Creating your own failures

We've all seen this and some of us have experienced it, we self-destruct at worst or create the path for self-destruction at best. And when it comes to the federal government, it's about ourselves and about our enemies, or rather our friends who then use our self-destruction, which they helped happen, as reasons to fix if not eliminate us.

Confusing? Not really. It the idea of appointing corporate or industry people into senior appointments in the federal government and then they arrange for their agency, department, commission, of whatever to fail. This causes folks to blame the government for the failure and then argue for the government to get out of the work. Self-destruction at the hands of those who want it most and will gain from it the most.

We saw this with the BP drilling rig and oil spill disaster. The Bush-Cheney administration put in corporate and industry people into the top levels of the management of the Minerals Management Service (MMS) responsible for overseeing oil drilling and operations. The MMS was full of oil industry people hired by the Bush administration.

[Note.--The top 3-4 levels of any government agency are political appointees, approved by the Senate. The rest are normal government employees. This is why you have to discern when you speak of "govenment" you distinguish between the political from the permanent employees.]

We saw the degree of this in royality payment program where political appointed people put friends in the lower positions who then worked with the corporations to avoid payments, avoid oversight, and everything else losing the taxpayers billions in revenue while the employees accepted perks from the corporations.

The commission charged with the review of the disaster blamed the MMS and their lax oversight and inspections. So, it's easy to say government failed. Except it didn't fail, people in the MMS where were friends of the industry or former employees with the industry failed. It's was the creation of their own self-destruction to blame government.

And now the commission for the financial disaster of 2008 has found the same thing. While they argue the financial market got greedy and lax in the greed, they focus on the failures of the government to oversee the financial markets, which was full of corporate and industry insiders.

The same people who oversaw the financial market was either from the financial market or had in an interest in the market. The good point is that they blamed the overlapping government agencies, banks, commissions, etal for infighting and failing to see the obvious abuses. The system was designed to be ineffective and inefficient, the self-creation of a problem which lead to their self-destruction.

I won't argue I know much about it except what I read in the papers. I just find it interesting that in the end these investigation always find fault and the failure to be at the hands of the government, when the people in the government weren't really government employees but former corporate and industry employees in government. They created the situation which created the opportunity for failure.

And it worked. And then politicians can blame the government for the failure, all the while the employees have left to go back to their corporate or industry jobs to reap the profits from their own work in governement. While this has been the long standing problem with the Defense Department, it's worse in the financial market.

And it hasn't changed under President Obama. All of his senior advisors and cabinet member overseeing financial matters are from the financial corporate and industry world. It's easy to pretend they're the best to do the job because of their experience, but you're relying on them to work for the government and us than their former and future employer, the corporations.

It's why nothing really changes beyond cosmetic ones. It's the corporate-governement complex running the show and we're just the tag alongs anymore. And it's political party independent. All thanks to deregulation (gee, thanks Reagan) and shuffling employees between industry and government.

Any wonder why the financial market is seeing record profits and the banks sitting on over $1 Trillion is cash reserves, most of that from the government stimulus money? And what do you expect will be done from the commissions findings? And do you expect the politicians won't argue it's the government that's to blame for the financial bust?

In the end it will be a lot of noise about government. And the conservatives will have their voice to argue for deregulation while the liberals can't defend govenment without appearing to blame themselves for the problem. The foxes were in charge all along and the chickens never stood a chance until they were dinner, and the farmer argues to buy more chickens, forgetting to ask to help control the foxes.