Civil servants? Heaven forfend

Big weapons commanded the big letters in the headlines relaying the policy shift in the Pentagon.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates would de-emphasize outer-space missile defense in favor of defenses on terra firma. He'd emphasize smaller ships over big ones. He would phase out the F-22 fighter and cancel a $13 billion splurge for a new class of presidential/vice presidential helicopters.

As significant as the announcement was, a matter just as weighty was buried in the coverage or hardly even reported. Bulletin: Our government has fallen out of love with big-ticket private contractors.

At the same time, it has come to appreciate again what civil servants do.

Within reforms of a procurement process under which weapons prices have shot into the stratosphere, Gates will hire "tens of thousands of civil servants to do the work," reports The New York Times, "since contracting that out to the private sector has not proven efficient."

Oh, really?

You mean, "contracting out" isn't necessarily the best way to meet the needs of the military and taxpayers? You mean we'd rely again on "bureaucrats" whose only interest is the public interest?

What? A motive other than profit?

This does not compute within the robot-like march over eight years to privatize everything our government does.

Let's say the robot did a heckuva job.

Months before Hurricane Katrina, FEMA hired a Florida firm to coordinate evacuations after hurricanes. It subcontracted and subcontracted.

You know the drill.

Post-Katrina, an investigation found that the subcontracting chain popped a sprocket, or maybe its commandants were on the golf course. The American Bus Association had an armada of buses ready to stream to the gulf. They never left the lot.

In Iraq, contracted security firm Blackwater USA really showed us what you can get away with if you aren't tied down to impediments like public accountability and/or scruples.

Blackwater did its job so well that it had to change its name, to Xe. A practice pioneered by renamed tobacco giant Phillip Morris (now Altria), it's a corporate version of the witness relocation program.

You see, corporations can morph and merge and divest and rebrand and relocate.

Our government, however, remains, well, ours.

Lone Star debacle

One of the too lightly reported stories in Texas is the debacle of privatizing of human services dating back to the 2003 Republican takeover of the Legislature.

A host of privatization initiatives either fizzled or blew up in policymakers' faces. The most prominent was the attempt to contract out enrollment and access to a host of human services including food stamps and Medicaid. Not only did Texas end up offering jobs back to great numbers of "bureaucrats" Gov. Rick Perry said we'd not need, but, with Texas' experience as inspiration, the U.S. Senate passed a bill (ultimately watered down) that would have barred privatizing food stamp programs.

Privatized schemes that didn't provide better services were part of the abomination. Another was the obscene sums made by contractors and middle men. In 2003 when Texas was dropping thousands of children from the Children's Health Insurance Program in the supposed name of austerity, an auditor found that the state overpaid a vendor $20 million to administer the program, including millions for individual consultants.

This brings us back to those much-reviled figures: civil servants. You know, like soldiers, and engineers, and public health workers. Oh, and teachers.

Who needs 'em? Can't a machine do what they do? Can't we devise one that does government? A drone craft, say, that Westinghouse or GE or Lockheed can build and operate?

I'll bet they'd say they could. For a price.

John Young writes for the Waco Tribune-Herald.

Our seed-corn squanderers

Uh, oh. Here they come with charts, ominous charts — as scary as the times. In lines of red: deficits, crippling deficits, unconscionable deficits, the Obama deficits.

The speakers pace back and forth, pointers pecking. And I'm wondering:

Where were these birds the same time last year? Likely they were clucking about how the Bush deficits were insignificant as a portion of the GDP. Or they were saying that whatever the cumulative and long-range price, it was all the "cost of freedom."

Right now, our feathered friends are doing an exceedingly good job stating the obvious:

Just as we did when we financed two wars simultaneously amid round after round of tax cuts, we are borrowing to pay for the federal stimulus package hammered out by President Obama and Congress.

Any way you look at it, we're talking a lot of money foisted onto future Americans. That is not good.

But observe a stark difference: The borrowing that preceded Obama didn't correspond to an economy in the tank, to 13 million people without jobs.

It was borrowing rain or shine, bubble or fizzle, gallop or shuffle. Every step of the way, the federal government was painting itself into a narrower corner with blue-sky tax policies and blank-check spending initiatives for the military.

Yes, some in the flock denounced this. Others saw it as part of the continued process of starving government into submission, Reagan-style. Deficit by design.

So, whadya know? A real, honest-to-Steinbeck, grapes-of-wrath calamity has befallen our land, the type that screams out for an activist government, the type that put FDR in our hearts and on our dimes.

We can all argue about what vehicles the Obama administration chose for its fiscal activism. We can argue about the efficacy of its tax cuts. (Is having $18 more in one's paycheck really a job-producer?)

But, get real. This crisis calls for bold action. Indeed, a growing list of economists is accusing Obama of being too meek.

I'm thinking: Surely we knew such a day would happen, that the economy would tank. Back when the sun was shining and the fields were brimming, and we could have acted with smarts and long-range acuity, who let these birds consume our seed corn?

We are paying for attitudes that put the next earnings quarter and the next election cycle ahead of long-range concerns.

Among those concerns: highways, health care, levees to hold against flood tide, schools saddled with mandates but not the dollars to execute them.

Ronald Reagan said government is the problem. As Katrina is our witness, we inspired a generation of leaders to make his words prophetic.

They will denounce "pork"— earmarks, for instance, all of 2 percent of the discretionary budget. They'll denounce foreign aid (4 percent). Point out that even without the off-budget costs of Iraq and Afghanistan, the military is 59 percent of the discretionary budget, and . . .? They'll change the subject.

But back to the subject of deficits: Now, we're told, they are despicable, irresponsible. This time last year? They were the American way.

John Young's column appears Thursday, Sunday and occasionally Tuesday. E-mail: jyoung@wacotrib.com.

Anti-abortion zeal and the blessed flood

The appeal from Fargo, N.D., was heartfelt and reverent. A flood threatened to consume a city. Prayers were solicited.

The exhortation, however, left one confused. Were we to pray to spare Fargo? Or were we to pray to punish it?

Punish it for allowing women to end unwanted pregnancies with a legal medical procedure. Surely, that's not what the prayer thread suggested. Or did it?

The confusion came in an e-mail forwarded my way. It was an appeal for good thoughts directed to an area where much of a town was evacuated, where citizens shivered and strained to hoist sandbags against catastrophe.

The cresting Red River has pulled back, averting the worst. Still, as of this writing, many operations in the Fargo-Moorhead area are closed.

One participant in the e-mail thread finds that worth rejoicing. Why? Because, the writer assumes, one of the operations shut down has been North Dakota's only independent abortion provider, the Red River Women's Center.

The commenter called the flood a "gift from God" in having people link arms at river's edge, it said. "Another great thing about this flood situation: no abortions! I hope this flood lasts forever if it will mean no abortions . . ."

In other varied forums, people of zeal were saying that flooding was God's revenge for abortions in Fargo.

The thing is, if the waters had said intent, they did not hit their mark.

The clinic, which is in downtown Fargo, faced no flooding and didn't close, said its director in a phone interview. A snowstorm did prevent its doctor from arriving. But flood? Sorry to disappoint anyone.

Meanwhile, families were uprooted and businesses were closed in other communities along the Red River. And their offense against goodness and decency was . . ?

One reason the Fargo clinic was drawing scrutiny is politics. In the days before the flood, anti-choice groups had gathered in Fargo to mount an effort to make North Dakota the first "abortion-free" state.

That would be some trick. Every hospital that delivers babies performs abortions. Why? Because abortion at times is a medical necessity. You may want to ban all abortions that aren't doctors' calls based on medical necessity. That would put you in dicey clinical territory.

A bill that passed the North Dakota House would, if Roe v. Wade were overturned, ban all abortions in the state except those deemed medically necessary. I'm wondering how any bill could be crafted to navigate those ethical straits. People of zeal in the Dakotas want to try.

In one way, I am in absolute solidarity with the folks so devoted to ending abortion. I, too, would wish for a world without it.

Then again, it would be a world where education and contraception were linked arm in arm so that every child was a choice. It also would be where rapists and lecherous uncles did not prey on the defenseless. In other words, I'd be wishing for a fantasy world.

Abortion as a right has been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court for more than three decades.

Some would have us believe that abortion wasn't going on before then. But, of course, it most certainly was: For women of means, skilled professionals would do it in a hush-hush way. For those of lesser means, shady practitioners would do it, with nothing safe at all about it. For those desperate and without other options, deadly, self-induced abortions would beckon.

Making laws declaring fertilized eggs persons, as the North Dakota bill would, is not the way to fewer desperate women. Neither is shutting down lawful abortion providers.

Empowering women to make reasoned decisions, while arming them with the means to prevent unnecessary pregnancies, is the way to less desperation and fewer abortion dilemmas.

An appeal for floodwaters most certainly won't do it.

John Young writes for the Waco Tribune-Herald. jpyoung@grandecom.net