One More Massacre — Revisited

Often, when I criticize the bureaucracies, I get several comments from a couple of people who, I have to assume, are bureaucrats themselves or, at least, are bureaucracy lovers. They quote me the rules, regulations and laws that are written to set up and direct the agencies and departments that make up our overly numerous bureaucracies. They are trying to show how well thought out and planned the bureaucracies are.  Well, if these rules and regulations were actually adhered to, perhaps we wouldn’t have the ills and inefficiencies that I complain about.

What I comment on are the results of how these agencies and organizations actually and really operate, like in the real world, the everyday, work-a-day reality. Last week I wrote something that, I’m sure, many people considered to be a big stretch, regarding bureaucratic inefficiency which resulted in the Naval Yard massacre, as well as other mass murders preceding it. I did receive a few emails from these bureaucracy lovers, pointing out how this and that bunch of rules and laws were to be considered when dealing with the bureaucracies that do the screening and restriction of nut cases. These emails talked about how the organizations were designed and what they were supposed to be doing and not supposed to do, as prescribed in their rules and regulations. This is what they are SUPPOSED to be doing, but it doesn’t account for the petty politics and egoistic manipulations, the self-interest, and the laziness, which interfere with what is SUPPOSED to happen.  These human frailties rule such organizations as much as their defining and controlling laws and rules,  on an everyday, real world basis.

We’ve all been victims of bureaucratic flaws, I have no doubt, but the New York Times published a story on its front page yesterday (September 28, 2013) that clearly and shamefully drives my point home, bureaucracies don’t do what they are supposed to do, they do not fulfill their mandates! This is a story of how the employees of a government contractor who investigates security clearances of governmental personnel were instructed to “flush” pending investigations, or “fast track,” them by their managers.  These instructions came down to them in order to expedite federal government payments paid to the contractor on a “pay by piece” basis. Clearly, this is not something that is written into the laws and rules which set up and regulate government agencies (click here for a link to this article).

When I was a kid, my elders would talk about how motorcycle cops would illegally hide behind billboards or bushes to catch marginal speeders in order to fulfill their “quota” of tickets they had to issue each month. The supposed reason for this quota was to make the local municipality a few extra bucks, not really to enhance honest law enforcement. Whether this is true or not, I’ve never heard, however, it is simply another example of how a government agency might make up its own rules and procedures to enhance its operation beyond its true, intended scope of operations and objectives.

And in the same vein, there are the allegations that the California Public Utilities Commission (PUC) was way too cozy with PG&E, resulting in such things as the Burlingame gas pipeline explosion which killed eight people, injuring . . .

(Click here to read conclusion)