Category Archives: Random Blogging

Hollow Government

Media commentators are finally beginning to understand something that academics have been warning about for well over a decade: when government contracts out–“privatizes”–too aggressively, it loses critical capacity. In the memorable phrase of one researcher, it “hollows out” government’s ability to perform.

Steven Pearlstein, a respected business columnist for the Washington Post, recently wrote

Two of the biggest news events of the past year have been the leaks about top-secret snooping by the NSA and the disastrous rollout of Obamacare. But in an important way, they are both manifestations of a story that has been unfolding for decades — that of a federal government that has outsourced too much of what it does to private contractors while allowing the quality of its own workforce to atrophy.

Much of the public debate about outsourcing has focused on the management challenges involved, the undeniable opportunities for favoritism and corruption, and confusion about when constitutional limits on government action should be applied to private contractors doing government’s work. Less attention has been paid to the danger Pearlstein addresses, although it has been highlighted by several scholars: government is losing its capacity to perform, and with it, the capacity to manage the performance of others.

Recognition of the problems caused by indiscriminate contracting have been mounting. The Office of Personnel Management recently announced that final quality reviews for background investigations will be conducted by government employees — not contractors.  According to Federal News Radio,

The news comes amid an employee’s whistleblower lawsuit, also joined by the Justice Department, alleging that the government’s largest background-check contractor, USIS, had improperly signed off on hundreds of thousands of background investigations that had never been properly vetted — a practice known as “flushing” or “dumping” records. 

Although he identifies market ideologues as largely responsible for the federal government’s excessive reliance on contracting, Pearlstein also places considerable blame on the need to “work around” outdated bureaucratic rules and intransigent public unions.

Not only are there caps on the number of government workers, but there are also caps on government pay that ignore the realities of the marketplace — and that, too, has driven the outsourcing trend…..

In the end, taxpayers are not only indirectly paying the higher salaries they refuse to pay directly to government employees — they also wind up paying for the contractors’ profit and the costs of winning and managing contracts.

Pearlstein notes that federal contracting grew from about $200 billion in 2000 to about $550 billion in 2011 before falling back to $450 billion last year, and that sixty percent of that was for services. By some estimates, there are twice as many people doing government work under contract than there are salaried government workers. As I have previously pointed out, we are not making government smaller–we are just making it less visible,  less efficient and less accountable.

[L]ong before the botched rollout of Obamacare, even the Professional Services Council, the leading trade association for federal contractors, was complaining publicly that too many agencies lacked skilled workforce to manage the contracting process — in particular, contracts for complex new computer systems.

Those who want to make government small enough to drown in a bathtub are evidently getting their wish. It should remind us to be careful what we wish for.

These Folks Aren’t Climate Denialists–They’re Worse

I recently read one of those blog posts you come across these days–the kind that is so ridiculous, so insane, you assume–usually correctly–that it’s another urban legend. But this one bothered me, so I investigated, and found confirmation in the very reputable Guardian.

Like many countries, Nigeria has already begun to see the effects of climate change. So the wealthy are building a new, privatized city that will be insulated from the effects of  the rising waters.

It’s a sight to behold. Just off Lagos, Nigeria’s coast, an artificial island is emerging from the sea. A foundation, built of sand dredged from the ocean floor, stretches over ten kilometres. Promotional videos depict what is to come: a city of soaring buildings, housing for 250,000 people, and a central boulevard to match Paris’ Champs-Élysées and New York’s Fifth Avenue. Privately constructed, it will also be privately administered and supplied with electricity, water, mass transit, sewage and security. It is the “future Hong Kong of Africa,” anticipates Nigeria’s World Bank director.

Welcome to Eko Atlantic, a city whose “whole purpose”, its developers say, is to “arrest the ocean’s encroachment.”

And who will occupy this new, privatized fortress against the elements? Certainly not the millions of poor Nigerians who will be left to fend for themselves–quite literally abandoned to the elements.

Those behind the project – a pair of politically connected Lebanese brothers who run a financial empire called the Chagoury Group, and a slew of African and international banks – give a picture of who will be catered to. Gilbert Chaougry was a close advisor to the notorious Nigerian dictatorship of the mid 1990s, helping the ultra-corrupt general Sani Abacha as he looted billions from public coffers. Abacha killed hundreds of demonstrators and executed environmentalist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who rose to fame protesting the despoiling of the country by Shell and other multinational oil corporations. Thus it’s fitting for whom the first 15-story office tower in Eko Atlantic is being built: a British oil and gas trading company. The city proposing to head off environmental devastation will be populated by those most responsible for it in the first place.

Evidently, once it is no longer possible to deny the reality of climate change, the self-identified “makers” of the world–in the US that would be folks like the members of ALEC, the managers and owners of energy companies, and of course the infamous Kochs and their ilk–will simply secede from the earth they’ve polluted.

Welcome to our dystopian future.

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As Long as We’re Rhyming

The meme of the moment, which annoys the hell out of me, is “makers” and “takers”–a sneering dismissal of the plight of the less fortunate and a wholesale rejection of their labor and aspirations, not to mention their human dignity. The maker/taker formulation assumes that comfort and privilege are the result of merit and responsibility, and that need and/or misfortune is a sign of irresponsible behavior, sloth or “poor decisions.”

It is an utterly self-serving construct– a latter-day Calvinism that equates poverty with moral defect and success with evidence of God’s approval.

As long as we are labeling with a broad and unfair brush, let me offer another rhyme that “slices and dices” human society into easily caricatured categories: Thinkers and (Kool Aid) Drinkers.

Thinkers occupy a complicated world, where issues are often thorny and their solutions partial and/or nuanced. Thinkers try to make their assessments based upon the best available evidence; they employ reason and logic in arriving at their conclusions, and (in the best tradition of the scientific method) such conclusions as they reach are usually tentative and subject to revision if and when contrary evidence emerges.

Drinkers, on the other hand, have imbibed the Kool Aid. They don’t need no stinkin’ evidence, because God or Fox or Marx or whoever already told them what to believe. Every argument is tested against whatever bumper-sticker philosophy or religion they cling to; if the argument is consistent with what they already “know,” they accept it. If it isn’t, it isn’t even examined; it’s summarily rejected. Psychologists call this “confirmation bias;” exasperated Thinkers call it cherry-picking.

Every society has both Thinkers and Drinkers, but Drinkers proliferate in times of rapid social change and uncertainty. When the proportion gets out of whack–when we have way too many Drinkers (or worse, when we’ve elected too many of them)– our political institutions no longer function.

Social scientists spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to make Drinkers think.

The prospects aren’t good.

I’ve recently come across some political psychology research that is extremely worrisome: when people who are invested in a belief– people who have “drunk the Kool Aid”–are presented with irrefutable evidence that the belief is false, they don’t abandon it. Instead, they cling to it even more tightly. They believe it more fervently. The “birthers” are a good, albeit extreme, example. (No birth certificate ever issued will convince them that the black guy in the White House is legitimate.) Creationists and climate-change deniers are others.

Most of us can come up with plenty of other examples, from the brother-in-law who sends those racist emails to the biblical literalists demanding that the legislature do (their version of) “God’s will,” to those who believe the world is composed of “makers” and “takers.”

Facts and evidence don’t move these folks. They don’t see shades of gray, and they are impervious to logic and reason. Show them mountains of data–most poor people work 40 hours a week, low taxes don’t create jobs, American health care ranks 37th in the world, not first– the Drinkers simply won’t believe you.

The Drinkers are driving me to drink.

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Truth to Power

When David Frum was a speechwriter for George W. Bush, I didn’t think much of him.  His most memorable phrase–the “axis of evil”–fed into the bipolar worldview of W’s administration, and was distinctly unhelpful.

Since he left politics for journalism, however, he has been nothing short of admirable.

Frum has joined the small but growing group of frustrated Republicans like Bruce Bartlett,  Norman Ornstein and Andrew Sullivan who have been willing to say aloud the things that so many of my own companions from a long-gone GOP share privately. He has been willing, as the saying goes, to speak Truth to Power.

A recent column about Fox News is an example, and well worth clicking through to read in its entirety.

Frum notes the research showing that Fox viewers know less than people who don’t watch any news at all, but he says that criticizing Fox for its manifest inaccuracies is to miss the point. Fox isn’t in the news business.

Before Fox, news programmers had struggled with the question of what their product was. Did it include health information, and if so, how much? Weather? Financial information? Human interest? Political opinion? Ailes built his new channel upon a very different question: who is my product for?

The largest generation in American history, the baby boomers, were reaching deep middle age by the mid-1990s. They were beginning to share an experience familiar to all who pass age 50: living in a country very different from the one they had been born into.

Fox offered them a new virtual environment in which they could feel more at home than they did in the outside world. Fox was carefully designed to look like a TV show from the 1970s: no holograms, no urban hipster studios, lots of primary colors.

In other respects too, Fox offered a path back to a vanishing past. Here was a place in which men were firmly in charge, and in which women were valued most for their physical attractiveness. Here was a place in which ethnic minorities appeared only in secondary roles — and then, with brave exceptions, only to affirm the rightness of the opinions of the white males in the primary roles.

Fox, Frum tells us, is intentionally geared to the anxiety-filled old white men who are having great difficulty dealing with the uncertainties of a rapidly changing world–a world where they no longer enjoy unquestioned privileged status.

Like talk radio before it, but even more intensely, Fox offered information programmed not as a stream of randomly connected facts, but as a means of self-definition and a refuge from a hostile external reality. Fox is a news medium that functions as a social medium.

Ailes began by identifying his target audience, and shaping his “news” to their tastes. As a business strategy, it was brilliant. Unfortunately, the collateral damage has been extensive–both to the American political system, and more recently (and ironically) to the Republican party.

What’s that old story about riding the tiger?

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Playing “Let’s Pretend”

There are two kinds of “let’s pretend” games.

The first is intended to illustrate a principle. For example, let’s pretend that you have a teenage son. You don’t have much money–you live in low-wage, “Right to Work” Indiana–so you’ve been saving  for several years in order to send him to college. He’s also been depositing money from his part-time job into the joint savings account the two of you have established.

One day, you discover he’s dropped out of high school, and taken all the money to buy a car. He explains that he needs a car now, to get to his job at Burger Heaven, where he makes three dollars an hour more than his friends who work elsewhere. Besides, he argues, the future benefits of a high school diploma (forget college) are speculative.

Would you dismiss the unequivocal data about education and lifetime earning disparities and general well-being? Would you endorse his decision to make more money now and damn the future?

Business groups evidently think the kid is doing the right thing.

According to a story buried a couple of days ago in the Indianapolis Star, a coalition of national and state business groups is fighting new rules on greenhouse gas emissions. Indiana  Gov. Mike Pence says Congress should quash the pending regulations because they would hike energy bills and cost jobs.

The new rules will cost businesses and consumers some money now. Those rules, however, are a necessary part of a still-inadequate effort to slow global climate change. It bears repeating that there is no scientific dispute about the reality of that climate change.  We are already seeing its effects. 

Too bad, say the members of the business coalition.

The business coalition, of course, is playing the other “let’s pretend” game–the one being played by people who prefer keeping an extra buck or so in their pockets now to addressing climate changes that will make life miserable for our children and grandchildren. The game played by pretending that the science is flawed, that the warnings are speculative, or that a heavy winter snow is proof that there is no “global warming.”  

As scientists have been telling us for quite some time, a warming planet changes climate patterns. Hurricanes increase in intensity; Alabama and Texas get massive snowstorms while the Arctic ice melts; California has droughts, sea levels rise, species lose their habitats.

All of these things are already occurring. Dealing with them is already costing us a lot more than compliance with federal regulations will cost, and failing to deal with climate change now–pretending that it’s a “hoax” or that the science isn’t settled–is ignorant at best and dishonorable at worst.

When the son who left high school is fifty and still making minimum wage, how will you justify letting him drop out?

When our grandchildren ask why we allowed the seas to swallow New York and Florida, why we failed to prevent the loss of twenty-five percent of the Earth’s species, and why we didn’t protect large areas of the planet from becoming uninhabitable, how will we justify our shortsightedness? Are we going to admit that greed and immaturity–our unwillingness to be even minimally inconvenienced in the here and now–led us to pretend it wasn’t happening?

Playing “let’s pretend” is for children. The businesses fighting for their right to keep polluting need to grow up.

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