A comment on the gun deaths in Boulder, Colorado

10 Dead yesterday, in a shooting at a supermarket in Boulder, Colorado.

A man held a sign for the victims of the mass shooting on Tuesday.

Credit:  Eliza Earle for The New York Times

Ironically, just last week, courts struck down an attempt by the City of Boulder to limit access to automatic guns ("A judge recently blocked Boulder from enforcing its assault-weapon ban," New York Times).  From the article:

Judge Andrew Hartman ruled that under a state law passed in 2003, cities and counties are barred from adopting restrictions on firearms that are otherwise legal under state and federal law, The Denver Post reported. Gun advocates made that argument when they sued to overturn the Boulder bans shortly after they were adopted. 

The judge rejected the city’s arguments that the home-rule provisions of the state constitution gave it the power to adopt the bans as a matter of local concern, and that they were necessary because the state did not regulate such weapons. As of last week, lawyers for the city had not said whether they planned to appeal. 

Given the number of mass shootings in Colorado, you'd think they could have had a reaction more like Australia's ("How Australia All But Ended Gun Violence," Fortune) or New Zealand's ("New Zealand tightens gun laws further in response to mass shooting," Reuters), where after mass shootings, the countries imposed strict limits on guns. Instead, in the US the reaction is to do nothing.

There is a serious disconnect between governments ensuring "public safety" and how modern interpretations of the Second Amendment have allowed for the wanton ownership of guns, especially high powered guns like assault weapons, which have no real public benefit or purpose outside of waging war.

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Interestingly, while federalism is often touted as supporting innovation by the states, so called "Laboratories of Democracy," with conservative groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council, Club for Growth, other lobbying organizations creating platforms to disseminate and pass conservative legislation ("You elected them to write new laws. They’re letting corporations do it instead," USA Today), and state attorney generals seeing an opportunity to sue the federal government to support political ideology instead of policy ("Republican AGs take blowtorch to Biden agenda," POLITICO), it's difficult for there to be a lot of, let alone any, innovation at the state scale. 

The false promise of ride hailing as a pro-city transportation mode

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Reprinted from Monday with new date because of the addition of the experience with parking in San Diego.  I meant to write about it, but I forgot.  It's very interesting.
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Except for one thing, measurable impact on demand for parking as reported by Ace Parking of San Diego, there really isn't anything new here, as I have written many times about these issues already.  But it's nice to sum it up.  The SD item is the new #1, and the other points have been renumbered.

1.  The San Diego Union-Tribune reports ("Ace Parking says Uber, Lyft have cut parking business up to 50% in some venues") on analysis by Ace Parking, the major private parking firm operating in San Diego, a company that is also active in other markets including DC, of the impact of ride hailing services on their parking business.  From the article:

In a September email buried deep in an environmental report, Ace Parking CEO John Baumgardner laid out the ugly truth facing the parking business. At San Diego hotels serviced by Ace Parking, overnight parking has declined 5 percent to 10 percent. At restaurant valet stands, business is down 25 percent.

And, most dramatically, nightclub valets are seeing a 50 percent drop off.

Homegrown Ace Parking — one of the largest parking companies in North America and also a fixture in San Diego’s political and business scene — is feeling the impact from Uber and Lyft, the wildly popular ride-sharing services that allow people to leave their cars at home.

For consumers, the bright side may be lower parking prices. In downtown San Diego, city planners are looking at the decline as they update parking guidelines — which could lead to changes in how much future parking is built.

Will parking companies go away? “Is this an existential threat to my business model? Or, is there a way to pivot and continue to provide a necessary service?” said Keith Jones, the third-generation managing partner of the Ace Parking empire, in a recent interview.

Jones likes to talk about “journey management.”

“Ace is hyper-focused on integrating new technology within our parking operations so we help consumers and cars,” he said. “We are pushing the parking and transportation industry to be connected in a way that makes parking smart.”

I like the point about shifting to "journey management."

2.  Most people driving ride hailing vehicles make less than minimum wage according to an MIT study ("MIT study reveals sad reality for majority of Uber, Lyft drivers: Median income far below minimum wage," WCVB-TV). From the article:

Drivers make a median hourly profit of $3.37 before taxes, the study found.

The report said that drivers incur a median cost of $0.30 per mile and that nearly a third of drivers incur expenses exceeding their revenue. At tax time, the standard mileage deduction could mean that there is untaxed revenue in the billions of dollars for these drivers.

-- The Economics of Ride-Hailing: Driver Revenue, Expenses and Taxes, MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research

NOTE THAT UBER DISPUTED THIS STUDY AND THE RESEARCHER RE-RAN THE NUMBERS. NOW HE SAYS THE FIGURE IS $8.55 HOUR WHILE UBER'S NUMBER IS $13.05.  See "Uber drivers per hour profit revised in disputed MIT study," San Jose Mercury News.

This shouldn't be a surprise.  Taxi driving is mostly resorted to by people with limited options.  Having to pay a good chunk of your earnings off the top to the software firms that run the service reduces margins.

Interesting, GM's Maven car sharing program is offering a high cost e-vehicle rental for people offering ride hailing services ("Maven Gig, GM’s car-sharing service for Uber and Lyft drivers, comes to Austin: Just in time for SXSW," GM Verge blog), after Uber made the decision to get out of the rental business because it was a money loser. From the article:

Someone who’s interested in driving for any of these on-demand services, but doesn’t own a vehicle, can rent an electric Chevy Bolt through Maven Gig starting at $229-a-week. The weekly price includes insurance, maintenance, and electric vehicle charging. There is no membership fee.

Maven first launched its gig worker product in 2016 in San Diego and San Francisco. Since then, it has been introduced in Los Angeles, Boston, Phoenix, Washington, DC, Baltimore, and Detroit. Maven says its customers have logged 170 million miles driving for various on-demand apps.

What’s different here is how closely Maven says it will be working with the city of Austin to ensure there’s an adequate electric car-charging infrastructure in place for drivers to use this service.

3.  Ride hailing reduces the use of transit. ("Ride-hailing is pulling people off public transit and clogging up roads," Technology Review). From the article:

A study by the Boston-based Metropolitan Area Planning Council found 42 percent of trips taken via ride-hailing services in Boston would have been completed on public transit had the option not been available. Another 12 percent of people would have walked or biked. Plus, most people use ride-hailers end-to-end, rather than mixing the service with other modes of transport.

4.  Ride hailing use is induced by venture capital subsidies which makes the cost of a ride less than actual cost ("You're not paying enough for Uber," Boston Globe). From the article:

A new study of 944 Boston-area passengers by the Metropolitan Area Planning Council shows that ride-hailing apps are adding to vehicular traffic; people are using them for lots of trips that they otherwise would have made by transit or bike.

This isn’t just happening because Uber and Lyft offer efficient service. It’s because the fares that customers pay don’t come close to covering the ride-hailing companies’ costs — much less the external costs to society of drawing more passenger cars into an already congested road network. ... In 2015, according to one transportation consultant, Uber passengers were paying only 41 percent of the cost of each ride.

5.  Ride hailing is a form of "inducing demand" and therefore increases congestion ("Studies are increasingly clear: Uber, Lyft congest cities," Associated Press).

6.  Chicago has instituted a fee per trip on ride hailing, which they use to fund sustainable mobility improvements ("Emanuel says Uber, Lyft fee hikes will pay for better transit cameras," Chicago Tribune; "Emanuel claims ride-hailing industry costing Chicago taxpayers $40 million per year," Chicago Sun-Times).

This seems like a reasonable mitigation measure.

7.  Transit consultant Jarrett Walker argues that there is less than meets the eye with microtransit ("Microtarnsit: What I think we know," Human Transit blog). The key point is the cost of labor to run a vehicle, and the ratio of passengers to drivers. The fewer the passengers, the more costly the service. He makes the point as I have that microtransit isn't new, in terms of either being an on demand service or contracting it out, and having an app doesn't make scalar changes to the mode.

David Aragon, an operation manager and one of the drivers for Free Ride Everywhere Downtown (FRED) waits at a local apartment building for his next pick up in the downtown area. (Nelvin C. Cepeda / San Diego Union-Tribune).


... speaking of San Diego, I do think there is a place for microtransit along the lines of the FRED e-shuttle operating in the Downtown ("Revisiting stories: FRED Downtown shuttle in San Diego," 2017) and supporting "park once, visit many places" consumption within the district.

8.  Meanwhile Uber takes aim at medical transportation ("Uber, Lyft try solving one of medicine's biggest problems: getting people to medical appointments," Chicago Tribune).

Again, not much new, and typical of firms aiming to make a good deal of money from government contracting (like Electronic Data Systems, the firm founded by H. Ross Perot, which had preponderate amount of business from state governments for IT systems).

Ethics in government: Michigan and DC

In some job interviews, I've been asked questions about how to handle policy disagreements, when the decision that was made is not what you preferred.  My response was, there is a difference between policy disagreements and unethical behavior, that I'd toe the line understanding within the executive branch that you're constrained by the decisions of the people in charge, but that in terms of doing something wrong or unethical, I wouldn't keep quiet.

This was an issue studied by Albert O. Hirschman in the book Exit, Voice or Loyalty and how people would react when faced with such a situation--would they stay, leave, or stay and speak out?

1.  This comes up in Michigan as a number of state government agency officials have been charged with crimes in association with their misfeasance and lawbreaking over the Flint water quality issues ("A look at the nine people facing charges in Flint's water crisis," Flint Journal), which were produced by the state and the local government when they changed the city's water source without treating the water with an appropriate mix of chemicals, unlike their previous provider (the Detroit water system).

Interestingly, with regard to the legal charges, it "helps" that in Michigan the Attorney General position is separately elected, although both the Governor, Rick Snyder, and the AG, Bill Schuette, are Republicans.  That's unusual.

2.  DC. Irrespective of the "pay for access" issue (e.g., "Bowser's $9000 in Trump change," Washington Post), it comes up with Councilmember Vincent Orange, who lost his bid for re-election, and in the interim, has been chosen to be President of the DC Chamber of Commerce, the city's trade and lobbying organization for the business community.  Mr. Orange intends to hold both jobs until he leaves office in January 2017 ("Vincent Orange on being the new D.C. Chamber CEO, conflicts of interest and his platform," Washington Business Journal.

DC law treats the Councilmember job as "part-time" even though typically a Councilmember works more than 40 hours per week and is compensated at the rate of not quite $135,000 per year.

Councilmember Orange is within the bounds of the law to take on another part-time job, as many other Councilmembers do, often for law firms, lobbying firms, or businesses doing work on government contracts.

It would be great if the outcry about this would lead to a change in the DC law so that outside employment would be disallowed.

I don't seem to be hearing that being suggested.

The Washington Business Journal editorializes, "Taking Inventory: Vincent Orange must resign now," that Mr. Orange should either resign his Councilmember upon taking the DC Chamber job, or defer his ascension to the position until his Council term ends.

The Post hasn't yet weighed in, although they did editorialize against the Prince George's County Council's proposed end-around term limits, by creating at-large positions that termed-out Councilmembers can run for ("A jobs plan for Prince George’s County council members").

Some times, Chris Christie type politics are understandable: The Town of Chevy Chase Maryland's continued opposition to light rail

Conceptual graphic of what a circle line "Purple Line" could be, from the Sierra Club Sustainable Metro DC campaign.

When I worked on H Street NE revitalization issues, the biggest stumbling block we had to deal with was the H Street Community Development Corporation, which had a decidedly "urban renewal" tear the historic buildings down approach.

They demolished a set of buildings at the corner of 8th and H St. NE, which included one of the oldest buildings on the corridor, dating to 1872.  Then they decided to build a one story building, with a fake second floor.

The city was willing to give them more money to build a real second floor but they weren't interested.  When someone from the Mayor's Office said "there's nothing we can do if they won't negotiate" I said, "sure there is, you can take away all their other funding."  He stopped talking and said "we never thought about that" but they never followed through and did it.

Light rail in Barcelona.  Photo by John Norquist.  This is how light rail can be inserted into the old Georgetown Branch Railroad corridor in Montgomery County.

So I do understand Chris Christie type hardball tactics, and sometimes I wish I were in the position to be able to wield such tactics, such as with the Town of Chevy Chase Maryland and their consistent opposition to the addition of light rail transit service in  Montgomery County.

Below is a reprint of a press release from Action Committee for Transit, the Montgomery County sustainable transportation advocacy group that has spearheaded the creation of the Purple Line light rail system--a proposed circle line connecting all of the legs of the Metrorail system--the first stage serving Montgomery and Prince George's Counties--since its founding more than 20 years ago.

This section of the line is proposed to be run on since "abandoned" rail line that used to serve a power station in Georgtown in DC.

For all intents and purposes, many residents on either side of the tracks have mostly done a form of "adverse possession" (which isn't legal when practiced against government-owned land) and have expanded their yards into the railroad right of way, which is also used as the Capital Crescent Trail.

Opponents who don't want a light rail "in their backyards" are using a variety of subterfuges such as "Save the Trail" or "the line is really just a way to make money for developers with no useful purpose"--even though once it opens it's likely to have the highest ridership of any single light rail line in the US, with as many or more than 70,000 daily riders--as a way to obfuscate that their opposition is nothing more than self-interest.

Recently, in return for some use of the abutting land, the Chevy Chase Golf Course agreed to drop its opposition to the line ("Purple Line Route Changed to Spare Part of Country Club Golf Course," Washington Post).

But the Town of Chevy Chase still shoulders on in opposition and they have the money to burn, as the ACT group and the Washington Post point out, by hiring a lobbying firm with familial connections to the chair of the US House of Representatives Infrastructure and Transportation Committee.

ACT's press release:

Lobbyist Filing Contradicts Chevy Chase Mayor

Shuster Brother Lobbies Congress Against Purple Line

New questions arose today about the Town of Chevy Chase's relationship with the brother of House Transportation and Infrastructure Chair Bill Shuster.

The new questions follow an expose in this morning's Washington Post of the small wealthy town's intention to pay $400,000 to the firm of Pennsylvania lawyer-lobbyist Robert Shuster.  The town has tried for years to block the building of the Purple Line, a badly needed transit link that would run along its border.  In the Post article, Mayor Pat Burda defends the town's behavior by saying that “We’re not lobbying Congress.”

But a disclosure form that Robert Shuster's firm filed with the U.S. House of Representatives shows just the opposite. It states explicitly that Shuster and his partners are lobbying the House of Representatives and Senate for the Town of Chevy Chase.

 “The news about this unseemly arrangement gets worse and worse,” said Action Committee for Transit vice-president Ronit Aviva Dancis. ACT, a volunteer-run organization of transit supporters that has advocated for the Purple Line since 1986, first unearthed the connection between Shuster and the town.

Purple Line routing.  Washington Post graphic by Nathaniel Kelso. 

 A section of the Capital Crescent Trail.

Uber, taxi regulation, UPS and FedEx and the unlevel playing field

In some of the discussions ("Cheh would limit regulation for Uber and taxi apps" from Greater Greater Washington) that have arisen over the Uber car service ("Uber Closes Yellow Taxi Cab Service In New York City" from Forbes), especially in view of pro-Uber legislation before the DC City Council, I am troubled by at least four things.

1.  Uber and pro-sharing forces claim that regulating such services somehow is a destruction of all that is good from the use of shared resources. See "Now New York City is giving Uber a hard time" from the Washington Post and "Will Regulations Kill The Sharing Economy?" from TechCrunch.

Uber is a mobile-app based car service that claims it is an application of the principle of collaborative consumption (see the excellent book What's Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption).

Carsharing or car sharing (in the UK known as car clubs) is a model of car rental where people rent cars for short periods of time, often by the hour. They are attractive to customers who make only occasional use of a vehicle, as well as others who would like occasional access to a vehicle of a different type than they use day-to-day.

Typically, users are "members" of such services, each car supports the use by multiple households, thereby supporting car-lite living, and reducing the demand for car storage in the public space, and encouraging sustainable transportation practices.

Uber is not carsharing.

Uber is a system that allows greater utilization of "car service" vehicles by providing an application so that they can operate as reservation-based taxi-like services some of the time, when they aren't already booked.

The Uber app provides a way to monetize slack resources, and often, provides better service than what taxis normally provide, for a higher price, but the provision of the service doesn't necessarily contribute to broader sustainable transportation goals and objectives, just as High Occupancy Toll lanes may encourage single occupancy vehicle use rather than discourage it.  (See the Resources for the Future Paper Are HOT Lanes a Hot Deal? The Potential Consequences of Converting HOV to HOT Lanes in Virginia.)

2.  So of course it bothers me that services such as Uber are being promoted without adequate consideration of the transportation planning implications of the service.

3.  As importantly, Uber wants the benefits of being able to sell its services, such as selling services on an auction basis (e.g., "Surge Pricing: One NYC Uber User Paid $219 For 7-Mile Ride" from the Gothamist) with none of the requirements that must normally be met by transportation services acting as common carriers, including a standard and public pricing system and provision of service to all potential users without discrimination.

Definition of common carrier from the Free Dictionary:

An individual or business that advertises to the public that it is available for hire to transport people or property in exchange for a fee.

A common carrier is legally bound to carry all passengers or freight as long as there is enough space, the fee is paid, and no reasonable grounds to refuse to do so exist. A common carrier that unjustifiably refuses to carry a particular person or cargo may be sued for damages.

The states regulate common carriers engaged in business within their borders. When interstate or foreign transportation is involved, the federal government, by virtue of the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, regulates the activities of such carriers. A common carrier may establish reasonable regulations for the efficient operation and maintenance of its business.


4.  Uber is seeking through legislation the creation of an uneven playing field.  Claiming the need for such a system "to support innovation and creativity" is subterfuge.

It occurs to me that the desire of Uber to be treated differently from taxi services is no different than the competitive advantages that FedEx enjoys over UPS because FedEx is regulated as an airline while UPS is regulated as a common carrier and therefore subject to the requirements of the National Labor Relations Act.  Therefore, UPS workers are represented by unions and FedEx's aren't, giving FedEx various cost advantages over UPS.  See "FedEx and UPS Clash Over Legislation" from the Wall Street Journal.

Interestingly, UPS's campaign for the two companies to be treated equally under the same set of regulatory rules is not seen as a question of fairness, but as one of unfairness (e.g., "A Special Delivery for UPS That Could Change FedEx Overnight" from the Heritage Foundation) no doubt because FedEx spreads a lot of funding around and conservative organizations don't want to be seen as helping foster union membership.
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That being said, plenty needs to be done to improve taxi services and their competitiveness and availability.  Uber is not it.  (Just like the creation of charter schools doesn't necessarily improve the provision of education in traditional public schools.)

Crying wolf in DC and California

Last week, the Los Angeles Times had an op-ed, "Business and employment: A 'job killers' list disproved," about how businesses often claim, in the starkest and hoariest terms, that X or Y law or regulation is a job killer, will destroy businesses, etc., but the reality is far different. From the piece:

Since 2003, the California Chamber of Commerce has published an annual hit list of bills it labels job killers. The list has included state legislation to protect consumers, workers and the environment, and to raise revenue to fund public services or support middle- and working-class families. ...

The chamber's argument is always the same: If "job-killer proposal X" passes, companies will go bankrupt, shrink or move out of California. Excessive taxes, regulations and paperwork, especially on small businesses, will crush private sector investment.

If all this sounds familiar, it's because business lobbies have made these claims every time California has increased the minimum wage; every time businesses have had to disclose or limit toxic material in workplaces, consumer products and communities; every time California's wealthiest or most profitable corporations have been asked to pay their fair share of taxes; and every time legislators and voters have taken action to limit greenhouse gas emissions. ...

But if we look backward, we find that the job-killer predictions are often wrong. Despite the chamber's political clout, some of the bills on its lists became law. So it is possible to evaluate whether the organization was providing honest analyses or crying wolf and engaging in scare tactics. ...

The chamber continues to promote its job killer list, despite the fact that its dire warnings of economic doom have been consistently wrong. And it does so despite the fact that Californians broadly support laws and protections that have made our air cleaner, our workplaces safer and our families more secure. Businesses do well when workers do well. That's what makes for a healthy economy.

Nonprofit arts organizations are making similar claims with regard to a proposed tax on admissions tickets to nonprofit events, according to "D.C. sales tax extension strikes a sour note>" from the Washington Times. From the article:

Should the theater tax become law, the “ripple effect would be quite profound,” far outweighing its estimated $2.3 million in additional tax revenue for the city, says Linda Levy Grossman, president of the Helen Hayes awards. Now-thriving areas such as the Penn Quarter arts and entertainment district would be especially hard hit, with its restaurants, shops and parking garages emptying as arts patrons stay home or take their business outside the city.

Any special interest is likely to cry wolf, to argue that they are exceptional and therefore deserve special treatment. It's not usually the case that this is true and I doubt that it would be the case for arts events in DC either.

Understanding national government through the lens of Growth Machine and Urban Regime theories

It's frustrating for me to read the "local" newspaper's coverage, in this case the Washington Post, of structural failure in organizations for a couple reasons. First, they don't seem to have an understanding of how organizations work generally. Relatedly, they don't understand that organizations are systems and have processes to produce their output(s).

I rail about this all the time and won't repeat myself here, too much. Basically, journalists focus on individuals and have a kind of bias that the "system" (which they don't understand) "works" and when it doesn't it's an aberration that has been corrected and will not occur again.

The former director of the media watchdog FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) describes this as the "bias of the center" and it is discussed in this article, "Propaganda from the middle of the road: the centrist ideology of the news media," which was published in 1989, and which I still remember, because of importance of the concepts it discussed.

While Jeff Cohen was talking (this was a speech originally) about reporting on national and international politics, the trope is relevant to local news reporting too.

Second, newspapers and journalists for the most part fail to think about the intersection of politics and business and how it works in practical terms.

Regular readers are probably bored about my constant mention of the Growth Machine and the Urban Regime. From "A superb lesson in DC "growth machine" politics from Loose Lips (Washington City Paper)":

... the Growth Machine thesis, first laid out by sociologist Harvey Molotch, in the seminal article, City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place. From the abstract:

A city and, more generally, any locality, is conceived as the areal expression of the interests of some land-based elite. Such an elite is seen to profit through the increasing intensification of the land use of the area in which its members hold a common interest. An elite competes with other land-based elites in an effort to have growth-inducing resources invested within its own area as opposed to that of another. Governmental authority, at the local and nonlocal levels, is utilized to assist in achieving this growth at the expense of competing localities. Conditions of community life are largely a consequence of the social, economic, and political forces embodied in this growth machine.

Political scientist Clarence Stone, a professor at University of Maryland has a competing thesis, that of the "urban regime." I don't think these theories are competing so much as different sides of the same coin. "Growth Machine" theory explains the motivation of "the land-based elite," and "urban regime" theory explains in detail how the land-based elite operates and functions.

Professor Stone was kind enough to send me his recent paper, "Now What? The continuing evolution of Urban Regime analysis," from 2005. He writes:

An urban regime can be preliminarily defined as the informal arrangements through which a locality is governed (Stone 1989). Because governance is about sustained efforts, it is important to think in agenda terms rather than about stand-alone issues. By agenda I mean the set of challenges which policy makers accord priority. A concern with agendas takes us away from focusing on short-term controversies and instead directs attention to continuing efforts and the level of weight they carry in the political life of a community. Rather than treating issues as if they are disconnected, a governance perspective calls for considering how any given issue fits into a flow of decisions and actions. This approach enlarges the scope of what is being analyzed, looking at the forest not a particular tree here or there. (emphasis added, in this paragraph and below)

In discussing Atlanta, Stone writes: "Land use, transportation, and housing formed an interrelated agenda that the city's major economic interests were keen to advance;" and

By looking closely at the policy role of business leaders and how their position in the civic structure of a community enabled that role, he identified connections between Atlanta's governing coalition and the resources it brought to bear, and on to the scheme of cooperation that made this informal system work. In his own way, Hunter had identified the key elements in an urban regime – governing coalition, agenda, resources, and mode of cooperation. These elements could be brought into the next debate about analyzing local politics, a debate about structural determinism.

Extending the Growth Machine and Urban Regime Concepts to the National Arena

The reality is that things function similarly at the national level of government too. It's just that the Growth Machine is not organized in terms of place. Instead, it's organized by "capital" and business sector, and "the governing coalition"is made up of business people and their representatives, elected officials, and government workers and appointees. This coalition focuses the regulatory structure on managing the regulatory function in ways that maximize business success and profits by minimizing regulatory cost and rules and regulations.

The tension is between representing the people, what Foglesong in Planning the Capitalist City calls the "democracy" contradiction, and representing the interests of capital, what Foglesong called "the property contradiction" in terms of local urban planning and zoning practice, and what in this context I would call the "capital" contradiction.

As industrial sectors have been reorganized on a global scale and the extra-normal profits that used to be generated by oligarchic and monopolistic participants in home markets once relatively free of competitors from outside the home country have dissipated, industries have worked to significantly reduce costs and eliminate slack costs, ranging from labor to the cost of complying with rules and regulations.

To make profits in a hypercompetitive arena, many companies choose to take significant risks as well in terms of the health and safety of their operations figuring that either they will luck out and things won't go catastrophic, or that they can afford the cost if it does. (see Union Carbide and Bhopal, BP and its refinery in Texas, BP and drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, GE and the Love Canal, GE and its practices with its appliance division, that peanut processor that went out of business due to contamination, mining disasters in Appalachia, etc.)

Industrial companies do this through trade associations and big lobbying budgets, and through the revolving door of people working for government then working for industry then working for government (e.g., Dick Cheney and oil industry policy, his sojourns in government bridged by working for Halliburton, the oil services firm).

So while the Washington Post believes that its expose of the U.S. Department of the Interior's branch which "regulated and promoted"--which yes is a contradiction that should have been fixed a long time ago-- the oil exploration and production industry is so significant that it deserves to be the top story of today's edition, for me it says very little that I don't already know. See "Lessons from oil agency's ties."

How is this any different from the so-called "iron triangle" described by political scientists in the 1970s with regard to policymaking (see this entry from Wikipedia, from which this image is also taken). Or the concerns that President Eisenhower raised about the growth of the military-industrial complex?

The real issue is the linking of politicians, government agencies and workers, and capital as organized by industrial sector or issue group as the governing coalition or "Growth Machine" that sets a common agenda and system for working together and provides the resources in people, money, and legal representation necessary to make it all happen.

What happened with the Minerals Management Service happens with virtually every federal government agency. Hey editors of the Washington Post, did you notice yesterday's front page article about the egg recall? ("Most eggs produced by a few firms : Safety inspections fall through cracks as industry consolidates ") Do you think this is a systematic problem with industry as it is organized in the United States or just happenstance, a number of freakish coincidences?