by Jack Lee
I was heading south to visit relatives yesterday and I was just leaving Live Oak when the news came on over the radio, maybe you heard it? It’s about millions of U.S. aide that was sent to bolster the economy of the impoverished Equatorial Guinea. This is one of the poorest nations on earth, but the way the playboy son of the country’s dictator lives (using our money) you sure wouldn’t know it. What a scandal! I was so ticked off I couldn’t get over it for the next 100 miles…I’m still ticked!
The rat is one Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, and he is living like a billionaire playboy. He keeps a second home in Malibu, California (paid with your tax money). He owns a collection of 24 sports cars valued at $10 million (you paid for em) and lives in $30 million dollar mansion..(you paid for it). He jets around the world in a private $40 million dollar jet (you paid for that too). And his people live in squalor because your generous aide money was diverted from them – to him!
According to the news stories, he’s the eldest son and heir apparent to Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, the president for life of Equatorial Guinea. He serves as a minister of forestry and agriculture in his father’s government.
Seventy per cent of the tiny west African nation’s 680,000 population lives well below the poverty line and tens of thousands have no access to electricity or even clean drinking water and this rotten, A-H is taking our US aide money and living it up. @#$%@! I want to reach into that picture and strangle this piece of scum!!! Dangit!!!!
“A 46-page civil complaint filed by the US government in a court in California said Teodoro Obiang earned $6,799 (4,234) a month for his government role but engaged in “extortion, misappropriation, embezzlement, or theft of public funds” to fund his lavish lifestyle. The US is seeking to recover $71 million in assets from Mr Obiang for “the benefit of the people of the country from which it was taken”. Yeah, good luck with that one, huh fellow taxpayers?
How do we do it? I’m mean, this isn’t the first two-bit dictator we’ve propped up with our tax dollars only to see it come to a bad end is it? No, and in this latest rip-off OUR MONEY he’s apparently been at it for years! There were surely those in our government that knew it too and they just kept right on feeding this pig our money for reasons yet to be discovered. But, they should be discovered! I want names, I want to know who allowed this to happen, I want an investigation! (Fat chance of that happening)
If there was any justice, this guy would be turned over to his people who were denied clean water so he could buy his fleet of sports cars. I would love to see them deal out a little Libyan/Kahdafy style justice. But, what makes even more angry is our own people in government who let this problem grow, evolve and get totally out of control. Somebody or somebodies, high up in government is responsible for this and they should be fired and their pensions seized. Oh, that would be a first eh? Actual accountability for screwing over us little taxpayers! Yeah, never happen, remember even after all the blunders in 9/11 nobody was ever held accountable, so don’t bet this latest little fiasco will go anywhere. But, somehow it helps to vent…and maybe someday all this venting will blow the lid off the Capital dome and we’ll start getting what we want and deserve for a change.
Personally I like to see them all hung by their heels, but I would settle for an immediate firing and loss of benefits. I have to wonder, …is there anyone left in Washington willing to sort this one out or are the scant good ones all tied up sorting out Fast and Furious?
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Of course it is a waste and fraud, but then so is all the foreign aid the US sends out. We give foreign aid to virtually every country on earth, even to China, which has the fastest growing economny of any nation in the world. Meanwhile, the US is so broke that we have to borrow money at high interest rates from China so we can…yes, give out more foreign aid to more poor countries. What do we get in return? Allies, respect, gratitude? Nope, we get resentment, hatred, even violent attacks.
Well, on a positive note, this story sure makes me feel a lot better about paying my son’s rent.
It reminds me of the tens of billions of US dollars that are lost and unaccounted for in Iraq. Will anybody go to jail, loose a job, or be held accountable in any way for this? NEVER! However, some of us are held accountable for what we do. Take me for example….The payroll for my business is and has always been about 35K per year (4-6 part timers). After an audit by the EDD, it has been determined that I owe over 115K for a 3 year period (05-08). How is it that I owe more in employee withholding taxes than what my entire payroll is? So I will be paying on this bill for the rest of my life while the government keeps dishing out rhetoric about helping small businesses to survive. We all got plenty to be pissed about.
Joe it’s an outrage – good comments. And challenge that tax bill! You will win, the gov. is incompetent.
‘Whats Wrong With Us’, that is always going to be my Question as well, We keep on re-electing people to office that serve a ideology verse the true publics needs. I recall a article that mentioned all foreign aid is a bundled deal and voted on as such, without selective eliminating funds to countries or people like Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue How lazy can we voters get to allow/re-elect such a stupid mentality as that to regulate us and waste out tax money. We have become nothing more than a credit card to Congress and any administration. Come on people wake up! There are people out there trying to help turn this around, but there are more of the wasteful types who remain seated, I can think of 3 right now that need to be retired that come from the Bay area and do nothing but spend spend spend on things like useless road crossing for endangered frogs, just to stay in power. And WE let It happen!!!
You and a lot of parents are doing that right now. Times are tough and it makes stories like this one even more frustrating. I swear…the people that got us into this ought to be hauled out and tarred and feathered and run out of Washington.
Yup…it is so disheartening. And for those of us who live in California, well, we get to be the first one’s to really see up close and personal how the nation is trending and this just about takes your breath away.
Isn’t it amazing how a few people in power can take the state with the most assets and run it into poverty?
The claim that “tens of billions of dollars” are lost or unaccounted for in Iraq may be grossly exaggerated.
An audit revealed that 6.6 billion that “went missing” was transferred to the Central Bank of Iraq. Nevertheless, the audit does not say that the location of the $6.6 billion is actually known or can be accounted for.
Nevertheless, I would say losing track of 6.6 billion, or even a million is outrageous enough.
Chief auditor Inspector General Stuart Bowen has stated, “What Ive learned is that hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars of development fund for Iraq money was stolen by senior Iraqi officials for their own personal gain.”
Too often foreign aid ends up making a few dirt bag thieves vastly wealthy. How do you think Yasser Arafat’s widow, Suha Arafat became filthy rich enough to afford the lavish lifestyle she enjoys? From selling Mary Kay?
Pie, you are really sending my blood pressure into orbit now! Geez, so much waste, fraud and abuse…how much more can we take before we all just go postal?
How could any Iraqi organization be trusted with that kind of money? One would think that it would require a little proof of performance and oversight with a small amount of money and then see how it goes. A little bit at a time…with oversight. But to load up one bank with that kind of money is beyond stupid. Anyone in our government who dared approve of that appalling waste of money should have a crowd of then thousand angry citizens lay siege to their offices, burn them to ground, catch them as they flee the flames, drag em into the street for a good beating…then hang them from light poles and finally throw their cold dead bloody bodies onto the steps of the capital and say, this is what happens to fools…we don’t suffer fools well, so Y-O-U watch it or YOU’RE next!
Ah, if that would only happened just once….think of the greater GOOD that was come from their sacrifice? Their deaths would be the best thing they ever did.
By the way, the 6.6 billion intended for reconstruction in Iraq came a reconstruction fund totaling $21 billion. That $21 billion came from sales of Iraqi oil and other government assets and from the U.N.-administered oil-for-food program that was imposed during the regime of Saddam Hussein. Much of the money had been held by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
So if “tens of billions of dollars” are lost or unaccounted for in Iraq then at least two tens of billions have gone missing, almost the entire amount of the $21 billion dollar reconstruction fund.
So, unless there are other funds besides those for reconstruction from which money has been lost or unaccounted for, the claim that “tens of billions” have been lost or are unaccounted in Iraq is likely a gross exaggeration.
Nevertheless, $367 million isn’t peanuts.
“The auditor, for example, has been unable to explain what happened to $217 million that was delivered to U.S. Defense officials to be kept in a vault in the basement of a presidential palace in Baghdad. The audit also cites a case in December 2003 in which U.S. authorities turned over $150 million in cash to the Iraqi finance minister at the Baghdad international airport, a violation of Iraqi rules.”
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iraq-billions-20111028,0,656632.story
I share your pain, Jack. Maybe I wouldn’t go quite that far with the punishment, but if the Iraqis would like to apply Sharia and cut off their hands and then tie the villains up in sacks and toss them from a cliff, who am I to object?
In any case, every effort possible should be made to recover as much of the absconded funds as possible.
Actually, the report released this week says that they accounted for the $6 billion in cash that was thought lost when the organization in charge of it dissolved in 2004. They knew what happened to it and it did not disappear. Now, what happened to it is that it was used as it was intended, to stimulate the Iraqi economy. Meanwhile, attempts to stimulate the US economy are not allowed. It was okay to build roads and bridges and schools and hospitals in Iraq, but it is not okay to build those things here.
Right now the Republicans are in the process of throwing the election to the Democrats because the party is pandering to the right wing nut jobs and letting the religious nut cases take us over.
John Huntsman is the ONLY candidate running who refuses to sign the asinine pledges these special interest groups demand, he does not change his opinion as the wind blows and refuses to cave in to the pressure from the media pundits to repeat nonsense and pander to the lowest of the low when it comes to conservatives. And Huntsman is in last place. Who is in first place right now getting all the media attention and making Republicans look like idiots? Herman Cain. Come on people, there is no way the Republican party I know wants Herman Cain in charge of this country. And do we really want another Texas governor? No we do not. But John Huntsman isn’t crazy enough to make good television and so he is ignored.
John Huntsman for president!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/shawn-lawrence-otto/republican-science_b_1034205.html
Joe, as stated above, find a very good CPA, and challenge that. It makes no sense on the face of it.
Jack, if you haven’t already gone postal here is a website you might want to give some serious study. You might see how all of these outrageous expenditures are paid for and the real reason to continue objecting to more tax increases. http://www.cafrman.com/index.html
Harriet, I did challenge it actually. It’s a very long and detailed story and I really wish I could tell it. However, I would be a fool to put anything in print about how the EDD goes about their business and what they did to me because, well, they scare me! I’m still in business and do not want to get audited again.
Re Princess’: “They knew what happened to it and it did not disappear.”
That is not quite correct. The audit traced that $6.6 billion was transferred to the Central Bank of Iraq, however the audit has not (yet) uncovered the actual location of the $6.6 billion or how it was (if it was) dispersed.
In other words, no one has followed it any further yet than to confirm that a transfer was made. A more detailed audit of the Central Bank of Iraq will have to be made if it is to be learned if the $6.6 billion is still there or has been dispersed and to whom.
I would think that Inspector General Stuart Bowen is following that up. I sure as heck hope he is.
Thanks CLOVA, that helps, we need to see that.
Gov. is too big. It takes in more money than it can safety control. There are too many incompetent people in gov. so it means we constantly need to restrain government from its tendancy toward waste, fraud and abuse.
What gets me, it’s such a simple message and yet the democrats in government and democrats who vote for them just don’t get it and I think they don’t want to get it…because there is something lacking in their character.
Joe, I am sorry this happened to you, it is outrageous, and probably criminal, sounds almost personal actually. These Agencies wield way too much power and most ARE scary.
I know you are still in business, one of the best in my opinion, actually had a family member of yours at my house.