Re: (erielack) What shoulda been

["Jim Guthrie" <jguthrie_@_pipeline.com>]

Bill Burt writes:

> It would be equally naive to assert that the ICC was merely the  sounding
> board for private interests, whose rivalries and other struggles 
> expressed

Though the Nader report took the view that not only did it reflect those 
nterests, it did it in a way that was generous to the railroads and truckers 
and worked against the public interest and good economics at all times. But 
I doubt that, say, George Hilton would see it in the same light as the Nader 
people did <g>.

Think of the three blind men and the elephant when trying to describe the 
ICC.

> flying around when one beats on the straw man, is that  public policy 
> embraced
> inconsistent, conflicting objectives that made it  possible for nearly
> everyone--railroads, shippers, labor, politicians--to game  the system 
> endlessly.
> The ICC was not the "commerce court" that Theodore  Roosevelt and William
> Howard Taft talked about when campaigning for greater ICC  powers 
> 1904-1910, it was
> an unseemly free-for-all.

But the ICC was assigned different jobs/objectives over the years. There's 
no broad brush over its entire history that describes it well. The Commerce 
Court concept didn;t last long anyway.

> Although the regulatory system was a shambles by the  1960s, generations 
> of
> Washington attorneys still paid off their homes  and sent their kids to 
> college
> on the money extracted from productive economic  activity by helping the 
> ICC
> "preside" over such fiascoes as Rock Island and  Dereco.  And now I speak 
> from

I was in college in DC in the 1960s (GWU) majoring in business with a 
Transportation and Traffic Management sepcialty (they still called it 
that -- it later became Business Logistics -- which I hit in grad school) 
and have bee recently remonstrated by the current Dean, "Supply Chain 
Management" <g>.

> memory: As a young congressional  staffer, I attended the 1974 meeting of 
> the
> ICC Practitioners Association in  downtown Washington to listen to an
> assistant attorney general from the U.S.  Department of Justice advocate 
> substituting

We had several students whose only goal in life was a sinecure as an ICC 
Practitioner. Not much pay, but good benefits and a good pension. They were 
already looking to push paper from one side of the desk to the other. We had 
good guys in the same classes -- one gut from the Bronx went on to be 
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and then Secretary of State).

Then there was the researcher at the ICC who was working on his doctorate, 
who found an empty office, made it his own, started asking for files on this 
and that to work on his dissertation, and nobody knew (a) he wasn't an 
employee and (b) filling out certain forms actually ended up putting him on 
the payroll. I thought it hilarious at the time -- having met him when I was 
a newly minted freshman spending all my spare time in the ICC Library 
instead of studying Psych 1 <g>.I still see him in my mind's eye when I see 
Wally and his cup of Coffee in Dilbert, by I digress <g>.

I ended up in the Maritime Lobby -- far more advanced than the railroad 
people -- Maritime had been taking huge subsidies for years by then, and our 
job was to keep the cash flow coming.

In doing research at MARAD (U.S. Maritime Adminsitration, which adminstered 
subsidies for operations and ship buiilding), I remembered my lessons from 
the "Wally" at the  ICC well.  I found they were still using Verifax 
Wet-paper copies (blue print on brown paper!). Having unlimited resources, I 
had my bosses purchase an early plain paper "luggable" photocopier that I 
hauled over the MARAD in a taxi every day to copy documents that stenos 
would then retype at my direction back in the office on L Street. I really 
wish I could have been at the ICC with the same abilities, but the railroad 
lobbyists were none too bright -- that's for sure!

Pretty soon, MARAD factotums would come asking if they could use my copier. 
And I said "Sure" -- and soon after that had the run of the place with 
access to every file cabinet and confidential business records of all the 
entire U.S. Maritime Industry in return for making copies (had to take an 
extrs ream with me every day!).

[The use of these records is even further off topic, so I won't go into it, 
but Will Shultz may remember that at Penn State I was the "Maritime Guy" in 
the Business Logistics Dept-- at least until word got out that I subscribed 
to Trains Magazine]

> It should be said that while the ICC's role during the legislative process
> that resulted in the Railroad Revitalization and Regulatory Reform Act of 
> 1976
> was almost entirely obstructive, its Rail Services Planning Office (a new

That the ICC, MARAD (and other agencies like the FCC, for that matter 
[another one of my haunts]) ended up doing things that in retrospect were 
destructive (and were so mismanaged as to allow smart alec students free 
rein), doesn't change the fact that many of the things they ordered (shall 
we say promulgated?) looked better at the time. Hindsight is always 20/20.

But one can also make the case that the 3R and 4R were passed as correctives 
once it was clear that the ICC was satisfying no one -- not the regulated, 
not Wall Street, not the public interest, and not even the political 
interests . . .

Cheers,
Jim Guthrie
ELHS #1296



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