It All Started With Dan Berrigan, S.J.-- A Conversation About
Dan's Life and Witness on the 36th Anniversary of
the Plowshares 8 Action with John Schuchardt (Co-founder of the
House of Peace, Ipswich, MA) on Fri., Sept. 9 at 7:30 PM at Dorothy
Day Catholic Worker, 503 Rock Creek Church Rd. NW, WDC 20010.
Contact Dorothy Day Catholic Worker at 202-882-9649 or artlaffin@hotmail.com.
On Sept. 9, 1980, eight peacemakers, including
Dan Berrigan and John Schuchardt, entered the General Electric
plant in King of Prussia, PA and hammered and poured blood on nose cones
of the Mark 12A nuclear warhead, thereby enfleshing the biblical prophesy of "beating
swords into plowshares."(Is. 2: 1-4) This first "plowshares"
action has inspired nearly 100 similar actions in the U.S. and abroad.
Dan Berrigan, renowned prophet and one of the most
influential peacemakers of our time, was a Jesuit priest, poet, teacher
and author of over 50 books, who died on April 30, 2016 at the
age of 94. John will share about how Dan profoundly influenced his life.
In 1990, John and his wife, Carrie, founded the House of Peace, a small
community in Ipswich, Massachusetts, which offers spiritual and physical
shelter to victims of war in companionship with some adults with special
needs. During these last 26 years over 400 refugees from over 30 countries have
been received in the healing embrace of the House of Peace which gives
supportive assistance for resettlement. In recent years children with serious
war injuries who come with a parent to receive medical treatment at Boston
hospitals also receive hospitality at the House of Peace.
Stuart W. Bowen Jr., left, a special inspector general who examined corruption and waste in Iraq. (photo: Christoph Banger/NYT)
Ignoring
the Pentagon's Multi-Trillion-Dollar Accounting Error
By Dave Lindorff, FAIR
05 September 16
In
2014, the New York Times (10/12/14) ran a major
investigative piece by reporter James Risen about several billion dollars gone
missing, part of a shipment of pallets of $12 billion–$14 billion in C-notes
that had been flown from the Federal Reserve into Iraq over a period of a year
and a half in an effort to kickstart the Iraqi economy following the 2003 US
invasion. Risen reported that about $1.5 billion of the cash, somehow stolen,
had been discovered in a bunker in Lebanon by a special inspector general
appointed to investigate corruption in the US occupation of Iraq. The article
got front-page play.
Earlier
that same year, the Washington Post (4/7/14) ran a story
reporting the US State Department inspector general’s finding that during
Hillary Clinton’s years as secretary, the State Department had lost records for
or misreported some $6 billion in government contracts. (State claimed the
money was not lost, just not accounted for.)
These
stories are basic Journalism 101, the kind of bread-and-butter reporting on
government that one expects from a major news organization. So how to explain
that neither of these prestigious and influential newspapers—or practically any
of the corporate media in the US, for that matter—bothered to mention it when
the Pentagon’s inspector general this year issued a report blasting the US Army for misreporting
$6.5 trillion (that’s not a typo; it’s trillion with a T) as its spending total
for the 2015 fiscal year.
Now,
clearly that number cannot be correct, since the entire Pentagon budget for
2015 was a little over $600 billion, or less than 10 percent of what the Army
was saying it had spent.
Even
if this were just an outrageous accounting error, it would certainly seem to
merit a news article. But the IG’s office did not see it as a laughing matter.
The 63-page report, released July 26 at the direction of Principal Deputy
Inspector General Glenn A. Fine (the last IG left office in January and hasn’t
been replaced), concludes:
The
Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army (Financial Management &
Comptroller) (OASA[FM&C]) and the Defense Finance and Accounting Service
Indianapolis (DFAS Indianapolis) did not adequately support $6.5 trillion in
year-end JV adjustments made to AGF data during FY 2015 financial statement
compilation. The unsupported JV adjustments occurred because OASA(FM&C) and
DFAS Indianapolis did not prioritize correcting the system deficiencies that
caused errors resulting in JV adjustments, and did not provide sufficient
guidance for supporting system‑generated adjustments.
In
addition, DFAS Indianapolis did not document or support why the Defense
Departmental Reporting System‑Budgetary (DDRS-B), a budgetary reporting system,
removed at least 16,513 of 1.3 million records during third quarter FY 2015.
This occurred because DFAS Indianapolis did not have detailed documentation
describing the DDRS-B import process or have accurate or complete system
reports.
As a
result, the data used to prepare the FY 2015 AGF third quarter and year-end
financial statements were unreliable and lacked an adequate audit trail.
Furthermore, DoD and Army managers could not rely on the data in their
accounting systems when making management and resource decisions.
There’s
a lot of jargon and a lot of use of DOD acronyms in there, but the key point
that makes this story newsworthy is the last sentence (as well as the alarming
bit about 16,500 missing records). If the Army is making up numbers—and that’s
exactly what “unsupported adjustments” means to an accountant—then nobody, not
a reporter, not a congressional oversight committee, not even an inspector
general, can tell what allocated funds are actually being spent on, where the
money really went, whether programs are cost-effective, or even whether funds
were misused or stolen. And we’re talking about the single biggest department
in the US government, which accounts for more than one-half of all
discretionary federal spending each year.
When I
called the Pentagon’s public affairs office for a response to the IG’s report,
it was a week in coming. Finally Bridget Serchak, chief of public affairs for the
DOD Office of Inspector General, emailed me this:
For clarification, these numbers reflect changes made in Fiscal
Year 2015…. These adjustments do not adjust the budget amount for the Army. The
dollar amounts are possible because adjustments are made to the Army General
Fund financial statement data throughout the compilation process for various
reasons such as correcting errors, reclassifying amounts and reconciling
balances between systems. The general ledger data that posts to a financial
statement line can be adjusted for more than the actual reported value of the
line. For example, there was a net unsupported adjustment of $99.8 billion made
to the $0.2 billion balance reported for Accounts Receivable.
Remember,
this is just a report on the Army’s budget. It turns out that the same kind of
indecipherable, fantastical and unauditable accounting is being done by the
Navy, the Air Force and the Marines.
One
news outfit that did report on this scandal is Reuters. Journalist
Scot J. Paltrow first reported on the DOD’s doctored ledgers and inscrutable
accounting in 2013 in a series of stories that culminated in an article
published on November 18, 2013, headlined “Special Report: The Pentagon’s
Doctored Ledgers Conceal Epic Waste.”
Paltrow
also wrote a report on the latest IG’s report, published by Reuters on
August 19, headlined “US Army Fudged Its Accounts by
Trillions of Dollars, Auditor Finds.”
Where
the rest of the media took no notice of the Pentagon IG’s scathing report,
preferring to focus instead on the report of another IG over at the State Department
who had investigated Democratic presidential candidate and former Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton’s improper and illegal use of a private server in her
home to handle her official State Department business, Paltrow homed in on the
reason this is a big story. He went to a major Defense Department critic to
explain:
“Where
is the money going? Nobody knows,” said Franklin Spinney, a retired military
analyst for the Pentagon and critic of Defense Department planning.
The
significance of the accounting problem goes beyond mere concern for balancing
books, Spinney said. Both presidential candidates have called for increasing
defense spending amid current global tension.
An
accurate accounting could reveal deeper problems in how the Defense Department
spends its money. Its 2016 budget is $573 billion, more than half of the annual
budget appropriated by Congress.
The
thing is, the Pentagon has been at this dodgy game for decades. In 1996,
Congress passed a law requiring all federal agencies to comply with federal
accounting standards, to produce budgets that are auditable and to submit an
audit each year. At this point, two decades later, the Pentagon has yet to
comply with that law, and therefore cannot be audited.
It is
the only federal agency that is not complying or, the IG’s report suggests,
even trying to comply.
One
would think that would be newsworthy, but apparently for the major newsrooms of
the US, not so much.
Edward
Herman, noted media critic and co-author with Noam Chomsky of the book Manufacturing
Consent, says the media love to report on Pentagon waste—things like the
epic cost overruns on the F-35 boondoggle that still can’t fly in combat or a
$600 toilet seat. That kind of story, he says “is something the media and
public grasp easily.”
Such reporting, he argues, “shows the Pentagon makes
mistakes but not that it is massively looting the public coffers.” It also
“shows that the media is on the alert in protecting the public interest.”
Herman
says, “Repeated failure to report on a refusal by the Pentagon to allow
an audit represents a major media failure, and one that is almost surely
very costly to the general public.” He adds:
The failure to take up this important story reflects, at a
deeper level, the power of the Pentagon and the unwillingness of the media or
politicians to challenge it. Only power and the derived conflicts of interest
can explain this remarkable ability of the Pentagon to avoid a legally required
audit.
Requests
for comment from the New York Times and the Washington
Post about their non-coverage of this $6.5-trillion Pentagon scandal
went unanswered as of press time.
C 2015 Reader Supported News
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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