An American Disingenuous Solution

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.