showing also the
aggregate percentage of total U.S. federal spending on private contractors
going to each company].
1. Lockheed Martin Corp.,
10.71% of all U.S. $ to contractors
2. The Boeing Company, 5.33%
3. Raytheon Company, 4.54%
4. General Dynamics Corp.,
4.22%
5. Northrop Grumman Corp.,
3.49%
6. United Technologies
Corp., 2.58%
7. L-3 Communications
Holdings Inc., 1.86%
8. BAE Systems plc, 1.63%
9. Humana Inc., 1.31%
10. Huntington Ingalls
Industries Inc., 1.13%
11. Bechtel Group Inc.,
1.07%
12. Health Net Inc., 1.01%
13. Unitedhealth Group Inc.,
0.97%
14. SAIC Inc., 0.92%
15. General Atomic
Technologies Corp., 0.85%
16. McKesson Corp., 0.79%
17. Bell-Boeing Joint
Project Office, 0.75%
18. AmerisourceBergen Corp.,
0.68%
19. Booz Allen Hamilton Holding
Corp., 0.65%
20. United Launch Alliance
L.L.C., 0.63%
As is obvious, all or almost
all of these firms are contractors to (recipients of money from) the U.S.
Department of Defense; and they may reasonably be presumed to be benefiting
significantly from some of the unaccounted-for payments from the U.S. DOD. However,
if the money isn’t going to them, then where is it going? And why? And for
what? Why is there no congressional investigation to answer these questions?
And why are U.S. ‘news’-media not publicizing this matter so as to force such
investigations? Are payoffs involved — payoffs for silence? Why are none of the
‘news’-media that have the resources to explore these questions, publishing
their own investigations into it, since Congress won’t investigate? And, since
the Inspector General’s reports into these matters have had no impact, why
isn’t the focus finally shifting away from studying to find how much is
missing, toward instead prosecuting the people who — at the very least — failed
to do what they were being paid to do: keep track of every
cent of taxpayers’ money? If doing that job is too dangerous, then shouldn’t
the people who are tasked to do it be paid more, so as to cover their
exceptionally high personal risk? Is all of this secrecy really necessary in
order to keep “The Military” far on top as the most respected of all
institutions in the United States — even after all of the harms that the U.S.
military has actually caused in Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc., destroying those
countries and others? How much would the American public’s respect for the military
— the mass-killing institution — be brought down, if the truth about it were
known? Would the mass-killing institution deserve to be the most respected
institution even if it weren’t so profoundly corrupt?
UPDATED DATA:
Scott Tibballs – August
8, 2019
1. Lockheed Martin
(NYSE:LMT)
Revenue: US$53.8 billion;
year-to-date gains: 39.5 percent
2. Boeing (NYSE:BA)
Revenue: US$101.1 billion,
year-to-date gains: 2.34 percent
3. Northrop Grumman (NYSE:NOC)
Revenue: US$30 billion,
year-to-date gains: 46.7 percent
4. Raytheon (NYSE:RTN)
Revenue: US$27 billion,
year-to-date gains: 19.72 percent
5. General Dynamics
(NYSE:GD)
Revenue: US$36.1 billion,
year-to-date gains: 15 percent
6. United Technologies
This company will be merging with
Raytheon in 2020.
UTX is up by 19.12 percent year-to-date, with its shares valued at US$129.01.
7. L3 Harris Technologies
(NYSE:LHX)
L3 Harris develops advanced
defense technologies in communications. It is up by 55.82 percent year-to-date,
at US$207.46.
8. Huntington Ingalls
Industries (NYSE:HII)
Huntington Ingalls is a
major component of US Navy shipbuilding capacity. The company is trading at
US$207.37, up by 7.69 percent year-to-date, though it has been much higher.
9. Leidos (NYSE:LDOS)
Leidos is a technology
company with major contracts with the Department of Defense. The company was
trading at US$80.54 as of August this year, up 54.79 percent year-to-date.
10. Booz Allen Hamilton
(NYSE:BAH)
Booz Allen Hamilton is a
cyber security and intelligence company, once called the “world’s most
profitable spy organization” by Bloomberg. The company is trading up 58.94
percent year-to-date at US$70.46 as of August.
ADDED OBSERVATIONS,
regarding those recently soaring military sales:
On 21 May 2017, I
headlined “U.S. $350
Billion Arms-Sale to Sauds Cements U.S.-Jihadist Alliance” and reported that, “On Saturday, May 20th, U.S.
President Donald Trump and the Saud family inked an all-time record-high $350 billion
ten-year arms-deal that
not only will cement-in the Saud family’s position as the world’s largest
foreign purchasers of U.S.-produced weaponry, but will make the Saud family,
and America’s ruling families, become, in effect, one aristocracy over both
nations, because neither side will be able to violate the will of the other. As
the years roll on, their mutual dependency will deepen, each and every year.”
I followed that up, on 14
August 2018, by “America’s
Militarized Economy” and
opened with “Donald Trump’s biggest success, thus far into his Presidency, has
been his sale of $400 billion
(originally $350 billion) of U.S.-made weapons to the Saudi Arabian Government, which is
owned by its royal family, after whom that nation is named. This sale alone is
big enough to be called Trump’s ‘jobs plan’ for Americans. It is also
the biggest weapons-sale in all of history. It’s 400 billion dollars,
not 400 million dollars; it is gigantic, and, by far, unprecedented in
world-history.”
That’s what has mainly been
driving the recent massively increased sales-volumes of America’s ‘defense’
contractors. It also underscores why Trump refuses to blame Saudi Arabia’s
Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman al-Saud for ordering Washington Post columnist
Jamal Khashoggi to be chopped up in Istanbul and disposed of, even while Trump
blames leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, etc., for all sorts of alleged
(usually fictitious) atrocities. On December 24th, İbrahim Karagül, of
Turkey’s Yeni Safak newspaper, bannered “Khashoggi
murder: Five executions, one cover-up can’t save you.” and he said, of Saudi Arabia’s ‘investigation’
into Khashoggi’s murder:
The case was a setup, the
trial was a setup, the death sentences are also a setup. The Saudi
administration, which refrained from disclosing even the whereabouts of
Khashoggi’s body, resolved to kill those who did the crown prince’s dirty work
to save Salman. This is an act of silencing, destruction of evidence, the
liquidation of people whose loyalty is in doubt and who are likely to talk.
Saud al-Qahtani, the leader
of the murder team, was not convicted. Even Mohammad al-Otaibi, Istanbul consul
general, whom Turkey showed as the unwanted man and asked the king to withdraw,
was not even accused. Ahmed Asiri, deputy chief of intelligence who planned the
murder – and was supposedly dismissed – was released.
But, because the vast
majority of Americans don’t get to know any of this, they think that today’s
America is still like pre-1945 America was, instead of having switched to
become more like the fascist powers themselves were. Germany, Italy, and Japan,
had heavily militarized economies during the 1930s through early 1940s, and
America has a heavily militarized economy ever since (at least) 1980, and
especially now — long after the Cold War ended on Russia’s side in 1991, and
especially long beyond any reasonable excuse for these constantly rising
‘defense’ expenditures. There’s economic growth in such countries (that is, in
imperialistic fascist countries), and almost all of it goes to the controlling
owners of ‘defense’ contractors. What grows, then, in such countries, isn’t
actually the patient, but the tumor. However, lots of Americans don’t know the
difference between the two and are satisfied with any type of growth at all,
and they even respect the world’s
most corrupt military more
than they respect any other institution. In a functioning democracy, this would
be impossible, because any public anywhere would be outraged by it and would be
in open revolt against it if only they knew about it. Furthermore, if this were
a democracy, then the entire public would already have learned about
this, and the situation wouldn’t have reached so bad — and so dangerous (for
the entire world — such as now, after Trump assassinated Iran’s #2 leader) — a
stage, as it already has reached, while nothing was being done to stop it and
to imprison (and nationalize the wealth of) the U.S. billionaires who have been
behind (and so enormously profiting from) heisting the Government and getting
the public to fund these imperialistic operations of the nation’s
aristocrats. Astronomical
political corruption is
the sole source of all of this. And this corruption is in the courts, and not
only in Congress and in the Executive, and allows this rape of democracy to be called ‘constitutional’ and thus go
unpunished, and thus to become constantly worse.
Soaring wealth-inequality,
not only inside the United States, but throughout the world, results from this.
And the biggest crimes are at the top — where there is impunity (because it’s
‘constitutional’ — even though that’s only a lie
about what the Founders had meant by their Constitution).
When the crooks actually
write the laws, the laws become crooked. When the crooks also control the
‘news’-media, the public are defenseless because ignorant and deceived.
Wherever fascism is in control, this is the way that it functions.
HOW THE ESTABLISHMENT
RESPOND TO THIS:
Mick West, who blogs as
metabunk dot org, is a propagandist for the “Establishment” or the
billionaires’ preferences of what the public should believe; and, on 16 May
2018, he headlined “Debunked:
Missing $21 Trillion / $6.5 Trillion / $2.3 Trillion – Journal Vouchers”, and he presented a representative of America’s
Military-Industrial Complex (MIC) asserting, to U.S. House members, that “this
is not a new story, it dates back to 2001 and before,” and, West noted, “All
these things are accounting things that, as Norquist says ‘occur after the
money is spent’. They are things that you want to get right in your accounting,
but if you get the values wrong then it does not mean you’ve lost the money. It
means you’ve got some estimate wrong, and you’ll put to little or to much [West
meant “too much or too little”] in one fund or another.” Referring, then, to
the $21 trillion, he wrote, “This is just more of the same though, still not
missing money, still just unsupported accounting information transfers.”
However, only a sucker would take that casual attitude to the enormous amount
of money in the ‘defense’ budget that is “unsupported” as to who received it,
and whether or not those payments were in accord with what Congress had
actually authorized. Furthermore, such a casual attitude toward U.S.
’defense’-expenditures — the expenditures which constitute actually over half
of the U.S. federal Government’s discretionary expenditures, and even around
half of the total world’s military expenditures — is an invitation to
corruption in over half of this Government’s annually authorized spending; and
any intelligent person would expect that such an invitation would be taken
advantage of by insiders who are in a position to benefit from it. West quotes
from only one alleged authority, the “Defense Department Comptroller, David L.
Norquist,” a person who is largely responsible for the problem, who said “it’s
an accounting problem that does need to be solved because it can help hide
other underlying issues,” but (at 1:43 in the accompanying video) “it’s not the
same thing as not being able to account for money that Congress has given you
to spend, but it’s still a problem that needs to be fixed.” Mick West simply
trusted this statement, by Norquist — though Norquist is one of the officials
responsible for the problem — but Norquist failed to prove (and wasn’t even
asked to prove it, by the Representatives whom he was there addressing, who
didn’t seem to be alarmed about where that $21T actually went) his key
assertion, that “it’s not the same thing as not being able to account for money
that Congress has given you to spend.” And, even if that assertion, by that
official, is true (which should not be assumed, and which even seems ludicrous
on its very face), the problem is unquestionably an invitation to corruption in
‘defense’-expenditures, and those are precisely the type of
federal expenditures that overwhelmingly dominate the income to the federal
Government’s contractors, the corporations that make all or most of their profits
from sales to the federal Government and to its allied governments (such
as to the Saud family). Therefore, casually allowing — and not even
investigating as being possibly treasonous — these expenditures, is, itself,
enormously scandalous, but the Representatives there were treating it so
casually. In fact, at the very opening of the hearing, which was held on 10
January 2018 (at 02:12 in the video of
the 1:41:33-long hearing) the Chairman of the Committee emphasized the “We must spend more”
on the military, even though we already spend around half of the entire world’s
military expenditures. Manifestly, this hearing was a charade. In the full
video, the passage that Mick West quoted from is at 18:00-22:00, and the
Representatives were clearly on the side of the charade, not on the side of the
American people. Clearly, all members of that Committee, the House Armed Services
Committee, behave as if they are in the pockets of firms such as Lockheed
Martin.
On 15 November 2018, Reuters
headlined “Pentagon
fails its first-ever audit, official says”, and reported that “‘We failed the audit, but we
never expected to pass it,’ Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan told
reporters.”
On 27 November 2018, The
Nation headlined “Exclusive:
The Pentagon’s Massive Accounting Fraud Exposed” and David Lindorff opened: “On November 15,
Ernst & Young and other private firms that were hired to audit the Pentagon
announced that they could not complete the job. Congress had ordered an
independent audit of the Department of Defense, the government’s largest
discretionary cost center — the Pentagon receives 54 cents out of every dollar
in federal appropriations — after the Pentagon failed for decades to audit
itself. The firms concluded, however, that the DoD’s financial records were
riddled with so many bookkeeping deficiencies, irregularities, and errors that
a reliable audit was simply impossible.”
So, that was the result of
the latest version of this charade, which is virtual treason by the federal
Government.
In short: Congress is
satisfied for this situation to continue, and the members of Congress evidently
have no fear that the voters back home will vote against them if a challenger
makes this issue a major issue in that Senator’s or Representative’s next Party
primary. The presumption is that the voters don’t care, and that the
‘news’-media won’t enlighten the voters about this matter, and about how it
impacts, for example, which nations the U.S. will categorize as being an
“ally,” to sell weapons to, and which nations it will categorize as being an
“enemy,” to target for conquest.
Invading and militarily
occupying all of these countries which ‘our’ Government calls an “enemy”
(though that country never even threatened, much less invaded, the U.S.) is the
end-product of a vast amount of corruption — this much is absolutely clear.
None of this could happen if
the United States Government did not secretly continue the Cold War against Russia
after Russia ended it on its side in 1991. Russia is the U.S. aristocracy’s necessary
bogey-man. For example: how many Americans know that in June 2013,
which was months before the Maidan demonstrations even started in Russia’s
next-door-neighbor Ukraine on 21 November of that year, the U.S. federal
Government was already seeking U.S. Government contractors to transform a
building in Sevastopol Crimea in Ukraine into becoming part of a U.S. naval
base there which Obama was planning to replace Russia’s largest naval base,
which had been — and still remains — located there since 1783? He had started by no later than June of 2011 his
planning for the February 2014 coup in Ukraine.
The origin of this goes all
the way back to 26 July 1945, but the next key date was 24 February 1990, which continued the Cold War after Russia ended it.
Anyone who writes about U.S.
policy and doesn’t place this issue front and center is either misinformed or
else corrupt. But anyone who does place it front and center will be unemployed
(except, perhaps, at struggling non-mainstream U.S. national
news-media). This is how much of a dictatorship today’s U.S. has now become.
Lying and cover-up have now become obligatory in all of the mainstream U.S.
media, so as to prevent the American public from knowing what this article has
documented to be true. This article has been written as an introduction to
understanding recent American history.
—————
Investigative historian Eric
Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not
Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and
of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created
Christianity.
/https://www.niagarafallsreview.ca/content/dam/thestar/news/canada/2021/09/25/huawei-executive-meng-wanzhou-receives-warm-welcome-upon-return-to-china/_1_meng_wanzhou_2.jpg)
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