America's minority party, the Republicans, are "governing" by Extortion

Steve Benen puts into words what we have recently seen from Republican politicians in America. They can't get their policies voted in by majorities, so they have resorted to a form of politics not ever seen from an American major party before - Extortion Politics.

Republicans aren’t just radicalized, aren’t just pursuing an extreme agenda, and aren’t just allergic to compromise. The congressional GOP is also changing the very nature of governing in ways with no modern precedent.

Welcome to the normalization of extortion politics.

Consider, for example, the Republican decision to reject any and all nominees to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, regardless of merit, unless and until Democrats accepted changes to the agency’s structure. Traditionally, if the GOP wanted to alter the powers of the CFPB, it would write legislation, send it committee, bring it to the floor, send it to the other chamber, etc. But that takes time and effort, and in a divided government, this “old fashioned” approach to policymaking probably wouldn’t produce the desired result.

Instead, we see the latest in a series of extortion strategies: Republicans will force Democrats to accept changes to the agency, or Republicans won’t allow the agency to function. Jonathan Cohn wrote a good piece on this a couple of weeks ago, noting the frequency with which this strategy is utilized.

Republican threats to block nominees to the consumer board are of a piece with their opposition to Don Berwick, Obama’s first choice to run the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services; to Peter Diamond, whom Obama tapped to sit on the Federal Reserve Board; and most recently to John Bryson, Obama’s nominee to take over the Commerce Department. It’s nothing short of a power grab by the Republican Party — an effort to achieve, through the confirmation process, what they could not achieve through legislation. And it seems unprecedented, at least in modern times.

Republicans effectively tell the administration, over and over again, that the normal system of American governance can continue … just as soon as Democrats agree to policy changes the GOP can’t otherwise pass.

The traditional American model would tell Republicans to win an election. If that doesn’t work, Republicans should work with rivals to pass legislation that moves them closer to their goal. In 2011, the GOP has decided these old-school norms are of no value. Why bother with them when Republicans can force through policy changes by way of a series of hostage strategies? Why should the legislative branch use its powers through legislative action when extortion is more effective?

The Great America that the Republicans are working so hard to destroy became great because it was operated democratically with legislation passed through majority votes. Today's Republicans are destroying America by destroying America's democratic process in which the nation is governed through rational legislation passed by majority ovtes.

The Republicans need to admit they got it wrong before being considered credible

The Republicans were in complete charge of the federal government from 2001 until 2006 and got the whole thing seriously wrong. An incomplete list of their failures includes:

• Running one of the most corrupt political administrations seen in America. this has been true both for the Executive and for the Congressional branches.
• Failed to deal adequately with the problem of anti-American terrorism,
• Embroiled America in two wars, at least one of them totally unnecessary and neither of which was well prosecuted.
• Failed to adequately deal with the well-anticipated problems that occurred when Katrina struck the Gulf Coast and New Orleans (then did not live up to the promises to rebuild New Orleans),
• Illegally wiretapped American citizens more for political purposes than for American security purposes while shredding the Constitutional due process requirements of the Rule of Law (a truly bedrock requirement for a Constitutional democratic Republic),
• Broke the law by authorizing the useless and counterproductive process of state sanctioned torture.
• And created economic conditions that put America and the entire world into financial conditions worse than any since the Great Depression of the 1930's. Had Barack Obama not directed unprecedented and desperate financial actions that have place the American taxpayers in the position of saving the Wall Street bankers whose unregulated risk-taking was the major contributor to the financial instability that effectively destroyed the world financial system, America and the world would now be deep into the greatest financial depression the world has ever seen.

Mind you, this is only a partial list of everything the conservative Republicans have gotten wrong. A much larger list will be available as historians dig out the criminality and idiocies that have been buried behind government secrecy laws.

The American voting public has caught on to the failure of the conservative Republicans and has repudiated them at the polls in 2006 and 2008. But the media acts as though the conservatives remain the more credible of the two significant American political parties, and the Republicans themselves have refused to recognize that anything they have done contributed to the major problems their governance have left for America to dig out of.

Steve Benen has been discussing this situation with Bruce Bartlett, a well-known and capable conservative analyst who worked in both the Reagan and H.W. Bush administrations. This is what Bartlett wrote to Steve about the Republican Party:

I believe that political parties should do penance for their mistakes and just losing power is not enough. Part of that involves understanding why those mistakes were made and how to prevent them from happening again. Republicans, however, have done no penance. They just pretend that they did nothing wrong. But until they do penance they don't deserve any credibility and should be ignored until they do. That's what my attacks on Bush are all about. I want Republicans to admit they were wrong about him, accept blame for his mistakes, and take some meaningful action to keep them from happening again. Bush should be treated as a pariah, as Richard Nixon was for many years until he rebuilt his credibility by more or less coming clean about Watergate with David Frost and writing a number of thoughtful books.

One reason this isn't happening is because the media don't treat Republicans as if they are discredited. On the contrary, they often seem to be treated as if they have more credibility than the administration. Just look at the silly issue of death panels. The media should have laughed it out the window, ridiculed it or at least ignored it once it was determined that there was no basis to the charge. Instead, those making the most outlandish charges are treated with deference and respect, while those that actually have credibility on the subject are treated as equals at best and often with deep skepticism, as if they are the ones with an ax to grind.

I am truly baffled by this situation, as I'm sure you are.

The American Constitution is very much the basis for the liberal American political system, but it was written by a group of the wealthiest men in Revolutionary America as a protest to the arbitrary tyranny of the King of England and an English Parliament that had no consideration for the rights of Englishmen who were overseas colonists. For all it's virtues, the Constitution set into place a government of limited and carefully separated powers that allows a small minority of wealthy and powerful Americans to relatively easily frustrate the will of the American people.

That's no surprise. The founding fathers represented the American oligarchy which dominated the primarily agricultural set of colonies that were later to grow into America. For all the advantages that the Constitution has given America as it grew into a massive urban industrialize nation spread across the North American continent, it failed to adequately deal with the corrosive problems of slavery which resulted instead in the Civil War followed by the American apartheid of segregation and it did not provide for a true democracy in which the government adequately deals with the economic problems created by exploitative and ignorant business people and especially Wall Street Bankers.

A preplanned and structured government to deal with those issues would have locked the nation into too many errors unforeseen at the time they were adopted. The ability to innovate and create better ways to do things created a much better overall system. But now we have a two-century old philosophy of government that locks the status quo and the existing power oligarchy into control at a time when the needs of the American people are opposed by that oligarchy. One of their weapons to maintain the status quo (by which they benefit at the cost of millions of Americans)is the philosophy of an agriculturally-based system of small government with low taxes and a set of tax and power preferences for the existing oligarchs. Worse, this is unquestioned by the mass media which those same oligarch control. Those oligarchs are in the catbird seat. Is it any wonder that they do not want to change a system they control and one in which they gain great advantage?

The American oligarchs are in a similar social and economic position today as were the French aristocrats in France against which the French people rebelled in 1792. They do not want to give up the advantages they have, and they do not want to permit the government to tax them further individually to support America. This is nothing new. The same economic and power class in America pushed through massive tax cuts for the wealthy in the 1920's just as they have again in the 1980's, 90's and the first decade of the 21st century. The economic and social result has been the same. The great and growing financial inequality has led to massive economic instability.

But since the same class of oligarchs control the American mass media, there has been little discussion of their power and of the dangers of the extremes of economic inequality that the oligarchs revel in. They prefer the secrecy that they enforce by propaganda and by control of the major media centers. The discussion has not escaped their control until the economic and political disasters they have fostered have festered and grown to an obvious wound in American society.

Bruce Bartlett professes to be "...truly baffled by this situation." He shouldn't be. The problem is that the small group of people who get the greatest advantage from the current system also have sufficient power to control the terms of debate through control of much of the media and through propaganda techniques that pushes a traditional conservative ideology rather than a fact-based modern scientific discussion. The oligarchs are conservative, since their power is based on tradition. The facts no longer support their ideology. They recognize this and fear what the actual facts will suggest should be enacted.

I am not arguing that modernism and the currently known facts should trump tradition and conservatism all the time, but when there are massive problems spread across society they can only be ignored so long before they endanger what America is and can be. Tradition is an important part of what makes any people great. But a tradition based on secrecy and secretly enacted power held by a small oligarchy who is gaining more power and wealth because of the problems in society is an illness in America. The strengths of the American Constitution all grow out of the collection, analysis and exposure of facts. The Constitution is a great document because it both grew out of traditional English law and political experience and yet was the result of a group of men who sat down together, collected the known facts of the situation and developed a new governmental structure to replace two that had failed - a distant traditional Monarchy and the Articles of Confederation.

The attempt of the then new Constitutional government to incorporate the economic system based on slavery failed because slavery cannot coexist with a democratic form of government, and the Constitution could not create an organic way to deal with slavery. The Civil War partially resolved that problem, although it festered on in segregation until the Civil Rights Movement finally placed American society on the path to correcting that clearly unAmerican problem.

Now, with modern America having grown into an urban industrial power, once again the conservative structures within society are failing to meet the needs of American society. Health care cannot be provided efficiently to everyone in America by the private and unregulated health insurance system, and the economy cannot be allowed to go under the control of oligopolistic and monopolistic economic power structures. The 18th century philosophy of Adam Smith does not work in a modern industrial society the way Smith described it in an economy dominated by craftsmen and small farmers.

It is time now to remove the blinders of tradition and ideology, collect reliable facts, and create new structures within the American tradition of government controlled by the people and conducted in public with minimal secrecy.

When that occurs, Bruce Bartlett will find that he is no longer baffled by the situation because he has stopped ignoring the power discrepancies that have created it.One very important step in that direction will include credible self-analysis of the Republican failures by Republicans themselves, aided by sharp and insightful analysis from the media. We Democrats are going to have to help them get there.

I seriously doubt that America has a competent government

It is my opinion that the first function of every government in existence is to provide social and economic stability and general security to its population. It's job is not to provide protection to the wealthy oligarch or to large corporations nor is it the job of a competent government to fight wars of choice because some stupid leader thinks that they can change another society to something that leader prefers. That's the Iraq war, and earlier the one in Vietnam if you don't already get the reference.

Because of the increasing cost and complexity of health care, and because of the many health dangers that exist in our increasingly complex and globalized economy and society, any government that fails to assure health care to every citizen and legal resident is failing in a major test of what it takes to justify its existence and it should be replaced immediately with a government that will provide universal health care. It is inexcusable that any citizen should for any reason have their health insurance canceled with they file any claim or be forced into bankruptcy because of the costs of care for an illness or accident.

Harry Truman ran for President on a platform that included a demand for and the promise of national health care. That was over 60 years ago, and the wealthy American oligarchs together with a greedy and insensitive medical establishment has delayed and blocked every effort to provide that program in all those decades. The American government has failed its people for more than two generations now. Will it fail again this summer?

Apparently I am not the only person who feels this way. David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo published this email earlier this evening:

TPM Reader AB:

Just to mention something that is obvious, but hopefully not overlooked, i.e., if this country cannot pass a bill which insures that every citizen has access to medical care, which every developed country has managed to do (and got done many many years ago), there is something very fundamentally and structurally wrong with this country.

Such an event, in my mind, would confirm that we live with a completely corrupt and dysfunctional form of government. Forty nine states, each with bicameral legislative bodies, some of which have distinguished themselves recently with unabashed levels of incompetency and cluelessness. Then, graft a federal government over that, which is also bicameral, the non-representative portion of it being filled with officials who are certifiable morons and/or who are bought and sold like whores by wealthy contributors.

Talk about a Waterloo.

This is a defining moment in our history. Do we fulfill our supposed status as a "shining city on a hill" or continue our long slow decline into a second rate oligarchy?

I am not one prone to hyperbole.

I believe this to the depths of my soul.

I have no idea who TPM Reader AB is, but he has it right.

If the government fails to pass the health care bill this Summer, then it is time to change to government to a party that will pass it. That's clearly not the Republicans or Libertarians, and if the Democrats fail this summer, it is no longer the Democrats.

Here is why the health care crisis so critical to America

Any government that fails to meet the needs of large segments of the population for economic and social stability for a long time becomes less legitimate. As the government loses legitimacy, threats to replace it by one means or another rise. The health care crisis has reached the point where government can no longer protect its legitimacy by buying off large groups of people. The number of uninsured is growing, and a much broader group of those supposedly with health insurance are beginning to realize that it may not mean anything. Even if you can get care, the uninsured cost can bankrupt you. Too often the insurance company itself will cancel the policy before paying large claims. Add the health care crisis to the near brush with Depression and the rising unemployment and the government is in trouble. Any politician in office right now should be looking over their shoulder and feeling that their job is threatened. Only those politicians in the most radically gerrymandered states or districts can feel safe. Watch the contortions that Arnold Schwarzenegger has been going through to try to act sane for the moderate voters and still keep his conservative creds with the right-wingers.

When the government attempts to enforce an ideology or religious doctrine on large groups of unbelievers they face push back. When the numbers of active unbelievers get large enough, the threat becomes dangerous to the incumbent government's continued hold on power. The government then has two choices on how to deal with that loss of legitimacy and the resulting threats to its continued hold on power. It can either step in and do what is required so that fewer people face the problems or it can resort to more extreme authoritarian methods of repressing those who threaten to replace the government in power.

China's communist government considers the Uighur population to be a threat because they reject the Communist doctrine based on materialism. That was also the Chinese government's problem with the Falun Gong and the Tibetan Buddhists. But it has also been the problem for the American conservatives who are trying to enforce their strange ideology on America. It explains the pressure to steal elections and conduct dirty tricks, as well as the expanded actions by right-wing extremist groups like the anti-abortionists, the racists and the anti-immigration groups. The push-back the conservatives get from those of us who recognize the snake oil they are peddling is why they still feel like they are an oppressed minority.

But that mechanism is also the basis for why Obama is dropping in the polls. Fewer and fewer people see him acting to protect them from the economy or from the American medical disaster-zone that is good primarily to make a few more people rich and occasionally provide pretty good medicine but unreliably for anyone but the very rich.

While the economy was expanding a lot of people who were not rich thought they might become rich, so the threat of a health care crisis seemed less likely. Now that the conservatives have also destroyed America's economic growth, that group has clearly gotten smaller as more and more people are sweating out just keeping their job.

The real problem for health care reform is clearly in the rich man's club in Congress - the Senate. The Republicans have been a shrinking minority, but they are no longer in power. The Democrats are, and the economy and health care crisis reflect on the Democrats now. It's clear to the Republicans who are left that if they can just hang on they begin to regain the power of the opposition during times of social and economic crisis. Which leaves the gang of six. All of them appear threatened and desperately grasping for funds to gain reelection. How to deal with them is the question.

Obama's advertising in their states is a really good idea. Let's hope it works, because the health care crisis is ground zero for the continued existence of the Demorats in power in Congress and in the federal government. This is one the Democrats must win. That is equally true for the conservatives.

So that's the battleground in a nutshell. And politically, nothing else matters now. Nothing.

America's growing plutocracy

America is becoming a nation in which wealth dominates the government and in which the financial rewards from the economy are monopolized by wealth instead of ability and accomplishment. The term for that is "plutocracy." The ideal of America has always been a society that was a "meritocracy" in which ability and accomplishment dominate government and the rewards from the economy flow to those who are most productive. We are losing that ideal.

What is the difference? In a meritocracy society rewards those who demonstrate personal abilities that increase economic and social productivity and who are useful to others. In a meritocracy the government is run by individuals who have demonstrated personal achievements. In a plutocracy, society rewards the holders of great wealth rather than those who have personally accomplished things of note.

The key government policies in a plutocracy are those that protect great wealth and the ability to keep it in the family. In a meritocracy the key government policies are those that grow greater wealth for society, and instead of allowing it to remain concentrated in a few pockets already dominated by inherited wealth, they spread it to those who contribute most to building society and to increase economic productivity.

But don't people with great wealth get rewarded for their achievements? No, generally they are rewarded for their personal networks and ability to raise funds needed to build organizations (productive or not) which they will then dominate because of their networks among the wealthy. I offer as an example George W. Bush, who has never in his life achieved anything, but because of his family and its wealth he was handed a series of jobs at the top of oil companies, then handed a professional baseball team, and finally was handed the Governorship of Texas followed by the Presidency of the United States. At no time has he ever achieved, let alone exceeded, expectations. There is one exception. He was placed in government by those who have great wealth, generally inherited, and his job has been to appoint government officials who act to protects and augment families with great wealth.

Just my opinion? Go look at the chart that Kevin Drum has posted and read his explanation. The top line on his chart - the one that shows the income flowing to the top 1% of America families - shows clearly that America is rewarding wealth, not ability or productivity.

Protecting and rewarding wealth is the central purpose of the conservative movement, even when it makes American society less productive.

Another example of Norquist's small government - the recent floods in the state of Tobasco

Rick Perlstein has a continuing subject he calls "E Coli Conservatives." It's all about what happens when government is starved for funds so that only private business can function. Now we have another example for his series. The Tobasco floods which occurred a little over a week ago in which over 80% of the low-lying South Mexican state of Tobasco flooded.

Tobasco isn't a very wealthy state, and it is mostly very close to sea-level. But the problem was anticipated and funds were made available to prevent exactly what happened. Here is the story from The Los Angeles Times:

VILLAHERMOSA, MEXICO -- Although many people in this rainy, low-lying tropical city regard last week's catastrophic flood as an act of God or fate, others see it largely as a man-made disaster that could have been anticipated and should have been prevented.

Residents of Tabasco state, one of Mexico's poorest and most isolated areas, have experienced such calamities before, including a 1999 deluge that left more than 600 people dead.

But even as water levels slowly receded this week, environmental activists, opposition politicians and others expressed frustration and anger that more was not done after the 1999 calamity to avoid a replay. They said that the present flooding was fueled by rampant overbuilding, deforestation and wetlands destruction, and the squandering of funds that should have been spent on flood-prevention measures. [Snip]

"The resources that were given from [1999] and 2000 for the matter of inundation were badly applied, badly handled," said Hugo Ireta, a member of the Santo Tomas ecological association. "The state government gave the concession for these works to people that had no idea of what was needed, that never did studies."

Government collects money through taxes a lot more easily than most businesses (the ones not selling to government) do. People in government who are not watched closely will steal government funds. This is true of both government officials and of contractors to government. Individuals simply cannot be trusted to be honest when handling large sums of other people's money.

That's why no government executive can be trusted to make decisions without being closely watched, and the watchers need to be subject to review, oversight and the most disclosure that is possible. This is especially true during wartime, since the tendency is to conceal all mistakes, thefts and corruption behind a veil of classification.

The government and its funds do not belong to the government officials of any rank, no matter how high. They belong to the People. American Republicans, Congressman Jefferson, and the officials of the government of the state of Tobasco need to be watched, investigated, and when wrong, punished.

Oh, and the corruption in which the American telecoms participated when they illegally handed telecommunication data over to the government should also be investigated, publicly exposed, and punished instead of offered immunity from prosecution.

Things government does well that private enterprise can't or won't do

Want a list of things done by government better than by private enterprise? Check this post out.

There are a lot of things that private enterprise does better than government, but they all are based on a private company that chooses a market to serve and focuses on that market, ignoring everyone else. They are also things that do not require spending money today for long-term uncertain returns in the distant future. That's why government funds basic science which is published without patent, and private enterprise designs and builds patented products.

Go read the article at Firedoglake. Things that would never have been built by private enterprise include nuclear power, Boulder Dam (for power, flood control and irrigation), computers generally (developed for the federal census and then social security programs), space rockets and satellites, microcomputers (developed first for the use of the space program since it cost too much to put vacuum tubes into space), jet aircraft, supersonic aircraft, the interstate highway system, the Internet, and myriad other things. Each of those was initiated and provided early funding by the government.

At some point lots of it was spun off from the government programs into private enterprise, but investors would never have placed their money in any of those items if government had not proven the ideas and developed the first products.

We also wouldn't have (as an example) pocket calculators if it weren't for Texas Instruments or personal computers without Hewlett Packard and Apple, so I am not attempting to belittle private enterprise. My point is that there are things best done in the private economy and others best done by government. Trying to replace government with private organizations will result in the governmental job not being done well. The key is to recognizes what functions belong to which sphere of society.

Problems too big for private enterprise

It is clear to anyone not blinded by ideology that some problems are best handled by letting private for-profit organizations deal with them and others cannot be solved by private enterprise. Creating and selling toothpaste, clothes and consumer electronics are not areas the government should be involved in. The products are manufactured and distributed as a matter of routine and are easily exchanged for money from the end users. For larger products such as automobiles lenders can establish systems of payment that are appropriate for those who need those items. No one dies because those goods and services are not provided as a matter of Right.

Providing military defense, police and justice services and gathering standardized date on the entire population are functions best handled by government because those functions cannot be turned into commodities which the end user can easily be charged for. This includes social infra-structure like building and maintaining roads, bridges, port facilities, levees, dams, etc.

Managing a city and a large region fit into the government category. So does planning and preparation for disasters, natural or man-made. Which brings us to Katrina. The problem with protection from a hurricane, evacuation ahead of it and recovery after it is that it requires close coordination, a lot of preparation work, the training and developing of a professional corps of recovery workers, and it all has to be done on a massive scale which is larger any private organization.

If a hurricane or earthquake were a regular and predictable occurrence, then it might be possible to let a private organization charge subscription fees and offer preparation and recovery services. Such an organization would be an insurance company. The problem is that any expenditures for preparation and for maintaining infrastructure would not be supported voluntarily by all of the population getting the services. This is the "Free Rider Problem."

The "Free Rider Problem" alone kicks the situation into one that requires government (with taxing power) to handle it. It fails just as subscription fire departments in cities failed. A fire department can't just let non-subscriber's property burn down because the fires will jump to the property of subscribers.

The next problem is the cost of preparation for an uncertain but massive event. Rick Perlstein discusses that in today's edition of "Conservative Failure."

Conservatives in government ignore warnings that are likely to cost a great deal of money and may or may not come true. In a private business the managers define the market they will serve and then focus on that market to the exclusion of other subjects. This permits tight focus so that the market can be served at the lowest possible cost. It does have the negative that it sometimes prevents top managers from recognizing other opportunities, but private businesses are small enough that if one organizations ignores a market, another will very probably serve it.

Governments are monopolies. They don't allow competitors. [This is necessary, but I will not discuss why here.] They cannot define a limited group of people to be their market and serve only that group. Governments are responsible for everyone withing their borders, and to some extent, for citizens outside their borders. This is not a choice, it is by definition.

The tight focus on a limited market that permits private enterprise organizations to limit costs and serve only those who are easy to serve is an impossibility for government bureaucrats. The problems dealt with by government are also, by definition, those which private organizations cannot handle effectively.

At this point, consider what it means to be efficient vs. to be effective. An organization is efficient as long as it provides output at the lowest possible cost. Serving only the easy customers and focusing on the process of serving them allows for efficiency.

An organization is effective as long is it performs the most important tasks, regardless of cost.

Government cannot choose which customers to serve most cheaply. It must serve those who it is most important to serve. When a few people reached Canada a few years ago with a very infectious form of influenza, they had to be isolated regardless of what it cost to find and isolate them. The problem was of uncertain size and seriousness, but clearly of great importance. It was too large to be handled by private business organizations, even assuming they could afford to throw the resources necessary at the task. Also, there was no room for an individual who might have the flu to tell government to leave him alone. Free riders are not allowed in Public Health problems. Public health is for this reason a government function, not a private business one.

People who think that the private enterprise model should be the model used by government organizations as well simply don't realize what they would have to give up.

If you haven't already done so, go read Rick Perlstein's description of the conservative failure to deal with Katrina. It's important.

Problems, decisions, boundries, and best practices

There are effective ways to sharply improve the outcomes from an organizational process or processes. The free market ideologues would lead you to believe that the only way is to let private business operate completely free from any and all government interference, and that somehow the magic of the market will provide great products and services at the lowest possible prices. There are elements of truth to that, but the idea is more flawed than accurate. Let’s look at how a process can be made to provide sharply improved outcomes over those it provided earlier.

In order to improve a process, a decision-making person has to have feedback on the quality of the results of what was done earlier, and that must determine which efforts succeeded and which failed. Then they must learn the “best practices” which can increase the number of successes and reduce the number of failures. This requires a thorough understanding of the process that provides the outcomes and very careful measurements of the most important aspects of that process. The very striking example Dr. Atul Gawande presents in his book "Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance" (Metropolitan Books, 2007) is the way the military has measured emergency medical care for injured soldiers and improved that care so that deaths have been reduced from 25% of causalities down to 10%, not by breakthrough new medical methods as just by applying best practices to the points in the process with the highest death rate.

The key is to isolate a process, or even a segment of a process, and then measure everything that is happening in that process and also to measure and rank the outcome of the process according to its degree of success or failure. Then focus on what elements of the process contributed to the failed outcomes and determine how those elements can be changed. The process must be thoroughly understood. I am not sure whether Dr. Gawande realizes that this is an application to battlefield medicine of the ideas called “Best Practices” in business quality control, but it is.

One very important point to keep in mind is that after a change in the process outputs will often degrade for a while until the newer process becomes established. This temporary period of degradation must be accepted if the overall process to become better in the long term.

Another very important point is to consider how the process is isolated. There has to be an organization that is inside those boundaries and which encompasses the problem that is to be improved. Those boundaries are of critical importance. People outside those boundaries must not be allowed to interfere with the decisions taken by the qualified decision-maker who is working to improve the process.

Andro Linklater reported on an interesting historical experiment in allowing individuals set up relatively autonomous organizations, measure their success and improve them in his book "The Fabric of America: How Our Borders and Boundaries Shaped the Country and Forged Our National Identity" (Walker, 2007.) He contends that it was not just the frontier that made America such a successful nation. It was also the fact that Americans applied the latest survey techniques to the older common law ideas of private property as Americans moved west into new frontier areas. By use of the latest surveying technology and by having the government record who owed each parcel of land American ranches and farms became independent little organizations, each managed by its owner.

These individuals then had their own personal property with which to make economic decisions. Output could be measured in terms of amount of a crop or number of cattle, and using markets to put prices on those outputs, prices could be used to compare relative outputs between farms and ranches. This allowed each farmer or rancher a sphere of independence in which no one else could step in and make decisions for him. The most successful farmers and ranchers were those who learned and adopted the best practices.

This isn’t really a new idea. It was, in fact, the reason for the state agricultural extension services and the agricultural schools in America. What it was, however, was unique in world history up to that time. The very economic success of this process is largely the basis of the free market ideologists in politics today.

There are a number of problems with this model, however. First, and most important, markets only provide a limited measure of economic success or failure. Productivity matters – a lot – but so does quality of life for people in and around a business. The sawmill up river from the town I grew up in threw its chemicals into the river for over half a century. That lowered their costs, increased their profit and destroyed the fishing (among other noxious results) for nearly 100 miles downriver. Market-based economic decisions could not, by themselves, measure all of the costs of the lumber produced because there is no connection between the market transactions for land, labor and capital inputs and the resulting corporate revenue accept the (self-serving) assertions and estimates of business management in their financial statements. Government has to provide additional measurements for such otherwise unmeasured things as environmental dumping. This always creates major political issues around what should be measured and published as measures of the real costs of input and output.

This becomes an even greater problem for organizations that are not economic in nature. Schools are an example. In spite of all efforts we have yet to develop comprehensive effective and informative measures of the important characteristics of the most important inputs to a school, especially the characteristics of students and teachers. On top of that, there are no markets that create a semblance of comparable measures of student outcomes. Grades at best record the opinions of teachers about short-term progress, or the outcome of very limited written tests. Nor do we understand the educational process well enough to describe it, let alone comprehensively measure the most important elements in it. The result is that every attempt to apply objective measurable standards to inputs and outputs of schools is met with political cries of outrage by those who don’t like the results of those measures.

Justice Roberts recently solved that problem very neatly in the question of determining the effects of Racism in schools. His decision was that measuring race is, itself, Racist, so it was forbidden to measure race or racial outcomes of schools. The American problem of Racism is one that he and four of his colleagues do not want solved, so they have the power to prevent measurement of the problem. They used that power.

Another problem is that as the American economy has become more interlocked both internally and internationally, the level of problems to be resolved has grown larger. The decision domain of the solution to a problem must be as large as the problem itself for any solution to work. Larger organizations exist to control larger (mostly economic) processes.

Also, as economic processes get larger, they begin to have to differentiate between those controlled by markets at each stage of production or by common ownership, which allocates resources administratively, rather than by free markets. A steel company that owns the iron and coal mines, the foundries, and the steel fabricators will rarely resort to using markets between the mines and foundries and again between the foundries and fabricators because the information collection costs of markets is very expensive. The overall cost of the final product can be greatly lowered by using administrative means to determine how much coal and iron is mined and shipped to foundries and how much steel is shipped to fabricators. However, the increase in efficiency is attained at the expense of flexibility, so that such a large organization cannot be innovative the same way smaller ones can be. The strategic requirement for such a large integrated company to compete on the basis of cost per unit means that major changes in the product cannot be made without losing market share during the period of the time in which the changeover is being made. (See Oliver E. Williamson and in particular his book “Markets and hierarchies : analysis and antitrust implications : a study in the economics of internal organization”)

The limited decision domain around the problem must be large enough to encompass the problem. If the problem is that trains do not leave a given station on time and the decision domain is established at the level of the station master, he can keep the trains from sitting at the station too long but he has no control over whether they arrive at the station late. A decision maker cannot completely deal with problems from outside his area of control. That is a major reason why economic organizations get larger. But the managers who work closer to the economic processes make only those decisions delegated to them from higher management.

The American agricultural economic experiment breaks down as businesses get larger and decisions are centralized further away from the individuals who physically work with the core productive processes. Government has always existed to solve society-wide problems, but as economic processes get larger, the organizations that control them get larger. But like government, top managers in larger organizations make their decisions primarily on the basis of political power of the decision makers, since they cannot have direct experience with all the processes they manage. Direct experience is possible only in small organizations.

The American agricultural economic experiment applied historically to decisions made in the limited domain of relatively small family farms, which is why the idea of establishing boundaries and measuring processes and outcomes carefully within those domains is important. Problems that are too large to be dealt with effectively within a given set of borders require that larger borders be drawn. But what happens when the decision is too large for any individual to handle by himself. The decision-makers in such very large and complex organizations require staffs of specialists to assist in decisions in their respective areas.

Decisions in such an environment cannot be made by a single all wise individual because individuals are limited in how much each can rationally decide. That is why the decisions made at the central core of every large organization will always be political. That is, the decision-maker with the greatest level of power will choose which of the alternatives will be implemented. But since the decision is based on political power, any negative outcome of that decision will cause the decision maker to lose power. Any measurement of negative results will either not be measured or the measurements will be spun to provide good results. It is impossible to improve processes when the outcome measurements are not honest, but no political decision maker dares honestly report negative results. Improved outcomes result only from determining what processes cause negative results, and that is impossible for a political decision maker to permit.

It is because of this process that rational decisions in an organization must always be made at the direction of a politically powerful individual.

Problems that are too large to be solved within any given organization normally have to be excluded by the decision maker instead of solved. As an example, when Racism is a major problem in society that problem will cross over any decision borders that are defined for groups smaller than a state or nation, and will often cause problems within the smaller decision domains. Racism, being a social problem, cannot be solved in each of the set of limited domains. The minority Race can, however, be excluded and this will often lead to better outcomes for those limited decision domains because of reduced conflict within each domain. As the American experiment with segregation proved, such problems grow larger in society if they are not solved. The social conflicts and the waste of productive resources limit both the economy and society, so a larger entity with more than just economic power will have to establish Race-neutral best practices and enforce them on the more limited domains. Only government can make such social changes, and the otherwise economically independent (but smaller) business groups have to be changed whether they like it or not.

Like any change in the process intended to improve the outcomes, such an edict will have the effect for a while of reducing preferred outcomes until it is fully established. Only after it is fully accepted will the better outcomes become apparent.

The advocates of totally free market solutions will not allow each employee of an organization to make their own independent decisions, but they have to let trained individuals work as professionals. A nation or society must also have the same flexibility with respect to the economic organizations within it. Social problems have to be solved just as well as economic ones do.

The Iraqi corruption

Iraqi corruption, much of it run from various offices of the Maliki government, is a major barrier to Iraqi development. The Mahdi Army is in control of the Health Ministry and diverts drugs into the black market to finance its operations. In the meantime, investigations into government corruption elsewhere have been stalled when the Prime Minister, Malaki, has stepped in to protect his supporters. MSNBC has the story.

This provides confirmation to an earlier report that says Iraqi 'government' refuses to take control of Iraq. There is no widely accepted single nation of Iraq and no strong-man government to force people to work together, so there is no nation-level cooperation for rebuilding Iraq. Instead there are separate tribes with militias of their own and all kinds of individuals out to line their own pockets, probably more as a survival process than from pure greed or evil intent.

It is not surprising that the Saudi Arabians have no confidence in the Maliki government and are working for its replacement. This is one more reason why Lt. Gen Odum had it right when he wrote that "American Victory in Iraq is not an available option." Every possible solution for a positive outcome in Iraq has depended on success by the Iraqi government, but his is one more indicator - a very strong indicator - that there is no effective government in Iraq.

Given the existing Civil War in Iraq, how likely is it that the problems of corruption can be solved? Can the Maliki government be replaced by a government with better prospects for success as a government?

Right now the very existence of the Maliki government depends on the presence of U.S. troops fighting in Iraq. How can the U.S. responsibly pull out of Iraq? What happens when (not if) the U.S. leaves?

Getting into Iraq was a Bush - NeoCon idiocy. I wrote at the time that we were grabbing the tar baby and wouldn't be able to let go. Sure wish had had been wrong. Two things are very clear, however. First, the solution to getting the U.S. out of the disaster in Iraq will not be found by the Republicans or other idiots who got us into this mess. Second, whatever the solution is, it will not be a result of American military operations. It will be political and will come from cooperation with a bunch of people the current administration does not like and will not cooperate with, almost certainly including Iranians and Syrians.

Sunnis in Iraq especially have every reason to be very, very afraid. The only thing standing between the Sunnis being treated like the KKK treated freed American slaves after the Civil War is the U.S. military, and al Qaeda in Iraq is trying hard (generally successfully) to make that not work. Al Qaeda in Iraq is also doing everything possible to fan the flames of Sunni - Shiite civil war, again with a great deal of success. Iraqis and American soldiers and Marines will continue to be getting killed and wounded for the foreseeable future, and the absence of an effective Iraqi government is a major contributor to the set of problems.

Can you say "Gordian Knot?" Unfortunately, the idea of a clear, simple bold stroke that will resolve the set of problems ("Cut the Gordian Knot.") is what got the NeoCon-inspired idiots in the Bush/Cheney government into this mess in the first place. Bush is no King Alexander, and Iraq is no fairy tale legend. The future for Iraq looks bleak, as does the future for America in Iraq.

Bush misunderstands the Presidency - Congressional leaders properly mistrustful of Bush.

Michael Abramowitz of the Washington Post has an excellent article today about the relations between the White House and Capital Hill. He provides the detail, but from that detail I'd draw the conclusion that neither trusts the other much at all.

I find that unsurprising. The White House does not understand how large organizations make and implement major decisions. For anyone who wants a very good explanation of organizational decision-making I STRONGLY suggest reading the classic Essence of Decision. It is about organizational decision-making, using the Cuban Missile Crisis as an example. Read it and you will never look at "idiotic" organizational decisions the same way.

Let me offer a thumbnail description of the process of strategic decision making for large organizations. The problem of a strategy involves not one, but a whole series of decisions. I'll ignore the problem of actually making an extremely complex decision by human beings who are physically incapable of dealing with more than about seven variables at any one time. For that I will refer you to Herbert A. Simon's concept of Bounded Rationality and Satisficing. The book mentioned above, "Essence of Decision," is largely a very readable example of how real decisions are made under the limitations of bounded rationality.

Strategic Decision Making.

The first decision for a strategic decision makers has to be to decide what goal is to be accomplished. The second decision then naturally flows from the first. How should the goal to be accomplished and what resources (people, money, capital goods, infrastructure, etc.) will be used to accomplish that goal. This seems nice and linear at first. Decide on the goal, then decide how to get there. But the big snag quickly raises its head. Some goals require unavailable resources. They may not exist (colony on the moon or mars,) the resources just may not be available (health care for the masses in extremely poor countries) or they may be being used for other, higher priority purposes (fighting a war rather than providing universal health care.) A lot of the impediments to achieving the goal do not appear until the effort to implement it starts. So what happens then?

The goal decision has to be reopened. Either the goal is abandoned, or it is changed. Then the implementation decisions of how to accomplish the revised goal and what resources are to be used have to be revisited. This iteration may occur several times until hopefully, the goal and implementation decisions are workable and agreed on.

The Goal and Implementation Decisions for Business.

Let's go back and look at the goal decision first. A business has a (relatively) easy job making the goal decisions. The job of a business is to manage a social and economic process so that the cost of the resources used are less than the revenue produced by selling the output of that process. It is relatively easy compared to decisions made by government because a business needs to be responsive only to those potential customers who want those results and to the needs of the process of obtaining and procesing raw materials and selling the output. Anyone who cannot afford the output of the business is simply ignored.

All business goals are based on this idea. A business works ONLY for its customers and potential customers, and IGNORES everyone else. The concept of a free market suggests that those ignored customers may become a market for other businesses, but many people will never become customers. Only people WITH MONEY are customers. [And yes, I am ignoring the problem of externalized costs at this time. Dumping waste into the river rather than dealing with the increased cost of properly disposing of waste is a social problem that businesses work hard to ignore.]

The Goal and Implementation Decisions for Government.

A government does not have the luxury of ignoring whole groups of people when it establishes its goals. A successful government controls (or is expected to control) a specific, defined area of land and is responsible for what people do there and for what is done to them.

With the development of the twentieth century concept of citizenship, the various governments also have become responsible for the care and behavior of individual citizens outside the national boundaries, although this is a limited function. The government of a specific territory always has primary jurisdiction unless the foreigner comes from a nation whose government has negotiated or enforces an immunity for its citizens from the powers of the local government. This is rare, because it is an admission by the less powerful government that it is not strong enough to fend for itself. The legal position of contractors in Iraq has been such a form of immunity for foreigners provided by more powerful nations such as USA and Great Britain.

So a government that governs fairly cannot do so by simply governing for certain powerful groups of people and ignoring the rest - not that they don't try. That is the major reason why industrial nations sooner or later become democracies. Government has one set of problems to solve, businesses another, and traditionally, religions have even another. The real genius of the U.S. Constitutional system of democracy includes the fact that each of those three sets of powers have their own specific realms in which the other powers tread only to protect the overall system, and then very cautiously. The fourth realm of independence was provided by the Bill of Rights to the individual people. This is at least as important as the first three, but individuals without the power of democracy generally have only the methods of riots and revolt with which to make their needs known.

The Social System of Developed Industrial Countries in more Depth.

The purpose of the entire national social system is to provide the very best life possible for every individual. Each of the powerful realms, Religion, Government and Business, has its function to best provide such lives for every individual. Only government has functions that infringe on the independence of the others, and this power to infringe comes with a much greater set of legal restrictions and with the requirement that secrecy be sharply limited unless it is absolutely necessary.

The government sets and enforces the laws and is itself tightly regulated by them. The independent judiciary is needed to evaluate individual cases for compliance with laws under the Rule of Law. For this system to work, no one can be above the power of the law, including all members of the government. But let's look at what each of what I am calling the realms of power contributes to the nation, and what limitations each should face. Then, remember that all of this is in support of the best, most free, and most productive lives of the individuals who make up this nation. Ultimately, the people is why the rest are allowed to exist.

• The purpose of the religious realm is to help individuals to understand and belong to their position in the Universe, or in a different set of words, to understand their relationship to the Divine. Religion offers insight into the mysteries of life and the unknown. It offers an educational function. Religion cannot be allowed to misuse people generally, and to this extent government must intrude on the functions of religious organizations. , but cannot be trusted with the legal powers of law, police and judiciary. These are all functions of government. The main thing that religion needs from government is to be left alone.
  
• The purpose of the business realm is to take in raw materials, process them to add value (including both processing and distributing them), then then sell them to customers who have the money to buy them. A business manages the process that it puts the raw materials through, but needs no power beyond that required to acquire raw materials, capital goods, and to hire labor. Every business requires enforceable contracts and a well-managed currency. Like religion, business cannot be trusted with the legal powers of law, police or judiciary, so the enforcement of contracts is farmed out to government. Similarly, a reliable currency is required for all businesses to operate effectively. This is another function that must be performed by government, and since the banks create most of the money supply through the lending function, the government must also regulate banks to a much greater extent than most other businesses. In a related function, business cannot function effectively without a good understanding of what the other businesses are doing, This is especially true for banks and financial institutions. Allowing other businesses to conduct this without some regulation gives too much power to competitors, so this is another function of government.
  
• The purpose of the government realm is to protect the people (all of them, regardless of the money they have. Government cannot exclude certain groups from its benefits and controls for greater efficiency the way businesses and religions can), religions and businesses from outsiders who ignore the rules. Government also collects system-wide information and applies it to the problems of state rule enforcement. The law enforcement function belongs to well-regulated government organizations. We give government the sole right to use force on individuals to make them comply with laws, and then limit to individuals and government organizations to a specific set of situations in which they can use such power. The independent judiciary has the final approval of such actions.
• People in general make up all of the three realms I have described. The purpose of government is to protect individuals from each other and from predations by religion, business, government and outsiders. Where possible and cost-effective, government also works to make individuals more useful to society. Most importantly, this means helping families to rear their children and to socialize them into American society so that they can function productively. Again, government must have a monopoly of force and there has to be an independent judiciary which passes judgement (within the Rule of Law) on apparent infractions of the law while limiting the effective power of religion, government and businesses.
  

Let me point out again that the above "realms of independence" work only if there is an effective Rule of Law and an independent judiciary in place to enforce it. None of the rest of the system works without the Rule of Law and its effective enforcement. The independent judiciary is absolutely critical to ensure that each case in which two parties have a conflict in which the law is to be applied have a fair and independent organization which will determine the facts, apply the law, and make a judgement. This allows both consistent and fair application of the law. It also exposes individual cases in which existing law is a bad law, and either applies the Common Law or provides the legislature with the information needed to revise the law.

So Why do the White House and Capital Hill Face Each Other with Distrust?

Bush is a business manager. Business decisions properly make a fetish decisions geared towards greater efficiency Efficiency can be best achieved by standardizing products and ignoring, even rejecting, large elements of customer demand. This allows long production runs that minimize costs. The easiest way to be allowed to produce a few very low costs models of any product is to operate a monopoly. Cost can be minimized while revenue will be higher than if there are competitors.

The second best solution for business is to have a few very large businesses who agree to split up the market. This often happens in a mature market. Businesses in such a mature market rarely provide new products or a large variety of models unless challenged by competitors. Frequently it is easier to deal with competitors in a mature or declining market by mergers or buying them out. Such mergers invariably lead to higher cost products, while every step away from monopoly makes achieving low cost through greater efficiency more difficult for the business. Government needs to prevent these mergers, because the closer a business comes to being a monopoly the fewer new products and services it provides, and the higher the price it charges. electric power utilities are an excellent example, as are phone companies. Privately owned and operated toll roads will soon prove to be similar disasters.

Businesses also supposedly react quickly to changes in markets. Such changes require an individual decision-maker with a free hand to be effective and even then often don't work. Still, that business model is better than committee decisions. But this leads to a particular socialization of business managers as they grow in their profession.

As business mangers get promoted in American business they tend to specialize. That limits to kind of decisions they are good at, but they supposedly get better and better at making those decisions - as long as the circumstances in which the decisions are made do not change rapidly. Such managers often know their speciality quite well, but they tend to be weak strategic managers. They make decisions based on limited information and their experience in the past about customers and goals and then focus on the most efficient implementation of those decisions - no matter who is hurt in that implementation. Efficiency becomes the primary attitude that leads to the implementation of decisions. Such managers are not trained to gather information on new and unusual situation, and they are discouraged from being curious outside their speciality. It's not efficient. So they don't deal well with new or sharply changed situations. Usually they try to find someone to hand such decisions off to. George W. Bush is this kind of manager.

The Constitutional Structure of American Government.

At the social and strategic levels, goals are more important than efficient implementation. Government cannot limit itself to a restricted set of customers, so efficiency in any one area tends to leave out a great many people who need government services. Setting goals requires a lot of information of various types from a variety of people. The U.S. Constitution sets up the Congress to represent the people and gather the information regarding what People, Families, Businesses and Religions need from government. The term "Represent" means to know the issues of importance to a variety of people and organizations and to bring this variety to bear on developing the goals of overall government.

The Legislature gathers that information and runs it through competitive pressures and power mechanisms to develop the national goals. Part of gathering that information is holding public hearings on various aspects of government and society. This informs the goal making process while also educating the population about what is happening in society. Once the goals are established, they are then given over to the Executive Department for implementation. The Executive Department does not have the sources of information nor does it have in place the needed procedures to make broad goal decisions for the government. Instead it has the single President and a hierarchical organization that is designed to make implementation of the goals easier once those goals have been provided by Congress.

So the only decisions which the President makes are those of implementing the goals given by Congress, and coordinating the use of the resources the Congress supplies. Congress establishes the goals and the priorities of those goals.

The President also has the limited function of making short term decisions to deal with rapidly changing situations, subject to the approval of Congress. The President also knows of should know what resources and abilities the government has to work with, so he provides information regarding the government's capabilities to Congress for them to use in formulating or reformulating goals. He also reports on the status of goal achievement to the Congress and the people at least once each year.

The Distrust between Capital Hill and the White House.

The distrust between the White House and Capital Hill is based on Bush's misunderstanding of the limitations of his goal formulation power. He has very little, but he wants to take on a great deal more. Yet he has neither the ability nor the Constitutional power to take on such extended duties.

His efforts to implement the so-called "Unitary Executive" are nothing more than an attempt to take the executive back to the forms of power practiced by Kings when the theory was the "Divine Right of Kings." Such power was done away with by every industrializing country as soon as it was realized that the government were too inefficient to run competitive business organizations. The U.S. Constitution was written at a time when it was realized that government was best run by a representative Parliament or Legislature, and America has been greatly blessed by this structure. George W. Bush, having never had a job as an independent manager unless someone brought him into the business for his name and connections, does not understand his own limitations or those of the Constitution.

The Democratic Constitutional leaders recognize this, and do not trust Bush, nor do the Democrats react as he expects to his assumption of powers that go beyond those allowed and expected under the Constitution and by American tradition. The previous Republican leaders of Congress were Right-Wing Authoritarian in personality, so they allowed Bush to take excessive leeway and they failed to do the job Congress is needed to do.

The change from the compliance of the Republican leaders to the distrust exhibited by the current Democratic leaders has rather shocked Bush, and he doesn't understand where he stands with respect to Congress now. Since he recognizes the distrust from the Democrats he similarly distrusts them.

So that is the source of the conflict right now that was described in Michael Abramowitz' article.

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Comments, criticisms and links would all be greatly appreciated. I am trying to get this information into an article short enough to read, and still make it flow easily so that my point is made. I also learn more from dealing with disagreement than I do from agreement, so don't hesitate to offer criticism.