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Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.

Proverbs 16:18

This time, we feature websites that tell a certain genre of cautionary tales. A spokesman for the Panama Canal Authority --- the guy who called the canal expansion project "a money machine" --- complained that more things are written about failed projects because books about success don't sell very well. Put that advice and your 100 shares of ENRON stock in the bank --- and say, didn't the former director of canal operations go to work for ENRON, just in time to see that company's underwater gas pipeline from Cartagena to Colon that was going to solve all of Panama's energy problems go belly up before construction even began?

This isn't a prediction that the canal expansion plan is bound to fail, but a warning that many other great construction projects have been cause for disappointment and that the consequences in such cases have often been quite serious. Those of us who are Panamanian citizens really do need to do our homework with all due diligence before stepping up to our voting tables.

Chunnel Financial Fiasco

http://www.scripophily.net/eurotunnel.html

It's sometimes a bit more convenient than taking the ferry, but the tunnel under the English Channel has been a financial nightmare that would have spelled total ruin were it, say, between Djibouti and Yemen rather than two relatively rich countries like France and the UK.

Defense and Cost of the Great Wall

http://www.paulnoll.com/China/Tourism/history-Great-Wall-3-defense.html

It's still one of the main tourist traps in the Middle Kingdom, but at the end of the day it not only didn't keep the barbarians out, its ruinous costs brought governments down from within.

Ferdinand de Lesseps

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/lesseps_ferdinand_de.shtml

“Eight years later, the Panama Canal appeared to have had made little progress, and de Lesseps was accused of mismanagement.

“A French court found de Lesseps, and his son Charles, guilty of this charge, and both were fined heavily and sentenced to lengthy imprisonment. In the event, de Lesseps did not go to jail, but his loyal son paid for his elderly father's misjudgements with a year in prison.”

The BBC is so very charitable to leave it as a matter of mismanagement --- the charge was actually fraud, for the lowball cost estimate by which the elder de Lesseps sold his project to investors. With the machinations associated with the separation of Panama from Colombia, Philippe Bunau-Varilla and a few associates got rich off the residue of the de Lesseps boondoggle, but the vast majority of those who invested in the French Canal lost their money.

Six employees of Big Dig contractor charged

http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/ma/pa/May2006/Aggregate%20Industries-pr.html

So you're going to look to Uncle Sam to save Panama from financial disaster, as if the Americans are immune to the effects of foolish mega-projects? They may have a bit more accountability up there than we have down here, as this sideshow to Boston's massive and ruinous public works project and the recent convictions of ENRON's top management people would suggest.

The Spanish Armada

http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/spanish_armada.htm

Why is England a predmominantly Protestant rather than a mainly Catholic country? Spain poured its fortune into a great conquering fleet of 130 ships, but bad planning and corruption made the mighty Armada vulnerable to mistakes, bad luck and Drake's sea dogs. The great Spanish Empire was an increasingly feeble has-been of a world power after the loss of this huge investment.

Also in this section:
Cool Internet sites
Books, The Assassins' Gate