Fiscal Irresponsibility, Fraud and the Military-Terrorism Complex
By STANDARD SCHAEFER
<snip>
[...]
The Defense Transformation for the 21st Century Act represents not just an assault on the working class and unionized labor, but also a cover-up of the fact that the Department of Defense's effort to improve and modernize the Department of Defense accounting practices is at least ten years old, has itself cost at least a hundred million dollars and has produced no real results. In fact, the Department by its own admission has only begun to implement its plan to completely overhaul its financial management systems aggressively since 2002.
This raises several questions.
First, given that many of Corporate America's finest managerial minds have worked for the DoD, how is it that this reform process has been so thoroughly bungled? Second, could the missing tanks and planes be located in places like Poland, for example, or any of the other countries that the US bribed to join the "coalition of the willing"? The fraud in military spending is, of course, legendary, but what is not addressed is the mismanagement and how it quite possibly furthers America's most covert foreign policies. Where is the assurance that this fraud and mismanagement is not another form of foreign aid? The last and most important question that must be asked, especially in light of the Bush Administration's vehement efforts at curtailing social spending, is this: Does running up massive deficits through Corporate Welfare (in which the Department of Defense plays a major role serve the Neo-Con agenda. Is it not clear by now that Bush's fiscal policies are largely meant to insure that his social policies will become inevitable? It is entirely reasonable that given the early criticisms of Bush's plan to privatize security, he or his handlers have decided to demolish the "safety net" and thereby force so-called free-market solutions.
<snip>
full at
http://www.counterpunch.org/schaefer06022003.html
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Calendar - Free online calendar with sync to Outlook(TM). http://calendar.yahoo.com