Although the words are often tangled up in everyday conversation, responsibility and accountability are two distinct concepts. We have legions of supposed leaders, experts, and managers in the private, institutional, and government sectors who clamor for responsibility alone. They’ll beat their drums with what they can or will do with the power that responsibility will confer.
Yet mighty few of them are willing to accept, or even acknowledge, accountability for stillborn accomplishments, less-than-promised results, or worse yet, disastrous outcomes. Accountability is the lonely outpost that rarely sees visitors.
In the corporate and institutional realms at least, this wasn’t always so. Until the 1970s, middle and senior managers were frequently held accountable for the results of their underlings. However, the rise of the business expert and consultant class undid much of this, especially for middle management — and with it, the essential concept of accountability crumbled.
Whatever remained of accountability further eroded with the rise of equity raiders, asset management experts — and way too many Ph.D.s. without practical experience — driven by belief that the only important result is what could be taken, rather than what could be built. This attitude too often takes precedence over larger outcomes, customer satisfaction, safety, service, and the very premise on which the companies and institutions were created in the first place.
The lack of accountability turns everything on its head.
In the muck and mire of government bureaucracies, accountability was never a requirement in the first place — except for the political class, which is only occasionally held accountable at the ballot box. That modern governments never hold their functionaries to standards of accountability for their responsibilities is by design.
The demands laws and regulations create are the lifeblood of governmental power — and powerbrokers hold for themselves the privilege to disregard outcomes, leaving the citizens and taxpayers generally powerless and intimidated into accepting what the lack of accountability always produces: things or agendas that work poorly, don’t work at all, or end in disasters. This phenomenon, which has been the defining characteristic of socialism, is now all too evident in the US and the West.
Unaccountable Government
Paradoxically, the bureaucracies internally use strict accountability to protect their procedural and ritualistic — often petty rules and customs that shield the bureaucracy itself against programmatic accountability.
The lack of corporate, institutional, and governmental accountability in just this young century alone has been shocking.
9/11, the anthrax scare, the Boston Marathon bombing, Fort Hood, Fast and Furious … these are but a few on a very long list of bewildering catastrophes for which there was virtually no accountability on the part of the government, which failed in its basic responsibilities before and after the events. Each of them carries a long trail of missed or ignored intelligence before the events took place, botched investigations, and even the railroading of unlikely suspects.
And, of course, every public policy disaster – and there are many — simply continues, regardless of its damage. In the absence of accountability, if a useless or counterproductive program is cut, much less eliminated, it is front-page negative news for the sheer sake of its rarity.
In the joint public and corporate world, there has been zero accountability for the corporate and government officials responsible for the financial collapse of the housing market in 2008. The subsequent government bailout required trillions of dollars to save both the corporations and public administrators who were responsible for the meltdown, even while millions of ordinary citizens were financially destroyed with no recourse.
Only one executive from Credit Suisse went to jail for concealing $37 million in losses in the bank’s mortgage-backed securities portfolio.
The COVID Scandal
The manufactured COVID pandemic was a wholly preventable crisis that killed millions and ushered in devastating financial, psychological, and medical ramifications as the economy was locked down and schools closed. County, state, and federal governments alike went into a binge of authoritarian insanity.
The FDA and CDC were being led by people their correspondence revealed to be liars and corporate shills instead of the expert health professionals the media portrayed them to be, and they pushed bogus science down everyone’s throats. Well-known and successful drug treatments were banned, while untested therapies posing as “vaccines” were prescribed and even mandated. You could go to a bar, but not to church or school. You could go to Walmart, but not to the gym.
In addition, a 500-page report of “lessons learned” (here) released by Congress suggests there was massive fraud and abuse in all the programs around COVID — perhaps $250 billion worth. While several thousand citizens have been charged with loan fraud in some of those programs, no one in the corporate or government axis has been held accountable for the needless catastrophe, or the lies they told to escape accountability.
But the absence of accountability may have finally reached critical mass in one crucial event: Former President Barack Obama and his minions are being exposed for leading what can only be called a coup against incoming President Donald J. Trump in 2016 and 2017. Obama assembled the government intelligence and legal functions to derail and paralyze an incoming, elected administration and negate the results of a national election.
The question is, will anyone be held accountable for that?
Toldja So
Recently, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has been releasing documents that demonstrate how Obama administration officials lied and manufactured much of the information released to the public about the intelligence surrounding the Russian interference hoax during the 2016 election. Gabbard discussed Obama disregarding an intelligence briefing showing that Trump had not colluded with Russia.
“The evidence that we have found and that we have released directly points to President Obama leading the manufacturing of this intelligence assessment [of Russian collusion],” she said. “There are multiple pieces of evidence and intelligence that confirm that fact.”
While we can be glad that further evidence showing how corrupt the Obama-Clinton machine was is now being officially disclosed, it is further confirmation — not original news.
In February and March 2017, using evidence available at that time, I wrote,
The invention of the Russian meme was a brilliant stroke by the Obama-Clinton media cabal, born within 24 hours of [Clinton’s] defeat, we now learn – it has been driven by repetition deep into the public mind. But a meme is not a fact. So far, after nearly four months of intensive “investigation,” there is not one single item, or even a fragment of one item, that constitutes evidence of [Russian] collusion, much less a crime.
In a follow-up article, I stated,
Whereas we know for a fact that former President Obama spent taxpayer money in an unsuccessful attempt to defeat Bibi Netanyahu in Israel (among other elections the US tried to influence), you can rest assured that if there was any evidence, no matter how insignificant, that the Russians and the Trump Campaign colluded to impact the election, it would have leaked from the sieve that is our government immediately. There simply is not one identifiable fact that there is any there, there.
Now, thanks to Gabbard, it’s clear that the insurrection declared and led by the Obama-Clinton-Corporate Media Cartel against the Trump administration went into high gear in the Oval Office itself.
Will there ever be any accountability?
Michael Giere writes award-winning commentary and essays on the intersection of politics, culture and faith. He is a critically acclaimed novelist (The White River Series) and short-story writer. A former candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Texas, he was a senior executive in both the Reagan and the Bush (41) administrations, and in 2016 served on the Trump Transition Team.
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