I picked up a passenger who told me he was on his way to a training assignment. I figured training people how to telemarket or something. Our initial conversation was polite chitchat. I don’t remember much of the beginning. He said he was from Northern California. He enjoyed the scenery here, but was used to it being a lot greener. We did have rain the day before, and he had commented that he had heard that it didn’t rain much here. I told him that it didn’t, but whenever it did, it just seems like everybody complained. He said California had a drought, and then a lot of rain and snow last winter that people complained about and he could never understand why they did. I said the same thing. When it’s hot, they complain that they want a cold, when it’s cold, they complain that they wanted hot. It was all just polite conversation.
It wasn’t until he started talking about government that I really started listening.
He said he was here training new agents. I wasn’t quite sure what kind of agents he was training, and I didn’t ask. He did say his training was more on the paperwork side of things. He said that side of government always seems to get ignored in the fancy TV shows.
At that point, I did ask him what kind of agents he was training. He said he was with the ATF. This did make me think he was training men to break into the rooms of drug dealers, gunrunners, or moonshiners.
I asked him if his job had a lot of action. He said that’s mostly a myth about most government agencies. What you see in the movies and TV shows is a very minor part of their work. Most of the time is spent on tracking and tracing and investigating, and when they finally have a lead that they are definitely sure of, they will send in a team. But most of the work is done from the offices. I said they should make a show about that. Spend most of the episode showing how they track down the criminals and in the last five minutes, show them getting busted. He asked if I had ever seen “Zero Dark Thirty” and said that was more what the job was like but the agents weren’t as hot as Jessica Chastain.
He started talking about guns and tracking, illegal sales, and how they spent months, sometimes years, tracking them through paperwork: where money was coming from, where it was going to, etc.
He told me that there were militias out there with lots of guns, but that most of the reports we have heard are exaggerated and that they were hardly a threat to the government. He started talking about guns in California, as that was where he was from. Most people there didn’t have guns because of the laws. I said I had lived in the Central Valley where I thought most of them had guns. He said there was a lot of drug activity in the area and a lot of guns but that the government had more and bigger guns.
He asked me if I knew that California was the fourth largest economy in the world. Not in the United States, but in the world. I told him I had heard that. I told him that I had lived all over California at some point, in northern and southern and central. I told him that I had one time heard that California had wanted to split into three states with those three sections separated. He had heard the same thing and laughed. He said, with the gun laws in California, and most people not owning a gun, it would be pretty hard for them to split up. It’s the same as if they wanted to secede from the country. They could make the threat, but they wouldn’t have the fire power to back it. I asked him about states like Texas or Florida seceding, as they all seemed to have guns in those states. He said that most people in those states did indeed have guns, but again not the kind of guns that the US government has.
In talking about California, and having mentioned my time in the Central Valley, I asked him, since he was with the ATF if he could verify a rumor for me. I had heard that the Central Valley was pretty much the meth capital of the United States. He told me that it wasn’t a rumor, that it was fact. Especially the corridor between Fresno and Bakersfield. Inside my brain, I laughed. I was going to ask him about the representative from Bakersfield who recently lost his position as House Speaker and who seemed to ignore the meth issue in Kern County, but I still wasn’t sure which side of the political spectrum this passenger was on.
As we talked about the things he was training people on, the investigating and paperwork stuff, he brought up all the corruption in government. He said that people seem to think about all the dirty cops in the world, but need to realize that the biggest corruption is at the top, and the closer a federal employee was to the White House, the more corrupt they probably were. He said it’s because those people talk to people of influence and so companies and lobbyists and billionaires will grease those palms to get them to speak for them and vote their way. Whatever a corrupt street level agent might do is nothing in comparison to what their superiors were doing.
It made me think about all the stories of corrupt cops. He said it’s always further up the chain where it’s the worst. He says it was unfortunate, because a lot of people go into law enforcement with a positive attitude and see what is happening and find themselves caught in it.
He did say that the ATF was probably the least corrupt of all the alphabet agencies. If you wanted to see the big corruption, again, it started with those closest to the White House. He was talking about agencies like the CIA, FBI, DEA… those agencies were a lot of money exchanged hands and was unaccounted for and had little oversight.
I said that the cops and agents on the lower level aren’t paid enough, probably leading them down the path of corruption. He said that there could be a lot of reasons, but mostly it’s because they’re recruited from those on the higher level to become a part of the corruption. He mentioned that the problem was that the way the government paid people was not incentive based. They were all based on grades and scales. So a good agent would be paid as much as a bad agent, and there was no bonus or incentive for doing your job better. He also mentioned how they were budgeted in a way that it was impossible to offer any incentive to employees. It was not like they could take money from the arms budget and give that to agents. they had to spend the money where it was allocated. There were some folks who found ways to spend the money in such a way that it benefited their people, but it just tended to enforce corruption.
He said he was about 15 years from retirement. He was living in San Jose, where it was ridiculously expensive, especially for a government employee. His wife had lived in San Jose all her life, while he had originally been from Tennessee. I told him that I had picked up a security specialist from Tennessee a few days ago, who identified himself because of his accent, and that the ATF agent had a much lighter accent. He said he had been in California for nearly 20 years now, but was ready to get out. He said the agency was willing to transfer him, and he was looking at a four year plan to move somewhere.
He was looking at transferring to Houston and so had his wife looking at houses in the area. She was amazed how much cheaper the housing outside of Houston was in comparison to San Jose. I told him that I thought the tech industry had basically ruined the Bay Area by forcing high prices for everything, especially real estate, and he was in total agreement with me. He said that a starting job at someplace like Apple was probably around $375,000, and needed to be for them to even be able to survive. No way the government was paying anybody that kind of money, not even the President. And yet these people come in office making $100k salaried bit leave office years later as millionaires.
I nodded my head a lot to the things he said, and was in full agreement. He said he had been clean his entire career. I told him, as he was climbing up the ladder, and reaching retirement, maybe he should use his influence to get some of that lobbyist money. He laughed, thankfully, as I did not want to insult him, and said he did not have it in him to schmooze up to those kind of people. I thought of how that had been my problem when I was living in LA and tryong to make it in the business. I had no ability to schmooze or suck up to people. And this man gave me some faith that there are good people working in the government.
We just need more of them. A lot more of them. A lot more of them that work near to the White House. And inside the White House as well.
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