Author Stephen Glain: $10 Trillion missing from Pentagon since 1991

In an interview with Tech Ticker's Aaron  Task, Stephen Glain suggests that the U.S. military has squandered via waste, fraud and abuse, up to $10 Trillion since 1991.  If that sounds ridiculous, recall that Rumsfeld admitted that the pentagon had "lost" $2.3 trillion in 2001, just one day before the 9-11 attacks.  I am personally zero surprised at Glain's guestimate.  After all, when you have a Military Industrial Complex running the show, and when the key word there is Military, what else can you expect but major theft and abuse?  They have absolute power and that is a human corrupting force.  It always has been, and it always will be.  All the con men have to do to get the sheeple to agree to go into more debt is to rattle the sabers, come up with phantom enemies, and start wars in far off lands only to follow up with ridiculous commitments to rebuild (using more US debt) that which they just blew up using munitions which were themselves paid for with debt.  It's creative destruction gone wild all fueled by fiat currency and fractional reserve banking without which none of this debt could happen.

Glain also correctly states that the military is a microcosm of the economic problems facing the country, and I will add, of the world.  In fact, how can it not be thus?  We all live under the same fraudulent Wimpy Promise economy in which people are asked to accept future promises for repayment in exchange for today's labor.  Instead of paying a fair and prevailing market-driven wage, government, industry, military, etc. have made trillions in unpayable promises for retirement plans that are far in excess of what an average person can expect to receive in their twilight years.  Of course, the big con was that future "growth" would pay for it all; through value created from their labor supplemented by a constantly increasing debt load, the young people would have enough for themselves AND enough to pay for the retirements of the past generation as well.   Folks who believe this mathematically impossible lie are going to wake up one day and realize that they are seriously misguided patsies of the con.  When government refers to "growth" it is mainly referring to growth of the debt, not real economic growth.

As for con-avoidance tactics, I've had a lot of people recently asking me about gold given my long term positive stance on physical ownership of the metal, especially in light of a recent post whereby I suggest that gold might be due for a significant pullback.  They wonder why I think people should continue buying gold in measured amounts at measured intervals at a time when my Elliott Wave model suspects that it could pull back hundreds of dollars.  Of course, models are never wrong, right?  In any case let me be very clear: any big pullback in gold will likely be accompanied by a big pullback in everything else: the stock market, oil, wheat, copper, corn - you name it.  Gold will retain or increase its buying power relative to these things.  In this case, the gold pullback in dollar terms would be a short term event caused by people who have vaporous value stored in debt trying to exchange it for dollars.  The short term shortage in real dollars would cause the dollar to rise for a while.   

Let me also be clear in that the dollar is just another empty Madoff style Ponzi promise.  Its perceived value can go up and down but its true value is zero.  This is not and cannot be the case with gold.  Ever.  Gold is not a Ponzi Promise to pay.  It is in fact payment in full.  Gold is real money and fiat currency is a promise to pay in the future.  The dollar can be devalued at the whim of government but gold retains its value as entire civilizations come and go.  Gold is timeless money, not scam ridden fiat currency dreamed up only 100 years ago by bankers and other con men.  This makes gold honest payment while pension promises and payments in fiat currency will eventually be globally understood to be dishonest, fraudulent payments for today's labor.  In other words, people trusting in these things will never get what they are actually owed.  Forget the mechanics of it because they can be complex and the actual play-out will be governed by the rules of chaos.  Just focus on the the desire to receive and to keep what you worked to earn.

As for our global military empire, it will eventually crumble along with everything else which has been getting paid for with debt.  The real question we the people have to ask is what will happen when the time comes to lay down arms due to lack of money to pay all the unpayable promises.  Will our military just turn honest all of a sudden or will we get our own little slice of Syria right here in the US?  If you think this is impossible then you would be in good company because the patsy always thinks that the con man is beyond reproach until just before the con falls apart.  In fact, the patsy often is the biggest advocate of the con man until the con goes south. 

This not a dig at our rank and file enlisted and commissioned service members.  I was in the service for nearly 6 years myself.  I know what it's like.  The little guy takes orders, he doesn't make the rules nor does he/she have any visibility into the master plan.  Only a few at the top, the real con men working in the Pentagon, know what their plans are.  The only advice I have for individual service members is this: if it's immoral, don't do it.  Let your conscience and not "orders" from some con man be your end guide.  An even simpler guide is the constitution which you have promised to uphold and which nobody in your entire chain of command has the legal right to circumvent.  Read the constitution.  That is your real playbook; your legal and moral guide going forward.