(photo credit: Haitian passports dumped in the ground in Brazil as they prepared to make their (organized)way to Texas.
I’m going to reprint a few lines what I mentioned only recently, but several times over the years, about how and why certain kinds of governments actually kill themselves.
Natural Law. How Things Work. Shite-happens.
It’s how Russia went from a feudal Christian country of serfs to a top-heavy atheistic military dynamo to an asteroid spinning out of control looking for some planet with enough gravitational pull to drag it into its orbit…all in 70 years. The Three Generation Rule, laid bare.
When the Soviet Union fell, American leftists like Hillary wanted to believe it was HomoRus (Russians males) that killed it, trying to envision Marxist ideals being managed in less boorish and uncouth hands. Saul Alyinsky’s acolytes believed this to the case.
Or was it HomoSovieticus, which other Euro-American Marxists wanted to lay at the feet of Stalin and his path to industrialization…with organization charts out the ying-yang, causing production to slow to a crawl, only not with labor intensification, but rather with management intensification, so many that it sometimes took 15-20 (unnecessary) sign-offs to get one manufactured piece to the shipping department? And woe betide! if one of those “essential managers” failed to show for work that day. Standstill. (I’ve seen this, btw, more than once.) That’s why Russians drank.
I met with a team of local heroes in Ukraine, a mountain climbing club (men after my own heart), who had been on the ground rendering assistance just days after the Armenian earthquake in ’88, while it took the Soviets days to organize rescue operations. (They had made national news here.) Anyone interested could have understood Chernobyl (’86) if they saw the similarities in the way the state managed the earthquake relief in Armenia.
Hurry up and wait
What was always vainly overlooked by American leftists as the principal killer of Soviet Communism, or actually getting anything done quickly, efficiently and inexpensively, was HomoBureaucraticus which actually defined the Sovieticus organizational model just described, for it was, is, and always shall be, a living, breathing organism on its own account, which, like any parasite, will attach itself to its host and never let go until it dies…and often as not…taking its host with it.
So, it’s my wager it was the #3 Homo that killed the USSR.
And if you’ll note, no one in the rest of the world’s academies, their academicians, are even inquiring as to how HomoRus, HomoUkrainus, HomoAzeri, et al are even faring today, as cultural not political entities, as they try to find their way back into humanity’s solar system as fit, survivable moral human cultures.
It’s all about political management, and guess who the academies always hire to assist in this complex important research?
HomoBureaucraticus
For generations America was the paragon of private sector virtue in organizational efficiency, money creation, and wise management of resources. It would take 122 years before Congress could get up the nerve to tax corporate income, four years before they then went after private income, (with the XVI Amendment)…after that, the nerve part was easy…thus allowing the first seeds of “bureaucratism” (the virus) to be planted at the national level. (Alexander Hamilton didn’t live long enough for us to know whether he’d have been for it, or against it.)
By the 1980s it has crept into our business schools. I’m not enough of a historian to know whether the government inherited “bureaucratism” from the business schools or the business schools actually modeled it from the federal bureaucracy.
This notion may sound crazy to free-market buffs. But I witnessed the military change earlier, brought on by the end of the Vietnam War, in the mid-70s. I was a lawyer-captain in middle-management in a major command, so got a ringside seat. My 3-star asked me to help identify and save military jobs that were being civilianized. I didn’t see any structural shifts in private sector manufacturing until the late 80s, when the manufacturing company I worked with, 60,000 production employees in 5 states, nice new HQ, centralized its front office under one roof, adding several hundred MBA’s, then began a slow process of diminishing the value of hands-on, front-line management up to and including plant managers, some of whom were vice-presidents. Instead if making the company more profitable they made it more “buyable”. (As I was very pro-factory culture, I preferred to live in one of the main factory towns instead of the HQ…better place to raise kids. As one MBA HQ production planner told me, “I can train monkeys to run a factory”.
Adam Smith would not have been amused.
This new culture was what drove me out of the corporate world, along with the change in the generational guard; Adam Smith out, Gordon Gekko in. Since I thought I knew how to beat China on the factory floor (they cheated on the numbers, still do) I would first try Asia, then spent several years in Russia and the Balkans before I would finally understand the Gordon Gekko, “Greed is good” amoral bottom line justification that stood starkly opposite to how Adam Smith would have defined free enterprise. (I no longer call it “capitalism” myself, seeing how both Mussolini and Hitler cozied up to a certain type of capitalist that still roams the room. It would be the early 2000s before it would dawn on me exactly what it was I had been watching (a lesson in itself for the smarter-than-thous who think they have it all figured out at 35), causing me to wonder why I hadn’t seen any alarms go off in the pre-internet, social media days. Even GW Bush, who I admired at the time, and whose only experience in “big business” was in post-Gekko major league baseball, took no note of the new standing both “greed” and the “little guy” took in the eyes of national management…as hundreds of labor intensive factories closed, their jobs sent oversea.
Now I have neither the modern academic training nor expertise to accumulate statistics and perform bullet-point analysis, but I do have historical hindsight and the Pascal-sense of inquiry to be able to ask questions and perform analysis on modern analysis.
So, look at the recent Afghanistan Bug Out and the DHS handling of the Del Rio water-walkers from Haiti, purely in terms of “management”. They are very similar.
Only 7% of the Afghan refugees who were flown out were American citizens, or had SIV (Special Immigrant Visas). So, how did the other 93% get a free ride out? Who let them on the aircraft? Who let them inside the passenger areas? Let’s see: State Department (with several separate managerial desks in Kabul and at the airport, plus Washington), Department of Defense, Defense Intelligence Agencies, (plural, CIA, et al) also with several direct lines to upstairs offices inside several international locations, each with their own bureaucratic chain-of-command.
Knowing that, I can’t begin to tell you how many desks at DHS (Department of Homeland Security) were involved in the Haitian water-walking incidences (still in progress), while the media is only talking to one officially (Public Relations).
Knowing this, now you can understand why no American, NO AMERICAN, nor state or local agency, can name even a single hospital that can say with any accuracy how many people have been admitted or been released, or moved to isolation, or died from Covid. None of these things can be known because there are so many “organizational” groups that are routinely collecting them, who in turn pass them forward to a collection area, (sort of like where the Fulton and Maricopa vote tallies were a gathered) and eventually into the hands of a person or office on the higher floors that had been designated to actually report these to the people…not directly, mind you, but via the media.
As you know, if you’ve been in any sort of bureaucratic position, you know that the life and career of someone on the top floor is infinitely more important than that of someone lower, in the middle, and certainly at the desks on the first floor.
That’s Natural Law of another level, only it affects only the individual, and not the herd.
This is How Things Work when managed from the top.
