Building Homes for the Army

Recently I was travelling in the United States which is always a sobering experience. I was in California which might explain some of the weirdness but I think it had more to do with trying to watch television in a world where the minimum advertising time in a 60 minute frame is 16 minutes. That's over 25% of every hour! It certainly made for some disjointed viewing of just about everything which might explain the rise in ADD in the USA.

Despite this assault on my senses I managed to sit through a news broadcast on MNBC which I believe is the All-News channel for NBC. It was therefore somewhat reassuring if not outright surprising that although there were still incessant interruptions that the programme gave a reasonably open presentation of the news even if to do so required it to be presented more like a talk show.

The "article" which caught my attention was on the imminent demise of a number of developers in Hinesville,Georgia who understood that the nearby Army Base was going to be receiving 1000's of new troops with their families and so they went out and invested millions of dollars into building the infrastructure and housing they understood the Army would need.

It is unclear what was actually promised-or not- by the Army. What is clear is that the developers saw an opportunity and piled in to the tune of at least $25million. Now they were all crying because the Army isn't going to bring the troops required. I was unable to find much empathy for these guys. They say they invested their money because they knew the Army was coming. What they actually did was speculate that the Army was coming, and are now crying that they were misled. If the Army presented them with contracts then the Army would be compelled to respect those contracts. This clearly did not happen. They got some news they believed to be(and may have been) in good faith and on the basis of that they went ahead and invested.

I think the fact that they speculated and lost is unfortunate, but no more so than for any other entrepreneur who analyses the market and decides to invest only to have it blow up in their face.

There are some more serious concerns this whole drama unearths. Firstly, were they operating on insider information. If the Army wants Housing built it is normally the case that it is put out to bid? That clearly didn't happen here. Secondly, what ROI were these developers hoping to make on building for the Army without a contract and yet still willing to invest millions of dollars? Lastly, and this is the most disturbing aspect to me. What has happened to our Armed Forces that their housing has become part of Real Estate Developers "get rich" schemes? This is a case unfortunately of the "chickens coming home to roost".

Go to a US Armed Forces Base anywhere in the world and you will see that it is built by Bechtel, Haliburtion or someone similar. That it is fed by Sysco or some other industrialised food processor at the mess, and by BurgerKing and PizzaHut in "town". There is talk of privatising the Medical Corp-they already tried with the VA Hospitals. None of this seems that strange when one considers the number of Private Security Firms such as Blackwater which operate as mercenaries for the US Army-but it should!

The government of the United States is for the people, of the people, by the people. Nowhere did our Founding Fathers mean that "for the people" meant for the people to free ride on the government and yet that is what has been happening. The very same people who protest against big government and high taxes are happily living high off the government whose only income is taxes. Except that the result would be catastrophic for every layer of society it would be interesting to see what would happen if there were no taxes. No taxes; no services; no national debt; no America.

I guess the Tea-Partyers can't think that far ahead.