Say Anything Blog

The government employees in charge of this fiasco need to be jailed first.

If after that there are contractors also responsible they also should be prosecuted.

The whole goddam thing is criminal Whistler - you would probably have to jail half the federal employees in Mass. to do real justice.

. . . including a certain pair of Senators, as well . . .

The whole goddam thing is criminal Whistler - you would probably have to jail half the federal employees in Mass. to do real justice.

Ya gotta do what ya gotta do.

. . . including a certain pair of Senators, as well . . .

I think the one was in the big dig before he was out of it wasn’t he.

I so miss the Red Green show, and the folks at the Possum Lodge.

It seems to me that the work was done by the private sector contractors and companies.  Also, I believe that the use of duct tape was the Bush administration’s answer to chemical weapons.

Also, I believe that the use of duct tape was the Bush administration’s answer to chemical weapons.

Yes! Yet another example of the Fed’s love affair with duct tape!

It seems to me that the work was done by the private sector contractors and companies.

And who was responsible for making sure they did their job right.  I’d be $chocked, $schocked if there was any graft involved. 

It’s be hard to imagine considering a 10 Billion dollar cost overrun.

I think this about says it all:
WaPo July 23, 2006:

Yet according to officials, government documents and people who shaped the project over the years, the Big Dig has not gone awry because its flaws were unknown. It has gone awry in spite of repeated warnings about its cost and design.

“It was nothing but problem after problem, and no one was looking, no one cared,” said A. Joseph DeNucci, Massachusetts’s longtime state auditor, whose office has since 1993 issued 20 critical reports about the Big Dig. “I get sick when I think about it.”

In addition to the auditor’s work, there were 13 negative reports during the project’s first decade by the state inspector general. More recently, there have been hearings in Congress and the state legislature, and financial reviews by the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Transportation.

“This has been the most investigated project in our history,” said James A. Aloisi Jr., a former assistant state transportation secretary and general counsel to the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority.

The warnings were overshadowed, many officials now acknowledge, by zeal among politicians, business leaders, lobbyists and private contractors who had a stake in the project. That eagerness to move forward coincided with a political culture in which a series of Republican governors and the state’s independent turnpike authority have trusted a private consultant to shepherd virtually every facet of the project, with relatively little government supervision. “What was missing from the whole project was outside oversight,” said Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino (D).

There will be plenty of blame to go around and there will be plenty of lawsuit which I predict will force the bankruptcy of a number of the construction and concrete companies.

There will be plenty of blame to go around and there will be plenty of lawsuit which I predict will force the bankruptcy of a number of the construction and concrete companies.

To the extent that private contractors are to blame it’s only a symptom of the fiasco of government that this is.

Nice how they can single out the one Republican amid the ocean of Democrats that were involved in this rip-off.

Tom Dennis from the GF Herald has some info on this.  He’s raising the specter of corruption in state government.

So it’s ok that the private companies didn’t do their jobs because the government didn’t properly supervise them.  Now I’ve heard everything. If there is graft, the heads should roll, but to excuse the private contractors cuz they weren’t supervised is sheer lunacy.

I would invest in “reading comprehension for dummies”.  Of course you may have to have someone read it to you.

I never said the private contractors should be off the hook.  I said the government types are the ones that are most guilty.

P: I’ll make it simple for you; “private” contractors + public money = govt boondoggle and guaranteed shoddy work.  It’s the unaccountable financing that queers the deal, not whether the govt hires “private” contractors or not.  If you aren’t accountable to the payers, bad things happen.  In real private enterprise, the guy you work for pays you and passes on the result.  It’s the accountability, as always.

Plus they are Canadian - I should’t be tarring them with this brush, you are right.

That is hard to say three times really fast!…

thanks for the mention ken

Why does Massachusetts keep electing Kerry and Kennedy? Do the people really like them?