Opinion — Between 1998 and 2015 the Pentagon has failed to account for $21 trillion in taxpayer money. Michigan State Professor Mark Skidmore and a team of graduate students discovered this when poring over documents for the Department of Defense and Housing and Urban Development. The analysis was done using publicly available information from the respective government agencies — though, after the story broke, these documents were no longer freely available to the public.
Redacted Tonight host Lee Camp brilliantly starts his show by calling out what the military truly is “Organized Human Murder Machines.” He then gets his audience up to speed on some of his old coverage with some “truth hurts” comedy attached:
Ten months ago I covered how 21 trillion dollars had gone unaccounted for in the past 20 years. Don’t try to think about the number 21 trillion because you’ll pass out and hit your head on a desk.”
Camp continues by giving some creative perspective behind that number:
If your salary is $40,000 a year it would take you 525 million years. At which point you can’t even enjoy the new jetski you bought because you’ll be a brain in a jar.”
Camp seems to have forgotten the old adage you can do anything you set your mind to. The pickled brain riding a jetski will be the hottest viral video in 525 million years. The words viral and video will have drastically different meanings though, both horrifying. It’s best not to think about it because you’re a brain in a jar…but maybe you can’t for that very reason…but I digress.
Camp continues to explain how the story he broke gained some traction:
Since I last brought you that report there has been a little more coverage of it. The Nation magazine did an article, Forbes did an article, and just a few weeks ago Matt Taibbi wrote about it in depth in Rolling Stone.”
Camp must explain that for every good nuclear news bomb there’s going to be some fallout:
Then a few months ago I brought you another article about the number of whistleblowers who’ve been retaliated against at the Government Accountability Office, the GAO….Now the GAO has come out with a full list of whistleblower complaints at the Department of Defense….Sorry human murder machine… nearly a 1,000….no wait, apparently that’s wrong, nearly 10,000,…nearly 100,000…that’s just stupid…”
Beside himself with comedic disbelief, Camp goes after “Robbie,” who Camp “suspects” of just throwing numbers up on the screen for Robbie’s own amusement. Classic Robbie. For him, humor exists as a binary. One cannot say for sure whether Robbie is a computer or a human. He likely doesn’t exist out of this context…sorry Lee…I pulled the curtain back.
FInally, a nice juicy square of text appears to see if we were being had by Robbie or if the number is close to 100,000.
This is straight from the Government Accountability Office:
Specifically DODIG [Inspector General], identified 8 substantiated violations of whistleblower confidentiality between fiscal years 2013 and 2018, representing approximately .01% of the 95,613 contacts handled by DODIG during that time frame, according to DODIG officials.”
Camp unspins what the Inspector General is trying to do:
…the sad thing is that the Government Accountability Office was trying to brag in that sentence; they were like, ‘Yeah, we only breached the confidentiality of our 95,000 whistleblower complaints; aren’t we heroes?’…That’s like saying ‘Hey man, of the 10,000 dolphins I’ve killed, not one has accidentally been a human!’”
Camp then returns to putting this malfeasance in perspective:
To get that 95,000 number to make sense, that averages out to every six minutes of every business day for five straight years. That waiting room must be insane… But maybe this number shouldn’t be that shocking. When you have $21 trillion of uncontrolled adjustments, parts, pieces, and devices floating around, that would likely create loads of fraud, and likely loads of whistleblowers.”
Camp points out that certain things were found that were lost. Sometimes buildings get lost:
According to a Department of Defense official, the Army found 39 Blackhawk Helicopters…similarly the Air Force found 478 buildings…HOW DO YOU LOSE A GODDAMN BUILDING!?”
Camp posits that the Air Force may have had a bad breakup with David Copperfield [the magician].
Camp sums up the issue neatly and succinctly:
This madness stems from the fact that the Pentagon has a Standard Operating Procedure of simply making up numbers to fill their books…which for normal human beings is called ‘fraud.”
To sum this up the Pentagon gets 55 percent of discretionary tax money we spend. They lose helicopters, buildings, and on a few occasions nuclear warheads….Thousands of whistleblowers have tried to come forward every year and…you would think in this topsy-turvy world if there is one place you could trust with $1 trillion it would be the “Department of Highly Secretive Mass Murder.”
Maybe someday they’ll find their conscience. They’ll have at least 100,000 places to look. I wonder how that will go?
Watch | Lee Camp’s segment on the Pentagon’s missing trillions
Top photo | Political comedian Lee Camp ponders the $21 Trillion “lost” by the Pentagon. Screenshot | RT
Nick Rehwaldt is a MintPress News intern. He is an author, artist, and standup comedian focused on political issues, with much of his material ripped from the headlines on any given week. He’s also a proud non-voter and global citizen who happens to live in the U.S.
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