Learning Political Lessons Elon Musk is too good at what he does. I am not saying this because I just feel like it, I am saying it because apparently the US government feels this way. You may wonder why I would say something like this but I said it because I know from experience what goes on with some bureaucrats. NASA is spending billions of dollars and taking forever to send people back to the moon and to send them to Mars. Musk recently embarrassed NASA, not on purpose and still may not realize he did. He offered to sell them 27 of his biggest rockets for a ridiculous low price. This seemed like a logical thing to him and good for business. What he didn’t realize at the time was this made NASA look foolish since they were spending far more money on developing their rockets and spacecraft while Musk had a rocket which was the biggest one in the world and was reusable. There must have been quite a stir at NASA and the politicians who decide the NASA budget must have been furious, after all it didn’t do them any good for a private company to show how inefficient NASA was. NASA turned down his generous offer for the rockets. Remember aerospace companies are making a fortune off of NASA and other US companies. These companies have very powerful lobbys and are part of the military industrial complex. This is what President Eisenhower warned us against when he said we shouldn’t let them get too powerful. The point being in this case they were not going to let that upstart Musk take away their gravy train. To punish him further when he launched a satellite recently and started streaming photos of the earth from space they cut his feed and told him he needed a license to do that. Never mind other companies were doing it. He has another satellite going into space soon and filed for a license, but was told this application could take up to 120 days which would mean he would miss being able to give earth video feeds again. Will there be further assaults against him and his companies? One thing I have found out in life is politicians do not like to get upstaged and some people who are only trying to do a good job don’t realize the political types think they are being shown up. I personally know of someone who worked for the state and was put in charge of creating a computer department in one county years ago. Let’s just call him Joe. Politicians who knew nothing about computers were put in charge at the state level. Joe was way ahead in meeting different required steps and that had angered the powers that be because they were grooming someone to be in charge and he was currently in charge at the county level in a different county. Joe didn’t know the plan and was only doing the best he could. He was never told about this and received many berating phone calls even though the work he did was advancing ahead of all others. One time the big boss sent his girlfriend to see Joe and when she arrived she was high. She blurted out orders to him which made no sense and when he refused to listen to her she called the big guy who again screamed at him and then called his local boss who was in charge of the installation and told him never to promote the guy. That was when Joe realized what was going on. All throughout the government these situations exist. This is one of the major problems with our government, much of it at the higher levels is a club with the higher-level jobs going to cronies, relatives and friends without any regard for ability or knowledge. I have seen people come from nowhere and be put in charge of places where years of expertise and education are required. Here is the funny part about that. One would think these people once they got these positions would keep quiet so they are not noticed since they are unqualified, but many start issuing orders to others who know what they are supposed to do and many times these orders if carried out make things much worse and are even against the law sometimes depending what agency we are talking about. I remember when Edward Snowden was discovered taking records from the CIA. One politician was calling for his death, not because he stole records from the CIA, but because he released an embarrassing document which involved this politician. No government agency is immune from this sort of thing. I wonder how many people remember when the Challenger space shuttle exploded? It was a cold day and the makers of the seals known as O rings called NASA and told them not to launch because the seals could fail in the cold weather. No matter how many urgent calls were made by Thiokal the company which manufactured the rings they were ignored. The head engineer there was Mr. McDonald and he had refused to sign the release to launch over safety concerns. He did everything humanly possibly to stop this launch but the political powers at NASA overruled this experienced engineer and the rest is history. The Challenger exploded and then NASA tried to blame his company. The government could be run a lot more efficiently if we had truly experienced people in charge who were not there because of any other reason except they were qualified. I shudder to think what we would find if we were to check out those in charge of some of our most important agencies. I am not just talking about those on the very top, I am talking about any of those who are receiving large salaries in important positions which effect the efficiency of these agencies. I guess this is only a pipe dream, because as they say power corrupts and power is what is used to get these people into their positions in the first place. |
