Why I don't trust the government (and neither should you) Part 2

I have a general mistrust of the government and have felt this way for most of my adult life. I have very real reasons for feeling this way and not just because of videos I see online either: I have first-hand knowledge of how the government is lying and stealing from us in the United States and while they do a better job of hiding it than other countries I have lived it is still evident if you look hard enough and I believe this is a world-wide phenomenon.

This is a great part of the reason why I am very hesitant to believe anything they are telling us about Covid and don't really understand the mindset of a person who doesn't question what their government tells them.

My experience is one of inadvertently being part of the problem and it was a major reason for my lack of job satisfaction when I worked for the Federal government in USA. It is particularly scary to me because my role was a relatively minor one and I saw lots of deceit and theft of public funds. I was "middle management" so to speak and had very little authority outside of my individual projects. If I was able to discover the level of lies, theft, and corruption at that level, I can't even imagine what goes on with the people that are actually pulling the strings.

I have to be vague about these descriptions because of a non-disclosure agreement that I was forced to sign upon my resignation, so you'll just have to take my word for it to a certain degree because while I do think it is important that people know this stuff, it is not something I am willing to go to jail for.

Let's talk about how the government will lie to the population and how I was part of it.

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I did what you are "supposed to do" when I graduated from high-school: I went straight to college, did really well at that (although I changed majors a LOT) and upon graduation from college, saw the job market, didn't like what I saw, and then went to graduate school. After that, the job market really opened up and I really believe the university system in the USA is a horribly overpriced, overused, and for the most part useless system. Other than spreadsheets I wouldn't say that anything I learned in the 5.5 years I spent in college actually prepared me for anything in my professional life - but this is another story.

I ended up getting a job offer with the Environmental Protection Agency after working with a private firm that was a sub-contractor for EPA projects and while I was in there I noticed something fishy before I even started working for the EPA. The private firm I worked with was marking up the cost of goods and services to the EPA dramatically and it was no secret that this firm, and others like it, were doing this.

These sub-contractors were few and far between, so there was relatively no competition for bids (and I think the actual competition was only an illusion and it was already agreed between the "competitors" who was going to get what project beforehand) and I feel this was by design from the start.

The EPA (which I later found out upon being employed directly by them) has a massive amount of staff and could have easily acquired all of the things that we procured for them (with the sub-contractor) on their own, yet they didn't do so and I feel as though this was by design. They wanted it to be marked up probably because the EPA was in cahoots with the massive corporate sub-contractors such as the one that I worked for. I estimate that the costs of all the projects that I worked on ended up costing at least 200% - 300% more than what they needed to because of this markup.

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Now let's get into the lies

One particular project that I worked on at a location I will not disclose but it was in a rural area that used to have a thriving oil business eons ago, the companies that operated these wells, when they went dry, simply abandoned them. The company went bankrupt and most of the rigs were dismantled but the wells themselves were still there.

First off, understand that the wells themselves were not much of a threat because they were totally dry. Companies that are drilling wells don't tend to walk away from places that still have oil in the ground, so these deposits were no more of a threat in their welled state than they were before they were tapped. There was very little in the way of any oil residue in the area at all.

This situation was once again revealed to me by a contracted scientist that was on the job site as he regaled me and laughed about how "there is no reason for us to be here." However, when we entered this small city with a population of just a couple of thousand people, they are going to notice a bunch of scary looking cars with "US Government" on the tags and initially we probably put the meth manufacturers in a panic.

The lies come in when our official position towards the local population needed to become public information. At first we told the public nothing and hoped they wouldn't notice we were there, then later we released a statement announcing that we were preventing contamination to the nearby river that was a source of drinking water for this, and many other communities downstream.

I didn't know this at the time, but these oil wells had been abandoned for nearly a hundred years and yet none of the supposed "affected populations" had shown any sort of adverse reaction to supposed contamination. Crops and land in general wasn't showing any adverse reaction to their existence either. Crops were actually thriving on the very land that these wells would sometimes be right in the middle of. Many of the land owners had no idea that the wells were even there.

This is where the lies came in and the numbers about the parts per million of whatever harmful chemical of the day was and how the oil wells were the culprits. Just like in the last project I described where we were dealing with "asbestos contaminated soil", the figures that we released to the public, which was all done in intentionally sciency talk that very few people would understand, were totally made up. The lone scientist was intentionally fudging the numbers to make it appear as though this project was necessary. He told this to me over some beers on a weekend.

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_{He didn't look like this, but I like to imagine he did}

If I worked for a private firm whose objective was making profits, I would have immediately put the project to a halt. But that is not the way the government operates.

All in all, this project cost tens of millions of dollars, took 6 months when it could have been finished in 1, and each week the work hours intentionally went into overtime to pay the skeleton crew as much as they could even though adding a few more people would have been much more economical. They were trying to make it as expensive as possible.

Spending a bunch of money on something that is urgent would make sense I guess, but the fact of the matter in the project was that the great-oil-well-evil and the eminent danger that it was presenting to the locals was completely made up. I'm a little bit in awe that no one ever questioned the fact that literally no one had ever gotten sick from this supposed contamination despite the fact that these wells had been there for decades in the same state that they were in when we arrived.

Plus, our process that we did wasn't terribly scientific anyway. The only thing we were doing was opening the wells an then dumping a bunch of cement-like product into them. Monkeys could have done this.

Think about it. If there is a dangerous chemical in the ground, what good does pouring a bunch of cement into the hole do? Wouldn't you actually need to remove said chemical if it was a real threat? We removed exactly zero product from any of those oil wells and even though I am not a scientist, the only thing I could imagine that pouring a bunch of cement into the ground would accomplish would be to spread it out a bit, not eliminate it.

So there you go folks! Tens of millions of dollars was spent on a completely unnecessary project and the explanation given to the public was all lies from the start. This was a relatively minor project also but you have to keep in mind that during the months I was working on it there were dozens of other projects similar to it going on all around the country.

We went over budget 3 times on this project and there were no repercussions for doing so. When you run out of money, the big wigs in D.C. simply give you more. Only the government can operate at this level because they never run out of money. It's sickening to me when I think about how people will complain about high taxes when things like this are going on right in front of them.

So when the government tells me something about just about anything I tend to think that they are lying especially if said project is going to use tons of tax dollars to fund it.... and it always does.