February 05, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

BUSH'S SPOILS SYSTEM

If you needed surgery, how comfortable with you be with the job being "outsourced" to someone who was loyal to the hospital administrator, but not necessarily good at surgery? That's in essence what this reactionary administration has been doing. The Heritage Foundation, one of the major right-wing think tanks, advocated outsourcing services formerly performed by career civil servants to private contractors. It's part of that old right-wing mantra that the private sector does everything better than government. Hurricane Katrina was devastating proof that the government is better run by government professionals. Bush and company have been reverting to the corrupt and inefficient spoils system that existed before civil servants became professionals based on competence, not on political loyalty. This column by Paul Krugman is at www.welcome-to-pottersville.com:

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.”

SEEKING THE COMMON GOOD

Right-wing philosophy, if you want to call it that, is really about dog eat dog self-interest. Right-wingers believe in what this writer calls "market fundamentalism," the belief that private markets always do everything better than government. It's this illogical belief in individualism and free markets that is impeding our progress in so many important areas. This article by Ruth Rosen is at www.tompaine.com:

Put it this way: What do catastrophic climate change, the widening gulf between the wealthy and the poor, America's obesity epidemic, and our society's lack of care for the young and the elderly have in common? Each has powerful special interests who insist that we need to let the market work its private magic and that government action would create more problems than it would solve.

These interest groups also block any effort to enlist the government by invoking the arguments of market fundamentalism: Privatize everything, rely on yourself and expect nothing from your government.

Market fundamentalism has become like the air we breathe; we hardly notice it. Every time George W. Bush argues for more tax cuts, he relies on the unquestioned assumption that we all embrace market fundamentalism. Like religious fundamentalism, it is based more on faith than on reason. Through constant repetition, however, the American public has been bullied into believing that private spending is rational and efficient, while public spending is always wasteful and unproductive. (Tell that to people in New Orleans.)