I resolved to get this blog going in October of 2007. That’s when I read Valerie Plame Wilson’s blog posts about how good it is for her to finally be telling her story of being outed as a CIA agent and living through the consequences of telling truth to power. I have also experienced betrayal at the hands of those I should have been able to trust, people whose jobs are, purportedly, to serve the citizenry that pays them.

To be sure, my case isn’t on the scale of Valerie Plame Wilson’s, but it is cut of the same cloth. I have seen state bureaucrats possessed of as much ineptitude and malice as anyone in the Bush administration, and what I’ve seen has convinced me that we’ve wound up with something as bad as our present corrupt federal government because of our acceptance of malice and incompetence at local and state levels. The attitude that “you can’t fight city hall” is what got us here, and it will be fighting city hall, the county commission, and the state house–along with the White House–that will get us out of it.

Our failure to create transparent process and hold accountable the powers that be is understandable, given the nature of bureaucracy. Hannah Arendt wrote of bureaucracy as “rule by Nobody;” i.e. it’s very hard, given its structure, to find anyone to hold accountable for bureaucratic failures and abuses. And if one can identify one or more persons to hold responsible, the means to do so are not readily available.

If there’s any blessing at all in our collective experience of the regime of Bush II, I hope it’s served to wake people up, shake people up, in great enough numbers and to great enough degree that we’ll bring unprecedented transparency and accountability to bureaucracies across the board. (Yes, I’m an unrepentant optimist.)

This is a place to shine a light into the dark halls of bureaucracy, as well as to share information, strategies, and successes.

Fight bureaucratic injustice.

Increase transparency and accountability.

Peace.

Deborah G. Alicen, Ph.D.