Rumsfeld admitted to $2.3 trillion missing on September
10, 2001 (the day before 9/11)
"You can have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, or democracy,
but you cannot have both."
-- Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis
Come you masters of war,
You that build all the guns,
You that build the death planes,
You that build the big bombs,
You that hide behind walls,
You that hide behind desks,
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks.
Let me ask you one question:
Is your money that good?
Will it buy you forgiveness?
Do you think that it could?
I think you will find,
When your death takes its toll,
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul.
-Bob Dylan "Masters of War"
A good introduction to the missing Trillions from the US government budget
(enough to end global poverty, to compensate Iraqis and other victims of US
warfare, and to fix US domestic problems) www.whereisthemoney.org
Richest 2% hold half the world’s assets
By Chris Giles, Economics Editor in London
Published: December 5 2006 13:13 | Last updated: December 5 2006 13:13
Personal wealth is distributed so unevenly across the world that the richest
two per cent of adults own more than 50 per cent of the world’s assets
while the poorest half hold only 1 per cent of wealth.
They say I shot a man named Gray and took his wife to Italy.
She inherited a million bucks and when she died it came to me.
I can't help it if I'm lucky. - Bob Dylan
This may be old news to you, but just a quick note here of something I'd missed
about Flight 77, thanks to "Bismillah" and the RI forum, that I hope
you won't miss, too.
At least among those with a mind for such things, it's fairly well-remembered
that on September 10, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld made the shocking announcement that
the Pentagon "couldn't track" $2.3 trillion of its transactions. "Iroquois"
observes, "What's interesting to me is that he made his press release on
a Monday. In DC, I always see bad news given on a Friday, usually late in the
afternoon on Friday. The exception, of course, would be when someone happens
to know that there is a far bigger story coming out."
And we know that Flight 77, allegedly piloted by an incompetent, made an aerobatic,
spiralling descent over Washington, effecting a 270-degree turn to strike the
Pentagon from a western approach at ground level. The side struck was the only
one with an exterior wall hardened against attack, and was relatively empty
while renovation continued.
Relatively. The unfortunate construction workers perished outside, but who were
the expendables within?
From The Pittsburg Post Gazette, December 20, 2001: "One Army office
in the Pentagon lost 34 of its 65 employees in the attack. Most of those killed
in the office, called Resource Services Washington, were civilian accountants,
bookkeepers and budget analysts. They were at their desks when American Airlines
Flight 77 struck."
The Arlington County After-Action Report noted that the "impact area
included both the Navy operations center and the office complex of the National
Guard and Army Reserve. It was also the end of the fiscal year and important
budget information was in the damaged area." And Insight Magazine editorialized
that "the Department of the Army, headed by former Enron executive Thomas
White, had an excuse [for not making a full accounting]. In a shocking appeal
to sentiment it says it didn't publish a "stand-alone" financial
statement for 2001 because of "the loss of financial-management personnel
sustained during the Sept. 11 terrorist attack."
High Crimes of State often come down to the movement of capital, and so the
high criminals generally share the gray and black economics of common felons.
Money is money; it's the magnitude of the heist that's different, and the means
to effect and cover-up the crime. And part of the cover-up of the Pentagon heist
has been the no-plane shell game, played smartly by Rumsfeld himself who "misspoke"
that a "missile" had struck the Pentagon the same week Thierry Meyssen's
original no-plane website was launched.
It's such disinformation that has drilled irrelevance and folly into a once
potentially dangerous and angry army of authentic skeptics.
Army unit piecing together accounts of Pentagon attack
By MILAN SIMONICH, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
WASHINGTON -- They are soldiers on the capital city's saddest mission.
Each working day, a three-man military history unit uncovers firsthand stories
of the Sept. 11 attack on the Pentagon.
The terrorism here killed 189 people, including the five hijackers who crashed
a commercial jet into America's military headquarters.
Now the Army's 305th Military History Detachment has the job of making sense
of the madness. It is interviewing every willing survivor and witness -- a
number that could climb into the thousands -- to write the U.S. government's
book on the Pentagon assault and the lessons that can be learned from it.
The job is full of pain. One Army office in the Pentagon lost 34 of its
65 employees in the attack. Most of those killed in the office, called Resource
Services Washington, were civilian accountants, bookkeepers and budget analysts.
They were at their desks when American Airlines Flight 77 struck.
Faced with so many funerals of friends and colleagues, the director of the
office, Robert Jaworski, agonized over which ones to attend. He could not
possibly be at all of them.
Jaworski's plight was extreme, but not so different from what the military
historians find every day. Just about every witness or survivor gets emotional
when recounting Sept. 11.
"In most interviews there's a tear or two," said Sgt. 1st Class
Dennis Lapic of Industry, Pa., who is a member of the history unit.
Before Sept. 11, Lapic spent most of his working life as a territorial sales
manager for a manufacturing company. His duties with the 99th Reserve Support
Command consumed only a few weeks a year. Now he is on active duty with a
two-year assignment to find out everything he can about the attack on Washington.
That job was daunting enough for the Army to dispatch a second unit, the 46th
Military History Detachment from Little Rock, Ark., to help with the interviews.
In all, the Army has 66 such units devoted to compiling history from battles
and missions around the world. The Pentagon project is unprecedented because
it will attempt to unravel an attack on domestic soil that indiscriminately
killed civilians.
Even Pearl Harbor was different in that respect. All but 68 of the 2,403 Americans
who died in the Japanese attack on Hawaii were soldiers and sailors.
More than three months after the Pentagon was hit, nuggets of information
continue to emerge as witnesses step forward.
One day last week, Lapic ventured to Arlington National Cemetery to interview
a groundskeeper who watched in horror as the plane crashed into the Pentagon.
The worker, William Middleton Sr., was running his street sweeper through
the cemetery when he heard a harsh whistling sound overhead. Middleton looked
up and spotted a commercial jet whose pilot seemed to be fighting with his
own craft.
Middleton said the plane was no higher than the tops of telephone poles as
it lurched toward the Pentagon. The jet accelerated in the final few hundred
yards before it tore into the building.
"My sweeper has three wheels. I almost tipped it over as I watched,"
Middleton said.
In those first minutes, he thought he had seen a plane in trouble, not a terrorist
attack.
Middleton and his co-workers at Arlington continued to work Sept. 11 as Washington
offices closed and buildings emptied. The cemetery crew had no choice. Funerals
were scheduled and burials had to be completed, chaos and all.
As Middleton labored, he could see the destruction less than a mile away at
the Pentagon, where the U.S. military mobilized for war.
Another Arlington worker who declined to be interviewed in front of the media
told a story that the military historians had not heard in the 244 interviews
they had conducted through last week. The man said a mysterious second plane
was circling the area when the first one attacked the Pentagon.
The interviewers ask every witness what might have been done to prevent the
attack. It is more than protocol. They want to know if somebody may have seen
or heard something hours or days earlier that could have been useful in stopping
the attack.
When the interviews are completed, the findings will be published in book
form and kept at the Army Center of Military History. The researchers hope
their work will be a thorough account of the Pentagon attack, as well as a
guide on what should be done to prevent terrorist attacks.
Along with facts for the book, the historians collect tidbits on what the
attack did to the nation's psyche.
"I felt complete anger. If I wasn't an old man, I might volunteer to
go back into the service," said Middleton, 54.
The history detachments for the Pentagon project are based at Fort McNair,
a Washington post established in 1791 as Old Arsenal Penitentiary. Until now,
the installation's most notable brush with American history involved the murder
of President Lincoln.
Four people who conspired with Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth were hanged
there July 7, 1865. The executions occurred as a nation torn by civil war
tried to heal itself.
Now the military historians see their research on the Pentagon attack as one
way to help people cope with today's crisis.
"There can be a cathartic effect to people talking about what they have
seen and gone through," said Maj. Robert Smith of Germantown, Md., commander
of the 305th History Detachment.
Military waste under fire
$1 trillion missing -- Bush plan targets Pentagon accounting
Tom Abate, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, May 18, 2003
The Department of Defense, already infamous for spending $640 for
a toilet seat, once again finds itself under intense scrutiny, only this time
because it couldn't account for more than a trillion dollars in financial
transactions, not to mention dozens of tanks, missiles and planes.
The Pentagon's unenviable reputation for waste will top the congressional
agenda this week, when the House and Senate are expected to begin floor debate
on a Bush administration proposal to make sweeping changes in how the Pentagon
spends money, manages contracts and treats civilian employees.
The Bush proposal, called the Defense Transformation for the 21st Century
Act, arrives at a time when the nonpartisan General Accounting Office has
raised the volume of its perennial complaints about the financial woes at
Defense, which recently failed its seventh audit in as many years.
"Overhauling DOD's financial management operations represent a challenge
that goes far beyond financial accounting to the very fiber of (its) . . .
business operations and culture," GAO chief David Walker told lawmakers
in March.
WHAT HAPPENED TO $1 TRILLION?
Though Defense has long been notorious for waste, recent government reports
suggest the Pentagon's money management woes have reached astronomical proportions.
A study by the Defense Department's inspector general found that the Pentagon
couldn't properly account for more than a trillion dollars in monies spent.
A GAO report found Defense inventory systems so lax that the U.S.
Army lost track of 56 airplanes, 32 tanks, and 36 Javelin missile command
launch-units.
And before the Iraq war, when military leaders were scrambling to find enough
chemical and biological warfare suits to protect U.S. troops, the department
was caught selling these suits as surplus on the Internet "for pennies
on the dollar," a GAO official said.
Given these glaring gaps in the management of a Pentagon budget that is approaching
$400 billion, the coming debate is shaping up as a bid to gain the high ground
in the battle against waste, fraud and abuse.
"We are overhauling our financial management system precisely because
people like David Walker are rightly critical of it," said Dov Zakheim,
the Pentagon's chief financial officer and prime architect of the Defense
Department's self-styled fiscal transformation.
Among the provisions in the 207-page plan, the department is asking Congress
to allow Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to replace the civil service
system governing 700,000 nonmilitary employees with a new system to be detailed
later.
The plan would also eliminate or phase out more than a hundred reports that
now tell Congress, for instance, which Defense contractors support the Arab
boycott of Israel and when U.S. special forces train foreign soldiers, as
well as many studies of program costs.
The administration's proposal, which would also give Rumsfeld greater authority
to move money between accounts and exempt Defense from certain environmental
statutes, prompted influential House Democrats to write Speaker Dennis Hastert
last week complaining that the proposals would "increase the level of
waste, fraud, and abuse . . . by vastly reducing (Defense) accountability."
"The Congress has increased defense spending from $300 billion to $400
billion over three years at the same time that the Pentagon has failed to
address financial problems that dwarf those of Enron," said Rep. Henry
Waxman, D-Los Angeles, one of the letter's signatories.
Saying critics of the bill "were arguing for more paperwork," Hastert
spokesman John Feehery said his boss would support the Bush reforms on the
House floor. "The purpose is to streamline the Pentagon to become a less
bureaucratic and more efficient organization . . . while also making it more
accountable," Feehery said.
PROCESS WILL TAKE MONTHS
The debate will center around the defense authorization bill, the policy-
setting prelude to the defense appropriations measure that comes up later
in the session. With the House and Senate considering different versions of
the transformation proposals, it will be months before each passes its own
bill and reconciles any differences.
But few on Capitol Hill would deny that, when it comes to fiscal management,
Defense is long overdue for "transformation."
In congressional testimony Rumsfeld himself has said "the financial reporting
systems of the Pentagon are in disarray . . . they're not capable of providing
the kinds of financial management information that any large organization
would have."
GAO reports detail not only the woeful state of Defense fiscal controls, but
the cost of failed attempts to fix them.
For instance, in June 2002 the GAO reviewed the history of a proposed Corporate
Information Management system, or CIM. The initiative began in 1989 as an
attempt to unify more than 2,000 overlapping systems then being used for billing,
inventory, personnel and similar functions. But after "spending about
$20 billion, the CIM initiative was eventually abandoned," the GAO said.
Gregory Kutz, director of GAO's financial management division and co-author
of that report, likened Defense to a dysfunctional corporation, with the Pentagon
cast as a holding company exercising only weak fiscal control over its subsidiaries
-- the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines. Today, DOD has about 2,200 overlapping
financial systems, Kutz said, and just running them costs taxpayers $18 billion
a year.
"The (Pentagon's) inability to even complete an audit shows just how
far they have to go," he said.
Kutz contrasted the department's loose inventory controls to state-of-the-
art systems at private corporations.
"I've been to Wal-Mart," Kutz said. "They were able to tell
me how many tubes of toothpaste were in Fairfax, Va., at that given moment.
And DOD can't find its chem-bio suits."
CRITICS CALLED UNPATRIOTIC
Danielle Brian, director of the Project on Governmental Oversight, a nonprofit
group in Washington, D.C., said waste has become ingrained in the Defense
budget because opposition to defense spending is portrayed as unpatriotic,
and legislators are often more concerned about winning Pentagon pork than
controlling defense waste.
"You have a black hole at the Pentagon for money and a blind Congress,"
Brian said.
But things may be changing.
GAO's Kutz said Rumsfeld has "showed a commitment" to cutting waste
and asked Pentagon officials to save 5 percent of the defense budget, which
would mean a $20 billion savings.
Legislators are also calling attention to Defense waste. "Balancing the
military's books is not as exciting as designing or purchasing the next generation
of airplanes, tanks, or ships, but it is just as important," Sen. Robert
Byrd, D-W.V., said last week. In a hearing last month about cost overruns,
Rep. John Duncan, R-Tenn., of the House Committee on Government Reform said:
"I've always considered myself to be a pro-military type person, but
that doesn't mean I just want to sit back and watch the Pentagon waste billions
and billions of dollars."
But while Capitol Hill sees the need, and possibly has the will to reform
the Pentagon, the devil remains in the details, and the administration aroused
Democratic suspicions when it dropped its 207-page transformation bill on
lawmakers on April 10 -- leaving scant time to scrutinize proposals that touch
many aspects of the biggest department in government.
"We have as much problem with the process as with the substance,"
said said Rep. John Spratt, D-S.C., who co-signed Waxman's letter calling
the transformation bill "an effort by the Department to substantially
reduce congressional oversight and public accountability."
Defense's Zakheim counters that the reform proposals would "remove the
barnacles of past practices (and provide) DOD with modern day management while
preserving congressional oversight and prerogatives."
But Waxman, a critic of the administration's handling of Iraqi reconstruction
contracts, called the proposals "a military wish list" to take advantage
of "the wartime feeling."
"Secretary Rumsfeld is hoping to march through Congress like he marched
through Iraq," Waxman said.
E-mail Tom Abate at tabate @ sfchronicle.com.
Page A - 1
[Like their American counterparts, the British elite have situated a significant
portion of their money someplace outside the taxable economy of their own nation-state.
While taxation was the traditional motive for doing so, new motives are active
now. Until Britain joins the EU, its fortunes are bound to the American system
of international loan-sharking. That system is in crisis. And if the energy
for which it ransacks the globe proves too elusive, Britain will be hard put
to replace the depleted North Sea reserves that drove its economic recovery
of the past twenty years. At that point, offshore assets will become useful
in a whole new way: they may help investors to survive the perils of a falling
dollar and its eventual impact on the pound, and they can equip the ruling class
of the UK to buy up forfeited domestic assets after a crash. -JAH (Jamey Hecht)]
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed
without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational purposes.
The world's richest individuals have placed $11.5 trillion of assets
in offshore havens, mainly as a tax avoidance measure. The shock
new figure - 10 times Britain's GDP - is contained in the most authoritative
study of the wealth held in offshore accounts ever conducted.
The study, by Tax Justice Network, a group of accountants and economists concerned
at the escalating wealth held in offshore locations, shows that the world's
high-net-worth individuals earn $860 billion each year from their assets.
But there is growing alarm among regulators and campaigners because exchequers
worldwide are missing out on at least $255bn of tax each year. Governments
appear unable, or unwilling, to prevent the rich employing aggressive strategies
to minimise their tax liabilities.
The OECD this weekend confirmed that international tax avoidance is a growing
problem that troubles governments not just of rich countries, but middle-income
ones as well.
'This is one of the defining crises of our times,' said John Christensen,
coordinator of the Tax Justice Network and a former economic adviser to the
Jersey government. 'One of the most fundamental changes in our society in
recent years is how money and the rich have become more mobile. This has resulted
in the wealthy becoming less inclined to associate with normal society and
feeling no obligation to pay taxes.'
James Jones, Anglican Bishop of Liverpool, said: 'In this country, we have
created a culture of tax avoidance. The current debate is pandering to a culture
of consumption and avoidance. We need a much better debate than the political
parties are currently giving us.'
Individuals such as Rupert Murdoch, Philip Green, Lakshmi Mittal and Hans
Rausing - among the world's richest men - all make extensive use of tax havens.
There is nothing illegal about placing assets and cash offshore, but campaigners
are promising to attack tax avoidance by the world's richest people in much
the same way that they currently target environment and trade issues.
The $11.5trn does not include the vast amount of money stashed in tax havens
by multinational corporations, which are using increasingly sophisticated
techniques to run rings round the authorities.
The Tax Justice Network study has drawn from data supplied by the Bank of
International Settlements, Merrill Lynch and McKinsey. Richard Murphy of Tax
Research, who co-authored the report, said: 'No one has tried to calculate
a number like this before. To ensure the credibility of our data, we have
only used information already in the public domain and produced by some of
the most authoritative sources in the world.
'In addition, we tested our conclusions against three independent sources
of information, and all seem to substantially agree, giving us a high degree
of confidence in the conclusions.'
'Gordon Brown and the British government are ideally placed to act on offshore
tax avoidance, since so many of the banks and tax havens that facilitate these
processes have British links,' said Charles Abugre, Christian Aid's head of
policy.
'Only last week, the Commission for Africa called for an immediate doubling
of aid to Africa to help it meet the Millennium Development Goals. And yet
here is a potential source of revenue that even the most responsible governments
are doing little to tap into.'
Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) has no patience for the idle rich.
Speaking on the House floor last week during debate over the estate-tax legislation,
he said the bill “should be more accurately described as the American
Idle Act, I-D-L-E, because it relieves the children of billionaires and multi-multi-millionaires
of over one-quarter of a trillion dollars in estate taxes in just five years
starting in 2013.”
But he wasn’t through with the colorful rhetoric. “The Bible says
it is easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich
man to get to heaven,” he said. “Here in Washington, the superrich
ride elephants, and some donkeys, to get to their alabaster heaven where they
pay no taxes.”
