The New Conspiracy Handbook: From GI Joe to Lady Gaga, 25 Truths You Won't Find on Wikipedia by Simon Trinculo

Author:Simon Trinculo [Trinculo, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General
ISBN: 9781481102711
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Published: 2012-11-29T06:00:00+00:00

Where Dollars and Sense Collide: The Particle Super Collider

$4.4 billion. That’s four point four billion dollars. In mathematical notation, it looks like this: $4,400,000,000. And that’s in 1987 dollars. When adjusted to 2010 dollars, it is more like $8,331,393,570.

Eight point three billion of today’s dollars.

Imagine what you could do with that kind of purchasing power.

$4.4 billion represents the original budget of the Superconducting Supercollider (SSC), a proposed 54 mile oval concrete tunnel that would allow scientists to shoot invisible sub-atomic particles at super high speeds at each other, supposedly creating new forms of matter or energy when they collide. In theory. Or, in theory, the particles might cause a black hole, destroying the entire universe.

Now, you may ask yourself what critical need our government is meeting by investing billions of dollars in a large concrete oval 200 feet under the town of Waxahachie, Texas. According to the scientists that proposed it, the SSC would allow physicists to prove the existence of the so-called “God Particle” (more formally known as the Higgs Boson Particle) which is thought to somehow be the very thing that gives everything else matter. Basically, we could unlock the key to one of the universe’s biggest mysteries, or, again, we could bring about the destruction of the universe. Oh yeah, it would also pump a massive amount of money into the economy of Ellis County, Texas. So it is little wonder that the project was championed in Washington by Ellis County’s Congressman, Rep. Jim Wright, who just so happened to be Speaker of the House from 1986 to 1989. Waxahachie was selected as the site for the potentially dangerous project in 1988, despite its proximity to the Dallas/Ft Worth area, one of the country’s largest population centers.

Jim Wright was known by that point already as a politician who didn’t mind using the power of government to further the interests of some businesses at the expense of others. He was best known around Texas as the author of the 1979 Wright Amendment, which was a contentious piece of legislation which protected fledgling Dallas-Ft. Worth International Airport by restricting air traffic at Dallas’ Love Field. This legislation was particularly odd considering the general deregulation of the airline industry at the time, and Wright was accused of playing preferences and restricting trade. DFW Airport became one of the largest in the world thanks to the Wright Amendment, which was eventually repealed by Congress.

Wright eventually became the first Speaker of the House to resign from Congress in shame after it was revealed that he had violated House ethics rules by accepting more in speakers’ fees than the maximum allowed and by allowing his wife to take a job with perks to get around rules that prohibit members of Congress from receiving gifts. His final day in Congress was October 30, 1989. By that point, however, Wright had already managed to champion his district as the best site for the project and it had won Congressional approval. The Federal money started flowing into Texas.

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