Young column: Mangy attack dog tears into agencies that serve

Say you had a gripe over a parking ticket. Say you had enough big-shot clout in town to resolve the matter by shutting down all parking enforcement.

Say you thought your company’s water bill was too high. You had it dissolved. The water department, that is.

In either scenario, that would make you Elon Musk.

If a federal agency does something that twists his silk underthings just so, watch out. He’ll come after it, just like the Master of Retribution who enlisted him to clear-cut the federal workforce.

Elon really has it out for federal employees, saying their profusion means, “We don’t live in a democracy. We live in a bureaucracy.”

I must say his idea of democracy is unassailable: people’s will “being carried out by their elected representatives.” He’d be a good one to preach that if, say, he were elected.

Even better: if cowardly elected representatives didn’t cede all lawmaking power to one man and his mangy attack dog.

Musk likes to snarl that people who rely on government aid are “parasites.” That’s some statement, considering it applies to all Americans who live long enough.

How about as long as Charles Seese lived? He was 98 when he died in Scottsdale, Ariz. He depended on Social Security and Medicare after a career in petroleum. Don’t forget the GI Bill after lending his services to the nation in WWII.

Pretty parasitic.

Unfortunately, he still needed additional help from the government late in life.

A debt collector harassed him on the phone over allegedly unpaid dentist bills. The collector wouldn’t hear it when he said he didn’t owe anything.

His daughter Barbara called the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The brainchild of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the agency was created to help victims of corporate malfeasance.

In a matter of days, the debt collector stopped calling, acknowledging it had the wrong person. You see, for the people served — CFPB has returned nearly $20 billion to consumers — another term for the bureaucracy Elon Musk detests is “customer service.”

Consumer Reports highlighted these things by putting human faces on the CFPB’s work: helping everyday people deal with businesses that did them wrong.

But there’s more to this story. The New York Times reports how the targeting of the agency, among others, wasn’t necessarily driven because of waste or inefficiency but because they rubbed Elon Musk wrong.

A public database perused by the Times found hundreds of consumer complaints against Tesla filed with the CFPB – most about debt collection or loan problems.

Musk’s SpaceX has tangled with the Federal Aviation Administration over safety and pollution. His companies have fought with the National Labor Relations Board over workers’ rights. Guess who’s getting punished by indiscriminate budget butchery?

In The New York Times, Eric Lipton and Kirsten Grind write, “Traditional federal conflict of interest rules seem almost antiquated” if Musk can be “involved in specific decisions about agencies his companies do business with.”

How quaint must “conflict of interest” sound to one like Musk who holds contracts with 17 federal agencies, billions of dollars of government business, and demands to dictate how it all will work? For that privilege, Musk spent $277 million to get his man back in the White House.

The Environmental Protection Agency. The Equal Opportunity Commission. The Securities and Exchange Commission. The Office of Government Ethics. All are in the crosshairs of a president and a hatchet man who seek to make “accountability” a relic of another age.

Well, that’s a big-picture problem. What about the $17 late fee a credit card company erroneously charged Jonathan Booth?

The Boulder, Colo., man, exasperated by a corporate runaround, contacted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on the matter and got it fixed, pronto.

As he told Associated Press’s Matt Sedensky: “If there’s no one watching, if the risk of getting caught goes down, more companies will bend the law to make more money.”

Elon Musk and his partner in grift are banking on you not watching.

Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.