Does Bureaucracy Breed Confusion? (Hint: YES!)
Long long ago, as the fires burned, I said that government ineptitude was at the root of all of it regarding the Los Angeles fires of last January. But that it would never be exposed because the bureaucratic stew was too thick to pick through. That it would end up with a bunch of agencies pointing fingers at each other with the responsibility ending up so diverse there would be no one person or agency to hold accountable. As investigations and reporting continue, that is in fact exactly what is happening.
At the moment, most of the furor surrounds the Palisades fire and the fact that apparently the F.D. was prematurely called off the predecessor fire that that ended up producing the big one. The Guardian gives a good summation of the state of that mess, and the fact that there is a debate of which bureaucracy should study the bureaucracy. Not satisfied, another news outlet is producing evidence that the state government was deeply involved in the poor decision making. And none of this deals with all the other fires of that period including the truly devastating Altadena fire.
The fault for the other massive fire, Altadena, has landed squarely on Southern California Edison. Yet it must be remembered that utilities in California live in such a regulatory and bureaucratic maze that they barely have any room to make their own decisions. But they sure do make a handy scapegoat in a situation like this when government mismanagement in areas that may not have sparked the fire, but certainly enabled it to grow to these massive proportions.
All this government ineptitude and yet Karen Bass, ostensibly in charge of Los Angeles, may be re-elected and if she isn’t she is likely to be replaced by a Mamdani-like creature. So regardless of how the election comes out, blame will not be assigned, especially where it belongs.
Within the last few years, new looks have been taken at the Chernobyl accident and the responsibility for that world altering event has landed squarely on the shoulders of the overwhelming bureaucratic nature of the Soviet government. These fires have been compared to that accident with the hope that they might produce radical change in California just as Chernobyl pushed the Soviet Union over the edge. I was quite skeptical of that hypothesis as the fires were being extinguished, and I am being proven right in my skepticism. Even if this reignition scandal produces a sacrificial scapegoat, that will only serve as a diversion from the myriad other issues that need to be addressed.
Death by a thousand cuts is so awful because each cut, of itself, does not seem significant enough to bother with. A recent report illustrates that China could seize control of Taiwan with such a strategy and the set piece battle we are all concerned about would never occur. That is what has happened in California, and the bureaucracies love it that way. As the nation is electing blatant communists in places like New York City and Seattle, the cuts are staring to connect and become significant. The time to act is now, before its all California.
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