We have all
read the stories about the cost over runs. The price that balloons from
$100 million to $1 billion; 900% more. Governments are the mobs that
tell us how to run our lives. They tax us to pay for their wanton,
spendthrift ways. Ronnie Reagan said: Government isn't the solution.
Government is the problem. Ronnie was right, not that he did too much
about it. Here are some examples of foul ups. Notice that the guilty
still get their promotions and their knighthoods. Even if there is an
inquiry it is arranged so that it will report after they have retired
and
the cheques are long since cleared. Then there are the
intelligence foul ups which can be even worse.
It is fair
to add that incompetence merges into fraud and the dividing line can be
difficult to see.
Nobody In Washington Gets Fired For Incompetence
Stephen Walt, a distinguished professor of politics explains all. Rumsfeld
is only one disastrous failure mentioned.
Build
a Cruise Missile for $5K
Building your own cruise missile for US$5,000 may sound like a fantasy
if you know how much the tax payers get screwed out of for anything
airborne. It is not. $5,000 covers the parts and one objective was to
buy them without getting noticed. It happened and a lot of them were
exported from America to New Zealand without problems. The man doing
this one has solid back ground in model aircraft, jet engines and
computing.
PS This tells us that government
contracts are grossly wasteful albeit the US$5,000 in this case is for
materials. It does not cover man hours.
CIA
The CIA or Central Intelligence Agency is a big firm in the
espionage business. It has had successes which tends to mean other
outfits have had their failures. The trouble is that it is difficult to
know whether your outfit is the winner or the mug in these games.
Then there is the little matter of their big time complicity in moving
heroin into America, torture and other criminal operations. This is not
incompetence; this is crime - see
Politics
of Heroin for more on this one.
DDT
DDT is that awful insecticide, isn't it?
No, is marvellous. Banning it has killed millions.
Equatorial Guinea - The Dachau of Africa
QUOTE
OCD readers, I must apologize for
misleading you over the past two months. I have left you with the
impression that Congo is the rock bottom towards
which negroes sink. It is difficult to imagine how a state could
possibly be any worse than Mobutu’s Congo, but I would say
that Equatorial Guinea qualifies.
UNQUOTE
Presumably he feels that it is even worse than Zimbabwe. I am not
arguing. Equatorial Guinea had the problem of being run by a mad man.
This is literal fact. He was merely
stupid in his better days.
Groundnut Scheme
It was Labour's bright idea to grow peanuts for vegetable oil
during the years of food rationing after the war. It was fed to them by Frank
Samuel, a Jew(?) who worked out there. Others who should have known agreed. It
went badly wrong and it was from the top down.
The Last Enfield
The last rifle to be made at Enfield was
a foreign design and a stolen design. They stole the wrong one. Then
there was the political meddling, senior officers meddling, shoddy
manufacture. The end result works sometimes. British soldiers will die
as a result. The system will shrug.
Lions,
Donkeys and Dinosaurs by Lewis Page
QUOTE
The past blunders which he highlights - for which no one has been
forced to accept the blame, so opaque is the accountability of both
armed services and the MoD - are history. What matters more are his
pointers for the future... It is all here.
Lewis Page details the ridiculous excess of senior officers for our
shrinking services (over 40 major-generals for just two army divisions,
46 Royal Navy admirals and 88 commodores, 340 RAF group-captains and 40
air marshals). He describes the fantastic procurement blunders. There
was the decision that Britain should build its own Apache helicopters,
at a cost of £40 million apiece, while the Israelis bought
theirs off the shelf from the Americans for £12 million.
There are the scandals of the Merlin anti-submarine helicopter and the
SA80 rifle, and the fact that the RAF possesses 150 uniformed men per
deployable aircraft, more than double the ratio of the Israeli air
force.
UNQUOTE
Defence procurement has a track record of gross incompetence and that
is the kindest thing that can be said for it. Look at the diaries of a
major general in his last eighteen months, the contracts he signs and
the well paid job that he gets when he leaves. Then wonder about
corruption.
MoD
refurbishment costs £100m extra
QUOTE
The PFI scheme to refurbish the Ministry of Defence's headquarters
is costing almost £100m more than originally budgeted because
it took
civil servants 16 months to close the deal. A damning report into
the Whitehall project published today by the Commons Public Accounts
Committee also reveals that the deal, signed four years ago with a
consortium including the beleaguered contractor Amey, is only expected
to produce savings of £100,000 over its 30-year life.
UNQUOTE
It
happens on time, every time. Do the guilty get aggravation. No! The
knighthoods come through just like the gold plated pensions. Then it is
off to join the firms that got away with it.
Public
sector shortfall is 'double the national debt'
It is just the government pension fund and it is not quite
£1,000 billion short. Worry not; MPs will still get their
gold plated pensions paid on time, every time. It is just the rest of
us.
Scottish
Parliament Building
The new Scottish Parliament decided that
they wanted a new building. They had a perfectly good old one ready and
waiting but that was not good enough. Commissioning something from a
fashionable architect meant that it was going to be ugly and shoddy
which is par for the course. Then there is the matter of the cost over
run. It went from somewhere between £10m and £40m
which tells me that men were guessing or merely incompetent. It wound
up at an estimated final cost of £414m. Notice that the final
number is still just an estimate. There is room for it to go up even
more. The cost over run is at least 935% - incompetent or corrupt? The
guilty will walk away laughing. Another view is at
PRESS
RELEASE - FROM THE OFFICE OF RENFREW MACLUDGE, CARE OF THE AULD KEECH
Voting - Avi
Rubin's tech memoir on Diebold, e-voting
Security researcher and e-voting expert Avi Rubin has published a tech
memoir of his three-year study of Diebold's controversial electronic
voting machines. It's not a complete guide to the e-voting landscape,
but it's a fine look into one of the swamps.
The
technology is complicated but the basic message is that the system is
rubbish, wide open to fraud and made a lot of money for
someone. An honest man tries to explain the issues in plain
English. You could also have a shufti at
Getting ready to hack the next election,
How
to hack a voting machine in 4 minutes and
Princeton professor hacks e-vote machines for practical
details.
Yellowstone National Park
Gave well meaning bureaucrats of the Park
Service an opportunity to foul up big time. They did and they kept on
doing it. They just did not understand the ecology of the area. They
still got paid and they still are - fouling up and getting paid that is.
Lost on duty
[ 19 January 2006 ]
Politicians love telling us how to run
our lives but their track record of incompetence should put us off.
Then of course there is their malice, greed and treachery.
British
threat to fighter project [ 5 January 2006 ]
They are complaining about lack of access to the technology. Israelis
don't complain. They don't need to. They get it for free or steal it.
Costs
hit fighter jet order [ 4 January 2006 ]
100 F35s would have been enough perhaps. 50 are not but they will be
shocking expensive. Have we heard this one before? Lots of times. Sign
the contracts then move the goal posts. No wonder defence contractors
get rich while we get half the number of aircraft.
Public
sector payroll will top 6 million this year [ 2
January 2006 ]
The NHS is a bigger employer than the Red
Army. They have their problems. So do we. We get to pay for them. Blair
and Brown see them as captive voters with grotty little jobs and
beholden to New Labour. They aren't all stupid enough to vote for him
or even the Tories.
Money
Explained [ 31 December 2005 ]
If you don't think that governments are
spendthrift rogues you don't understand monetary policy in America or
England. Forging is illegal when we do it. It is SOP [ standard
operating procedure ] for them.
Aceh
aid salaries slammed [ 24 December 2005 ]
$50,000 a month sounds pretty good to me especially when it is tax
free. Throw in a four wheel drive and five star hotels and you can see
why the UN is so keen to get its snout in the trough. I would be
prepared to look keen for that kind of money.
They
Are Great At Wasting Money Though
[ 6 December 2005 ]
QUOTE
Meanwhile, in the fantasy world of the public sector, the Chancellor
has created 680,000 new jobs in eight years. Yesterday, he boasted of
having "saved" £4.7 billion, yet also mentioned having sold
off £5.7 billion worth of public sector assets - that is, he
has liquidated more capital wealth than he has saved in expenditure.
This Chancellor is as
rapacious in getting money as he is profligate in spending it. We
urgently hope that David Cameron - expected to become Tory leader today
- has a different approach to fiscal policy.
UNQUOTE
£8bn
of public cash lost to fraud and waste, say MPs
[ 6 December 2005 ]
And that is just what they know about.
One government department has achieved levels of luxurious idleness
which strongly resembles corruption. That is just the one that I know
about. There will be others. MPs talk, people talk. Nothing changes.
UK
faces death by taxes, say City chiefs [ 4 December 2005 ]
Brown is taxing England so that he can waste more and making it more
complicated which adds costs too. He is self righteous and dangerous.
He is also abusing privatization. When Maggie started it Labour
squawked. Now they are selling off the family silver as fast as they
can so that they can waste that too.
Trade
barriers indefensible [ 4 December 2005 ]
Brown wants to drop farm trade barriers which will annoy the
French but makes more barriers for trade in England. Fool or rogue? See
the previous article.
Brown
Screwed The Economy [ 17 November 2005 ]
He did and he still is. He is the kind of
canting, self righteous, spendthrift rogue that will do it as long and
as hard as he can. He has nothing left to learn from
Antonio Gramsci
PS
This is from the Governor of the Bank of England, not a semi-literate
journo.
Million-dollar
refugee ships lying half empty [ 30 September 2005 ]
Katrina made a mess of New Orleans. The
criminals that live there made even more but that is another story
covered in depth at
New Orleans Special.
The government decided to hire three ships for six months and pay only
twice the price. They will probably get to pay for the damage done by
the criminals on board too so make that an extra 50%.
Scottish
Parliament cost hits £421m
It started around £50
million so that is around 800% up and civil servants were holding out
on us. Let the truth leak out when they have got their pensions.
PRESS
RELEASE - FROM THE OFFICE OF RENFREW MACLUDGE, CARE OF "THE AULD KEECH"
- March 4th, 2000 explains all. Mr MacLudge is a sound sort
of man who knows how to get a pint down his throat. The Holyrood Inquiry
achieved its very own little cost over run so you can have one
for £15 which will help make the lawyers fatter.
Oz faces a systems failure [
16 May 2006 ]
There is plenty of tax payers' money.
There has to be with incompetents like this running the system. The new
submarines cost $1 billion extra to get them right. British cock ups
like this are normal. Do they care? Not really. Civil servants get
their knighthoods regardless. With patronage like this and cost
increases merely dependent on a bit of patter it is easy to see that
favours might be involved.
Consultant
Breached FBI's Computers [ 12
July 2006 ]
The FBI system was wide open to anyone
with the right background but the interesting part of the story is that
this wide open system cost the peasants big time.
QUOTE
The FBI's Trilogy program cost more than $535 million but failed to
produce a usable case-management system for agents because of cost
overruns and technical problems, according to the Government
Accountability Office.
While Trilogy led to successful hardware upgrades
and thousands of new PCs for bureau workers and agents, the final phase
-- a software system called the Virtual Case File -- was abandoned last
year. The FBI announced in March that it would spend an additional $425
million in an attempt to finish the job. The new system would be called
"Sentinel."
UNQUOTE
NHS
computer system delays cost taxpayers £40bn [ 1
October 2006 ]
QUOTE
Company charged with rescuing the NHS's troubled IT system has
consistently failed to meet its deadlines.
UNQUOTE
We used to have major cock ups and major cost over runs with new
aircraft designs. Now it is computer projects that foul up on time
every time. Using a private company does not mean that they carry the
cost. The tax payer gets screwed instead. Remember that Her Majesty's
Government is the mob that tells us how to run our lives.
PS Setting a system like this takes a bright lad who is a good
programmer and a good manager. It is being done by smooth talking
patter merchants; the kind that understands Blair and his light
fingered apparatchiks.
Home
Office reveals £5.4bn cost of ID cards [ 9
October 2006 ]
QUOTE
The national identity card scheme will cost £5.4bn to set up
and run over the next decade.
UNQUOTE
If you think that this project will come in on time, on cost you do not
understand the depth of government incompetence. Then there is the
little matter of whether they are setting up a dictatorship [ Hint -
they are ] and why [ Hint - love of power ]. The most important point
is why bother when they are importing illegal immigrants and other
criminals in their hundreds of thousands deliberately? [ Hint - they
are subversives following the techniques advocated by Antonio
Gramsci the chief
theoretician of the communist party ]
Auditor
on the make retires [ 26 October 2007
]
QUOTE
Sir John Bourn, the Government's spending watchdog, spent
£365,000 in travel expenses and £27,000 in
restaurant bill [ sic ] in just three years as head of the National
Audit Office (NAO)..... Sir John was also recruited in 2006 to a new
position to police the ministerial code of conduct, which sets out
standards of behaviour for ministers.
UNQUOTE
If you enforce the rules you should live by them. You certainly can't
claim ignorance. Bourne proves what you need to know about apparatchiks
and gravy trains.
Speed
kills? [ 12 November 2007 ]
QUOTE
Christopher Booker and Richard North reveal the damage caused by scare
stories, from salmonella and satanic child abuse to passive smoking and
global warming. Here we publish an edited extract from the chapter on
speed - a scare that cost lives
"Road deaths are a
global epidemic on the scale of malaria and tuberculosis." Commission
for Global Road Safety, 2006.
UNQUOTE
Government meddling is malign. It starts with a plausible story and
turns into an expensive boondoggle which can do enormous damage.
PS They did lie about their own
statistics. It all sounds pretty normal.
The �900 Million Government Waste Of Our Money [
12 October 2011 ] QUOTE
A �900million contract covering the transportation of inmates has been
branded 'an absolute farce' by a judge after it emerged the new prison vans are
too big to fit through court entrances. GEOAmey won the lucrative deal from the
Ministry of Justice (MoJ) in August to escort prisoners between courts and
jails.
UNQUOTE
The fact that
Big Business fouled up is a side issue.
Concentrate on the fact that politicians and civil servants are spending our
money like water then disappearing into
Big Business with heavy payoffs. This is not
corruption; it is blatant corruption. Moving criminals is not difficult. It
needs bog standard Landrovers, handcuffs, bludgeons and sturdy warders. It is
just one small part of the reason why government finances are causing
aggravation.
Errors & omissions,
broken links, cock ups, over-emphasis, malice [ real or imaginary ] or
whatever; if you find any I am open to comment.
Email me at Mike
Emery.
All financial contributions are cheerfully accepted. If you want to
keep it
private, use my PGP Key.
Home Page
Updated on Thursday, 19 November 2020 09:10:04