The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Here’s How the Military Wasted Your Money in 2014
New year, old problems
The U.S. Congress approved $581 billion in military spending for 2014. That number includes the Pentagon’s base budget plus the Overseas Contingency Operations fund that pays for America’s various wars.
Shitty super-weapons (F-35, Littoral Combat Ships, M1A1 Tank)
Lazy ineffective Defense Logistics Agency
Afghan money pit
Pentagon could waste $100 million overpaying for spare parts, watchdog says
The Pentagon could wind up overpaying more than $100 million for spare aircraft parts because a contracting agent didn't check that he was getting the right prices, an investigative report found in May.
Huge Waste In $604 Billion Defense Bill Heads For Obama Veto
The $604 billion defense spending bill now nears passage with many billions of dollars in rampant defense waste scattered throughout. Aircraft waste on the pricey but flawed F-35, Navy waste on a next generation of nuclear submarines, and systemic waste in unchecked new weapons, all have found their costly places aboard the defense authorization bill.
How the Pentagon Lost Track of $45 Billion
It’s almost impossible to audit what taxpayers have spent to rebuild Afghanistan
Since 2002, Congress has set aside $104 billion specifically to rebuild Afghanistan. Of that, $66 billion went to the Pentagon. Recently, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction asked the military to account for all that spending. It couldn’t. According to a new report from SIGAR, the Pentagon only knows how it spent a third of its reconstruction budget.
That’s $45 billion dollars the military can’t track and the reason is … ridiculous. According to SIGAR, the Pentagon didn’t check a box on an electronic form when it filed the information in government databases.
How The U.S. Government “Covers Up” 72% Inflation Before Your Very Eyes
Dear Bureau of Labor Statistics: please pay careful attention to this case study of how your CPI “inflation” gauge, hedonically, seasonally-adjusted or otherwise, is completely inaccurate, and how what you record as 0% inflation is really 72%. As Consumerist points out, for the latest example of “stealth inflation” we go to Sodastream, where as part of a redesign of its proprietary line of flavoring syrups which “cost the same” the actual bottle contents are now not only smaller but also diluted.
In the last week, much has been made of the leaked DoD briefing entitled ISR Support to Small Footprint (CT) Operations – Somalia and Yemen, dated February 2013. To date, all the reports I have read, save one, focus on the “critical shortfalls” of drone warfare revealed in these slides — see, for example The Intercept, which broke the story on October 15 and placed the slides on the net, and this report in Common Dreams, and anti-war progressive outlet. Both of these reports and the briefing slides contain a lot of useful information are well worth careful reading. But there is more.
Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: Drones of War — Send Money”
The Republican antics in the hearings of the Benghazi Committee in the House or Representatives are a good example illustrating how broken American politics have become. The clear aim is narrowly political: to embarrass Hillary Clinton (and President Obama) for partisan reasons, while avoiding the roots of the larger Libyan debacle that flowed from the US led intervention. Accounting for the deeper causes of the Libyan debacle is off limits, because just about everyone’s hands are dirty: Our bombing campaign was supported by the Republican neo-cons and their humanitarian interventionist allies in the Obama White House, as well as a majority of the Republican congressional leadership* and most Democrats in Congress. So, the Democrats have tried to present the hearings as yet another anti-Clinton witch hunt for the parallel reason of partisan domestic politics.
