Memories of the 28th Century

Maybe I’m becoming more cynical in my middle age, but it seems like government exists exclusively to fill the pockets of the insiders and their friends. That seems pretty obvious in the case of Trump and his pals, but it is also true on the state and locals levels.

On the federal level the use of government to enrich people has been going on for a long time, and it has been publicized for decades. Eisenhower warned us about the “military-industrial complex”, and he was in a position to know, because he had been a logistics man in the Army, and that’s where corruption has been most common in the military.

Even with his warning and an absurdly high defense budget, the military continues to be given more and more tax dollars. Outsourcing has become the thing for the defense department, and when they retire, the former Pentagon personnel step into jobs that they paid for by giving contracts. In addition to auxiliary activities, the Pentagon has used contract fighters. They were a major issue for a time in Iraq (remember Black Water?), see the article below. Recently someone mentioned that when he was in the Marines the Defense Department stopped using Marines to guard some naval bases and switched to using contractors. If you want to learn more about the matter, then use google.com and use ‘U.S. military outsourcing’ as the search term. There are plenty of results. It is interesting that while outsourcing in industry usually reduces costs, but in the military it increases costs, because the people doing the work have already been trained by the U.S. Defense Department, and they are paid much more than military personnel.

The Defense Department isn’t the only part of the federal government that is outsourcing to funnel money to family and friends, see the Washington Post article linked below. It mentions that Edward Snowden was a contractor with unsupervised access to top secret files; some of which he downloaded and gave to reporters. All sorts of things are being contracted out by the feds, and that means that people are doing government jobs without the oversight that would have been there a few decades ago. There is a lot more to this matter, but I’m not concentrating on the problems of federal outsourcing now; I am interested in the breadth of similar problems throughout the U.S.A. at all levels.

I don’t know how it is in other states, but here in Massachusetts the mental hospitals were closed starting in 1973, and the closings were completed just a few years ago. Many of the people who were patients or who would have been patients if they were found to be mentally ill in an earlier time are being treated by contractors, if they are being treated at all. How they are being treated and how they are being supervised is also a question. Because of the nature of that business, the activities of the contractors is almost completely invisible. I don’t want to know how any individuals are being treated, but I wonder if they are being treated, or if they are being housed and kept sedated so they won’t require much care. But a great many mentally ill people are not being treated, and they survive on the streets however they can. We were assured decades that “Everyone will be taken care of,” but that simply wasn’t true.

That isn’t the only area where Massachusetts has outsourced. Apparently, the Commonwealth has outsourced customer service jobs to India, and I worked for a company that did some work for the Department of Revenue. It also appears that some IT functions are outsourced, and the testing of many people who need to get state licenses for their work is outsourced. (Having taken one such test, I was completely unimpressed.) I do not know whether any of these contractors are connected in any way to state employees, but it would have cost less to put a few more people on the payroll, and the supervision would almost certainly have been better. As with the military outsourcing, this costs much more than doing the same things in-house, but the money usually goes to friends, former co-workers, and others with some connection with the government agency.

In local government outsourcing has been common for a long time, because it doesn’t make financial sense to keep large numbers of people on the payroll for jobs that are seasonal. Some of the contractors are professionally searched for and bids taken, while for some functions the hiring process is casual; although it may be based on who is available, but there is a problem of jobs being made up that are completely unnecessary, except to feed the contractor. One way that contractors can be fed is by creating unnecessary work. I see that every day. Right now the town is installing a rotary in place of a light controlled intersection, because someone likes rotaries. The intersection is too busy for a rotary to be effective, but it’s work for employees and contractors, and the intersection will have to be rebuilt in less than a year, because the rotary won’t work.

There is a lot more to be expressed in regard to this matter, but until we get government that cares about serving the citizens nothing will happen, except for the citizens having their pockets picked.

I just went through this again, and I realized that I implied that all government contracting involved kickbacks or other criminal activity, but there are many government contracts that involved real competitive bids and true arms-length negotiations. People within the same industries tend to become acquainted over time, so it makes sense for that to happen in government contracting. There is a problem when a government agency outsources the task that is central to their existence, as is the case with the Defense Department hiring mercenaries.



https://www.brookings.edu/articles/outsourcing-war/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/busin...=.afd3015b1ecb

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden

http://pausebuttonforddsfiveyearplan...ct%20Sheet.pdf