A failure of salesmanship at the highest level of government

[Guest guest]

S

Tue, 27 Sep 2005 01:46:04 EDT

A failure of salesmanship at the highest level of government

 

 

 

 

As I have said -- Bush appointees are chosen to trash the departments

or agencies and so while the media is saying they failed --actually,

they are a flaming success because that is exactly what they were

supposed to do.

 

If he had someone else in charge of FEMA who was qualified, they would

have quit when they saw the agenda was to NOT take care of the people.

Just like all legitimate scientists have quit. Just like the woman who

had been newly appointed and went to the Kyoto meeting in Japan, very

first month bush was in office and he told her to walk out of the

meeting in the middle, embarrassing her. If she is worth her salt, she

won't stay. And indeed, she quit citing family reasons. If they will

not cover up what they are not supposed to do (which is succeed) and

if they will not be loyal to bush, they are gone. If there is anyone

qualified, they quit when they realize their own integrity is at stake.

 

His success is the department's or agency's failures.

 

After all, that is why that particular person was chosen. Why not kill

two birds with one stone? Pay back someone that gave you support while

being able to have someone who will just keep their mouth shut and not

do their job?

 

We could make a list of the very worst possible for appointments.

Christopher Cox for the SEC is another one. Goss for the CIA. Good

grief. All you have to do is take the list of all his appointments and

if they stayed then they are trashing that department. If they are

gone, then it is because they would not trash that department.

 

People think bush is making mistakes or not paying attention. NO. He

knows exactly what he is doing...and he chooses those people who are

not qualified or are corrupt or paybacks for that purpose.

 

And this is what scares us about Supreme Court appointees. They will

be appointed to destroy the Bill of Rights.

 

What is stunning is that the American people blame the person who

fails, rather than also blaming the person making the appointments.

 

******

 

 

9/26/2005

 

A failure of salesmanship at the highest level of government

 

 

 

The Bush administration have spent the better part of five years

systematically dismantling the US government as we know it. Whether

Bush himself is aware of this, only he (and possibly his wife) can

say. But it’s what he’ll be remembered for, along with a

disastrous war that will ultimately have damaged this country more,

and in more ways, than Vietnam ever did. That’s his legacy:

Presiding over what one can only hope is a failed attempt to remove

governance from the province of government, and exposing and

increasing the limits of US power in and over the world.

 

At every turn, this administration have chosen to embrace greed,

spectacle and a vicious ideology over the exercise of any common

purpose. They have sought and largely succeeded in turning the clock

back not to the Hoover administration †" although they’ve damaged

the New Deal, they’ve not managed to destroy it, at least not yet

†" but to the Caligula administration.

 

Bush may or may not have followed in Caligula’s footsteps to the

point that he’s insane, but he’s more than matched the worst Roman

emperor’s whimsical appointment of a horse to the Roman senate, and

there’s a hideous symmetry in his appointment of Arabian horse

afficianado Michael Brown to head FEMA.

 

Of course Brown did far greater damage than Caligula’s horse, and

he’s just one among a herd of similarly qualified department heads

and secondary managers. And where the administration haven’t used

government office to reward otherwise useless political and financial

supporters, they’ve appointed people whose job is to undermine the

public purpose of departments such as the EPA and the Food and Drug

Administration, or, as with the abortive appointment of a veterinarian

to head the Office of Women’s Health in the FDA, to spite and insult

an annoying constituency already incensed by the agency’s refusal to

move on decontrolling the “morning after†pill.

 

None of this is new, but the press have been slow to notice in part

because they were only mildly interested in critical reporting on the

administration before 911 and not at all afterward, in part because

they were enthralled by the spectacle, and in part because the scale

of the problem makes it hard to grasp even for people who are

sensitive to it. With Brown exposed by Katrina, the problems at the

FDA and the arrest of the lobbyist appointed to oversee government

purchases, the problem and the results of it have become too public to

ignore; even the Washington Post editorial board, which has swung far

to the right in recent years, feels compelled to weigh in.

 

Time Magazine ran a 4000-word story on the subject Sunday, subheaded

“A TIME inquiry finds that at top positions in some vital government

agencies, the Bush Administration is putting connections before

experience.â€

 

No kidding? Even now, though, the magazine fails to distinguish the

Michael Browns from someone like FDA commissioner Mark B. McClellan

(whose successor, Lester Crawford, abruptly resigned on Friday, one

month after his confirmation) who was exported from the White House

council of economic advisors to bring a pharmaceutical industry

supporter to a position that stood vacant for a year after Bush took

office.

 

That wasn’t a question of cronyism †" or at least not entirely;

McClellan’s mother is a player in the Texas GOP, and his brother,

Scott, shows up behind the podium in the White House press room on a

daily basis †" but a deliberate effort to complete the

transmogrification of the FDA from an agency charged with protecting

the public interest to one charged with protecting industry interests.

 

Crawford’s is far from the only dual-purpose appointment; government

is now filled with corporate and industry lobbyists and executives who

are being rewarded for their financial and political support at the

same time as they serve the blatant borderline fascism that

constitutes the administration’s domestic ideology and informs its

foreign policy.

 

The Time story raises (and falls short of fully grasping) another,

related issue: the replacement of career department Inspectors General

with politically oriented ones.

 

The Post-Watergate law creating the position of inspector general

(IG) states that the federal watchdogs must be hired “without regard

to political affiliation,†on the basis of their ability in such

disciplines as accounting, auditing and investigating. It may not

sound like the most exciting job, but the 57 inspectors general in the

Federal Government can be the last line of defense against fraud and

abuse. Because their primary duty is to ask nosy questions, their

independence is crucial.

 

But critics say some of the Bush IGs have been too cozy with the

Administration. “The IGs have become more political over the years,

and it seems to have accelerated,†said A. Ernest Fitzgerald, who

has been battling the Defense Department since his 1969 discovery of

$2 billion in cost overruns on a cargo plane, and who, at 79, still

works as a civilian Air Force manager. A study by Representative Henry

Waxman of California, the top Democrat on the House Government Reform

Committee, found that more than 60% of the IGs nominated by the Bush

Administration had political experience and less than 20% had auditing

experience†" almost the obverse of those measures during the Clinton

Administration. About half the current IGs are holdovers from Clinton.

 

Here again, the purpose is at least as much corruption as cronyism:

Bush administration Inspectors General may be friends of the family,

but they have a specific job to do, and that’s to look the other

way. The job requires cronies because they’re the ones who can be

trusted to do it.

 

Reactionary icon and Republican power broker Grover Norquist is famous

for saying he wants to shrink the federal government “down to the

size where we can drown it in the bathtub.†The Bush administration

aren’t at all concerned with shrinking government, but they share

Norquist’s enthusiasm for killing it; only by poison rather than

starvation.

 

The administration’s reaction to the problems created by the

attention being paid Brown, David Safavian (the arrested purchasing

czar) and others has been twofold: On the one hand they’re

scrambling to find an appropriate sales pitch to counter the bad

publicity, and on the other they’re actually accelerating the

program to corrupt and obstruct the functions of government. Safavian,

for instance †" an intimate of both Norquist and indicted lobbyist

Jack Abramoff †" is credited with the idea of raising the credit

limit on federal charge card purchases from $15,000 to $250,000 in the

wake of Hurricane Katrina, and despite his arrest and some

Congressional opposition, there’s no indication the administration

is reconsidering the plan.

 

On the international front, the administration is perhaps best

represented by former Coalition Provisional Authority chief L. Paul

“Jerry†Bremer and John Bolton, the shiny new US ambassador to the

UN, courtesy of a recess appointment.

 

Bolton is the internationalist equivalent of Norquist. His current

brief is to break the UN; his previous job, as undersecretary of state

for arms control, involved sabotaging international treaties,

crippling UN attempts to return weapons inspectors to Iraq and

corrupting intelligence analyses that failed to serve the

administration’s goals in Iraq and elsewhere.

 

Bremer oversaw the orgy of corruption and incompetence that

distinguished the CPA from the post-World War II US occupation and

democratisation administrations, in Japan and Germany, with which it

was most often compared by White House. Charged with spending Iraq’s

Oil for Food revenues on reconstruction projects †" 98% of the

contracts for which went to US firms rather than local ones †" Bremer

and his organization managed to misplace roughly $9 billion of that

money along with nearly as much in a combination of US appropriations

and deliberately unmetered sales (â€contrary to earlier

representations the award of metering contracts have been

delayed…â€) of Iraqi oil, the latter ensuring that the total amount

of oil exported by the country under Bremer’s watchful eye, and

therefore the income received from it, will never, ever be known.

 

Bremer, who worked for Henry Kissinger in the 1970’s at the state

department and more recently at Kissinger Associates, also sought to

impose a laissez faire capitalism regime in the country, illegally

altering much of Iraq’s legal code, including a provision

overturning a ban on foreign ownership of Iraqi businesses, and

attempting to prevent the eventual sovereign government, to the extent

that there is or ever will be one, from overturning his decrees.

 

He also gave Iraq’s insurgents a significant boost when he dissolved

the army, creating an vast pool of unemployed, resentful and in many

instances well-armed young men, along with a cadre of experienced

officers, who have been busily killing and maiming Americans ever since.

 

Bremer, of course, was awarded a Medal of Freedom, presumably for

freeing Iraqis of their money and Americans of their lives. Bolton is

yet to get his.

 

Again, none of this is exactly news, other than the recent public

placing of particular names to particular crimes, to anyone who has

been paying attention. That excludes the press, for the most part;

either they’re not paying attention or, as with the Time story,

they’re not imaginative enough to connect cronyism with the

administration’s pathological contempt for traditional governance.

 

“Failure of imagination†could be the headline for Washington Post

writer Jim Vanderhei, who two weeks ago profiled Kristen Silverberg,

an attorney all of 34 years old who just got confirmed as assistant

secretary of state for international organization affairs, a position

reporting to Karen Hughes, whose job is to sell bad US policy to

strange brown people overseas.

 

She was one of the wide-eyed conservatives who trekked to Austin

in 2000 to get the George W. Bush for President train rolling. The

former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was in the White

House policy shop in the pre-9/11 days helping to dream up a health

care plan, big tax cuts and “compassionate conservative†policies.

 

In 2003, she shipped out to Baghdad to advise L. Paul Bremer on

the creation of an elected Iraqi government. Then it was back to the

White House to help develop Bush’s second-term agenda. She went to

work for Andrew H. Card Jr. and Karl Rove, the president’s two most

powerful aides, on domestic, economic and foreign affairs.

 

Apparently working on the 2000 campaign and participating in several

disasters †" health care? compassionate conservatism†IRAQ?? †"

qualifies you not only to help craft a failed second term agenda and

for a promotion which your previous experience would seem to render

unwarranted, but a glowing profile in the Post as well.

 

Ten days later, Vanderhei is the principal reporter for the Post story

about the administration’s inability to get a grip on damage control

necessitated by a series of obvious failures, including two that

Silverberg was involved with and a third, Hughes’ public diplomacy

enterprise, that has yet to be fuly realized.

 

The story exemplifies the general press approach to the deaths of 2000

US troops and perhaps 100,000 Iraiq civilians, along with everyone who

died unnecessarily in the aftermath of Katrina, along with a host of

other administration follies: “Aides who never betrayed self-doubt

now talk in private of failures selling the American people on the

Iraq war, the president’s Social Security plan and his response to

Hurricane Katrina.†The subject is not the actual failures, but the

failure to sell the failures as successes. What’s remarkable to

Vanderhei isn’t the unbroken record of failure †" all the things

mentioned above, the massive deficits, the ungodly new Homeland

Security bureaucracy, an FBI that still can’t send secure emails,

and all the deliberate destruction of government functions †" but the

sudden inability of the administration to make turds taste like suasage.

 

It’s the failure of salesmanship, not the failure of leadership,

that has reporters awed and energized but always at risk of relapse.

 

 

 

BTC News » A failure of salesmanship at the highest level of

government

 

http://www.btcnews.com/btcnews/1126

 

 

 

" People join the military to defend their country, not lies. "

Adam Reuter, 22-year-old Georgia resident

who was given a medical discharge from the Army four months ago.

Washington DC Protest, September 24, 2005