Tag: Government Accountability Office

The US Is Making Billions Being Warlords in Yemen

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

One of Biden’s promises during his presidential campaign was to immediately move to end all support for the Saudi-led coalition’s war in Yemen. In February 2021, Biden stood at a podium at the State Department and proclaimed that the war in Yemen must end. Biden underlined the humanitarian crisis as the key reason the United States withdrew support. An investigation (PDF) by the Government Accountability Office found that the United States is training the Saudi-led coalition, and the US has troops on the ground in Yemen. Biden confirmed that the United States has troops in Yemen in a letter to Congress in June last year. Biden lied to the American people when he claimed that the United States was withdrawing US support for the war in Yemen in 2021.

The US Is Making Billions Being Warlords in Yemen

Don’t Be So Quick To Listen To America’s Retired Generals On Ukraine

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Don’t Be So Quick to Listen To America’s Retired Generals on Ukraine: Americans have always loved military leaders, especially generals; the 1970 movie Patton, about the life of the United States’ greatest World War II commander, is still popular in America. When the current crop of active and retired generals speak today, it is unsurprising that most in our country reflexively accept what they say at face value. Especially as their assessments and advice relate to American vital national interests in the Russia-Ukraine War, however, such trust should be reassessed.

Don’t Be So Quick To Listen To America’s Retired Generals On Ukraine

He doesn’t think that we’re in a proxy war with Russia?!

Related:

At War With the Truth

An interview with General Valery Zaluzhny

How Much it Actually Costs to Fly U.S. Military Aircraft

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

How Much it Actually Costs to Fly U.S. Military Aircraft

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter costs $41,986 an hour across all models, including the F-35A for the Air Force, the F-35B for the Marine Corps, and the F-35C for the Marine Corps and Navy. The Air Force in particular is stuck with the headache of replacing the F-16, which costs $26,927 an hour, with a plane that costs 25 percent more to operate, permanently raising costs. This is especially a problem as the F-35 was originally promised to cost the same to operate as the F-16. The Air Force must now either buy fewer F-35s or figure out how to foot a bigger annual bill.

Sheila Bair, Former Chair of the FDIC, Is Now an “Organizer/Director” of a Cayman Islands Crypto Company that Got a U.S. National Bank Charter Last Year

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)1 Comment

On November 17, Sheila Bair, the former Chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) during the financial crisis of 2008, went on CNBC to lament the lack of controls leading to the collapse of the crypto currency exchange, FTX. During the interview, Bair used the phrase “nobody looking behind the curtain.”

Sheila Bair, Former Chair of the FDIC, Is Now an “Organizer/Director” of a Cayman Islands Crypto Company that Got a U.S. National Bank Charter Last Year

Related (why no one was prosecuted for the financial crisis of 2007–2008 + another comment):

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The Latest Digital Token Scheme from Hell: New York Fed Teams Up with Citigroup and Sullivan & Cromwell

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)1 Comment

Just two business days after the crypto exchange FTX filed for bankruptcy and headlines swirled around the world suggesting it had used its crypto token to perpetuate a massive fraud reminiscent of Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, the New York Fed thought this would be an ideal time to announce it was launching a digital token pilot with the serial fraudster, Citigroup. (See here for the unintelligible, jargonized version from the New York Fed; here for the decrypted translation from CoinDesk; and here for a sampling of Citigroup’s rap sheet.)

The Latest Digital Token Scheme from Hell: New York Fed Teams Up with Citigroup and Sullivan & Cromwell

Health Insurance Whistleblower: Medicare Advantage Is “Heist” by Private Firms to Defraud the Public

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Many of the nation’s largest health insurance companies have made billions of dollars in profits by overbilling the U.S. government’s Medicare Advantage program. A New York Times investigation has revealed that under the Advantage program, health insurance companies are incentivized to make patients appear more ill than they actually are. Some estimates find it has cost the government between $12 billion and $25 billion in 2020 alone. We speak with former healthcare insurance executive Wendell Potter, now president of the Center for Health and Democracy, who says Medicare Advantage will be recognized in years to come as the “biggest transfer of wealth” from taxpayers to corporate shareholders, and blames the lack of regulation over the program on the “revolving door between private industry and government.”

Health Insurance Whistleblower: Medicare Advantage Is “Heist” by Private Firms to Defraud the Public

Related:

‘The Cash Monster Was Insatiable’: How Insurers Exploited Medicare for Billions (archived)

Biden’s student-loan debt forgiveness would cost $300 billion, report says — less than half of the defense budget

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)1 Comment

Biden’s student-loan debt forgiveness would cost $300 billion, report says — less than half of the defense budget

Student loans currently aren’t even profitable for the government. A July report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that federal loans are actually projected to cost the government $197 billion, instead of bringing in what the Education Department estimated as a $114 billion profit, because of the various pauses and changes over the last couple of years.

The price of student-loan forgiveness pales in comparison to other major federal expenditures. Defense spending is projected to cost nearly $8.7 trillion over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office, and will cost $796 billion in 2022 alone.

That $300 billion is also a fraction of how much borrowers hold right now; America’s student loan debtors currently owe $1.7 trillion.

While Biden has not publicly confirmed his plans for broad student-loan relief, he has said himself he will make the decision before August 31, when student-loan payments are set to resume. In April, he shot down $50,000 in relief — an amount many Democratic lawmakers and advocates have been pushing for — and recent reports have suggested his final amount will be near $10,000, which he pledged on the campaign trail.