Another Portrait of the Bush Administration Asleep at the Wheel

Foreign Workers Abused at Embassy, Panel Told - Washington Post

The Bush Administration appears to be doing a pretty spot-on, unintentional Spinal Tap parody. Only here the question isn't how much more black can an album cover be, but how much more tone-deaf can his administration be about the damage his policies and actions (and as here, inaction) are causing to America's image and interests abroad recently?

I know that's saying a lot, but I don't know how else to characterize being seen as kidnapping foreign nationals, and not to bring them home to the US do our menial labor. We've already got people illegally coming here for free to do that, plus many of them are actually skilled to boot! Instead we shanghai these hapless souls and drop them into a deeply unpopular war zone instead of a Persian Gulf paradise awash in glitz and golf (you've seen all of the Dubai ads on CNN and what-not, right?).

Don't think that because it was a Kuwaiti subcontractor at the pay end of the abuse allegations, the Kuwaitis will be the ones more reviled. The Kuwaitis are seen here as clearly doing America's bidding in supplying work on the American Embassy in American-occupied Baghdad, after we did Kuwait's bidding kicking Saddam Hussein out of their country in the early '90s. Those kinds of contracts don't go to non-friendly, or even a-political organizations and everybody knows it.

Even worse, the Kuwaitis were clearly violating the principal law of capitalism, that of supply and demand, part of the very bedrock of all that it means to be Republican. If you can't get people willing to work for what you're willing to pay them to do that work and you have no alternatives, you are clearly offering too little and need to offer more money. What's left unsaid is that in modern Capitalism you generally don't have the ability to compel your work force to show up as much as you used to, say in at the end of the 19th century (Lattimer Massacre).

At least that's how it works here. In the wealthy US, where the vast majority of citizens at even the low end of the economic pole are no longer having to deal with 3rd World poverty (exceptions granted, as John Edwards recent "Poverty Tour" amply demonstrated Edwards on Poverty - washingtonpost.com), we have private citizens who are volunteering to work hellish stints in Iraq (Civilian Contractors Face Perils in Iraq -CBS News). Only they aren't making "as little as $240 a month", more like $8,000 a month for generally non-combat support job, like running recreational facilities (see CBS again).

I'll grant that running recreational facilities is quite a few notches in importance above day-laborer, but that is still on the low end of the American contractor food chain I'd imagine, behind those operating on the front-lines, running force-protection and other missions, so maybe not that far off of an analogy, though I guess that might depend on whether or not we import or use local clerical support.

I'm not sure if we do or don't import purely administrative staff to Bahdad, like some modern-day version of a "Three Coins in a Fountain" world (IMDB link) where big American companies actually moved secretaries to exotic locales to work in the typing pool^*. The only difference is there's a long way between "exotic" and "hellish" and I can't see many American women today that willing to make that sort of leap, so I'm guessing these two positions are likely far closer in terms of where their recipients are in the pecking order.

How could this most Republican of Republican administrations have allowed this ridiculous situation to occur? At some point there have to be some Republicans in Congress and party activists starting to question on balance whether President Bush's limited ability to promote any of their agenda any longer, coupled with revelations like this, mean that he and Vice President Cheney may actively be causing long-term harm damage to their party far greater than in the 2008 Presidential election.

How soon do you think the American people will be able to forget Iraq, Katrina, and the fact that Bin Laden and Zawahiri are still alive? Especially if a Democratic President in 2009 actually re-commits significant troops and diplomacy efforts away from Iraq and towards Afghanistan and Pakistan, managing to capture or kill either of the masterminds of 9/11?

Combine that with an economy teetering on the brink of a collapse due to the lengthy and ongoing weakness in the housing market, negative real-term salary growth that means most people don't personally feel better off today than 8 years ago, despite the supposed strength of that economy overall. Most people see record corporate profits, yet little if any more money in their pockets, and do the math that if the economy is good and I ain't getting my share, that means somebody else is, and guess which party that "somebody else", the rich, are closely associated with promoting the economic interests of?

^*
Remember typing pools? My mom used to work in one, I think, if my family memory serves me correctly. She even met my father when she was working in one back in 1969, and now I don't know what the modern equivalent could possibly be. Maybe the people who respond to those "make money working at home on your computer" ads?