About 87% of these frauds were Obamacare abuses. However, other crooked government contractors got caught as well. Early 2019 was a busy time for me personally; blogging slowed down a lot and I found a couple of stories in the article that I'd missed (and it wasn't like the MSM would report them or anything).
Duke University: home of the infamous Lacrosse Sexual Assault scandal that turned out to be nothing but a giant hoax. Four innocent men were held up to public humiliation---sacrificed on the Altar of Political Correctness. Well, it seems that back in March, Duke was caught in another scandal: this one cost the university a fat $112 million.
It seems that "between 2006 and 2018, Duke knowingly submitted and caused to be submitted claims to the NIH and to the EPA that contained falsified or fabricated data or statements in thirty (30) grants, causing the NIH and EPA to pay out grants funds they otherwise would not have. Specifically, the United States contends that the results of certain research related to mice conducted by a Duke research technician in its Airway Physiology Laboratory, as well as statements based on those research results, were falsified and/or fabricated. Duke knowingly falsified data to claim millions of grant dollars from the National Institutes of Health,”
NPR actually wrote an article containing the text of the Judgment, which is an enlightening read in and of itself about how the Academic Mafia pressures its researchers to fake results and then throw these same stooges under the bus when they get caught. In one part of the testimony, a researcher describes financially-interested parties actually coming to the lab with complete test results and instructing them to make sure that their experiments matched those results. At least three dozen of these fake studies too got published in Academic 'peer-reviewed' journals. These researches could lead to product patents; and we all know how much Corporate America donates to universities. Seriously, what a scam. And it's doubtful that Duke is the only institution of higher learning doing things like this.
Frankly speaking, I would have cut off all of Duke's federal funding. But part of the agreement is that all future funding is going to be subject to monitoring and audits.
The second story, from last April, should also have been a major news story. Over the last several years, NASA has been an international laughingstock for the number of rocket crashes and missile failures occasioned under its programs. Since Trump began his Swamp Draining initiatives, some investigators within NASA were emboldened to look into the problem. They discovered that several of these failures occurred because aluminum extrusions failed; and that these same extrusions tested at lower tensile strength than required by NASA specifications. The contractor supplying them, it later came out, had been falsifying tensile strength tests since 1996.
The contractor has since gone under and several of its corporate leaders are in jail. The successor trust agreed to pay $46 million in damages. The money here isn't the important part of the story: the damage that these nitwits did to the prestige of the American Aerospace programs is incalculable. It should be noted here that these same faulty extrusions were also built into anti-ballistic missiles purchased by the US military. These are the missiles designed to shoot down incoming warheads onto American soil. The Pentagon estimates about $15 million in repair costs; but having ABMs fail at the critical moment would have been a real disaster.
Thank goodness that Trump was elected or much of this never would have come to light. Here's hoping that 2020 (and the following fours years) will see more Swamp Draining.
No comments:
Post a Comment