PriorBlog

“How do you determine which laws and regulations should be followed?”

This is a line from BearingPoint’s website, which I am unfairly singling out from a page I found in the BearingPoint Institute for Executive Insight, although you have to admit, it is kind of funny in its grammatical ambiguity. I had never even heard of Bearing Point until the other day when there was an article in the Globe about some formerly top-secret committee in Washington called the Iran Syria Policy and Operations Group. Since I don’t have enough concentration to finish an entire article in a newspaper without seeing a name like “BearingPoint” and going off on a google search, I can only offer you a hazy summary of the article, something like, the ISOG is making sure that all of Iran’s neighbors will be able to bomb it back into the stone age during the next war du jour.*

That’s all well and good, but who is this Bearing Point company, and why do they get to be part of the ISOG getting cool top secret information, making weapons deals, and wearing (most probably) secret decoding rings and stuff, while I have to sit in this dull cubicle all day? My thirst for information was moving beyond its bearing point, so I did a google search.

What a company! Is there anything they can’t do? And with so many giant projects taken on, it’s a wonder you don’t see them in the grocery store and stuff. There must be hundreds of thousands of employees. Reading their website, you begin to think that anytime the government runs into a stumbling block, Bearing Point gets hired.

Gov’t: How can we track of all our bombs?
BP: RFID’s.

Gov’t: How should we rebuild Iraq’s economy?
BP: Let us do it.

The reach of the company is astounding. I got lost reading about all of their “projects” and so forth, very sophisticated stuff. It’s not as cool as Black Water’s website, but it’s more impressive in an ‘I-can’t-believe-the-amount-of-complexity-it-takes-to-control-millions-of-people-and-products-and-this-company-claims-they-can-do-it’ kind of way.

I knew there had to be a dark side to Bearing Point, but wondered if I would be able to find since they have done some projects for Google, and that, of course, is my only link to the world outside my cubicle. Turns out there’s no hiding it. They wrote the new Iraq’s economic policy (contracted by the US gov’t to do so for like $240 million, A-rod money), which called for opening the country up for easy access to foreign investmentors. Foreign investors like themselves. They were number two on the 2004 Top Ten Worst War Profiteers list put out by corpratepolicy.org. Again, why do they get to profit from the next war while I have to sit here in this cube? They got to profit in the last war. It’s not fair. There should be a random draft of who gets to profit from these wars, because it seems like the same people always get dibs.

I was thinking about BearingPoint during a complaint session I was having with a fellow bus rider while we waited for the bus this morning. I was telling him how yesterday the bus driver saw me, pulled over to get me, but way overshot me because she hasn’t yet figured out how to use her brakes, and then, when I didn’t magically appear immediately at the bus door situated a full twenty-five to thirty feet beyond the bus stop, not wanting to miss the light, she drove away. I’ll spare you his complaints because mine are more important and I have a tangent I want to move along, as quickly as possible and, while this fellow passenger is not a fictional character, I just don’t have time for him right now. After the bus pulled away, I spent a few seconds getting angry, and then decided to run for it and try to catch it at the next stop (.277 miles away according to gmaps pedometer). I would not advise most non-athletes to attempt such a feat. Being a highly accomplished runner (once won the fourth heat of the mile [it’s funny if you know track, so lay off]), I was able to catch the bus, but was too winded to come up with anything nasty to say to the driver, something that is still eating me up inside.

I would like to say this was the culmination of a series of gripes and frustrations I currently have with the MBTA, but there are a whole bunch of other little things they continue to do to ruin my life that I won’t bore you with right now. There is definite room for improvement, but I think help needs to come from the outside. That’s where BearingPoint comes in. If they took over running the MBTA, the buses would stop when they were supposed to and the trains would run on time.

Note

*I will say this about the proliferation of nuclear weapons- and I think we can all agree to this being a promising development for mankind- the new version of MAD is much more democratic in that everybody gets to participate. Of course, I am not referring to Mothers Against Drunks here, but Mutually Assured Destruction. Thanks to MAMAD (Mothers Aggrandizing Mutually Assured Destruction) for pointing out that this might strike some as confusing.