by Arjun Walia, Collective Evolution:

• The Facts:A Michigan State University economist teamed up with multiple researchers, including Catherine Austin Fitts, former assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development and they found trillions of unaccounted for dollars missing from housing & D.O.D


• Reflect On:Do we really live in a world with honest government transparency? How can we claim to be living in a democracy when trillions of dollars are being spent on projects that nobody has any idea about? What is going on here?

The very word “secrecy” is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. There is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment. That I do not intend to permit to the extent that it is in my control. – JFK

If you suggested to someone a decade ago that secrecy dominates our world, and that transparency on a larger scale really doesn’t exist at all, not many would take you seriously. We, the public, have been kept inside a bubble, and outside that bubble exists a “breakaway civilization,” a term coined by author and historian Richard Dolan to describe the vast amount of knowledge in the form of science, technology, history, etc that’s been amassed by the military industrial complex.

Everything in this area is simply deemed “classified,” receiving absolutely no oversight from Congress. They’re referred to as deep black projects that in 2008 ex-Canadian Defence Minister Paul Hellyer described as projects that the “Commander in Chief has no idea about.”

This information is now coming to light, and it received even more attention when last year, a Michigan State University economist, working with one former government official and multiple graduate students discovered that $21 trillion of “unauthorized” spending had occurred within the Department of Defense and Housing and Urban Development. This is only for the years 1998-2015

For their research, the team used several government websites and made inquiries to multiple U.S. agencies. Much of the time they received no response and the Office of the Inspector General even disabled links to all key documents that revealed unsupported spending, according to the team.

Unfortunately for them, the researchers downloaded and stored the documents, and thus they made their way into the public domain. Regardless, many people still haven’t heard about it.

The name of the Economist from Michigan State is Mark Skidmore. He was sparked to do something when Catherine Austin Fitts, former assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development (where all the missing money is from, including the D.O.D)  referred to a report that indicated the Army had $6.5 trillion in unsupported adjustments and spending, in the 2015 fiscal year.

Given the Army’s $122 billion budget, that meant unsupported adjustments were 54 times spending authorized by Congress. Typically, such adjustments in public budgets are only a small fraction of authorized spending….Skidmore thought Fitts had made a mistake. “Maybe she meant $6.5 billion and not $6.5 trillion,” he said. “So I found the report myself and sure enough it was $6.5 trillion.” (source)

Fitts was one of the people involved with Skidmore’s research, they worked together, and found documents indicating a total of $20 trillion of undocumented adjustments had been made, from 1998 t0 2015, as mentioned above. The original government documents and a report describing the issue can be found here.)

They also recently provided an update, as when this information went public, the Pentagon claimed that they were going to do an internal audit.

Update As of September 2018

Several months after beginning the audit, recommendations of the Federal Accounting Standards Board were accepted by the government which stopped the process. https://fas.org/sgp/news/2018/07/fasab-review.pdf (see page 3 for a summary).

Fitts explains how “the statement allows government officials to misstate and move funds around to hide expenditures if it is deemed necessary for national security purposes, and the rule applies to all agencies, not just the black budget.” She then shares an excerpt from the report:

This Statement permits modifications that do not affect the net results of operations or net position. In addition, this Statement allows a component reporting entity to be excluded from one reporting entity and consolidated into another reporting entity, and the effect of the modification may change the net results of operations and/or net position.

Fitts then makes another point that needs to be emphasized, one that I’ve been writing about for years, and it’s the fact that only a few people with high-level security clearances have the authority to determine what exactly a national security issue is. These days, there is so much secrecy in our world that ‘national security’ has simply become a term used to justify extreme and unethical secrecy. This secrecy ultimately benefits a select powerful few, and keeps the dollars rolling into their pockets.

No one but these few people would ever know that expenditures on activity A are hiding in a completely different area of government. What good is an independent audit if authorities are allowed to move expenditures around with no transparency? How can one conduct an evaluation of any portion of the federal budget under such an arrangement? How is this policy in compliance with financial reporting laws or Constitutional requirements for reporting on government spending to the citizens of the United States? -Fitts explains.

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