Tag Archives: government

Food, Water, Air and Government

Okay. Sunday sermon time.

For the past 30+ years, self-described “small government” conservatives have waged a propaganda war on the legitimacy of the state. While that war has rarely been as explicit as Grover Norquist’s famous threat to make government “small enough to drown in a bathtub,” or as intentional as the campaign I blogged about yesterday, the constant focus has been on what government does badly and the constant refrain has been that “we don’t need no stinkin’ government telling us to [fill in the blank].

Let’s stipulate that, yes, there are many things government at all levels does badly, and yes, we need to monitor its operations and correct its mistakes. Yes, there are good forms of government and oppressive forms, and thoughtful citizens should opt for—and attempt to institute— the former. But that is very different from the irresponsible attacks on the very existence of established political authority.

The shock that has accompanied the water crisis in Flint, Michigan demonstrates the extent to which even the most anti-government among us depend upon a well-functioning bureaucracy—not to mention the extent to which ill-considered ideological decision-making poses a very real threat to the well-being of citizens. (Especially citizens who lack the means to remove themselves from the polity and retreat into privileged enclaves where they can pay for clean water and other “amenities.”)

There’s a lot that might be said about Flint’s situation, and a lot of blame to go around, but  the lesson to be learned goes well beyond the idiocy of “penny wise, pound foolish,” stubbornly ideological policies, or even official misconduct.

America is no longer a country of family farmers and small merchants scattered along the eastern seacoast. The overwhelming majority of Americans no longer grow and preserve our own food or draw our water from a pristine nearby creek. Cars and factories discharge pollutants into our air, airplanes criss-cross the skies, and we live in densely populated cities where—among other things— we can’t just toss our garbage out the back door. The list is endless.

American citizens are utterly dependent on the institutions of government to provide services we cannot effectively or efficiently provide for ourselves. We expect government to assign air lanes so our planes don’t crash into each other, to inspect the foods we buy at the local grocery so we don’t get ill, to prevent the local factory from discharging its toxic waste into our waterways so we don’t drink contaminants, and much more.

The private sector cannot protect even the richest gated communities from polluted air.

There are certainly areas of our communal life where government need not and should not intervene. Debates about the necessity and/or propriety of programs and initiatives is entirely appropriate, as is criticism of poor performance of government agencies or officials.

But.

When self-serving political rhetoric encourages our dimmer citizens to fear a “government invasion” of Texas, when the slightest effort to curtail gun violence sets off hysterical accusations of “confiscation,” when loony-tunes cowboys try to “take back” land held in trust for the benefit of all citizens, when efforts to ensure equal treatment of the nation’s more marginalized groups is rejected by zealots who claim exemption from the laws of the land “because God,” we have not only weakened the bonds of citizenship, we have endangered our own safety and well-being.

If we don’t retreat from our bipolar “government bad/private good” approach to complicated issues, there will be a lot more people drinking brown, lead-filled water and breathing toxic air.

Among other things.

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A Wake-Up Call Too Late?

Finally, the alarms are going off in what is left of the rational GOP. The question is: is it too late? Has the party slept through earlier signals and bells, hitting the “snooze” button too often?

Okay, enough with the strained analogy.

Bill Brock recently wrote a “must read” column for the Washington Post. For young people and those with bad memories, Brock, from Tennessee, served as both a Representative and a Senator from that state, and for four years, was Chair of the Republican National Committee.

I am just as concerned about the destructive tone of the Trump campaign as I am about its demagogic content. How can you hear what someone else is saying, no matter how important, when you’re shouting? How can you bring people into a constructive search for solutions to our national problems when you do nothing but belittle them, and even suggest they are stupid, weak or corrupt?

A truly free society, one that gives its citizens the responsibility of participation, can function only to the extent there is civil discourse. We can engage in a mutual search for solutions only to the extent that we agree a problem exists. That can never happen unless we talk to each other, listen to each other and respect the fact that honorable people can reach different conclusions. When that sense of comity is missing, we are at risk.

Before readers dismiss Brock’s column as just one more heart-felt but ultimately feckless appeal for civility, I would call attention to an important paragraph in which he identifies the structural elements—what he calls “root causes”— that have brought us to this (very unpleasant) place in our national life:

Shouting is only part of it. There are also root causes. They include, but are not limited to, the ever-widening gap between our two parties caused by redistricting abuses and the undeniable sense that the election process itself is being swamped by unlimited and too often undisclosed funds from a select few. There is one more I fear — the too-often cable-TV-driven sense that only the dramatic, only the negative, only the ad hominem attack can garner sufficient attention to assure electoral success. The public disgust is palpable, and rightly so, but in a more fundamental sense, the results are disastrous.

Redistricting. Unlimited and unreported money. The rise of sensationalist, propaganda radio and TV.

We can and should do something about these causes of our political pain. It won’t be easy, but we need to move from today’s pervasive gerrymandering to nonpartisan redistricting. We need a Constitutional Amendment to overturn Citizens United, and far more transparency about political funding.

And–most difficult of all, but also perhaps most important–we need to reclaim what has been called the journalism of verification. We need a journalism that fulfills its constitutionally-protected function of acting as government’s watchdog, a journalism that is trusted because it has demonstrated that it is trustworthy.

Let’s take Brock’s wake-up call seriously—and hope that it isn’t too late to restore both civility and a government that functions.

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What If We Tried Running Government Like a Government?

We’ve all heard it a million times: “why can’t government be run like a business”? I generally want to scream “because government isn’t a business….” but I generally settle for “Don’t you mean we need to run government in a businesslike fashion? You really don’t mean we should run government like a business…”

This notion that government is just like business, only less efficient, is often cited by people as the reason they support candidates for public office who, like Donald Trump or Carly Fiorina, have no government experience (and frequently, only the dimmest idea of what government is and does).

In a recent post–rant, really–Mark Sumner insisted that the recurrent theme that “government should be run more like a business,” is both dangerous and completely counter to the whole idea of democracy.

Government and business are not the same thing. In fact, there are good reasons why, in a democracy at least, any effort to run the government like a business should be seen as a hostile act.

After making the (obvious) point that the business of business is profit,  and the business of government is the common good, he goes on:

Well, those who still want to run government like a business would surely be thrilled at the idea of giving the president a pay raise of 16 percent a year—the average increase for Fortune 500 CEOs last year. In fact, CEO pay has risen 937 percent since the business-friendly 1980s, while presidential pay hasn’t even kept up with inflation. Come to think of it, when you compare average CEO pay to company revenues, it looks like President Obama should have pocketed about $124 billion last year. I think everyone can get behind that aspect of “running it like a business.” Right?

But then, the president would deserve that money, because unlike an actual president, as government CEO he’d have enormous freedom to ignore what anyone else said and run the nation as he wanted. Sell the Grand Canyon! Swap North Dakota for North Sudan! Fire the Congress! Yes, Mr. President.

I suppose that people could mean “run the government like a business” in terms of keeping the books tidily balanced. Only, of course, they don’t. Check out Amazon. Or Twitter. Or… well, just about any of them. Check out all those investment banks that invented more theoretical money than the GDP of the entire world, and then lost it.

I particularly liked his conclusion:

If you want a government that takes as much of your money as it can, delivers as little as possible, gives what it takes to a handful of the powerful, and is intrinsically unstable … Sure. Run it like a business.

And actually, there have been governments run this way. Plenty of them. There’s even a word for it. Starts with an ‘F.’ Just Google Mussolini, Benito. You can take it from there. Though, speaking of Mr. M, a lot of this “run it like a business” stuff seems to grow out of a longing for having one tough-talking leader at the helm. Maybe you should add Mugabe, Robert and Franco, Francisco and Dada, Idi Amin to that search. Like I say, this kind of government isn’t exactly a new idea.

On the other hand, if you’d rather have a government that’s interested in providing the best service to the greatest number of people, in rewarding everyone fairly, in protecting the weak from the powerful, then you have another choice. You need to run it like a government. That’s the only way you can, hmmm, what’s that phrase?

“Establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”

That stuff. There’s no profit in that stuff. That’s why it’s nobody’s business … but should be everybody’s government.

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Pogo Was Right

The long-discontinued cartoon Pogo was famous for one particular insight that Pogo– an amiable, philosophical opossum–shared with his friend Albert the Alligator: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

No kidding.

Is the American public ill-served by a media that has abandoned journalism for propaganda and celebrity? Whose fault is that?

Who clicks on the links about missing blonds in Aruba or Kim Kardashian’s latest selfies while ignoring well-sourced, comprehensive news reports? Who tunes in to talk radio and Faux News in order to have urban legends repeated and prejudices reinforced? America’s media is a business; it responds to the market and gives us what we demonstrably want–entertainment, not credible, verifiable information.

Are the interests of voters and citizens alike ignored by the squabbling fools in Congress? Who elected them?

And whose apathy will re-elect most of them, even after ongoing demonstrations of their inability to compromise, negotiate or do the public’s business. Even after it becomes embarrassingly clear that many of them have zero understanding of the Constitution they’ve sworn to uphold. Even after it becomes abundantly clear that they are doing the bidding of their donors rather than concerning themselves with the interests of their constituents.

Yep. We have met the enemy, and it is most definitely us.

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Letter to the Next President

Don Kettl is a highly respected scholar of government and public management, and he has penned a very thoughtful article–I would say a “must read” article– for a recent issue of Washington Monthly.  In it, he pretends that the 2016 election is over and he’s advising the winner.

Titled “Ten Secret Truths About Government Incompetence,” he begins with the “secret truth” that government actually does a great many things with admirable competence, and works far better than most people think, sharing a long list of areas in which good government performance is taken for granted.

Kettl uses the list to warn the new President that good management will go unremarked, but screw-ups will be magnified.

He also points out that media and citizens alike fail to distinguish between embarrassing, but essentially minor, mistakes, and truly consequential ones:

You’ve benefited from the “Obama is incompetent” narrative. It increased the public’s appetite for getting you—and some fresh air—into Washington. But let’s be honest: you lucked out because of the media’s inability or unwillingness to notice, care about, or explain the difference between hugely consequential management screw-ups and only modestly consequential ones.

Failing to plan for the occupation of Iraq? Disbanding the Iraqi military? Putting inexperienced political cronies in charge of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and downsizing the agency prior to Hurricane Katrina? Now those were screw-ups—big, far-reaching, world-historic blunders that led directly to the deaths of thousands.

As Kettl says, compare that to the inept Obamacare website roll-out , where no one died, and the problems were soon fixed.

Of course, these were big stories—but they were mostly big political stories. The stumbles embarrassed the Obama administration, hinted at an underlying management problem in the administration (more on that shortly), and helped the Republicans weave a powerful campaign narrative. But the stories weren’t about big failures with huge consequences. They were about putting torpedoes below the political waterline.

Kettl also addressed one of my pet peeves: the notion that government should be “run like a business.” Addressing his mythical new President, he writes

You made the case in your campaign that government needs to learn from the best-run private companies. That’s an irresistible line that Republicans invented and Democrats—especially Obama—have come to champion. But, of course, you know that the private sector isn’t always a model of good management. Remember New Coke, Windows 8, the collapse of Chi-Chi’s restaurants, and shrapnel-filled airbags? That’s even before we get to the wholesale financial miscalculations and fraud that led to global economic collapse.

The private market has a big advantage over government: it can bury its bodies in balance sheets and deal with its failures by quietly turning out the lights and locking the doors.

The entire article is well worth reading, especially the section on outsourcing–the fact that most government work is no longer done by government, and how that fact complicates management and accountability. His reminder that so many of the problems we attribute to a President are really problems created by Congress is especially timely.

All in all, the article is an important corrective to the rampant, uninformed anti-government rhetoric meant to appeal to people who don’t have the foggiest notion what government is or does or how it functions.

It’s also reminder that We the People not only need government,  we need the civic skills to make it work properly.

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