How the Pentagon Floats to the Tax Payer the Massive, Tiered, Overheads of Major Corporations in the Military Industrial Complex
Chuck Spinney Photo Courtesy of Bill Moyers Interviews at "Now" on PBS http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_spinney.html
The
following article is an outstanding guest blog by Chuck Spinney on the
Project on Government Oversight (POGO) a venerable Washington D.C.
Non-Profit that has been around since they first assisted in bringing
attention to $640 toilet seats and $436 hammers of the 1980s.
Spinney spent 33 years at the Department of Defense including 26 years as a staff analyst, has testified before congress and won many awards for his straight forward critique of the Pentagon.
Rather than blowing whistles on classified data, Chuck has been respected for years for his straight-forward views and recommendations on how the Pentagon, our biggest government agency, has been managed. This is a man who has been there.
As Spinney points out the reasons for the astounding costs at the Pentagon are the same today - "It is all about allocating overhead spending by contractors in an unaccountable financial system"
Below is an extract from Chuck's article and a link to it at POGO:
POGO
"The fact that the Pentagon does not have an in-house capability to do audits is a reflection of its own priorities of delay and obfuscation. The Pentagon does not have a capability to make sense out of accounting systems after 20-plus years of failing to meet its legal obligations, because it has not assigned a high enough priority to the problem. Punt bluntly, the Pentagon does not want to have that capability.
The reason the Pentagon does not want auditable books is simple: the Military-Industrial-Congr
Spinney spent 33 years at the Department of Defense including 26 years as a staff analyst, has testified before congress and won many awards for his straight forward critique of the Pentagon.
Rather than blowing whistles on classified data, Chuck has been respected for years for his straight-forward views and recommendations on how the Pentagon, our biggest government agency, has been managed. This is a man who has been there.
As Spinney points out the reasons for the astounding costs at the Pentagon are the same today - "It is all about allocating overhead spending by contractors in an unaccountable financial system"
Below is an extract from Chuck's article and a link to it at POGO:
POGO
"The fact that the Pentagon does not have an in-house capability to do audits is a reflection of its own priorities of delay and obfuscation. The Pentagon does not have a capability to make sense out of accounting systems after 20-plus years of failing to meet its legal obligations, because it has not assigned a high enough priority to the problem. Punt bluntly, the Pentagon does not want to have that capability.
The reason the Pentagon does not want auditable books is simple: the Military-Industrial-Congr
