There's something happening here...

I was reading Matt Taibi’s excellent article in the new Rolling Stone about how the SEC has been engaged in series of ménage a trois arrangements with the same greed-bag Wall Street firms and slimy criminals they are supposed to be policing and it brought to mind a disturbing thought.   I’m generally not a conspiracy kind of guy, although I do firmly believe that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.  But there are some long term situations that are going essentially unreported in a mainstream media still following Sarah Palin around in salivating packs and that should - at the very least - give one pause to think that perhaps there is grand right wing conspiracy, to paraphrase Hillary Clinton.

The first of these is the aforementioned relationship between an SEC enforcement division turned into a eunuch because of what seem to be standing offers of bags of cash from the dirty dealing firms they’re charged with overseeing.  Every time someone at the SEC follows a trail of bread crumbs leading to a financial crime, some big-daddy power suit guy takes them to lunch and they suddenly lose interest, can’t find the file, deem the charges unsubstantiated by the evidence or just flat out shred the paper trail in madcap all nighters in the basement of the building, fueled by bottles of Cristal and handfuls of amphetamines.  It’s a well known and much remarked on fact that none of the treacherous bastards responsible for the giant sucking wound of the economic debacle have gotten so much as a weekend in the county jail for bringing the world economy to its knees and, in fact, they’re still playing three card monte with other people’s money right under the SEC’s nose.   How these buttoned down assholes were able to avoid all culpability and basically skate away from the train wreck they perpetrated is one of the great mysteries and disappointments of the Obama administration and a sharp needle in the eye of the American public too busy praying for god’s help with their 401k account to give a shit.

In another completely under-reported story, a couple of weeks ago there was a report issued, called Limited Interagency Coordination and Insufficient Controls Over US Funds in Afghanistan Hamper US Efforts to Develop the Afghan Financial Sector and Safeguard US Cash, a sublimely clear and straightforward title to a report that begs to get more attention and which is almost guaranteed to piss you off if you read it.  It essentially says that we have a “process” set up in Afghanistan that has been relentlessly funneling cash to an utterly broken and corrupt Afghan government for 10 years and 70 billion dollars worth and now suddenly some genius in Washington decided they probably should try to do an audit and accounting of where this has been going, just for the record.  And their findings can be summed up with just a couple of sentences from the report:

“However we found that agencies have not instituted sufficient controls over US funds, limiting their oversight over these funds and potentially the ability of the ATFC, (Afghan Threat Finance Cell)to insure that these funds are not diverted to insurgents.  As a result, the US risks inadvertently funding activities that directly oppose its reconstruction goals for Afghanistan.”  

I’d say that’s pretty unambiguous.   The US taxpayer, at a time of profound financial crisis, has been throwing money down a rat hole in Afghanistan and very likely financing flat screen TV’s in insurgent caves all over the god damn country, not to mention paying for RPG’s and all manner of mischief making supplies and equipment our happy Afghan peasants are buying from Iran.  The report goes into some detail about the fact that the various US agencies charged with overseeing the theoretical reconstruction projects in the country don’t communicate with each other, let the Afghan banks run wild and have no systematic accounting of the pallets of $100 bills that have been delivered there for years.   

Either the government hires the most incompetent accountants they can find across the enterprise or they’ve been bought off by a cabal of criminals who don’t have our best interests at heart. 

The Obama administration has had its hands full for the better part of three years but there comes a time when they have to be held accountable for this chaos and the thieves that are running amok in seemingly every building in DC. 

Meanwhile the lunatic republican presidential wannabes wander around spouting extravagant nonsense denying global climate change, challenging the theory of evolution and advocating prayer as the answer to our economic problems, masking the very real culpability of the Wall Street money changers and a defense establishment that stands to profit immeasurably from the endless “war on terror” at the expense of normal, average people who want to have the good life of the American dream and are witnessing it being stolen from under their noses without being able to recognize who the fixers and thieves really are.   Now today it is being reported that house republicans are marshaling their forces to oppose Obama’s extension of the payroll tax cut, a tax cut that actually benefits these average American dreamers, all while continuing to say over and over that they’ll fight to the death against any proposed tax increase on the wealthiest 2% of us because it is a “job killer”, a hilarious example of bald faced hypocrisy that really only a republican could try to get by with a straight face.

I’m not lining my windows with aluminum foil yet, but there’s a foul stench in the air and it’s starting to smell like conspiracy…