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By Raff Ellis
(YellowTimes.org) – When George W. Bush
came into office, he announced that henceforth, government would be run like
a business. No more of that inefficiency and skullduggery of the Clinton
years. With George W. as CEO of USA. Inc., government would run on time;
meetings would be short; and complex issues would be presented to him on no
more than three typewritten pages. What's good for American business is good
for the country.
And perhaps no administration in history
was as prepared for the job of transforming the federal government into a
corporation than the Bush team. Most of the president's intimate advisors,
including the vice president and secretary of defense, have long resumes as
businessmen, as well as politicians. If anyone could whip the company, uh,
country into shape, it would be these seasoned executives.
Now that they've had more than two years on the job, I think it's time for
the American people to grade their report card. When George W. Bush took
office, the Dow Jones average stood at approximately 10,785. Today it stands
at around 8,600. But that's just one indicator, and anyway, it's not the
president's fault, his supporters say, because he inherited these problems
from the Clinton administration.
Yet a quick glance at the records of our businessmen-cum-bureaucrats suggests another, more plausible reason of why things have gone south: the "executives" in Bush's USA Inc. are acting the way they did in business: telling lies, breaching ethics, practicing cronyism and feathering their own nests while cutting benefits for the average worker.
It should come as no surprise, of course, because George W. didn't make his fortune from his business acumen but from sweetheart deals and unethical drift. While an officer of Harken Corp., he pocketed over $800,000 by using insider information to sell Harken stock a week before it tanked. It's the same insider breach that caught Martha Stewart and ImClone. The difference is that, unlike the president, she was not an officer of the company.
In fact, the Bush family has a long, well-known litany of business failures and sugar-laced deals of the type rarely offered to those without political power and the ability to pay back. Both of Bush's younger brothers, Neil and Jeb, were involved in the crash of large Savings & Loans in the 1980s, joining the cadre of unscrupulous businessmen who made millions while the taxpayer ended up paying $500 billion to clean up the mess.
And that's just the family. VP Dick Cheney denied his oil services company, Halliburton, did business with Iraq during the embargo even though it was shown to be true. Now, while in office, he continues to receive compensation from Halliburton as it is being awarded contracts for pumping oil and reconstruction work in Iraq. That used to be called conflict of interest, but now its become business as usual.
And the list goes on. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is well known as a profiteer who never let ethics stand in the way of a lucrative business deal. He was on the board of a company, ABB in Switzerland, when it sold light-water nuclear reactors to North Korea in the year 2000. Back in 1983-84, Rummy met Saddam Hussein, the future threat to the security of the U.S., as an envoy of Ronald Reagan. He was lobbying to get a Bechtel-built oil pipeline approved that would route oil from Iraq to Jordan.
And let's not forget Attorney General John Ashcroft, who often wears his morals on his sleeve. He, too, has skeletons in his ethics closet that include political payoffs. As governor of Missouri, Ashcroft declared an "economic emergency" to push through an 18-mile, $140 million freeway right to a major contributor's property. He also received (and didn't report) a favorable deal on a boat from a contributor who got $1 million in Missouri state contracts.
The case could be further augmented with an examination of the dispatched Thomas White, former Secretary of the Army, and Harvey Pitt, former SEC Chairman. But you get the idea.
When asked why he robbed banks, the famous robber Willie Sutton honestly answered, "Because that's where they keep the money." In today's world, it's too risky to emulate old Willie and because "where the money is" is in the executive suite. Why rob a bank with a gun when you can fleece the company you work for with a pencil?
The business practices of the last decade in corporate America have led to a decline in quality and services in many areas of our economy. The captains of industry learned that hiring part-time workers is less expensive because you don't have to supply them with costly training, health insurance or pension benefits. Such cuts in costs and services have resulted in lower quality or higher prices for many essential goods, not the least of which is health care and drugs. And we see the same pattern emerging in government. Many citizens go without proper medical care or insurance because the government can't muster the wherewithal to provide for them due to the higher priorities of military spending and tax cuts.
As a result of this "business approach" in USA Inc., we have higher unemployment (some 2 million jobs lost since Bush took office), fewer people with health coverage, an education system that lacks proper funding and veteran's benefits being slashed. These issues are virtually the same as those that these former corporate executives resolved by robbing their shareholders and raping their employees. Cutting costs for social programs, the environment, and cutting benefits to the little people allows the administration to finance small things like a war with Iraq (also with the abundant use of "temps" from the National Guard and Reserves), while running up huge deficits for programs to pay back their corporate friends in the defense and energy sectors. These grateful beneficiaries will, in turn, use some of this largesse to lavish contributions on their benefactors, helping them to remain in office. It's something these businessmen have been doing all their executive-suite lives, only now it's the citizens and taxpayers who are being raped.
Perhaps Mr. Bush and his cronies who run USA Inc. would do well to remember this warning from Franklin D. Roosevelt:
"The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in essence, is fascism -- ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling power. Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing."
Is it time to turn out the businessmen and give government back to the politicians?
[Raff Ellis lives in the United States and is a retired former strategic planner and computer industry executive. He has had an abiding and active interest in the Middle East since early adulthood and has traveled to the region many times over the last 30 years.]
Raff Ellis encourages your comments: rellis@YellowTimes.org
Printed with permission from www.yt.org