Throughout history, the elite have always acted the same. When they believe a government to be doomed their final official acts are to rob the treasury for their own profit and advantage. It happened in Rome, Constantinople, in France leading to the French Revolution, up through World War II when the Nazis sent gold and other resources to safe areas in South America where they could hide after the war. But it did not end in World War II, other governments have fallen in Iran, the Philippines, and many others, and in each case, high-level actors in government participated in robbing the treasury through “lucrative contracts” or other money-laundering schemes. Please understand this is rarely so obvious as paying themselves money. Instead, they pass out contracts or other benefits to friends and/or companies that they own. All of which amounts to enriching themselves from the taxes of the citizens of the nation.
You must be clear on one thing. Every dollar the government spends has been taken from you or from the promise of taxes to be paid by your children or grandchildren. This corruption gets worse when the elite have decided the government is already so far in the hole that it will never work its way out. At that point, they launch a spending spree of money that has a dizzying array of paths that flow out from the government and, amazingly and subtly back into their own pockets. I believe this is what we are seeing today with the US Government and the trillion-dollar deficits that are increasing far beyond what we can effectively repay.
If you think that I am overstating the issue or are so naive as to believe that “it can’t happen here” I give you this quote from Marjorie Taylor Greene that she recently said in an interview:
“ …government is completely corrupt, and I don’t say that lightly. It is a serious problem, and my eyes have been open to it actually, serving in Congress.” – Marjorie Taylor Greene, (R-GA)
And she is not the only Congresswoman or Senator who has made such an observation. Corruption is being reported everywhere from the FBI, ATF, Justice Department, and nearly every agency of government but those are issues for other blogs. Just looking at financial corruption this blog post had grown to nine pages of notes which I cannot include here and maintain brevity. Let alone get into the corruption of our law enforcement and other executive agencies. (I will post articles at the end that contains some of the information I have used in this article. Resources like Transparency International, the US Government, and various news sources all contributed to this article).
Speaking of Transparency International their advocacy director for the US office cited “a broader “decay” in US Political institutions as a major contributor to the country’s declining [confidence] rating.” Noting that “confidence in U.S. elections has been undercut by disinformation and record-setting amounts of untraceable money.”
Twice the amount of money was spent in 2020 as in 2016 and more was promised as a way of garnering votes (for instance Biden promised 10,000 dollars to every student in America. Money that they would never see. Older people knew that money would never materialize but, as too often happens, people in their teens and early twenties are too easily duped by illicit promises. It is worse today when youth don’t even have a working knowledge of how government decisions are made or that spending decisions are initiated by the House of Representatives and not the President.
“Second, and increasingly important, are these series of really bombshell exposés by media outlets that are demonstrating how much dirty money is flowing into the United States’ financial system,” he said, referencing a joint investigation published by BuzzFeed News and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists last year that revealed how major banks had knowingly allowed trillions of dollars of suspect financial transactions to go ahead, enabling drug kingpins, kleptocrats, and terrorists to move corrupt cash around the world. The 2020 index also revealed how global corruption has hamstrung countries’ abilities to protect public health and their economies during the pandemic. In the United States, there have been repeated reports of loans issued under the Payment Protection Program, intended to support small businesses, flowing to not-so-small businesses: Among the beneficiaries are defense contractors, the international fast food chain Shake Shack, and the Los Angeles Lakers.” We saw how although congress approved a great deal of money for small businesses the large corporations who maintained their lobbyists in Washington all knew about the money long before it was even announced and by the time the small businesses heard of it through normal channels most of the money was gone to the big businesses whose lawyers had filled out and prepared their own requests for relief money before the announcements were even made.
“COVID-19 is not just a health and economic crisis. It’s a corruption crisis. And one that we’re currently failing to manage,” said Delia Ferreira Rubio, the chair of Transparency International.
The continued citing that: “Another side effect of the pandemic is that authoritarian governments have seized on it as an excuse to silence critics, curtail civil liberties, and increase surveillance. The report found that high levels of corruption closely correlated with a reliance on undemocratic methods to control the pandemic. The Philippines, which scored 34 out of 100, saw one of the longest and strictest lockdowns early on in the pandemic, as President Rodrigo Duterte warned the police would “shoot … dead” people who violated the restrictions.” Now before you congratulate yourselves that “it’s not that bad here” remember you are comparing the situation in the United States to what some have called a “ruthless dictator.” Is that the land of the free and the home of the brave when, to look good, we must be compared with such a corrupt leader?
Those are just a couple of examples of corruption around Covid-19 when others abound and are being exposed weekly in the Pfizer documents. But let’s move to the international arena where a new report: “Corruption in Conflict: Lessons from the U.S. Experience in Afghanistan” on how the US government knew of the risks of corruption in Afghanistan and the effectiveness (or lack thereof,) in their program with 5 main findings: 1) corruption undermined the US mission spreading grievances against the Afghan government and material support that was deflected to the Taliban; 2) tens of billions of American dollars into the Afghan economy was governed by “flawed oversight and contracting practices” and “partnering with malign power-brokers”; 3) the US was slow to recognize the problem; 4) when it did recognize the depth of corruption “security and political goals” were considered more important than the corruption; and, 5) success only occurred “in the absence of sustained Afghan and US political commitment.”
According to the government, about 113.1 billion was appropriated for Afghanistan since 2002 and the report concluded that in Afghanistan “Corruption is the system of governance.” It was to this corrupt den of thieves that the Biden administration, abandoned our allies overnight and left pallets full of US dollars, and 10s of billions of dollars of US equipment, weapons, and ammunition at a time when average Americans are struggling to pay for fuel, food, and utilities. And I have to ask, were there people in the government who got kickbacks for such graft or was our incompetence genuine?
Again, I remind you that every one of these dollars came from our taxes. Perhaps you had better things to do with your money than waste it in these waves of corruption because every dollar that was so wasted is one less than you had in your own pocket. And we continue to pay our government so that it can continue to waste our tax dollars while we struggle to pay our bills and heat our homes.
But Afghanistan is money wasted then, what about now?
Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) said, in a podcast with Lisa Boothe, that the financial support America provides to Ukraine looks very much “like money laundering schemes,” and that “money supposedly” destined for Ukrainians ends up in the pockets of “non-profits and NGOs” that are often run by people close to the politicians in Washington.
“They want to get $40 billion to Ukraine and you have these $40 billion on top of the money that have already been given. That brings it to $53 billion. That is over two thirds of the State Department’s entire budget for the year,” and, more often than not, she states, that the money is going to fund NGO’s operated by politicians’ “families and friends…It is basically like money laundering schemes.”
She is not the only one to accuse the government of hypocrisy in its claims to help the people of Ukraine as I watched a video by VICE that exposed that whatever money we were sending to Ukraine did not seem to be getting to the soldiers on the front line or the people whose homes had been destroyed. But it is not only MTG that is concerned, Rand Paul the Senator from Kentucky, and others voted No on the aid package and blocked the vote demanding that a special inspector general be appointed to monitor how the aid package is spent. He also noted that this would bring aid to Ukraine up to 60 billion which is nearly as much as Russia spends annually for its ENTIRE defense budget. So where is all this money going?
Greene voted twice against sending all this aid to Ukraine along with 56 other Republican Representatives but the vote was 368-57 to send our tax dollars to the Ukrainian government and NGOs. Note that I did NOT say they were sending it to help the people of Ukraine.
Our tax dollars are just like one big slush fund for criminal operations and it needs to end. – Marjorie Taylor Greene.
As our corrupt government plans to send $150 million overseas for global agriculture US farmers are on the verge of going out of business. Record numbers of animals were slaughtered this year as ranchers and farmers could not afford to feed them over the winter. That means that it will take years to rebuild the livestock and meat supply in this country at a time when food prices have already doubled. All across the board farmers and ranchers are losing money but we are sending money that could help them overseas. Oh, we are helping some here. Ads all over youtube tout Biden’s relief package that is paying 600$ or even 1000$ to people to “help them with their bills” but nowhere in that ad does it mention that the government is stealing much more money from its citizens and the future than it is giving us back. And people are tricked into thinking these checks are helping when they are only hurrying the collapse of our government and the dollar.
The oligarchs seem to have decided that our government is not worth saving because they are robbing the treasury to make themselves richer without regard for what we will do to get out of the pit they are putting us in. There is more but I have already gone to far. The amount of our National Debt has grown every year since 1957 and is pushing 3 trillion dollars (and more by some estimates.)
When France could no longer pay even the interest on its bank loans the people got so fed up with their endless taxes that the French Revolution and the Storming of the Bastille was the result. Hopefully, Americans will wake up and oust these corrupt criminals before we become so angry we turn to solutions like “madame guillotine.”
I haven’t even touched on the Heritage Foundations article on government waste which is listed below and includes (among other things,) the Commerce Department losing 1,137 computers with the personal data of American Citizens in them and some other articles that I used for sources for today’s blog.
But I think I have written enough for today, although this is barely even the tip of the iceberg about how our politicians, bureaucrats, oligarchs, robber barons, human traffickers, and banksters are all getting rich off our tax dollars. But don’t worry. They will get more money this April ‘23 when we do our taxes for 2022.
https://www.heritage.org/budget-and-spending/report/50-examples-government-waste
https://www.rt.com/news/555644-us-aid-ukraine-money-laundering/
https://www.rt.com/usa/359352-corruption-and-waste-in-afghanistan/