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Health & Fitness

Gov.-for-Life Branstad' Echoes Sgt. Schultz in "Hogan's Heroes": "I Know Nothing!"

Despite my occasional problems with the Des Moines Register's delayed delivery and the circulation department's brain-dead robot, I've got to give the Register a lot of credit for its recent investigations into the long hidden corruption of the Branstad administration, together with some of the same do-not-hire list corruption in Democratic administrations like Culver's, but to a lesser extent.

No, when it comes to corruption, nobody's corruption is quite as intense or as long-lasting as Gov.-for-Life Terry Branstad's. I knew he had a black list of "do not hires" for state employment back in 1994 when I left the Department of Human Services. Branstad successfully denied the blacklist until just recently, when the list was published.

My old boss at the Department of Human Services in Muscatine was on the do-not-hire black list. Her very odd successor should have been on it, but wasn't. What a horrible place DHS was to work. In my experience there, DHS was a corrupt, alcoholic work environment.

One of my coworkers lived above a bar so he could get plastered every night and walk home upstairs. He kept coming on to me even though he knew I was married and had two small children. Yet if I asked him for help at work as a new employee he'd yell loudly, "I'm not here to train new staff!"

He'd laugh about having three different kids' names on boilerplated case files going to court. Why didn't he get fired? He'd yell every morning, "I HATE this job!!"

And then there were the truly horrifying child welfare cases that came my way, some of the worst involving the methamphetamine addictions of parents in Muscatine's "Crystal City," as if there wasn't enough to be freaked out about already. What happened to the boss who hired me was deplorable. She had twice-weekly performance reviews to hound her out of office. A posse of senior administrators from the eastern regional office terrorized our office for weeks.

As for the child welfare job itself, it seemed like you had to fight the system just to save one or two abused/neglected kids. Although I managed to save a few, I had to have allies: foster parents, judges, and occasionally, a Court-Appointed Special Advocate, although there weren't nearly enough of those.

When an abusive, truly injurious parent hired a lawyer, suddenly DHS backed off. For what reason? A nine-year-old child I met on the job when she was a newborn was found hanged in her own home after DHS management forced me out of a case because the parents hired a lawyer. I read the story about this little girl's horrifying demise in the newspaper.

I knew the father was abusive to the older boys and so did the child abuse investigator who investigated the family before me. It was hard to know how evil and conniving this man was and have my hands tied because the parents hired a lawyer. I can't say much for the mother who chose her husband over her children, either. 

We need a merit system where politics don't play such a huge part in who gets hired and who gets fired and why. People's lives are literally at stake, including the lives of infants and children. Don't tell me that people aren't dying because of who gets hired and who gets fired in state jobs because I know different.

My husband Jim and I were discussing why the Des Moines Register has declared all-out war on Gov. Branstad. My husband thinks it's because the Register is tired of Branstad coming out so far ahead on the Register's own Iowa Poll. The notion that this slimeball can fool so much of the public so much of the time is pretty hard to take when you know the man's history.

He doesn't even advertise a lot of the jobs he hires for. And then to have two blacklists on top of that? One has been published, but the other hasn't. Not yet. That list is of probationary employees who were fired/laid off during their probation. No cause is required. The probationary employee is essentially at will or less than that, since long-term at-will employees with numerous good performance reviews probably have more legal recourse than probationary employees.

Of course, that's where Gov. Branstad's crony in the Iowa Workforce Development Department, Theresa Wahlert, comes in. Funny how she leans toward employers and not employees in cases of unemployment compensation. The Register has investigated her, too, and her firing of a chief administrative judge, Joseph Walsh, who used to serve as a buffer between her bias toward employers and the presumed objectivity of administrative judges who ruled in unemployment compensation cases. Former chief administrative judge Walsh has filed a lawsuit against Wahlert.

At Hamburg Inn 2, when Gov. Branstad ran the last time, I asked him who he was going to appoint to head the Department of Human Services. I told him that whether I voted for him or not would depend on his answer.

He proudly answered, "Charles Palmer" and was just sure I'd be pleased with the fine past work of Mr. Palmer.

Charles Palmer was head of DHS at what we social workers called "Hoover Heaven" in Des Moines when I worked for DHS. That's all I needed to know.

It hasn't surprised me much that senior management crawls up the colon of every supervisor who belongs to the wrong political party or spooks somebody somehow. Apparently, what my DHS supervisor in Muscatine experienced is commonplace throughout Branstad's hierarchy. I compliment the Register for digging into every nook and cranny of the Branstad sewer. 

Imagine being fired because you belong to the wrong political party and being paid to keep quiet about it. Gov.-for-Life Branstad has done that many times. He claims his underlings are doing it and not telling him about it, but we all know better than that, don't we?

Branstad is a Chris Christie look-alike. Branstad doesn't care how much taxpayer money he has to spend or how many people he has to fire to prove that he ordered nothing illegal or unfair to be done and knows nothing about any of it.

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