Patronage has existed as long as government. The two go hand in hand. Sometimes, the worst is rooted out by the media but usually only after an appointee demonstrates utter incompetency (see Michael Brown/FEMA) or commits egregious crimes and such becomes just impossible to ignore or cover up (Kenneth Tomlinson/Corporation For Public Broadcasting).
As with so many things, the Bush Administration has taken the awarding of jobs and positions to a low heretofore unknown. But this typical to-the-victor-goes-the-spoils system has also been re-worked as a construct of the political/idealogical philosophy saluted by the I-Hate-Government crowd, the Bush Administrationists.
See, not only is the Bush Administration rewarding it’s cadre of loyalists and purchasing new foot soldiers with figurative diamonds and gold–it is also quietly doing its best to be the worst government entity ever in order to reinforce the meme that all government is bad and that private enterprise is the one and only indisputable saviour. Granted, sometimes, such as the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, spin control spins out of control but then its simply time to blame anyone and everyone else and order your corporate media sycophants to broadcast just such.
How else can the number of completely unqualified and inept ‘bush leaguers’ placed in charge of important agencies, entities that could do great public good if led correctly and allowed to, be explained? Granted, placing the kool-aid imbibers throughout the levels of government has also taken place because of the desire to implement no-questions-ever-asked as part of the official modus operandi and to have brutish enforcers at the ready.
A scurrilous example is the hiring of contractors to do much of the dirty work in Iraq. Not just hiring them but making sure to annoint them free of ANY liability for ANY action while on Iraqi soil. We have so-called enforcers earning thousands more a month than the typical soldier—aye, there’s a real cost savings for you—with zero ultimate responsibility. Kill an iraqi because you want to and the worst thing that will happen is being put on a plane ASAP to the United States.
Also, look at who was hired to work in the Green Zone in Iraq. From my earlier review of “Imperial Life In The Emerald City” came this:
“A vast majority of the advisory staff in the Green Zone were there because of allegiance to George Bush and the Republican Party. Financial contributors and those having other connections were the chosen. Aadherence to Bush’s vision for Iraq was mandatory. Those uncertain about Bush’s vision were rejected. Also, key hiring questions were an applicant’s stance on Roe v. Wade and which presidential candidate did you vote for in the last election? An attempt to headhunt was shut down by those in D.C.despite Bremer’s pleas for bodies to fill positions. A galvanizing example: Bremer’s budget chief asked to be sent ten go-fers so a search was made, primarily focused on entry level Heritage Foundation job applicants. After ten were hired, six were then assigned to manage Iraq’s 13 billion dollar budget although none had any previous financial experience. The CPA was for Bush zealots–similar to a cult.”
Does this sound like George Bush wanted or even cared about succeeding? Allegiance before all else is blatantly treasonous. How many people, Iraqi and American, have died because George Bush is too weak and infantile to brook any debate or differing views?
It’s one thing to boldly announce your true and actual political philosophy and lay out how you will operate if elected. It’s obviously totally another to secretly operate as a Fifth Column. But when you are as badly malformed as George W. Bush…
Paul Krugman wrote a spot-on column recently that highlighted all this:
The Green-Zoning of America
By PAUL KRUGMAN
New York Times
February 5, 2007
One of the best of the many recent books about the Iraq debacle is Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s “Imperial Life in the Emerald City.” The book tells a tale of hopes squandered in the name of politicization and privatization: key jobs in Baghdad’s Green Zone were assigned on the basis of loyalty rather than know-how, while key functions were outsourced to private contractors.
Two recent reports in The New York Times serve as a reminder that the Bush administration has brought the same corruption of governance to the home front. Call it the Green-Zoning of America.
In the first article, The Times reported that a new executive order requires that each agency contain a “regulatory policy office run by a political appointee,” a change that “strengthens the hand of the White House in shaping rules that have, in the past, often been generated by civil servants and scientific experts.” Yesterday, The Times turned to the rapid growth of federal contracting, fed “by a philosophy that encourages outsourcing almost everything government does.”
These are two different pieces of the same story: under the guise of promoting a conservative agenda, the Bush administration has created a supersized version of the 19th-century spoils system.
The blueprint for Bush-era governance was laid out in a January 2001 manifesto from the Heritage Foundation, titled “Taking Charge of Federal Personnel.” The manifesto’s message, in brief, was that the professional civil service should be regarded as the enemy of the new administration’s conservative agenda. And there’s no question that Heritage’s thinking reflected that of many people on the Bush team.
How should the civil service be defeated? First and foremost, Heritage demanded that politics take precedence over know-how: the new administration “must make appointment decisions based on loyalty first and expertise second.”
Second, Heritage called for a big increase in outsourcing “contracting out as a management strategy.” This would supposedly reduce costs, but it would also have the desirable effect of reducing the total number of civil servants.
Go here to read the rest:
Wonderful diary.
We are heading for a form of pure, rapacious capitalism, unrestrained by the balancing socialism that has held it in check. Everything is to be privatized, and if you can’t afford it, tough. The Bush administration is intentionally incompetent in order to destroy every vestige of the New Deal. America has filled the government with Republicans who hate government, except as a means of making money. All the things that seem so wrong-headed and mind boggling (like appointing Bolton as U.N. Ambassador) make sense if we view it through your diary.
To seal the fate of our social programs, they are willing to bankrupt America for decades by throwing money away (into the laps of the loyal) on wasteful wars that are the single most effective way to transfer money from the lower and middle classes to the wealthy. Why not? They are in no danger of poverty. And real wealth needs masses of poor and desperate people to keep the cost of good and services down. We will be so burdened with debt that there will seem no choice but to privatize schools, social security, police and fire, social services, the military, basic infrastructure. Everywhere a toll; everywhere a fee, and if you can’t pay, you can’t play. When the poor are incapable of caring for their children, we’ll have for profit orphanages that contract out the little slakers. We already have a fine business model in our for profit prisons.
This drive to dismantle and privatize any institution that provides for the common good will end in nothing less than slavery for all but the wealthy few.
The thought occurred to me driving to work today that the administration could well have set out to create anarchy in Iraq to turn the Sunnis and Shia against each other and prevent the consolidation of opinion in the Islamic world against the west under the banner of Bin Ladin, creating appropriate conditions for a permanent occupation of the oil fields and lots of highly profitable activity for Halliburton, etc.
Then I realized my thoughts were just an attempt to find a rational pattern where nothing but randomness (chaos)exists, like the story in the News Bucket yesterday about our mind’s tendency to find faces in clouds, sandwiches, buns, etc.
Chaos doesn’t keep the bottom-feeders away from profits, whether created by accident or design.
Yes, he is. And it is modeled on the political control that Stalin had over the Soviet bureaucracy by placing party members as overseers in a parallel hierarchy to the civil service.