- Where did the money go?
-
- I get paid bi-weekly. Inevitably - and always on the
'off' week - some unexpected expense will arise and I will discover that
my budget is blown.
-
- At times like this, my husband and I will turn to each
other in amazement and ask, 'Where did the money go?' But, for us, it is
a rhetorical question. Perhaps it was that trip to the garden shop where
we only intended to buy a bag of mulch and came home with $100.00 worth
of ornamental rose bushes. Perhaps it was a visit to the dentist or the
auto mechanic. Maybe we made one too many trips to the McFastFood joint.
Whatever the reason, there is always an incriminating receipt or a check
stub or, at the very least, an extraneous rose bush, to remind us of exactly
where it was we went astray.
-
- Apparently, this is not the case with the federal government
- and the military-industrial complex is one of the worst offenders. Earlier
this year, a report came off the wires informing us that the Department
of Defense was unable to account for $2.3 trillion dollars - or fully one-quarter
of its aggregate budget of recent years. This would be 'unable to account
for as in 'gone,' 'missing,' 'misplaced.'
-
- NOW WAIT! Before your eyes glaze over and the 'We-know-we-know'
mantra begins, think about it: $2.3 trillion worth of stuff has somehow
evaporated into thin air. It's breathtaking. It's staggering. It makes
the Bermuda Triangle look like a petty thief, stuffing a hapless fishing
boat up its sleeves from time to time. What is the Triangle when compared
with the U.S. Military which has, among other things, managed to disappear,
among several tanks, some surface-to-air missiles, and an entire destroyer.
How exactly does one do that? "Er...I don't know, sir. It was in the
Caspian Sea last time I looked. Have you checked behind the sofa?"
-
- And this has been going on for years. The military routinely
loses weapons and supplies the way most of us civilians lose socks in the
dryer. In June of 1999, for example, Defense Week reported that, "At
last count, the Navy had no record of receiving nearly $1 billion worth
of 'ammunition, arms and explosives that the service knew had been shipped.'
$112 million of same had apparently been 'in transit' for over six months.
-
- Loosely translated, 'in transit' is the military's version
of 'your check is in the mail.' In other words, "We're pretty sure
we shipped it, it will probably arrive sometime, but please don't do anything
stupid like bet the family farm on it." And the 1999 figures were
a 'significant improvement' over 1997, when auditors noticed that $432
million of inventory had been 'in transit' for two or more years.
-
- The good news, the military tells us it isn't really
the inventory that is missing - it's just the paperwork. The bad news is,
in the absence of a physical shipment, they can't prove it.
-
- As for the 'significant improvement,' the only thing
that appears to have improved over the years is the creativity of the Pentagon
auditors. With a deftness that would put David Copperfield to shame, astute
government auditors observed that the disappearing equipment, itself, could
be disappeared, using the old 'roll your own audit' technique. According
to a December 2001 article entitled, 'Pentagon Auditors Fail Peer Review,'
defense auditors 'left out evidence to support their conclusions and occasionally
altered investigative paperwork after reports were completed.' Department
auditors referred to these altered documents as 'mistakes.'
-
- Thus, in Pentagon-speak, we have the following: "We
have about a hundred million dollars worth of equipment that appears to
have been in transit for an excessive amount of time. This is a significant
improvement over last year due to our improved audit techniques. A peer
review of these techniques uncovered a few mistakes, but we 'are grateful
that we had people from the outside to come in and help us fix them."
-
- Now let's put the same spiel in plain English: "We
are missing millions of dollars of weapons and supplies. We were missing
millions last year, and we'll probably be missing millions again next year.
If you have not yet received your shipment of missiles, you probably never
will. Please don't call us to inquire about where they might be. We are
clueless. But don't worry - at the end of the year we'll have a few guys
in serious suits come around and cook the books. We keep sending them to
ethics classes, but fortunately they are slow learners."
-
- This is not a mistake. Mistakes are what the puppy makes
on the new carpet. Mistakes are things like dangling participles, spilled
milk and broken glass. No, this annual ritual of accounting hide-and-go-seek
is something else entirely. It is called fraud. However, unlike ordinary
fraud which merely bilks sweet elderly grandmothers out of their life savings,
the kind of fraud the Pentagon engages in could bilk folks out of things
like, say - spending their golden years above ground.
-
- In 'The Case of the Missing H-bomb,' Jeffrey St. Clair
notes that, since 1945, the United States has lost 11 nuclear weapons.
Some of them have eventually been located, but actually retrieving them
can prove to be more difficult than picking up a lump of gelatin with a
pair of chopsticks. The H-bomb featured in St. Clairís article,
for example, is currently on hiatus in a Savannah salt marsh where 'the
presence of the unstable lithium deutride and the deteriorating high explosives
make retrieval of the bomb a very dangerous proposition - so dangerous,
in fact, that even some environmentalists and anti-nuke activists argue
that it might present less of a risk to leave the bomb wherever it is.'
-
- And then there is the infamous case of Redstone arsenal
in Huntsville, where Pentagon whistleblower, Al Martin, reports that 'older'
chemical weapons are routinely sold out the back door to unregistered arms
dealers, or merely left in rusting, substandard containers where they eventually
discharge their toxic ooze into the soil, no doubt producing everything
from thirty-pound thyroid glands to three-headed crawfish. Either way,
the accounting must get pretty tricky, and covering up the accounting,
trickier still. Indeed, one has to wonder what great strides could be made
toward correcting these abysmal conditions if the Pentagon spent half as
much time and energy correcting these blatant abuses as it does attempting
to bury them.
-
- Sadly for us - and our tax dollars - this epiphany is
unlikely to occur at the Pentagon any time in the near future. And it isn't
as if no one has ever offered the military brass any helpful suggestions
either. Constructive criticism has poured in from all quarters. Perhaps
the most useful suggestion dropped in the box came from Dina Rasor, a consultant
for the National Whistleblower Center, who suggested that if the military
was serious about cleaning up its act, all it needs to do is give Wal-Mart
a call.
-
- Says Rasor, "There's a business model that works.
The Pentagon deals with things that Wal-Mart deals with every day, tens
of thousands of vendors, employee wages and inventories. Wal-Mart does
more than $200 billion a year in revenue, which means that company is keeping
track of $200 billion worth of transactions the Pentagon is not too big
to manage. If the president wants a business model that works he doesn't
need to call in the accountants, just call Wal-Mart."
-
- But perhaps the president does not want 'a business model
that works.' One can only surmise this from looking at his recent increases
in defense spending. Bush's business model appears to involve rewarding
his dysfunctional family with more money to buy more stuff so that they
won't miss the stuff they've already lost. And the really wacky part is
that Congress - the people we have elected to represent us - agree with
him. Tell me, dear readers, where else but in Washington D.C. would this
seem like a good idea?
-
- Pretend for a moment that the Pentagon is your pesky
neighbor - the one who always stops over to borrow your lawn mower. If
he came back to your door with the highly improbable story that he would
love to return your mower but unfortunately he could not remember exactly
where he left it, would you immediately run out and buy a new lawn mower
to loan him - and then say, "Here. You better take my hedge clippers,
too. And what about my edger? Do you think you may need it? Please look
through my tool shed. In fact, take the shed too. Can I help you move it?"
-
- If you think this scenario sounds reasonable, you should
probably run for public office. However, if you would react - as most of
us would - by not only refusing to loan your neighbor so much as a cup
of sugar, but by insisting that he reimburse you for the misplaced mower,
it might be about time you wrote your Congresspersons and ask why in the
heck they are allowing this spectacular abuse of your tax dollars to continue
unabated.
-
- Unfortunately, it seems, we have been conditioned to
believe that the world of politics is somehow different from our own world
- exempt from the laws of common decency and common sense. We have been
conditioned by standing in inordinately long lines at the Department of
Motor Vehicle. We have been conditioned by our annual encounters with
the IRS. We have been conditioned by contorted transactions involving the
petty bureaucrats on our school boards and in our town halls. And the thing
that we have been conditioned to believe is that all political entities
are either corrupt, inept, or some unholy combination of the two, and that
is just the way things are.
-
- Try dropping this line at your next around-the-water-cooler
conversation: "All politicians are crooks." Or this one: "Our
government is so screwed up." Watch the heads bob up and down in agreement.
Liberal heads. Conservative heads. Heads belonging to both political junkies
and the apathetic alike. No one will disagree with you. Why? Because it
is part of our modern myth system. We know these things to be true as sure
as we know that 'a stitch in time saves nine' and 'a pound of prevention
is worth an ounce of cure.' We accept it and we never give it another thought.
This is why, when the media drops a bombshell and headlines scream, "The
Pentagon is missing 2.3 trillion dollars," our eyes glaze over, our
heads bob, and we collectively murmur, "We know. We know." It's
Pavlovian.
-
- But it's wrong. Politicians breathe the same air as ordinary
citizens. They drink the same water. They occupy the same revolving ball
of planetary goop. They do not dwell in some sort of arcane alternate universe
where down is up and up is down. And when it comes to cold hard cash, it
is just a matter of doing the math. At the end of the day, if there is
money missing from my household budget, I cannot just shrug it off and
say, "Oh well. That's just the way things are." I need to know
where it went and what went wrong. The Pentagon, give or take a few billion
dollars, is no different. In the end, it all boils down to, "Where
did the money go?"
-
- And in the end, this citizen thinks that the Pentagon
damn well needs to be able to answer the question.
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