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In 2000 Bush-Cheney-Dumsfeld promised Americans that they were the wiser,
experienced hands to guide the ship of state. After 9/11 Bush promised that he
would lead the nation in national security and economic crises. He played that
card again in 2004. The façade is weakened, however, and more voters express
anger at being misled. In interviews conducted during the anti war protests
this weekend, many said they were galvanized from their silence about the war by
polls showing that Bush’s popularity had plunged. Complacency and patriotic hesitation
have retreated, the lack of accountability momentum runs against them now, and
not even major staff changes at the top will provide a Lazarus second chance. The Bush-bashing conservative ‘movers and shakers’ who met in Aspen
recently were likely worried about the 2006 midterm elections, as well as the
fiscal bottom line. With leadership in the House (DeLay) and Senate (Frist)
under investigation, and presidential and vice presidential advisors Rove and
Libby under suspicion in the Plame case, Junior Bush’s ‘whatever it takes’
management style is breaking the unity of both the religious conservatives and
traditional fiscal conservative base.
Bush’s ‘coalition of the culture wars’ may yet be as fleeting as the ‘coalition
of the willing’ in Iraq: with Britain planning to pull out next year, Japan’s
small contingent must follow. And US Generals are themselves speaking in contradiction
to the official B-C-D rosy rhetoric. Were the hurricanes Custer’s last stand or will it be the civil war in
Iraq? Here are two more dissenting voices, one a neighborly rebuke, the
second with deadly satirical accuracy. kwC He's
No Warren Buffett The legacy of the Bush administration may
well be that government can no longer be entrusted to business people.
That would be a shame, given that business savants as varied as Kennedy
treasury secretary Douglas Dillon and Silicon Valley legend Dave Packard served
ably in Washington. Many of the most
prominent CEOs in the current administration aren't real business people at
all, but faux CEOs who after a lifetime in politics cashed in on brief stints
as trophy CEOs at Fortune 500 firms before returning to public life in George
W. Bush's White House. With few exceptions,
those CEO stints - at Halliburton Co. (Dick Cheney), rail operator CSX Corp.
(John Snow), and George "dry hole" Bush's string of oil-exploration
flops in Texas - were not models of exemplary corporate stewardship. Just the same, future
historians will make the connection between the most CEO-heavy administration
in memory, headed by the first MBA president (Harvard, no less), and a White
House of unsurpassed fiscal recklessness, flawed strategic thinking, failure to
execute even on its best ideas (its unrealized goals of education reform and
energy self-sufficiency, for instance), and a stubborn unwillingness to change
course when conditions dictate. With his successive
rounds of tax cuts skewed to the wealthiest Americans, in tandem with a 37 per
cent increase in federal expenditures and Bush's refusal to veto a single
spending bill from the GOP-controlled Congress, this White House has in a short
five years boosted the national debt by 12 per cent, to almost $8 trillion.
America is increasingly a hostage of its foreign creditors. In a recent study titled "The Grand
Old Spending Party," the Cato Institute, a conservative Washington think tank, says
that "Throughout the past 40 years, most presidents have cut or restrained
lower-priority spending to make room for higher-priority spending. What is
driving George W. Bush's budget bloat is a reversal of that trend." Bush has conducted
three wars - on the Taliban, Saddam's regime, and terrorism - without asking a
dime of sacrifice from Americans. Indeed, Bush persists in seeking to make his
earlier tax cuts permanent and to eliminate the estate tax. Even with federal
spending at a post-World War II high of $22,000 (all figures U.S. dollars) per
household, Bush and the GOP congressional leadership are deaf to bipartisan
calls to postpone by a year the new prescription drug benefit for seniors - a
$139-billion handout to Big Pharma that actually does little to help the
elderly. Or to downsize last
summer's pork-laden, $286.5 billion highway bill, the costliest in history, with
its $8.5 million for seven transport museums, $4 million for a parking garage
in Oak Lawn, Ill., and $220 million for a road extension in Alaska that GOP
Sen. John McCain decries as "a highway to nowhere." The supposed
managerial expertise of an administration headed by two former oilmen would
suggest a high level of preparedness to protect a region that is the biggest
U.S. gateway for oil imports, is home to America's largest concentration of
petroleum refineries, and is America's biggest transit point for lumber,
coffee, rubber and steel. But preparedness was
woefully inadequate for New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. The Bush administration
cut funding for the Army Corps of Engineers's proposed refurbishment of
hundreds of kilometres of levees in the region. Bush folded the Federal
Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) into the new agglomeration of 22 agencies
known as the Department of Homeland Security. The administration slashed FEMA's
budget, and installed in the demoralized agency's top posts refugees from Bush
political campaigns who lacked expertise in disaster-management, triggering an
exodus of FEMA's most talented staff. In the aftermath of
Katrina, Bush and Congress hastily began to channel what may ultimately amount
to $200 billion - the equivalent of Denmark's GNP, or $400,000 for each of
Katrina's half-million displaced people - through FEMA, which lacks the prowess
to handle anything like $200 billion. Its 2003 budget of $87 million
accounted for a miniscule 0.03 per cent of total government spending. "You
can easily compare FEMA's internal resources to what you saw in the early days
of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq: a small, underfunded
organization taking on a Herculian task under tremendous time pressure," Steven Schooner, a contracting
expert at George Washington University, told The Wall Street Journal last week.
"That is almost by definition a recipe for disaster." Again, common sense
argues for re-establishing FEMA as an independent agency; or better yet,
creating an agency autonomous of the administration and headed by a can-do
leader like Rudy Giuliani, Gen. Tommy Franks or Colin Powell to expedite
reconstruction and ensure the efficacious spending of the restoration outlays. But for now, at least,
the White House refuses to relinquish control of the biggest domestic
reconstruction project in U.S. history, which will require the removal of
enough debris across a six-state region to fill more than 600 football fields
to a depth of 15 metres. Instead, as in Iraq, the administration has swung into
action on behalf of Bush campaign donors, swiftly granting no-bid, cost-plus
contracts in the Gulf Coast region to the usual suspects - Halliburton, Bechtel
Corp., and Fluor Corp. Halliburton and Bechtel
are under federal investigation for alleged government over-billing on Iraqi
reconstruction contracts. Kenyon Worldwide
Disaster Management, hired by FEMA to collect human remains in the
Katrina-stricken region, is a subsidiary of funeral operator and longtime Bush
contributor Service Corp. International (SCI). In Texas and Florida, SCI has settled
class-action lawsuits alleging improper burial methods. (In one case, bodies
were dug up and tossed in the woods so plots could be resold.) Katrina subcontractor
Goldstar EMS, a star-crossed ambulance provider, is being pursued for local tax
arrears, is under federal investigation for suspected Medicaid fraud and is now
operating in bankruptcy. Another
firm whose luck has changed for the better since Katrina is Bode Technology
Group Inc., hired by FEMA to identify the bodies of storm victims. Bode was
fired last month by Illinois state police over allegations of shoddy work. Meanwhile, in
contacting local contractors in the Midwest last week, the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch learned that even the most persistent were failing to obtain
Katrina-related work. Typical was
independent contractor Kevin Williams, who has an excavating firm in Sedalia,
Mo. and whose petitions to FEMA have been less than fruitful. "I've tried
calling, e-mailing, NOTHING," he told the paper. Katrina, of course, is
a disaster that has disproportionately afflicted the poor. One of Bush's
earliest responses was to sign an executive order suspending contractors on
Katrina-related work from federal law requiring employees be paid the local
prevailing wage, which means many will be toiling for a minimum wage of $5.15
an hour. Edward Sullivan, head
of the AFL-CIO Building and Construction Trades Department, described Bush's
regard for the working poor as "legalized looting of these workers who will be cleaning up toxic sites and
struggling to rebuild their communities, while favoured contractors rake in
huge profits." Bush, more obsessed
with tax cuts than any president in modern times, has also declared a tax-free
Gulf Opportunity Zone. A tax holiday might help the few surviving restaurateurs
in the French Quarter, but not 400,000 New Orleans residents who have lost
their jobs and have no income from which to deduct tax. Asked about this odd
policy move at a luncheon for GOP supporters last week, Bush responded: "Somebody said the other day, well, that's a tax
break. That region is going to have zero income anyway. There's nothing there,
in many parts of it. It makes sense to prove economic incentives for jobs to
exist." Read
that passage six times and it still doesn't make sense. With his job-approval
rating in decline even before Katrina, it didn't take long for Bush to begin
reminding Americans that he is a war president and deserves their patriotic
support. Last week he linked
Katrina with the war on terrorism. Terrorists,
the president said, are "the kind of people who look at Katrina and
wish they had caused it. We're in a war with these people." It appears that the president and the
rules of logic have parted ways. If only the U.S. were
run more like a business, was the Bush/Cheney mantra in 2000; then America
would be a more contented kingdom. But a sustainably prosperous business doesn't hand vital
tasks to cronies, fail to vet its suppliers, starve essential employees of job
fulfillment, or blame its shortcomings on bogeymen. It's a pity the GOP
running mates didn't say what kind of business they had in mind - the
managerial prowess of a General Electric Co., or the train-wreck of Enron Corp.
Stormy
Spins in a Vortex And still the pesky
press was painting him as a storm groupie, racing Rita to Texas just to score a
windswept backdrop to recapture his image as protector. Stormy preened for the cameras at FEEBLE
FEMA headquarters in Washington yesterday. On CNN, a bilious image of a
hurricane spun next to his head. You could imagine the little hurricane
trailing him through the rest of his presidency, like the storm cloud with a
lightning bolt that always trailed Joe Btfsplk in "Li'l Abner." He said he was jetting
to San Antonio to check out "the prepositioned assets" and then
riding out the storm watching "the interface" between the military
and state and local authorities at Northcom in Colorado. But David Gregory at NBC quizzed W. on
what good he could really do in Texas: "Might you get in the way, Mr.
President?" Stormy didn't
like that. "One thing I won't do is get in the way," he snipped. Mr. Gregory, part of a
newly amped-up press corps, followed up: "Isn't there a risk of you and
your entourage getting in the way?" Now Stormy let off a
little high pressure. "There will be no risk of me getting in the way, I
promise you," he said dismissively. The smart aleck
reporters didn't understand how crucial it was for the president to intertwine,
inter alia, with the interfacers. So W. explained it again: "See, Northcom
is the main entity that interfaces - that uses federal assets, federal troops,
to interface with local and state government. I want to watch that
relationship." But soon the San
Antonio leg of the trip was scotched amid fears that Stormy would really be
interfering more than interfacing. And besides, the weather was too sunny there
for poses in foul-weather gear. (it has been reported elsewhere this was the real reason for
the SA bypass). Stormy is like his
dad, Desert Stormy. They both love wardrobe calls: cool costumes, sports
outfits, presidential windbreakers, "Top Gun" get-ups, weather gear. But leadership is not a series of costume
changes. The former Andover cheerleader has been too reliant on photo-ops,
drop-bys and "Mission Accomplished" strut-bys, rather than a font of
personal knowledge. What Katrina exposed
was a president who - remarkable as this may sound - seemed bored after his
re-election, just as Bill Clinton had drifted after his re-election. Before the
Monica scandal broke, Mr. Clinton's aides had to beg him to call lawmakers on
the Hill to support his own legislative agenda. Before the Katrina
scandal, W. had lethargically wandered the country, lifelessly promoting his
Social Security plan and an energy bill that did nothing to solve the energy
crisis, and endlessly vacationing in Crawford. He campaigned as a strong daddy who would keep us safe, but then
seemed lost when his daddy figure, Dick Cheney, kept vacationing as Katrina
exposed a grotesque rescue apartheid in New Orleans. The more tuned-in W.
is now, the more obvious it is that he tuned out as New Orleans drowned. There
is a high cost for presidential learning curves. Hundreds of thousands of
people died in Bosnia before Bill Clinton got it right in Kosovo. A lot of
elderly hospital and nursing home patients died in New Orleans before W. could
pay attention to Houston and Galveston. On Wednesday, Stormy
tried to make one of his strained linkages, this time with Katrina and terror.
The terrorists, he said, were "the kind of people who look at Katrina and
wish they had caused it," while he is the kind of person who looks at Katrina
and tries to energize himself to deal with natural disasters by thinking, What
if this had been done by terrorists? On Thursday, he tried
to move past the image he had projected of a lost boy wandering alone in the storm, and stood at the Pentagon flanked
by his war council, talking about how he was moving to "develop a secure,
safe democracy in Iraq." Unfortunately, the Saudi foreign minister was in
town dropping a bomblet by saying that Iraq was going down the tubes, a
judgment other Sunni Arab leaders had been conveying privately. After his Pentagon
remarks, W. looked at his vice president for approval and received a proud,
avuncular smile that said, "You're the Man." But before he chases any more wind
tunnels, Stormy should heed the Bob Dylan line: "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the
wind blows." http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/092405G.shtml |
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