This Can't Be Happening!

In late 2014, the New York Times ran a major investigative piece by reporter James Risen about several billion dollars gone missing, part of a shipment of pallets of $12–$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 Postran 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…
 

This article by DAVE LINDORFF appears on the website of the media criticism organization Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, and can be read in full by going to: FAIR.org

What are we running from?
Where are we going?
 
My feet hurt, but I don’t have time to rub them
Or cool them in a stream.
Like a deer,
Leaping old barbed wire, and new
 
I bound over smoldering fires
Hotspots,
Always cautious, always anxious for the herd.
I’m like an old dog
 
Showing that I still have it in me
To run and run and run.
Always, always away.
I can barely see the city rushing past.
 
I have wings on my feet.
My sight skims over the bones of things.
I see too much.
I smell the fear . . .
 
But I keep running.
I see the future like a slow-motion wave
Before which I am flying,
Before the crash and foam.
 
What message am I carrying
From god to impotent god?
What silver-winged flight have I achieved
Leaping from mist-draped ledge to fog to cloud?

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I was reading the latest smug piece by New York Times columnist Timothy Egan, when I came across the most amusing example of being what you’re criticizing.

Egan, in a piece titled “The Dumbed Down Democracy,” bemoaned the spreading ignorance of the American electorate.

Not only are 10 percent of Americans illiterate, Egan groaned. They’re also “politically illiterate.” Expressing mock astonishment, he wrote, “I give you Texas. A recent survey of Donald Trump supporters there found that 40 percent of them believe that Acorn will steal the upcoming election.”

He goes on: “Acorn? News flash: That community-organizing group has been out of existence for six years. Acorn is gone, disbanded. dead. It can no more steal an election than Donald Trump can pole vault over his Mexican wall.”

In Egan’s view, it’s those Trump voters who are ignoramuses.

Egan goes on: “We know that at least 30 million American adults cannot read. But the current presidential election may yet prove that an even bigger part of the citizenry is politically illiterate — and functional. Which is to say, they will vote despite being unable to accept basic facts needed to process this American life.”

Example?

Well, Egan says, “If Trump supporters knew that illegal immigration peaked in 2007, or that violent crime has been on a steady downward spiral nationwide for more than 20 years, they would scoff when Trump says Mexican rapists are surging across the border and crime is out of control.”

Maybe he’s right (though I’ve heard supposedly well-educated college grads tell me they believe the same stuff), but then Egan goes on to write: “If more than 16 percent of Americans could locate Ukraine on a map, it would have been a Really Big Deal when Trump said that Russia was not going to invade it — two years after they had, in fact, invaded it.”

I don’t know what knowing that Ukraine shares a long border with Russia has to do with knowing Russia supposedly invaded the place in 2014 (not having a remotely shared border certainly didn’t stop the US from invading Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya or Syria), but in any case, Russia never invaded Ukraine. Only in the New York Times or similarly compromised corporate media would you read such bullshit propaganda.

The NY Times, in April 2014, ran this photo allegedly showing Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine, based on unverified claims by the Kiev post-coup government. The image was later shown to have been an old photo taken in Russia, not Ukraine, and the paper’s ombudswoman announced it was a 2013 photo that had been taken in Russia.
 

Even in politics, where alarming perversions too often parade as acceptable standards, it is pretty astounding for a politician to assert that inadvertent error is the reason for his failure to report receipt of gifts and other free items valued at $160,050 over a five-year period.

Yet, that is the stance Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams is taking after he recently filed belated annual financial disclosure forms listing nearly ninety items he received, including luxury vacations, cash, gift cards, tickets to professional sporting events and a Rolex watch that Williams valued at $6,500.

This oops-I-forgot-to-file-the-required-forms claim comes from a man who once served as Philadelphia’s Inspector General, a post tasked with pursuing unethical conduct and corruption. Williams clearly knew he was required to complete those disclosure forms listing all gifts he received on an annual basis.

DA Seth Williams (r) with Philly police union president
 

The FBI and other federal enforcement authorities are now examining Williams’ receipt of those gifts plus allegations about misuse of his campaign funds and irregularities at a non-profit organization created by Williams, a Democrat. Federal probes of Williams’ activities began months before his belated ethics disclosure filings.

Williams, elected as Philadelphia’s first African-American District Attorney in November 2009, entered office enjoying high public support. Most Philadelphians expected he would fulfill his campaign promises to end the unjust practices of his predecessor Lynn Abraham, who was an ardent death penalty advocate who virtually ignored abuses by police ranging from perjury to brutality.

Hampton — Recently, while selecting the appropriate worn and muddy clothes for yard work, I chose a mostly-broken belt that a sensible person would have tossed long ago. To me, however, there was still a shred of usefulness in it so I kept it to occupy the lowest rung of my very short wardrobe ladder. The belt had problems; the holes for the various sizes became seriously enlarged after the first few uses making it barely functional and quite unattractive. As I cinched it, I felt something give, only to discover that one of the two screws that held the buckle to the belt tore through the cheap belt material rendering it now, even to me, totally useless. As I grumbled and inspected the problem, I noticed the brand name proudly displayed on the buckle: Donald J. Trump.

Trump belt bites the dust a week after purchase (photo by Elizabeth Lindorff)
 

While I periodically have written commentaries dissecting and pillorying news articles in the New York Times to expose their bias, hypocrisy half-truths and lies, I generally ignore their editorials since these are overtly opinions of the management, and one expects them to display the elitist and neo-liberal perspective of the paper’s publisher and senior editors.

That said, the August 17 editorial about Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who has spent four harrowing years trapped in the apartment-sized Ecuadoran embassy thanks to a trumped-up and thoroughly discredited political rape “investigation” by a politically driven Swedish prosecutor and a complicit right-wing British government, moves far beyond even the routine rampant bias and distortion of a Times editorial into misrepresentation and character assassination. As such it cries out for criticism.

Headlined “A Break in the Assange Saga,” the editorial starts off with the flat-out lie that “Ecuador and Sweden finally agreed last week that Swedish prosecutors could question Julian Assange at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London where he has been holed up since 2012.”

The casual reader fed only corporate media stories about this case might logically assume from that lead that such an interview has been held up by a disagreement of some kind between Ecuador and Sweden. In fact, Ecuador and Assange and his attorneys have stated their willingness to allow Swedish prosecutors to come to London and interview Assange in the safety of their embassy for several years now. The prosecutor in Sweden, Marianne Nye, who has been pursuing Assange all that time like Ahab after his whale, has not only never taken up that offer, but by her refusal to go to London in all this time, demanding instead Assange’s enforced presence in Stockholm, has allowed any possible rape charges, if any were even appropriate, to pass the statute of limitations. The paper doesn’t mention this. Nor does the editorial mention that the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Working Group on Arbitrary Detention last February found that Assange is effectively being held in arbitrary detention by the UK and Swedish governments, and called for his release, and for the lifting of British government threats to arrest him and extradite him if he leaves the safety of the embassy.

Julian Assange remains holed up in the Ecuador embassy in London fearing extradition to the US on an espionage charge
 

UPDATE: A week after this article was originally written and posted on this site, Bridget Serchak, chief of public affairs at the Pentagon’s Office of General Inspector, sent us the following supposed explanation of the enormous unaccountable and unauditable 2015 expenditure budget of the US Army, as reported on below. Her explanation of why that budget is somehow stated as being nearly double the entire FY 2015 budget of $3.8 trillion is as follows:
 

“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”
 

We will let this obtuse “explanation” stand. Clearly, even if Congress — or someone in Congress — wanted to police the country’s military and see what it is actually doing with the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars it receives and spends each year, they would find it totally impossible to do so, with this kind of “accounting” going on. I took a semester of managerial accounting at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business during a journalism fellowship program once, and I cannot begin to understand what they’re saying here. No doubt that’s the object.
 

What if the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services were to report that $6.5 billion in spending by that federal agency was unaccounted for and untraceable? You can imagine the headlines, right? What if it was $65 billion? The headlines would be as big as for the first moon landing or for troops landing on Omaha Beach in World War II.

But how about a report by the Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General saying that the US Army had $6.5 trillion in unaccountable expenditures for which there is simply no paper trail? That is 6,500 billion dollars! Have you heard about that? Probably not. That damning report was issued back on July 26 — two whole weeks ago — but as of today it has not even been reported anywhere in the corporate media.

I took a long hike today through a local nature preserve. It was a humid 96° F with the heat index, thanks to the humidity making it feel like 110° — too hot to work on the stone re-pointing job I’m doing on our old stone house. I needed some nature, though, after spending the last few weeks reading and writing about our insane political situation, with Republican Donald Trump, a con artist posing as a fascist and denouncing minorities and immigrants and Hillary Clinton, a Democratic war-monger, corrupt and probably richer than Trump, posing as a people’s advocate.

Mexico-bound Monarch butterfly…but will the butterfly reserve still be there for it?
 

Wandering down a path into the woods and following a local stream, though, I found myself getting more troubled than before. These woods, where I’ve walked for years, used to be filled with myriad species of birds — water birds, hawks, songbirds and others, and insects — dragonflies, butterflies, bees and flies of all kinds, as well as frogs, turtles and snakes. I’d usually return from such walks to report having seen a Baltimore oriole, a blue heron, a garter or a water snake, a large snapping turtle or one or another kind of hawk. I wouldn’t even report on the butterflies, as they were myriad.

Today though, the forest was quiet. Occasionally I’d hear the sound of some unidentifiable bird, probably a starling or sparrow, but bird sounds were rare. Sightings too. I heard no cries from bluejays or crows, saw no hawks or waterbirds — not even mallard ducks, and heard no songbirds. I saw one small painted turtle sunning itself on a fallen tree in a dammed up part of the stream — a spot that used to be covered with turtles on a day like this. And I heard no frogs, which might explain the lack of any herons or other wading birds. The two creatures I did see were a deer (these apex mammals seem to have made the suburbs home, with no available predator except the automobile to diminish their numbers, and with grass and suburban flower gardens providing abundant food) and a beautiful solitary orange Monarch butterfly, which was flying with more purpose, in almost a straight line down the pathway, than I’ve ever seen a butterfly fly (perhaps it is on it’s lonely way to Mexico hoping to find a mate?). Other than that, there were almost no bugs too. That’s really scary, since bugs, besides pollinating plants, provide that basic protein source for most larger animals up the food chain. I had read that bugs of all kinds are in a dramatic decline all around the globe, and it certainly looks like it if they aren’t even pervasive in a nature preserve where there is no insecticide being used, where grass isn’t cut, and undergrowth is left alone.

I had noticed this decline earlier when we were up in the Catskills where we have a summer house. The streetlight in front of our property, which used to be enveloped in literally thousands of moths, flies and flying beetles during late spring and early summer months, to the delight of the brown bats that dove into the cloud again and again filling their bellies each night, these days is devoid of insects, which is astonishing and, when one thinks of it, terrifying.

 
 
Ok . . .
Ok, this is where I draw the line in the sand.
I don’t even know if this is true,
But I imagine it is.
 
It comes with a true-enough ring to it.
Turning dingoes into time-bombs,
Animals as bombs . . .
Is this really new?
 
Or am I just waking up from a dream
On the porch of a nursing home,
And I am gagging on my spittle
Because I’m dehydrated and
 
Because the sun just cleared the edge of the porch roof
And it is as if someone removed my blindfold
And I find myself bound to a stake
Facing five men pointing rifles at my heart.
 
And everything just came together for me,
In this dream about explosive dingoes.
I’m a Native American about to take a drink from a bottle
And I pour out the first sip to the earth for the ancestors and
 
When the liquid hits the ground it sends up a little puff of dust,
A little mushroom cloud and
Now I am a mother giving birth. I am my mother,
And I’m giving birth to myself.