This will be a post in two parts. First, the “Stimulus”.
It has long annoyed me that so little attention has been paid publicly to the patent farce of the dispersal of Stimulus funds. BILLIONS of dollars have been sent to non-existent Congressional Districts, and non-existent Zip Codes. For reasons known only to them, New Mexico Watchdog has taken down the description of the process they got from Ed Pound, El Jefe of the Stimulus accounting program. What he said was this:
Recipients file their reports on a password-protected site. That information is then relayed to officials who oversee the recovery.gov website to post, Pound said. Unless an egregious error is noted, Pound said they post the information exactly as it is received.
“Our job is data integrity, not data quality,” he said.
On my reading, this would seem to indicate a check—actual or virtual—is created by someone, deposited by someone, then self-reported. You get the money, then type in whatever information you want. That information is then duly relayed by the [bureaucrats]to the taxpayers, as if they had done their job.
This system, quite obviously, is open to fraud. If you are plugged in, you get money wired to you, your buddy Twitters you a password, you log in, then you type in anything that sounds plausible. Can we not suppose that legitimate recipients are cognisant of their district and zip code, meaning that errors of this quantity cannot be random? We are talking about amounts equal to the annual revenues of large multi-national corporations.
And according to their chief spokesperson, the very agency tasked with monitoring the money is in essence saying that if people cheat, they will not be caught. Once the money is gone, it’s gone.
Let us take this fact, and add it to the current Middle East situation generally. How would you get money from here to secret agents in, say, Egypt? Simple: you set up a front company supposedly doing “Stimulus” work, with one of your guys. They get a check which they claim was for the 22nd District of New Mexico. It’s “only” for $10 million, so nobody really cares anyway.
Your recipient is plugged into the Hawala system, and the money goes to agents in 6 countries. This is categorically not impossible. I have been arguing for some time that that money might just as easily have gone to radical groups in the U.S.
Are these uprisings random? If so, why so many, and all at once? The status quo in the Middle East has been much the same for the last thousand years. One greedy SOB has taken the place of another. Some have been more cruel than others, but democracy has never been seriously considered. Democracy has, however, long been a code word used by Leftists for tyranny. It plays well in the all-too-compliant Western media, and as long as you keep using the right words, you can kill innocent people in the name of freedom, jail innocent people people in the name of justice, and usurp power for an unelected elite in the name of “democracy”.
Taken as a whole, does this situation not feel a lot more like a Socialist Summer of Rage? Like activists have been going around, putting up posters, inflaming sentiment in public speeches and COMMUNITY ORGANIZING?
We read the Muslim Brotherhood initially did not back the protests. They weren’t sure what they were about. Is it not equally plausible that their agents set the whole thing in motion, and stayed publicly on the side-lines so as to not make their role obvious to all?
I am of course talking about treason here, on the part of Obama and his cohort, but why not? The man is plainly a radical, and ALL of these nations would on his accounting be the victims of Western Imperialism. We have kept many of these petty tyrants in power, largely to keep even worse tyrants from seizing power. Case in point: Iran. No rational human being can even BEGIN to argue that ordinary Iranians are better off under the Mullahs than the Shah. He only persecuted radicals who wanted to overthrow him. As it happens, his fear of a coup was quite justified. The Mullahs persecute, torture, and kill anyone who differs from them ideologically AT ALL.
Whenever you see these sorts of coups, you can run the numbers. Without looking it up, I can tell you–and someone feel free to prove me wrong–that the Shah killed or tortured say 200 people in the decade before losing his throne. The Revolutionary Guards, guaranteed, did that in their first six months in power. That is how these things always work. Does anyone seriously think the Shah’s torture chambers were closed, or that some amorphous decency of “the people” restrained them from using it to support THEIR AUTOCRACY? To be clear: the SAME FORM OF GOVERNMENT THEY CLAIMED TO ABHOR.
These protests in Egypt are not at all about democracy. When you look at leftist rabble-rousers, they will say ANYTHING they have to to get themselves installed in power. They then bide their time, let the dust settle, get the army and police under control, then take back EVERYTHING they offered, and more.
It is my considered feeling that at some point in the future, assuming our democracy survives, which I think likely, we will have just cause to look at large segments of our intelligence community–both civilian and military–with unrestrained contempt. All too often, they don’t do their jobs, in my opinion. They are shackled by political correctness, and sometimes just politics. Things are going on that they should know about. No excuses. It doesn’t matter who the Commander in Chief is. Get it done.
To Congress: a starting point is a THOROUGH, top down audit of the Stimulus. No more checks go out until the past checks are accounted for. And if they can’t account for the money, and if it is in the billions, we could impeach and remove Obama for GROSS negligence and dereliction of duty. You cannot lose BILLIONS without consequence. In the end, he is where buck stops. This is his responsibility.