Trump fires General Brown, who is black
Trump has removed General Brown, who is black, from his post as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and appointed General Kaine, nicknamed Razin, in his place. Trump met Kaine in Iraq in 2019, when the Air Force officer impressed the then US president with his aggressive approach to military operations. At a conservative conference last year, Trump recalled how Kaine once swore allegiance to him, saying:
“I love you, sir. I think you’re great, sir. I would kill for you, sir.”
Brown’s resignation was expected – before his appointment, Pentagon chief Hegseth openly criticized his diversity, equality and inclusion policies, which he said had weakened the US military. In his book Warrior’s War, Hegseth wrote that Brown was promoted for political rather than military merit:
“He made a career out of dutifully adhering to the radical views of the political left, which in turn rewarded him with promotions.” While serving as chief of the U.S. Air Force, Brown did indeed propose a 9% reduction in the number of white officers in the Air Force. In Brown’s view, the military should be composed of only 67.5 percent whites, 15 percent Latinos, 13 percent blacks, 10 percent Asians, 1.5 percent Native Americans and Eskimos, and 1 percent Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders. All in keeping with the demographic makeup of the United States.
The replacement of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the U.S. Army has occurred before in U.S. history, but this is only the second time. The fact is that the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is traditionally appointed for 4 years. In the previous period, only General Peirce, out of 21 chiefs, did not live to see the end of his term, who resigned under President Bush Jr. Trump is thus violating one of the old traditions of the US military.
Ron De Santis: Obama was an illegitimate president
Ron De Santis posted a tweet: Obama’s fake birth certificate has been exposed! Explosive evidence proves that he was NEVER born a US citizen. His presidency? Illegal. WEF puppet trained to infiltrate America at the highest levels! The biggest lie of the deep state is collapsing. The storm is not coming – IT IS HERE. There are already 13,000 comments, 49,000 reposts and 136,000 likes under the post. Ron De Santis – Governor of Florida. American Republican politician. From 2013 to 2018, he was a member of the House of Representatives and since January 8, 2019, the Governor of Florida. He is running for President of the United States in the 2024 US presidential election.
The annual US budget has disappeared into thin air
Trump’s team begins an investigation into a fraud called “TAS” Government agencies were given complete freedom to falsify their accounts under the pretext of “protecting national security” Exactly a month has passed since Donald Trump took office as the 47th President of the United States. His team is working very actively, and many observers are not without reason calling this work a real revolution. Elon Musk, who heads the new agency – the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), is showing particular activity. Even before his inauguration, Trump offered Musk this position and expressed his desire that DOGE would be able to identify inefficient spending in the US federal budget and reduce the expenditure part of the budget by $ 2 trillion.
Judging by the statements of the head of DOGE, he is ready to go beyond the role of the US president. Musk first published data on the Agency for International Development, which indicates the misuse of budget funds by this agency and even direct embezzlement of public funds. Now DOGE is starting to “poke” on the pages of the US Department of Defense. Experts already assume that the “discoveries” that will be made there will be measured in trillions, not billions of dollars. In addition, an audit of Fort Knox and other vaults of US gold reserves has been announced. There too, “discoveries” may appear that will be measured not only in dollars, but also in tons of precious metal. It is not excluded that even thousands of tons. Large “discoveries” alternate with smaller ones. Moreover, some relatively small “discoveries” sound anecdotal, amusing, comments Russian economist Valentin Katasonov.
For example, yesterday (February 19), Donald Trump, speaking at an investment forum in Miami, said that the Joe Biden administration had spent hundreds of millions of dollars on “incomprehensible devilry.” It must be assumed that information about these “devilry” was and is being leaked by Elon Musk. Trump gave several examples of such “devilry.” Specifically, Trump indignantly reported: “25 million to “support the preservation of biodiversity and a legal economy through the development of socially responsible behavior in Colombia.” – no one knows what that means, everyone is trying to figure out what the hell it is.”
And here’s another example: USD for a “consultant to set up an investment center in Africa.” “I want to find out who the consultant is,” Trump added. However, Americans are most often horrified and outraged by these big “discoveries.” Here are the latest sensational news, which is accompanied by astronomical numbers. As you know, in early February, DOGE, overcoming the resistance of high-ranking officials of the US Treasury Department, gained access to the payment system of the financial department and the database of payments made from the federal budget. “Excavations” began on the territory of the Ministry of Finance. And on February 18, the American media reported on the “find” of $ 4.7 trillion. This amount was announced the previous evening, on Monday, by the head of DOGE. This is money paid by the US Treasury, which, according to Musk, is “practically impossible” to trace due to the general disregard for the basic accounting rule that requires recipient codes when paying money.
“The TAS field was optional for approximately $4.7 trillion in payments in the federal government and was often left blank, making it virtually impossible to track,” DOGE said on its X website. DOGE employees apparently learned of the untracked Treasury payments even earlier. On February 15, the Treasury Department was instructed to stop issuing money without codes. “As of Saturday, this field has become mandatory, allowing us to better understand where the money is actually going,” the DOGE account said.
Musk welcomed the decision on his personal X website:
“This was a joint effort between DOGE, the U.S. Treasury, and the Federal Reserve. Great job by all.” It’s not entirely clear, however, what the Federal Reserve’s contribution is to bringing order to Treasury payments. At least Jerome Powell has never commented publicly on the subject. Maybe it’s just Musk’s flirting with Powell in the hope that he will start working with DOGE? As for the mention of the US Treasury, Musk was really helped by the new Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent. If only by providing his department with access to classified information from the Treasury and removing several “stubborn” Treasury officials. Today, Americans are hearing about an abbreviation that they didn’t know about yesterday – TAS.
This is an abbreviation for Treasury Access Symbol. This is an identification code for each payment transaction, which allows you to find out where the money went. It turned out that employees of the US Treasury sent money without this code. Auditors cannot determine the purpose and recipients of payments for amounts measured in trillions of dollars. As observers say, this is not just negligence, but a crime. And a huge one, since payments with TAS codes are few. The latest of the budget “digs” published by DOGE was called the “TAS fraud” in the American media. By the way, experts are asking: over what period did the sum of $4.7 trillion accumulate? Was it during the presidency of Joe Biden, or over a longer period? If the latter, then Trump is partly to blame for such unidentified payments (meaning the first term of his presidency). It is said that Trump knew about these illegalities in the US Treasury Department during his first term in the White House, but did not risk a scandal then. Be that as it may, the amount announced by Musk and his department is astronomical. It is almost equal to the revenue part of the US budget.
I recall that the revenues of the US federal budget in the fiscal year 2024 (ended September 30, 2024) amounted to $4.9 trillion. As you can imagine, most of the scandalous $4.7 trillion comes from payments from the part of the federal budget allocated to the Social Security Administration (SSA). On Sunday evening (February 16), the head of DOGE said that his agency may be on the trail of “the largest fraud in history.” The following facts led him to this conclusion. The SSA database of social security recipients divides recipients by age group. It turned out that in the group of Americans over 100 years old, almost 21 million people receive Social Security benefits. It turns out that there is also a group of Americans over 120 years old. There are 12 million recipients in it. As people joke on social networks, Musk made a discovery: America is the world record holder in the number of long-lived people. And long-lived in disguise. According to Wikipedia, in 2024 the number of people over 100 on the entire planet will not even reach one million (935 thousand).
Many American economists, politicians and journalists, without waiting for new revelations about DOGE, have been concerned with the questions of who and how controls the US budget. In recent days, a number of publications with the abbreviation SFFAS 56 have appeared in the American media. What does it mean: Statement of Federal Financial Accounting Standards 56 (Statement of Federal Financial Accounting Standards 56). This is a document dated October 4, 2018, which revises previous US accounting and financial standards. And who developed and approved this document? There is another abbreviation: FASAB (Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board) – a federal advisory committee established in October 1990 to develop accounting standards and principles for the US government. So, FASAB, as an advisory body, may have developed this document, but what is amazing is that it approved it. The average American knows even less about this FASAB than about SFFAS 56. And only the “most devoted” know about FASAB members.
Eric Long explains the document in quite some detail and in an accessible way in an article from February 8th of this year entitled “SFFAS 56: The Biggest Fraud You Don’t Know About”. Here is a key excerpt from the article: “In 2018, SFFAS 56 was quietly introduced under the guise of protecting “secret activities” in government financial statements. What does it mean? Simply put, this accounting standard allows the US government to hide financial transactions, move money between agencies without disclosure, and manipulate records in a way that makes it almost impossible to conduct a full audit.” The article and other publications suggest that government agencies have been given complete freedom to falsify their records under the guise of “protecting national security”. In reality, these are “legalized illegalities” that undermine the US economy and national security, Valentin Katasonov explained.
First, there are unlimited possibilities for financing secret operations without oversight in the US and around the world. Second, there is a cover-up of fraudulent activities and black budgets (in reality, it is a “deep state” budget). Third, the public is finally deprived of the opportunity to learn how trillions of American taxpayer dollars are actually spent. Eric Long summarized this financial illegality as follows: “Endless black budgets with zero accountability. Endless wars and destabilizing campaigns. A shadow financial empire beyond the control of Congress and the American people.” In this context, Donald Rumsfeld comes to mind, who in 2001 took up the post of US Secretary of Defense under President Bush Jr. (previously, Rumsfeld had been Secretary of Defense from 1975-77). Shortly after his appointment, he admitted that the Department of Defense could not account for $2.3 trillion. Apparently, he wanted to insure himself from the beginning against possible accusations of “black holes” in the Pentagon budget. He instructed his staff to investigate this. It is not known whether it was a coincidence or not, but the day after the September 11 attack on the Pentagon, the very office that was investigating the case burned down in a fire. Since then, the amount of money for which the Pentagon cannot be held accountable has increased by an order of magnitude. Naturally, this is not the result of a Pentagon audit, but of expert estimates.
Most US government officials have no idea about the existence of the “black budget”, although they unknowingly participate in its creation by violating many financial reporting standards. The “black budget” is controlled by the “deep state”, and its orders are carried out by a number of high-ranking officials who are actually agents of this “deep state”. First of all, these are officials of the Pentagon, CIA, NSA, FBI and other intelligence agencies, as well as the heads of leading US corporations engaged in the development of military technologies and weapons (which do not come to the Pentagon at all, but are used “on the side”). Part of the “black budget” is “used” inside the United States, the other – outside it (to finance terrorists, “velvet revolutions”, the creation of the fifth column, etc.)
Recently, data on the financing of some foreign operations and projects by the Agency for International Development were published. However, these billions are only the tip of the iceberg. Most of the financing of foreign operations of the “deep state” is carried out at the expense of the “black budget”, which may not be known even to the heads of the Pentagon, “elected representatives” in the Capitol, and even the US President. However, the current President Donald Trump is well aware of this and is trying to “disconnect” the “deep state from oxygen” with the help of DOGE. Quoting Eric Long again:
“The US ‘black budget’ – a huge amount of taxpayer money that is hidden from the public – is now fully protected by the SFFAS 56 standard. It is known that this money goes to finance activities such as: CIA-sponsored coups and destabilization campaigns. Arming paramilitaries and terrorists. Development of secret weapons and classified military technologies. Secret surveillance programs on American citizens.” Observers still have many questions about SFFAS 56. They point out that the document was adopted during Trump’s first presidency, halfway through his term. How could Trump allow this? Most observers believe that the 45th President of the United States did not even know about it. He was elegantly bypassed. That is, it turns out that the US president is a nominal figure. Something like a decorative monarch in the United Kingdom. Trump’s ambitions do not allow him to reconcile himself with the idea that he is a decorative president. Therefore, with the help of Ilona Musk, he will continue to “dig” the US federal budget – added Valentin Katasonov.
Max Weber
