$40B Ukrainian “Aid,” My ASS.

It’s stealing from Americans, pure and simple. I’m going to show you how…

Last week the House of Representatives passed a $40 BILLION “aid” bill for Ukraine. Per this laughable CNN article, said bill “provides funding for a long list of priorities, including military and humanitarian assistance.” There has been a LOT of discussion and outrage about this, perfectly encapsulated by Tucker Carlson. If you haven’t seen this, it’s worth 19 minutes of your time…

Notice the comparisons he made with previous spending, and you begin to understand how truly massive the US government spending-spree truly is. It’s mind-boggling. At one point Tucker notes in passing, that there are kickbacks from contractors, but says nothing more about that.

But that’s the key to everything our government is doing, at this point.

I have some experience working with government agencies (non-military), with heavy involvement in contracts on capital projects. Mostly projects of small size, a few million dollars or so. But I directed several projects, from design to commissioning and then final hand-off to operations teams. My final project came in a little over $200 million, completed in 2013. I quit in disgust after that job was finished; the rampant fraud was… unbelievable.

[I’m going to lay things out, as much as I can. I have to be intentionally vague on certain details and locations for legal reasons, as well as the safety of my family and myself. It is, in fact, the reason why you will never see my face on TV, why I can never divulge my identity or location. You’ll see why, shortly.]

Here’s how it’s supposed to work… A project is deemed necessary by the government (local, state, federal), and the government issues a “request for proposal” (RFP) to approved vendors (who are qualified to do the job). The RFP provides a high-level description (for example, I want a vehicle that carries a bunch of people, kinda’ like a bus, but with armor), performance goals (it has to turn within a 100′ radius, it has to achieve 55 MPH, and green-tip ammo has to bounce off it without penetration), and so on. The vendors provide proposals, how they would best achieve the goal, estimated cost, delivery times, and so on. The government picks the best choice amongst the proposals, formally accepts it, and a contract is signed with payments, delivery times, etc., etc. That way the government gets a good solution for the lowest price… Or, alternatively, they may pick a vastly superior product for a moderate price increase, getting the best option in terms of performance. It depends on who’s picking amongst the proposals, and what they deem most important; we don’t buy the cheapest body armor for spec-ops guys, we buy the best we can find, and then try to save money on volume discounts. That’s how it’s supposed to work.

But when there’s big money involved, say >$10 million on a project, the different vendors will try to be, how shall we say it, “extra nice” to the people on the board choosing which option is best. Oh, you like ski-boats? Isn’t it amazing that some person you don’t know in the slightest just left a $50k jet-boat in your driveway with keys in the ignition, and the owner name in the title left blank? It happens to us all, dontcha’ know…? Yeah, if you could help us on this bid process, that’d be great. Of course, the higher up in the food-chain of the organization you are, the more valuable these lovely gifts are. You get the idea. The expenses of those gifts will be incorporated into the final bill to the organization, disguised as overtime pay for fictitious workers, R&D, or whatever.

The system of fraud I discovered will- at some point- hopefully become public knowledge, though my hope is dimming at this point. I estimate, based on projects I personally know about or was involved in, cost the tax-payers for at least $5 billion in stolen money. It has also cost the lives of four people, who were murdered. I knew two of them.

But it gets worse. There are times when the approved contractor doing the job starts swapping out cheaper materials for the ones that the contract calls for, and writes it down on paper as matching the contract on the receipt. The Project Manager for the government agency (PM) is aware of this, and willing to sign off on it. If you have a technical manager, an in-house subject matter expert (SME) like I was, then the SME is responsible to sign off on all the documents, attesting to the fact that the project was executed in accordance with all stipulations. So if the contractor can figure out a way to bribe or otherwise induce the PM and SME to not ask any questions, look away as the papers are signed off, then all sorts of shenanigans happen. Examples are buildings 1/3 smaller in footprint than the contract specified, electrical systems grossly undersized for the intended use, cooling systems that are also undersized, automation systems that don’t work, and so on. It’s like paying a contractor to install a deep jet-bath in your house, and he instead puts in the cheap Home Depot tub/shower combination you see in every tract-home in America… but the contractor expects you to pay $5000 instead of the $1000 it’s actually worth. That’s how it really works with government contracts; at the management level, everybody is on the take, in one fashion or another. Those that refuse to be bribed- more common than you might think- are sent packing by whatever means necessary; a false accusation of sexual harassment, an accusation of racial discrimination, accusations of impropriety in other ways, whatever it takes. You play ball, we pay you well, and all you have to do is look the other way… Or you’ll be fired.

After all this, I turned the evidence I have- boxes of documents- to the corporate fraud division of the FBI; they confirmed what I had direct evidence of, but they lacked sufficient probable cause to get warrants to dig into the finances of the other players. If I’d seen someone being handed a lunch-bag full of money, that would have been sufficient… but I didn’t have that, and so it died.

[Interestingly enough, I learned later that several executives were exposed by my actions, leading to some particularly corrupt people going to prison on other charges, but the theft I saw…? Nope.]

This kind of thing happens in every local agency of this sort of government service; there are dozens. And I have been told that this is the same business-model that they all follow, for every state in America.

So there’s a LOT of money being made, more than you can possibly imagine. The gravy-train is very wide, and VERY deep.

This sort of thing happens at every agency, whenever big money is being spent.

Military contracts can be especially egregious with the corruption, as they typically have “cost-plus” pricing for the big boys, like Ratheon or Boeing or General Dynamics. In other words, for certain products (like the Lockheed-Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, for example), the price is whatever the manufacturer says it is, and the government agrees to pay, say, 10% above the cost. That works in theory, as the company makes a reasonable profit, and the government gets exactly what it specifies.

[And that works when the government can print (or digitally create) any amount of money they need, because it’s backed by nothing but the “full faith and credit” of our corrupt government.]

“Ahhh,” you say, “but what is in the stated costs?” The development costs, the manufacturing costs, labor to build the product, and public relations costs… I.e., the bribes and kickbacks, to whoever is needed to be paid, to sign off on the purchase of the product, is built into the “cost” of the product. The payoffs, of course, are at the level of Congress-critters, Senators, admirals and generals, etc. Again- because this is important- the costs of the pay-offs are incorporated into the pricing of the product, and then the government pays. Or more precisely, WE pay.

See how that works? Everybody is happy, everybody makes money… except we the people are stuck with the bill. This is why a crappy plane, which can’t fly, can’t climb and can’t turn, was made the de facto Western military combat jet.

Now, let’s get back to that “aid” for Ukraine. We’ve sent 1,400 of technologically obsolete Raytheon Stinger anti-aircraft missiles as well as 5,500 anti-tank FGM-148 Javelin missiles. I’ve seen plenty of videos where the stinger missiles are easily defeated with countermeasures. The Javelins we sent are the oldest missiles in inventory, some of which have been sitting in stores for 20+ years. What I’ve heard is that the old batteries that power the Javelin’s electronics are no longer reliable, resulting in the Javelins are not functioning as MSM would have you believe; instead they’re usually duds. Indeed, there are videos out there where a Russian tank is hit with 4+ Javelins, and it’s still combat-capable, afterwards.

We’ve also sent 90 155mm Howitzers (obsolete) with 183,000 rounds, 200 (obsolete) M113 Armored Personnel Carriers, 7000 small arms, 50 million rounds of ammo, miscellaneous drones, Humvees, support vehicles, Claymore mines, C4 explosives, and so on. Oh, and don’t forget the 16 Mi-17 transport helicopters purchased from a Russian state-owned arms exporter in the early 2010s, intended for the Afghan government, the Washington Post reported.

Do you notice the trend, here? It’s that damn-near everything we’re sending them is obsolete, either because current technology defeats it, or it’s been sitting in the inventory so long that it’s no longer a given that the shit will actually work when you need it to.

The other trend? Ahhh, this one is more sneaky. Electronically-based systems are inherently perishable items, and batteries are even worse; it’s the nature of the beast. The manufacturers like Raytheon have had these missiles sitting on their shelves for so long, already made, that they’re out of warranty, out of their service dates, and cannot be trusted, and therefore can’t be sold to the US military. But, in the interest of “saving Ukraine from that mean old Putin,” they’ll be happy to send this their aged inventory to support the cause. Of course, they’ll use the usual “cost-plus” model (cost plus plenty of grease for the skids), or ideally they’ll sell their entire inventory of expired munitions at full-boat retail price.

The bill (for $40 Billion) goes to the US Treasury, they cut the checks, and the manufacturers in turn cut in everybody who voted for the $40 billion- for equipment that might be worth 30% of that, in secondary-market sales, or 10% if sold for scrap- if even that.

In my experience seeing government corruption with my own eyes- holding the contracts, and performing full financials audits on what really happened- at least half of the tab paid by taxpayers does NOT pay for the product, but for bribes, kickbacks, etc. Without having access to the actual contracts currently in play, I can only make a (very) educated guess that this $40 billion is about the same- 50% is going out the back door, hard cash looted straight from our pockets.

The government agents- Congressmen, Senators, Biden- who have to vote on this scam, are getting a stated percentage or the total package. I know that with absolute certainty. HOW? Because they actually voted for $7 billion MORE than what the phony POTUS Biden requested (which was already an outrageous number), and were excited about it… If they wanted more money, they had to make that package bigger. See how that works?

It’s all about the money; nobody really gives a shit about Ukraine.

The House voted for that $40 billion 368-57. Every congressman and Senator who voted for this is on the take, getting a cut of the overall package.

What this really means is that our “representatives” are no longer representing us, they are representing only themselves. They’re busily emptying the treasury of every last bit of purchasing power, financially stealing everything left that isn’t nailed down.

Tucker WAS right, when he pointed out that our representatives view us with contempt. But they really don’t think about us at all; they’re just lining their pockets, before the whole financial system implodes.

George Carlin was right.