Newsflash: Government Employment Is Deadly!

Two stories in the paper in the past two days provide further evidence that Public Sector employment is not the unambiguously benevolent pursuit it is always proclaimed to be by the Democrat Party, although it does appear to be a sweet deal for those in society who are dangerously incompetent or even outright evil. It is also further evidence of how GEFAFA (the Government Employee Full Actualization and Fulfillment Act) has so enriched the lives of those who draw a government paycheck, insulated as they are from the slightest scrutiny or accountability. Of course, GEFAFA is not a real law, but rather the shorthand that OffHisMeds likes to use to describe the inertia of Government - sometimes intended, sometimes unintended - and the regularity with which it is used to destroy Society with Taxpayers' money.

The Purely Dangerous Bus Driver

In the first instance, Aldine Independent School District bus driver Nellie Rose ran over a student she had just let off the bus with both her front and her back wheels, killing her. What's remarkable about this event is not that she killed a student, but that she hasn't killed more. This same bus driver ran over another student two years ago with her bus, and has been involved in two other accidents since 2003, at least one of which also resulted in injury.

This is also the second time Rose has used the phrase "I felt a bump as I drove forward", in describing the most recent event to police. She used exactly the same words in describing how she inadvertently ran over another teenage girl in 2007. In this latest incident, the kids on her bus were familiar with her previous record, and actually began teasing her after the first "bump", asking her if she had just run over another student. Cutting up with the students being her first priority, she ignored that first "bump", particularly after other students re-assured her that she had simply run over a dog. Apparently, being neither an animal lover nor somebody with an appreciation of Cause and Effect, she continued on and ran over the student with her back wheel.

In a classic case of understatement, school officials proclaimed that this pattern of activity "raised a red flag" and that Rose had been "removed from her route pending the outcome of the investigation". As Barack Obama likes to say: "talk about the horse already being out of the barn". Not only is this the third injury/accident she's been involved with, Rose had also accumulated only four points on the ten-point scale used by the State of Texas to deprive a bus driver of their license. By that standard, she might rack up as few as four additional points, technically leaving her eligible to keep her job.

This is the same school district, by the way, which found Rose faultless for the first incident in which she ran over a student, which was apparently news to the Student in question. No word as to whether school officials have questioned Rose's victim in the third injury/accident.

Serial Murderer/Serial Government Employee

The big GEFAFA news today, however, was the story about what Los Angeles police describe as a man who might be "the most prolific serial killer in the city's history", which is no mean feat, considering the abundance of mass murderers who have called, or continue to call, California home. Due to recent advances in DNA testing, LA police have charged John Floyd Thomas Jr. in at least two rape/murders of elderly women throughout California, and implicated him in dozens more going back as far as the 1950s.

After a dishonorable discharge from the military and being convicted of burglary, sexual assault and numerous parole violations in the 50s and 60s, Thomas went on to hold jobs as a Social Worker, hospital employee and Workers' Comp Claims processor, the last job of which he has held for the past twenty years. More about that later.

The short version of this story is that throughout the late 60s and through to the late 80s, wherever this rapist/murderer went, he was generally able to a) get a job in the public sector, b) use those jobs to finance and even enable his murderous hobby, and c) totally escape the attention of law enforcement authorities tasked to protect the public.

We can drive ourselves crazy speculating about why this guy was given such light sentences despite conviction as a serial felon as far back as the 1950s; we can drive ourselves crazy trying to figure out why this recidivist rapist was not kept under closer scrutiny once he did get out; and we can drive ourselves crazy trying to figure out why it is that California and U.S. Law Enforcement "Professionals" did not connect the dots on the pattern of this guy's activities. The record shows that every time he got out of jail, and wherever he moved, old women were raped and murdered.

The thing that will absolutely drive you crazy is Thomas's employment history after his convictions. He got a job as a Social Worker after his 1966 release for rape and burglary. The Rape/Murder wave began shortly thereafter. When he was released from prison in 1983 for a non-fatal rape he committed in 1978, he went to work as a "hospital peer counselor" for a hospital in Pomona. The murders resumed shortly thereafter, and continued until 1989 when he went to work as a Workers Comp claims adjuster.

They are all job descriptions that only a bureaucrat could love, but my favorite was "Peer Counselor". Similar to such job titles as "Social Worker" and "Grief Counselor", it seems to consist of Empathizing - the makework and busywork so typical of government employment. Simply put, a Peer Counselor's job is to regurgitate to students, breast-feeding mothers, drug addicts, the Disabled and other groups requiring empowerment the benefit of their experience as a student, breast-feeding mother, drug addict or Disabled Person.

This is not to say that Peer Counseling lacks any legitimacy. Those lacking experience will always benefit from those that have experience. It is to say, however, that until the Democrat Party came along, nobody thought to make it not only a full-time job, but an esteemed "profession". It is also to say, that, given Floyd's past record, the only constituency for whom he was qualified to be a Peer Counselor would have been Rapists and Murderers.

Conclusions

It seems that there's a double standard in the qualifications for employment between the Public Sector and the Private Sector. After all, compared to Etta Rose the Purely Dangerous Bus Driver, your typical UPS driver gets two shots - neither involving injury or fatalities - before he or she can be fired; and of course, UPS would be sued by the ubiquitous hordes of Personal Injury attorneys which flock after Democrat politicians like so many female mosquitoes looking for the first blood-meal of breeding season.

The typical automobile driver with Rose's driving record would also have considerably more than four points on their driving record, so Government Employees not only live by different rules when it comes to employment, they live by different rules when it comes to the Law.

As for John Floyd Thomas, The Serial Murderer/Serial Government Employee, the differences in treatment of the Private Sector compared to Public Sector - and mandated by Government - are not only numerous, but obscene. Take simple workplace behavior, as defined by the Social Engineering geniuses in the Democrat Party. For the Private Sector, it is practically mandatory that an employee accused of being a sexual predator or even sexual harassment should not only lose his job, but be permanently read out of polite society and any future meaningful employment. And as you know, if it is a case of being convicted of a sex crime, that individual is incarcerated for a long term, and if he or she eventually regains their freedom, is deprived of all privacy and kept under constant surveillance. Their criminal record also follows them for all future employment, their faces are posted on internet websites, and they are banned from various government jobs. All for the public good.

Of course, there are the "standards" that normal folk are expected to live under, and then there are the "double standards" reserved for Government employees. The most obvious examples of this phenomenon would be those serial abusers of women and propriety, Judge Samuel Kent of Houston, President Bill Clinton of Arkansas, and Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts. For the sake of this narrative, we are assuming that even their most ardent defenders would be willing to admit that the Courthouse, the White House and a government vehicle would be considered a "workplace". They suffered no punishment for their crimes, though; they were all undone because they lied about it, and then they got a mere slap on the wrist, even though their crimes ranged from Rape to Murder.

In the case of John Floyd Thomas the convicted multiple rapist, his prison time for past offenses clearly should have been longer; and to say that jobs as a Peer Counselor, Social Worker and Workers' Comp Adjustor probably shouldn't have been opportunities that were available to him would be an extreme understatement. What's important to keep in mind is that we are talking California here, which portrays itself as the Land Of Enlightenment. Seems California is also the Land Of Unintended Consequences, as Thomas plowed through the senior community, raping and murdering Grandmas with gleeful abandon for over three decades.

In the department of large ironies, both the Killer Bus Driver and the Serial Killer Rapist allowed the States of Texas and California (and likely the United States as well) to justify ever-burgeoning Law Enforcement and Social Welfare bureaucracies, with ever more Special Commissions, Task Forces, Crime Scene Investigators, Coroners, Policemen, Emergency Response Personnel, Professional Grief Counselors, Administrators and sundry other Governmental Lifers too numerous to mention to deal with the deaths, the investigations, crowd control, the social aftermath, the inevitable lawsuits, and last, but certainly not least, the paperwork; the endless paperwork which is not only the lubricant but the very fuel of modern Governance.

In the article by the L.A. Times, Thomas's co-workers were quoted as saying that "his job mostly involved paperwork". While I'm unwilling at this point to claim that mindless, soul-sucking jobs that "mostly involve paperwork" are responsible for murderous pathologies, there is a disturbing trend to his pattern of government employment and a lifetime of misconduct, starting with his dishonorable discharge from the Army. And we see this same behavior played out in other walks of Government life, most notoriously with the expression "Going Postal".

Simply put, since the time of FDR, Government seems not to be concerned about whether a Government employee is kept productively busy, nor is it of import that they might be busy because of the incompetence or outright criminality of other Government employees. What is important to Government is that there are increasingly more of Government employees, and that they are all kept busy, endlessly. The Wheels of Government continue to grind, but these days, rarely to the benefit of Society.

In the Department Of Small Consolations, the Dangerous Bus Driver was from my home state of Texas; the Serial Killer was from California. 'Nough said.