There is a sea change sweeping the planet presently. This change brings with it the reek of disaster for many; and a gradual drift into a new era of bloc behaviour. This is happening, perhaps as an inevitable outcome of rapid paced globalisation. Or maybe it is an equally inevitable outcome of the rise of corporate capitalist power on a scale even the majestic Ayn Rand could not have conceptualised: Mercantilism on steroids.
It may even be that the real seeds of disaster for many of the planet’s occupants lie in the bureaucratic structures that have come into existence to serve our modern society and these labyrinthine global corporatocracies. These bureaucracies have seemingly become self-serving to an extent that we only really notice when disaster strikes and nothing happens, as we noticed two years ago with Katrina, two weeks ago with an earthquake in Peru and most recently in Greece where the country blazed while the bureaucrats snoozed..
Not that there is anything new about bureaucracy or its ability to paralyse action. It was after all the core theme of Ms Rand’s disturbingly prophetic book “Atlas Shrugged”. It also doesn’t matter where you are in the world the suffocating dead hand of bureaucracy is making your life miserable somehow, somewhere.
This sea change on the planet is also a post 9/11 thing; bringing with it America’s revealed impotence in Iraq. We are witness to the growing threat of a protectionist backlash from the USA. Having erred so spectacularly in the Middle East they now show signs of pulling off the world stage in something of a huff. Perhaps the bureaucrats in Washington are unable to handle the asymmetrical conflict in Iraq. Taking Katrina, the post-invasion failures in Iraq and the reported disintegration of its infrastructure the sense that America is bureaucratically paralysed is disturbingly evident to anyone who has tried using their airline system lately [or anyone else’s for that matter]
So what has this got to do with August?
Think about this past August. It was a pretty packed month, so much happened that it is hard to remember even the key things, if there can be key things in a world of chaos where a butterfly flapping in Peru as they say [or perhaps more appositely an earthquake crashing in Peru] can impact on a man crashing his car into a tree 10,000 kilometres away… that’s the theory anyway.
Okay. So the minor points then were a sharp global financial mini-meltdown as a load of seriously disturbed lending practices came home to roost. The contagion raged for days before someone somewhere did something to ease the pain for a moment. Undoubtedly this period of “correction” is not over.
Then there were the Greek fires, that raged uncontrollably for days while all those charged with putting them out were looking for the means to do so. According to a number of Greek holiday returnees interviewed on Wednesday this week in Jozi by one of my sources: “No one knew what to do and no one would make any decisions.”
In between this somewhere, that new Russian autocrat Putin lodged a spectacular claim on the Arctic region that had the planet floundering… and the corporate bureaucrats of all those governments implicitly involved blustered instantly before collapsing into a lethargic dis-response. True to misdirected form the bureaucrats dithered over Canada’s claim to the newly unfrozen Northwest Passage and ignored the rude Mr Putin or perhaps they, being inherently timid yes men [sorry, yes persons] will desperately avoid the bully.
At a far more minor and personal scale a little boy playing soccer with his mates on the grounds of a Liverpool Public drinking house [in the UK] was, apparently randomly, shot dead on ‘his’ playground by, allegedly, a teenage boy. Sky TV has railed against the rising tide of youth violence occurring in Britain and a local report here on various radio stations this august month spoke of rising youth anger and violence in SA, where during this past week more than 60 Metro Police were called to stop a gang fighting with knives and broken bottles at [ironically] Liverpool Secondary school, and a group of boys at Four Ways school were stabbed in a random argument, allegedly over a two rand coin [roughly 14 US cents]. [Presumably we should be happy that the weaponry was so “traditional” one often expects AK47’s, although these were used to slaughter a number of policemen locally]
Elsewhere mobs of schoolchildren rampaged through the city streets, put roadblocks up in different parts of the country and forced schools in poor neighbourhoods to close down completely in some regions for a few weeks. The education department managed to rouse themselves after about a fortnight to get a court interdict against the striking student but other than that no one wants to deal with their problem…. Perhaps their problem cannot be dealt with?
I would suggest that all of these events are symptomatic of the increasingly dead hand of bureaucracy and what happens when things go wrong.
Which brings us back to August.
For us here in the South there is nothing all that spectacular about August, is there? It’s the month when we struggle to escape winter. It’s the dry firestorm month. And it’s private school holidays. Rumour has it that the overwhelming majority of our new leadership in SA send their kids to some of the many thousands of private schools that have proliferated in SA since “94. Perhaps that is why no one noticed that the schools in poor neighbourhoods were on strike.
On the other side of the planet: the big part where most of the world’s action takes place, August is holiday month deluxe. The summer holidays are not the best time of the year for a crisis in the Northern hemisphere. The First World War for instance started in August, so did the second, if one assumes that it formally started with Hitler’s ultimatum to Poland over the Danzig corridor that took place on August 29th, following weeks of ineffectual negotiations. Some argue that Hitler chose the time on purpose.
In August everyone important is away in some fashionable place on holiday, and if they aren’t then; according to “Alex” the apocryphal Business Day cartoonist, they are not taking calls: in case someone realises they aren’t away.
There are historians who argue that the complete breakdown in diplomatic negotiations during that fateful few weeks between the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand and the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914 was a consequence of the fact that almost every important decision making person was either on holiday or preparing to go on holiday that August and was hence incommunicado.
Similarly we could infer that the financial fatcats who have been creaming billions in illusory video money over the past few years of glorious excess, are slowly realising that they are [relatively] poor [suddenly]. You will remember that the fall in the market happened in two stages. One senses that the first assault occurred while the boss was off somewhere on his motorised sailing boat and the first round of was handled by standardised computer sell triggers with flunkeys overseeing the crisis.
Then later when many had dragged themselves back to reality and the chaps at the Fed got in from the rest camps at which they were lagging, there was a sudden second wave, and, one suspects once the sobered and renewed boss class gets around to seriously evaluating the reality of the new situation we will see the market decline further until it returns to value rather than some fanciful pretentious imaginary model, as Mr Buffett put it this week..
In Greece the problem was much like what we witnessed two years ago [during August] when Katrina destroyed … what was that place again… ah it’s gone… I can’t remember … a big American city.
Greece blazed and no one could be told what to do, so no one [other than the affected citizens] was permitted to act. Interestingly the Economist observed this week that most of the reconstruction work in that Katrina destroyed Gulf city is driven by private initiative: the bureaucracy having collapsed in a corruption mired heap.
The issue of rising youth violence in Britain and South Africa [and maybe other places as well] is more subtle, but is arguably due to the encroaching dead hand of bureaucracy that has effectively eradicated all hope of preferment for millions of poor and disadvantaged citizens, who find themselves in bleak circumstances propped up with the reasonably valid belief that advancement has more to do with connections than merit.
Ironically the bureaucracy was intended to do exactly the opposite.
For those who watch those ghastly paeans to human sacrifice that we call reality television the process whereby ‘bureaucracy’ grinds out the most assertive, difficult or spontaneous contestants, is an illuminating example of what happens inside bureaucratic structures. The winner is most frequently the best of the mediocrities. The one who sucks up the most or offends the least. Maybe this is inevitable.
It certainly seems to be true of the circumstance that finds us struggling to cope with adversity, particularly in the holiday season. To the extent that bureaucracies all over the world are increasingly loaded with people who “fit in” or “get along” and to the extent that the encroaching tentacles of the Bureaucratic corporate State become ever more real to that extent are we paralysed by an absence of leadership when the wheels come off the plan, and things go wrong.
If there has been one phrase that has cropped up routinely this month whether on the McLachlan group’s evaluation of the infrastructure crisis that faces the USA to the financial market meltdown, to comment on the Greek fires problem and certainly in respect of our own response to the growing schools crisis in our own country it is this idea of an absence of leadership.
And this is inevitable… Our bureaucratically structured world does not want leaders who announce their intention to change the world…look what we got with Dubya… it calls for negotiators. As I write this, a man called Kreuger [sic] is telling an interviewer on CNBC Asia that he doesn’t lead his team [he is a regional chief executive for BMW in Asia] rather he works with them as one of the team and they negotiate their strategies together. It goes without saying that a corrolary to this epidemic of corporatised decision making through intense negotiation is also mediated by the ever encroaching issue of legal liability for a wrong decision so that all to often lower order “flunkeys” dare not make decisions because it could nmean the end of their careers and in an age of declining employment opportunities that alone is a powerful disincentive to action.
And this is excellent. Except that when a hurricane hits town and the president is chilling on his farm [sorry, ranch] nothing happens and plenty of people die. When market’s meltdown and the punters are on break the meltdown continues, the fires burn and the kids break the schools. Under these conditions of stress the combination of bureaucracy, inept performance, cronyism and the all-engulfing global cancer of corruption renders almost all action nugatory.
There is nothing new about bureaucracies, as I mentioned before it is arguable that bureaucratic breakdown contributed to the outbreak of war in 1914. However it is the sheer reach of bureaucracy in the digitalised wired age in which we now live that has rendered so many lower order operatives in “the system” impotent in the absence of direct instructions and simultaneously we are being assailed by a global epidemic of intensive disasters.
It has long been policy for many organisations that their executives do not travel together on the same aircraft in case of disaster. Perhaps the bureaucrats of the world need to start changing their holiday habits as well… cancel all leave from July to November hey… ja well no fine… didn’t the tsunami trigger happen on Christmas day when all the planet was on holiday? In fact come to think about it the bureaucrats at the top, who seem to be the only people allowed to make any decisions anymore for unplanned events, seem to be permanently on holiday.
Ayn Rand saw this collectivised decision making disintegrating as the source of her grande novel; she wrote a timeless script, based on the legend of Achilles.
Perhaps Eliot put it best when he wrote, “this is the way the world ends not with a bang but a whimper”.
Keep on Blogging
NiK aka Blogroidnik the Blogospherian.
NiK’s work can also be found at http://www.editred.com/nicholasjakari
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