Clarifying Ocasio -Cortez' $21 Trillion Pentagon Waste Gaffe

WaPo columnist Aaron Blake (Monday) continues the Post's "Pinocchio" campaign against Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) now claiming she "has made a bigger splash than any freshman in the 116th Congress — in either the House or Senate." Quickly adding that:

"And a big reason is an often-overzealous conservative effort to knock her down a few pegs. The congresswoman has put on a PR master class in using those efforts to build her profile and social media following. (Her retort to the overblown dancing-video kerfuffle last week has been viewed nearly 20 million times.)"

So what? I have seen it and have no problems with it. The conservos bellyaching needed a good slapping down and putting in their place anyway, and Alexandria delivered it. Besides, it's not the conservos' business to "knock her down a few pegs" - or to dismiss her as a "commie" because she belongs to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) like I do.. Blake then goes on:

"But she’s also shown a tendency to exaggerate or misstate basic facts. And her defense of this in a Sunday interview with “60 Minutes” was very bad. When Anderson Cooper confronted her with The Washington Post Fact Checker’s Four-Pinocchio verdict on her claim about $21 trillion in waste at the Pentagon, Ocasio-Cortez offered this (emphasis added):

COOPER: One of the criticisms of you is that-- that your math is fuzzy. The Washington Post recently awarded you four Pinocchios --

OCASIO-CORTEZ: Oh my goodness --

COOPER: -- for misstating some statistics about Pentagon spending?

OCASIO-CORTEZ: If people want to really blow up one figure here or one word there, I would argue that they’re missing the forest for the trees. I think that there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.

COOPER: But being factually correct is important--

In the case of the $21 trillion, Ocasio-Cortez was suggesting that this was all Pentagon waste and that cleaning it up could pay for two-thirds of the estimated $32 trillion price tag for single-payer health care, which she and others are referring to as Medicare-for-all.

$21 TRILLION of Pentagon financial transactions ‘could not be traced, documented, or explained,’" Ocasio-Cortez wrote in a tweet that still appears on her timeline and has been shared more than 26,000 times. "$21T in Pentagon accounting errors. Medicare for All costs ~$32T. That means 66% of Medicare for All could have been funded already by the Pentagon.”

Okay, I think it's time here to take a deep collective breath and inquire what Blake and the Post's "Pinocchio" designators are so worked up about.. In fact, it turns out Ms. Ocasio-Cortez main gaffe was simply conflating the magnitude of the Pentagon's accounting scams with actual money being available, i.e. for "Medicare for all'. This is based on the recent extensive investigative piece ('Exposing The Pentagon's Massive Accounting Fraud',) by David Lindorff, appearing in The Nation (Jan. 7, 2019, pp. 12- 16). As Mr. Lindorff write (p. 13):

"As a result of the Pentagon's accounting shenanigans some $21 trillion - yes, trillion- worth of financial transactions cannot be accounted for. That number caught the eye of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio -Cortez who tweeted )on Dec. 2) to her 1.47 million followers that this missing $21 trillion cold have been used to fund a Medicare for All program.

However....there is no $21 trillion pot of money hidden inside the Pentagon. what there has been instead is a systematic, long standing, unconstitutional effort by the Department of Defense to feed phony numbers to Congress and thereby inflate the DOD's budget by billions of dollars each year. NO one knows for sure, though informed estimates put it as high as $100 billion - not enough to fund Medicare for All but a good down payment on a Green New Deal..."

So there you have it: Ocasio-Cortez basically was over optimistic regarding the money available from the Pentagon's funny money accounting gimmicks. For example, one method entails laundering "one year money" pools into "five year money" pools. The reason? The unspent money in the latter (longer ) pool doesn't have to be returned during the 5-year period. The phony numbers arising are then referred to as "plugs" (as in plugging a hole) by the Pentagon's money wonks and paper pushers.

As Lindorff puts it (p. 14):

"Such nippering can be repeated multiple times - according to one Pentagon budgeting veteran- 'until the funds become virtually untraceable'"

Of course, this deplorable fudging of budgets and accounts didn't just pop up recently. Former defense analyst Chuck Spinney - as long ago as 2000 (on Bill Moyers' PBS NOW program)- reported on the Pentagons' accounting gimmicks and 'plug' rackets to the extent of being unable to account for $1.1 trillion - at that time.

Enter now Thomas Hedges who reported for The Guardian in March 2017 - after Trump proposed a $52 billion increase in military spending - "the Pentagon has exempted itself without consequence for 20 years now, telling the Government Accountability Office that collecting and organizing the required information for a full audit is too costly and time-consuming."

Exempted itself!? Are you kidding me? As Chuck Spinney pointed out on Bill Moyers' NOW program, if a gov't agency declines fiscal accountability we are no longer a democracy because the agency or department is no longer accountable to the citizens - the taxpayers. It is then a law unto itself, and we are short steps from fascism. Lindorff himself also references Spinney's previous efforts at examining the mess, i.e. :

"For Spinney, the Pentagon accounting fraud is deja vu all over again. Back in the 1980s he and a handful of reform-minded colleagues exposed how the Defense Department used a similar accounting trick to inflate its spending and to accumulate money for 'off the books' programs. Spinney recalls: 'The DOD routinely overestimated inflation rates for weapons systems. When actual inflation turned out to be lower than the estimates, they did not return the excess funds to the Treasury as required by law. They slipped them into something called a merged surplus account. In that way the Pentagon was able to build up a slush fund of almost $50 billion, or about $120 billion in today's money."

OK, so Ocasio-Cortez basically erred by mixing up Pentagon slush fund money accrued from sleazy accounting with a total amount ($21 trillion) missing from the ledgers on account of such a ruse'. But she's young and still learning, so should be forgiven. I warrant she didn't lie (with implies intention) but simply "shot from the hip" in not really investigating the fiscal mechanics behind the shady accounting using 'plugs'. In other words, she's not guilty of "Pinnochios" but rather laziness. After all, it's not that there doesn't exist ANY money from the Pentagon's accounting tricks for social uses, only it just isn't enough to support a Medicare for All program. What we do know is right now there is a desperate need to provide a much wider social safety net, and we need to find any and all means - including higher taxes- to pay for it!

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