Posted by CotoBlogzz 05-30-2010 03:30 PM
A piece titled Dishonesty at Interior not Comforting at this Crucial Hour by American Solutions published today in the Red County is a clear indictment of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and the now ex- Minerals Management Service Director Liz Birnbaum.
The piece takes exception to Secretary Salazar’s assertion
that Ms. Birnbaum “ has been a strong leader, and we have done tremendous
work….and has helped to address a "culture
of corruption" in MMS.
While Secretary Salazar’s statement is interesting,
we find that the President’s statements
are even more telling – just after asserting that the “Buck stops
here” and “we are in charge”, the President, when asked about Minerals
Management Service Director Liz Birnbaum’s resignation, he had no idea as to whether Ms. Birnbaum had
resigned or been fired - Not a good illustration of a leader who is really in charge, as he asserted minutes earlier.
The piece then goes on to describe its frustration resorting
to the use if the Freedom of Information Act (FOI) to obtain information from
the MMS: “After months of delay, we
finally received on February 3, 2010, a set of documents that included an email from
Ms. Birnbaum to several Interior officials. As reported
in the Wall Street Journal the next day, Birnbaum wrote "The Secretary may
get questions about this FOI request
while he's in Houston ... We do have a preliminary tabulation of the comments,
it has not yet gone to the Secretary," – anyone faintly familiar with the
FOI should know that when a parasitic bureaucracy wants do withhold information
from the public, it very easily can and does.
Parasitic bureaucracies use the
Madoff approach – the idea is to not leave a paper trail such as the use of
the un-recorded telephone conversation, personal communication tools, such as
personal compute resources and or email accounts, or even outsource
telecommunications services, hence arguing that it is someone else’s
responsibility to make sure proper records are kept. The culture at MMI is symptomatic of parasitic bureaucracies,
such as the Department of Education, the EPA, the California Law Revision
Commission, the EECO, LAFCO and others. Heck, just take a peek at the
“alternative paths” characterization of Bill Clinton’s latest job offer to pave
the way for Specter’s ultimate Spectre.
No reasonable argument can be made
stating that MMS should not be held accountable for the comedy of errors
surrounding the Golf Spill and that the culture of corruption at MMS does not require
change – Let's be clear, the culture at MMS or any other parasitic bureaucracy will not change, unless lawmakers and the public take a stand against what
we call the Triple Threat: 1) Unions, 2) Parasitic Bureaucracies
and 3) Lobbyists - just note that it
takes generations to truly change a culture - and while the disingenous argue that "culture change starts at the top," the real culprit is the union aided an abetted by civil
servant legislation which fertilizes the union and subsequent parasitic
bureaucracies.
Perhaps
more intriguing than the indictment by American Solutions against Secretary Ken
Salazar and the now ex- Minerals Management Service Director Liz Birnbaum, is
American Solution’s self-described grandiose objective “… designed to rise above traditional gridlocked partisanship, to provide real, significant
solutions to the most important issues facing our country…. driven by its
powerful approach:
- Broad scale engagement of elected officials and candidates of both parties at all levels of government, interested citizens, private sector leaders, reporters, scholars and students.
- Development of big, breakthrough solutions to the most important issues facing this country, including creating jobs and prosperity, energy independence, protecting workers' rights, reforming education, moving government into the 21st Century and more….?
Now, if the piece Dishonesty at Interior not
Comforting at this Crucial Hour
is intended to describe a breakthrough solution or to rise above traditional
gridlocked partisanship, then it is an utter failure.