Citizen Nanites

If you haven't heard yet, President Obama is not like other politicians in Washington. Unlike past administrations, he wants it to be clear that he will be meticulously monitoring government spending to eliminate waste, fraud, incompetence and personal or political agendas. On February 14, the Washington Times tells us: "As he prepared to sign the massive economic recovery spending bill President Obama ... [told the American people that] ... 'ultimately, this is your money, and you deserve to know where it's going and how it's spent,' [and promised] to help with the most ambitious spending scrutiny project the government has ever undertaken." And then again, as reported by FoxBusiness News on February 20, Mr. Obama warned the Mayors of America:"We have asked for the unprecedented trust of the American people to deal boldly with the greatest economic crisis we have seen in decades -- and the privilege of investing unprecedented amounts of their hard-earned money to address this crisis. With that comes an unprecedented obligation to do so wisely, free from politics and personal agendas. On this I will not compromise or tolerate any shortcut ... " But the problem, of course, is just how spending of this magnitude - let's repeat it again as it cannot be said enough, the stimulus is close to $1 trillion - just how spending of this magnitude can possibly be monitored to achieve such pristine and pure results as are desired by Mr. Obama. Not to mention the fact that neither Mr. Obama nor the Congress have enunciated any objectives precise enough to give direction to any such oversight. They have talked of spending "stimulus" that will be "stimulating" on "shovel-ready" projects, that will "save" the economy and those who are "most harmed" by the failure of capitalism, but these obviously fall far short of the precision needed. In actuality, the most concrete objective our governing class enunciated in all of their deliberations was that the spending needed to be "large." History apparently teaches us that FDR, our sainted 32nd President, committed the grievous error of not spending enough, and so the current crop of FDR wannabees began with a number in mind, $800 billion, and then proceeded to insert spending projects until that number was met or exceeded. To Washington, any spending will "stimulate" and it is only important that it be sufficiently LARGE enough to "jolt" the economy back into gear. Unfortunately, LARGE is not any more precise for oversight purposes than "stimulus," "stimulating" or "shovel-ready." Now it is the bane of the existence of the largest corporations in the world (who deal in billions and not hundreds of billions, much less trillions) to control such gargantuan spending as they do each year. It is actually a marvel of the capitalistic system that such large entities have developed ways to track and manage their spending in any meaningful way, but no victory against corporate bloat ever ends the war. Each month, each year, each decade produces re-newed bloat, inefficiencies, fraud, and sloth in the body corporate, and the company that forgets this is the company that ultimately will fail. But don't worry, President Obama has a plan to leverage the information age we live in to effectively monitor all this federal spending as no one has been able to do before him: he is introducing what I can only call citizen nanites into the blood-stream of the economy, to oversee and report to him the effectiveness of all this stimulus spending, right down to the smallest dollar spewed out of the body politic. That same Washington Times article noted above stated: "As he prepared to sign the massive economic recovery spending bill President Obama called Saturday for citizens to become watchdogs on where the $787 billion goes ... [and] ... called on 'every American' to use recovery.gov — a Web site that will be up and running once the money begins to be spent — to track where the money is being spent and to 'weigh in with comments and questions.' " What a concept. Thousands and thousands of citizen nanites, watching government spending at every level and reporting back in real time to President Obama, his staff and Congress, for immediate action as appropriate to save the stimulus package from waste, fraud and abuse. This grand vision provokes a thought-experiment. To be continued ... via email