Fake Incompetence in St. Louis Government
90+ municipalities. Multiple judicial circuits. Mayors. But who actually calls the shots?
Time to dive back into the project of getting rid of the Mobsters and spies in St. Louis! If you’ve forgotten the overall scope of our little research project, here’s a reminder of the framework:
Remember, we’re not really interested in St. Louis, Missouri, per se. The point of analyzing how organized crime and espionage networks work in this Midwestern city is to understand how their malign operations can corrode America in general and democracy all over the world in specific. The reason to analyze St. Louis’ malign networks is to expose how hostile intelligence services can exploit the weakest points of a nation to subvert the rule of law. Those hostile services do this all over the globe; St. Louis is but a microcosm.
We’ve already discussed how Ferguson never quite has a mayor and how the officials sometimes make as low a salary as $4000 per year, leaving one to wonder how else they might be compensated when they are the ones in charge of handing out lucrative government contracts.
The Federal bribery prosecution of convicted St. Louis County jail executive Tony Weaver alongside a foreign drug trafficker answered some of those questions, but we of course need a lot more information.
In addition to “how can there be tiny governments where the few employees can skim 25% of the annual budget for years and walk those funds into casinos with nobody complaining,” we come to a broader, more important question that is very interesting for criminals and enemies of America: How Does Anything Get Done in St. Louis?
The standard answer for the uninitiated is: None of your business.
That’s not one we should accept. So let us explore.
IaaS: Incompetence as a Service
If you come to St. Louis from Washington D.C., a marvelous city of self-important, status-seeking, stuffed-shirt, warmongering, Dunning-Kruger-cursed, loud-mouthed nerds (or as I also call them “my closest friends”) one of the first things you will notice if you try to get something done around here is that you are not allowed to criticize anybody in Missouri for doing their job poorly. And many people will do their jobs poorly.
I don’t mean if you try to get a sandwich or some breakfast pancakes that the waiter will come back in three hours. That would not be tolerated. Food is quite good here, reasonably priced, and there are too many delicious restaurants for anyone to tolerate a bad dining experience.
Nor will your attendance at Busch Stadium for a Cardinals game be marred by anything short of excellence. You will enter the gigantic arena smoothly with thousands of other sports fans; your seat will be stable and comfy; you will attain hot dogs and beer with ease.
Ah, but let us say you need to pay a parking ticket in North County St. Louis. Imagine that you have been given a speeding ticket for a four-mile-an-hour excess of the speed limit, and now you must, as a law-abiding citizen, pay up. So you send in your ticket, or drop off a check in one of the “city halls” of the tiny pseudo-towns—a building which may not even have any employees present. Then, two months later, you receive notice that you haven’t paid the ticket. Worse, perhaps the police pull you over again and note that you didn’t pay that last ticket which you paid. So now you pay it twice. Or perhaps you are remanded to jail. And you pay it three times. Or more. Hard to say. The records often aren’t computerized.
Or let us say you are a litigant in St. Louis County Circuit Court and you file a pleading. Did you file it on paper? Sorry, you must file by fax. Did you file by fax? Sorry, that must be filed on paper in person. Was there a deadline for the filing? Sorry, you filed it in paper and faxed it from the St. Ann Satellite Office, and that can take up to four days to be filed, so you went past the deadline. That strange incompetence on behalf of the staff might just coincidentally go in favor of someone with more family and business connections in the city dozens of times in a row.
Now, if you’re wealthy and connected, this isn’t even a question—you will have what you need, when you need it, and you will not be given a hard time. So what’s going on here?
Ah, this isn’t a design flaw, it’s a design feature. It’s St. Louis’ famous Incompetence as a Service, IaaS! If you complain that something is done incorrectly, then you are being emotional or intolerant. Worse yet, you might be from the East Coast. Far worse still, you might be connected to the Federal Government, and that is something that just is not smiled upon in these parts.
Feds might be here to take apart what really makes this city run. Making their stay as difficult as possible might be a tradition that goes back to the 1850s.
But more than stymie outsiders, IaaS serves to help the insiders.
The wealthy sometimes need fake dumb bureaucrats
Once you understand how many critical businesses and government functions there are in St. Louis, the more you will question why so many “incompetent” fools could be allowed to take top positions in critical democratic institutions.
I mean, if you wouldn’t have a breakfast joint run poorly, why would you allow government offices and police and courts to be managed by dullards?
There are multiple groups who understand the answer to that question. Organized crime networks need this type of corruption so that they can run their rackets, pay a reasonable bribe, and keep records from being produced. The corporate-type wealthy simply enjoy having a city they own in its entirety. Their paperwork is produced by the law firms and accountancies in Clayton; they don’t pretend not to own a copy of QuickBooks, like the local governments do.
The real decisions are sent through entirely different networks. Thus, the thin veneer of fake-incompetent bureaucrats is merely to cover for how and why those decisions get made.
On that note, I recommend this article from The Atlantic about St. Louis’ “Veiled Prophet Society,” the classic type of shadowy, secret cabal that people imagine really run things in the world. Well, they have one or more of those here, not counting Opus Dei. As bizarre as it gets, these people actually run the city.
I mean, get a load of this photo. It’s real. This is the “Veiled Prophet.” Don’t you have one of those in your town?
I gather that the Veiled Prophet is some symbol of wealth and mystical, um, influence, and confluence, and…he traveled here after taking a left turn at Albuquerque, and stopped for some toasted raviolis and…
Dude, it’s weird. So if you’re interested/creeped out, read this article, too.
Point is, there’s a direct connection between this weird pseudo-Persian prophet thing and the people pretending they don’t know how Microsoft Excel or fax machines work.
These are the powerful people actually in charge of St. Louis. And it’s no surprise they tried to sell America to dictatorships.
We should discuss them.
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