The holiday season is here and President Bush is evidently feeling merry, because he’s distributing bundles of cash – our cash – to his political appointees. No, that’s not right. The holiday season is here and we just found out President Bush is handing out bundles of cash to his friends. In truth, Mr. Bush found the Easter Bunny that laid the golden egg, because the bonuses have been going to the political hacks since Good Friday. Like the Easter Bunny, George W. hid his treats from the public.
What’s a political appointee? As the name implies, they’re among the top people in the cabinet departments – the under secretaries, the deputy administrators, the press spokespeople. In their positions, loyalty to Mr. B counts at least as much, if not more, than job skills. Political appointees are the government officials who – for example – decided to cut half a million poor people from the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program the same week the thermometer plunged across the country. You know someone got a bonus for that.
Political appointees need bonus money because they earn – well, maybe earn is the wrong word – they get between $100,000 and $140,000 a year. The bonuses, which might run as high as $25,000, help appointees make ends meet. Kristen Forbes, a political appointee until recently, defended the bonuses because she says political appointees give up high-paying jobs to take on public service. Don’t know about you, but – one- I think a hundred grand a year is a high paying job and – two – I have yet to detect ways in which the Bush administration is serving the public. Corporate service, yes. Public Service? Not so much.
The White House never announced the bonus plan, it was revealed by the New York Times. The practice of giving bonuses to political appointees was suspended by Bill Clinton in 1994, because the stench of cronyism inevitably accompanies the giving of tax dollars to in-house apparatchiks. The worst conflict of interest came in the final days of the Bush I regime, when $100,000 of bonus money leaked out of the Justice Department alone. It’s ironic that Bill Clinton restored honor to the Oval Office, only to have George W. take it away again.
A White House official who is so proud of his or her work that she/he refuses to be quoted by name said Mr. Bush’s politicos earned their bonuses by performing above and beyond the call in the months following 9-11.
Four days before the bonus expose, on the Friday evening following Thanksgiving, Mr. Bush announced from his Crawford ranch that he is limiting pay raises for the federal work force. The people with the limited pay raises are not political appointees; they do not make $100,000 a year. They’re the park rangers, the clerks at the passport offices and the people who investigate plane crashes. Mr. Bush limited their pay raises because he has the authority to do so in times of national emergency.
I suppose this all makes sense if your last name begins with “B” and your daddy was the 41st president. The same national emergency that prevents you from giving a fair share to the working stiffs requires you to throw more money at your buddies at the top of the heap. This is the same national emergency that required taxpayers to put Army Secretary Thomas White – the guy who used to work for Enron – on a private jet and fly him to Aspen to sell his $6 million vacation home before Bush’s economic policies tanked the property values. It’s this kind of – excuse the expression – “fuzzy math” – that seeks to end a recession by cutting taxes for the wealthiest five percent of Americans.
What other surprises lurk beneath the Bush Christmas tree? Candy for the rich, coal for the poor? No, not even coal, the political appointees cut the heating assistance program. Remember?
Christmas Bogus
The holiday season is here and President Bush is evidently feeling merry, because he’s distributing bundles of cash – our cash – to his political appointees. No, that’s not right. The holiday season is here and we just found out President Bush is handing out bundles of cash to his friends. In truth, Mr. Bush found the Easter Bunny that laid the golden egg, because the bonuses have been going to the political hacks since Good Friday. Like the Easter Bunny, George W. hid his treats from the public.
What’s a political appointee? As the name implies, they’re among the top people in the cabinet departments – the under secretaries, the deputy administrators, the press spokespeople. In their positions, loyalty to Mr. B counts at least as much, if not more, than job skills. Political appointees are the government officials who – for example – decided to cut half a million poor people from the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program the same week the thermometer plunged across the country. You know someone got a bonus for that.
Political appointees need bonus money because they earn – well, maybe earn is the wrong word – they get between $100,000 and $140,000 a year. The bonuses, which might run as high as $25,000, help appointees make ends meet. Kristen Forbes, a political appointee until recently, defended the bonuses because she says political appointees give up high-paying jobs to take on public service. Don’t know about you, but – one- I think a hundred grand a year is a high paying job and – two – I have yet to detect ways in which the Bush administration is serving the public. Corporate service, yes. Public Service? Not so much.
The White House never announced the bonus plan, it was revealed by the New York Times. The practice of giving bonuses to political appointees was suspended by Bill Clinton in 1994, because the stench of cronyism inevitably accompanies the giving of tax dollars to in-house apparatchiks. The worst conflict of interest came in the final days of the Bush I regime, when $100,000 of bonus money leaked out of the Justice Department alone. It’s ironic that Bill Clinton restored honor to the Oval Office, only to have George W. take it away again.
A White House official who is so proud of his or her work that she/he refuses to be quoted by name said Mr. Bush’s politicos earned their bonuses by performing above and beyond the call in the months following 9-11.
Four days before the bonus expose, on the Friday evening following Thanksgiving, Mr. Bush announced from his Crawford ranch that he is limiting pay raises for the federal work force. The people with the limited pay raises are not political appointees; they do not make $100,000 a year. They’re the park rangers, the clerks at the passport offices and the people who investigate plane crashes. Mr. Bush limited their pay raises because he has the authority to do so in times of national emergency.
I suppose this all makes sense if your last name begins with “B” and your daddy was the 41st president. The same national emergency that prevents you from giving a fair share to the working stiffs requires you to throw more money at your buddies at the top of the heap. This is the same national emergency that required taxpayers to put Army Secretary Thomas White – the guy who used to work for Enron – on a private jet and fly him to Aspen to sell his $6 million vacation home before Bush’s economic policies tanked the property values. It’s this kind of – excuse the expression – “fuzzy math” – that seeks to end a recession by cutting taxes for the wealthiest five percent of Americans.
What other surprises lurk beneath the Bush Christmas tree? Candy for the rich, coal for the poor? No, not even coal, the political appointees cut the heating assistance program. Remember?