Dusty Newspaper Clippings and other mental disorder

Bush Gives Management a Bad Name
By
Molly Ivins, AlterNet. Posted November 9, 2005.

Recently released emails from Michael
'Heckuva Job' Brown reveal how horrifically he bungled the Katrina
response

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 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."