Here's my presentiment: If we have much more "good for business" Republican misrule, it's not just poor Preston who's going to get his ass fired

Was President Mobutu swapping management tips
with the first President Bush?

These days I get most of my news, not from a newspaper, or TV or radio, or the Internet, but from the elevator in my office building. This 22nd-century technology may not have reached you yet, but in our elevators we have a little display screen that dispenses concise nuggets of wisdom along with ads, ads, ads.

This morning, for example, I learned that the IRS's corporate audit rate has dropped to 26% from 72% in 1990. I assume this is because corporations have become so scrupulous in their attention to even the finest points of the tax code, but it's a very small screen in the elevator, and there was no room to explain. Do you think there could be any other reason for the drop?

The tax-audit information was displayed while I was riding back down to the lobby, intending to go out to the coffee wagon down the block, where--if you get there early enough--you can get a really good (and really big) cinnamon roll for a dollar. If the cinnamon rolls are gone, you can usually still get a bowtie--not quite as many empty calories, but a serviceable day-starter. (Last week the woman ahead of me was thrilled to get what appeared to be the last chocolate-iced French cruller in Midtown.)

You also get a genuinely friendly greeting from the proprietor, who always seems authentically grateful for your business, even though you're only giving him a buck--and even that only on those days when you can't get through the morning without a sugar rush. As commercial transactions go, this is about the only one I look forward to, the one that leaves me feeling that both parties have come out ahead on the deal.

On the way back up to my office the Elevator Genie offered his/her daily word-improvment feature. Every day the Genie teaches us a new word, and today it was presentiment. I don't remember the Genie's definition, but the American Heritage Dictionary College Edition offers: "A sense of something about to occur; premonition."

But what I can't forget is the example the Genie offered. The day's word is always used in a sentence. The sentence for presentiment was:

"Preston had a presentiment that he was going to be fired."

Gadzooks!

Now I don't know this Preston fellow, and it may be that he deserved to have his ass fired. Maybe his coworkers can't believe that he managed to hold onto his job this long, though his vulnerability today seems to have been fatally enhanced by the too easy alliteration of his name with today's word, presentiment.

Gee whiz, though, is this truly the only kind of presentiment available to us in the Age of Bush? I mean, was it really so far-fetched for our Preston to have a presentiment that his boss was going to offer him a promotion and a raise? Alas, there are two things we can be fairly sure of in this case: (1) Preston's company probably was under no pressure from an impending tax audit, and (2) the poor guy was probably replaced with a nitwit. If he was replaced at all. It could just be "downsizing." I wouldn't be at all surprised if the managerial geniuses several levels above Preston, who likely have no idea who does what in the company, simply decided that his workload can be divvied up among his surviving coworkers. Somebody'll do it. That's what makes them geniuses.

Maybe this hit home because we just had a sudden and shocking firing in our company on Friday. And it was somebody way above poor Preston's pay grade. It was a fairly highly placed person--several levels above me, though that's not saying much. (Over the years I seem to have worked my way down the ladder to a rung lower than the lowliest clerk.) Still, this person wasn't so highly placed that she didn't have a level or two of fire-at-will management above her.

I spoke to my (former) boss briefly on Friday, and she indicated that she had had short notice--unlike Preston, she apparently did not have any presentiment. She said that when she got home she planned to have a giant martini.

Very likely that's what poor presentimental (yes, there really is such a word--it's in the dictionary) Preston will do when he gets home, probably before he breaks the unhappy news to the wife and kiddies--with or without reference to the unfortunate presentiment. I hope the poor sap doesn't have one of those creative mortgages that are destined for default under the best economic circumstances. Otherwise it's just a matter of time before he and his loved ones are out on the street.

This will, it appears, come as something of a shock to former HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson. People are suggesting now that he may not have been absolutely on top of the looming mortgage crisis. Yesterday's Washington Post reported:

In late 2006, as economists warned of an imminent housing market collapse, housing Secretary Alphonso Jackson repeatedly insisted that the mounting wave of mortgage failures was a short-term "correction."

He pushed for legislation that would make it easier for federally backed lenders to make mortgage loans to risky borrowers who put less money down. He issued a rule that was criticized by law enforcement authorities because it could increase the difficulty of detecting and proving mortgage fraud.

As Jackson leaves office this week, much of the attention on his tenure has been focused on investigations into whether his agency directed housing contracts to his friends and political allies. But critics say an equally significant legacy of his four years as the nation's top housing officer was gross inattention to the looming housing crisis.

And it's only in the second Bush term that people have seemed subject to firing for these gaffes. In the first term, about the only way you could get fired was by disagreeing with the escaped-mental-patient "orthodoxies" of the World According to "Big Dick" Cheney, a man we now know doesn't have a sane cell in his brain.

It's sometimes said that economics adviser "Fat Larry" Lindsey was an exception, having been fired for failing to go along with Chimpy the Prez's "Run Like a Rodent" quasi-fitness program. Or then again, Fat Larry may have been fired for attempting to provide even a rudimentary answer to the question of how much our prospective adventure in Iraq might cost in actual taxpayer dollars. Everyone knows that if you have to ask how much a war is going to cost, you can't afford it.

In the second Bush term, throwing loyal lackeys overboard has become a lot more common, as the people in charge struggle to save their own sorry asses. Heck, if "Dandy Don" Rumsfeld could be made to fall on his sword, could anybody be safe? Why, eventually even that tamest, lamest lapdog, former counsel to the president and then-Attorney General Idiot Al "The Torture Guy" Gonzales got his marching orders. Say, did you see where Idiot Al can't seem to find a job? I'm not surprised. If he said, "Fries with that?" to me, probably the last thing on earth I would do is get the fries.

But then there was a "good news" story of a sort in this morning's Post, about how managerial responsibility and accountability seem to be gaining a foothold in the Congo as it tries to recover from the decades of catastrophic misrule by "the famously kleptocratic dictator Mobutu Sese Seko" and political upheaval. Mobutu himself of course became unimaginably rich, and I think it's safe to say that a circle of his cronies made out pretty well too. However:

Graft and mismanagement have left the Congolese among the poorest people in the world. But with a years-long civil war for the most part over and a democratically elected government in place, investors are beginning to return to the resource-rich country.

This ought to be a feel-good story, and I certainly wish the Congolese all the luck they've been denied all these decades. I'm just a little spooked by that sentence, "Graft and mismanagement have left the Congolese among the poorest people in the world."

I wish this didn't sound so eerily like the Bush-McCranky Economic Policy. Especially as we head into recession, we have to hope that in this election cycle massive numbers of American voters--enough to offset not just Republican candidates, but Emanuelite and Schumeresque corporatist "Republican lite" Democrats---see through the dreadful misapprehension that Republican governance is "good for business."

Just ask poor Preston.

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