The Pentagon's $21 Trillion Con Game

Some of you may recall a few weeks ago, newly elected Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made a splash, talking about $21 trillion in misappropriated Pentagon money, which she claimed was enough to take care of Medicare for all. She based her conclusions on the misreading of an article in the Nation by investigative reporter, Dave Lindorff.

It’s too bad, because her misreading took the focus away from what the story did say about the Defense Department’s shady and possibly unconstitutional budgeting practices and the massive amount of fraud that has now been uncovered. What the story did detail is how the Pentagon badly failed its audit that it has resisted for decades, and that $21 trillion of financial transactions on both sides of the ledger between 1998 and 2015 could not be accounted for.  This is the story that award-winning investigative reporter Dave Lindorff writes in"The Pentagon's Massive Accounting Fraud Exposed," in a recent issue of The Nation.

My WhoWhatWhy.org conversation with Dave Lindorff:

If you thought the current VA scandal was bad...listen to this!

Today we have an all volunteer military. When young men and woman join the Marine Corps, they do so to serve their country. They know full well they the work may put them in harms way. That a bullet, or a grenade, or an IED might cut their life short, at any time. What none of them expect is to be killed or maimed by drinking water.

Yet that is exactly what has happened to Marines at the historic Camp Lejeune facility in North Carolina. As many as a million people connected with the base were exposed to highly toxic and contaminated well water. What the military and government has done about it, is truly a crime.

Long time journalist Mike Magner takes us into the human tragedy of the government and Pentagon inaction in A Trust Betrayed: The Untold Story of Camp Lejeune and the Poisoning of Generations of Marines and Their Families.

My conversation with Mike Magner: