The Administration To Revolutionize Government

The Administration To Revolutionize Government
The administration were privatizing damned near everything as a pretty good move in direction of revolutionizing government.

 

Made sense. Every generation from boomers to bloomers has their personal axe to grind concerning how dumb government agencies are and how smart the private sector proves itself to be.

 

But it ain't necessarily so. To paraphrase George Gershwin,

 

Dey tells all you chillun

 

De gov'ment's a villun,

 

But it ain't necessarily so

 

In the enthusiasm of the early days, Donald Rumsfeld decided privatizing would enable a war without a draft (and save a gazillion as well). He sub-contracted out the war in Afghanistan to the Reserves. That worked so well, in the eyes of The Beholder, that he sold The Decider on subbing out the whole Iraq operation to the Reserves, Halliburton and Blackwater .

Privatizing in war zones has legal and ethical ramifications and raises unanswerable questions about chain of command, but no matter.

 

Committed costs so far--a $ trillion, maybe more. The costs in waste, single-bidder contracts, cost overruns, corruption and loss of operational control by the Army and Marines--beyond calculation.

 

Tom RidgeHeady times for The Privatizers during those dazed days after 9-11, when the strings seemed to come off of everything, including purses. A new Department of Homeland Security was cobbled together out of 22 separate agencies. Tom Ridge, the guy who got out quickly enough to let Michael Chertoff take the heat, pretty much fired everybody who knew anything.

He pared down what staff was left and then privatized everything from airport screening to Katrina housing.

 

Committed costs so far, in an agency that has yet to see its fifth birthday, are a 'who the hell knows?' throwing up of the hands in exasperation. What is known is that their budget for 2006 alone (before Congress starts fiddling with it) is billion. All they bought by privatizing and sub-contract, is thousands of unused and rotting mobile homes and a string of unprecedented embarrassments.

 

FDR, in his most wasteful days and during the nation's worst ever financial collapse, was never able to shovel money out the doors in similar fashion. But there are upsides;

 

* Because your and my kids didn't get drafted, we privatized abu Ghraib and off-loaded America's Geneva Convention compliance to civilian contractors.

 

* Over at the Pentagon, while Donald was busy with other things, they totally lost track of .3 trillion in payouts. Lost track. Like it was the petty-cash account. The Pentagon's own auditors admit it cannot account for 24% of what is spent.

 

* With a 0 billion budget for next year, an additional (and annual) 0 billion will be laundered, like it was a mafia organization (which, in some ways, it is).

 

Interstate highway signFor sure it is the responsibility of government to oversee and authenticate the costs of services. The Interstate highway system didn't get built by Senators with pickaxes. Connections maybe, but not pickaxes. Government contracts are by their nature watering holes for graft and the special treatment of special interests. It has ever been so.

 

What has not ever been so, is the wholesale firing of mid-level bureaucrats and their replacement by incompetent political appointees. That has gone on at a wholesale level across all segments of this administration. Worse, Republican connected businesses (some of them quickly formed for the single purpose of feeding at the trough) have been ushered in, given a single-bid contract and sent on their way.

 

What did they get in return for this largesse? Who the hell knows? Randy Cunningham got a Rolls-Royce and a couple million bucks defense contractor Mitchell Wade and Wade was a penny-ante player. Halliburton, the best known and best connected of these criminal organizations, pocketed tens of billions of dollars doing things we used to do for ourselves--like feed and shelter our troops. All that's privatized now.

 

When I was at Fort Leonard Wood, in boot camp, a scandal arose over a mess-hall cook who was trading butter for margarine and pocketing the profit. That was a scandal. It made headlines in the (local) newspapers. An investigation was mounted by the Inspector General and the cook was court-martialled.

 

IG Dept of DefenseConsider the case of one military accountant who tried to find out what happened to a mere 0 million at the Pentagon. According to CBS, Jim Minnery, a former Marine turned whistle-blower, risked his job by speaking out for the first time about the millions he noticed were missing from one defense agency's balance sheets. Minnery tried to follow the money trail, even crisscrossing the country looking for records.

"The director looked at me and said 'Why do you care about this stuff?' It took me aback, you know? My supervisor asking me why I care about doing a good job."

 

He was reassigned and says officials then covered up the problem by just writing it off.

 

"They have to cover it up," he said. "That's where the corruption comes in. They have to cover up the fact that they can't do the job."

 

The Pentagon's Inspector General "partially substantiated" several of Minnery's allegations but could not prove officials tried "to manipulate the financial statements."

 

I guess the IG at Fort Leonard Wood is dead, or at least retired by now.

 

Too bad.

 

Administrative Support for Online Programs

Administrative Support for Online Programs
Many organizations today have adopted the official standard for project management processes ill frustrated in figure 1.6 below.The constituent project management processes are initiating, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling, and closing. We
will cover each of these process groups in detail in the next chapter. But we will define the process groups in detail in the next chapter. But we will define the process groups briefly below: Initiating: Introduces the project and the project manager and defines the charter for the project. Planning: Describes the project scope in more detail. Detailed project plans for schedule, cost, risk, quality, and communications amongst others are defined here. A
realistic project baseline is committed to.Executing: The project has begun and the project manager uses various tools and techniques to make sure that the project is progressing smoothly. The project manager monitors the project for deviations from cost, schedule, or quality and takes corrective action in needed.Closing: The focus of this process is on acceptance and approval of the project deliverable and documenting lessons learned.
The project manager should also be good at understanding the project environment since most projects are planned and implemented in a social, economic, and environmental context. The project manager should consider the project in its cultural, international, political, and physical environmental contexts.As a part timer you may not have the same access to career placement services as the full time students. It's advisable to make an appointment directly with the Career
Development Office and develop a good rapport before you begin your MBA program. The expense of building classrooms is enough in itself to restrict educational opportunities and to leave less-developed countries with only the most fragmentary physical infrastructure for education. On the other hand, as I mention several times in the book, one should not presume that teaching and learning in classrooms have achieved nirvana. But is is important to be aware of the differences between these and classroom based online bca
and to compensate as far as possible for the loss of learning opportunities caused by the restrictions on human contact. I do not mean to make distance learning MBA students sound like second-class citizens; i have a lot of time for distance learning programmer and many of them are excellent in may ways, This sort of device is still in its infancy, and every distance learning MBA I have seen has kinks to be worked out in his respect. But the groundwork is there. On the other hand the participants often have more time to think and rame their views, the instant response often required in a classroom discussion is missing
Distance learning : manginess the virtual classroom. Students on distance learning MBAs of course have no physical classroom and therefore miss out on this particular For the moment, the most important point to be stressed is active learning that is students proactively acquiring knowledge, not just waiting passively for it to be delivered to their desks.
Away from the concerns and inhibitions of the work place, students can be free to innovate and create, to work out solutions to come up with new concepts and yes to fail from time to time.Critics who voice these opinions are missing the point. It is the very separateness of the classroom which makes it so important.Oddly though the concept of the classroom as a focal point of learning has often been critized. It is seen as being not practice oriented, too remote from the real world of business.
A classroom which does all these things is one which is well managed by the teaching faculty, but it is also one where every student plays his or her part in the information exchange process.
In most MBA programmed the classroom is the crucible. Information is exchanged, analyzed, synthesized. The faculty and students are the players, improvising their own production as they go through each session.
The possibilities for redefining the meaning and shape of educational institutions through online learning are examined in chapter 13 and the discussion continues in to chapter 14 with a further look at the courses themselves. Chapter 12 weighs the prospects for using e-learning to reach those who have been served least prospects for using e-learning to reach those who have been served least well by the traditional
system. These courses are part of a new, business-oriented landscape that is taking shape in education, as pointed out in chapter 7,8 deals with the career focus already prevalent in so many online courses,
and chapter 9 considers the legitimacy of this new way of learning.Even the chronicle of Higher Education, the weekly newspaper of record in higher education, had barely taken notice of online courses as a dimension of distance education as recently as 1989.
The ascendancy of online courses was swift during the last decade of the twentieth century, but the fiscal disasters of the early 2000s crimped the expansion and sent some of the lofty ambitions crashing to the ground, along with
many of the dot-com. Nonetheless, as the 1980s drew to a close almost no one executed that online that is has. There are already more than enough opportunities to do that in classrooms. Higher education will
transform itself most but precolonial education, especially secondary schools, will change, too. A part-time program is perfectly suited for you if you are looing to gain more experience at managing people and teams. There are two main reasons for this: