David Brooks Has Something Up His Sleeve

David Brooks has the ability to see the craziness that the G.O.P. has saddled the country with, but he is forever seeking to balance it with the Left’s progressive bent. For example, he read the Priest and Arkin series in the Washington Post on the terrifying post-9/11 growth of the security apparatus in the US. Brooks writes:

David Brooks, The Technocracy Boom

During the first part of this period, the Republicans were in control. They expanded a vast national security bureaucracy. In their series in The Washington Post, Dana Priest and William M. Arkin detail the size of this apparatus. More than 1,200 government agencies and 1,900 private companies work on counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence programs at around 10,000 sites across the country. An estimated 854,000 people have top-secret security clearance. These analysts produce 50,000 reports a year — a flow of paper so great that many are completely ignored.

In the second part of the period, Democrats were in control. They augmented the national security bureaucracy but spent the bulk of their energies expanding bureaucracies in domestic spheres.

Brooks then proceeds to detail the implementation of health care and financial reforms, enumerating the committees, departments and liaison offices that are being created to restructure the health insurance and financial industries.

But he never returns to the slight-of-hand offered at the start: the nearly 900K people with top secret clearance, the exponentially increased security efforts, the 50,000 reports per year. He never suggests the obvious: that it should be cut back drastically, at least to a point of comprehensibility. He never explicitly says that the Bush administration was wrong to spend so much and to build so grandiose a security world.

He merely holds it up and by implicit rhetorical magic implies that Obama and company are doing something similar with financial and health care reform. However, that isn’t the case. Trying to corral the costs of health care — which are eating into the countries future like rats in the corn crib — is nothing like spying on Yemeni citizens or money lenders in Islamic countries. Attempting to counter risks from unfettered financial markets — remember the bank disaster in 2008, David? — is really not like analyzing cell phone calling patterns.

Suggesting that the American people will rise up in a class war because a few years from now they are incensed about these reforms, and chop off the heads of the Technocrats that put them in place is really over the top. It looks like Brooks is going Tea Party on us.

The American people — if it is even possible to refer to that wildly diverse populace as a coherent entity — ought to be marching in the streets, demanding that the 75 billion dollars being pissed away every year, on top secret spook projects, surveillance, and who knows what, should be invested in the future: in a new energy system, new transportation infrastructure, and re-architecting our economy for a new world. We should demand that Obama dismantle the incipient police state infrastructure that Bush and Cheney built to control us.

If the people decide to revolt about something it won’t be because insurance companies can no longer drop people from health care policieswhen  they get sick, or because fat cat bankers are being forced to trade fancy derivatives transparently.

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Bush And Cheney: Criminals

The NY Times has come out with its strongest condemnation of Bush and Cheney, and calls for an investigation into their law breaking:

[via Editorial - Illegal, and Pointless - NYTimes.com]

“We’ve known for years that the Bush administration ignored and broke the law repeatedly in the name of national security. It is now clear that many of those programs could have been conducted just as easily within the law — perhaps more effectively and certainly with far less damage to the justice system and to Americans’ faith in their government.

That is the inescapable conclusion from ,a href=”http://documents.nytimes.com/federal-report-on-the-president-s-surveillance-program#p=1”>a devastating report by the inspectors general of the intelligence and law-enforcement community on President George W. Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program. The report shows that the longstanding requirement that the government obtain a warrant was not hindering efforts to gather intelligence on terrorists after the 9/11 attacks. In fact, the argument that the law was an impediment was concocted by White House and Justice Department lawyers after Mr. Bush authorized spying on Americans’ international communications.

[…]

So why break the law, again and again? Two things seem disturbingly clear. First, President Bush and his top aides panicked after the Sept. 11 attacks. And second, Mr. Cheney and his ideologues, who had long chafed at any legal constraints on executive power, preyed on that panic to advance their agenda.

[…]

This is not an isolated case. Once the Bush team got into the habit of breaking the law, it became their operating procedure that any means are justified: ordering the nation’s intelligence agents to torture prisoners; sending innocents to be tortured in foreign countries; creating secret prisons where detainees were held illegally without charge.

Americans still don’t have the full story. Even now, most of what the inspectors general found remains classified, including other wiretapping that Mr. Bush authorized. Mr. Yoo’s original memo is also classified.

President Obama has refused to open a full investigation of the many laws that were evaded, twisted or broken — pointlessly and destructively — under Mr. Bush. Mr. Obama should change his mind. A full accounting is the only way to ensure these abuses never happen again.”

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Yes, President Obama. We need to know more than you need Republicans on your side.

Social Capital: De Tocqueville, Putnam, and the Future of New Orleans

[reposted from Centrality, originally published 15 September 2005]

A recent Washington Post editorial by Joel Garreau on the heartbreaking Katrina disaster, entitled A Sad Truth: Cities Aren’t Forever, starts out stating a historial truth — that cities don’t necessarily live forever — and then winds up suggesting that New Orleans will find it difficult to bounce back from Katrina because of relatively low social capital:

In his 2000 book, “Bowling Alone,” political scientist Robert Putnam measured social capital around the country — the group cohesion that allows people to come together in times of great need to perform seemingly impossible feats together. He found some of the lowest levels in Louisiana. (More Louisianans agree with the statement “I do better than average in a fistfight” than people from almost anywhere else.) His data do not seem to be contradicted by New Orleans’s murder rate, which is 10 times the national average.

Garreau sparked my curiousity, so I dug out Bowling Alone, and looked through for the salient mention of Louisiana, and discovered a much darker truth buried there:

[from pp 292-294 Bowling Alone] Differences among the states on the underlying measures [of social capital] are substantial, with ratios of roughly three to one between high- and low-ranking states. Social trust, for example, ranges from 16 percent in Mississippi to 67 percent in North Dakota. The average number of associational memberships per capita varies from 1.3 in Louisiana and North Carolina to 3.3 in North Dakota. […] Even a cursory glance at America’s social capital resources leads one to ask, “Where in the world did these differences come from from?” Answering that question in detail is a task for another day, but this pattern has deep historical roots. Alexis de Tocqueville, patron saint of contemporary social capitalists, observed precisely the same patterns in his travels in the America of the 1030s, attributing it, atleast in part, to patterns of settlement:

As one goes farther south [from New England], one finds a less active municipal life; the township has fewer officials, rights, and duties; the population does not exercise such a direct influence on affairs; the town meetings are less frequent and deal with fewer matters. For this reason the power of the elected official is comparatively greater and that of the voter less; municipal spirit is less awake and less strong…. Most of the immigrants who founded the northwestern states came from New England, and they brought the administrative habits of their old home to the new.

Well-trod paths of migration helped establish regional and local patterns of social capital in contemporary America. […] Still more striking is the spatial correlation between low social capital at the end of the twentieth century and slavery in the first half of the nineteeth century. The more virulent the system of slavery then, the less civic the state today. Slavery was, in fact, a social system designed to destroy social capital among slaves and between slaves and freemen. Well-established networks of reciprocity among the oppressed would have raised the risk of rebellion, and egalitarian bonds of sympathy between slave and free would have undermined the very legitimacy of the system. After emancipation the dominant classes in the South continued to have a strong interest in inhibiting horizontal social networks. It is not happendstance that the lowest levels of community-based social capital are found where a century of plantation slavery was followed by a century of Jim Crow politics. Inequality and social solidarity are deeply incompatible. [emphasis mine.]

As a result of these observations — based on nationwide studies, not anecdotal observations, like de Tocqueville — we would be less surprised, although no less grief-stricken, by the events that unfolded in New Orleans. New Orleans is smackdab in the heart of the Old South, a city where the great majority of the poor are black, in a region with next to no history of “horizontal social networks”, but instead more than two centuries of intentionally stunted and blocked social networks, dividing individual from individual, individual from group, and group from group. This is not meant to blame the victims or to condone the evident lack of planning on the part of municipal, state, and federal authorities. On the contrary: awareness of the social capital that can be expected in an emergency is just as important as knowing that the levees will be swamped in a Force Four hurricane. It’s just a different element of the same problem. Just as any sensible military commander knows that morale is just as important as weaponry, our leaders need to move beyond a superficial and potentially catastrophic attitude about social capital. People in different parts of the country may respond radically differently to similar sorts of emergencies, based on social trust, affiliation, and other factors. And I am explicitly not singling out the poor or Blacks; the region as a whole is the question. As we turn our thoughts to rebuilding the fallen buildings, removing the debris, and burying our dead, it will be insufficient to only look to the physical infrastructure necessary to make a city alive. We have a much larger and potentially longer-term project ahead of us: to increase social capital in a region that has been starved for centuries. Perhaps the potential windfall from the enormous diaspora of all walks of life from the region — the rich, the poor, the powerful, and the weak — may actually increase the social connectedness in these benighted states. Although Barbara Bush had something else in mind (I think) when she said Katrina evacuees are better off now because “they were underprivileged anyway,” she may be revealing a higher truth. Yes, they lived in a region of enormous social poverty: not just the financial sort, but where everyone has come to expect lack of involvement, divided communities, and low connectedness between feuding camps. A wave of outsiders coming in to rebuild and reanimate the darkened city and the greater region around it might trigger an increase in social capital, and those who have been displaced — many who will never return — now have the chance to become connected with possibly richer, more open, and at the very least different social networks, elsewhere. But those elected and appointed officials theoretically in charge of mobilizing us in times of emergency simply did not heed the experts who have been making warnings about the city’s social vulnerability for years. Now we know that social capital in the Gulf region is also below sea level, and it is likely to take a lot longer to raise that than repairing the levees and pumping the streets dry.