© Agence France-Presse
On November 15, Ernst & Young and other private firms that were hired to audit the Pentagon
announced that they could not complete the job. Congress had ordered an independent audit of the Department of Defense, the government's largest discretionary cost center -
the Pentagon receives 54 cents out of every dollar in federal appropriations - after the Pentagon
failed for decades to audit itself. The firms concluded, however, that the DoD's financial records were riddled with so many bookkeeping deficiencies, irregularities, and errors that a reliable audit was simply impossible.
Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan tried to put the best face on things, telling reporters, "We failed the audit, but we never expected to pass it." Shanahan suggested that the DoD should get credit for
attempting an audit, saying, "It was an audit on a $2.7 trillion organization, so the fact that we did the audit is substantial." The truth, though, is that the DoD was dragged kicking and screaming to this audit by bipartisan frustration in Congress, and the result, had this been a major corporation, likely would have been a crashed stock.
Comment: Google can run all the PR it wants, but its behavior is telling. By the way, they were pushing down alternative media in search results at least a decade ago...
- Study shows Google search manipulation can swing up to 80 percent of undecided voters
- Google's new search algorithm decides search results based on if they are 'officially approved' or not
- Who decides what's relevant? Websites to Google: 'You're killing our business!'
- The Disappeared: SOTT.net and Google's conspicuous omissions
They aren't fooling the rest of the world either.