(erielack) What shoulda been

[Wdburt1_@_aol.com]

Let's revisit what Mike Connor actually said.  The key sentences are  these:
 
Connor:  The N&W did not want to take the EL or the D&H,  they were ordered 
to by the ICC as a price for the approval of the N&W-NKP  merger. 
 
True statement.  Anyone can find documentation in the NKP merger  proceeding 
and other sources.  These facts were also widely reported.
 
Connor:  The ICC, after all, is the agency that presided over the  
destruction of much of the American railroad network and the services  thereon.  
 
Another true statement.  These things happened on the ICC's watch,  i.e. 
while it presided over a regulatory system that had as some of its  statutory 
objectives the preservation of essential rail service  and competitive options for 
shippers.
 
I do not read here anywhere that the ICC deliberately wrecked the  
northeastern railroads or that it had an agenda to do so.
 
I do not read here that the ICC took it upon itself to do anything outside  
the context of pressure emanating from railroads (the applicants, connections,  
rivals, and others), shippers, mayors, and all the rest.  It isn't what  Mike 
said.  And it would be naive to assume that the ICC acted this way,  except 
rarely.  That's just a straw man.
 
It would be equally naive to assert that the ICC was merely the  sounding 
board for private interests, whose rivalries and other struggles  expressed 
themselves in ICC orders, or that its decisions were the mathematical  product of 
such struggles.  ICC bureaucrats were paid to represent the  public interest, 
as defined by Congress and the courts (good point Jim), and  presumably they 
mostly tried to do so.  The crux of the problem, which  is obscured by the dust 
flying around when one beats on the straw man, is that  public policy embraced 
inconsistent, conflicting objectives that made it  possible for nearly 
everyone--railroads, shippers, labor, politicians--to game  the system endlessly.  
The ICC was not the "commerce court" that Theodore  Roosevelt and William 
Howard Taft talked about when campaigning for greater ICC  powers 1904-1910, it was 
an unseemly free-for-all.  
 
Although the regulatory system was a shambles by the  1960s, generations of 
Washington attorneys still paid off their homes  and sent their kids to college 
on the money extracted from productive economic  activity by helping the ICC 
"preside" over such fiascoes as Rock Island and  Dereco.  And now I speak from 
memory: As a young congressional  staffer, I attended the 1974 meeting of the 
ICC Practitioners Association in  downtown Washington to listen to an 
assistant attorney general from the U.S.  Department of Justice advocate substituting 
antitrust enforcement for many of  the ICC's powers.  I was astounded to see 
lawyers in expensive suits  standing on chairs shouting and shaking their 
fists at him.  A year later I  watched white-haired, courtly ICC chairman George 
Stafford testify before  Congress with what really was nothing more than a 
bitter attack on railroad  deregulation.  I re-read Stafford's testimony a couple 
of years ago.   I reads no better today than it did then, an abject account of 
how we were  sliding into nationalization without any hint of the elemental 
courage necessary  to propose a better idea.
 
It should be said that while the ICC's role during the legislative process  
that resulted in the Railroad Revitalization and Regulatory Reform Act of 1976  
was almost entirely obstructive, its Rail Services Planning Office (a new 
office  mandated by the 3R Act of 1973) did yeoman work analyzing the MARC-EL 
option,  branchlines, and competitive issues generally.  It was almost like what  
that guy from DOJ proposed in 1974.
 
WDB
 
 
 
 


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