Detroit Update
by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt
Detroit Update
Today Former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was convicted in federal court of 24 felony courts of racketeering, extortion, mail fraud, bribery and tax evasion.
His chief henchman contractor Bobby Ferguson was convicted of 9 counts of racketeering and bribery.
Kilpatrick’s father was convicted of one count of tax evasion but the jury did not find him guilty on three extortion and bribery counts.
Jurors from the diverse jury expressed disgust after listening to and watching an immense amount of evidence.
Probably the biggest damage is that while Kilpatrick was running his criminal enterprise the City of Detroit was left to deteriorate and drift.
The next target of federal prosecutors may be Wayne County executives, perhaps including County Executive Robert Ficano.
Kwame should be “creating” jobs in Ft Worth.
GAO 13-309, March 2013 F-35 Current Outlook is improved, but long term affordability is a major concern. Published yesterday, after being leaked on Friday.
http://www.gao.gov/assets/660/652948.pdf
The improved current outlook is; very limited, near term, GAO is being extremely kind. The major concern; the F-35 will not perform initial operational capability (IOC) at any time in the future, while being unaffordable. More kindness from GAO, if the software does not work there is no capability to perform anything useful or not.
Less than 34% of testing has been done, much of it has caused scrap and rework on the 4 lots of airplanes ordered to “open the barn door”.
There is no approved earned value management system which means there is no control of cost and schedule.
$90B has been spent, “opening the barn door” is the hucksters canb say “too much to walk away from” the potential for 1400B in corporate welfare.
Signing receipts for billions in failed engineering work is innocence!
The Pentagon should be treated like Detroit, the F-35 program should have an ’emergency manager’.