Cambodia’s Curse:
The Modern History of a
Troubled Land
by Joel Brinkley
Public Affairs, 416 pp.

All of the aid workers, many of whom had lived in Cambodia since the beginning of the massive United Nations assistance program in the early 1990s, had heard about the intimidation; some had traveled to villages and seen the effects in person. Only two years earlier, in 1997, a group of Americans working for the International Republican Institute, a democracy-promoting NGO, had attended a rally of the opposition Sam Rainsy Party, along with around 200 party supporters. In what seemed to be a well-planned attack, someone tossed four grenades into the crowd, killing at least sixteen people, maiming at least 100, and leaving limbs and other body parts scattered around on the street. The leader of the IRI mission in Cambodia was seriously wounded in the attack.

But whenever I brought up the problems with the elections, and the general chaos, intimidation, and thuggery that was coming to characterize all of Cambodian politics, my expat acquaintances responded as if I’d committed some terrible social solecism. Turning the conversation to the unpleasant, even brutal nature of Cambodian politics forced people to put down beers or stop talking about the latest affairs in Phnom Penh’s incestuous expat community—and, more important, it deflated the promise of the UN aid effort, the largest in history. “Look at how far the Cambodians have come since the Khmer Rouge era,” one aid worker told me. “You have to admit it’s impressive—even if there are problems with the election, they are having an election, one generation after a genocide.” Another aid worker, who had spent considerable time in villages where opposing the ruling party was once tantamount to a death sentence, said, “Sure, there are some problems. But they’re still holding an election.”

I nodded my head—of course, after one of the most genocidal regimes in history, elections where people campaigning are only sometimes beaten up or killed were a step forward. But how long should the country be measured against that low standard? And how would any free elections be preserved if Cambodia’s political culture became more and more violent and repressive? By the time I could ask those questions, most of my dining companions had moved on, returning to stories of a European official’s torrid affair with the wife of a friend.

Ten years after that evening, Cambodia—back then the site of the largest and most far-reaching UN reconstruction program ever—has not made much more progress. Cambodians have fallen into what democracy experts like Larry Diamond call “the fallacy of electoralism”—they have focused almost exclusively on holding elections as a sign of progress, all but ignoring the other, more important foundations of a free society. In that vacuum, Cambodia’s long-ruling, ironfisted prime minister, Hun Sen, and his cronies, have robbed the country blind, selling off much of its valuable land to China and using unfair laws and outright intimidation to crush any opposition.

In his new book, Cambodia’s Curse: The Modern History of a Troubled Land, veteran journalist Joel Brinkley chronicles the travails of modern-day Cambodia and the unprecedented UN effort to get the nation back on its feet. Brinkley was a cub reporter for the Louisville Courier-Journal in 1979 when he visited the devastated country shortly after the genocidal Khmer Rouge fled Phnom Penh. During their four years in power, the Khmer Rouge killed as many as two million Cambodians, out of a total population of just under eight million—proportionally the worst genocide of the twentieth century. They wiped out the country’s entire industrial and commercial base in their attempt to create an agrarian society that they believed would become a communist utopia.

During the 1980s, fighting persisted, a civil war between a Vietnamese-installed government in Phnom Penh and a coalition of rebels, including the remnants of the Khmer Rouge. (In a particularly low point in American foreign policy, the U.S. supported the rebel alliance, which included the Khmer Rouge, as a way to fight back against enemy Vietnam, which controlled the government in Phnom Penh.) But in 1991, with the Cold War over, a peace deal inked in Paris brought an end to the Cambodian civil war and offered a promise of freedom and peace for its people.

After the truce, the UN, invigorated by post-Cold War unity, embarked upon its grandest mission. Thousands of UN advisers, aid officials, and peacekeeping troops descended on Cambodia. Over the next decade, the UN would spend more than $3 billion on Cambodia’s reconstruction. Even after the UN formally ended its assistance in the late 1990s, Western donors like the United States, Australia, France, and Japan would continue subsidizing much of the country’s budget, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars per year. Western advisers helped set up new media outlets, human rights groups, and political parties, demined roads and rebuilt water systems, wrote textbooks and other school curricula, and helped set up new phone, Internet, and other communications systems.

A decade after the UN formally withdrew from Cambodia, Brinkley, who by then had moved to the New York Times and then to Stanford University, arrived in the country again, with a mission of assessing the results. Unlike many writers, he took the time to travel the whole country, leaving built-up Phnom Penh, where most Westerners stay, for the remotest and poorest regions of Cambodia. He demanded, and often got, sit-downs with the country’s most powerful leaders, and frequently obtained insightful, revealing answers from them about how badly Cambodia today has failed.

And failed it has. For a visitor who stops only in Phnom Penh or Siam Reap, the tourist town near the gargantuan ruins of the twelfth-century Angkor Wat temples, Cambodia might seem like a prospering developing nation. Espresso bars and French hotels have popped up, and Cambodians with money can move into high-end serviced apartments fronting the Mekong. In recent years, growth rates often have topped 6 percent annually. But this sheen of development conceals a much harsher reality. Nearly all the wealth has gone to a tiny circle of elites around the prime minister, while, as Brinkley shows, the rest of the country suffers from poverty and hunger. The per capita income is one-third that of North Korea, and half the population goes to school for fewer than three years. Malnutrition rates are rising even as they fall nearly everywhere else in Asia, and most hospitals are nothing but disease-ridden shacks where patients come to lie down and die.

The country’s politics, too, are miserable. The opposition parties that existed in the 1990s have crumbled in the face of persistent pressure from Prime Minister Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party, which now dominates the legislature as a one-party giant. Grenade attacks, shootings, and beatings of opposition activists are common, and the vibrant civil society that emerged in the early 1990s is dying, with union leaders and NGO heads fleeing into exile. Other opposition politicians are simply bought off. Brinkley describes a common stratagem in which opposition politicians who agree to throw in their lot with the ruling party are given control of parts of certain ministries, which allows them to loot public coffers to help themselves and their families.

Meanwhile, politically powerful men and women can act with total impunity— they can grab land, steal from the public treasury, or even kill peasants, without repercussions. The tribunal designed to try former Khmer Rouge leaders has focused on only a handful of the top cadres, leaving hundreds of ex-Khmer Rouge to wander free across the country. In the kind of incident that is all too common, a nephew of the prime minister ran down a man on a motorcycle with his Escalade SUV, tearing off the other man’s arm and leg and leaving him bleeding to death in the middle of a crowded street in the capital. As the motorcycle driver died, Hun Sen’s nephew was greeted by military police, who comforted him—and then took the license plates off of his car, making it harder for anyone to report the crime.

How did such a massive, and in many ways idealistic, UN operation fail so miserably? Brinkley too often resorts to cultural essentialism, blaming what he sees as traits inherent in Cambodian psychology and culture for the country’s problems. He claims that Buddhism has made Cambodians passive, willing to accept tyrants since the time of the Angkor Empire a millennium ago. There have in fact been multiple uprisings against oppressive rulers in Cambodia, including against the former French colonists and the Vietnamese occupation in the 1980s. I have personally seen any number of passionate demonstrations in Phnom Penh and other parts of the country, protesting, among other things, illegal land grabs, discrimination against HIV sufferers, and political graft. Brinkley argues that Cambodian customs basically have not changed since the autocratic Angkorian era, ignoring the fact that the country’s urban areas today are wired, its opposition activists have deep relationships with other Asian nations, and its years of war and foreign occupation greatly changed traditional customs and mind-sets.

In fact, the real explanation for Cambodia’s misery can be found in the decisions made by the country’s top leaders, and UN complicity in them. Cambodian rulers used the power of the state primarily to enrich a few elites and their allies. The UN, for its part, was mostly focused on holding elections, the most visible way to claim success. Inspired by the belief that they would finally have a chance to determine their own destiny, in 1993 Cambodians turned out in overwhelming numbers for a national election, which was won by the royalist party of Prince Norodom Ranariddh. But Hun Sen, who in the 1980s had served as prime minister in the Vietnamese-installed government, refused to concede the election, and threatened a return to civil war. In an unconscionable decision, the international community went along with the installment of Hun Sen as co-prime minister. From that point on, Brinkley notes, Cambodians lost the trust that their votes would really matter.

Meanwhile, Cambodia’s political leaders have morphed into a kind of elected autocracy, an increasingly common situation in the developing world. For Hun Sen, and even for opposition leaders like Ranariddh, all of whom grew up in the winner-take-all climate of civil war-era Cambodia, politics have remained a zero-sum game. The concept of a loyal opposition does not exist. And Hun Sen, by far the savviest and most ruthless of the country’s politicians, has played this game the hardest. After 1993, he built up his personal bodyguard corps, whom he could deploy during campaigns to harass or kill opposition politicians. He also recruited the country’s most prominent businesspeople to his side, giving them access to the government, control of valuable natural resources, and ceremonial titles as they allegedly kicked back money to him and his family. (The prime minister now lives in a lavish estate on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, despite making a modest official salary.) He eventually even bought off his biggest rival, Ranariddh, by giving him control of enough ministries to ensure that the opposition leader could himself become fabulously wealthy.

As Hun Sen consolidated his power (this year, he will celebrate some twenty-six years in control), Western donors began to accept that they would have to work with him. Until recently, these donors provided the bulk of Cambodia’s budget, but they never used their leverage to demand real reform. For more than a decade, for example, Cambodia’s parliament has promised donors such as the U.S., France, and Japan that it would enact a tough anticorruption law. But for years, the parliament has held up the bill, citing one ridiculous excuse after another. Nonetheless, each year the donors pledge more large sums after hearing promises that this will be the year the anticorruption bill will finally pass.

One of the most devastating sections of Brinkley’s book is about this Western toleration of Hun Sen’s thuggery. Compared to many other major aid recipients, Cambodia is a pretty cushy place for foreigners to work. With its legacy of French colonialism, quick air links to Bangkok, new French bars and restaurants, and beautiful homes—all at discount prices—Phnom Penh is a very attractive place to live. Despite the crime and poverty that afflicts Cambodian society, foreigners are rarely attacked. Aid workers who live in Cambodia thus seem to have no incentive to push their bosses to withhold assistance. “For a lot of these aid workers, they are happy in Phnom Penh—it’s really a pretty nice place for them to live. So they don’t want to cut off aid,” says Brinkley.

Though Brinkley only touches on this point at the end of his book, developing nations like Cambodia now have new models of development that mix successful capitalism with undemocratic rule. They can copy the example of China—and, to a lesser extent, Vietnam or the United Arab Emirates—and delink prosperous free-market capitalism from democratization. It is noteworthy that China has, in recent years, become far more powerful in Cambodia, surpassing the influence of the Western nations. It is now the largest donor and investor in the country, and Chinese companies have been buying up large swaths of land for a kind of plantation agriculture, often in collaboration with Cambodian tycoons who are close to Hun Sen. Cambodian peasants living on the land are unceremoniously kicked off, with minimal compensation. Chinese schools have proliferated across Phnom Penh, and China has begun training Cambodian military officers—one reason why the Pentagon, despite its concerns about Cambodia’s atrocious human rights record, has been upgrading its defense ties with the country.

Two decades ago, Hun Sen castigated the People’s Republic of China as an enemy of Cambodia for backing the murderous Khmer Rouge. Today, he lavishes praise on his Chinese counterparts, clearly understanding that China provides him leverage over Western donors. China is “a long-lasting close friend,” Hun Sen declared earlier this year as he presided over the opening of a rural bridge financed by the People’s Republic. China, of course, says little about Hun Sen’s tough approach to politics while his government has complied with China’s demands: when a group of Uighur refugees, the embattled ethnic minority from western China, arrived in Cambodia in late 2009, seeking sanctuary from China’s oppression, the Cambodian government promptly deported them back to China, over the objections of UN agencies.

In the concluding section of his book, after hundreds of pages of examples of the Cambodian leadership’s failure to address the problems of poverty, environmental destruction, and political thuggishness, Brinkley offers a thin gruel of hope. As Cambodia begins to open up to the world, he says, a Cambodian middle class, more forceful and demanding than their parents and grandparents, eventually will push harder for real change, finally leading the country to throw off the yoke of tyranny.

I am not that optimistic. Hun Sen is only sixty years old, and easily could stay in office for another decade or more. He faces no real opposition now, and whatever global ferment has been created by the uprisings this spring in the Arab world, it has not resonated in Cambodia. Meanwhile, the major Western donors seem totally unwilling to cut off aid in order to push for democratic governance. And as China becomes more powerful, and the U.S., Japan, and other democratic donors slash their foreign aid, Beijing will only gain more leverage over Cambodia, making it even less likely that any outside forces will push for real democratic change. Reversing years of criticism of Hun Sen, Washington has increasingly built ties with his government, worried about losing out to China for strategic influence in the region. Despite all the country’s problems, at the most recent donor-pledging conference on Cambodia, last June, Western democracies gave the country $1.1 billion, a record amount. And so, ruined by both its own rulers and its overindulgent “friends,” Cambodia’s curse continues.

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Witness to Transformation:
Refugee Insights into North Korea
by Stephan Haggard
and Marcus Noland
Peterson Institute for International
Economics, 256 pp.

Even though the world’s most militarized country has not yet disintegrated, analysts were prudent to warn that the conditions for sudden ruin were in place. In the past two decades, North Koreans have struggled through famine, floods, political prison camps, and a slipshod currency reform. Now they’re faced with an increasingly volatile Kim Jong Il, who, while in poor health, is attempting to prove to North Koreans that his youngest son, Kim Jong Un, will be the country’s next strong and unifying leader. Today, living in an economy that is still in shambles, North Koreans typically have three choices: scurry for goods on the black market, starve, or flee the country.

By most conservative estimates, more than 100,000 North Koreans have chosen the last option, making the perilous trek across the Chinese border and sometimes into Thailand, Vietnam, and Mongolia, where they attempt to enter the safety of South Korean consulates. The lucky ones start new lives south of the border. Their less fortunate compatriots, many of whom wander around China unable to set down roots, are sent home by Chinese police to face torture, imprisonment, and worse.

These exiles may just be the world’s best resource for understanding what is happening in North Korea. In their recent book, Witness to Transformation: Refugee Insights into North Korea, political economists Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland present the first-ever methodical study of public opinion among North Korean refugees. For a field in which most studies are limited to anecdotes, interviews, and oral histories, the statistics in Witness to Transformation are refreshingly precise—and they affirm much of what the West has always suspected about the Hermit Kingdom.

Haggard and Noland drew on a survey pool of 1,700 defectors who lived in China and South Korea from 2004 to 2008. The refugees’ assessments of the North Korean regime are fervently negative: nearly all refugees living in China, for example, cited poor economic conditions as the reason for leaving North Korea, while a third of those who settled in South Korea pointed to political discontent as their motive for leaving. Haggard and Noland’s study divides recent North Korean history into four waves of economic change, and categorizes the refugees by the periods during which they left the country.

The first of these periods began in the early 1990s with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. North Korea, hugely dependent on its communist patron, was deprived of the food and fuel subsidies that had, until then, artificially propped up its economy. By the mid-1990s, the country was gripped by a horrific famine. North Korea’s fraying socialist-state food distribution system was unable to handle the task of getting food to the entire populace. Mass starvation claimed between 600,000 and a million lives, in a country of twenty-one million people. North Koreans responded to the famine by bartering their possessions on the black market. Everything was fair game, and everyone who could, took part—from ordinary folks selling off household goods to officials selling off natural resources, weapons, and drugs. Foreign governments donated food aid, hoping to feed at least a third of the population, but half the respondents in Haggard and Noland’s survey said they were unaware of foreign food aid before they left North Korea. Among those who did know about the aid, more than three-quarters reported not receiving it.

During the second economic wave—what the authors call the post-famine period of 1999 to 2002—the authorities introduced reforms to accommodate the black market. They increased food prices to ease food providers off government subsidies and encourage production, and they raised wages. But the new policies set off uncontrollable inflation of 100 percent per year, prompting the party to eventually revert to socialist programs.

This led to the third wave, known as the retrenchment period, from 2003 to 2005. Officials brought back the government’s food distribution system, banning all private trade in grain. They also threatened to expel foreign donor aid groups. Even so, 70 percent of Haggard and Noland’s respondents said they made most of their meager earnings through private trading. The post-retrenchment period followed in 2006 and beyond, a time when tougher socialist restraints in tandem with poor harvests and global price increases once again set off inflation. They also led to the worst food shortages since the famine of the mid-’90s. In late 2009, the government introduced a surprise monetary reform: they knocked two zeroes off the currency and, in an attempt to cripple informal traders, limited the number of old bills that North Koreans could trade in at about $40. The move effectively erased most people’s savings. Protests ensued—enough to prompt the regime to issue an unprecedented public apology.

The currency reform could be considered a culmination of a rocky two decades, but the North Korean power clique hasn’t budged. Still, refugees who formerly held military and police posts swear the regime can’t hold out much longer if its information apparatus falls apart. “Do you actually think we believed what the government told us?” one former North Korean police commander told me in his office in Seoul, the South Korean capital. “Of course not. We got together after work and watched bootleg copies of Titanic and Superman Returns. We always knew life on the other side was better, but we stayed quiet. We didn’t know what anyone else thought.”

In a military state that has a virtual lock on the flow of information and a vast security apparatus, this refugee’s discretion is what the report’s authors call “preference falsification,” or the tendency of people to keep their adverse beliefs secret because they don’t know about others’ allegiances. But there’s evidence that the information barriers are being knocked down. Haggard and Noland found that an increasing number of refugees were watching foreign news reports, especially during the retrenchment period—and that this act was associated with negative views of the regime.

Despite the insights they gleaned, Haggard and Noland note that the interviews come with one caveat: that these refugees are not perfectly representative of the attitudes of the entire population because they are potentially its most disaffected sample. Still, the research follows a long academic tradition of gathering information from refugees who escaped from formerly closed states, such as China and the Soviet Union.

The authors partially got around the representation problem through statistical modeling. They created projections of the views of the general population based on the refugees’ characteristics—age, gender, and occupation, as well as life experiences such as receipt of food aid or arrest and detention—offering a remarkable glimpse into the closed state.

Since the famine in the 1990s, humanitarian do-gooders and policymakers have tried unsuccessfully to alleviate the plight of North Koreans even as they hope to persuade Kim Jong Il to give up his nuclear weapons and join the community of nations. Their attempts have included engagement known as the “Sunshine Policy,” six-party talks, and the donor aid of the late ’90s. More importantly, however, the world needs to push China to change its refugee policy. China has a policy of repatriating North Korean defectors because it recognizes them as “economic migrants” and therefore not refugees under the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention, to which China is a signatory. But China’s assertion rests on an inconsistency. One legal basis for claiming refugee status is a fear of persecution upon return to the fatherland—a stipulation that should make refugees out of nearly all North Korean defectors. Still, North Korea and China remain stubbornly impervious to blandishments and change.

What, then, might lead to a collapse of North Korea? Andrei Lankov, a prolific historian of the country, told me that three factors will be needed for revolt: a way for the dissidents to communicate with each other and with the outside world, a reasonable alternative to the current government, and a chance that the revolt will succeed. A better government is certainly possible for a country at rock bottom, and a chance for victory may be there. As this year’s North Africa protests have shown us, an angry populace can topple strongmen with little forewarning.

The third aspect of communication seems to be gaining a hold, an assertion backed by the data in Witness to Transformation. The protests against the currency reform in 2009 were scant and disorganized, but they revealed that the government was willing to reverse policies when it faced opposition. Giving more reason for concern, North Korea appears to be experiencing yet another food shortage—an embarrassment after it asked charities and foreign governments, including famine-struck Zimbabwe, for assistance last spring. The recipe for discontent is brewing, and even if the regime does not lose its hold on power, some North Koreans will continue to subvert Kim Jong Il’s agenda in simpler, quieter ways.

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The post Watching <em>Titanic</em> in Pyongyang appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The Bee Eater:
Michelle Rhee Takes on
the Nation’s
Worst School District
by Richard Whitmire
Jossey-Bass, 296 pp.

Less well known is that Rhee is part of a generational shift in school reform. She’s one of a new breed of “social entrepreneurs” who have sought to create a performance-driven brand of public schooling on behalf of the nation’s disadvantaged students. Some of these new education entrepreneurs are shaping federal education priorities as senior officials in the Obama administration’s Department of Education, where they have pushed for school reform through the federal Race to the Top competition and other signature Obama plans.

Like many of the new reformers, including Richard Barth, the chief executive of the well-known KIPP network of charter schools, and Kim Smith, a founder of the venture philanthropy NewSchools Venture Fund, Rhee got her start at Teach for America. Founded in 1990 by Princeton graduate Wendy Kopp, TFA is a public service program that aims to end “educational inequity [and] the reality that where a child is born determines the quality of his or her education and life prospects.” It recruits students from the nation’s best colleges and universities, who spend at least two years teaching in some of America’s worst schools.

Rhee, herself an Ivy Leaguer, put in three tough years at a failing Baltimore elementary school that had been turned over to a for-profit company. In 1997, she left TFA to launch the New Teacher Project, a TFA offshoot that contracts with public school systems to recruit new teachers from outside schools of education, which attract few of the nation’s best and brightest college students.

In 2007, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty, at Kopp’s urging, brought Rhee to Washington and tasked her with fixing the city’s dysfunctional school system, which couldn’t manage to calculate daily attendance, deliver textbooks on time, or keep its buildings clean, much less successfully educate its 48,000 students. With the help of a veritable SWAT team of former TFAers and others, Rhee closed nearly two dozen underenrolled schools, introduced twenty-first-century information technology, slashed the system’s bloated bureaucracy, and replaced nearly a third of the city’s principals. Most notably, she won a new teacher contract that ended tenure, introduced performance pay and a comprehensive new evaluation system, and made D.C. perhaps the only city school system in the country to fire significant numbers of teachers for incompetence. These actions, predictably, made her both a hero to the advocates of urban education reform and the nemesis of teacher’s unions and other traditional voices in public education.

In his new book, The Bee Eater: Michelle Rhee Takes on the Nation’s Worst School District, Richard Whitmire, a former education editorial writer at USA Today, provides a lively narrative on Rhee’s personal history and the political and public policy drama that marked her three and a half years in Washington. He delivers an insightful commentary on one of the first pitched battles between the new generation of school reformers and the nation’s urban educational and political establishments.

Whitmire’s portrait is a sympathetic one, and rightly so. He chronicles Rhee’s evolution from privileged daughter of an ambitious Korean immigrant doctor; to student at an elite private school in Toledo and, later, Cornell; and then to a young woman drawn to TFA by a television documentary and subsequently overwhelmed by the task of teaching in inner-city Baltimore (where, to show her young students how tough she was, she reportedly ate a bee she swatted in her classroom). The Baltimore experience radicalized her to the cause of helping impoverished urban kids get a decent education.

What drives Michelle Rhee, and the entrepreneurial wing of school reform as a whole, is disdain for the commonly held belief in traditional public education theory that if students are unlucky enough to live in poverty, they shouldn’t be expected to achieve at high levels—and, more to the point, that schools shouldn’t be expected to get them there. (The frequent refrain is: “We’re doing the best we can with the kids we have.”)

Rhee and her allies also have little tolerance for public education policies that put the interests of adults ahead of those of students. This stance led her as D.C. chancellor to end the long-standing practice of laying teachers off on the basis of lack of seniority rather than inadequate performance, one of many steps that drew the ire of the city’s teacher’s union and its parent organization, the American Federation of Teachers.

Even though Rhee wrote the introduction to Whitmire’s previous book, on the challenges of educating boys, and his research for Bee Eater was funded by foundations that also back Rhee (which he fully discloses), Whitmire, whom I’ve known professionally for several years, is candid about Rhee’s shortcomings during her tenure in the nation’s capital. His analysis of where she went wrong is a particularly engaging part of the book, both for readers wanting to know more about the celebrity schools chancellor and those thinking about the larger consequences for school reform.

Whitmire reveals the kind of brash and sometimes bullying style and supremely bad judgment that led Rhee to do the Time cover. He tells us, for instance, that D.C. city council members first learned in the Washington Post of Rhee’s plans to close schools in their wards, and that she invited a television camera crew along when she fired a principal in his school. When Whitmire asked her why she had such a hard time finding strong school leaders, she responded, “The problem is we have extraordinarily high standards.”

Mayor Fenty, himself a young, supremely self-confident urban reformer and one of the nation’s few mayors to control his city’s school system, failed to restrain Rhee. Eventually, Whitmire writes, one of the city’s leading philanthropists stepped in to try to rescue her from herself by paying Anita Dunn, the former Obama White House communications director, to handle her public relations. But it was too little, too late.

Whitmire doesn’t shy away from reporting the questions that have been raised about Rhee’s claims of dramatic increases in her students’ test scores during her TFA stint in Baltimore, and he’s careful to attribute the claims to Rhee and her principal in Baltimore, neither of whom could produce evidence to substantiate the statements on her resume. Recently, USA Today published a series of stories suggesting that cheating on standardized tests in the Washington public schools was common during Rhee’s tenure as chancellor. The paper found that there were unusually high rates of wrong answers that had been erased and changed to right ones on student tests at more than half of the system’s public schools between 2008 and 2010. Rhee, who routinely used improving city test scores to justify her reforms, initially attacked the paper’s reporting, but she more recently acknowledged that there may have been isolated cases of cheating and has endorsed a probe of the paper’s findings that is currently under way by the city’s inspector general.

Rhee’s biggest failing, Whitmire argues, was her inattention to the racial dimension of her reforms. The racial side of school reform is not frequently discussed in policy circles, and Whitmire makes a valuable contribution by addressing it head on.

Unfortunately, many of Rhee’s changes in Washington—the purging of patronage hires from the central office dating back to the Marion Barry era; the performance-based firings of principals and teachers; the ending of teacher tenure—led to the undermining of job security for many middle-class African Americans, for whom urban public school systems have long been an important source of stable government employment.

As a result, blacks saw Rhee’s reforms as a threat to a system that sustained many members of their community. As Whitmire writes, “White voters thought Rhee was cleaning house; black voters saw no reason to sweep out a head of household with a steady paycheck.” In addition, Whitmire reports, many of the city’s African Americans saw the large number of predominantly white TFA and D.C. teaching fellows that Rhee recruited to her central office and classrooms not as new talent to help the city’s struggling students but as “cultural tourists.” Whitmire blames both Rhee and Fenty, an African American, for failing to convince the city’s working-class blacks of the connection between performance firings and school quality.

So when Rhee sought to attract both black and white middle-class families to public schools in transitional or mixed-race neighborhoods by introducing programs like preschool education and International Baccalaureate classes, representatives of the city’s many impoverished African American neighborhoods interpreted the moves as Rhee currying favor with white residents at the same time she was laying off blacks. It didn’t help that she was firing working-class African Americans during the height of one of the worst recessions in the nation’s history.

Rhee also hurt herself by introducing a plan to make teachers’ jobs and pay dependent on their performance before she had put a defensible teacher evaluation system in place. Washington teacher evaluations, like those in most school systems, were cursory and undependable when Rhee arrived. Declaring that she was going to end tenure and introduce performance-based pay before teachers knew how they were going to be judged guaranteed that they and their unions would oppose the plan.

Nor could Rhee bring herself to build more health screening and other student and family assistance into her reform agenda, a strategy that Fenty’s deputy mayor for education, Victor Reinoso, advocated. That move would have improved her many needy students’ readiness to learn and signaled to teachers and principals that she recognized the many challenges they faced in educating students from impoverished backgrounds. Doing so would have won her allies without spending a lot of additional money or relinquishing her commitment to high standards and accountability.

By the time Rhee introduced the new system, in 2009, opposition to her reforms was already widespread among the rank-and-file. The enmity toward Rhee among Washington’s African Americans contributed to Fenty’s resounding defeat in the city’s black wards in last fall’s Democratic primary and spelled, shortly afterward, the end of Rhee’s important work in Washington. She has since launched a national advocacy organization, Students First, to counter the influence of teacher’s unions.

Rhee’s crusade in Washington was about transforming a system driven by bureaucracy to one shaped by performance incentives. This shift remains the core challenge facing reformers in urban school systems and public education generally. That Rhee got as far as she did is a testament not only to her take-no-prisoners personality but also to the importance of mayoral control of urban school systems. If Rhee had had to deal with a traditional elected school board, and if Fenty hadn’t cleared a political path for her, she might not have been able to push through the most important reforms.

It’s hard to overestimate how much Rhee accomplished, despite her flaws—or perhaps in part because of them. Reformers have sought for decades, without much success, to implement many of the changes she was able to make in Washington during her brief tenure. She put an end to hiring and firing by seniority. She shrunk D.C.’s famously bloated central office and closed struggling schools. She created a new staffing model with clear standards and a state-of-the-art teacher evaluation system built not just on student test scores but on classroom visits by both principals and trained school system observers.

It’s an impressive system, albeit one that needs to be improved to win teachers’ respect, a key to its longevity. The other key to its longevity is political support, and that, surprisingly, seems assured, at least for a while: Fenty’s successor, Vincent Gray, has named Rhee’s deputy and close ally Kaya Henderson to replace her as chancellor.

Of course, the ultimate measure of any set of reforms is whether they improve student performance. In D.C., despite the allegations of cheating on the city’s standardized tests, students’ scores on the federal NAEP test, which is very hard to cheat on, rose during Rhee’s tenure. If those increases continue under Henderson, it will be hard to argue that the system Rhee created wasn’t worth the pain it took to build.

If you are interested in purchasing this book, we have included a link for your convenience.

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I’m Feeling Lucky:
The Confessions of Google
Employee Number 59
by Douglas Edwards
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 432 pp.

The best parts of I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59, Douglas Edwards’s intermittently interesting account of five years spent at Google during its start-up years (some of them not yet a decade past), are those that capture the excitement of being among the explorers and builders who have ventured forth into the new century’s new world. Its enormous success aside, Google is a particularly apt company to watch during this period; Google, at root, is a search engine, and, with other search engines like Alta Vista and Inktomi and so on, it performed the function that Lewis and Clark and Captain Cook and other explorers performed in previous centuries, namely, mapping the unknown world.

While it is true, reading an account of encountering Pacific aboriginals will always read more dramatically than accounts of the crises confronted during a tech company’s growing years (“Here, attach this cable to that server—now!), we have to take the new world as we find it. Besides, some of these tales can be quite exciting. For example, things got pretty touch and go the day a cornerstone deal between the established Netscape and the up-and-coming Google went live. Suddenly a Mississippi of search requests swamped Google’s servers, which nearly caused a systemic breakdown, which was avoided only when Larry Page, cofounder of Google with Sergey Brin, boldly ordered that Google stop responding to search requests from people coming to the Google site, and handle only requests coming from Netscape, until more server capacity could be brought on board. This averted paralysis preserved the all-important business relationship and enhanced the young company’s credibility. Okay, it’s not wrestling a bear, but then, what is these days?

One of the limitations of this memoir is that although Edwards was an early hire at Google, and certainly had close contacts with key players and witnessed some privileged moments, there was always a kind of cognitive membrane between him and key people at Google. Edwards was a journalist for the San Jose Mercury News who was hired to serve as Google’s online brand manager. He was, as he often reminds us, a word guy, the person who wrote screen copy and messages to consumers and other suspiciously unquantifiable material. The big men on Campus Google were its engineers, the code writers and software designers and hardware architects who designed and built the search engine. After them were the business people, the people who figured out how to turn all these bits and bytes into money. After them, and probably after the staff chef, and almost certainly after the staff masseuse, were the wordsters.

There is throughout the book the sense that if Page and Brin thought that what Edwards was doing was important, he wouldn’t be doing it. Page and Brin would be dealing with it, or at least an engineer would be. The reader feels just a bit marginalized, as though one had entered a drawing to have dinner with Keith Richards and ended up in second place, having nachos with Ronnie Wood. It is, moreover, difficult to gauge just how valuable Edwards was to the organization. We assume he made a useful contribution—he was kept around long enough for him to hit the jackpot when Google went public—but it would seem to auger poorly for anyone’s status in any company if the co-CEO felt comfortable saying, as Sergey Brin did at one meeting in 1999 during Russia’s war with Chechnya, “I have a good idea. Why don’t we take the marketing budget and use it to inoculate Chechen refugees against cholera? It will help our brand awareness and get more new people to use Google.” A worthwhile cause, certainly, and who among us would not give his salary if it would mean saving a child’s life? Note, however, that Brin did not offer even a sliver of the engineering budget to rescue the refugees.

Far and away the most interesting people in Edwards’s book are Page and Brin, the brilliant researchers who developed the Google search program as undergraduates at Stanford, and who, by placing a premium on technological excellence and shrewd, patient business dealings, then led the company into other wildly successful Internet services and technologies to become the world’s top tech company. On the face of it, they are a pair of admirable and still-young geniuses (both were born in 1973). “If we can’t win on quality, we won’t win at all,” Page said at one marketing meeting; as a consumer, it’s hard not to applaud an attitude like that. “Don’t be evil” is the famous, if unofficial, motto of the company, coined by engineer Paul Bucheit, and again, one has to admire co-CEOs who are bold enough to affix that phrase, as infinitely fungible as those words may be, on a bull’s-eye on their backs. For all that, though, they still seem to have a bit of that undersocialized quality that seems to be characteristic of hard-driving visionaries. It’s true that Edwards doesn’t report either of them saying “I drink your milkshake,” but one wonders if that is because he was never in the inner sanctum with them and the engineers and the masseuses.

“Larry and Sergey,” Edwards writes, “for all their opacity and all their antipathy to traditional thinkers, were easy to approach and easy to like.” Okay, but Edwards doesn’t expend very much energy capturing them in their “easy to like” mode. Mostly he portrays them as iconoclasts, highly demanding and willing to use applied anxiety as a management technique. To their credit, Edwards never depicts them as mean or abusive, which bosses so frequently can be, but they do display the overweening self-confidence that high school quarterbacks, teen heartthrobs, mid-level royalty, and others who have never known defeat often possess. There’s the moment, for instance, when Edwards, after a contentious debate with his bosses, said, “Larry, I realize that more often than not you’ve been right about things,” and Page, with the uninflected tone of a robot encountering data that does not compute, responded, “When were we ever wrong?” There’s Edwards’s introductory interview, in which Brin—who was wearing roller hockey skates at the time—not only asked Edwards his college GPA but, for the decisive query, challenged him to take five minutes and then “explain something complicated to me that I don’t already know.” There was the time Brin had his secretary summon Edwards to help load the boss’s scuba gear into his car, and Brin and Page’s habit of praising an idea with the withholding phrase “That doesn’t seem too sucky” and of rejecting an idea with the alienating phrase “That’s not very Googley.” There was the time when Google CEO Eric Schmidt was conducting an off-site meeting with mid-level managers in a country club conference room while Brin, wearing spandex bicycle shirt and shorts, periodically attempted to make a battery-operated remote-controlled flying saucer hover over Schmidt’s head; there was also the time a staff engineer came up with Gmail, and they insisted on releasing it on April 1 because it would be amusing to see the press grapple with whether or not it was a joke.

Perhaps they had poor upbringings; perhaps it comes with being visionaries. The good news is that there is hope for Brin and Page. For example, if you Google the phrase “Am I being a jerk?” you get about 33,900,000 results in a tenth of a second; presumably at least of few of them would be useful.

“I’ve been asked if Larry and Sergey were truly brilliant,” Edwards writes. “I can’t speak to their IQs, but I saw with my own eyes that their vision burned so brightly it scorched everything that stood in its way. The truth was so obvious that they felt no need for the niceties of polite society when bringing their ideas to life. Why slow down to explain when the value of what they were doing was so self-evident that people would eventually see it for themselves?”

Virgin spaces are seldom settled by the mild-mannered; they need zealots, criminals, and iconoclasts who are willing to go where no one has gone before and hew out of the jungles and deserts the neighborhoods the rest of us will live in. It is a good thing that they have confidence in their visions, and we ought to offer them honor and gratitude and reward. But we should also be careful. John Winthrop, standing on the deck of the Arabella in 1630 and calling for the Massachusetts Bay Colony to be “a shining city on a hill” would recognize a kindred spirit in Google’s “Don’t be evil.” But within six years, rivalries with other settlers and various tribes led to the death or captivity of 700 members of the Pequot tribe. Sooner or later, somebody goes too far.

If you are interested in purchasing this book, we have included a link for your convenience.

The post The Searchers appeared first on Washington Monthly.

American Dreamers:
How the Left Changed a
Nation
by Michael Kazin
Knopf, 365 pp.

In a new compendious and erudite history of the left, American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation, Georgetown University historian Michael Kazin does not closely examine the Obama presidency, but he suggests that such despair may just be a constituent part of belonging to the left. Even his title signals caution: dreamers seldom make for the most effective political leaders. And Kazin’s is no rosy account of a continual march of progress; rather, it is a careful and nuanced view of the saga of the American left, and one that focuses on the idealistic radicals and progressives from the early nineteenth century down to Barry Commoner and Betty Friedan. For the political junkie as well as those simply curious about the saga of the left, his book is helpfully crammed with numerous informative portraits of famous as well as more neglected figures. (Ever hear of Emma Tenayuca, a young organizer known as “La Pasionaria de Texas” who called for bilingual education and workers’ rights in the 1930s?)

This approach can run the risk of becoming a gauzy PBS-type special, but Kazin is rarely less than incisive. He divides his history in three parts—the first focuses on the abolitionist and feminist movements, the second on the rise of the labor unions and socialism, and the third on communism and the New Left. Throughout, Kazin contends that while the left’s political accomplishments have been sporadic, its cultural impact has been far more pervasive.

The question haunting Kazin’s study is the one first raised by the German scholar Werner Sombart, who famously asked why there was no socialism in America. A conservative, of course, might flip the question around and ask why there should be socialism in America. Either way, America remains something of an outlier—at least compared with its European brethren, where socialism took hold in the nineteenth century. Solid conservatives such as Germany’s Otto von Bismarck regarded a social insurance system as a key element of state building. And in England, Benjamin Disraeli warned about the danger of “two nations,” one rich and one poor.

In America, however, the ambitions of the left, Kazin writes, collided headfirst with the American ethos of individualism. American immigrants and their descendants were not eager to replicate the oppressive states they had sought to flee back in Europe. Except at times of war and emergency, attempts to enhance state authority were, and remain, suspect. Many radicals, writes Kazin, understood that “the promise of individual rights be realized in everyday life and encouraged suspicion of the words and power of all manner of authorities— political, economic, and religious.” Squaring individual rights with the dream of social equality is a conundrum that the left has never been fully able to resolve.

As Kazin sees it, the left first emerged in America with the abolitionist movement. Perhaps some historians will quarrel that this is a form of cooptation, of retrospectively endowing the abolitionists with a political coloration they never possessed. But as Kazin emphasizes, the abolitionists—mostly middle-class Protestant radicals—called for both individual rights and broader social justice. They were trying to create nothing less than a new nation. Their aims retain a contemporary ring. Antislavery militants, Kazin writes, tried to lead interracial lives: “Black and white activists wrote for the same publications, spoke from the same platforms, worshipped in the same churches, insisted on eating in the same restaurants and sleeping in the same hotels when on tour, and stayed in one another’s homes.” The pickle, however, was that the “freedom movement,” Kazin continues, “could never break through a stubborn barrier that divided it from a critical section of the emerging white working class”—in particular, from the Irish Catholics, who went on to become mainstays of the Democratic Party. The very same problem continues to assail the Democrats today as they seek to win back the white working-class vote, which the Republicans have successfully wooed away by emphasizing cultural issues.

The women’s movement was also coeval with the critique of slavery. Having witnessed the depravities authored by men in attempting to enforce and defend slavery, it probably could not have been otherwise. But the fight was slow going: when New York State gave women the right to vote in 1917, only one woman who had signed the 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments was “still alive to cast a ballot.”

Industrialization and the Gilded Age led to a different kind of left focused on labor. Kazin is particularly insightful on the Progressive Era, during which the left tried to curb the worst abuses of the new industrial magnates. He points to the emergence of three types of socialist movements. The first began among skilled workers in midwestern cities and tenant farmers. The second one was comprised of secular Jewish immigrants. “Jews,” Kazin writes, “are the only American ethnic group with an unbroken history of radicalism, and that tradition began with the rise of the socialist movement at the turn of the twentieth century.” The third was the rise of the modernist left, ensconced in Greenwich Village and a few neighborhoods in Chicago. “Modernist radicals sympathized ardently with the plight of labor and aided strikes by Jews and other recent immigrants from eastern and southern Europe. But their true passion was cultural revolution.”

The modernists, suggests Kazin, perhaps achieved success out of all proportion to their actual numbers; birth control, sexual freedom, civil rights for black people, and a new transnational identity meant that they were advancing a “cultural agenda whose appeal would grow in the years to come.”

His affinity for the left notwithstanding, Kazin is clear-eyed about the illusions in which some radicals swaddled themselves. During World War I, for example, they fancied that Washington, D.C., might be ripe for its own Winter Palace coup—a pipe dream not shared by the Bolsheviks themselves. Leon Trotsky, who lived in exile for several months in New York before returning to Russia in May 1917, sneered that the American Socialist Party was a “party of dentists.” A new American Communist Party emerged in 1919, one that battled relentlessly with American socialists.

The New Deal was a headier time for the left. Franklin Roosevelt saved capitalism from the capitalists, which meant that radicals didn’t wield much practical political influence, but they did, Kazin writes, help alter America’s perception of itself. Artists belonging to the Popular Front, a coalition of leftists and centrists, “took up subjects and themes that went beyond the limits of New Deal politics” by reinterpreting the American past as a struggle between plutocrats and working people of all races and campaigned against segregation laws. Pictures, cartoons, and films were all part of their assault against what they saw as American backwardness. Kazin reminds us that the sentimental populist film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (heralded, incidentally, by Sarah Palin as the kind of movie that liberal weenies don’t get) was written by none other than Sidney Buchman, a member of the American Communist Party. It’s important to note, however, that Kazin has no illusions about the mendacious character of the American Communist Party, which he notes always fought for civil rights and intellectual freedom “with one eye fixed steadily on the needs of the USSR.” “Glued” might be an even more apposite term.

It’s the 1960s that marked the true heyday of the left as a political and cultural force. Kazin reports that the professor and philosopher Marshall Berman, then a radical student, asked the literary critic Lionel Trilling what he thought of the Students for a Democratic Society-led strike taking place at Columbia in 1968—the rock music, erotic energy, chanting, and so on. Trilling was unfazed. “It’s modernism in the streets,” he replied. Perhaps it was. The New Left, as has been often noted, helped make significant strides that we now take for granted: the availability of birth control; feminism; civil rights. Kazin neatly links the 1960s left with what he sees as its progenitor during the abolitionist years. The insistence on uniting personal behavior with political aspirations marked both movements: “Both took delight in smashing taboos about interracial sex, about the proper roles of men and women, and about dress and diet. Both experimented with styles of communal living they believed would allow individuals to realize their ‘true’ nature and to find happiness doing so.” The impulses may have been similar, but it seems only appropriate to stipulate that William Lloyd Garrison or John Brown would have been bug-eyed at what was taking place at Woodstock or in Berkeley communes, though perhaps Brown could be seen as a distant intellectual ancestor of the Black Panthers. Violence, as Kazin notes, was “part of the utopian tradition.”

The left sputtered out as a political force in the 1970s—the end of the Vietnam War probably did more than anything to enervate it. Once the war ended, the left began to focus its efforts more intently on the environment, another cause that has gone mainstream, even if America’s actual efforts to improve it have been fitful and halting. For conservatives and neoconservatives, however, the 1960s served, and continue to serve, as a useful way to stir up middle-class anxieties about returning to an era of depravity and debauchery, a time when neither the kids nor the grown-ups were all right—a moment wittily captured in the 1968 movie I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! In it, Peter Sellers, who plays a successful, nerdy Jewish lawyer, abandons his suit and tie to join the psychedelic counterculture with his blond hippie girlfriend, who bakes hash brownies and gets his square parents laughing hysterically. All of this issued in a conservative backlash led by then California Governor Ronald Reagan, who attacked the counterculture with metronomic regularity. “A hippie,” he liked to say, “is someone who looks like Tarzan, walks like Jane, and smells like Cheetah.”

The result has been to emasculate mainstream liberalism. Even the very word has become taboo, as liberals try to rebrand themselves as progressives. Is this true progress? Kazin is dubious. He believes that it requires more than modest, practical policy prescriptions to create change. “Without powerful left movements,” writes Kazin, “neither Bill Clinton nor Barack Obama could become the transformative figure each aspired to be, and liberalism retained the baleful image it acquired in the 1970s: as an ideology out of touch with the interests and beliefs of ordinary Americans.”

The problem, of course, is that Kazin cannot specify what a return to socialist ideals would actually entail. And it is as much the strength of the right as the fractured nature of what the Obama White House has itself derided as the “professional left” that has prompted Obama to search for an elusive middle ground. That Obama’s moves, including bailing out big industry, have triggered a frenzied rush to tar him as a socialist dictator, out to expropriate the means of production, provides a telling index of the opposition that he faces. Instead of accusing Obama of slackening in his efforts to effect change, maybe the moment has arrived to cut him some slack.

If you are interested in purchasing this book, we have included a link for your convenience.

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Of course, GOP leaders have refused to even consider tax increases, especially on the rich—or, as conservatives like to call them, the “wealth producers.” The Ryan plan would further cut taxes on the wealthy and pay for them by gutting Medicare benefits. So determined are Republicans to shield the wealthy from taxation that they have been playing a game of chicken with the White House over raising the debt ceiling, at the risk of spooking financial markets, wrecking America’s credit rating, and plunging the economy back into recession.

As it happens, the willingness of the rich to defend their wealth from taxation to the point of national ruin is nothing new in world history, as Francis Fukuyama recounts in his magisterial new book The Origins of Political Order. The Han dynasty in China fell in the third century AD after aristocratic families with government connections became increasingly able to shield their ever-larger land holdings from taxation, which helped precipitate the bloody Yellow Turban peasant revolt. Nearly a millennium and a half later, the great Ming dynasty went into protracted decline in part for similar reasons: unable or unwilling to raise taxes on the landed gentry, the government couldn’t pay its soldiers and was overrun by Manchu invaders.

In the fifteenth century, the Hungarian King Matthias Corvinus persuaded his reluctant nobles to accept higher taxes, with which he built a professional military that beat back the invading Ottomans. But after his death the resentful barons placed a weak foreign prince on the throne and got their taxes cut 70 to 80 percent. When their undisciplined army lost to Suleiman the Magnificent, Hungary lost its independence.

Similarly, the cash-strapped sixteenth-century Spanish monarchy sold municipal and state offices off to wealthy elites rather than raise their taxes—giving them the right to collect public revenues. The elites, in turn, raised taxes on commerce, immiserating peasants and artisans and putting Spain on a path of long-term economic decline. This same practice of exempting the wealthy from taxation and selling them government offices while transferring the tax burden onto the poor reached its apogee in ancien regime France and ended with the guillotine.

By contrast, in England during the same period, the nobility and gentry didn’t conspire with the crown to exempt themselves from taxation. Instead, thanks to a number of factors—greater social solidarity, a keener sense of foreign threats, reforms that made the government itself less corrupt, and the principle of taxation only with the consent of Parliament—the wealthy of England willingly accepted higher taxes on themselves. As a result, government spending in England rose from 11 percent of GDP in the late seventeenth century to 30 percent during some years in the eighteenth century. That’s higher than U.S. federal spending today. These higher taxes on the wealthy in England, Fukuyama notes, “did not, needless to say, stifle the capitalist revolution.”

Higher taxes on the rich won’t stifle America’s economy either. Nor, I think, would most wealthy Americans object to paying more if they truly understood that the fate of the country is on the line. Unfortunately, the GOP may now be too ideologically rigid to see the real interests of its own wealthy constituents. History shows that the rich sometimes make suicidal decisions. The challenge of American democracy right now is to somehow keep ours from doing so.

The post Playing Chicken with History appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Much of this column will be devoted to a short course on how Washington really works, with special emphasis on truths that are not widely understood.

One of these truths emerged in a survey of government workers by Lisa Rein of the Washington Post, asking them for suggestions on how to cut fat from the budget. From an employee of the EPA, and one from the IRS, came the same answer.

EPA: “The layers of management are insane.… It takes 13 steps and five layers to get a signature from our office director.”

IRS: “Bottom line, there are way too many levels of management, too many meetings, too much duplication of effort, too many meetings about meetings.”

The IRS worker added: “We have too many [Washington] employees (many of them in higher paid brackets) and far too few in the field assisting taxpayers.”

All of this is true of mature government agencies. Career employees aspire to be chiefs, not Indians. Bureaucracies accommodate them by creating layers of authority, with secretaries, undersecretaries, assistant secretaries, deputy assistant secretaries, division directors, deputy division directors, section chiefs, deputy section chiefs, and so on. As a result, too much of an agency’s budget is consumed by the management and not enough by those who work in the field.

The Department of Housing and Unbelievable Delays

Another effect of the concentration of money and effort in Washington is that too little attention is paid to making sure that programs are effectively carried out in the field. This was recently illustrated by a long article in the Post about the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Seven hundred projects “have languished for decades or longer” because the department “does not track the pace of construction and often fails to spot defunct deals, instead trusting local agencies to police projects.”

God help the squeaky wheel

Sometimes agency heads don’t want to know what is going on down below because they fear they will be held responsible for fixing it, so they keep their fingers crossed that the bad news won’t emerge on their watch. But often the problem is that the people at the top know all too well what is going on, and are desperate to keep a lid on it. Take U.S. Air Marshal Robert MacLean, who revealed that his boss’s plan to reduce air marshal coverage on long-distance flights was to save money on hotel costs. He was fired. And consider the ordeal of Franz Gayl, described in this issue.

Thomas Drake is another public servant who lost his job for whistle-blowing, at the National Security Agency. Indeed, he has been indicted under the Espionage Act and threatened with thirty-five years in prison. His crimes: he told Siobhan Gorman, then a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, about management failures at the NSA, including its rejection of a computer program that would have protected the privacy of American citizens, called ThinThread, in favor of a more costly program that failed to protect citizens and was less effective against terrorists.

Drake is not some nut. The program he advocated was supported by several other highly regarded employees of the agency. He has been the subject of sympathetic portrayals by 60 Minutes and the New Yorker. And he is far from alone in accusing the NSA of mismanagement. Indeed, according to the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, a study commissioned by Michael Hayden, the NSA head who presided over the programs that Drake called into question, concluded that the agency was “mired in bureaucratic conflict and suffering from poor leadership.” (The government has since abandoned the espionage charge and Drake has pled guilty to the misdemeanor of “unauthorized use of a government computer.”)

When obfuscation is a virtue …

Hayden demonstrated the kind of leadership he provided at the NSA with the following memo to his staff. Responding to dissension in the ranks over the abandonment of ThinThread, he complained that “individuals, in a session with our congressional overseers, took a position in direct opposition to one that we had corporately decided to follow. . . . Actions contrary to our decisions will have a serious adverse effect on our efforts to transform N.S.A., and I cannot tolerate them.”

If this strikes you as just a bit defensive, I share your reaction. Let me try to explain why so many government officials agree with Hayden.

One reason is that there are secrets worth keeping. Suppose a disgruntled official had leaked—and an anything-to-become-a-star reporter had revealed— the plan to raid Osama bin Laden’s compound before the raid could take place. Of course, it is also true that “confidential” or “secret” labels are all too often used to hide facts that may be embarrassing but that the public should know.

My job in the government was to rub the collective noses of my agency’s top officials in what they were doing wrong and why our programs in the field weren’t working. The agency was the Peace Corps, the time was the first seven years in the 1960s. Our glow of good intentions made it hard for outsiders to criticize. The result was highly favorable treatment by the press, which had the effect of making it even harder for the top officials to face my news that things weren’t quite as good as they seemed, with too many volunteers being sent to nonexistent or poorly defined jobs, without adequate training in the culture or language of the people they were sent to help.

I took great pride in telling the truth within the agency, even when I knew it would make me unpopular with the senior staff. However—and this is a big however—I felt a loyalty to the agency that made me very reluctant to expose our dirty laundry to outsiders. And those included not only the media but other arms of the government, including Congress, the Government Accounting Office, and the Office of Management and Budget.

I would not lie to these people, but I would studiously avoid volunteering any unpleasant facts about the Peace Corps, for fear that it might be used to hurt the agency I loved and was proud to serve. If they were planning to visit a Peace Corps program overseas, I would suggest one of our best. If they threatened to visit a program in trouble, such as ours in Brazil was for a time, I would remind them of the terrible humidity, the boa constrictors, and every other unwelcoming fact about the Amazon basin that I could come up with. At the same time, I would praise the salubrious climate, the lovely scenery, and the stunning herds of elephant, giraffe, and zebra they would see in Kenya, which just happened to have an outstanding Peace Corps program.

The benign attitude that the media showed toward the Peace Corps was shared by almost all Democrats and moderate Republicans in Congress. Still, there were some who wanted to give us a hard time. But in hearings they rarely proved informed enough to ask the right question, and if they happened to stumble upon it, the right follow-up question almost never came. Even if it did, the questioner would soon have to leave the hearing for a quorum call or some other congressional business, or their time for questioning had expired.

… and when loyalty curdles

As long as we had frank internal self-evaluation, the Peace Corps could get by without informed outside critics. After the 1968 election, however, the Nixon administration abolished my office, and the loyal desire to protect the agency, left unchecked, ultimately led to the disgraceful concealment of the rapes of female volunteers that has recently come to light. At its worst, this desire to hide the bad news resulted in the agency’s helping a murderer go free. (See American Taboo: A Murder in the Peace Corps, by Philip Weiss.)

As an agency matures, pride in its work as a motive for not revealing the bad news is accompanied or replaced by a concern for the agency’s budget. The one sure way any civil servant can lose his job is if his agency’s budget is cut. And so the survival imperative becomes a strong motive for avoiding excessive candor.

Asking the right questions

Today I can imagine that there is an even greater reluctance to disclose the bad news. The Republicans in Congress have become so automatically anti-government that they are almost certain to use any critical information to reduce or eliminate an agency’s effectiveness rather than to improve it.

This does not excuse control freaks like Michael Hayden, or the inanity, not to mention insanity, of indicting Thomas Drake for espionage. But I hope it does help explain why good people can feel obliged to conceal their agency’s difficulties, and why it becomes so important for White Houses, congressmen, and journalists who are truly concerned with better government to do enough homework to ask the right questions.

Who said “monster”?

Oddly enough, I think that Democrats in the 2012 election will have a similar problem with truth telling. It seems to me that their most likely road to success is to oppose any change in Medicare or Social Security and to wholeheartedly embrace the public employees unions that are among their major sources of funding and campaign workers.

For the conscientious among them, the challenge will be to find a way to tell the truth without sacrificing their electoral heads.

I had a recent experience in the difficulty of doing so. In our last issue, in the course of describing the selfishness and greed that had increasingly dominated this country in the last thirty years, I noted that the selfishness even extended to the non-greedy, giving as an example “those teachers who are more concerned with protecting their tenure than educating children.”

I then received an otherwise thoughtful letter from a reader who began, “Who are these monsters? If I were looking for a highly paid sinecure, it would not be in a classroom.”

Of course, I had not called anyone a monster, and I had specifically stated that I was talking about the non-greedy. And of course I was not describing all teachers— after all, my son is one—but only those “who are more concerned with protecting their tenure than educating children.”

Don’t be Mediscared

For Democrats who were not convinced by the 2010 election, in which Republicans exploited seniors’ anger over Obama’s attempt to rein in Medicare costs with the Affordable Care Act, the recent congressional election in upstate New York has probably clinched the case that any discussion of Medicare is hazardous to their political health. Yet I cling to the hope that a way can be found to raise issues like Medicare costs and teacher quality without immediately inviting reactions like that of my reader.

My hope is shared by two of the Monthly’s contributing editors who are now columnists—Joe Nocera of the New York Times and Matt Miller of the Washington Post—who have recently urged Democrats to face the problems with Medicare. But I think we critics have a responsibility to help find the magic combination of words that will enable politicians to grapple with the real issues while preserving some reasonable hope of winning an election.

The patient can suffer from more than one illness, you know

The cause of tenure reform, which seemed to be gaining traction with Davis Guggenheim’s documentary Waiting for Superman, has recently become the subject of a strong counterattack led by Diane Ravitch. Both the Washington Post and the New York Times have recently published pieces by her and others that question the wisdom of tenure reform. The argument these people emphasize—take, for example, “Five Myths about America’s Schools,” by Paul Farhi in the Post—is that there are many other problems, like poverty, that adversely affect the quality of education. Of course there are. But this does not mean that tenure itself is not a serious problem, keeping bad teachers in the classroom, absorbing too much of the education budget with their higher salaries, and, when budget cuts are necessary, requiring that talented young instructors be fired instead of their less competent elders.

The old boys still run the show

One of the oddest articles in this counterrevolution was a front-page piece by Sam Dillon of the New York Times, which seemed to find sinister— and, according to one source, “Orwellian”— purpose in Bill Gates’s support of grassroots advocacy “aimed at focusing the presidential candidates on issues like teacher quality and education standards,” or “revealing that existing evaluation systems tended to give higher ratings to all teachers,” or “arguing against seniority-based layoffs.”

Dillon’s fear is that Gates money will dominate the education debate. My fear is that, even with Gates money and a lot more, the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, and the schools of education will continue to prevent any significant reform in public education. If you have any doubt about the power of these groups, read Joel Klein’s account of his attempts to effect reform in New York in the June Atlantic.

Stacked deck

To give you an idea of how the presidencies of Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and the two Bushes have enabled the Republicans to dominate the federal judiciary, thirteen of the sixteen judges on the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals—now in the news because of the NFL lockout case—were nominated by one of them.

The “election fraud” fraud

You have probably read about the Republican efforts to make it difficult for poor Democrats to vote. In order to register to vote, the people of Kansas, for example, are now required to prove they are citizens with a birth certificate or other document. Then when they go to the polls, they must produce a government-issued photo ID. These requirements are supposedly aimed at preventing fraud. But, as an editorial in the New York Times points out, “Kansas has had only one prosecution for voter fraud in the last six years,” and concludes, “because of that vast threat to democracy, an estimated 620,000 Kansas residents who lack a government ID now stand to lose their right to vote.”

You go to war with the war you have, not the war you want

The Pentagon is organized to plan a war, not fight a war, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently observed. This is gospel truth, and it is why billions of dollars have been wasted on weapons systems designed for wars that aren’t happening instead of the wars we have actually been fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is why simple things like body armor and IED protection were so long neglected.

Stalled on stalls

In May the Federal Aviation Administration issued proposed rules requiring adequate crew training in how to handle engine stalls. The catch is—or, rather, the catches are—first, that they come more than two years after the Colgan Air crash near Buffalo that cost fifty lives because the pilots did not know how to deal with a stall; and second, that they are only “proposed,” with the final rule, according to Andy Pasztor of the Wall Street Journal, “still likely years away from taking effect.”

The reason is that the FAA is allowing the airlines time to comment. Now for what is totally infuriating: the FAA had already issued a version of the proposed rules in 2009, and the new proposed rules were announced only after the airlines had two years to comment and complain.

To sleep, perchance to crash a jetliner

I believe that most federal employees are generously compensated, taking into account their salaries plus pension and health benefits. But some crucial fieldworkers are underpaid. As we recently pointed out, this was certainly the case with oil rig inspectors in the former Minerals Management Agency. Now as we read about sleepy air traffic controllers in the press, we learn that the Bush administration cut their starting salary down to $30,000 in 2006 in some parts of the country. Controllers were moonlighting to supplement their income.

To accommodate underpaid controllers who needed time to work their second jobs and to promote long weekends for other controllers who were adequately paid, the FAA allowed them to set their schedule as follows: two evening shifts, followed by only eight hours off before a pair of day shifts, and then another quick turnaround leading to a midnight shift, giving the controller very long weekends that lasted from early Friday morning till late Monday afternoon.

It also was a schedule almost guaranteed to produce drowsiness in the control room. Now salaries are being raised—but the schedule is only being slightly amended, meaning, of course, that the hazard of sleepiness continues, which in turn means that the FAA has to use extra controllers to make sure someone is awake.

Prestige for rent

Magazines as respected as the Atlantic, in an understandable search for fiscal survival, have drifted into potentially dangerous relationships with corporate America. The problem is illustrated by recent issues of the New Republic and the New Yorker. After the New Republic had cosponsored a conference with the nuclear power industry, the inside front cover of its May 26th issue contained an ad for that industry featuring a photograph of the New Republic’s editor, implying that the magazine endorsed nuclear power. And after the New Yorker had cosponsored a conference with the University of Phoenix, that institution ran a four-page ad in the magazine flaunting the relationship. I was shocked. The University of Phoenix has been shown to be a business that finances itself with loans given to students it has enrolled without regard to their qualifications and who often prove unable to repay the loans, leaving the federal government, which had guaranteed them, holding the bag. It is well known that the admissions counselors for the university were paid on the basis of the number of students enrolled, without regard to the merits of the student.

Mainely wrong

The Republican governor of Maine, Paul LePage, is removing the name of Frances Perkins from a state facility. For those too young to be offended, let me explain: Perkins, a Maine native who became the first woman to be named to a president’s cabinet, was a great secretary of labor in the 1930s and ’40s. She also wrote one of the most perceptive books about her boss, Franklin Roosevelt, called The Roosevelt I Knew.

The grass is greener—dangerously so

Of all the problems in the federal government, the one that worries me the most is the increasing number of public servants who look forward to cashing in by selling their expertise to corporations or lobbying firms who will give them cushy jobs when they leave government service. Far too often, their anticipation of this outcome leads them to curry favor from their future employers while they are still in government service. A recent example is Meredith Atwell Baker, a commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission, who “criticized the FCC’s review of Comcast’s joint venture with NBC/Universal for taking too long,” reports Cecilia Kang of the Washington Post, “and voted in favor of the merger.”

In June, she got her reward: a nice job with Comcast.

The Securities and Exchange Commission requires that its former staff members file a statement if they plan to represent a client before the commission within two years of leaving. The Project on Government Oversight, headed by Danielle Brian, one of Washington’s savviest critics, has found that between 2006 and 2010, 219 former SEC employees filed 789 such statements. They were so eager to cash in that they couldn’t wait two years.

The post Layer cake… The Department of Housing and Unbelievable Delays… God help the squeaky wheel appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The G.I. Bill’s transformative effects on the lives of men like Marchesi have become legendary, but just as striking in hindsight is the clearly visible role that government played as the source of those opportunities. In more recent decades the federal government has expanded its efforts to provide college aid to all Americans. But instead of delivering a straight benefit, like the original G.I. Bill, most of that aid has come through roundabout means, like payments to banks to provide students with loans, or loopholes in the tax code to subsidize families to save for or pay for college. Generations of Americans have now graduated with the help of these costly-though-indirect programs. Yet over the years, in conversations with my own students, I’ve noticed that, unlike Marchesi, few of them recognize that they’ve received benefits from government. It’s hard to imagine them reflecting on their HOPE Tax Credits, or their 529 and Coverdell college savings plans and saying, “Thank God the government had the door open for us.”

Photo: Mark Thomas

And it’s not just my students. In 2008, I conducted a survey to gauge the degree to which Americans who had received various government social benefits recognized them as such. Not surprisingly, most beneficiaries of the G.I. Bill who took part in the survey acknowledged that they had been given a leg up by the government. But of the respondents who made use of tax-advantaged Coverdell or 529 education savings accounts, 64 percent said they had “not used a government social program,” as did 59.6 percent of those who used HOPE and Lifelong Learning Tax Credits.

This disparity has far less to do with some inherent difference in character between the Greatest Generation and their grandchildren than it does with a fundamental change that has taken place in the relationship between citizens and the welfare state. Over the past few decades, while many standard social benefits have atrophied in real value, those packaged as “tax expenditures”—the formal name in federal budgeting parlance for subsidies provided through the tax code—have flourished, growing rapidly in value and number. These tax expenditures for individuals and families represented 7.4 percent of GDP in 2008, up from 4.2 percent in 1976. (Tax expenditures for business, such as those for the oil and gas industry, made up another 1 percent.) By way of comparison, Social Security amounted to 4.3 percent of GDP in 2008; Medicare and Medicaid, 4.1 percent.

These social tax expenditures comprise a major part of what I call the “submerged state.” By that I mean that they are public policies designed in a manner that channels resources to citizens indirectly, through subsidies for private activities, rather than directly through payments or services from government. As a result, they are largely hidden from the public: through them, government benefits people, providing them with opportunities and relieving their financial burdens, often without them even knowing it. Appearing to emanate from the private sector, such policies obscure the role of the government and exaggerate that of the market.

What’s more, the vast majority of Americans garner only modest assistance, if any, from the submerged state. In the case of social tax expenditures, that’s because the most expensive of these subsidies shower their largest benefits on the most affluent Americans.

The great drama now unfolding in Washington over how to deal with the government’s deficits and growing debt tends to be framed in conventional ways. Conservatives aim to use this moment to reduce the size of “big government” while liberals find themselves on the defensive, hoping to limit the damage and furious at the president and Democratic congressional leaders for not fighting harder. But these negotiations can actually be an important opportunity to advance progressive goals, if—as the Bowles-Simpson Commission and others have recommended— we scale back tax expenditures. Doing so could improve the nation’s balance sheet and restore some fairness to the tax code. Even more, it could address the real if inchoate sense many Americans have that government has been “growing,” as measured by deficits and new programs, but in ways that don’t benefit them. Saying good-bye to the submerged state could reconnect citizens with government and reinvigorate our democracy.

The clarion call of the conservative approach to governance that has dominated American politics for much of the past thirty years has been the demand to rein in the welfare state. Although few provisions have suffered outright termination, average benefit rates for several traditional and longstanding policies—such as welfare, unemployment insurance, Pell grants, and food stamps—have deteriorated in real terms, and in some cases the scope of coverage has atrophied. As deficit hawks continually remind us, costs have grown for the “entitlement” programs—Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid— owing to inflation-protected benefits, soaring health care costs, and the sheer numbers of Americans aging into eligibility. Generally ignored, however, have been the rapidly escalating costs of tax expenditures for social welfare purposes—the sine qua non of our submerged state.

Known in informal parlance as “tax breaks” or “tax loopholes,”
these policies permit households to pay less in taxes if they are involved in some kind of activity or belong to a class that policymakers deem worthy of public support. From the time Ronald Reagan took office in 1981 until 2010, the number of such tax subsidies had increased by 86 percent, from 81 to 151. As of 2011, the federal government annually doles out more than $1 trillion in these tax expenditures.

Understandably, to many people tax breaks may seem substantively different from traditional social benefits. The latter are funded by tax revenues collected from the public and delivered through checks or services to particular citizens, whereas tax breaks function by allowing recipients themselves simply to keep more money, reducing the amount that they would otherwise owe. Traditional social programs also require the development of a bureaucracy to determine eligibility and deliver benefits, whereas the tax expenditures do not. For these reasons, many libertarians and conservatives object to the term “tax expenditures.” While conceding that tax loopholes constitute government intervention in the market, such thinkers equate closing them with raising taxes, unless the changes are offset by lower rates.

As a matter of budgeting, however, there is no difference between a tax break and a social program: both have to be paid for, either by raising tax rates or by adding to the deficit. Eugene Steuerle, a tax economist and political appointee in the Reagan administration, said of the distinction between tax expenditures and direct social spending, “One looks like smaller government; one looks like bigger government. In fact, they both do exactly the same thing.” Certainly their status has not eluded the policymakers who crafted them; the Louisiana senator Russell Long, chair of the Senate Finance Committee from 1966 to 1981 and the father of the Earned Income Tax Credit, said of the term “tax expenditures,” “That label don’t bother me.… I’ve never been confused about it. I’ve always known that what we’re doing was giving government money away.”

The largest tax expenditures have been around at least half a century, each the product of inadvertent origins. As political scientist Christopher Howard of the College of William & Mary has observed, policymakers involved in the haphazard array of decisions that generated these policies could not have imagined that they were establishing benefits that by the late twentieth century would gain quasi-entitlement status and cost the nation burgeoning amounts. Of the three most expensive ones, the Home Mortgage Interest Deduction was created first, as part of the original tax code in 1913; the preferential tax treatment of employer pensions was established through a hodgepodge of administrative rulings and congressional statues between 1914 and 1926; and the tax-privileged status of employer-provided health benefits resulted from a similar conglomeration of policies during World War II and in the 1950s. In 2011, these three pillars of the submerged state are expected to cost the nation $104.5 billion, $67.1 billion, and $177 billion, respectively. The cost of each component has ballooned, owing not only to market forces but also to the incentives the policies themselves offer that promote consumption in particular forms—such as the purchase of bigger homes, pricier college educations, or more expensive health care—thus inflating their value.

Remarkably, despite the vast drain such provisions impose on federal resources, policymakers have mostly allowed them to grow unchecked. Unlike direct social spending, they are not subject to the annual appropriations process in Congress, and thus they have been able to snowball while sheltered from the public glare.

Whereas mainstream Democrats have traditionally taken the lead in creating our landmark direct social programs, it was originally Republicans and conservative Democrats who initiated the benefits that operated through the tax code. Doing so enabled them to court their favored constituencies and channel resources toward them, but without creating or enlarging government bureaucracies to distribute the funds.

Over the past three decades, however, tax expenditures have evolved into the template of choice for anyone designing new social benefits. Conservatives have actively promoted and protected them, and moderate and liberal Democrats have realized that it is far easier to build a coalition of support for social provision through the tax system rather than through direct spending. Thus they have become willing accomplices. President Clinton promoted and signed into law higher education tax credits, a policy favored by Republicans as an alternative to direct spending ever since the creation of the Higher Education Act of 1965; he also expanded dramatically the Earned Income Tax Credit. President Obama has treated tax expenditures as a policy tool for achieving a broad array of objectives; tax benefits accounted for 37 percent of the $787 billion stimulus he signed into law in 2009, including everything from expansions of existing programs to credits for first-time home buyers and those who purchased energy-efficient doors, windows, and appliances.

But the broader goals of progressive politics are undermined by tax expenditures. Reducing them is a goal we should embrace. The problems start with their redistributive impact.

Most Americans assume that U.S. government social programs aid primarily the poor and the middle class, but tax expenditures generally shower their most generous benefits on those in the upper reaches of the income spectrum. To be sure, there are exceptions—most notably the EITC, which genuinely aids the working poor, and Clinton’s HOPE credit, which targeted the middle class. But in the main, such policies are upwardly redistributive, despite rhetoric to the contrary.

On the rare occasions when policymakers do actually speak about the Home Mortgage Interest Deduction, they portray it as a middle-class benefit that helps to increase home ownership, a pillar of the American dream. Yet countries such as Canada and Australia manage to have U.S.-level rates of home ownership without offering a home mortgage interest deduction in their tax codes. Moreover, in 2004, 69 percent of the benefits of America’s home mortgage interest deduction were claimed by households with incomes of $100,000 or above—the top 15 percent of the income distribution. That same group also reaped 55 percent of the benefits emanating from the tax-free status of retirement benefits and 30 percent of those from employer-provided health benefits. This is because most tax expenditures reward activities that people with greater resources are better poised to take part in: buying more expensive homes and qualifying for mortgages far bigger than those of the typical home buyer; or obtaining generous employer-provided benefits, whose previously broad coverage has declined sharply, particularly among those with low to moderate incomes. Tax expenditures also exacerbate economic inequality by dramatically reducing the revenues government collects, leaving considerably fewer resources available for the programs like Head Start and Pell grants that benefit lower-income Americans.

Even more harmful to the United States than the economic
effects of these submerged state policies are the effects of the politics they generate. The vested interests that profit from these policies—ranging from the real estate and health care industries to the nonprofit foundation world—are keenly aware of them and invest heavily in their political capacity to preserve and defend core policies. For example, the amount the real estate sector contributed to campaigns more than tripled between 1992 and 2008, growing from $43 million to $138 million in 2010 dollars. Its spending on lobbying escalated far more quickly, increasing by 73 percent between 1998 and 2009.

Ordinary Americans, by contrast, have little awareness of the very existence of such policies, even if they are beneficiaries themselves. In the 2008 survey I mentioned above, respondents were asked whether they had “ever used a government social program, or not” and later queried on whether they had ever utilized any of nineteen different social benefits. Those who had benefited from tax expenditures were most likely to deny having used a government social program—for example, 60 percent of those who had used the Home Mortgage Interest Deduction gave that answer.

To make sure respondents weren’t just reacting negatively to the term “government social program”—which for some Americans may connote welfare for low-income people—the survey also asked participants whether they agreed with the statement “Government has given me opportunities to improve my standard of living.” Among people with the same income, level of education, age, race or ethnicity, and sex, the greater the number of direct, visible policies they had ever used—from a list including Social Security, food stamps, Pell grants, unemployment insurance, and several others—the more likely they were to agree with this statement. Yet, controlling for the same factors, the more tax expenditures the individual had used, the less likely he or she was to agree. Those who used the visible programs could see government improving their life chances, but those who used the hidden ones failed to observe such effects.

This finding is ironic, because policymakers of both parties routinely justify tax expenditures by claiming that they either provide people with opportunities—for example, to pursue education or home ownership—or they improve their standard of living. Such policy effects appear to be lost on the beneficiaries themselves—who, in fact, seem fairly convinced that government did not assist them. The submerged design of tax benefits appears to mistakenly convey to people that they have gained whatever measure of economic security or opportunity they have strictly through their own merits, unaided by government help.

We might expect that even if recipients of tax expenditures do not recognize them as public social benefits, then at least the lower tax bills they enjoy as a result would generate more positive views about the tax system. I examined this possibility in the same survey by asking people whether they felt that the amount they were asked to pay in federal income taxes was “more than [their] fair share,” their “fair share,” or “less than [their] fair share,” once again controlling for the factors noted above. All else equal, the greater the number of visible policies individuals had used, the more likely they were to feel that they paid “less than [their] fair share.” By contrast, however, tax expenditures seemed to have no discernible impact on their beneficiaries’ attitudes about taxes, regardless of the enormous drain these policies impose on federal budgets. Evidently, beneficiaries of visible policies understood that taxes help to pay for such programs, whereas those who prospered from the policies of the submerged state failed to grasp that connection.

Not surprisingly, given the invisibility of tax expenditures to most Americans, they generate a passive public. If people are barely aware that such policies emanate from government, then they are obviously unlikely to have opinions about them that reflect their interests and values, or to engage in political participation related to them. The same 2008 survey also asked beneficiaries of specific policies who had indicated that they participated in political activities whether they had ever done so with that policy in mind. For example, beneficiaries who had voted were asked if they had ever “taken into account the position of a candidate on the [program used] in deciding either how or whether to vote,” and, if they had ever made campaign contributions, whether they did so “at least in part, because of [their] concern about [the program used].”

Beneficiaries of visible programs like Social Security and Medicare reported high rates of action to influence the policies they rely on—far more than beneficiaries of tax expenditures. Certainly part of the problem is that, whereas seniors are mobilized by the AARP and the political parties, no broad-based citizens’ groups advocate on behalf of the public’s interest in tax expenditures, leaving the vested interests’ power unchecked. But even beneficiaries of the food stamps program, who lack a group to mobilize them, targeted their political activity at higher rates than the tax break beneficiaries: among those who had voted, 21 percent reported taking the policy into account when doing so, compared to only 14 percent of Home Mortgage Interest Deduction beneficiaries; the rates for campaign contributing among those same groups were 17.7 percent and 8.1 percent, respectively. In short, while the policies of the submerged state engender activism among the powerful groups that benefit most from their existence, they inculcate only passivity among ordinary citizens. This means not only that their interests are routinely circumvented through these upwardly distributive policies, but also that democracy itself is undermined by their existence.

Given how unaware the average citizen is of the submerged state, it’s no surprise that decisions to cut or expand it typically happen with little public airing, usually as part of some larger debate over budgets and taxes. In his first budget to Congress, President Obama proposed to rein in the tax breaks given to the most affluent Americans via deductions for charitable contributions and home mortgage interest by capping their value at a rate lower than the marginal tax rate assigned to those in the upper income brackets. Instead of being able to deduct 39 or 36 percent of the value of their mortgages, in other words, single Americans making more than $174,400 per year would only be able to deduct 28 percent—the same as those who earn $83,600 a year. (This change would actually have reinstated restrictions on tax breaks that existed during the 1990s, signed into law by President George H. W. Bush and ended by his son George W. Bush in 2001. During the decade in which these restrictions were in place, housing prices and charitable contributions soared.) Obama’s proposal was projected to save the federal government $267 billion over ten years—45 percent of the funds needed to finance health care reform.

Instantly, the proposal set in motion the typical politics of the submerged state, as vested interests rallied to defend their pet policies while the public remained out of the loop. Each of the organizational “likely suspects” in the real estate industry stormed Capitol Hill, circulated letters to all elected officials, and placed ads in prominent newspapers in order to express their unequivocal opposition to the changes. Charles McMillan, president of the National Association of Realtors, said, “Diminishing or eliminating [the Home Mortgage Interest Deduction] would hurt all families, the housing market, and our national economy”— language that cloaked the fact that the proposed changes would affect only the wealthy, and would simply reinstate prior policies. Perhaps more surprisingly, the philanthropic, foundation, and nonprofit sector mobilized just as quickly—and in some ways more effectively than the real estate sector. They committed two-thirds as much to lobbying—$44 million—but as the presumed beacon of altruism, they were able to stir even more opposition to Obama’s plan. Claiming the moral high ground, the Council on Foundations and others predicted sharp declines in charitable giving if the tax benefit was reduced. Even Democratic leaders in Congress quickly distanced themselves from the president’s proposal.

At one press conference, reporters pressed Obama on whether he regretted putting forth the idea, to which he answered forthrightly,

People are still going to be able to make charitable contributions. It just means if you give $100 and you’re in this tax bracket … instead of being able to write off 36 or 39 percent, you’re writing off 28 percent. Now, if it’s really a charitable contribution, I’m assuming that shouldn’t be the determining factor as to whether you’re giving that hundred dollars to the homeless shelter.… What it would do is it would equalize. When I give $100, I get the same amount of deduction as … a bus driver who’s making $50,000 or $40,000 a year [who] give[s] that same hundred dollars…. [H]e gets to write off 28 percent, I get to write off 39 percent. I don’t think that’s fair.

This explanation—a rare instance in which a public official clearly articulated how tax breaks function and who benefits— failed to be heard amid the fray, as executive directors of numerous philanthropic organizations wrote to Congress insisting that the proposal would “impose a tax on charitable giving.” The proposal never had a chance. Rent-seeking crony capitalism reigned, with interest groups protecting the subsidies that benefited themselves and the affluent, and ordinary Americans had no inkling of what had transpired.

Would ordinary citizens be more likely to support efforts like Obama’s if they were better informed about them? A survey-based experiment I conducted with Matt Guardino of Syracuse University in 2008 suggests the answer is yes. After respondents were provided with basic information about the upwardly redistributive effect of the Home Mortgage Interest Deduction— the fact that it benefits mostly affluent people—opposition grew sharply, particularly among those with low to moderate incomes and among liberals and Democrats. By contrast, after being informed that the EITC benefited mostly those in low-to-moderate-income groups, support grew among respondents generally, regardless of income.

These findings are consistent with what we know about contemporary American attitudes toward taxes in general. Countless polls in recent years have shown that strong majorities of voters favor higher taxes on the wealthy as the way to close budget deficits and shore up entitlements like Social Security. Similar majorities would likely favor cutting tax expenditures for the well-off if the issue were explained to them.

At present, however, few opinion leaders, even on the left, have taken up the cause of tax expenditure reform, except on a few issues, such as ending tax subsidies for oil companies. Indeed, some of the most sophisticated and influential seem confused about the subject. Comedian-commentator Jon Stewart, for instance, has mercilessly skewered Republicans for defending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. But when Obama gave a speech in April calling for “spending reductions in the tax code,” Stewart took the position—common among conservatives— that the president was engaging in doublespeak:

What? The tax code isn’t where we spend. It’s where we collect.… You managed to talk about a tax hike as a spending reduction. Can we afford that and the royalty checks you’ll have to send to George Orwell?

American politics today is ensnared in the paradox of the submerged state. Our government is integrally intertwined with everyday life from health care to housing, but in a form that eludes our vision because it makes governance invisible. As a result, many Americans express disdain for government social spending, incognizant even when they themselves benefit from it. They are disturbed by growing deficits, but do not realize that policies whose benefits flow disproportionately to the affluent consume a large portion of growing federal entitlements. They are easily seduced by calls for small government, not realizing that champions of that philosophy brought us the most costly policies of the submerged state.

Political and opinion leaders permit this deception to persist by failing to talk openly and honestly about tax expenditures. A minor exception to the rule, Obama has shown that he is quite capable of speaking clearly and candidly about how such policies work and who benefits from them, but the number of occasions when he has done so have been few and far between. His own party in Congress has yet to join him in a full-throated manner; in fact, its leaders themselves torpedoed his efforts in 2009. Without discussion of what is actually at stake in spending through the tax code, citizens are not told what these subsidies really are: special provisions for particular groups of people, especially the wealthy, that are paid for through either higher taxes on other Americans, reductions in spending, or expansions of our deficit.

For too long, progressives have accepted the conservative playbook, creating and expanding tax expenditures on the assumption that they can tilt some of their benefits to low- and middle-income Americans. As long as this cornerstone of the submerged state is left intact, it fosters the delusion that governance is generally ineffective and unhelpful to most Americans, and it prompts people to attribute to markets more credit than they are due.

Fortunately, and rather ironically, the coming showdown over raising the debt ceiling presents a golden opportunity to substantially scale back the submerged state—and to advance progressive goals in the process. Republican lawmakers, obliged by their base to cut federal spending but fearing an electoral backlash if popular social programs like Medicare are decimated, are increasingly open to the suggestion of the Democratic deficit hawks in the administration and Congress that if the budget ax must fall, it ought to fall most heavily on tax expenditures. It is a negotiating strategy that liberals would be wise to encourage. For those who care about reducing inequality, making American governance more transparent, and reinvigorating democratic citizenship, this is a chance that should not be missed.

The post 20,000 Leagues Under the State appeared first on Washington Monthly.

As he had every morning for years, on October 4, 2010, Franz Gayl woke up at five, fed his two Rhodesian Ridgebacks, and then walked down the street from his modest home at the end of a cul-de-sac in northern Virginia to wait for the bus to the Pentagon. Once there, Gayl swiped his badge, thanked the security guards, and proceeded down the vast corridors to an office of the B Ring and the Marine Corps’ Department of Plans, Policies and Operations. At almost exactly seven thirty, Gayl, a science adviser to the Marines, walked into his Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, a secured office in which military employees with high-level security clearances spend their days, and sat down at his desk, eager to get to work. Though Gayl had followed this routine for more than a decade, he still loved the exact minutia of it.

Then the day went sideways. His supervisor walked in and said, “Come with me, we’re going to see the general,” referring to the head of the department. With the general when Gayl arrived was a representative from human resources. He handed Gayl a letter. The subject heading: “SUSPENSION OF ACCESS TO CLASSIFIED INFORMATION.” As the others watched him, Gayl began reading.

“Credible information exists which raises serious questions as to your ability or intent to protect classified information,” the letter, from Marine headquarters, read. The Naval Criminal Investigative Service, or NCIS, had been investigating Gayl, and, “[b]ased on the forensic analysis contained within the report, it appears that on multiple occasions you used an unauthorized USB media flash device within the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF), in violation of SCIF security requirements.” The letter didn’t specify what, if anything, was put on or taken off the flash drive. It concluded, “The culmination of the above demonstrates a disregard for regulations, a pattern of poor judgment, and intentional misconduct.”

Gayl was asked if he understood the charges. He said he did. He was led back to his SCIF, where he was given a few minutes to collect his belongings. He was brought down to the parking lot, where a car was already waiting. He was driven to Marine headquarters, where another general was waiting. Gayl was “read out” of the cascade of clearances he’d accrued over the years—top secret/SCI, top secret, secret, confidential.

Back in the car, his supervisor handed Gayl a letter notifying him that he was now on administrative leave, pending review. He was driven to the bus stop. He thanked the driver, and, as he was getting out of the car, the supervisor said, “One more thing, Gayl—I need your Pentagon badge.” Gayl handed it to him.

With that, Franz Gayl’s thirty-five-year career working for the Marines came to an abrupt halt—and, more than likely, ended for good.

“It was a disgrace, a public humiliation. I think it was designed that way,” Gayl (pronounced guile) told me ruefully about that morning, whose details he remembers down to the minute. But he couldn’t help but admire its efficiency. “It was beautifully choreographed! It was so well organized, even for the Marines.”

Nor could Gayl claim to be surprised. “I’d been expecting something like this for years, but they finally found a way to make it happen,” he said. The flash drive is a red herring, he believes—another in a series of reprisals against him by the Marines for revealing what he calls unconscionable mismanagement in the high command. After returning from a tour in Iraq, Gayl went public with an account of how Pentagon delays in sending protective equipment there may have cost troops their lives. He appeared on PBS’s NewsHour and testified before Congress, and in doing so crossed many people more powerful than himself, including General James Mattis, now the chief of U.S. Central Command and one of the most important men in the military.

Many Marines have personally thanked Gayl for his outspokenness. He’s been called a hero by senators and a “super-star” by the former commandant of the Marine Corps. But according to other Marines, Gayl was long a dangerously untraditional thinker in an organization that values tradition above all. “Just by virtue of his ideas, he made enemies,” said a general for whom Gayl once worked.

This is not the first federal investigation of Gayl, nor the first time the military has tried to dismiss him. His former supervisor, who urged his firing years ago, said Gayl had a history of insubordination and inappropriate behavior. “He had four or five projects he felt committed to, and when it came to them he wasn’t too interested in what the leadership or regulations required him to do,” he said.

Oddly, it’s a characterization that Gayl himself doesn’t entirely refute: “I was always a contentious figure,” he told me. “Everyone who has associated with me, they all think I’m a little … well, wack.” But “everything I’d complained about before going to Iraq was a theoretical exercise. Iraq was the first time that there was a real correlation between the problems I knew about in the Marines and the actual human impact.” So he broke ranks. “It struck me that if I didn’t go outside of command, there’d be no change. I also knew it would be career suicide.”

Gayl enlisted in the Marines the day after his seventeenth birthday, and at fifty-three he still looks the part. At six feet tall and 220 pounds, he has gone soft around the middle, but he has a Marine’s at-the-ready bearing, massive arms, and a Robert Duvall-intense balding pattern. He calls to mind the actor until he opens his mouth, at which point a fusillade of figures and acronyms and jargon comes at you in a Minnesota accent.

“But what was special about this LAV was it had a 25mm Gatling gun on it, and it was just awesome! It would tear up the targets!” he explained as we drove out of Washington, D.C., in his wife’s cherry-red Volkswagen bug on a recent April morning. Gayl, wearing jeans, a sweatshirt, and very clean white sneakers, was describing in minute detail a day fifteen years prior that he spent blowing up things in the Mojave Desert. My question hadn’t been about light assault vehicles—I’d asked how he met his wife—but he stores most memories according to what he was doing, or, more specifically, shooting, for the Marines at the time. (He met his wife on the flight to California.)

We were on our way to Quantico, which elicited more fond recollection (“When I was on an antitank assault team there I used to fire flamethrowers!”) and then got Gayl onto the subject of the famous Quantico brig. At the moment it was home to Bradley Manning. Gayl had surprisingly little sympathy for him. “He apparently acted on his conscience, and I have great respect for that,” he said of the WikiLeaks source, but “there was no way he could have read all that material and educated himself on the issues.… I would have more respect for him if he’d stayed in the chain of command.”

“Isn’t that a little ironic, coming from you?” I asked.

“I guess it is!” he said. “But the last thing I ever wanted to do was become what we call a whistle-blower. Whistle-blower—in the Marine Corps? Snitch. Narc. Traitor. It’s as counter to the Marine ethos as you can imagine. It is going outside the family. Never embarrass the Marine Corps— that’s what I grew up with.”

Gayl grew up in a military family, of sorts. His father, Franz Joseph Ferdinand Gayl, was raised in Berlin and in the 1930s joined the Hitler Youth. When he tried to enter the Wehrmacht officer corps, a records search revealed that his mother was Jewish by birth; undeterred, he became a Luftwaffe paratrooper instead, and was captured in North Africa. He spent the remainder of the war in American prison camps in Texas and Maryland; he was sufficiently impressed with the country that he returned after the war to finish his architecture degree, and met Gayl’s mother, a computer scientist and amateur historian.

Gayl described his father as both a visionary and a man with a “strong distrust for the capitalist view of technological progress.” In the 1970s he became increasingly pessimistic about society and moved the family from Minneapolis to an uninhabited island in Lake Minnetonka. There he taught Franz to drive a World War II-era amphibious landing craft and an engine-propelled sled for traveling on ice that he’d built, among other machines (though he didn’t allow him to shoot guns or even play with toy guns).

He also descended into a crippling depression that Gayl believes came from self-hatred: though he had Jewish ancestors, he remained to his death a casual conspiracy theorist about Judaism and a virulent opponent of Israel. “You know how there are some people who seem to want to kill themselves slowly? My dad became like that,” he said. Gayl’s parents divorced when he was in his early teens, but not before his father passed on to him an awe for the Marines— the heirs, as he saw them, to the Prussian military tradition.

After flirting with juvenile delinquency, Gayl dropped out of high school and enlisted. His transformation was instantaneous. “It gave me a purpose, an identity, a shared identity,” he said of the Marines. “The basic principles of self-disciple, the will to see things through, endurance, a sense of civility. It’s a pattern for life.” He was assigned to the infantry, then officer candidate school, then Ranger school, then jump school, along the way designing equipment that would be used in the first Gulf War. He was made a war tactics instructor at Quantico and sent to the Naval Postgraduate School, where he earned a degree in space systems operation. Michelle Shinn, a physicist at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News, where Gayl worked on a free electron laser project for her, said that he had a natural gift for seeing the practical potential in abstract science. “I had a healthy skepticism about his ideas,” she said. “But we tried them, and they worked.”

Based on their research, he built, in his living room, a weapon for immobilizing people without injuring them (and tested it, on himself). When he was awarded a patent, what had been known in military labs as the Gayl Blaster became the “high intensity directed light and sound crowd dispersion device.” Popular Science chronicled his work, as did Wired writer Sharon Weinberger in her book Imaginary Weapons. When he left the Corps in 2002, after twenty-two years of active duty, the Marine commandant wrote him a note: “You have been a super-star for the Marine Corps for your entire career; if I had a chance to vote you would be our first one-star space general!” That year, he was hired as a science adviser to the Marine Corps at the Pentagon.

But Gayl had an equally pronounced talent for making waves. In 2004, he wrote a report exposing the dysfunction of the Marines’ science and technology division. Unsatisfied with the attention it got among the brass, he published an article in the Marine Corps Gazette suggesting that the service risked irrelevance if it didn’t change. The report was right, the general whom Gayl worked for told me, as was Gayl, usually, but he was also incapable of subtlety and indifferent to hierarchy.

“He’s very smart and gifted and very passionate about what he does. He would do anything for the Marines,” the general said, but he was not particularly well liked in the high command. “I think people resented his intellect.”

In 2006, Gayl accepted an offer to deploy to Iraq to join the staff of General Richard Zilmer, his former commander at the Pentagon. Zilmer was leading the Marines in Al-Anbar Province. Anbar would later become known as a cornerstone of the surge, but when Zilmer arrived it was, he liked to joke, the “ugly stepchild” of Iraq’s provinces. Neglected by the Provisional Authority and at the heart of the insurgency, troops there were dying at a rate of nearly one a day, mostly because of improvised explosive devices, or IEDs.

For months, Zilmer had been requesting equipment to combat insurgents, including laser dazzlers—nonlethal devices similar to what Gayl had designed that can disorient drivers of oncoming vehicles to avoid violent encounters at checkpoints—and a surveillance system to seek out bomb planters. Most importantly, he wanted mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles, known as MRAPs, trucks with raised armored V-shaped hulls that provide exponentially better protection against mines than standard Humvees. Indeed, a growing chorus of generals had already been asking for the vehicles. But they had found the Pentagon in no rush to field them. So Zilmer called in Gayl.

“Franz knew how to get money, he knew how the Hill operated, how the Pentagon operated. His understanding of those processes was superior to a lot of the people he was working for at Quantico,” the general said, and thus, “Quantico never fully trusted him.”

Particularly distrustful was the Marine Corps Combat Development Command, the Quantico-based department responsible for taking equipment requests from commanders like Zilmer and deciding what should and should not be delivered. “Franz has always had a bad reputation with the people at MCCDC,” the general said. When Gayl was ordered to deploy, its head was General James Mattis.

Also known as Mad Dog Mattis, Warrior Monk, and Chaos, Mattis was, and is, a legend in the Marines. An immensely capable war fighter, he had commanded troops in the first Gulf War, in Afghanistan, and in Iraq, where he led the 1st Marine Division’s famous charge into Baghdad, a campaign chronicled in the HBO miniseries Generation Kill (Mattis’s character was played by actor Robert John Burke). A soldier-scholar, he helped General David Petraeus rewrite the Army’s counterinsurgency field manual. He also had a reputation for blunt, Patton-like utterances. In 2003, for instance, he told Iraqi military leaders, “I come in peace. I didn’t bring artillery. But I’m pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you fuck with me, I’ll kill you all.”

Putting Mattis in charge of the MCCDC seemed, at the time, a way to infuse a hidebound procurement agency with new energy. The problem, however, was that Mattis had spent his entire career on the operations side of the Marines. He had little experience on the support side—the world of acquisitions, contractors, and Beltway politics.

Mattis and Gayl had already had one run-in. The Marine Corps science and technology division that Gayl had officially lambasted in 2004 was part of the MCCDC, and the briefing he gave to Mattis, newly installed as its leader, was not well received, Gayl recalls. Nevertheless, in Iraq Gayl was determined to get what the Marines in Anbar wanted. Stationed at Camp Fallujah, “I’d see the helicopters coming in daily with these busted-up, blown-up kids being flown in to the field hospital,” he said. He sent report after report to Quantico. He stayed up for days developing proposals and researching contractors who could fulfill them. He worked all of his angles and contacts.

“He was one of the few guys from back at headquarters
trying to help us,” Gary Wilson, a lieutenant colonel stationed
in Anbar at the time, told me.

Yet Gayl ran into the same intransigence Zilmer had. In answer to his request for MRAPs he encountered a wall of resistance: the vehicles wouldn’t be applicable after the war; they weren’t versatile enough; industry couldn’t manufacture them en masse. Some Marines, including the general I interviewed, took Quantico at its word, and still do. Gayl didn’t, and he wasn’t alone: a colonel who worked on the MRAP requests told me, “I believed them at first, but the more I thought about it and the more I asked questions, the more the arguments didn’t make sense.”

The real problem, say some Marines I spoke with, was that the military was simply too plodding to react to an insurgency. “We never underestimated the insurgents’ capabilities, but I think people back in Washington did,” Wilson told me. “There were too many layers and too many ways to impede people like Franz.”

Some Marines point out that the MRAPs would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and the Marines are frugal by nature. Roy McGriff, a lieutenant colonel who studied the use of mines by insurgencies and had been urging the Marines to look for alternatives to Humvees for years, said, “To a man, up the command the reaction to the MRAP was ‘It’s too expensive, we’d never do it.’ Meanwhile we had Humvees with canvas doors. I could stick a pencil through the side of it and kill you.”

But others believe the problem was neither red tape nor money, but rather that the MRAPs threatened pet programs in which the Marines had already invested and on which many officers and civil servants had staked their careers. “We don’t reward managers who do the right thing by the war fighter or the American taxpayer. The ones who get promoted are the ones who get the gear out there regardless of whether it’s right,” a lieutenant colonel who worked at the MCCDC told me. “And the more expensive the gear, the more successful the manager.”

Gayl would become convinced of this view.

Upon returning from Iraq in 2007, he learned of McGriff’s work and contacted him. McGriff told Gayl, to his amazement, that the process for fielding MRAPs was supposed to have begun fully two years prior. In February 2005, as deaths from IEDs started to soar, McGriff had written what is known as an Urgent Universal Need Statement request— the military equivalent of saying “We need this now”—for a fleet of the vehicles to go to Anbar. The request included information on MRAPs manufactured by a South Carolina company; several of them had, in fact, already been sent to Iraq. The request had been signed off on, and McGriff had even briefed Mattis directly.

“I told [Mattis] we must transition as quickly as possible to a family of MRAP vehicles,” he recalled, “and we need to get them wherever we can.” Mattis then shook his hand and said, ‘That’s what we’re going to do.’ ” Yet two years later, McGriff’s request had vanished. “I don’t know what happened to it,” he told me.

What happened, it appears, is during the spring of 2005, staff from the MCCDC and other Marines met to discuss McGriff’s request. The question at hand was what effect the MRAPs would have on existing programs. A PowerPoint slideshow that Gayl would later unearth and make public showed that the money needed would eat into a number of projects dear to influential Marines, including, most notably, the long-awaited and very costly expeditionary fighting vehicle. Mattis in particular had championed it. (The lieutenant colonel who worked at the MCCDC also singled it out, telling me, “The expeditionary fighting vehicle has been such a huge resource drain. But heaven forbid anyone stand up and say cancel it, because you’ll be branded a heretic and you will not have a future” in the Marines.)

Gayl went from frustrated to incensed. “I realized that kids are getting hurt and killed on a daily basis as a direct result of delays that could be avoided.” When allies arranged for him to brief key officials in the secretary of defense’s office on his views, Mattis and other top Marine generals objected and the briefing was canceled, blocking Gayl’s last opportunity to work through the chain of command. Then he saw an Inside the Pentagon article that quoted Marines Commandant James Conway telling the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the first MRAP request hadn’t been made until 2006. Conway would later tell the Senate Armed Services Committee the same thing. “I looked at that and said, that’s a lie. The commandant of the Marine Corps told a very serious lie,” Gayl said. “Then I said to myself, the commandant wouldn’t lie. But the people who prepared him would.”

Gayl contacted Inside the Pentagon to ask for a correction to be printed. None appeared. So he e-mailed Sharon Weinberger, attaching Roy McGriff’s original MRAP request, and that afternoon, May 22, 2007, a damning headline appeared on Wired.com: “Military Dragged Feet on Bomb-Proof Vehicles.” The article, which didn’t mention Gayl by name, made its way through the military in hours. The next morning it was published in the Defense Department’s news briefing.

The rebukes started flying at the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill. An aide to Delaware Senator Joe Biden then called Gayl. During visits to Iraq, Biden and then Missouri Senator Kit Bond (each of whom has a son who served in the military in Iraq, Bond’s as a Marine) had learned about MRAPs and were trying to appropriate money for them. They’d written to President Bush and Defense Secretary Robert Gates without effect. Would Gayl be willing to brief their staffs on the MRAP affair, the aide asked—and, if need be, talk to the press?

Gayl came home that night and spoke to his wife. If he went public, he told her, all of their plans—their retirement, their kids’ educations—would be at stake. “I said, ‘Honey, I have to do this. I’m sorry our lives aren’t going to turn out the way we thought they would,’ ” he recalled. “I felt, whatever the cost, we could not allow another Marine or soldier to ride outside the wire in anything but an MRAP. That was my goal.”

Characteristically, he did not start at a low volume. At once he briefed not just Biden’s and Bond’s staffs, but anyone in Congress who would listen. He e-mailed David Petraeus. He became an on-the-record source for USA Today. He went on the NewsHour and on National Public Radio, and testified before the House of Representatives.

And in July, just two months after the Wired.com article, Robert Gates announced the creation of a new MRAP task force to ensure that the vehicles got to Iraq as fast as possible. He asked Congress for an additional $750 million just to fly them there. By the next year they were being manufactured in the thousands.

“We have yet to have a Marine killed in the Al-Anbar Province who is riding inside an MRAP,” General Conway admitted at a press conference. “So with that knowledge, how do you not see it as a moral imperative to get as many of those vehicles to theater as rapidly as you can?”

Two weeks after Gates’s announcement, Gayl received his first formal letter of reprimand in thirty years working in or for the military. That fall his first proposed suspension notice came, and for the next three years, Gayl says, he saw his duties diminished and was subjected to needless counseling, name-calling, and attempts at intimidation. According to notes he kept, he was threatened with demotion and told he should resign.

He, in turn, filed a complaint with the Office of Special Counsel alleging illegal reprisals for his whistle-blowing and hired the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit law firm that represents whistle-blowers. Gayl’s defenders in Congress also rallied around him. Biden and Bond wrote a letter to Conway calling Gayl a “hero,” and during Senate hearings Claire McCaskill asked Conway to ensure that the Marines didn’t persecute him. Conway responded, “We are making every overture to ensure that we don’t violate any aspect of his whistle-blower status. But if it’s determined that Mr. Gayl has done something other than what his leadership and his bosses have instructed him to do, then that outcome will have to be determined as to what happens to Mr. Gayl.”

Gayl’s critics say that he did indeed contravene orders and that it was only a matter of time before he met with disciplinary action. His former Pentagon supervisor told me he believes Gayl is exaggerating or even fabricating his claims of reprisal, and that Gayl has a history of inappropriate behavior and insubordination that justified his dismissal.

“I think he was treated exceptionally fairly. I think we bent over backwards for him. If it was anyone else it would have happened much differently,” the supervisor, Retired Colonel David Wilkinson, said. “He had a deep-seated feeling that he had the answer. Everyone else was wrong, and he had it right. God bless him for it. We want guys like that in the Marines. But there are ways to go about doing things and ways not to.”

Gayl could certainly act eccentrically. Last summer, he mounted a campaign to advocate sealing the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico with a particular kind of high explosive (though not a nuclear bomb, as some were proposing); the White House had to publicly disown Gayl’s idea. This was not the first time an administration had responded awkwardly to something he had said: in 2005, Gayl wrote a report, Realism and Realpolitik, whose chapters include “The Logical Absurdity of a ‘Global War on Terrorism,’ ” “Gracefully Accepting America’s Decline as a Step Towards 21 Century Survival,” and, most significantly for those who know of Gayl’s family history, “Planning for Israel’s Evacuation.” He sent the report to George W. Bush with a letter attached that said, “I am a loyal supporter of your determined vision. But I also believe in signs, and perhaps the unexpected aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is a sign that we should consider modifying our national course for a time.”

In 2006, the NCIS and the FBI first began looking into Gayl. The investigation is still classified, but it seems to have been incited by communications he had with Chinese diplomats while writing Realism and Realpolitik. The NCIS would say only that it was eventually “resolved in Gayl’s favor.” But in 2008 it opened another investigation after learning that Gayl may have divulged classified documents in the case study he wrote on the MRAP affair. During that investigation, the NCIS found out about the flash drive.

It wasn’t just these investigations that raised questions. By his own account, Gayl skipped meetings he was ordered to attend and informed the Marines he would continue to talk to Congress, without going through the congressional liaison, whenever he liked. At Plans, Policies and Operations, Wilkinson says, Gayl openly discussed his depression, and in the midst of the financial crisis he took to warning about the possibility of widespread social collapse. He wrote a letter to his neighborhood association that predicted a future without electricity, clean water, or adequate law enforcement, started stocking up on canned food and purchasing shotguns— and kept his coworkers abreast, in detail, of all of it.

“I’m not a psychologist, and I don’t know what to look for in guys who may be ready to go over the edge,” Wilkinson said. “When he started expressing his concerns about the stock market crash and the state of the country I asked, ‘When do I need to worry about things like this?’ ” Gayl’s worries and fears of reprisal eventually left him incapable of doing his job, Wilkinson said. “He wasn’t doing what needed to get done. Everything else was becoming a distraction to him.”

Gayl, who can’t help being candid, at times uncomfortably so, discussed all of this openly with me. He showed me the gun safe in his living room, and the letter he sent to his neighbors. He even volunteered the exact daily dosage of his Prozac prescription. Such exactitude and bluntness define him. His attorney told me he’s never had a client do so much of the work of building a case. Gayl corrals witnesses and prepares them, digs up years-old e-mail exchanges, writes arguments. He responds to the NCIS’s queries with meticulous briefs, and has buried the Department of Defense inspector general’s office, which is investigating his case, in documentation.

“Franz has got incredible survivor instincts and is very smart,” a Defense official involved with the case said. So much so, indeed, that “Franz sometimes makes life more difficult for Franz.”

But that Defense official suggested that both NCIS investigations were probably unnecessary and may well have been politically motivated. Of the flash drive allegation, the official said, even if it is true, which is in doubt, “I’m having trouble believing that someone could lose his security clearance and his job, potentially, for using a flash drive.”

The evidence would seem to warrant skepticism. According to internal Defense Department documents, the supposedly classified material Gayl divulged in his MRAP case study was not documents but two footnotes that referenced nonpublic requests for equipment—requests that Gayl himself wrote while in Iraq. It has not escaped the inspector general’s notice, meanwhile, that the official who reported those footnotes to the NCIS was formerly General Mattis’s chief civilian aide at the MCCDC, the staffer who oversaw the 2005 briefing that Gayl claimed to the press and Congress had hobbled the original MRAP requests. However, the Defense inspector general has found that neither NCIS investigation of Gayl’s conduct technically constituted reprisal.

As for the details of the MRAP affair itself, the Pentagon’s own internal reports have borne Gayl’s claims out. Its audit of the case found that, under Mattis, the MCCDC “stopped processing the [request] for MRAP-type vehicle capability in August 2005. Specifically, MCCDC officials did not develop a course of action for the [request],” or “attempt to obtain funding for it,” and concludes that it failed to “address an immediate and apparent joint warfighter need.” (Gayl served as an expert source to the auditors, even as he was being investigated for his own research.) A Naval Audit Service report found that the MCCDC’s process for handling Urgent Universal Need Statement requests like McGriff’s was “not effective.” And this January, Robert Gates told the Marines to cancel the expeditionary fighting vehicle. By now a notorious albatross, the program has eaten up $3 billion (or about six times the budget for Roy McGriff’s original MRAP plan), with little to show for it.

Even Gayl’s staunchest critics don’t deny the justice of his cause. “Everyone’s interpretation was that Franz had nothing but the best intentions for the Marines and the Marine Corps,” Wilkinson told me. “Gayl’s answer turned out to be the one that the secretary of defense went with. History will show getting the MRAP to Iraq was the right decision.”

Gayl’s case and his fate may finally hinge not on the truth of his claims, however, but on their timing. Marines like Wilkinson say that Gayl’s disclosures only pointed up issues the Marines were already handling internally, and that the MRAPs would have gotten to Iraq with or without Gayl. His defenders counter that he was essential in saving lives. For his own part, Gayl takes no credit for agency—only amplification. “I was just the messenger,” he said. “The Marines [in Iraq] were making the requests.”

Gayl remains astonishingly loyal to the service that pushed him out. “I love the Marine Corps. It’s my identity,” he said. But “talking about brotherhood and taking care of our own, blah blah blah, all that stuff—it’s wonderful, if it’s real.”

He’s not alone in this conviction. “Anyone who actually tried to help us, like Franz, ended up getting a bloody nose from the bureaucracy. Anybody who tried to work with Franz got ostracized,” Gary Wilson, the colonel who met Gayl in Anbar, said. “The reason people take umbrage with Franz is not just over the MRAP. It’s because he made an indictment of the whole system.… He realized we’ve priced ourselves out of the defense business.”

“The organization he professes his undying loyalty to has turned its back on him,” the general whom Gayl worked for said.

The Marine Corps would not make anyone I requested to speak to available for this article, and General Conway, now retired, did not respond to an interview request. James Mattis likewise refused multiple requests for comment. As the general who took over U.S. Central Command from David Petraeus and oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he is by some measures the most important uniformed official in the military. He is discussed as a possible candidate for membership in the Joint Chiefs or even as a future national security advisor. In public statements, Mattis has said that MRAPs did not arrive in Iraq sooner mainly because of lack of industrial capacity to make them. This is a contention most Marines I spoke with don’t buy, and one largely disproved by the fact that the Pentagon managed to get thousands of MRAPs built and shipped to Iraq a year after Gates gave the order.

In response to a lengthy list of questions for Mattis, his spokesman sent a three-sentence reply:

Our young troops constitute a national treasure, and we have always been committed to getting them the right equipment at the speed of war. There never has been— and never will be—anything more important than making sure our courageous young men and women in the fight are well trained, well prepared and well equipped. We fulfill our solemn obligation to our troops by never being content with how we provide the best possible training and equipment within the fastest possible time.

When Gayl and I went to Quantico in April, he pointed out his old barracks, the obstacle courses he’d trained on, the classroom he taught in. At the National Museum of the Marine Corps, he described with textbook precision each weapon and vehicle on display. It was a Thursday. Without security clearances, Gayl is all but unemployable in Washington, so he can make such weekday excursions.

Lately he’s been filling his time reading the Koran and the Talmud, and studying Chinese. He’s preparing for the likelihood that he’ll have to leave government service altogether, but his greater concern is that the brass’s story will win out. “If they say it enough, it will become the history,” he said. “They’re confronted with the fact that the blood of their fellow Marines may have been unnecessarily shed on their watch. After promenading themselves in front of widows and wives and wounded Marines organizations and all this glorious patriotic nonsense—now they have to admit, Whoops, I was negligent? I was asleep at the switch? Your son didn’t need to die? They’d never admit to that.”

The post The Unquiet Life of Franz Gayl appeared first on Washington Monthly.

One sweltering day last spring, out of curiosity and a long-standing interest in the old-fashioned American institutions of civic engagement, I stepped out of my apartment building in the nation’s capital and walked over to attend a nearby conference of the Toastmasters. Founded in a Southern California YMCA basement for the betterment of tongue-tied young men, the Toastmasters have been offering “practice and training in the art of public speaking” along with “sociability and good fellowship” since the mid-1920s. In my mind, the group harked back to a half-imagined America of bowling leagues, church barbecues, and Rotary signs on the edge of town. What was funny was that my apartment resided in a sandy, congested neighborhood of Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates.

Under the Arabian midday glare, I scurried across one of the city’s sprawling six-lane boulevards—past a billboard that months earlier had advertised the local Krispy Kreme’s “Ramadan Dozen” special—to reach the campus of a local women’s college that was hosting the event. When I arrived at the main auditorium, I found it humming with a 300-horsepower murmur. The place was packed with men and women in off-the-rack power suits, plus a few starched white robes and black abayas. The room was decked end-to-end with gold silk banners, each, to my amazement, representing a different local chapter of the Toastmasters. By itself, Abu Dhabi—a young boomtown of global migrants roughly the size of Milwaukee—harbors seventeen active chapters of the group, I learned. The UAE as a whole, with a population of about eight million people, has seventy-one chapters.

When I first heard that the Toastmasters had a presence in Abu Dhabi, I pictured a small roomful of ill-adjusted American expatriates draining their water glasses, trading a few speeches, and then adjourning to a bar. Suffice it to say, my imagination had failed me. At the conference, I found only one fellow American in the crowd. In fact, I found only one other native speaker of English in the crowd. Instead, the group drew from a pretty representative sample of Abu Dhabi’s usually rather fragmented society: there was a strong majority from the Indian subcontinent, small contingents of Filipinos and Arabs from abroad,and a few actual citizens of the UAE—all guffawing warmly at speeches delivered in broken English about following dreams, learning lessons from failure, seeing through appearances, and other themes of uplift worthy of a motivational poster.

Curious, I called up the Toastmasters headquarters in Rancho Santa Margarita, California, to find out whether the United Arab Emirates was some kind of anomaly. It isn’t. The organization reports hotspots of growth throughout Asia and the Middle East. “Within India and Sri Lanka,” said Daniel Rex, the Toastmasters’ executive director, “we’re organizing about a chapter a week.”

Then, on a hunch, I began poking around to see how similar organizations were faring overseas—groups like Rotary, the Boy Scouts, the Lions, and the Kiwanis, which all came into existence during the same early-twentieth-century period that gave rise to the Toastmasters. Most of these groups have been bleeding members in the United States for decades. And yet, as I discovered, many have been growing nonetheless.

“We have 11,000 Kiwanians in Taiwan,” said a chipper spokeswoman for the Indiana-based group, which has seen a 59 percent rise across Asia in the new millennium. Rotary International, after a decade of 60 percent growth in South Korea, counts 60,000 members there. And a number of different groups have found particularly fertile soil in India. In addition to the Toastmasters’ strong showing there, the Lions have grown by 36 percent over the past decade, with a total membership of more than 200,000 in the land of Gandhi. Rotary has grown by 55 percent there over the same period. (Fun fact: There are twice as many Rotary clubs in Kerala as there are in Kansas.) As of July 1, the new president of Rotary International is Kalyan Banerjee, a chemical executive from the medium-size industrial city of Vapi, Gujarat. And between 1980 and today, the Indian equivalent of the Boy Scouts—called the Bharat Scouts—has grown by about a third.

In a radio interview earlier this year, the former Arkansas governor and Fox News personality Mike Huckabee sniffed at President Obama’s childhood years in Indonesia. “Most of us grew up going to Boy Scout meetings,” he said, “and, you know, our communities were filled with Rotary clubs, not madrassas.” Huckabee’s innuendo was unmistakable, but he got one thing precisely backward. Indonesia has more than twice as many scouts as we do. In fact, with around 17.1 million badge-seeking, uniform-sporting, oath-swearing youth, Indonesia has the largest scouting association in the world. The United States, whose scout numbers are steadily dwindling, is not even a close second. And for the record, Rotary has around eighty-nine clubs in the country as well.

As Robert D. Putnam famously chronicled a decade ago in his book Bowling Alone, Americans in the latter third of the twentieth century precipitously abandoned the clubs and associations that once defined us. Many of the trends Putnam outlined have continued. Over the last ten years alone, American membership in the Lions has fallen by about 20 percent, in Rotary by about 8 percent, and the Kiwanis by about 22 percent. Since the mid-twentieth century, everything from card games to church attendance, from Sunday picnics to membership in unions has plummeted. Screen time has crowded out much else. Today, we might follow scores of people on Twitter, join a dozen Facebook groups, and sign up for a few mailing lists, but it’s considerably more rare for us to actually show up for anything.

This is, of course, a familiar story—one that has by now been subject to about as many interpretations as Moby-Dick. And there is disagreement as to how much we should mourn. Technophiles say we have simply moved beyond an old-line civic order into an online one, where powerful social networks offer infinite connection in a frictionless world. Others view these innovations as at best pale substitutes for the Grange Halls and other groups that helped drive progressive reforms in the twentieth century, or the once-thriving fraternal orders that sponsored Little Leagues and helped knit different classes of Americans together as recently as the 1960s. “We’ve reached a point where our most important elites do not join anything with anybody else,” says Theda Skocpol, a professor of government at Harvard who wrote elegiacally about the history of membership groups and fraternal organizations in her book Diminished Democracy.

And yet it’s worth pausing to consider that this familiar story of the decline of the old-fashioned American civic association may not, in fact, be quite accurate. Like the Fortune 500 companies that are expanding operations in emerging markets while trimming their U.S. payrolls, many of America’s major fraternal organizations are thriving globally even as they wither here at home. And while the decline of these groups domestically is certainly not a good thing for America, their growth abroad is hardly unwelcome. Indeed, it may represent a strength—a sort of commercial-civic soft power—that we barely know we have.

“Religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited,
immensely large and very minute”—American associations, in Alexis de Tocqueville’s view, were the defining feature of the nation he anatomized in 1835. His visit to America happened to coincide with a period that the historian Mary P. Ryan has called the “era of association,” when the expansion of male suffrage and the rise of mass political parties spawned a proliferation of cross-class fraternal societies and clubs. Putnam’s historical account in Bowling Alone focuses on a more recent boom in voluntary associations, one that arose in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, during the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era.

This time, the catalysts were industrialization, massive urban migration, the rise of corporations, and breakneck economic growth. Jeffersonian bumpkins streamed into Hamiltonian industrial cities; a good portion of the Old World’s tired, poor, and huddled masses were freshly arrived too. The social networks that had once served these new arrivals back at home were either dashed to pieces, left behind, or else ill-suited to helping them advance and associate in this new world. The reaction against these economically charged but civically impoverished conditions was a geyser of new clubs, associations, unions, lodges, and fraternal orders—“a crescendo,” Putnam writes, “unmatched in American history.” It doesn’t seem like too much an abuse of history, I think, to note that much the same basic conditions apply in developing countries today.

When I wrote to Putnam, he said he knew nothing about the overseas expansion of the groups he’d written about in Bowling Alone (though he said he was very interested to hear of it). Just about all of the academics I contacted said much the same thing, expressing mild wonderment when I told them about the growth rates that groups like Rotary are posting in the developing world. Theda Skocpol pointed out that it’s hardly novel for American associations to spread vigorously abroad. (The temperance movement apparently had serious legs.) But this more recent phenomenon—of American civic groups’ expansion overseas during a period of contraction at home—seems to have largely escaped scholarly notice.

Michael Woolcock, a leading scholar of social capital at the World Bank, wasn’t very familiar with the trend I described to him. But he did offer a possible theory to explain it. Historically, he said, the growth of civic groups is often tied to rapid urbanization. And there may be no greater hallmark of our moment in history than the breakneck growth of cities in the developing world. “The world is now, as of last year, more urban than rural,” he said. “That could suggest flush times ahead for groups like Rotary.”

Like Russian immigrants newly arrived in Brooklyn from the shtetl, or Okies plopped down in San Francisco after the Dust Bowl, youth with narrow social networks are streaming into cities from the countryside in vast waves in nations like India. “It’s the proverbial yokel going to town,” said Anirudh Krishna, a professor at Duke University’s School of Public Policy who studies social capital in India. “His sleeves are too short, he knows his table manners are atrocious, his breath smells like garlic.” For educated newcomers with professional aspirations, groups like the Toastmasters or the Lions or Rotary might stand to offer “a school in which villagers can learn to conduct themselves with dignity in a city setting,” Krishna said.

For their part, the leaders of these voluntary associations themselves see their overseas expansion fairly straightforwardly as a phenomenon tied to rapidly expanding global markets. “Rotary thrives in areas that are becoming much more active economically,” said Donna McDonald, the manager of membership development at Rotary International. Explaining his organization’s rapid growth on the subcontinent, Daniel Rex, the executive director of the Toastmasters, said, “It has to do with the rise of India and the buying potential there, and the rise of middle and high-level management.”

At the same time, the Americanness of these groups seems essential to their appeal. (No expert I contacted could think of much in the way of analogous indigenous groups in, say, India or Egypt.) Embedded in the DNA of organizations like Rotary and the Toastmasters are the memes of American business culture, with all its odd tribal rituals, upbeat nostrums, manners, and codes. The Toastmasters not only provide a safe harbor in which to practice one’s English in front of a crowd, the group has also perennially stressed the training it offers in the somewhat baroque skill of running a formal meeting. (The founder of the Toastmasters, Ralph C. Smedley, was also the chief biographer of Henry M. Robert, of Robert’s Rules of Order fame.) “It’s a lot of cultural information,” said Rex.

And in places where America still stands for aspiration, many of these clubs offer a simple marker of status. A Scottish friend of mine who works for the World Bank recently described checking into a hotel in Bhubaneswar, the ramshackle capital of Orissa, which was until recently India’s poorest state. The concierge promptly assured her of the hotel’s quality by informing her that the local Rotary club met there. And at a Toastmasters meeting I attended in a little upstairs room at an Indian restaurant in Abu Dhabi, I watched a very solemn induction ceremony for a few new members, during which an officer of the club offered this somewhat garbled testament to the organization’s prestige: “If at all you are going to be the president of the United States, he has to be a Toastmaster.”

At the end of his travels, Tocqueville came away thinking of the democratic structures of American politics as “great free schools to which all citizens come to be taught the general theory of association.” In his view, it was the peculiar institution of American democracy that gave rise to the thicket of clubs and societies he found in the hinterland. But more recent observers have wondered whether Tocqueville got it backward. What if democracy was the general theory, and fraternal orders, commercial associations, and religious committees were the schools? “This was the civic garden in which people learned all these skills of negotiation and dialogue and speaking in the public square,” says Michael Woolcock. In Robert Putnam’s 1993 book Making Democracy Work, a study of regional governments in Italy, he found that even the presence of completely nonpolitical groups, like choral societies, correlated with more responsive governance. If associations grow thick on the ground, Woolcock says, “it can’t help but have osmosis-like effects in political life.”

One remarkable fact about the global spread of old-line American civic groups is that they’ve often been allowed to thrive in authoritarian countries that systematically repress other kinds of membership organizations. Rotary International managed to grow by 18 percent over the past decade in Mubarak’s Egypt, for instance. And the tiny, troubled nation of Bahrain may have more Toastmasters per capita than any other country in the world, with fifty-eight chapters for its total population of 1.2 million. That’s not to say that these groups had anything to do with the Arab spring uprisings in those countries. Indeed, it is likely their very apolitical inoffensiveness that has allowed them to survive. (“It’s all charity work,” Hisham Fahmy, CEO of the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt, told me with a shrug when I asked him about Rotary. “It’s good networking.”) But when democracies do in fact emerge, it’s not outlandish to think that groups like Rotary and the Toastmasters may offer them strength going forward.

Of course, it’s hard to say how significant that role might be. But there is a clearer lesson to be gleaned here. In recent years, American-style capitalism has undeniably—and for good reason—lost much of its luster on the world stage, beginning with the failure of the “Washington Consensus” in Latin America and Russia and accelerating with the collapse of the global financial markets brought on by Wall Street. And yet despite all that, strivers across the globe still apparently want to associate themselves with these quintessentially American, Babbit-like business groups. We shouldn’t be surprised. These groups do not represent the culture of Davos—of an Olympian elite that sits at the helm of a few overweening multinational corporations. They represent a capitalism of opportunity and dignity for the average man or woman. And as much havoc as we’ve wreaked, that’s still a club much of world thinks worth joining.

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