As the federal and state governments continue to shutdown or curtail core educational, environmental, and scientific programs due to lack of money, the disclosures of unspeakable waste continue to mount in Afghanistan and Iraq with no appearance of accountability or abatement. Indeed, for years, the media has reported billions of lost or wasted funds, including money disappearing into the corrupt government circles of leaders in the countries. Yet, Congress would prefer to debate Planned Parenthood or global warming grants. Consider the latest outrage. The U.S. military spent $34 million to build a huge headquarters for the Marines in Afghanistan with a theater, special operations rooms and other amenities. The problem that various people including the Marine commander were saying that it was not needed and would not be used. Now it is likely to be demolished, unused and unoccupied. There was the bridge to nowhere and now we have the building for no one.
The building is larger than a football field and has state-of-the-art air conditioning and equipment. As usual, contractors made a mint on the building and people in the military made sure that its lack of need or likely use would not stop the money flowing to willing hands.
John F. Sopko, special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, wrote about the building in a recent letter. The 64,000-square-foot facility in Camp Leatherneck has everyone, as usual, pointing fingers in every direction with the result that no one will be punished. Sopko wrote “The building will probably be demolished.”
The building continued despite a letter sent by the top commander at the base that the building would not be used and should not be built. Contract officers simply ignored the letter and kept the money and construction going.
Of course, the building is the perfect metaphor for our recent wars — throwing billions at operations and programs that showed little evidence of long-term impact. No one wanted to take responsibility to pull out of the wars so we just kept spending hundreds of billions and killing or wounding thousands of our personnel. The importance was the appearance that we remain firm and victorious like an empty building in the middle of the desert.
Yet the war was a tremendous success for contractors who have made these billions.
Source: Washington Post
WOW just what I was looking for. Came here by searching for how to
get taller
It’s happening at home, too. My hometown is building a 350-slot, three-level parking ramp with an overwalk for pedestrians (complete with stairs and elevators) at a train station to replace a 150-space parking lot that is never more than half-full, which has sidewalk access to the platform on the other side. It’s gotta be a waste of multiple millions.
bill mcwilliams you beat me to it again. but you left out the fact that the elites have been living on mars for many years now. no one paid attention to neither the first nor the remake of “total recall” one thing they love to do is make a movie, or a book about whats really going on. especially if something is leaked out about it….
its called mind control because some people once they see it in a movie swear to high heaven that could never happen in real life not realizing they are watching exactly that.. it amazes me that enemy of the state was a high grossing movie. and yet when the leaks about the nsa came out. they still yelled and hollered. same thing with deja vu and other movies like genre.. the military and corporation are at the least 40 yrs ahead of the people technology wise… we only receive the toys once they are finished with them. and that is only to keep us distracted from the truth of things like the above referenced article this is also in line with a article posted here a few months back. about the corporation demanding to build tanks for the army they have been told time and again are not wanted nor needed.. but the corporation is going to build them anyway
When you got money to burn who cares…. Just print up more….
The underlying phenomenon of such conduct by “government officials” was meticulously elaborated in the publications of C. Northcote Parkinson, starting with his, “Parkinson’s Law: And Other Studies in Administration,” Houghton Mifflin, 1957. Professor Parkinson was then Raffles Professor of History at the University of Malaya.
Professor Parkinson described the mechanism of why work expands to consume all the time available for doing it, and why expenditures always increase so as to consume all available income.
Professor Parkinson continued writing books on the historicity of the foibles of being human in a world society that is as though profoundly anti-human.
While those phenomena have been rigorously studied and understood for more than half a century, no person who is in a position to do anything to change time and income allocations is in a position to do anything about them.
Those phenomena may be given names such as,”double bind” or” Catch 22.”
Bill McWilliams/ George Mason and others:
Just a reminder, we are watching you: