One of the Now-Censored Reports Says the Army Lost Track of $6.5 Trillion in Fiscal 2015, a Sum 54 Times Greater Than the $120 Billion Army Budget Approved by Congress. Is This Inept Accounting? Or Is It Governance as Gangsterism, Complete with Under-the-Table Payoffs?
DESPITE OUR NATIONAL MATHOPHOBIA -- and if the two remarkably courageous economics professors who authored this mind-blowing scoop-the-world report for the online 8 December 2017 issue of Forbes magazine are not disappeared by government agents -- these disclosures could evolve into the most devastating scandal in U.S. history.
Yes, math is a big turn-off for many of us, but in this instance the numbers are too important to ignore. Their apparent message is so damning it literally enters the realm of the unthinkable.What the numbers suggest is the federal government is composed of out-of-control bureaucracies granted unlimited ability to print paper money and thereby elevated to veritable omnipotence by whichever cabal of plutocrats is secretly in command.
To clarify what these numbers might be telling us, our best metaphor is organized crime. Imagine a seemingly legitimate business actually owned by a Cosa Nostra family, invariably in some field characterized by maximum cash flow and minimum documentation. (Who is to say how big that real estate commission truly was?) Typically such an enterprise serves two purposes. It provides its mafiosi with what are known as "income-tax jobs" -- apparently legal sources of income on which they pay the taxes by which they hope to deceive their Internal Revenue Service adversaries. But it also provides a cover for one or more big-money rackets the finances of which are many times larger than those of the legitimate business. Thus the operation necessitates two sets of books. One set records legitimate income and expenses and provides the basis for tax returns and the like. The other set, protected by the deadly code of omerta, documents the operation's true finances. The difference between the two is often in millions, even billions of dollars.
What the two economists discovered -- initially in a U.S. Army Inspector General's report that was flushed down the Orwell hole almost as soon as one of the economists questioned it -- suggests the U.S. Government is doing the same sort of thing on a trillion-dollar scale. Which prompts two vital questions:
Where did the Army get 54 times more money than Congress budgeted for it?
On what did the Army spend the money?
In keeping with the other worst-of-all-possible-worlds disclosures that in this darkest epoch of our species' history continually monkey-wrench our individual and collective consciousness, it is not at all difficult for me to imagine the most icon-smashing, delusion-destroying answers: that the money came from those Capitalist plutocrats who behind the Big Lie of "American Democracy" are in fact our true overlords -- tyrants as omnipotent as Adolf Hitler, as sadistic as Reinhardt Heydrich and as morally imbecilic as Ted Bundy -- and that the money they gave the Pentagon was spent on murderously clandestine operations wherever they chose to advance the Empire's agenda of world conquest.
Imagine Iran-Contra on an unimaginable scale. Did this indeed mark the reduction of the U.S. Government to the One Percent's global bag-man? Did such a function grow out of the government's alliance with the Mafia during World War II? Or is it far older, perhaps even dating to the revolution fostered in large measure by the fears of southern planters and northern bankers the British would outlaw slavery?
As to the use of Meyer Lansky book-keeping by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, that too is easily explained: note once more the connections between the real estate industry and the mob (see again the links in my third paragraph, above). For example, in New York City -- something I know from my years in journalism there and across the river in New Jersey -- it was customary to mark up construction budgets by at least 50 percent to cover the requisite payoffs to mobsters, officials and politicians.
And what then might the breathtaking discoveries by economics professors Laurence Kotlikoff and Mark Skidmore actually mean?
If my darkest suspicions are correct, these revelations tell us...
(To read the rest, go here.)
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