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Paul Merrell

DOD, HUD Defrauded Taxpayers Of $21 Trillion From 1998 To 2015 - 0 views

www.mintpressnews.com/...232905

corruption DoD HUD audit missing-funds

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Last year, a Reuters article brought renewed scrutiny to the budgeting practices of the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), specifically the U.S. Army, after it was revealed that the department  had “lost” $6.5 trillion in 2015 due to “wrongful budget adjustments.” Nearly half of that massive sum, $2.8 trillion, was lost in just one quarter. Reuters noted that the Army “lacked the receipts and invoices to support those numbers [the adjustments] or simply made them up” in order to “create an illusion that its books are balanced.” Officially, the DOD has acknowledged that its financial statements for 2015 were “materially misstated.” However, this was hardly the first time the department had been caught falsifying its accounting or the first time the department had mishandled massive sums of taxpayer money.
  • The report, which examined in great detail the budgets of both the DOD and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), found that between 1998 and 2015 these two departments alone lost over $21 trillion in taxpayer funds. The funds lost were a direct result of “unsupported journal voucher adjustments” made to the departments’ budgets. According to the Office of the Comptroller, “unsupported journal voucher adjustments” are defined as “summary-level accounting adjustments made when balances between systems cannot be reconciled. Often these journal vouchers are unsupported, meaning they lack supporting documentation to justify the adjustment [receipts, etc.] or are not tied to specific accounting transactions.” The report notes that, in both the private and public sectors, the presence of such adjustments is considered “a red flag” for potential fraud. The amount of money lost is truly staggering. As co-author Fitts noted in an interview with USA Watchdog, the amount unaccounted for over this 17 year period amounts to “$65,000 for every man, woman and child resident in America.” By comparison, the cost per taxpayer of all U.S. wars waged since 9/11 has been $7,500 per taxpayer. The sum is also enough to cover the entire U.S. national debt, which broke $20 trillion less than a month ago, and still have funds left over. What’s more, the actual amount of funds lost — measured at $21 trillion – is likely to be much higher, as the researchers were unable to recover data for every year over the period, meaning the assessment is incomplete.
Paul Merrell

DOD and HUD Missing Money: Supporting Documentation - The Missing Money - 0 views

missingmoney.solari.com/money-supporting-documentation

Army budget journal-vouchers

shared by Paul Merrell on 18 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Subsequent to the publication of Dr. Skidmore’s report, the Office of the Inspector General at the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) took reports off line, consequently our primary links in the table below are to the same documents posted on our website. We have preserved the original DOD and HUD links in the footnotes – if they result in a 404 error or not found message, this indicates they were taken down or moved subsequent to publication. On October 5, 2017 we discovered that the link to the report “Army General Fund Adjustments Not Adequately Documented or Supported” had been disabled. Within a several days, the links to other OIG documents we identified in our search were also disabled. The sequential non-random nature of this disabling process suggests a purposeful decision on the part of OIG to make key documents unavailable to the public via the website, as opposed to website reorganization, etc. We also revisited the website intermittently to see whether the documents had been reposted under different URLs—until very recently they had not been reposted. On December 11, 2017, we learned that key documents had been reposted on the OIG website, but with different URLs. Documents now appear to be reposted on new URLs. As we find the new URLs we are adding them in the footnotes entitled “new link” next to the original link.
Paul Merrell

US Military Uses IMF and World Bank to Launder 85% of Its Black Budget | Global Researc... - 1 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...5469097

Dark-State black-budget banksters IMF World-Bank WTO CIA Fitts

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • hough transparency was a cause he championed when campaigning for the presidency, President Obama has largely avoided making certain defense costs known to the public. However, when it comes to military appropriations for government spy agencies, we know from Freedom of Information Act requests that the so-called “black budget” is an increasingly massive expenditure subsidized by American taxpayers. The CIA and and NSA alone garnered $52.6 billion in funding in 2013 while the Department of Defense black ops budget for secret military projects exceeds this number. It is estimated to be $58.7 billion for the fiscal year 2015. What is the black budget? Officially, it is the military’s appropriations for “spy satellites, stealth bombers, next-missile-spotting radars, next-gen drones, and ultra-powerful eavesdropping gear.” However, of greater interest to some may be the clandestine nature and full scope of the black budget, which, according to analyst Catherine Austin Fitts, goes far beyond classified appropriations. Based on her research, some of which can be found in her piece “What’s Up With the Black Budget?,” Fitts concludes that the during the last decade, global financial elites have configured an elaborate system that makes most of the military budget unauditable. This is because the real black budget includes money acquired by intelligence groups via narcotics trafficking, predatory lending, and various kinds of other financial fraud.
  • The result of this vast, geopolitically-sanctioned money laundering scheme is that Housing and Urban Devopment and other agencies are used for drug trafficking and securities fraud. According to Fitts, the scheme allows for at least 85 percent of the U.S. federal budget to remain unaudited. Fitts has been researching this issue since 2001, when she began to believe that a financial coup d’etat was underway. Specifically, she suspected that the banks, corporations, and investors acting in each global region were part of a “global heist,” whereby capital was being sucked out of each country. She was right.
  • As Fitts asserts, “[She] served as Assistant Secretary of Housing at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in the United States where I oversaw billions of government investment in US communities…..I later found out that the government contractor leading the War on Drugs strategy for U.S. aid to Peru, Colombia and Bolivia was the same contractor in charge of knowledge management for HUD enforcement. This Washington-Wall Street game was a global game. The peasant women of Latin America were up against the same financial pirates and business model as the people in South Central Los Angeles, West Philadelphia, Baltimore and the South Bronx.” This is part of an even larger financial scheme. It is fairly well-established by now that international financial institutions like the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund operate primarily as instruments of corporate power and nation-controlling infrastructure investment mechanisms. For example, the primary purpose of the World Bank is to bully developing countries into borrowing money for infrastructure investments that will fleece trillions of dollars while permanently indebting these “debtor” nations to West. But how exactly does the World Bank go about doing this? John Perkins wrote about this paradigm in his book, Confessions of an Economic Hitman. During the 1970s, Perkins worked for the international engineering consulting firm, Chas T. Main, as an “economic hitman.” He says the operations of the World Bank are nothing less than “pure economic colonization on behalf of powerful corporations and banks that use the United States government as their tool.”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • In his book, Perkins discusses Joseph Stiglitz, the Chief Economist for the World Bank from 1997-2000, at length. Stiglitz described the four-step plan for bamboozling developing countries into becoming debtor nations: Step One, according to Stiglitz, is to convince a nation to privatize its state industries. Step Two utilizes “capital market liberalization,” which refers to the sudden influx of speculative investment money that depletes national reserves and property values while triggering a large interest bump by the IMF. Step Three, Stiglitz says, is “Market-Based Pricing,” which means raising the prices on food, water and cooking gas. This leads to “Step Three and a Half: The IMF Riot.” Examples of this can be seen in Indonesia, Bolivia, Ecuador and many other countries where the IMF’s actions have caused financial turmoil and social strife. Step 4, of course, is “free trade,” where all barriers to the exploitation of local produce are eliminated. There is a connection between the U.S. black budget and the trillion dollar international investment fraud scheme. Our government and the banking cartels and corporatocracy running it have configured a complex screen to block our ability to audit their budget and the funds they use for various black op projects. However, they can not block our ability to uncover their actions and raise awareness.
Gary Edwards

Peter J. Wallison: The Price for Fannie and Freddie Keeps Going Up - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...3278604574624681873427574.html

financial-crisis socialist-scourge obammunism banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 31 Dec 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 31 Dec 09
     
    Whoa.  This is bad stuff.  The facts, the numbers, the players.  They all point to our Federal government, the Clinton Administration in 1993, Democrat obstruction of much needed reform, and a Democratic Congress in 2007 as the catalist that blew an $18 Trillion dollar hole in our economy.  Miserable socialist bastardos!! excerpt:  Fannie and Freddie's congressional sponsors-some of whom are now leading the administration's effort to "reform" the financial system-have a lot to answer for. Rep. Barney Frank (D., Mass.), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, sponsored legislation adopted in 2008 that established a new regulatory structure for the GSEs. But by then it was far too late. The GSEs had begun buying risky loans in 1993 to meet the "affordable housing" requirements established under congressional direction by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Most of the damage was done from 2005 through 2007, when Fannie and Freddie were binging on risky mortgages. Back then, Mr. Frank was the bartender, denying that there was any cause for concern, and claiming that he wanted to "roll the dice" on subsidized housing support. View Full Image Associated Press In 2005, the Senate Banking Committee, then controlled by Republicans, adopted tough regulatory legislation that would have established more auditing and oversight of the two agencies. But it was passed out of committee on a partisan vote, and with no Democratic support it never came to a vote. By the end of 2008, Fannie and Freddie held or guaranteed approximately 10 million subprime and Alt-A mortgages and mortgage-backed securities (MBS)-risky loans with a total principal balance of $1.6 trillion. These are now defaulting at unprecedented rates, accounting for both their 2008 insolvency and their growing losses today. Since 2008, under government control, the two agencies have continued to buy dicey mortgages in order to stabilize housing prices. There is more to th
Gary Edwards

Obama Goes All Out For Dirty Banker Deal | Rolling Stone Politics | Taibblog | Matt Tai... - 0 views

www.rollingstone.com/...for-dirty-banker-deal-20110824

matt-taibbi Banksters Obama-Bankster-Power-Play

shared by Gary Edwards on 24 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 24 Aug 11
     
    This is as bad as white-collar crime gets. But to Wylde, it doesn't rise to the level of being "indefensible." Until they do something worse than this, we apparently should support the banks, and make sure they don't have to pay more than a fraction of what they made off of this kind of crime. What is most amazing about Wylde's quote is the clear implication that even a law enforcement official like Schneiderman should view it as his job to "do everything we can to support" Wall Street. That would be astonishing interpretation of what a prosecutor's duties are, were it not for the fact that 49 other Attorneys General apparently agree with her. In Schneiderman we have at least one honest investigator who doesn't agree, which is to his great credit. But everyone else is on Wylde's side now. The Times story claims that HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan and various Justice Department officials have been leaning on the New York AG to cave, which tells you that reining in this last rogue cop is now an urgent priority for Barack Obama. Why? My theory is that the Obama administration is trying to secure its 2012 campaign war chest with this settlement deal. If he can make this foreclosure thing go away for the banks, you can bet he'll win the contributions battle against the Republicans next summer. Which is good for him, I guess, but it seems to me that it might be time to wonder if is this the most disappointing president we've ever had.
Paul Merrell

Debt Revisited: Obama Merges Low-Income Students & For-Profit Colleges | nsnbc internat... - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...ncome-students-profit-colleges

Obama student-debt banksters

shared by Paul Merrell on 06 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • President Obama called on college presidents and “higher education advocate” to participate in the White House College Opportunity Day of Action (CODA) so that thought leaders in education would team up with the president’s list of “colleges and universities, business leaders and nonprofits to support students and to help the nation lead the world in college attainment.” With the secretary from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) alongside the secretary of the US Department of Education (DoE), Obama revealed “new steps” on how the current administration will “support college accessibility, including an additional $10 million to help promote college completion and a $30 million AmeriCorps program that will improve low-income students’ access to college.”
  • Several Congressmen are calling this move a sale for for-profit colleges to enslave students with debt. These representatives wrote a letter to Arne Duncan, secretary of the DoE, stating: “Serious consideration should be given before transitioning management of Corinthian’s campuses from one company that profited off deceptive lending practices to an umbrella company that also has a checkered history in student loans.” One such debt collection agency ECMC, “offered to buy 56 of the campuses currently run by Corinthian, which is under multiple state investigations for deceiving students and faking job records.” The Congressmen explained: “We are concerned that neither the ECMC Group nor the Zenith Education Group has any previous experience in operating an academic institution. Rather, the ECMC Group, as one of the largest student loan guaranty agencies in the United States, has benefited by collecting loan payments from students, sometimes using dubious tactics.”
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