Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Orbital pork

When you’re talking Euro-business, you’re talking bloated (selected) ‘champion’ industries engaging in long term projects that hang around the taxpayer’s neck. The usual ritual involves delays, cost over-runs, and the requisite overturned indictment of an executive a few years later.

Far from stimulus, they weigh down the healthy parts of the economy. A “make work” project is still, after all, a “make work” project. In this case done up with a dozen flags, an alphabet soup of state managed entities in contracting kumbaya with the suffering taxpayer’s last “€”.

Then again, there’s always a breath-taking example of still not getting it. Such as has been found with the €3.4 billion Galileo GPS project. The reason all of the services they plan to offer sound so familiar, is because they already exist.

The fuse is lit!

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