You're listening to the Corbett Report.

Welcome, friends James Corbett here, CorbettReport.com in a conversation that is being recorded on the 17th of December 2018.

And today we're talking to Dr. Mark Skidmore of Michigan State University. He is the director of the North Central Regional Center for

Rural Development, the Moore's Chair in State and Local Government Finance and Policy, Department of

Agriculture, Food and Resource Economics, and a professor in the Department of Economics at

MSU. Dr. Skidmore, thank you for joining us on the program today. Thanks, James. It's really glad. I'm really glad to have an opportunity to talk with you.

Excellent. Well, we're talking today about a subject that will be familiar to any of my long-term viewers and listeners, because I've talked about it several times, but it's something that we keep coming back to because it is an incredibly, unbelievably important subject that bafflingly receives zero attention in the mainstream

press, or perhaps not so bafflingly when you look at the implications of what this could mean.

I'm talking about the question of the quote-unquote missing trillions, the trillions of dollars

of unaccounted entries in the books

of the Pentagon that we know about through a series of reports from the Office of Inspector General.

And this, as I say, this is a story that we've talked about over and over because it keeps

getting more and more incredible and amazing. Perhaps the most familiar example of this,

the revelation of this knowledge for my audience will be the September 10th, 2001 press conference

in which defense secretary at that time, Donald Rumsfeld, announced the new war on bureaucracy,

in which they were going to be fighting the accounting systems that for some reason couldn't track $2.1 trillion

in transactions on the Pentagon's books. But of course, as, again, as my listeners will know,

that number ballooned into $8.5 trillion at some point,

and now we're facing the number $21 trillion.

It just keeps getting more and more incredible, insane.

And again, the complete lack of interest of the mainstream media would be, again,

would be baffling if we were to expect that this was an issue that they wanted to cover. At any rate, this is an issue which you have taken up. And I did mention this recently on the program when we were talking about the Pentagon's failed audit. For the first time in the 20, I believe, 22 years that the Pentagon has been legally required to audit its books,

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