- How bureaucracy is evidence of the complexity of the real world, and the only way to solve global problems;
- Notes from the fringe: How Tennessee prevents people voting; Trump’s niece on Trump’s dementia; USA Today about covering Trump’s dementia; Candace Owens is preoccupied with homosexuals; and Anderson Cooper challenges Trump’s claims.
Salon, Matthew Rozsa, 6 Sep 2024: Bureaucracy is despised for inefficiency and waste. But it might just save us from climate change, subtitled “Despite attacks on bureaucracies, experts agree such organizations are more important than ever”
My take, before reading this: If you have no idea what all those people are doing, it’s easy to think they’re inefficient and wasting their time and our money. But the real world is always more complex than most people think. And the inevitability of bureaucracies is the evidence.
Government bureaucrats are often depicted as wasteful and inefficient bleeding hearts with secret, sinister and sometimes “socialist” agendas. Former president Ronald Reagan famously denounced bureaucrats throughout his political career — and, four decades later, Donald Trump and his acolytes did so in their own way by decrying a supposed “Deep State.”
Because bureaucracy inevitably implies some kind of coordinated purpose among many people. Which to rugged individualists (as Mike Johnson admitted) seems sinister.
Trump, the current Republican presidential nominee, has vowed to fire career civil servants en masse and replace them with loyalists, specifically laying out how he will do this through Agenda 47 and Project 2025. He even recently said he will appoint billionaire and Tesla CEO Elon Musk to help him cut “trillions” in government spending through a “government efficiency commission” to audit the entire federal government.
As if *all* organizations, both government and private, don’t already have a motivation to be more efficient, to save money, either to benefit their stockholders, or protect themselves from government audits. Are there outfits out there with blank checks who need to be reigned in? Perhaps. (Decades ago, aerospace companies working for NASA, like Rocketdyne where I worked for 30 years, had “cost-plus” contracts, where the government would keep paying until a project was finished. But that’s because those NASA projects were highly experimental, and could not be planned and monitored the way an ordinary engineering project, like building a bridge, would have.) But Trump’s scheme seems to be an excuse for dismantling government organizations conservatives simply don’t like.
Yet according to experts who spoke with Salon, this kind of anti-bureaucratic sentiment can have profoundly negative policy consequences, especially when it comes to regulations that protect the planet. Scholars who study bureaucracies agree that these organizations are actually more important than ever. Indeed, humanity’s ongoing survival as a species will depend on many of the bureaucracies that Trump and Musk wish to eliminate, such as energy regulators, environmental agencies and any institution that holds fossil fuel and other companies responsible for greenhouse gas emissions.
While the lack of bureaucracies, including undermining them through de-regulation (another conservative priority), have led to calamities.
[H]istory is riddled with examples of occasions when a well-managed bureaucracy might have averted considerable calamity. Perhaps most infamously, the incompetence and corruption of the Soviet bureaucracy was so severe that, when the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine experienced a disaster, the bureaucrats threw their own citizens under the bus to cover up their mistake. Decades later, the ruthless march of deregulation implemented by neoliberal presidents like Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush resulted in the economic crash of 2008. Climate change is as severe as it is today in part because fossil fuel companies subsidized spreading misinformation to justify energy deregulation during the Bush era.
With many more examples from history.
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Notes from the Fringe.
- NY Times video: How Tennessee Keeps Nearly Half a Million People From Voting
- Conservatives are using a fake Twitter account to claim the Georgia school shooter is trans. Lying again.
- Donald Trump’s lesbian niece blasts media for dishonestly hiding his dementia, subtitled “The difference, of course, is that Biden is aging while Donald is dementing.”
- USA Today: Trump is 78 and barely coherent. Where’s everyone who questioned Biden’s age and fitness?, subtitled Where are the headlines screaming: ‘Deranged old man peddles nonsense while threatening violent deportation of immigrants’?”
- Candace Owens claims “world leaders…all seem to be homosexual” in wild conspiracy theory, subtitled “She says that Joe Biden & Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy are gay.” I think she’s a little too preoccupied with this subject, as many anti-gay conservatives are. Why do they care so much?
- Donald Trump tried to lie about Anderson Cooper. But Cooper brought the receipts. subtitled “Trump claimed that E. Jean Carroll told Cooper “loved” being sexually assaulted. That didn’t happen.”
