As you know, our economic ship of state has hit a seriously big iceberg. So does it surprise you that the Bush administration’s response is to rearrange the deck chairs?

Anyone who has worked in a large organization — or, for that matter, reads the comic strip “Dilbert” — is familiar with the “org chart” strategy. To hide their lack of any actual ideas about what to do, managers sometimes make a big show of rearranging the boxes …

You now understand the principle behind the Bush administration’s new proposal for financial reform, which will be formally announced today: it’s all about creating the appearance of responding to the current crisis, without actually doing anything substantive.

Sounds like Katrina, non? More incompetence after the jump.

Krugman points out that this Homeland-Security-like reorganization will actually result in less regulation:

… the new plan was originally conceived of as “promoting a competitive financial services sector leading the world and supporting continued economic innovation.” That’s banker-speak for getting rid of regulations that annoy big financial operators.

And did you think you’d get out of this post without a couple of Bush administration lies? Ha! Ha! I say.

I’ve been disappointed to see some news outlets report as fact the administration’s cover story — the claim that lack of coordination among regulatory agencies was an important factor in our current problems.

The truth is that that’s not at all what happened. The various regulators actually did quite well at acting in a coordinated fashion. Unfortunately, they coordinated in the wrong direction.

For example, there was a 2003 photo-op in which officials from multiple agencies used pruning shears and chainsaws to chop up stacks of banking regulations. The occasion symbolized the shared determination of Bush appointees to suspend adult supervision just as the financial industry was starting to run wild.

Oh well, it’s just your children’s future. Why not throw them off a cliff?

The Dilbert Strategy [NY Times via Calculated Risk]