Category Archives: Problem Practices

Communication behavior or analysis that is often counter-productive

Federal Workers on the Firing Line

Problem Practices, , , , , , , , , ,

The trumped-up urge to cut the size of the federal workforce started as a whim that has been grotesquely distorted into a faux emergency. 

If there is evidence that the nation has lost its soul, it is found in the somewhat muted response to mass firings of federal employees who work in our behalf. News of instant dismissals is its own awful spectacle of humiliation, made worse by the fact that it comes from  self-satisfied billionaires who seem mostly indifferent to the pain they have created. Images of dismissed workers at USAID are searing. These folks funneled American aid from the American public to some of the poorest of the poor around the world. There is evident depravity in this president’s capacity for dismembering careers and whole government agencies.

The urge to cut the size of the federal workforce –including Veterans Affairs–is yet another whim turned by this administration into a fake emergency. It has gained surprising energy by feeding off of the rancid American habit of sneering at honest wage workers who make our civil society possible. Slow some of the bureaucracies may be. But that is a long way from suggesting that they are unnecessary.  We should have been smarter to keep both a felon and a reactionary away from the crown jewels of our best agencies.

 “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy”  –Elon Musk

Our busy lives would not be possible without the millions who work in federal jobs that support the nation’s financial and physical infrastructure. In my own family the Army sort of taught me to swim. I had a grandfather who was a USDA meat inspector, and an uncle who played his part in building the mammoth Roberts Tunnel that carries water 23 miles under the continental divide to cities on the eastern side of the Rockies. He was especially proud of the huge working models of western dams at the Bureau of Reclamation’s labs at Denver’s Federal Center. We westerners were well aware that life itself was not sustainable without the many high desert water and power projects managed by the federal government.

Public employees work to sustain the nation’s fragile forests, national parks and vast tracts of land, often with backhanded asides about “lazy” federal workers. In the nation’s twisted values, we are supposed to honor the darlings of the American economy that flood us with useless things that they have imported from China. Many are kept watered and overfed in order to keep investors happy with our top-heavy consumer economy. By comparison, public employees should have our respect for laboring to do essential things like help keep the lights on.

When we step into an airplane to start a trip we rightly assume that the FAA has assured that we will safely step off at the other end, no worse for the experience. Similarly, we expect to be able to travel at freeway speeds because we benefit from carefully engineered highways. Like all cars, Musk’s overpriced Teslas require federally funded Geotech engineers that give cars their value. We also expect federal inspectors to notice unsafe bridges, accurately determine the airworthiness of airplanes and their pilots, and to coordinate electronic superhighways that are licensed to accommodate wireless messaging.

If you live long enough, you probably will owe your life to the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates every major transportation accident, vowing that a known cause will only happen once. The learning curve of this federal board has helped to make flying safer than walking.

A federal worker has probably helped you get federally-backed insurance, or worked to insure your health through their research at the National Institutes of Health. We depend on others at NOAA, the Food and Drug Administration, and the many other federal agencies that have extended our lives. These folks do their work without seeking the spotlight: They usually don’t strut around in suits and ridiculous trucker’s hats to pretend they are from working world.

We should not be surprised to witness Donald Trump still treating working men and women badly. Readers may recall that decades ago he developed, furnished, and eventually bankrupted several Atlantic City casinos. In 1989 one small family-owned music store delivered new pianos to the Taj Mahal Casino worth $100,000, and was promptly stiffed. After signing a contract for the full amount, Trump claimed he could only pay $70,000, forcing Hightstown’s Mike Diehl to take a $30,000 loss. It was the first and only time in 30 years that Diehl had a client who abused his trust. In retrospect it was one of what has become a whole series of grifts, including four additional bankruptcies and 34 felony convictions, all signaling his misanthropy.

 

 

red bar graphic

It’s 1984 Again

Problem Practices, Rhetorical Mastery, , , , , , , , , , , ,

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”  –George Orwell

It has been a pathetic spectacle to witness the ransacking of our federal government under the guise of serving the American public. Extra-legal acts of sabotage to agencies like the NIH have come with the explicit endorsement of the GOP and implicit acceptance of a somnolent public. We have to wonder what kind of country actually wants the self-inflicted wounds of wholesale firings and dismembered agencies. Few democracies have seemed so placid in the face of such self-destruction.

It tends to be the smaller declarations from the White House that capture its sloppy logic and daily rhetorical mayhem.

Consider the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. The Gulf is shared by three nations. Though the  mental  fog may sometimes lift from his thinking, Donald Trump was logically out of his lane to overturn tradition and unilaterally assign a new name. Mexico and Cuba rightly have other ideas.

And for keeping the same geographical label, the Associated Press was suddenly barred from full access to the White House.

In overturning an uncontested place name Trump sought to turn a rhetorical whim into reality. Like his absurd palaver ignoring the sovereign states of Canada and Greenland, he squandered his authority to deny what others can clearly see. Such denial tries to sell a fantasy as the truth. Only small children and politicians engorged with a sense of power would try this kind of sleight-of-hand.

And so when CNN’s Kaitlan Collins put the question to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, her response was stunning in its audacity. The logic of Leavitt’s non-answer would bring no credit to even a child. She tried to sell the renaming as settled fact, and the traditional name a “lie.” “I was upfront on day one if we feel that there are lies being pushed by outlets in this room, we are going to hold those lies accountable,” she noted. And with a straight face she continued with a perfect example of doublespeak: “It is a fact that the body of water off the coast of Louisiana is called the Gulf of America, and I am not sure why news outlets don’t want to call it that, but that is what it is. The secretary of interior has made that the official designation, and geographical identification name server, and Apple has recognized that, Google has recognized that, pretty much every outlet in this room has recognized that body of water as the Gulf of America, and it’s very important to the administration that we get that right.”

                                 Karoline Leavitt

The circular logic here tries to sell this weeks old fabrication as the status quo, presumably while the rest of us will avert our eyes to avoid noticing that Mexico itself shares over 1700 miles of shoreline along the Gulf. This kind of  binary thinking is Alice in Wonderland kind of stuff, spoken—amazingly—to a packed pressroom disappointingly silent except for Ms. Collins.

Ditto for the new administration’s insistence in the same press conference that gender is a simple two-tailed concept. In attacking efforts to deal with the dynamic nature of gender identity, Leavitt wanted to hold to a view of language that admits no well-documented subtleties. Apparently the Trump administration is ready to declare “that there are only two sexes, male and female. And we have directed all federal agencies to comply with that policy.”

Again, Leavitt can say this, but even in the precincts of the White House her truth is a forgery. She needs to get out more. It is settled science that gender is fluid, allowing no one-size-fits-all dichotomy. As the University of Iowa’s Maurine Neiman has noted, scientists of human reproduction “are in wide agreement that biological sex in humans as well as the rest of life on earth is much more complicated than a simple binary.” In fact, according to the Gallup Organization, nearly one in ten Americans identify as L.G.B.T.Q. Poor Ms. Leavitt wondered off into the weeds again to presume that it was her place to deny firm scientific proof. He attempt to usurp the prerogative of Americans to shape and affirm their own identity would have been wide of the mark even in 1894.