HerbEly

Katrina, the Big Dig & Workplace Spirtuality

Brian Feil, writing in Government Executive has this to say about Katrina and the tunnel collapse in Boston:

The Big Dig highway cost $14 billion and took well over a decade to build. It was complex, involving many federal, state and local agencies and numerous contractors. The New Orleans levee system was similarly complex, involving many agencies and many contractors. These two projects have been the subject of numerous oversight reviews by inspectors general and other watchdogs.

In both cases, the engineering problems that contributed to the deaths were identified by overseers in the past, though the significance of the problems was not understood before it was too late.

Because both projects were messy, complicated affairs with multiple masters over many years, it's hard to pin the engineering failures on any particular player or any particular decision. Perhaps there are lessons to be learned about the need for clear lines of authority, centralized control and oversight methods that not only identify problems but make sure they are solved. Continuity of leadership was missing in both cases.

Once again - and this is a lesson that bears frequent repetition - workplace spirituality is not just, or even first, matter of witnessing one's faith. It is first a matter of rendering service to one's employer and to the public. This requires the practice of ten basic disciplines including attention to quality and challenging one's employer when serious mistakes are being made.

Katrina: Post-Traumatic Personal Growth

There are some ghosts in today’s stories about recovery by the victims of Katrina. The GetReligion Blog defines "ghosts."

One minute they are there. The next they are gone. There are ghosts in there, hiding in the ink and the pixels. Something is missing in the basic facts or perhaps most of the key facts are there, yet some are twisted. Perhaps there are sins of omission, rather than commission.
A lot of these ghosts are, well, holy ghosts. They are facts and stories and faces linked to the power of religious faith

Here are two news stories about an ongoing study of the mental health and recovery of victims of Katrina. See if you can spot the ghosts in this story by AP writer Jeff Donn:

In a testament to the resilience of the human spirit, a new survey reveals that the traumatized survivors of Hurricane Katrina forged a surprisingly powerful inner strength that steeled them against suicidal despair.

Katrina & the Big Dig: It Wasn't Bush's Fault it was --

Tip Oneil's fault. Ten months ago I was writing this about Katrina and Tip O'Neil's remark that "all politics is local:

Katrina revealed that there were weak links in every level: local, state, federal and private. While this is true, the “all politics is local” remark reveals another set of links, firmly forged, that blocked informed efforts at preparedness. (See FEMA’s July 23, 2004 press release on the impact of notional “Hurricane Pam”and the telling photo of the mayor Nagin memorial motor pool). Local, state, and federal politicians have forged a well-oiled mechanism for channeling federal money to local flood related construction projects. These projects, however, are are more related to getting re-elected than to flood prevention.. Our Senators and Congress-critters all understand Tip O’Neil. Federal funds get local votes. Local voters are more likely to respond to appeals to short term interests than to long term efforts to prepare for the next crises.

Now Jeff Jacoby makes a similar point about the newlywed crushed by piece of falling concrete in the Boston tunnel

All politics is local, Tip O'Neil famously said, and it surely doesn't get any more local than when a 6,000-pound slab from a project championed by the late House speaker falls on a 38-year-old newlywed from the Boston neighborhood of Jamaica Plain, crushing her to death as her husband drives her to the airport. O'Neill died in 1994, but the political culture he epitomized is alive and well and enshrined in the Big Dig, a slough of corruption, callousness, and cover-ups that had become a synonym for government mismanagement long before it killed Milena Del Valle on July 10. It would be going too far to link O'Neill to the incompetent workmanship and negligent oversight that led to the collapse of a 3-ton ceiling panel in the Interstate 90 connector just as the Del Valles drove beneath it last week. But the culture that he embodied is still solidly in place.

George Bush was wrong when he said that the country was addicted to oil. It is addicted to Pork.

Wolf – Warning Weariness, Part III

Last week the Washington Times questioned the scare stories about the coming Avian Flu epidemic. Today's WaPo has review of two books about Avian Flu. One of them warns that "the wolf is coming" the other says that it isn't.

Wolf – Warning Weariness, Part II

This morning Michael Fumento offers a debunking of the coming Avian Flu crises. His excellent story reminded me of my earlier posting on how the public tires of and then ignores continuous alarms of coming crises. Eventually, just like the village elders in the fable, the public gets tired of the little boy who always cries: The wolf is coming!”. Some times the wolf, like Katrina, does come and then we are sorry that we did not heed the warning. Other times the warning comes from a “little boy” just trying to attract attention, just as in Aesop’s fable. In some cases the warning may be genuine, but we are sure that politicians, pundits, and fund-raisers are just trying to attract attention. This is true for the coming wolves known as:
• Global warming
• Social Security
• Medicate funding
• Energy shortages
And now the Avian flu crises.

Before we yield to panic, lets look at some of Fumento’s skepticism about the danger:

'THE indication is that we will see a return of the 1918 flu virus," warned the nation's top health official. "The projections are that this virus will kill one million Americans . . . " But the topic wasn't an impending "bird flu"pandemic — it was 1976, and the prediction for the "swine flu" fell 9,999,999 deaths short.

That's something to remember as we endure the current hysteria. Another is that we've been here before with the same virus everybody is now squawking about: Avian influenza type H5N1 hit Hong Kong in 1997. Typical headline: "Race to Prevent World Epidemic of Lethal 'Bird Flu.' " (I published an anti-hysteria piece then, too — and got condemned as "irresponsible.")

The world death toll from that "wave?" Six.

But this time it's for real, right? Predictions of worldwide deaths range from a U.N. official's "5 million to 150 million" (Translation: We're clueless) to one U.S. health official's estimate of 180 million to 360 million, while ABC News sent feathers flying saying there'd be a billion dead.
…
Ersatz expert and former Newsday reporter Laurie Garrett, now with the Council on Foreign Relations, claims that unlike our annual flus, which usually kill indirectly by exposing the body to secondary (and treatable) bacterial infections, Spanish flu "was a direct killer" and therefore, "Had antibiotics existed, they may not have been much help."

Wrong.

"Even in 1918 there was a window of opportunity so that if they had drugs they could have made a major difference," one of the nation's top virologists, Dr. Frederick G. Hayden of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville told me. "It would have been susceptible to both antibiotics and antivirals."

Register with the NY Post and give Fumento a reading. We need to be prepared – but should not be pushed into a panic, spending our tax dollars needlessly, and then be surprised by a different wolf.

Katrina: Pork Addiction VII - Withdrawal Symptoms

Starting on September 22, I've been making the case that it the broken levees were a result of addiction to federal pork. Now we read that Senator Tom Coburn tried, and failed to break the addiction by shifting funds from a bridge in Alaska in order to rebuild a bridge destroyed by Katrina. The senate found this withdrawal of funds too painful. For an account of the story, see Outside the Beltway

Katrina: Pork Addiction VI

For the past nineteen months I’ve been writing about how leaders can make bad, even disastrous, decisions. I’ve suggested that institutions, including the Roman Catholic Church and the intelligence community can exist in a state of denial. In this morning’s Michael Grunwald and Susan B. Glasser paint a broader picture of societal failure to prevent a flood that everyone knew was coming. The canvass is broader than the one used by Sidney Finkelstein in his Why Smart Executives Fail: And What You Can Learn from Their Mistakes.

Katrina: Pork Addiction V

Part of a continuing series on how hard it will be stop the spending patterns that contributed to the severity of the flooding in New Orleans. Misspent federal funds, aka Pork, prevented construction projects that might have saved the city. An obvious first step in rebuilding is to stop spending federal money on low priority projects. It won’t be easy. Townhall columnist Herman Cain writes

Congressman Don Young’s (R-AK) response to the suggestion by some of his colleagues that he forego an appropriation for his home state to offset a portion of the hurricane recovery cost exposes our monumental weakness in congressional leadership. Congressman Young called giving up his $223 million “bridge to nowhere,” which will connect the City of Ketchikan to an island with 50 residents, a “moronic” idea.

This leadership weakness is found in the shocking number of elected officials who care little if any about the overall good of our nation and could not lead themselves out of a paper bag. In crises like the magnitude of the recent hurricanes, this lack of leadership is accentuated by finger pointing, indecisiveness, bad ideas and doing absolutely nothing. As a result, the citizens are receiving from many in Congress a collective leadership-to-nowhere.

Consider Senator Max Baucus’ (D-MT) response to his own constituency’s offer to help pay for hurricane relief by returning the $4 million he secured for a parking lot in Bozeman. Senator Baucus stated that he “can not and will not support giving away these hard-fought dollars.” That’s code for “I fought for this pork, and I’m going to keep it.”

…

Unfortunately, the Republicans are just as leaderless on spending offsets

All those congress-critters (note my use of a gender neutral term) need that pork. Their constituents need it. The very thought of doing without it causes pain. Sounds like withdrawal symptoms to me.

Give Hermain Cain a read.

Katrina: A Pork-free Recovery Plan?

The Center for Economic and Social Justice contacted me concerning their "proposal to finance the rebuilding of the areas affected by Katrina and Rita in a manner consistent with Catholic social teaching and without putting everything on the backs of the taxpayers."

I'm honored to be contacted. it will take some time to evaluate this - especially since it is outside my areas of expertise. Please read and leave comments if you wish.

This post linked to Beltway Traffic Jam

Katrina: Pork Addiction IV – Tom DeLay Secures the Supply Chain

On September 22 I observed that the root cause of the disaster in New Orleans was an addiction to Pork. Had federal funds been spent as intended, the flooding would have been less severe – or even non-existent. Local politicians diverted federal funds to other projects, even though they knew the potential destruction from a direct hit by a category four hurricane. Pork is just this: spending funds intended for legitimate purposes in order to make local politicians feel good.

Now we see that Representative Tom DeLay has been indicted for misusing campaign contributions. News stories and opinion columns will be dominated by the question of his guilt.

This debate should not distract us from another issue: DeLay’s contribution to the pork delivery system. As a politican, he plays hardball. As David Brooks points out in today’s NYT

The DeLay Era would be marked by one word: partisanship. Far from being a conservative ideologue, DeLay was a traditional Tammany Hall politician who would do whatever it took to put more Republican fannies in House seats. DeLay was never the ruthless tyrant news media reports made him out to be. He's actually a modest, decent and considerate man. But he is willing to sacrifice all else for the team.

(Thanks to Tim Worstall for the link.)

The problem isn’t that DeLay is a dedicated Republican, willing to use the rules to help his party win. The problem is that DeLay’s actions make it easier for the politicians to acquire, deliver, and prepare federal Pork. This is the charge that Dick Morris delivers in his column The Real Sin of Tom DeLay

In the reapportionments that followed the 2000 Census, the political parties in almost every state cooperated to draw the district lines to minimize the number of incumbents who would lose their seats. As a result, the number of House incumbents defeated in the post-Census elections has reached an all time low. In the elections following the 1980 census, 42 House members were defeated. In those after the 1990 election, 39 lost their seats. But after the 2000 census, only 16 members were defeated — half by other incumbents drawn into the same districts as a result of the shrinkage of the state population.

The result of DeLay's efforts is that the control of the House of Representatives has now been predetermined and taken out of the hands of the voters. No matter what happens nationally, the GOP will control the House until the 2010 reapportionment.

Once in place, our congress-critters (note the gender-neutral term) are secure. It is expensive to challenge an incumbent. It is almost impossible to dislodge a politician with his hands on the pork supply chains.