For two years, the Kansas City Democrat has secured earmarks totaling about $2 million with the aim of supplying a south Kansas City defense plant the latest in design software technology.

What seemed to him an easy chance to bring home some bacon, however, turned into a lesson on why earmarks are so controversial and difficult to follow.

For starters, the local plant he sought to help — the federally owned Honeywell Federal Manufacturing & Technologies Kansas City Plant — never asked for the money, plant officials said.

In fact, most of the public dollars are slated to go to Parametric Technology Corp., a for-profit software developer based 1,200 miles from Cleaver’s district.

“I’d never heard of that company in my life” until recently, said Cleaver, voicing agitation that a lobbying group may have used his appetite for earmarks to its advantage.

In tracing the origins of one little earmark — just a drop in a $7.7 billion bucket of pet projects earmarked in Congress’ recent omnibus spending bill — The Kansas City Star found that a lobbying group working for Massachusetts-based Parametric pushed for the funds.

That lobbyist, known as The PMA Group, is under federal investigation for its dealings with lawmakers. It was a major campaign donor to an Indiana congressman and others who served on the appropriations panel that signed off on Cleaver’s earmark…

Congress tucked into the latest omnibus bill, for the second year running, Cleaver’s submission of MDICE funding for the plant.

An allocation of $951,500 for the 2009 fiscal year was on top of $1 million that the software project secured from Cleaver for fiscal year 2008…

As for the stated merits of MDICE, “it sounds legitimate. … It uses all the right wording,” said Neal Schmeidler, president of Omni Engineering & Technology Inc. of McLean, Va.

Schmeidler reviewed the MDICE application at The Star’s request. He is an industrial engineering consultant specializing in defense procurements.

“One of my questions is, why not compete this thing out in the open market?” Schmeidler asked.

“Why do it with a special earmark where only one firm can get the money? And who’s going to check if the system even works in the end? … It seems a little odd.”

One reads this and wonders whatever happened to Chuck Grassley’s probe into NASA’s flawed awarding of a software contract to PTC back in 2005.

Welcome to the ‘aristocracy of pull’.  I guess if you can’t compete in the open market, you can always call in favors.

A few houses still stood within the skeleton of what had once been an industrial town. Everything that could move, had moved away;  but some human beings had remained. The empty structures were vertical rubble; they had been eaten, not by time, but by men: boards torn out at random, missing patches of roofs, holes left in gutted cellars. It looked as if blind hands  had seized whatever fitted the need of the moment, with no concept of remaining in existence the next morning. The inhabited houses were scattered at random among the ruins; the smoke of their chimneys was the only movement visible in town.  — Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1957

With this description of the re-wilding of present day Detroit:

His little Cape Cod is an urban Appalachia of coon dogs and funny smells. The interior paint has the faded sepia tones of an old man’s teeth; the wallpaper is as flaky and dry as an old woman’s hand.

Beasley peers out his living room window. A sushi cooking show plays on the television. The neighborhood outside is a wreck of ruined houses and weedy lots…

“This city is going back to the wild,” he says. “That’s bad for people but that’s good for me. I can catch wild rabbit and pheasant and coon in my backyard.”

Detroit was once home to nearly 2 million people but has shrunk to a population of perhaps less than 900,000. It is estimated that a city the size of San Francisco could fit neatly within its empty lots. As nature abhors a vacuum, wildlife has moved in.

A beaver was spotted recently in the Detroit River. Wild fox skulk the 15th hole at the Palmer Park golf course. There is bald eagle, hawk and falcon that roam the city skies. Wild Turkeys roam the grasses. A coyote was snared two years ago roaming the Federal Court House downtown.

And throw in these photoessays from the ruins of the city’s once-thriving downtown for illustration – lots more links at BoingBoing. I disagree emphatically with the BoingBoing commenter who claims that this is the result of ‘hypercapitalism having its vampiric way’ – it was capitalism which built all of these now-ruined buildings and the now-decaying wastelands of Detroit. The ruination came in degrees as Detroit’s industrial giants were increasingly hamstrung by unions and Detroit’s government increasingly fell victim to corruption and identity politics – if there were any vampires preying on “The Twentieth-Century Motor City”, they were from the union hall and the city hall.