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.
- Post-9/11 Intelligence Apparatus Enormous, Wasteful, Intractable [Investigations] (gawker.com)
- Washington Post Investigates the Intelligence World Responsible for America’s Safety (eon.businesswire.com)
