If you make yourself a sheep, the wolves will eat you - B. Franklin and Democracy for Houston and Texas Kaos - Join Us
In an odd twist the Neo-Cons and their political lackeys have become the black beast traditional conservatives have railed against for years - ivory tower social engineers], oblivious to reality. How else explain their love of grand theory divorced from the consequences of their policies on real people, in real time?
Exhibit 1: The Iraq War. On the basis of some half-baked theory, Cheney and Rummie sell little "Georgie, I don't read much" on going to war to socially engineer an entire region , on the cheap! The Neo-Cons, of course married this to a bastardized version of Leo Straussianism, claiming that the people are too dumb to know what is best for them. George's last press conference echoed this belief, indicating that future historians might see his ship wreck of an administration as something else than what it is, a shipwreck.
All this , of course, flies in the face of old fashioned , Goldwater style conservative principles. In particular it flaunts the fundamental principle that we are not smart enough to do social engineering , to use the power of government to remake societies. That was one of the fundamental conservative knocks on the Great Society. It was an overly ambitious and naive attempt to solve deeply rooted complex social problems with ham-handed legislation crafted by self-interested politicians.
In Texas, Goodyear and the boys, following the trial blazed by "The Great Decider" pushed ahead with the privitization of social services, prisons and if we let them, schools. It is an old wet dream of some economic conservatives that anything that government does, the private sector can do better and cheaper. This belief is impervious to facts. But, in the case of social services to the poor in Texas, it has become untenable. Even Goodhair can't pretend any longer that Accenture services is an upgrade on the Texas Social Services administration. As always this failed experiment has come at the expense of the weakest among us .
Remember the horror stories and ideological boneheadedness I blogged about here and here?
LINK Lorna Harvey of Missouri City says her 9-year-old son, Kyle, takes $700 in medications each month and could have died if state Rep. Charlie Howard, R-Sugar Land, hadn't intervened to reinstate his denied coverage under the Children's Health Insurance Program.
Likewise, Richard Uhr of Houston said he tangled with private contractor Accenture LLP's Texas Access Alliance when its Midland call-center workers mistakenly claimed they didn't receive a CHIP renewal application for his 11-year-old grandson."
From the article:
Under the restructured contract, the Bermuda-based company will be largely relegated to data entry, leaving judgments about whether Texans qualify for food stamps, Medicaid and other welfare programs to state workers. "We didn't draw the line between vendor work and state work in the right place," Hawkins said. "As we rebalance the roles between the state and the vendor, we will be drawing that line in a different place."
Lest you think that they finally get it, that government functions involving the weakest among us cannot and should not be privatized, there is this :
Accenture will retain more control over processing applications for the Children's Health Insurance Program, but all appeals of its decisions will be handled by state employees. Currently, clients denied benefits must first appeal to Accenture before going to the state.
Government has never been the problem. Bad government, out of touch government, overly partisan government is always a problem, but not government itself. Sorry Mr.Norquist. From the article:
"I think the Legislature significantly underestimated the value of what the public sector did. There's a tremendous amount of expertise and skill in the public sector that the private sector could not replicate," he said. Hawkins said that the state eligibility workers, for the most part, are better trained and more experienced.
There was no testing of the Accenture system, none at all. The ideology was right, the "savings" could be rolled over into property tax cuts, the poor and children couldn't fight back, why bother testing anything. Ironically, there is this excuse from Accenture:
" No one should interpret the contract changes as a failure of privitization, said Accenture spokesman Jim McAvoy. "Some of the technology and business processes we tried to apply did not succeed. ... This is why you do a pilot to determine whether new structures will work."
I close with something I have written before and yes it is a "I told you so"....
LINK Goodhair and the boyz don't mind experimenting with the well-being of the most needy Texans. In fact it is standard operating procedure, sort of "Human Sacrifice as Public Policy".