Enron was small beer; worry about the Pentagon!
http://www.cbsnews.com/now/story/0,1597,325985-412,00.shtml?
Just last week President Bush announced, "my 2003 budget calls for more than $48 billion in new defense spending."Speaking of Enron...More money for the Pentagon, CBS News Correspondent Vince Gonzales reports, while its own auditors admit the military cannot account for 25 percent of what it spends.
"According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions," Rumsfeld admitted.
$2.3 trillion — that's $8,000 for every man, woman and child in America. To understand how the Pentagon can lose track of trillions, consider the case of one military accountant who tried to find out what happened to a mere $300 million.
"We know it's gone. But we don't know what they spent it on," said Jim Minnery, Defense Finance and Accounting Service.
Minnery, a former Marine turned whistle-blower, is risking his job by speaking out for the first time about the millions he noticed were missing from one defense agency's balance sheets. Minnery tried to follow the money trail, even crisscrossing the country looking for records.
"The director looked at me and said 'Why do you care about this stuff?' It took me aback, you know? My supervisor asking me why I care about doing a good job," said Minnery.
He was reassigned and says officials then covered up the problem by just writing it off.
"They have to cover it up," he said. "That's where the corruption comes in. They have to cover up the fact that they can't do the job."
The Pentagon's Inspector General "partially substantiated" several of Minnery's allegations but could not prove officials tried "to manipulate the financial statements."
Twenty years ago, Department of Defense Analyst Franklin C. Spinney made headlines exposing what he calls the "accounting games." He's still there, and although he does not speak for the Pentagon, he believes the problem has gotten worse.
"Those numbers are pie in the sky. The books are cooked routinely year after year," he said.
Another critic of Pentagon waste, Retired Vice Admiral Jack Shanahan, commanded the Navy's 2nd Fleet the first time Donald Rumsfeld served as Defense Secretary, in 1976.
In his opinion, "With good financial oversight we could find $48 billion in loose change in that building, without having to hit the taxpayers."
In a strong sign that Arthur Andersen finally understands the extent of the trouble it has caused and is willing to do something about it, company executives today announced the firm has changed its name.http://www.satirewire.com/news/jan02/probitium.shtml
And today...
A delegation of American high school students today demanded the United States stop waging war in obscure nations such as Afghanistan, Kuwait, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, and instead attack places they've actually heard of, such as France, Australia, and Austria, unless, they said, those last two are the same country...http://www.satirewire.com/news/jan02/geography.shtml
Eh, what aboot this, eh?
Canadian television reported Friday that a Canadian warship in the Arabian Sea had seized a tanker suspected of smuggling oil from Iraq, leading many to suspect that the report was a hoax...http://www.satirewire.com/news/feb02/warship.shtml
It's a pity the one about massive accounting irregularity is actually the serious news item; $2.3 trillion (that's two point three thousand thousand million (that's the same as rebuilding Afghanistan 500,000 times over, or giving everyone in the world clean water supplies in their home several times over, or eradicating a disease (or six) of your choice, or putting men on Mars and two other planets of your choice probably).
People living in glass paradigms shouldn't throw stones...