[Dialogue] Bush Gives Management a Bad Name

Wed Nov 9 11:27:04 EST 2005

Colleagues, a good one from Molly. Peace, Harry 
  _____  

AlterNet

Bush Gives Management a Bad Name

By Molly Ivins, AlterNet
Posted on November 9, 2005, Printed on November 9, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/28007/

As those silver-tongued poets at the Pentagon put it, we are in a
target-rich environment. One cannot -- honestly, one simply cannot -- pass
up the Brownie memos.

The e-mails <http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/11/03/brown.fema.emails/index.html>
sent to and from Michael "Heckuva Job" Brown, head of the Federal Emergency
Management Agency during and after Hurricane Katrina, are too absurd, too
please-tell-me-they-made-this-up awful. As Katrina sent a 30-foot wall of
water toward Mississippi, Brownie, steeped in disaster relief work at his
former job with the International Arabian Horse Association, asked a top
aide the burning question: "Tie or not for tonight? Button-down blue shirt?"

Fashion was quite the FEMA priority under Brownie. On the day Katrina hit,
his press secretary wrote of his appearance on television: "My eyes must
certainly be deceiving me. You look fabulous -- and I'm not talking the
makeup." Brownie replied: "I got it at Nordstroms. ... Are you proud of me?"

An hour later, he added: "If you'll look at my lovely FEMA attire, you'll
really vomit. I am a fashion god."

After Brownie's appearance with President Bush at a post-Katrina press
conference, the press aide spotted an emergency: "Please roll up the sleeves
of your shirt, all shirts. Even the president rolled his sleeves to just
below the elbow. ... You just need to look more hardworking. ... ROLL UP THE
SLEEVES."

The only FEMA worker in New Orleans in the first days after the hurricane
was Marty Bahamonde, who e-mailed Brownie describing the situation as "past
critical": people dying, food gone, water going, the homeless and hungry
massing in the streets. Brownie replied: "Thanks for the update. Anything
specific I need to do or tweak?"

Thanks for the update? Anything I need to tweak?

Three hours after receiving this message about hunger and thirst in New
Orleans, Brownie's aide was on the food case, e-mailing colleagues on the
need to free up enough time in the director's schedule for him to have
dinner because restaurants in Baton Rouge were crowded and "he needs more
than 20 or 30 minutes."

This prompted Bahamonde to e-mail a co-worker, "I just ate an MRE (military
rations) and crapped in the hallway of the Superdome along with 30,000 other
close friends, so I understand her concern about busy restaurants."

I guess all that would be a lot funnier if it weren't for what the Pentagon
poets call "collateral damage." But at least we don't have to worry about
Brownie: The administration signed him up as a $148,000-a-year consultant to
FEMA.

Our chief executive is a graduate of Harvard Business School, and his
Cabinet is studded with former CEOs. This was supposed to be the "management
administration" -- government was to be run like a big business, meetings
would start on time, not like those slack Clinton years. These folks are
giving management a bad name.

Back in Iraq, the $30 billion appropriated for the reconstruction of Iraq is
running out. According to a New York Times article on the report by the
special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, "Officials in charge
cannot say how many planned projects they will complete, and there is no
clear source for the hundreds of millions of dollars a year needed to
operate the projects that have been finished. ... (The report describes) an
array of projects that went awry, sometimes astonishingly, like electrical
substations that were built at great cost but never connected to the
country's electrical grid."

After two-and-a-half years and $30 billion, electricity in Baghdad is on
intermittently, just as it was two-and-a-half years and $30 billion ago.

So you figure, "Of course nothing's getting done -- there's an insurgency,
the country's sliding into chaos." Let's look to Afghanistan, where peace
reigns. How goes the rebuilding there? Oops. According to The New York
Times, a New Jersey company got the contract to build 96 health clinics and
schools by September 2004. To date, nine clinics and two schools have been
completed and passed inspection.

The company told the Times it is hard to get good help in Afghanistan --
they have to use Afghani construction companies. After four years of
reconstruction in Afghanistan, the United States has spent $1.3 billion, and
according to American and Afghani sources, nobody's sure where the money is
and how it's been spent -- and the net result is between unimpressive and
pitiful. The agency in charge, the U.S. Agency for International
Development, says things are moving right along and defends its programs.

One of the funnier legacies of the Nixon administration was an accounting
award named after Maurice Stans, a secretary of commerce and chairman of the
finance committee for Nixon's re-election, who kept suitcases of cash in his
office and pled guilty to five misdemeanors relating to mishandling money.
In that fine tradition, the Bushies should establish a management award
named the Heckuva Job Brownie Prize. It would go to the person who makes the
best suggestion for improving government management -- like, "Roll up your
sleeves, it makes you look like you're working." 

Molly Ivins writes about politics, Texas and other bizarre happenings. 

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