Why is the media so surprised when we're not?

John Byrne of Raw Story:

President George W. Bush's Labor Department misled Congress in an effort to prove outsourcing jobs to private companies was more efficient than assigning the jobs to government employees, according to a Government Accountability Office report released Monday.

Misled? Misled? When are we going to be able to just come out and say it? He LIED. They LIED. The Bush administration LIED and they will continue to do so even as they walk out the door. LYING to the American people is what they did, do and will do. Look for Bush administration apologists trying to rewrite history and LYING in their forthcoming books.

The report (pdf here) found that the Department used fictional projected numbers to improve "savings reports" -- even when real numbers were already available. And when the government did find private firms to take a government job, that employee generally was either reassigned to another task with the same title or promoted.

The effort was called "competitive sourcing," aimed to increase government efficiency by having federal and private organizations compete for providing services. While part of a federal government approach since 1955, the Bush Administration has made the approach a key element of the President's Management Agenda under the Office of Management and Budget.

An investigation revealed, however, that the Labor Department -- under direction from Bush budget officials -- deliberately withheld information about true costs.

According to the report, the Department of Labor "excluded a number of substantial costs in its reports to Congress -- such as the costs for precompetition planning, certain transition costs and staff time and post competition review activities -- thereby understanding the full costs of this contracting approach."

The report noted that this approach was consistent with "guidance" given by the Administration's Office of Management and Budget.

In addition, the report found the Department's "savings reports" were "not reliable: a sample of three reports contained inaccuracies, and others used projections when actual numbers were available, which sometimes resulted in overstated savings."

Most workers were also demoralized as the government tried to find private firms to take over their jobs, the probe found.

Bush Labor Secretary Elaine Chao began having workers compete for their jobs in 2004. Few employees have lost their jobs. But when the government found a private company to take over their position, 84 percent were reassigned to different positions with the same title or were promoted.

And look at this:

Since implementation, 22 employees were laid off or demoted, all of them African American.

Move along. Nothing to see here!

The senator who commissioned the report, Iowa's Tom Harkin, along with the House committee that oversees the Labor Department, David Obey, said in a letter Monday that the report proved "the negative impact the Bush Administration's failed policies have had" on the Department.

"Under the direction of this White House, the Department of Labor has increasingly attempted to move work performed by Federal employees to private contractors" and, in so doing, hurt workers' morale and "grossly overstated savings," they wrote. "We look forward to working with the Obama Administration to strengthen the Department of Labor as it undertakes the critical missions of making sure our workplaces are safe; protecting employee pensions, health benefits and rights; and providing workers with the skills they need to compete successfully in the 21st century economy."

Bring the shovel and the bleach, we've got a hell of a lot of purging and cleaning to do.

Remembering the Confederacy

With fondness:

March 12, 2007 — Guestworkers who come to the United States are routinely cheated out of wages; forced to mortgage their futures to obtain low-wage, temporary jobs; held virtually captive by employers who seize their documents; forced to live in squalid conditions; and denied medical benefits for injuries, according to a new report released by the Center today.

The report — Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States — comes as Congress is about to begin debating immigration legislation that could greatly expand guestworker programs to cover hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of new temporary foreign workers.

"Congress should reform our broken immigration system, but reform should not rely on creating a vast new guestworker program," said Mary Bauer, director of the SPLC's Immigrant Justice Project and author of the report. "The current program is shamefully abusive in practice, and there is almost no enforcement of worker rights."

The 48-page report, based on interviews with thousands of guestworkers and dozens of legal cases, describes the systematic abuse of workers under what is known as the H-2 system administered by the U.S. Department of Labor. The program was created in 1943 to allow the sugar cane industry to bring in temporary workers and was revised by Congress in 1986 to include non-agricultural workers.