November 23, 2013

$8.5 Trillion in Taxpayer Money Doled Out to the Pentagon Since 1996 Has Never Been Accounted For



Billions in Pentagon spending down a black hole

Reuters
Nov 18, 2013

Linda Woodford spent the last 15 years of her career inserting phony numbers in the U.S. Department of Defense's accounts.

Every month until she retired in 2011, she says, the day came when the Navy would start dumping numbers on the Cleveland, Ohio, office of the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, the Pentagon's main accounting agency. Using the data they received, Woodford and her fellow DFAS accountants there set about preparing monthly reports to square the Navy's books with the U.S. Treasury's - a balancing-the-checkbook maneuver required of all the military services and other Pentagon agencies.

And every month, they encountered the same problem. Numbers were missing. Numbers were clearly wrong. Numbers came with no explanation of how the money had been spent or which congressional appropriation it came from. 

"A lot of times there were issues of numbers being inaccurate," Woodford says. "We didn't have the detail … for a lot of it."
The data flooded in just two days before deadline. As the clock ticked down, Woodford says, staff were able to resolve a lot of the false entries through hurried calls and emails to Navy personnel, but many mystery numbers remained. For those, Woodford and her colleagues were told by superiors to take "unsubstantiated change actions" - in other words, enter false numbers, commonly called "plugs," to make the Navy's totals match the Treasury's.

Jeff Yokel, who spent 17 years in senior positions in DFAS's Cleveland office before retiring in 2009, says supervisors were required to approve every "plug" - thousands a month. 

"If the amounts didn't balance, Treasury would hit it back to you," he says.
After the monthly reports were sent to the Treasury, the accountants continued to seek accurate information to correct the entries. In some instances, they succeeded. In others, they didn't, and the unresolved numbers stood on the books.

STANDARD PROCEDURE

At the DFAS offices that handle accounting for the Army, Navy, Air Force and other defense agencies, fudging the accounts with false entries is standard operating procedure, Reuters has found. And plugging isn't confined to DFAS (pronounced DEE-fass). Former military service officials say record-keeping at the operational level throughout the services is rife with made-up numbers to cover lost or missing information.

A review of multiple reports from oversight agencies in recent years shows that the Pentagon also has systematically ignored warnings about its accounting practices. "These types of adjustments, made without supporting documentation … can mask much larger problems in the original accounting data," the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, said in a December 2011 report.

Plugs also are symptomatic of one very large problem: the Pentagon's chronic failure to keep track of its money - how much it has, how much it pays out and how much is wasted or stolen.

This is the second installment in a series in which Reuters delves into the Defense Department's inability to account for itself. The first article examined how the Pentagon's record-keeping dysfunction results in widespread pay errors that inflict financial hardship on soldiers and sap morale. This account is based on interviews with scores of current and former Defense Department officials, as well as Reuters analyses of Pentagon logistics practices, bookkeeping methods, court cases and reports by federal agencies.

As the use of plugs indicates, pay errors are only a small part of the sums that annually disappear into the vast bureaucracy that manages more than half of all annual government outlays approved by Congress. The Defense Department's 2012 budget totaled $565.8 billion, more than the annual defense budgets of the 10 next largest military spenders combined, including Russia and China. How much of that money is spent as intended is impossible to determine.

In its investigation, Reuters has found that the Pentagon is largely incapable of keeping track of its vast stores of weapons, ammunition and other supplies; thus it continues to spend money on new supplies it doesn't need and on storing others long out of date. It has amassed a backlog of more than half a trillion dollars in unaudited contracts with outside vendors; how much of that money paid for actual goods and services delivered isn't known. And it repeatedly falls prey to fraud and theft that can go undiscovered for years, often eventually detected by external law enforcement agencies.

The consequences aren't only financial; bad bookkeeping can affect the nation's defense. In one example of many, the Army lost track of $5.8 billion of supplies between 2003 and 2011 as it shuffled equipment between reserve and regular units. Affected units "may experience equipment shortages that could hinder their ability to train soldiers and respond to emergencies," the Pentagon inspector general said in a September 2012 report.

Because of its persistent inability to tally its accounts, the Pentagon is the only federal agency that has not complied with a law that requires annual audits of all government departments. That means that the $8.5 trillion in taxpayer money doled out by Congress to the Pentagon since 1996, the first year it was supposed to be audited, has never been accounted for. That sum exceeds the value of China's economic output last year.

Congress in 2009 passed a law requiring that the Defense Department be audit-ready by 2017.

Then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta in 2011 tightened the screws when ordered that the department make a key part of its books audit-ready in 2014.

Reuters has found that the Pentagon probably won't meet its deadlines. The main reason is rooted in the Pentagon's continuing reliance on a tangle of thousands of disparate, obsolete, largely incompatible accounting and business-management systems. Many of these systems were built in the 1970s and use outmoded computer languages such as COBOL on old mainframes. They use antiquated file systems that make it difficult or impossible to search for data. Much of their data is corrupted and erroneous.

"It's like if every electrical socket in the Pentagon had a different shape and voltage," says a former defense official who until recently led efforts to modernize defense accounting.

"AMALGAM OF FIEFDOMS"

No one can even agree on how many of these accounting and business systems are in use. The Pentagon itself puts the number at 2,200 spread throughout the military services and other defense agencies. A January 2012 report by a task force of the Defense Business Board, an advisory group of business leaders appointed by the secretary of defense, put the number at around 5,000. "There are thousands and thousands of systems," former Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England said in an interview. "I'm not sure anybody knows how many systems there are."

In a May 2011 speech, then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates described the Pentagon's business operations as "an amalgam of fiefdoms without centralized mechanisms to allocate resources, track expenditures, and measure results. ... My staff and I learned that it was nearly impossible to get accurate information and answers to questions such as ‘How much money did you spend' and ‘How many people do you have?' "

The Pentagon has spent tens of billions of dollars to upgrade to new, more efficient technology in order to become audit-ready. But many of these new systems have failed, either unable to perform all the jobs they were meant to do or scrapped altogether - only adding to the waste they were meant to stop.

Mired in a mess largely of its own making, the Pentagon is left to make do with old technology and plugs - lots of them. In the Cleveland DFAS office where Woodford worked, for example, "unsupported adjustments" to "make balances agree" totaled $1.03 billion in 2010 alone, according to a December 2011 GAO report.

In its annual report of department-wide finances for 2012, the Pentagon reported $9.22 billion in "reconciling amounts" to make its own numbers match the Treasury's, up from $7.41 billion a year earlier. It said that $585.6 million of the 2012 figure was attributable to missing records. The remaining $8 billion-plus represented what Pentagon officials say are legitimate discrepancies. However, a source with knowledge of the Pentagon's accounting processes said that because the report and others like it aren't audited, they may conceal large amounts of additional plugs and other accounting problems.

The secretary of defense's office and the heads of the military and DFAS have for years knowingly signed off on false entries. "I don't think they're lying and cheating and stealing necessarily, but it's not the right thing to do," Pentagon Comptroller Robert Hale said in an interview. "We've got to fix the processes so we don't have to do that."

Congress has been much more lenient on the Defense Department than on publicly traded corporations. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, a response to the Enron Corp and other turn-of-the-century accounting scandals, imposes criminal penalties on corporate managers who certify false financial reports. 

"The concept of Sarbanes-Oxley is completely foreign" to the Pentagon, says Mike Young, a former Air Force logistics officer who for years has been a consultant on, and written about, Defense Department logistics.
Defense officials point out that most plugs represent pending transactions - like checks waiting to clear with a bank - and other legitimate maneuvers, many of which are eventually resolved. The dollar amounts, too, don't necessarily represent actual money lost, but multiple accounting entries for money in and money out, often duplicated across several ledgers. That's how, for example, a single DFAS office in Columbus, Ohio, made at least $1.59 trillion - yes, trillion - in errors, including $538 billion in plugs, in financial reports for the Air Force in 2009, according to a December 2011 Pentagon inspector general report. Those amounts far exceeded the Air Force's total budget for that year.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel declined to comment for this article. In an August 2013 video message to the entire Defense Department, he said: 

"The Department of Defense is the only federal agency that has not produced audit-ready financial statements, which are required by law. That's unacceptable."
DFAS Director Teresa McKay declined to be interviewed for this article.

In an email response to questions from Reuters, a Treasury spokesman said: 

"The Department of Defense is continuing to take steps to strengthen its financial reporting. ... We're supportive of those efforts and will continue to work with DOD as they make additional progress." 
While the Treasury knowingly accepts false entries, it rejects accounts containing blank spaces for unknown numbers and totals that don't match its own.

Senators Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican, and Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, introduced legislation earlier this year that would penalize the Pentagon if it isn't audit-ready by 2017. Under the proposed Audit the Pentagon Act of 2013, failure to meet the deadline will result in restrictions on funding for new acquisition programs, prohibit purchases of any information-technology systems that would take more than three years to install, and transfer all DFAS functions to the Treasury.

"The Pentagon can't manage what it can't measure, and Congress can't effectively perform its constitutional oversight role if it doesn't know how the Pentagon is spending taxpayer dollars," Coburn said in an email response to questions. "Until the Pentagon produces a viable financial audit, it won't be able to effectively prioritize its spending, and it will continue to violate the Constitution and put our national security at risk."
TOO MUCH STUFF

The practical impact of the Pentagon's accounting dysfunction is evident at the Defense Logistics Agency, which buys, stores and ships much of the Defense Department's supplies - everything from airplane parts to zippers for uniforms.

It has way too much stuff.

"We have about $14 billion of inventory for lots of reasons, and probably half of that is excess to what we need," Navy Vice Admiral Mark Harnitchek, the director of the DLA, said at an August 7, 2013, meeting with aviation industry executives, as reported on the agency's web site.
And the DLA keeps buying more of what it already has too much of. A document the Pentagon supplied to Congress shows that as of September 30, 2012, the DLA and the military services had $733 million worth of supplies and equipment on order that was already stocked in excess amounts on warehouse shelves. That figure was up 21% from $609 million a year earlier. The Defense Department defines "excess inventory" as anything more than a three-year supply.

Consider the "vehicular control arm," part of the front suspension on the military's ubiquitous High Mobility Multipurpose Vehicles, or Humvees. As of November 2008, the DLA had 15,000 of the parts in stock, equal to a 14-year supply, according to an April 2013 Pentagon inspector general's report.

And yet, from 2010 through 2012, the agency bought 7,437 more of them - at prices considerably higher than it paid for the thousands sitting on its shelves. The DLA was making the new purchases as demand plunged by nearly half with the winding down of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The inspector general's report said the DLA's buyers hadn't checked current inventory when they signed a contract to acquire more.

Just outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the DLA operates its Eastern Distribution Center, the Defense Department's biggest storage facility. In one of its warehouses, millions of small replacement parts for military equipment and other supplies are stored in hundreds of thousands of breadbox-size bins, stacked floor to ceiling on metal shelves in the 1.7 million-square-foot building.

Sonya Gish, director of the DLA's process and planning directorate, works at the complex. She says no system tracks whether newly received items are put in the correct bins, and she confirmed that because of the vast quantities of material stored, comprehensive inventories are impossible. The DLA makes do with intermittent sampling to see if items are missing or stored in the wrong place. Gish also says the distribution center does not attempt to track or estimate losses from employee theft.

The Pentagon in 2004 ordered the entire Defense Department to adopt a modern labeling system that would allow all the military branches to see quickly and accurately what supplies are on hand at the DLA and each of the services. To date, the DLA has ignored the directive to use the system. William Budden, deputy director of distribution, said in an interview that the cost would have exceeded the potential benefits, and that the DLA's existing systems are adequate.

A "Clean Out the Attic" program to jettison obsolete inventory is making progress, DLA Director Harnitchek said in an interview. But the effort is hindered because the lack of reliable information on what's in storage makes it hard to figure out what can be thrown out.

The DLA also has run into resistance among warehouse supervisors who for years have been in charge of a handful of warehouse aisles and jealously husband their inventory. 

"I believe that the biggest challenge is helping item managers identify things we have in our warehouses that they can just let go of," Budden said in an interview published in an undated in-house DLA magazine.
OLD AND DANGEROUS

A few miles away, amid the gently rolling hills of south central Pennsylvania, a series of 14 explosions interrupt the stillness of a spring afternoon, shooting fountains of dirt more than 100 feet into the air. Staff at the Letterkenny Army Depot - one of eight Army Joint Munitions Command depots in the United States - are disposing of 480 pounds of C4 plastic explosive manufactured in 1979 and at risk of becoming dangerously unstable.

If Woody Pike could have his way, the soldiers would be destroying a lot more of the old, unused munitions stored in scores of turf-covered concrete "igloos" ranged across the Letterkenny compound.

There are runway flares from the 1940s, and warheads for Sparrow missiles that the military hasn't fielded since the 1990s. Most irksome, because they take up a lot of space, are rocket-launch systems that were retired in the 1980s. 

"It will be years before they're gone," says Pike, a logistics management specialist and planner at Letterkenny.
More than one-third of the weapons and munitions the Joint Munitions Command stores at Letterkenny and its other depots are obsolete, according to Stephen Abney, command spokesman. Keeping all those useless bullets, explosives, missiles, rifles, rocket launchers and other munitions costs tens of millions of dollars a year.

The munitions sit, year after year, because in the short term, "it's cheaper for the military to store it than to get rid of it," said Keith Byers, Letterkenny's ammunition manager. 

"What's counterproductive is that what you're looking at is stocks that are going to be destroyed eventually anyway."
Also, an Army spokesman said, the Pentagon requires the Army to store munitions reserves free of charge for the other military services, which thus have no incentive to pay for destroying useless stock.

To access ammunition and other inventory still in use, depot staff often must move old explosives, much of which is stored in flimsy, thin-slatted crates. "Continuing to store unneeded ammunition creates potential safety, security and environmental concerns," Brigadier General Gustave Perna said in a 2012 military logistics newsletter, when he was in charge of the Joint Munitions Command. The cost and danger of storing old munitions "frustrates me as a taxpayer," he said. Perna declined requests for an interview.

Sometimes the danger leads to action, as when the C4 was detonated. And the depot recently received funding to destroy 15,000 recoilless rifles last used during World War II, Pike says.

Yet, on the day of the C4 blasts, piles of Phoenix air-to-air missiles - used on Navy F-14 fighter jets that last flew for the U.S. in 2006 - had just been offloaded from rail cars and were waiting to be put into storage.

In 2010, as part of the Defense Department's modernization effort , the Joint Munitions Command scrapped a computer system that kept track of inventory and automatically generated required shipping documents. It was replaced with one that Pike says doesn't do either.

His staff now must guess how much inventory and space Letterkenny has. The Army built at additional cost a second system to create shipping documents and an interface between the two systems. 

"We're having problems with the interface," Pike says.
COSTLY REPAIRS

Media reports of Defense Department waste tend to focus on outrageous line items: $604 toilet seats for the Navy, $7,600 coffee makers for the Air Force. These headline-grabbing outliers amount to little next to the billions the Pentagon has spent on repeated efforts to fix its bookkeeping, with little to show for it.

The Air Force's Expeditionary Combat Support System was intended to provide for the first time a single system to oversee transportation, supplies, maintenance and acquisitions, replacing scores of costly legacy systems. Work got under way in 2005. Delays and costs mounted. In late 2012, the Air Force conducted a test run. The data that poured out was mostly gibberish. The Air Force killed the project.
The system "has cost $1.03 billion … and has not yielded any significant military capability," the Air Force said in a November 2012 announcement.
Fixing the system would cost an additional $1.1 billion, it said, and even then, it would do only about a quarter of the tasks originally intended, and not until 2020.

The Air Force blamed the failure on the main contractor, Virginia-based Computer Sciences Corp, saying the company was unable to handle the job.

Computer Sciences spokesman Marcel Goldstein said that the company provided the Air Force with important "capabilities," and that "the progress we made, jointly with the Air Force, and the software we have delivered could be the foundation for the next effort to develop and deploy a logistics system for the Air Force."

David Scott Norton, an expert in accounting systems who worked for CSC on the Air Force contract, said the project employed too many people, making coordination and efficiency impossible. 

"There were probably thousands of people, both Air Force and contractors, on it," he says. 
High turnover among both Air Force and contractor staff hurt, too, he says; many of the people who worked on it weren't the people who had conceived and designed it.

More than $1 billion was wasted when the Pentagon in 2010 ditched the Defense Integrated Military Human Resources System, launched in 2003 as a single, department-wide pay and personnel system that would eliminate pay errors. Interagency squabbles and demands for thousands of changes eventually sank it.

The Air Force's Defense Enterprise Accounting and Management System was supposed to take over the Air Force's basic accounting functions in 2010. To date, $466 million has been spent on DEAMS, with a projected total cost of $1.77 billion to build and operate it, an Air Force spokeswoman said. The system lacks "critical functional capabilities," and its "data lacks validity and reliability," according to a September 2012 Defense Department inspector general report. It now isn't expected to be fully operational until 2017.

The Army's General Fund Enterprise Business System is often held up as an example of rare success. Up and running in 2012, GFEBS is now used in Army posts all over the world to handle basic accounting functions.

Some things it does well, but the inspector general said in March last year that the system didn't provide department management with required information and may not resolve "longstanding weaknesses" in the Army's financial management, "despite costing the Army $630.4 million as of October 2011."

In 2000, the Navy began work on four separate projects to handle finances, supplies, maintenance of equipment and contracting. Instead, the systems took on overlapping duties that each performed in different ways, using different formats for the same data. Five years later, the GAO said: "These efforts were failures. ... $1 billion was largely wasted."

The Navy started again in 2004 with the Navy Enterprise Resources Planning project to handle all Navy accounting - at first. The Navy later decided on a system design that would cover only about half of the service's budget because a single, service-wide system would be too difficult and time-consuming, according to former Navy personnel who worked on the project. Accounting for property and other physical assets was dropped, too.

Now in use, the Navy ERP relies on data fed to it from 44 old systems it was meant to replace. "Navy officials spent $870 million ... and still did not correct" the system's inability to account for $416 billion in equipment, the Pentagon inspector general said in a July 2013 report.

The Navy declined to comment.

Even an effort to coordinate all these projects ended in failure. In 2006, Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England established the Business Transformation Agency to force the military branches and other agencies to upgrade their business operations, adhere to common standards and make the department audit-ready.

Three years later, the Center for Strategic and International Studies said that while the Defense Department was spending "in excess of $10 billion per year on business systems modernization and maintenance, (o)verall the result is close to business as usual."

Defense Secretary Gates shut it down in 2011 - after the Pentagon had spent $700 million on it. England declined to comment on the episode.

Former BTA officials blamed the failure on their lack of authority to enforce their decisions and resistance from the individual services.

CONTRACT HITS

Over the past 10 years, the Defense Department has signed contracts for the provision of more than $3 trillion in goods and services. How much of that money is wasted in overpayments to contractors, or was never spent and never remitted to the Treasury, is a mystery. That's because of a massive backlog of "closeouts" - audits meant to ensure that a contract was fulfilled and the money ended up in the right place.

The Defense Contract Management Agency handles audits of fixed-price contracts, which are relatively problem-free. It's the Defense Contract Audit Agency that handles closeouts for department-wide contracts that pay the company or individual for expenses incurred. At the end of fiscal 2011, the agency's backlog totaled 24,722 contracts worth $573.3 billion, according to DCAA figures. Some of them date as far back as 1996.

The individual military services close out their own contracts, and the backlogs have piled up there, too. The Army's backlog was 450,000 contracts, the GAO said in a December 2012 report. The Navy and Air Force did not have estimates of their backlogs.
"This backlog represents hundreds of billions of dollars in unsettled costs," the GAO report said. 
Timely closeouts also reduce the government's financial risk by avoiding interest on late payments to contractors.

To trim its backlog, the DCAA last year raised to $250 million from $15 million the threshold value at which a contract is automatically audited. DCAA says that by concentrating its auditors on the biggest contracts, it will recoup the largest sums of money, and that it will conduct selective audits of smaller contracts, based on perceived risk and other factors. Still, hundreds of thousands of contracts that would eventually have been audited now won't be.
"Having billions of dollars of open, unaudited contracts stretching back to the 1990s is clearly unacceptable, and places taxpayer dollars at risk of misuse and mismanagement," Senator Thomas Carper, a Delaware Democrat and chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said in an email response to questions. "We must make sure that the Department of Defense is actively assessing risks and making sure that contractors who fall underneath the threshold remain accountable for their work."
Spotty monitoring of contracts is one reason Pentagon personnel and contractors are able to siphon off taxpayer dollars through fraud and theft - amounting to billions of dollars in losses, according to numerous GAO reports. In many cases, Reuters found, the perpetrators were caught only after outside law-enforcement agencies stumbled onto them, or outsiders brought them to the attention of prosecutors.

In May this year, Ralph Mariano, who worked as a civilian Navy employee for 38 years, pleaded guilty in federal court in Rhode Island to charges of conspiracy and theft of government funds related to a kickback scheme that cost the Navy $18 million from 1996 to 2011. Mariano was sentenced November 1 to 10 years in prison and fined $18 million.

Mariano admitted that as an engineer at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, Rhode Island, he added money to contracts held by Advanced Solutions for Tomorrow. The Georgia-based company then paid kickbacks to Mariano and others, including friends and relatives.

Mariano was charged more than five years after the allegations against him first emerged in a 2006 civil whistleblower lawsuit in federal court in Georgia that had been kept under seal. Court documents suggest one reason why the conspiracy went undetected for so long: The Navy not only gave Mariano authority to award money to contractors; it also put him in charge of confirming that the contractors did the work. The Navy never audited any of the contracts until after Mariano was arrested, a Navy spokeswoman confirmed.

On the opposite side of the country, federal prosecutors in San Diego, California, in 2009 accused Gary Alexander, a Navy civilian employee, of arranging with subcontractors to have them bill the Defense Department for services never performed and then pay him kickbacks from money the subcontractors received. Alexander masterminded the scheme while he was head of the Air Surveillance and Reconnaissance Branch of the Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center, based in San Diego.

Alexander in 2010 pleaded guilty to defrauding the Navy and filing false tax returns. He was sentenced to 75 months in prison and was required to pay restitution and forfeitures totaling more than $500,000.

Robert Ciaffa, a federal prosecutor assigned to the case, said the bills were easily padded because DFAS didn't require detailed invoices. The case came to light, he said, only after "a woman friend" of one of Alexander's associates went to prosecutors in 2008 with information about the fraud.

A Navy spokeswoman said that Navy Secretary Ray Mabus has taken steps to avert such fraud, including creating a contract review board, requiring closer oversight of employees who manage contracts and establishing antifraud units within Navy contracting services.

Ciaffa said the Alexander case prompted his office in 2009 to set up a toll-free fraud tip line that has so far have yielded at least six cases. One led to guilty pleas in March 2012 by four civilian employees of the North Island Naval Air Station, near San Diego, after they were accused of receiving $1 million in kickbacks from contractors.

PLUGGING ALONG

In its 2007 audit-readiness plan, the Defense Department called on DFAS to eliminate plugs by June 2008. That hasn't happened.

In its financial report for 2012, the Army said each month it "adjusts its Fund Balance With Treasury to agree with the U.S. Treasury accounts." In its 2012 annual report, the Defense Logistics Agency said it does the same. "On a monthly basis, DLA's (Fund Balance With Treasury) is adjusted to agree with the U.S. Treasury accounts."

The Navy, in a footnote in its 2012 financial report, "acknowledges that it has a material internal control weakness in that it does not reconcile its" numbers with the Treasury's. The footnote said the Navy inserts inaccurate numbers in its monthly reports so that they agree with the Treasury's. It said it is working with DFAS to try to eliminate the problems.

The Treasury says it requires the monthly reports from Pentagon agencies to ensure that it is "providing accurate financial information to Congress and the general public." The reports verify that the military is using money for its intended purposes; spending money on things other than what it was appropriated for is, with rare exceptions, a violation of the Antideficiency Act, which forbids anyone but Congress to appropriate money. The law carries penalties for individuals involved in violating it.

Because of the lack of accurate accounting, a 2012 GAO report said, "the Department of the Navy is at increased risk of Antideficiency Act violations."

Without a functioning, unified bookkeeping system, the Pentagon's accountants have no option but to continue taking that risk.

Woodford, the former accountant in DFAS's Cleveland office, says that in the frenzy to complete the Navy's monthly financial reports to the Treasury, much of the blame rested with the "old antiquated systems" the Pentagon used. A common reason for inserting plugs was that "you knew what the numbers were, but you didn't have the supporting documents."

The Navy data, pouring in through dozens of jury-rigged pipelines into similarly disparate systems, required many "manual workarounds" - typing data from one system into another, which only added to the potential for errors.
"They do so much manual work, it's just ridiculous," says Toni Medley, who retired five years ago after 30 years doing an assortment of jobs at the same DFAS office. It's tedious work, she says, and the people doing it "make a lot of mistakes."
The Navy declined to comment.

Yokel, the retired official at the DFAS Cleveland office, worked as a consultant on the Navy Enterprise Resource Planning project, the new accounting system that fell short of expectations. He says that in recent years, the new system has managed to reduce the number of plugs, though they still can add up to a lot in dollar terms. And nearly half the Navy's budget isn't covered by the system.




November 12, 2013

Agenda 21 is the Master Plan for a New World Order



The full text of Agenda 21 was revealed at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (Earth Summit), held in Rio de Janeiro on June 13, 1992, where 178 governments voted to adopt the program; then-U.S. President George Bush signed the treaty at the summit. The final text was the result of drafting, consultation, and negotiation, beginning in 1989 and culminating at the two-week conference. The number 21 refers to an agenda for the 21st Century. In 1995, Bill Clinton signed Executive Order #12858, creating a Presidential Council on ‘Sustainable Development.’ In 1997, the General Assembly of the UN held a special session to appraise five years of progress on the implementation of Agenda 21. The Assembly recognized progress as 'uneven' and identified key trends including increasing globalization, widening inequalities in income and a continued deterioration of the global environment. A new General Assembly Resolution promised further action. The Johannesburg Plan of Implementation, agreed at the World Summit on Sustainable Development (Earth Summit 2002) affirmed UN commitment to 'full implementation' of Agenda 21, alongside achievement of the Millennium Development Goals and other international agreements. In 2012, at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development the attending members reaffirmed their commitment to Agenda 21 in their outcome document, "The Future We Want". Within the executive branch of the US government, President H.W. Bush, President Clinton, and President Obama have all signed executive orders that broadly support the tenets of Agenda 21 but do not make reference to Agenda 21 by name. [Source]

The truth is: Obama, Bush and every president since 1912 has worked for those WHO WANT TO DESTROY THIS COUNTRY. Do the research! The plane is going down folks, and you've been duped. 

Democrats Against UN Agenda 21

UN Agenda 21/Sustainable Development is the action plan implemented worldwide to inventory and control all land, all water, all minerals, all plants, all animals, all construction, all means of production, all energy, all education, all information, and all human beings in the world. INVENTORY AND CONTROL.

Have you wondered where these terms 'sustainability' and 'smart growth' and 'high density urban mixed use development' came from? Doesn't it seem like about 10 years ago you'd never heard of them and now everything seems to include these concepts? Is that just a coincidence? That every town and county and state and nation in the world would be changing their land use/planning codes and government policies to align themselves with...what?

UN Agenda 21. What is it? Considering its policies are woven into all the General Plans of the cities and counties, it's important for people to know where these policies are coming from. While many people support the United Nations for its 'peacemaking' efforts, hardly anyone knows that they have very specific land use policies that they would like to see implemented in every city, county, state and nation. The specific plan is called United Nations Agenda 21 Sustainable Development, which has its basis in Communitarianism. By now, most Americans have heard of sustainable development but are largely unaware of Agenda 21.

In a nutshell, the plan calls for governments to take control of all land use and not leave any of the decision making in the hands of private property owners. It is assumed that people are not good stewards of their land and the government will do a better job if they are in control. Individual rights in general are to give way to the needs of communities as determined by the governing body. Moreover, people should be rounded up off the land and packed into human settlements, or islands of human habitation, close to employment centers and transportation. Another program, called the Wildlands Project, spells out how most of the land is to be set aside for non-humans.

UN Agenda 21 cites the affluence of Americans as being a major problem which needs to be corrected. It calls for lowering the standard of living for Americans so that the people in poorer countries will have more, a redistribution of wealth. Although people around the world aspire to achieve the levels of prosperity we have in our country, and will risk their lives to get here, Americans are cast in a very negative light and need to be taken down to a condition closer to average in the world. Only then, they say, will there be social justice which is a cornerstone of the UN Agenda 21 plan.

Agenda 21 policies date back to the 70's but it got its real start in 1992 at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro when President Bush signed onto it.

"Agenda 21 - This global contract binds governments around the world to the UN plan for changing the ways we live, eat, learn and communicate – all under the noble banner of saving the Earth. Its regulations would severely limit water, electricity and transportation – even deny human access to our most treasured wilderness areas. If implemented, it would manage and monitor all lands and people. No one would be free from the watchful eye of the new global tracking and information system." - Berit Kjos, "Local Agenda 21 - The UN Plan for Your Community"

"Sustainable Development - The concept of Sustainable Development basically says that there are too many people on planet Earth and that the population of the world must be reduced in order to have enough resources for future generations. [Under the New World Order plan,] the UN should be the global custodian of the Earth and all of its resources. This means that we will be measured by how much we produce and how much we consume as found in the 'family dependency ratio.' Every person will be valued according to their usefulness. In addition, the UN will control the Earth's resources – energy, water, food and so on. The concept of Sustainable Development can be found in the Communisto Manifesto and the 1977 USSR Constitution." - Joan M. Veon, The Women's International Media Group, Inc.

Green idealolgy was at the core of Nazi thinking. Read Martin Durkin's article: "NAZI GREENS - An Inconvenient History


The 'Sustainable' Plot to Erode American Prosperity, Liberty and Independence

Right Angles
September 5, 2011

Colorado is on the verge of succumbing to a virulent plague that's disguised with the innocuous label of “sustainability.” The pestilence is spreading across the entire country. The primary infecting agent is the International Council on Local Environmental Initiatives USA, commonly known as ICLEI USA.

Once the pathogenic ICLEI invades a host community, citizens experience seemingly benign symptoms such as smart growth plans that concentrate population centers and initiatives to reduce CO2 and greenhouse gases.

But as the sustainability infection rapidly strengthens, the evidence of a potentially terminal illness is apparent. American citizens are being stripped of liberty, subjected to quasi-government control, and forced into dwindling prosperity.

More than 600 local governments in the United States use taxpayer dollars to pay membership dues to ICLEI USA. In Colorado, member communities include Denver, Fort Collins, Aspen and Carbondale.

On its website, ICLEI unabashedly reveals that it advocates “participatory, long-term, strategic planning processes that address local sustainability while protecting global common goods … and therefore links local action to global goals and targets such as Agenda 21.”

Agenda 21 (aka Agenda for the 21st Century) is the social engineering blueprint of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs.

According to Agenda 21, the goals of sustainable development are integration of economic, social, and environmental policies to reduce consumption, restore biodiversity and attain social equity.

For the record, social equity is synonymous with social justice, which asserts that all people have the right “to benefit equally from the resources afforded us by society and the environment.”

The clear-stated goals of ICLEI are rooted in the core principles of Agenda 21. In that regard, sustainability balances three interrelated aims: environment, economy and social equity. Societal decisions are to be made from a global holistic standpoint, casting aside the narrow perspectives of individual liberty, national sovereignty and free-market economics.

In the United States, ICLEI advocates are increasingly occupying staff positions within local governments. Aided by community activist groups, these staffers push elected leaders to sanction membership in ICLEI USA. The organization offers money and resources to member communities that adopt sustainability plans per ICLEI guidelines.

Sustainability plans typically include a climate action plan with measures like energy efficiency audits of municipal buildings, streetlight retrofits, public transit expansion, and renewable energy projects. Other common initiatives are affordable housing, green jobs programs, and bans on products like plastic bags. The entire globalist agenda is enacted without voter approval.

In addition to membership dues, ICLEI is funded by entities such as the U.S. Department of State, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Green Building Council.

At every level, our own government and regulatory agencies are paying this pseudo-government globalist entity to undermine our constitutional rights as Americans. Citizens are letting it happen because media buzzwords, such as climate change and carbon footprint, incite guilt for adherence to constitutional law and preservation of America's founding principles.

In fact, the rash of local sustainability planning has nothing to do with protecting the environment. ICLEI is part of a scheme, sanctioned by United Nations, to erode American independence, liberty and prosperity. It's about power and control for a globalist movement.

The prognosis is grim. ICLEI-sponsored education programs are already entrenched in our schools, teaching kids to be global citizens instead of Americans. Our inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness could atrophy and die in a generation.

Eradication of the ICLEI infection is imperative. The cure must incorporate educating our children about American history and heritage, enlightening our neighbors about the lies of sustainability, and demanding that our leaders act within the framework of the Constitution. Without a concerted effort, our sovereign health is doomed.

Agenda 21 and the Step by Step Process to Enforce It in America

Throughout the spring and summer of this year I have been traveling the nation, speaking to audiences and elected officials about Agenda 21 and how it has become official policy in nearly every city and rural section of the nation. My audiences have been enthusiastic and eager to learn more. At every stop someone has asked me for a copy of my address, usually saying it is the best explanation of Agenda 21 they have ever heard. So, for this addition of the DeWeese Report, I have decided to reprint it in its entirely. Please make copies and share with your friends, family and elected officials. We are truly starting to make incredible progress in this fight to stop Agenda 21. Every person's education on the subject becomes a more effective activist to stop it!

DeWeese Report
November 10, 2011
The official word is out about me. According to several newspaper reports from around the country, I am only here to spread wild conspiracy rumors to scare you into fearing your benevolent government. 

Recently, the Corvallis, Oregon Gazette-Times carried an article entitled “The Great Riparian Conspiracy.” The reporter took great delight in making those of us who oppose Agenda 21 sound like the typical redneck who “just hates that there UN.”

And said the article,
“Like any good conspiracy theory, there is a kernel of truth at the fore of this one. For instance, there really is something called Agenda 21.” And there really is an International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI).
Well, hurray for this reporter, he at least read the title pages. But he obviously failed to read even the introduction to the Agenda 21 reports. It’s the same old story in news reports across the nation. The reporter just assumes there is no truth to it and does no more checking of the facts.

Of course, that is the kind of condescending smirk those of us who have spent years studying this issue have come to expect. Through 18 years experience devoted to this issue, I think I can say with some confidence that this reporter hasn’t spent ten minutes actually reading a single Sustainable Development document and compared it to “local” development plans. I have. And here is what I know.

Where did Agenda 21 come from?

There is a new language taking over government. The typical city council meeting discusses “comprehensive development,” “density,” “historic preservation,” and “partnerships” between the city and private business.

Civic leaders organize community meetings run by “facilitators,” as they outline a “vision” for the town, enforced by “consensus.” Free trade, social justice, consensus, carbon footprints, partnerships, preservation, stakeholders, land use, environmental protection, development, diversity, visioning, open space, heritage, comprehensive planning, critical thinking, and community service are all part of our new language.

What are they really talking about? What mental pictures come to mind when those words are used? Where was such language first developed?

The term “Sustainable Development” was born on the pages of a United Nations document called “Our Common Future,” the official report of the 1987 UN World Commission on Environment and Development.

As a result of this report, for the first time, the use of environmental protection and human development were tied to the age-old Socialist goals of international redistribution of wealth. And that is the key to understanding the true purpose of Sustainable Development and all of its policies — control of all facets of the economy.

Here is how the UN described Agenda 21 in one of its own publications in 1993 in an article entitled “Agenda 21: The Earth Summit Strategy to Save our Planet:”
“Agenda 21proposes an array of actions which are intended to be implemented by EVERY person on Earth…it calls for specific changes in the activities of ALL people… Effective execution of Agenda 21 will REQUIRE a profound reorientation of ALL humans, unlike anything the world has ever experienced.”
So the same reporter, who would undoubtedly argue that the US must be involved in the UN, completely ignores its call for a policy that will profoundly change our society. And when you and I point it out and protest against it — we are just a bunch of nuts. Pardon me, for taking offense at that — but who is the stupid one here?

I have never said that there are UN troops or UN representatives enforcing Agenda 21 in this country. It is being done in a much more subtle, less direct way. But the result is the same.
What gives Agenda 21 the “ruling authority” to become American law?

Here is the exact course that brought Agenda 21 to America and into our local community.

The infrastructure pushing the Sustainable Development agenda is a vast, international matrix. At the top of the heap is the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP). But the UNEP doesn’t operate on its own. Influencing it are thousands of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). These are private groups which seek to implement a special political agenda. Through the UN infrastructure, particularly through the UNEP, they have great power.

And I should point out that true NGOs are groups officially sanctioned and certified by the UN to participate in these international efforts. Prior to the 1992 UN Earth Summit in Rio, these sanctioned NGO groups spent considerable time writing and creating the document that would be introduced to the world as Agenda 21.

At the Earth Summit, nearly every head of state signed agreement to follow Agenda 21, including President George H. W. Bush

Agenda 21 is not a treaty that has to be ratified by the Senate. Rather it is what is known as a soft law policy — a guideline that the nation agrees to implement through its own legislative process. That is why it is so difficult to follow and document as UN-created policy. President Bush, in signing the document, committed the US to implement the policies of Agenda 21. That sent the policy to our Federal bureaucracy, which started to set it in motion.

Agenda 21 then gained huge momentum when, in 1993, President Bill Clinton, issued an Executive Order to create the President’s Council on Sustainable Development and made it official US policy.

Take a look at who served on that Council and you will see many of the same NGOs which helped write Agenda 21 for the UN. They include Jonathon Lash of the World Resources Institute, one of the three most powerful organizations influencing the UNEP. And the President’s Council also contained John Sawhill of the Nature Conservancy and Jay Hair of the National Wildlife Federation and Michele Perrault, international Vice President of the Sierra Club. All players in the creation of Agenda 21, openly serving on the President’s council with the specific mission of implementing Agenda 21 into American policy.

And here is the vitally important connection between Agenda 21 and the US enforcement of it that all of these reporters and government officials and NGOs deny exist. Listen carefully. Included at the UNEP table to develop the policy, along with all of the NGO groups who helped write it are these players — an incredible mix of agencies of the federal government. These include the Department of State; Department of Interior; Department of Agriculture; Environmental Protection Agency; the National Park Service; The U.S. Forest Service; and the Fish and Wildlife Service. These agencies send representatives to all UNEP meetings. Why do they do that — if Agenda 21 is just a myth that has no affect on our government?

You might remember a great deal of discussion during the Clinton Administration about the idea of a “Reinvention of Government.” Vice President Al Gore was put in charge of the reinvention. The reinvention, of course, was Sustainable Development.

The purpose of the President’s Council’s was to translate the guidelines of Agenda 21 into public policy to be administered by the federal government.

And this step by step process translated into the “ruling authority” through which a UN plan (Agenda 21) has become unquestioned US policy throughout the nation. It was invented by NGOs through the UN. It was brought to the US through the President’s Council. And, through federal and state legislation it is being implemented on the local level through the involvement of NGOs who helped write it.

Sustainable Development is not a local idea or a local policy.

What is Agenda 21 and Sustainable Development?

So what is Sustainable Development? Sustainable Development is about a planned central economy and redistribution of the wealth — on a local, state, national and international level.

The process by which it is implemented creates a matrix of locked away land — or severe land use controls; control of energy and energy production; control of transportation; control of industry; control of food production; control of development; control of water availability; and control of population size and growth.

Most of their policies and regulations are issued under the excuse of protecting the environment.
This is the process through which America is being transformed. It is what your elected officials are really doing as they use terms like comprehensive development plans, energy audits, open space and historic preservation. That is Agenda 21 and Sustainable Development.

Agenda 21 is not just policy — it is a complete system to change the way we think, the way we react, the way we make decisions — and those who promote it have very specific answers as to how they want each of you to do those things.

That’s why they call it an AGENDA. Let me show you what I mean.

The Three Es

The Sustainable Development logo used in most literature on the subject contains three connecting circles labeled Social Equity; Economic Prosperity; and Ecological Integrity (known commonly as the 3 Es).

Social Equity: I will tell you straight out, if you fail to grasp the Social Equity aspect of Sustainable Development — then you simply have no grasp of this issue. Period.
Social Equity is based on a demand for “social justice.” Social justice is described as the right and opportunity of all people “to benefit equally from the resources afforded us by society and the environment” — redistribution of the wealth. By the way, Karl Marx was the first to coin the phrase “social justice.”

Today, the phrase is used throughout Sustainablist literature and is the root of new policy initiatives. The Sustainablist system is based on the principle that individuals must give up selfish wants for the needs of the common good, or the “community.

This is the same policy behind the push to eliminate our nation’s borders to allow the “migration” of those from other nations into the United States to share our individually-created wealth and our taxpayers-paid government social programs. Borders, they say, stop the natural migration of the human race. “National sovereignty” they say, “is a social injustice.”

According to the Sustainablists it is a social injustice for some to have prosperity if others do not. Profits are made at the expense of the people. And so Sustainable policy is developed from that starting position.
As a result, Social Equity through Sustainable Development is a means to a forced utopia with promises of healthcare for all. Jobs for all. Housing for all. Equality for all.

So, the reason the government refuses to secure our borders is because it is committed to imposing sustainable development.

The reason congress refused to listen to your pleas against centralized health care is because it is committed to sustainable development. Simply do a Google search for “Sustainable Medicine” and you will find more than 5,850,000 references, containing most of the provisions of Obamacare.

Incredibly, a new social justice policy making its way through state governments is called “Gross National Happiness” (GNH). Under the Health plank of Agenda 21, it is an attempt to qualify in psychological terms general wellbeing.

If allowed to move forward, Gross National Happiness will slowly replace Gross National Product (GNP) as the standard to measure the health of the nation. Rather than using economics, it will measure social trends that affect quality of life.

This is combined with the “Happy Planet Index” (HPI), developed by the New Economy Foundation, with support from the Friends of the Earth.

At its core, the Happy Planet Index argues that long and happy lives must be the economy’s ultimate goal and not merely insatiable economic goals.

And you wonder why the economy is collapsing as the rantings from a bad LSD trip become serious policy actually considered by real government agencies. What I have just revealed to you comes from official documents from the state of Maryland.
Economic Prosperity: The international system of Agenda 21 encompasses the free trade movement that created the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and Public/Private Partnerships, all pulled together into a government-driven economy called “corporatism.” It is not Capitalism or free markets, though it may have some of the trappings. The marketplace is still there. But, ultimately, corporatism does not trust the marketplace to do what the elites want done.
The partnerships allow for special tax breaks; access to land for some developers but not others; non-compete clauses in government projects that guarantee profits, access to grants and lucrative special government projects, and much more. Under PPPs there is a guarantee of protection and profits.

Corporations that play ball get the power of government and Government gets to hide behind the independence of private business. Thus the partnership between corporations and government is done at the expense of ordinary people — the exact opposite effect of free markets controlled by consumers. This is the new way business is being run in America under Sustainable Development. The business plan of the day — lobby for regulations. They argue that it’s good for the economy, creating jobs by destroying things from the past. They say it’s good for the economy to enforce regulations to make people buy things they didn’t need before.

It’s certainly not free enterprise or open markets. The true description is government-sanctioned monopolies; right out of the Mussolini fascist play book.
Ecological Integrity: Well, this is the excuse for the whole agenda — environmental protection .
To understand the power of the transformation of society under sustainable development, consider this quote from the UN’s Biodiversity treaty which was also introduced at the 1992 Earth Summit:
“Nature has an integral set of different values (cultural, spiritual and material) where humans are one strand in nature’s web and all living creatures are considered equal. Therefore the natural way is the right way and human activities should be molded along nature’s rhythms.”
This quote lays down the ground rules for the entire Sustainable Development agenda. It says humans are nothing special — just one strand in the nature of things or, put another way, humans are simply biological resources.

Sustainablist policy is to oversee any issue in which man interacts with nature — which, of course, is literally everything. This is necessary, Sustainablists say, because humans only defile nature.

In other words, Sustainablists view man as nothing more than a swarm of locusts which swoops down on nature and sucks it clean until there is nothing left. Nothing good comes from man, according to Sustainablist doctrine.

And private property ownership and control is a main target of Sustainable Development. Consider this quote from the report of the 1976 UN’s Habitat I conference which said:
“Land …cannot be treated as an ordinary asset, controlled by individuals and subject to the pressures and inefficiencies of the market. Private land ownership is also a principle instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth, therefore, contributes to social injustice.”
The fact is, Agenda 21 is a blueprint to completely change our society to a top-down planned central economy in a strange mixture of Socialism, fascism and corporatism.

To convince Americans to accept it required something that that would get us to sacrifice our natural rights voluntarily. The answer was environmental Armageddon. You must sacrifice freedom to protect the planet. It’s urgent we’re told.

Do you doubt that? Then consider this quote by Alexander King, co-founder of the Club of Rome:
“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming. Water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill…All of these dangers are caused by human intervention…the real enemy then, is humanity.”
So the urgency is on. Global warming and Climate Change are feeding the hysteria. There’s no time to consider things like individual concerns, wants and needs. Selfish, cries the Sustainablist! We must save the environment! Go Green! Get out of your cars. Stop using energy. Sacrifice. Cut your carbon foot print or perish.

And so Federal and state governments, working hand in hand with a horde of non-governmental organizations — private groups with personal political agendas, force passage of rules and regulations- passed down to local communities.

But, say your local officials, none of that UN, socialist stuff is true — just conspiracy theories by right wing radicals.
“We’re just creating the tools necessary in a local effort to manage growth and development for our community,” they say.
Have you heard any of these? Then consider this quote from J. Gary Lawrence, a planner for the city of Seattle, and an advisor to the President’s Council for Sustainable Development:
“Participating in a U.N. advocated planning process would very likely bring out many…who would actively work to defeat any elected official…undertaking Local Agenda 21. So we will call our process something else, such as “comprehensive planning,” “growth management,” or “smart growth.”
Local indeed.

Sustainable Development is the process by which America is being reorganized around a central principle of state collectivism using the environment as bait.

This is a political movement led by those who seek to control the world economy, dictate development and redistribute the world’s wealth. They use the philosophical base of Karl Marx, the tactics of Adolph Hitler, and the rhetoric of the Sierra Club.

Everything connected with Sustainable Development translates to higher costs, shortages and sacrifice.

The best way to understand what Sustainable Development actually is can be found by discovering what is NOT sustainable.

Maurice Strong, Secretary General of the UN’s Rio Earth Summit in 1992 said,
“…Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class — involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, home and work air-conditioning, and suburban housing are not sustainable.”
Four routes to Agenda 21

So how is this wrenching transformation being put into place? There are four very specific routes being used.
  • In the rural areas it’s called the Wildlands Project.
  • In the cities it’s called smart growth.
  • In business it’s called Public/Private Partnerships.
  • In government it’s called stakeholder councils and non-elected boards and regional government — or reinvented government.
Let’s take them one at a time.


The Wildlands Project was the brainchild of Earth First’s Dave Foreman and it literally calls for the “re-wilding” of 50% of all the land in every state — back to the way it was before Christopher Columbus set foot on this land.

In 1983, when Foreman first dreamed up the scheme for the Wildlands Project, he said:
“It is not enough to preserve the roadless, undeveloped country remaining. We must re-create wilderness in large regions: move out the cars and civilized people, dismantle the roads and dams, reclaim the plowed lands and clearcuts — reintroduce extripated species.”
Destruction of human civilization was his goal.

In reality, The Wildlands Project is a diabolical plan to herd people off the rural lands and into human settlements. Crazy you say! Yes. Impossible? Not so fast. From the demented mind of Foreman, the plan became the blueprint for the UN’s Biodiversity Treaty. So now the scheme is international in scope — with the power of law.

Thomas Lovejoy, a science advisor to the federal Department of Interior said,
“We will map the whole nation…determine development for the whole country, and regulate it.”
And your local elected officials are helping to implement this insanity. Yet, they are quick to deny that such ideas have their origins on the international level. They accuse me of wearing a tin foil hat and hearing voices.

Well, here is a voice I hear. Again, Maurice Strong said at the UN’s Earth Summit,
“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrial nations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” And that is the true agenda we face!
But how do you remove people from the land? One step at a time. There are many tools in place to stop human activity and grow the wilderness.
  • Deny grazing and water rights on public lands. It becomes more difficult and more expensive to run the farm or ranch — eventually he goes out of business.
  • Lock away natural resources by creating more national parks. It shuts down the mines — and they go out of business.
  • Call every mosquito infested swamp and occasional mud puddle a wetlands and ban any development around it.
  • Invent a Spotted Owl shortage and pretend it can’t live in a forest where timber is cut. Shut off the forest. Then, when no trees are cut, there’s nothing to feed the mills and then there are no jobs, and — they go out of business.
The state of Maryland is considering a plan to ban septic tanks as a means to protect the Chesapeake Bay, even though there is no evidence that septic tanks do any damage what so ever.   The only result of the ban will be to make it impossible to live in a rural area — unless you want to spend several million dollars on a private water treatment plant. Cleverly, they don’t ban building on private property or impose a land grab. They just make it impossible to live there.

The Wildlands Project comes in many names and many programs. Wilderness areas, Comprehensive land use plans, Bike ways, Green ways, Heritage areas, land management, rails to trails, open space, wolf and bear reintroduction, Conservation Easements, and many more.

Each of these programs is designed to make it just a little harder to live on the land — a little more expensive — a little more hopeless. In reality the process is simply herding people off rural land and into human habitat areas — or cities.

Smart Growth

The second path to Sustainable Development is called Smart Growth. They put a line around the city and tell you no growth can take place outside that line. Urban sprawl, they say disdainfully.

They refuse to build more roads as a ploy to get you out of your car into public transportation, restricting mobility. New highways, they say are feeders to more development. They even stop the widening of existing roads — for the same reason. So roads become overcrowded in gridlock. And they blame development. Their new ploy is to force cars to share the road with bikes — the “complete street,” they call it.

In many smart growth cities new apartment buildings now have no garages or parking lots — we don’t want any stinking cars!

Smart Growth creates an unnatural restriction on space inside the controlled city limits—so there is a shortage of houses, and prices go up. That means populations will have to be controlled, because now there is a shortage of land.

That’s why kind, compassionate environmentalist Dr. Jacques Cousteau declared
“In order to stabilize world populations, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day.”
Sustainablists call for an 85% reduction in human population. How is that done? Do we use the proven success of China’s population control methods of forced abortions and sterilizations? The Chinese, I can tell you, are big supporters of Sustainable Development and I’m sure they can share some ideas with us.
Of course, Comprehensive Development Plans are the tools of choice in nearly every city in the nation to produce the proper smart growth community. Through these plans, energy and water use is tightly controlled.

Smart Growth advocates force individuals to live in denser communities that take up smaller tracts of land per housing unit. Planning advocates and government bureaucrats are forcing such planned communities across the state and nation, and those plans put severe controls on private property. In fact, there can be no private property in a smart growth community.

Reinvented Government and Stakeholder Councils

The Third way to Sustainable Development — inside the human habitat areas, (our cities and towns) government is steadily being controlled by an elite ruling class called stakeholder Councils. These are mostly NGOs, who, like thieves in the night, just show up to stake their claim to enforce their own private agendas.

The function of legitimate elected government within the Sustainablist system is fast becoming little more than the rubber stamp to create and enforce the dictates of the councils.

Once the councils are established, it becomes nearly impossible to discuss issues with your elected representatives. Instead they will automatically refer you to the proper council or administration or department, run by unresponsive appointed hacks armed with their own political agenda.  Consequently, they control almost all business decisions. They can dictate the kind of building materials you may use in your home — or whether you can build on your property at all. They decide if roads are built. How much water can be used. How downtowns will look through historic preservation. How neighborhoods will be built.

These non-elected councils fit almost perfectly the definition of a State Soviet: a system of councils that report to an apex council and then implement a predetermined outcome. Soviets are the operating mechanism of a government-controlled economy — the exact opposite of a Constitutional Republic.

Public/Private Partnerships

The fourth path to Sustainable Development, as I mentioned, is Public/Private Partnerships. That means they can charge what they want and they can use the power of government to put competition out of business. You hear the propaganda of the PPPs nightly on your television as their commercials tell you to go green.

And they use Congress to build more wealth and power. GE used their partnership with government to ban their own product — the incandescent light bulb and replace it with the new “green” bulbs. By next year you won’t be allowed to buy incandescent bulbs. Why? Because GE can make three times as much from the new ones as they are more expensive.

Such is the reality of green industry. In fact, there would be no green industry if not for the billions of dollars in grant money shelled out to the partnerships to develop alternative energy schemes.

In reality, wind energy may well be the least sustainable and least eco-friendly of all electricity options. In fact, it probably requires more energy to manufacture, haul and install these monstrous windmills and their transmission systems than they will generate in their lifetimes. Yet the nation, in the name of Sustainable Development is investing everything in our future to enforce them over real energy providers.

Alternative energy amounts to less than one percent of our energy needs. And for every green job created, two in legitimate industry are lost because of green rules and regulations.

America has now discovered that is has a near infinite amount of shale oil in literally every state. Rather then celebrate our good fortune to reduce gas prices and eliminate dependency on foreign oil cartels, the Sustainablists are rushing in a near panic to block the drilling of shale oil.

To the Sustainablist elite, who loath competition and free markets, such a change in the status quo is terrifying because their control is highly profitable for those industries as they take the tax money through the Public/Private Partnerships.

And now there is a new kind of corporation being developed through Public Private Partnerships — it’s called “benefit” corporations. As Michael Shaw of Freedom Advocates describes it, imagine a legislated brotherhood of business where favored businesses get to go to the front of the line for permits, licenses and opportunities merely because they agree to advance the principles of Sustainable Development and Agenda 21.

Five states already have Benefit Corporation legislation: Hawaii, Virginia, Maryland, Vermont and New Jersey. And six more are in the process of making it part of their states corporate legal system, including California, Colorado, Michigan, New York, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. This policy will destroy free enterprise and guarantee that we can’t stop Agenda 21.

ICLEI

Many Americans ask how dangerous international policies can suddenly turn up in local government, all seemingly uniform to those in communities across the nation and around the globe. The answer — Meet ICLEI, a non-profit, private foundation, dedicated to helping your mayor implement all of his promises.

Originally known as the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI), today the group simply calls itself “ICLEI — Local Governments for Sustainability.” In 1992, ICLEI was one of the groups instrumental in creating Agenda 21.

ICLEI’s mission is to implement Agenda 21 world-wide and it’s having tremendous success. ICLEI is now operating in more than 600 cities in all 50 states. The group is shooting for 1,000 member cities in the next three years. Each of these cities pay dues to ICLEI to receive its programs. When local governments contract with ICLEI they agree to implement the Agenda 21 policy of Sustainable Development.

Here’s just some of the programs ICLEI provides cities and towns, in order to spread their own particular political agenda in the name of “community services” and environmental protection:
Software products and associated training, Access to a network of experts, newsletters, conferences and training workshops, Toolkits, online resources, case studies, fact sheets, policy and practice manuals.
These tools are used to fully indoctrinate employees at city hall to assure only Sustainable policies are considered. And, then there’s Notification of relevant grant opportunities — this is the important one — money — with severe strings attached.

But keep in mind, your community does not have to be an ICLEI member to be affected by Agenda 21 ICLEI policies. Around the nation, ICLEI partners with other, established organizations, like the American Planning Association and the International City/County Management Association (ICMA). And then there is the Renaissance Planning Group.

These groups, and hundreds more like them, work hand in hand with groups like U.S. Conference of Mayors, the National Governors Association, the National League of Cities, the National Association of County Administrators and more that your elected representatives belong to.

We are now finding that while ICLEI is a convenient target because of its obvious ties to the UN, the American Planning Association may be the more dangerous player in the game. That’s because the APA is in literally every city, trusted as a legitimate, non-controversial, established organization. Nothing here to tie it to some international UN conspiracy, we are told.

Well, again, not so fast. The APA just issued its new planning guide — sent to every community in the nation. A quick look through it finds references to social justice, smart growth, promotion of “affordable housing,” protection of farm land, stopping urban sprawl, combating climate change, dealing with homelessness, energy preservation, provisions for child care and more — all out of the social justice plank of Agenda 21.

And then there is a section on “property fairness,” wherein the report discusses efforts by property owners to stop government land grabs without compensation. How radical of them to actually want to be paid for land the government takes! The APA refers to these property owners as “radical property rights organizations.”

These are the people who are making policy. These are the people your local officials trust to be main stream. These are the true enemy of freedom on America. That’s how these policies quickly spread across the nation as enforced regulations. And here are some of the results of these efforts?


Dictates from the top

Across the nation, state legislatures are passing laws requiring cities and towns to establish comprehensive development plans that include high density urban development areas, controls on energy and water use, controls on transportation, making it more difficult to drive cars, perhaps forcing acceptance of light rail and high speed trains. These laws are now being used as a weapon to force Sustainable Development at a rapid pace across the nation.

Whole areas of communities are now being redesigned to “encourage” industry and office buildings as a means to build economic development. Of course that means eminent domain trumps property rights and private homes. And the cold hard fact is that after the land has been taken for such development, many cities find that no industry uses the project. The land just lies empty, unused, worthless, the result of government over reach rather than common sense free market decisions. That too is Sustainable Development.

Comprehensive Development Plans in city after city across the nation are enforcing schemes to “cut their carbon footprint” by controlling energy use.

Here’s some of what each of you can now expect from these plans that your city fathers say will make things better:

One of the most popular tools now to control energy use is the energy audit and building review. They establish quotas for electrical use and for heating and cooling pumps; water use; weatherization of existing buildings; replacing incandescent light bulbs; and on and on.

That means that government bureaucrats will come into your home or office building and determine the amount of potential energy use you should have.

You will be given a list of “recommendations” necessary to bring your home into compliance. These may include the need for a new roof; new energy efficient appliances; new windows, etc.

In Oakland California, the city council did just these things, and the result was an average cost to every single homeowner of at least $35,000. And if you don’t comply, you will be fined, and possibly unable to sell you home until you do.

Across the nation, power companies, in partnership with government planners, are forcing the use of Smart Meters. These meters contain RFID chips. The technology enables the power company to keep track of how much power you are using and control, regulate and ration your use of that electricity. They will set the temperature in your home.

If they decide that you are using too much hot water for your showers or washing machines, or too much air conditioning, your electricity will automatically be turned down or even off. Moreover, a future goal is to have all appliances replaced with those containing that same RFID chip, which the smart meter will “speak to” for more regulations and controls.

Those who protest that such meters are a violation of their private property rights and freedom of choice are told that their only choice is to accept the meters or have no electricity to their home.
  • Under the title of Sustainable Farming, the planners are excited about a new sustainable style of tractor to pull the plows — it’s called a team of Oxen. Don’t laugh — they’re serous. There is a college in Vermont that teaches sustainable farming and they have a herd of Oxen. Students are paying for an education to learn Davy Crockett’s farming techniques.
  • In San Diego, California, there have been no new docks built in its harbor because the docks hide the sun from the plankton underneath.
  • In Lincoln, Nebraska, there is now a pending rule to force property owners to cut back trees in their yard so they don’t block the solar panels on the neighbor’s roof.
  • There are now policies being advocated to place taxes on use of toilet paper; on the number of miles you drive; and on the use of plastic bags.
  • The EPA is now providing funding to NGO groups to run training programs for people to photograph and report neighbors who may be “committing crimes against the environment.”
This summer, Obama signed Executive order 13575 to create the White House Rural Council. The council is a list of the most aggressive agencies and departments of the US Government. It will bring an army of regulators into rural areas to completely control every decision of land use, farming, and development. It will even affect curriculum in schools.

Farmers who have been feeding America for over 200 years will not be able to make a single decision without permission and massive paperwork from bureaucrats from over 25 agencies. The result will only be food shortages and higher prices.

Welcome to the utopia of Sustainable Development.

Socialism, Fascism, Corporatism by any other name is really…

This is Big Brother at its worst. And it’s planned control enforced by your local leaders and representatives — in partnership with ICLEI — an organization who’s Vice Chairman (Harvey Revin) said,
“Individual rights will have to take a backseat to the collective.”
Would any of your elected officials admit to enforcing communism on your community? Of course not. Then why are they so eager to be in partnership with an organization which does?

The United States is not a global village run by elders who hand down the rules from on-high. We are a nation of individuals whose rights are supposed to be protected and guaranteed by the representatives we elect. We demand accountability from them.

However, global forces which do not accept the unique American form of government sneak behind the curtain, avoiding controversy and honest debate.

The only possible result can be the tyranny of a powerless electorate stripped of their rights, property, and self determination.

Global Warming has been the excuse for the hysteria, but true science is now showing that to be the greatest hoax ever perpetrated. So there is no need for these dire policies to cut back our carbon footprint by forcing us to lock away land and resources and live in high density cracker boxes.

International NGOs tell you its all “local”

We all want a clean environment. However, what we are objecting to here is not environmental protection, but the process that is being used in its name.

There is nothing local, or innocent or normal about it. This is an international agenda created by ideological zealots working hand in hand thorough massive international gatherings sponsored through the United Nations.

There, documents are carefully prepared for the signatures of leaders of every nation. Once signed, the bureaucracies of the nation use documents like Agenda 21 as a blueprint for legislation and regulations.
To write that legislation, the bureaucrats work hand in hand with the same zealots who wrote the UN documents it’s based on. And then these UN sanctioned NGOs, such as the Sierra Club and the Nature Conservancy team up with local groups like the American Planning Association to apply pressure and make sure local city councils and county supervisors toe the line.

And as they dutifully put the agenda in place, these representatives tell you every step of the way that it is all a local plan.

The resulting non-elected boards, councils and region governments, appointed by an “ecologarchy,” answerable to no one, is the perfect definition of a soviet. A centrally-controlled economy.

I assure you, we cannot restore our unique American Republic if our communities are little soviets. Nor can we protect the environment if our economy is destroyed and free men are unable to make choices other than survival in a Sustainablist tyranny.

The Sustainablists are using our carbon footprint as a measure of our guilt. One fact is sure — if you have no carbon foot print you are dead.

Steps to stopping Agenda 21

Elected officials can no longer play ignorant about the origins of their policies. America is dying while they are denying! It is their elected duty to represent the people and protect them from these piranhas that are devouring our way of life.

To save it you must now take action. And understand that the main battle is being fought, not in congress, but on the local level.

If America is to survive, you and I must stop Sustainable Development and Agenda 21 now, at every level of government. We must stand up and protest at every city council and commissioner meeting, at every planning board, and consensus meeting.

Fight the creation of non-elected councils, commissions, or boards, because they can and will be used as a weapon against your ability to deal and reason with local government.

Above all, refuse federal or state money or new sustainable programs and get rid of the old ones.

And if ICLEI and the American Planning Association are now running things in your town — throw them out! Stop payment of dues, disband anything they have built and start looking for some high grade tar and feathers.

And if your elected representatives continue to ignore you while playing footsy with those leading this tyranny, then you must force them out of office. Your survival depends on it.

Nameless, faceless bureaucrats wielding power in the backrooms, untouchable and unseen, is not freedom.

The Sustainablists now haunt the upper levels of the federal government, our state houses, and our city council chambers.

Stirrings among the citizenry

In these very dangerous times it is easy to despair over our nation’s future.

They have achieved many of their goals, but they have not yet won. Their whole agenda is built on a house of cards that stands only when you are ignorant and compliant.

And their arrogance and impatience to force the policy into place is resulting in a stir of the American people.
We are beginning to move the rock of freedom uphill. We are on the threshold of great change because the word is quickly spreading about Agenda 21.

After 18 years of issuing warnings about Agenda 21, finally opposition is being heard. In the past ten months, ten communities have taken action and revoked contracts with ICLEI. Starting with Carroll County, Maryland; then Amador County, California; then Montgomery County, Pennsylvania; then Edmond, Oklahoma, then Las Cruces, NM, then Spartanburg, SC, then Albemarle County, Virginia, then Plantation, Florida, then James City County, Virginia, the place where American basically started — and most recently, Lexington, Virginia — all have rejected its contract with ICLEI.

I have just returned from an extensive ten-day tour of Idaho, Washington, Oregon and Montana, where I spoke to enthusiastic audiences, was interviewed by the news media (resulting in favorable news reports) and met with several elected officials, with exciting results.

In the Washington state legislature, Rep. Matt Shay reports the creation of an anti-Agenda 21 caucus — and one is being planned for the Washington Senate as well. In Oregon, I addressed a meeting of state legislators are the capital building in Salem. The address was live-streamed over the internet and several legislators heard that message and expressed interest in learning more and taking action against Agenda 21.

Of great significance, in Bonner County, Idaho, County Commissioner Cornel Rasor is working to establish a “Property Rights Council” as an official arm of the county government. The Council will oversee legislation that comes before the county commission to determine if it violates private property. In addition, it will train county staff to understand property rights and assure they are protected in all county business. This is a revolutionary idea that must be shared and implemented across the nation.

While I was traveling in Montana, word came that presidential candidate Newt Gingrich talked about Agenda 21 on the Sean Hannity radio show. I had supplied the Gingrich campaign with that information after they contacted me. Apparently Mr. Gingrich and all presidential candidates are being pummeled with questions about Agenda 21. We need to increase that pressure at every campaign stop for candidates at every level!

Finally, in a surprise move, two bills (Assembly Bill 303 and Senate Bill 225) have been introduced into the Wisconsin legislature to allow local community government to repeal comprehensive development plans that were forced under state smart growth legislation. The bills also eliminate the grant program that was set up to finance the smart growth planning. These bills need support and more co-sponsors. Moreover, this legislation needs to be used as model legislation for every single state legislature in the nation.

Every day I talk to activists across the nation hoping to be the next community to kick these zealots out. In a panic, ICLEI is now rushing to cleanse its web site of any mention of Agenda 21. Our opponents are trying their best to ridicule us and paint our movement as extremists. It’s not working — we are getting stronger everyday. For the first time since I started down the road to expose Agenda 21, I believe we will succeed in crushing it.

When Lambs become Lions

You know, recently I watched the film Robin Hood, starring Russell Crowe. And I was struck by the similarities between England of the Thirteenth Century and today’s America.

It was a time of surfs who had no rights, no property and only poverty in their future. It was a time when the king owned everything, from land to livestock. And it was a time when tax collectors could literally confiscate everything you had in the name of the king, leaving you with virtually nothing.

The people attempted to rise up, demanding that the king give them legal rights from which they could be guaranteed the ability to benefit from the fruits of their own labor.

The people of 13th Century England knew what they had to do, if ever they were going to be free. The slogan under which they organized was, “Rise and Rise again, until lambs become lions.”

Today, as we face an ever growing tyranny by a congress and a president, as well as elected officials at every level who ignore you, lie to you, deny their actions that you can plainly see.  Americans, for the first time in our history, face the same evil those Englishmen faced so long ago.

And so today, I appeal to you to take that same resolve. Today, begin that effort to rise up, and continue to fight again and again, at city council and Board of Supervisor meetings. Take their ridicule and return for another fight.

Stand up to the self-proclaimed Stakeholders and outsider NGOs — the carpetbaggers of our day. Reach out to your neighbors and help them see the threat to their freedom that is Agenda 21.
Never give in. Rise and rise again until lambs become lions.

More on Agenda 21 : www.freedomadvocates.org

Here is what the US looks like under UN Agenda 21:

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