Thanks, it's a theme, looking at the flow of funds from Joe Six Pack up the line to the potholes and the profiteers.
It's a sick system.
It would correct itself pretty quick, with full transparency and accountability, on every dollar, every program and publicly-employed person, on the web, organized by department, multiply indexed by chronology etc. The information is already in electronic form, and costs nothing to post, except legacy conversion, and there are thousands of public-minded technocrats willing to do that in a New York minute. In fact, that isn't even needed, just a webcrawler targeted to all gov't information.
The only exception is bona-fide military secrets, which are very few, and temporary.
Bottom line, the people of this country are anxious to work on these problems, and are being held back by "Bush Inc. central government" attitudes of keeping everything secret, to extract taxes, skim off the top, and redistribute, mostly to insiders.
In the information age, those with the information control the money, and won't relinquish that information. It's called "national security", but what it really is is "sucking the blood from the American people".
Hell, Tom Ridge is pushing a plan for $34 billion. "What is it Tom". "Can't officially tell you, national security. Colors, or something." And that's nothing, it'll be a trillion or two this decade in DOD and spook-driven funding. The lifeblood of the national economy, being secretly spent, by people we're to trust never caused any "blowback". |
