War on Workers. Bushco fires its latest salvo in its continuing campaign against workers:

The administration wants to abolish the General Schedule pay system by 2010 and require that at least part of every pay raise for the government's 1.8 million civilian employees hinge on an annual performance evaluation, President Bush's top management guru said yesterday.

Clay Johnson III, a deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, laid out a proposal to expand government-wide the kind of pay-for-performance systems being implemented at the departments of Defense and Homeland Security as part of the recent overhaul of civil service rules at those agencies.

Yes, because DOD is such an efficient place:

At the end of the Iraq war, vast sums of money were made available to the US-led provisional authorities, headed by Paul Bremer, to spend on rebuilding the country. By the time Bremer left the post eight months later, $8.8bn of that money had disappeared.
....
Bremer maintained one slush fund of nearly $600m in cash for which there is no paperwork: $200m of it was kept in a room in one of Saddam's former palaces.

So that's why Viceroy Jerry got the Medal of Freedom!

Sure, the federal pay and raise system isn't perfect. Not everyone who gets a raise deserves one. And surely, some people work harder than others but don't get the rewards. But that's the case just about anywhere. So this is like cutting off your hand to treat a hangnail. But these are the same people who think that Social Security needs to be saved, and doing so means getting rid of it.

Of course, Congress will just keep on giving itself a raise whenever it feels the need. But as for those people working for minimum wage and still living below the poverty level...well, they don't really vote anyway, so fuck 'em.

But what the hell do I know, right?