20 year veteran of the Georgia school resigned after surveillance video captures her pausing and then intentionally kneeing a special needs student in the back causing to fall forward….Amelia Stripling, a special needs instructor at Tift County Pre-K Center in Tifton, Georgia, has stepped down after the video was released to the public.
By Brianna Ehley,
The Fiscal Times
September 15, 2014
While the eyes of the world are on Iraq and President Obama’s plans to defeat ISIS, the chief auditor in charge of overseeing the U.S. reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan has a warning to policy makers: Don’t forget about the other war-torn country that has already cost hundreds of billions of dollars and has serious problems with corruption and sustainability.
So far, the United States has poured more than $104 billion into Afghanistan reconstruction efforts – that’s more than all the money spent on reconstructing Europe after World War II. Much of that money, as auditors have noted, has been lost to waste, fraud and abuse. In 2010, SIGAR accountants told The Fiscal Times they could only account for less than 10 percent of that money.
That’s a shocking sum, especially since Congress has already authorized another $16 billion to spend in Afghanistan in the next few years. Still, despite spending an “unprecedented” amount of money to rebuild this country, it has no strategy to weed out corruption – leaving hundreds of billions of tax dollars vulnerable, John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) told an audience at Georgetown University on Friday.
“This is astonishing, given that Afghanistan is one of the most corrupt countries in the world and a country that the United States is spending billions of dollars in,” the auditor said. He added that “things could get worse with the drawdown” that is scheduled for the end of 2015.
It’s not just corruption that threatens to derail all of the gains the U.S. has made in the country. Afghanistan, as Sopko noted, has a major problem with sustainability.
Right now, the United States and other international donors fund more than 60 percent of Afghanistan’s national budget of around $7.6 billion. Last year, for example, the Afghan government raised $2 billion in revenues; the rest came from foreign aid, mostly from the United States.
Sopko says in the next few years, the Afghan National Security Forces are going to require a force of 374,000 – at a cost of roughly $5 billion a year. “At these levels, if the Afghan government were to dedicate all of its domestic revenue toward sustaining the Afghan army and police, it still could only pay for about a third of the cost. Moreover, all other costs from paying civil servants to maintaining all roads, schools, hospitals and other non-military infrastructure would also have to come from international donors,” Sopko said. “The bottom line is, it appears we’ve created a government that the Afghans simply cannot afford.”
Sopko is known for being extremely critical of the government agencies involved in reconstruction efforts. He told the audience that the U.S. government has failed to address Afghanistan’s corruption and sustainability issues – which threaten to “jeopardize every gain” the U.S. has made. Meanwhile, he said the government’s counter-narcotics effort has also been a failure and if unaddressed could completely derail any progress the U.S. has made.
“The U.S. has already spent nearly $7.6 billion to combat the opium industry. Yet, by every conceivable metric, we’ve failed,” Sopko said.
Sopko and his team frequently churn out scathing reports highlighting the failures of the Defense and the State Departments in Afghanistan – and many of them receive a wide swath of media attention. This has unsurprisingly sparked some tension between the auditors and officials from the departments being audited who routinely have problems with the IG’s findings. They say that responding to IG reports “chews up countless hours, and that the inspector general’s work ultimately undermines the effort to build stronger civilian institutions here by creating the impression that the United States is simply pouring money down the well,” The New York Times reported.
Sopko says, “SIGAR welcomes publicity because publicity gives our reports and work impact in this town and in Kabul and around the world.” He added, “I admit, some ambassadors and generals and nameless, faceless bureaucrats and contractors are unhappy with the fact we get press coverage, even though our two-person press shop pales in comparison to the squadrons of PR people at Embassy Kabul, ISAF, or the Pentagon. But that is the cost of transparency and open government.”
– See more at: http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2014/09/15/Eyes-ISIS-America-s-104B-Afghanistan-Failing#sthash.riTYbKt6.dpuf
The story below is a reflection of the entitlement mindset that has proliferated for decades in Europe and the United States. It is a mindset of corruption, laziness, and entitlement that has been encouraged and exacerbated by the socialist welfare policies and programs that were supposed to help the poor and disadvantaged. Instead these programs morphed into a way for politicians to dole out benefits for votes. Generations have now become dependent upon the government for their subsistence from birth until death. The learned helplessness has been a key tactic for liberal/ left wing politicians across Europe and the USA. Keep promising people more free shit and they’ll keep voting for you. It works until you run out of other people’s money. Greece has run out of other people’s money. Now the blind can see.
The story below would be funny if it wasn’t so sad. The cancer of entitlement and corruption is so ingrained in Greece society that the patient can never recover. It’s too late. Southern Europe is dead entitlement states walking. There is no rescue plan big enough to save these people from their debt based delusions. Reality is really going to bite for these people.
We sit here across the pond and chuckle at this story about the island of the blind. But, we are only a couple years behind Greece and the ability to print more fiat currency will not save us. Chris Christie is right – we’ve become a paternalistic entitlement society. The 47 year War on Poverty has successfully enslaved millions into an entitlement mindset of not working, not caring, and gaming the system for everything they can get away with. This behavior and these programs have been actively encouraged by liberals and do-gooders looking for easy votes. The ridiculous solutions implemented since 2008 have made the situation 100 times worse as we have an all-time record of 47 million people on food stamps paying out $72 billion annually. The government has been paying millions of people to not work for 99 weeks. And now that the 99 week gravy train is drying up, millions have just realized they are disabled. The rampant fraud in the SSDI program is actively encouraged by Obama and his minions. The $132 billion per year is well spent for a few more voters. The Federal Government lets you into this lifelong program for depression, muscle pain, or being too fucking fat to get out of a chair. Anyone who doesn’t think millions are gaming this system should look at this little chart. The number of 50 to 55 year olds piling into the SSDI rose by 50% between 2007 and 2011. Wow!!! Our workplace safety must have really gone downhill in the last 4 years.
It is surely just a coincidence that as soon as the FSA got kicked off the 99 week unemployment rolls, the SSDI rolls began to surge. No fraud there.
