The management culture in action

One of my earliest posts was about "scientific management," in which autonomy and independent thought is taken away from workers, and replaced by incredibly detailed, step-by-step instructions written by management. I wrote about this because public schooling as we know it was designed during the era in which this idea was taking hold and fascinating the robber barons. The more perfect management of the masses was their goal, not merely the more perfect management of the assembly line.

We have that management culture now. We are stifled by sclerotic, pointless bureaucracy everywhere you look, and meanwhile many employees, having been thoroughly trained by over a decade of infinitesimal, tedious directions in the classroom, do not act unless specifically directed. The university nearby is full of managers (the administrative side of most universities has grown dramatically faster than the academic side)-- managers who are unable to comprehend what their employees even do, yet suck down well over $100,000 a year doing nothing but going to meetings and writing emails full of management speak. The supervisors do not come up from the ranks, they are instead imported from business school. And there are virtually as many supervisory personnel as there are employees in a lot of offices.

All of this has been floating around in my head while I watch CNN these past few days (via closed captioning and while distracting the kids elsewhere). Yesterday one of their anchors, who has been in Mississippi since the storm hit, interrupted Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana after she had been thanking various politicians. She was congratulating Congress for calling a special session to pass appropriations, in full management-BS Pollyanna mode, and the anchor stopped her. He said no, sorry, he hadn't heard about that, because he'd been walking past dead bodies lying in the street for the past 4 days, including one woman whose body was being eaten by rats.

I actually laughed when he said that, in the hysterical shocked way you do when something sounds like a joke, like a line out of a B horror movie, even while the rest of my brain knew that no, this was actually happening. But Senator Landrieu could not be broken out of her bubble. She nodded sympathetically and went on thanking her fellow Senators, thanking the President, talking about appropriations.

Mayor Ray Nagin of New Orleans is not, apparently, a 'manager' in this sense. Sample from an interview he did last night:

RN: I need reinforcements. I need troops, man. I need 500 buses. Man, they were talking about... you know, one of the briefings we had, they were talking about getting public school bus drivers to come down here ... I'm like, you've got to be kidding me! This is a national disaster! Get every doggone Greyhound busline in the country, and get their asses moving to New Orleans. That's them thinking small, man.... this is a major major major deal! ...

Interviewer: Do you believe that the President is serious, holding a news conference on it, but can't do anything until [Louisiana Governor] Catherine Blanco requests him to do it....

RN: I have no idea what they're doing, but I'll tell you this. You know, God is looking down on all this... and if they're not doing everything in their power to save people, they are going to pay the price. Because every day that we delay, people are dying... and they're dying by the hundreds....

We're getting reports calling in that are breaking my heart, from people saying, 'I'm in my attic...I can't take it any more. The water's up to my neck. I don't think I can hold out.' And that's happening as we speak....

I don't want to see anybody do any more goddamn press conferences. Put a moratorium on press conferences. Don't do another press conference until the resources are in this city, and they come down to this city, and stand with us, with their military trucks and troops that we can't even count. Don't tell me there are 40,000 people coming here, they're not here! It's too goddamn late!

Get off your asses and let's do something. Let's fix the biggest goddamn crisis in the history of this country!

Shortly after that the mayor breaks down crying and gets off the phone (listen to the interview here).

Let's be clear: those who stayed in the City stayed because they were poor. Nearly 1 in 3 New Orleanians is below the poverty level, which, for a family of 4, is under $20,000/year. An estimated 100,000 people there did not own cars. Thousands of them have died and perhaps hundreds or thousands more will continue to die, mainly because they are poor, and our destroyed military is apparently incapable of bringing them rescue or aid.

So far the politicians have held press conferences, taken tours, made speeches on the floor of Congress regarding a bill which should have been passed without discussion, organized a Joint Military Task Force, and written executive orders to suspend gas taxes.

But nobody took a fire-fighting helicopter over to the beach, picked up sand in its bucket, and dumped it into the levee breach. Apparently the Army Corps of Engineers couldn't drop their 3,000-pound sandbags, first because of confusion in the chain of command, and then because they didn't have some pulley they needed. (Hello-- they are engineers, they should fricking figure it out, there are hundreds of people who drowned because they did not plug the levee breach.)

Nobody, to my knowledge, has lowered a giant net full of bottles of water for the people at the convention center, who have received no supplies whatsoever even though they were directed to go there by the authorities. Women have given birth while waiting for food and water, and there are now over a dozen corpses sitting in the street. And no National Guard pilot has yet said "F--- the suits, we're landing at Wal-Mart, loading up on water and juice and formula, and dropping it off the back of the chopper." No one, even though their lack of common sense action has caused people to die.

Nobody, to my knowledge, has been landing C-130's on the interstates to bring in supplies-- why the hell not?

One man who brought his 20-foot boat downtown to aid with the rescue effort was told he'd have to buy his own gas, so he was unable to assist them (he had no money). Excuse me, but gas stations in New Orleans are still charging the police for gasoline? If that is the case, Governor Blanco needs to sign another executive order and just nationalize those stations.

Those Navy ships full of food and water? No sign of them so far.

Those supposedly plentiful National Guard in Louisiana? According to the mayor, there are 250 Guard members in New Orleans; the rest, though the federal government claims it has sent them, have not materialized in the city. The Pentagon appears to be fabricating imaginary National Guard members out of thin air, while simultaneously replying that no, they are not going to let the Louisiana and Mississippi National Guard members come back from Iraq one month early to aid in reconstruction. We are busy reconstructing the buildings we bombed into rubble in a far-flung land, we can't spare troops to rebuild an American city.

No firefighting helicopters have been seen dumping water on the buildings burning out of control in New Orleans. There is a hotel on fire near the Superdome -- near the Superdome, still home to 30,000 people -- and apparently nothing can be done. If it spreads the catastrophe is unimaginable.

What are these FEMA people doing? Sitting on their hands? Getting out maps and having long meetings over coffee, under the whir of the air conditioning machines, in some safe city like Baton Rouge? They say they are spending $500 million per day-- on what? My two guesses are: 1) subsidies to oil companies, and 2) Enron-style mismanagement (if not straight-up embezzling). The head of FEMA, after all, financially destroyed an organization while serving as its financial manager. He was fired and I think there were legal actions taken against him.

The international papers are in disbelief. Europeans are reported to be clustering around their TVs in horror, unable to believe this is the United States, and we are about to let several thousand more people die of dehydration and drowning, because still, still, five days in, virtually no one from the military has shown up to help.

This is the management culture in a life-and-death situation: anyone who cannot save themselves dies. Of course, it's not only that, part of the explanation resides in the fact that certain top members of this administration are sociopaths incapable of empathy or compassion. Condi Rice spent the past couple days shoe shopping in NYC and taking in a few shows. As for Bush, this is a picture of him on Tuesday, enjoying himself while 80% of the City of New Orleans lay underwater, falling into anarchy and despair:

















Whatever happened to the nation of able-bodied, autonomous, pioneering individuals? How did we get to be such cogs, led by such incompetents?

I'm not being totally fair, as there are instances of creativity. Doctors escorted by police went to a Walgreens pharmacy and seized all its medication. Many people have looted stores non-violently in order to get water, food, formula, and diapers. People have used their own boats to rescue people all on their own, and policemen have refused to wait for permission to use police boats, and have jumped into floodwaters in order to rescue people. Many individuals do take common sense action, but the folks being flown in from elsewhere, the ones with equipment, the ones with helicopters, they seem to be manacled by their superiors.

I mean, why can we not get water to thousands of dying people, not even after 5 days? They are supposedly flying Chinooks in the city. A Chinook holds a tremendous number of bottles of water. Somebody needs to decide which is the higher priority: maintaining the chain of command, or saving hundreds of people from dying.


Yeah, this post is another major detour, but all I can think about is New Orleans.