This past April, TCBH! founder Dave Lindorff won an “Izzy” award from the Park Center for Independent Media for a Nation cover story published last December exposing how the Pentagon has been brazenly and unconstitutionally lying for over two decades about its spending, and how Congress, unable to do any oversight because of this massive fraud, nonetheless submissively gives the Pentagon everything, and often even more than everything, it asks for each year for the next fiscal year’s budget.
That is, in fact, what just happened, with the US War Department getting $738 billion for FY 2020 — its biggest budget in constant dollars since WWII — despite the fact that Pentagon, just last November 15, had to report that it had failed the first outside audit of its financials since Congress demanded in 1990 that all federal agencies be auditable and audited (an audit it had been dragged to kicking and screaming after years of foot-dragging).
Here, in this just-aired interview on radio station KMUD, Dave points out how insane it is that Congress and the American people aren’t up in arms over this outrage, when we know both would be screaming if federal agencies like Health and Human Services, Labor, the EPA, Education, OSHA or any other number of agencies had failed an audit or committed the kind of fraud the Pentagon’s been committing for decades. MIlitary spending, after all, accounts for a staggering 57% of all federal discretionary spending each year, while those other agencies combined represent just a small fraction of that amount.
You can listen to the whole hour of the program, which begins with an interview of noted international law professor Francis Boyle talking about US warmongering in the Persian Gulf, or you can go straight to Lindorff’s segment starting at 31 minutes into the “Heroes and Patriots” program.