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 Editorials | September 2005 
He's No Warren Buffett
 David Olive - The Toronto Star
The legacy of the Bush administration may well be that government can no longer be entrusted to business people.
That would be a shame, given that business savants as varied as Kennedy treasury secretary Douglas Dillon and Silicon Valley legend Dave Packard served ably in Washington.
Many of the most prominent CEOs in the current administration aren't real business people at all, but faux CEOs who after a lifetime in politics cashed in on brief stints as trophy CEOs at Fortune 500 firms before returning to public life in George W. Bush's White House.
With few exceptions, those CEO stints - at Halliburton Co. (Dick Cheney), rail operator CSX Corp. (John Snow), and George "dry hole" Bush's string of oil-exploration flops in Texas - were not models of exemplary corporate stewardship.
Just the same, future historians will make the connection between the most CEO-heavy administration in memory, headed by the first MBA president (Harvard, no less), and a White House of unsurpassed fiscal recklessness, flawed strategic thinking, failure to execute even on its best ideas (its unrealized goals of education reform and energy self-sufficiency, for instance), and a stubborn unwillingness to change course when conditions dictate.
With his successive rounds of tax cuts skewed to the wealthiest Americans, in tandem with a 37 per cent increase in federal expenditures and Bush's refusal to veto a single spending bill from the GOP-controlled Congress, this White House has in a short five years boosted the national debt by 12 per cent, to almost $8 trillion. America is increasingly a hostage of its foreign creditors.
In a recent study titled "The Grand Old Spending Party," the Cato Institute, a conservative Washington think tank, says that "Throughout the past 40 years, most presidents have cut or restrained lower-priority spending to make room for higher-priority spending. What is driving George W. Bush's budget bloat is a reversal of that trend."
Bush has conducted three wars - on the Taliban, Saddam's regime, and terrorism - without asking a dime of sacrifice from Americans. Indeed, Bush persists in seeking to make his earlier tax cuts permanent and to eliminate the estate tax.
Even with federal spending at a post-World War II high of $22,000 (all figures U.S. dollars) per household, Bush and the GOP congressional leadership are deaf to bipartisan calls to postpone by a year the new prescription drug benefit for seniors - a $139-billion handout to Big Pharma that actually does little to help the elderly.
Or to downsize last summer's pork-laden, $286.5 billion highway bill, the costliest in history, with its $8.5 million for seven transport museums, $4 million for a parking garage in Oak Lawn, Ill., and $220 million for a road extension in Alaska that GOP Sen. John McCain decries as "a highway to nowhere."
The supposed managerial expertise of an administration headed by two former oilmen would suggest a high level of preparedness to protect a region that is the biggest U.S. gateway for oil imports, is home to America's largest concentration of petroleum refineries, and is America's biggest transit point for lumber, coffee, rubber and steel.
But preparedness was woefully inadequate for New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. The Bush administration cut funding for the Army Corps of Engineers's proposed refurbishment of hundreds of kilometres of levees in the region. Bush folded the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) into the new agglomeration of 22 agencies known as the Department of Homeland Security. The administration slashed FEMA's budget, and installed in the demoralized agency's top posts refugees from Bush political campaigns who lacked expertise in disaster-management, triggering an exodus of FEMA's most talented staff.
In the aftermath of Katrina, Bush and Congress hastily began to channel what may ultimately amount to $200 billion - the equivalent of Denmark's GNP, or $400,000 for each of Katrina's half-million displaced people - through FEMA, which lacks the prowess to handle anything like $200 billion.
Its 2003 budget of $87 million accounted for a miniscule 0.03 per cent of total government spending.
"You can easily compare FEMA's internal resources to what you saw in the early days of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq: a small, underfunded organization taking on a Herculian task under tremendous time pressure," Steven Schooner, a contracting expert at George Washington University, told The Wall Street Journal last week. "That is almost by definition a recipe for disaster."
Again, common sense argues for re-establishing FEMA as an independent agency; or better yet, creating an agency autonomous of the administration and headed by a can-do leader like Rudy Giuliani, Gen. Tommy Franks or Colin Powell to expedite reconstruction and ensure the efficacious spending of the restoration outlays.
But for now, at least, the White House refuses to relinquish control of the biggest domestic reconstruction project in U.S. history, which will require the removal of enough debris across a six-state region to fill more than 600 football fields to a depth of 15 metres. Instead, as in Iraq, the administration has swung into action on behalf of Bush campaign donors, swiftly granting no-bid, cost-plus contracts in the Gulf Coast region to the usual suspects - Halliburton, Bechtel Corp., and Fluor Corp.
Halliburton and Bechtel are under federal investigation for alleged government over-billing on Iraqi reconstruction contracts.
Kenyon Worldwide Disaster Management, hired by FEMA to collect human remains in the Katrina-stricken region, is a subsidiary of funeral operator and longtime Bush contributor Service Corp. International (SCI). In Texas and Florida, SCI has settled class-action lawsuits alleging improper burial methods. (In one case, bodies were dug up and tossed in the woods so plots could be resold.)
Katrina subcontractor Goldstar EMS, a star-crossed ambulance provider, is being pursued for local tax arrears, is under federal investigation for suspected Medicaid fraud and is now operating in bankruptcy.
Another firm whose luck has changed for the better since Katrina is Bode Technology Group Inc., hired by FEMA to identify the bodies of storm victims. Bode was fired last month by Illinois state police over allegations of shoddy work.
Meanwhile, in contacting local contractors in the Midwest last week, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch learned that even the most persistent were failing to obtain Katrina-related work.
Typical was independent contractor Kevin Williams, who has an excavating firm in Sedalia, Mo. and whose petitions to FEMA have been less than fruitful. "I've tried calling, e-mailing, NOTHING," he told the paper.
Katrina, of course, is a disaster that has disproportionately afflicted the poor. One of Bush's earliest responses was to sign an executive order suspending contractors on Katrina-related work from federal law requiring employees be paid the local prevailing wage, which means many will be toiling for a minimum wage of $5.15 an hour.
Edward Sullivan, head of the AFL-CIO Building and Construction Trades Department, described Bush's regard for the working poor as "legalized looting of these workers who will be cleaning up toxic sites and struggling to rebuild their communities, while favoured contractors rake in huge profits."
Bush, more obsessed with tax cuts than any president in modern times, has also declared a tax-free Gulf Opportunity Zone. A tax holiday might help the few surviving restaurateurs in the French Quarter, but not 400,000 New Orleans residents who have lost their jobs and have no income from which to deduct tax.
Asked about this odd policy move at a luncheon for GOP supporters last week, Bush responded: "Somebody said the other day, well, that's a tax break. That region is going to have zero income anyway. There's nothing there, in many parts of it. It makes sense to prove economic incentives for jobs to exist." Read that passage six times and it still doesn't make sense.
With his job-approval rating in decline even before Katrina, it didn't take long for Bush to begin reminding Americans that he is a war president and deserves their patriotic support.
Last week he linked Katrina with the war on terrorism. Terrorists, the president said, are "the kind of people who look at Katrina and wish they had caused it. We're in a war with these people." It appears that the president and the rules of logic have parted ways.
If only the U.S. were run more like a business, was the Bush/Cheney mantra in 2000; then America would be a more contented kingdom.
But a sustainably prosperous business doesn't hand vital tasks to cronies, fail to vet its suppliers, starve essential employees of job fulfillment, or blame its shortcomings on bogeymen.
It's a pity the GOP running mates didn't say what kind of business they had in mind - the managerial prowess of a General Electric Co., or the train-wreck of Enron Corp. |
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