By Fester
Some of my colleagues have already hit up the reporting on massive unaccountabilities in US spending in Iraq. BJ noted that it is absurdist theatre for accountants:
Controls, the saying goes, are there to keep honest people honest. Without them, nearly everyone strays, and the fact that oversight and spending controls have been allowed to lapse in just about every government function is one of the most pervasive legacies the Bush administration is going to leave the American people.
The highly knowledgable and respected budget analyst, Stan Collender, is looking at these stories and proclaiming a general financial scandal on the order of Credit Mobilier or Teapot Dome. The amount of money involved makes most political scandals, including the $90,000 frozen cash found in Rep. Jefferson's (D-LA) freezer scandal and Jack Abramoff, look like mere pikers:
But this story from Friday's Washington Post, which talks about $15 billion in spending on Iraq that can't be accounted for properly, or in some cases at all, shows that the other stage of federal budgeting -- implementation -- is similarly broken, not working properly, and...well...you certainly get this picture as well.
In fact, it appears as if virtually every procedure and law designed to prevent just this type of malfeasance was circumvented....
...The Pentagon's own inspector general confirmed that this lack of concern for procedural safeguards was blatant and commonplace. That makes it hard to come to any conclusion other than that they were ignored rather than expedited or poorly executed.
It's also hard to come to any conclusion other than that the spending of taxpayer funds in Iraq bordered on, or actually was, simple and straightforward corruption.
Given the magnitude of the spending involved, Iraq may be the Bush administration's contribution to the biggest public corruption scandals of all time like Boss Tweed in New York, James Michael Curley in Boston, and Teapot Dome.
Occams' Razor suggests that the Mayberry Machiavellis saw unaccountability as a feature and not a bug. Simplest explanation is that this $15,000,000,000 was a slush fund on the public tab and was intended as such. Minimizing accounting and record keeping requirements makes tracing the money damn near impossible.
Just because Milo Minderbinder Enterprises was (is still?) in charge shouldn't really be problem. Everybody has a share, right?
ReplyDeleteLike I said a week or so ago...
ReplyDeleteWhen you steal people blind, eventually they notice -- even stupid or uneducated people. Then they get pissed-off at you. And they stay pissed-off for a very long time, especially when you've taken the food from their table, and the gas from their cars.