Dissecting a $231 Million High-Tech Boondoggle

The L.A. Times takes to task the U.S. Congress, the Obama administration, and various military agencies for their combined role in supporting the expenditure of vast amount of money on a system called the Precision Tracking Space System. All told, according to the paper, the PTSS program -- which was to have provided early warning of missile launches, and precision tracking of the missiles themselves -- ended up blowing through more than $230 million before being cancelled. After talking to defense experts and reviewing hundreds of documents, the Times comes to what probably sounds like an easy conclusion for any big-budget military program that never reaches operation: it shouldn't have even left the drawing board.

Comments

Re:good.

[__aaclcg7560]

politicians write the rules, dont blame others for playing by the rules signed off on by politicians.

These days the politicians don't write the rules. The Wall Street lobbyists do. I'm not giving neither Wall Street nor the politicians a free pass.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/12/spending-bill-992-derivatives-citigroup-lobbyists

Re:good.

[sjames]

No. Clinton ordered the banks to be more willing to write mortgages on STARTER HOMES for first time buyers who couldn't afford large down payments and had less than stellar credit (but not terroble).

Instead, the banks knowingly made bad loans on McMansions and then processed them into dubious CDOs which they sold (hot potatoed) based on outright fraud by the ratings agencies as AAA investments. Absolutely nobody told them to do that except their CEOs eyeing huge bonuses. Then all the robosigning, certainly that wasn't mandated.

The fact is, a bunch of exceptionally greedy and fat pigs ripped the world off and then passed the blame. The big failing politically was not making bacon of them for the rest of us.

Re:good.

[meglon]

I continue to see people blame Clinton for the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act, you know.... Phil Gramm (REPUBLICAN), Jim Leach (REPUBLICAN), and Thomas J. Bliley, Jr. (REPUBLICAN)... and i have to wonder if anyone that does was even alive in the 1990's. I mean, you'd have to have been comatose to think that Clinton could have gotten much of anything passed the republican congress he had, and even worse off to think that 3 of the most powerful REPUBLICANS at the time would be THE ONLY THREE people whose name got put on the bill. I mean... serious brain-death, head up ass comatose to think that. Yet, people who wanted something that turned out to be a serious fuck-up will continue to try to place blame elsewhere.

The REPUBLICAN bill to repeal the Glass-Steagall, which they'd been attempting to do for 20+ years prior to Gramm-Leach-Bliley, passed without enough votes to sustain a veto, however democrats agree to go along with it after republicans yielded on privacy legislation to keep medical and financial records private (republicans didn't want them to be), and on consumer protection legislation (again, republicans at the time didn't give a flying fuck about consumers rights). After conference, Clinton was sent a version of the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act that was veto-proof. Now, you could argue that he could have veto'd it, but it would have been purely symbolic.

So.... Glass-Steagall was actually repealed by republicans (because that's where bills get repealed... the house and senate, not the presidents desk), after they held consumer protections and private citizens privacy rights hostage to do what they'd been trying to do for decades. You can certainly blame Bill Clinton... but you'd be wrong, and anyone who lived through the 1990's (and actually remembers them) should know that.

You are correct though about that being a massive negative on economic stability.

'Unsuccessfully fought" != "Idly watching"

[dfenstrate]

Bush didn't sit idly by. From a 2008 article:

Bush's first budget, written in 2001 — seven years ago — called runaway subprime lending by the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac "a potential problem" and warned of "strong repercussions in financial markets."

In 2003, Bush's Treasury secretary, John Snow, proposed what the New York Times called "the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago." Did Democrats in Congress welcome it? Hardly.

"I do not think we are facing any kind of a crisis," declared Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., in a response typical of those who viewed Fannie and Freddie as a party patronage machine that the GOP was trying to dismantle. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," added Sen. Thomas Carper, D-Del.

Unfortunately, it was broke.

In November 2003, just two months after Frank's remarks, Bush's top economist, Gregory Mankiw, warned: "The enormous size of the mortgage-backed securities market means that any problems at the GSEs matter for the financial system as a whole." He too proposed reforms, and they too went nowhere.

In the next two years, a parade of White House officials traipsed to Capitol Hill, calling repeatedly for GSE reform. They were ignored. Even after several multibillion-dollar accounting errors by Fannie and Freddie, Congress put off reforms.

In 2005, Fed chief Alan Greenspan sounded the most serious warning of all: "We are placing the total financial system of the future at a substantial risk" by doing nothing, he said. When a bill later that year emerged from the Senate Banking Committee, it looked like something might finally be done.

Unfortunately, as economist Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute has noted, "the bill didn't become law, for a simple reason: Democrats opposed it on a party-line vote in the committee, signaling that this would be a partisan issue. Republicans, tied in knots by the tight Democratic opposition, couldn't even get the Senate to vote on the matter."

Had they done so, it's likely the mortgage meltdown wouldn't have occurred, or would have been of far less intensity. President Bush and the Republican Congress might be blamed for many things, but this isn't one of them. It was a Democratic debacle, from start to finish.