From Bible Belt
to Sun Belt: Plain-Folk
Religion, Grassroots
Politics, and the Rise
of Evangelical Conservatism
by Darren Dochuk
W. W. Norton & Co., 520 pp.

In his new book, From Bible Belt to Sun Belt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism, Purdue University history professor Darren Dochuk tells the tale of southern migrants (mainly from the freewheeling states of the western South such as Texas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma) who flooded into the Los Angeles area before and after World War II. They brought with them a distinctive brand of institutionally adaptive but theologically rigid evangelical Protestantism, which eventually served as a crucial vanguard for the conservative movement that mobilized behind Barry Goldwater and reached the promised land via Californias own Ronald Reagan.

Dochuk excels in his profiles of early plain-folk settlers and their world, and the tangled personal, institutional, and doctrinal motives of the ministry that served them. He describes the evangelizing and church-building activities of tent-makers and prophetsessentially religious entrepreneurslike Bob Shuler, Jonathan Perkins, and Robert Lackey, and the educational efforts of John Brown (whose John Brown University in Arkansas pioneered evangelical championship of capitalism) and George Pepperdine (whose eponymous university in Los Angeles, originally affiliated with the Churches of Christ, became one of the flagship conservative schools in the country). All of these leaders contributed to the politicalization of Southern California evangelicals and built a close alliance between churches and wealthy conservative ideologues.

Most of these settlers, battered by the Dust Bowl, were drawn to the Los Angeles area by the jobs that came with the massive defense spending that accompanied and followed World War II, and were soon inhabiting Americas first major sprawl community. Neighborhood churches became a focal point for political activism, and a militant anticommunism become a near-universal creed.
Throughout From Bible Belt to Sun Belt, Dochuk shows an unusual sensitivity to the particular religious strains represented by his subjects, particularly the early importance in California of the conservative restorationists of the Churches of Christ (Pepperdines denominational origins), the neo-Pentecostals of the Assemblies of God, and both the southern and independent versions of the right wing of the Baptists.

Also born in California were the cross-denominational phenomena that were later to assume national importance. These included the neo-Pentecostal charismatic movement that eventually spread beyond Protestantism into the Catholic Church, and the youth-based Jesus Movement that became a notable feature of the popular culture of the 1970s. In addition, the first megachurches, a major Sun Belt phenomenon in the 1990s, first took root in the rich and heavily tilled cultural soil of Southern California.

But it is in the realm of politics where Californias Christian conservatives most significantly led the way. Whereas white Christians in the South didnt bolt the Democratic Party until the 1960s, their brethren in California began leaving as far back as the 1940s and 50s, Dochuck notes, thanks to the growing progressivism of Californias Democratic Party and its labor allies. There were widespread battles over school curricula and textbooks in California a good forty years before the Christian Coalition made school boards a prime target across the country. Dochuk also suggests that Californias political culture (up to and including the shock of the Watts riots of 1965) forced southern expats to abandon overt racism and pioneer the sort of race-is-not-an-issue rhetoric and aggressive recruitment of like-minded African American and Latino ministers, a strategy that southern conservatives took longer to adopt.

By the end of the 1950s, much of what was later known as the Christian right was already in place in Southern California, with very active evangelical ministers and lay people avidly backing conservative cultural and economic causes and assisting in a conservative takeover of the states Republican Party. Its no wonder that the area was a hotbed of support for Barry Goldwaters candidacy in 1964, which in turn was the basis for Ronald Reagans successful gubernatorial run in 1966.

Reagan, suggests Dochuk, was the perfect vehicle for a centrist conservatism that reassured voters frightened by Goldwaters rhetoric, but was closer personally to the religious and corporate figures who dominated Republican politics in Southern California. They forgave him several heresies as governor, most notably his signature on a liberalized abortion law and his opposition to a ballot initiative aimed at barring gay teachers from classrooms. But it was the disgrace of Richard Nixon, who had his own complex relationship with religious conservatives back home, that united Californias evangelical conservatives behind Reagans national aspirations. Because of Watergate, an emboldened Democratic Party was able to solidify control of Congress, writes Dochuk. Moderate Republicans, meanwhile, leveraged Nixons follies to shift the GOP back to the center, a transition symbolized by President Fords choice of Nelson Rockefeller as his vice president. Thus Californians (particularly the future apocalyptic novelist Tim LaHaye) played a major role in the creation of the organized Christian right, even though southerners like Jerry Falwell were their most visible spokesmen.

The book ends with Reagans 1980 victory, with a short epilogue suggesting that Californias ever-changing demographics (including a reverse migration of southerners back to Texas and other new Sun Belt boom areas) and the fading away of key leaders shifted the center of gravity in the latter-day Christian right eastwardbut without changing the formative elements the movement acquired in the crucible of greater Los Angeles.

Dochuk carries off his argument quite well, though the vast cast of characters he conjures up is difficult to navigate. His ardor to make his case for Southern Californias central position in the religious and political conservative movements also leads Dochuk to a cataloging of California connections for virtually every major conservative figure in the country that sometimes rings false. Reading this book, you might be forgiven for thinking Strom Thurmond spent more time in LA than in Columbia or Charleston, or that Billy Grahams California Crusades were the only ones that mattered.

This meticulously researched book is also marred by some factual errors. Billy Graham was never, as Dochuk calls him, Richard Nixons right-hand man. Pat Boone was not quite the political and cultural powerhouse he seems to be in this account. But Dochuks central hypothesis comes through the exposition well established. As he puts it in a comment on those who advance the standard theory of contemporary conservatism:

[W]here they saw the southernization of America on a north-south trajectory, they should have looked for it on an east-west axis. During the preceding generations, transplanted Texans and Oklahomans like Bill Bright and E. V. Hill had southernized Southern California evangelicalism, creating an awesome political force. As a way to compete in a cultural marketplace saturated with faiths of all kind, adjust to new arrangements of urban space, capture and hold their hearts of their young, and vie for control of a fiercely contested political sphere, they had turned Californias evangelicalism into the vanguard of American evangelicalism. By the early 1970s, this emboldened religiosity had drawn on its entrepreneurial sense to help forge a creative, centrist, youthful, color-blind conservatism and fasten it to Ronald Reagans Republican Right.

Before they became thoroughly politicized, Southern California evangelicals were radicalized by the cultural collisions inevitable in their environment, and this drove them to find identity and a sense of collective purpose in the traditional faith and values of the region they had left behind. Its significant in Dochuks tale that the most theologically rigid leaders often were the most innovative in building culturally adaptive churches, parachurch organizations, worship practices, evangelizing techniques, and political tactics. Conservative theology in a chaotic milieu often led to an identification of godliness with everything old that could be maintained when everything seemed new, and conservative cultural and political causes provided the glue once supplied by creeds, strong denominations, and traditional liturgy.

Throughout Dochuks book, conservative evangelicals regularly alternate between the defensive reaction of the righteous remnant to the alleged tyranny of secular humanists and big government, and self-assured claims that they represented a moral majority that was simply exercising the right to self-government. This ambiguity about the basic nature of America has become a regular feature not only of the Christian right but also of todays big conservative grassroots movement (which heavily overlaps in membership with the Christian right), the Tea Party movement.

It may well be that this ambivalence was born in California, the wonderland and nightmare of so many of the plain folk and leaders Dochuk writes about in this ultimately fascinating portrait of the early Christian right.

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

The post Desert Fathers appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The Same Thing Over
and Over: How School
Reformers Get Stuck in
Yesterday’s Ideas
by Frederick M. Hess
Harvard University Press, 304 pp.

Much of what we now accept as fundamental, almost definitional, aspects of schools—that a school must be a wholly geographically based institution, for example—was a “makeshift response to the exigencies of an earlier era,” says Hess. Standard “chalk and talk” schooling made sense for a basically agrarian, small-town nation in which communications and transportation were slow and expensive and schools could rely on an army of talented, underpaid women who had few job opportunities outside of teaching, nursing, and secretarial work. The length of the school day is another relic of a time when relatively few women worked outside the house. Today it makes little sense that most schoolchildren are let loose at three p.m. when their parents often don’t get home from work until the dinner hour. Our current model is increasingly obsolete in a society where demand for high-skilled labor has accelerated, the population has become urbanized, and young people are as comfortable communicating virtually with people around the world as they are with someone at the front of the class.

Almost all efforts at major education reform over the last few decades have been compromised by the failure to recognize this obsolescence. School districts have accepted (if sometimes reluctantly) demands for higher teacher preparation standards, additional Advanced Placement classes, and a greater focus on the “core” subjects of math, science, English, and history. But more radical changes—such as replacing teachers with technology, using a global labor pool, or hiring a lower-paid staff—face much fiercer opposition. This has led reformers, for all their good intentions, to simply add more rules and regulations over existing ones. The result is an accumulation of claims on institutional time and resources which makes for an increasingly resentful bureaucracy and schools that have become unmanageable.

It isn’t just the school districts and teacher’s unions that resist systemic change. Interests as varied as school construction firms, textbook publishers, summer camps, and amusement-park owners (whose survival depends in part on America’s relatively long summer vacations) have a powerful stake in the maintenance of outdated educational practices.

All this because most of us have difficulty imagining schooling occurring outside of a single, physical place led by a full-time, salaried professional who teaches students organized by age-appropriate grades. Even more prosaic are the physical constraints of our existing schools, in which the practices of the past are often quite literally bolted in place. Challenging these deeply embedded practices would require the kind of institutional and physical creative destruction—comprehensive, systemic change from the inside out—for which even the most enthusiastic of reformers may lack the stomach.

As a result, advocates for better education have repeatedly latched on to a depressing litany of fads as the panacea for what ails American education. Believing that they have only a short window of opportunity for change, these reformers push for their ideas to be applied uniformly across the board. “New math,” standardized testing, centralization, merit pay, small schools, community control, mayoral control, and dozens of other ideas have ripped through schools, often with disappointment and disillusion not far behind.

Many of these ideas actuallydid have some merit, says Hess, in the sense that they could  help some specific students in some specific circumstances. For example, a rigorous focus on a narrow set of tested subjects may be reasonable for schools in chaotic, urban contexts where simply focusing on anything counts as success. But that treatment, like chemotherapy, has powerful side effects that should not be risked on the (relatively) healthy “patients” in more advantaged school districts.

The same can be said about the often-furious conflict over pedagogical practices. From the start, there should have been more discussion about what style of teaching or curriculum fits the needs of particular students, rather than the establishment of a one-size-fits-all model. Instead, we have seen wave after wave of disappointment, as some promising changes have been overapplied and not worked as advertised. Which, in turn, paves the way for the next overapplied fad, creating another cycle of failure and disillusionment.
Hess is a refreshing change from many other analysts who hold forth on the subject of education. He is unafraid to take on flaws even in policies he largely supports—such as merit pay, school choice, and greater competition, which, he says, were at once oversold and misunderstood.

But the most critical lesson from the book is Hess’s powerful theory about what makes schools succeed or fail. That theory, simply put, is that the basic components of schooling—parents, children, school leaders, and teachers—are irreducibly diverse. Parents have different ideas about what a “well-educated” child is, and children differ quite significantly in temperament, aptitude, habits, and interests. School leaders vary as to how they think schools should be run, while teachers have different skill levels, enthusiasm for different tasks, and ideas about what children should learn and know.

Successful education requires alignment between these four groups. Educators will always be less effective if they are made to teach in a way that they believe is wrongheaded or that they haven’t bought into. Students will have difficulty learning if they are forced to work at a pace that is too fast or too slow, or if they are taught in a manner that doesn’t match their individual learning styles. Parents can be disengaged or hostile if the pedagogy, discipline, or school culture differ fundamentally from what they think is right for their child. And schools as a whole will be incoherent and disorganized if they cannot count on some baseline of agreement as to what—and who—the school is for.

The implications of this simple set of assumptions are profound. If you take them seriously, almost every aspect of schooling—how students are assigned to schools, who teaches and how they are trained, where and when teaching and learning occurs, who provides education and who regulates it, and, most radically, how disagreements are settled—must be called into question.
For almost the entire span of America’s experiment with universal education, we have had two ways of dealing with the diversity and conflict that are inherent in public education. For those without substantial mobility or means, that approach has been democracy: parents and other interested community members argue about what schools should do, and then the majority determines what plans will be put into place. Parents and their children can either accept what they are given or organize through the political system for change.

Persons with means and mobility, however, have a different set of educational options: they can try to match their preferences and attributes to a public jurisdiction they think is appropriate; they can supplement public schools with other educational experiences in order to bring their children’s education closer to their preferences; or they can opt out of public schools entirely and place their children in private schools. The preferences of the well-to-do thus are aggregated through the classically liberal mechanisms of choice and markets, while those without such means must content themselves with majoritarian, democratic mechanisms.

One takeaway of Hess’s argument is that, where education is concerned, democracy is distinctly inferior to liberty. The basic issues we fight over in education, he suggests, are not susceptible to definitive settlement. We will never agree on the question of what it means to be truly educated, because this is a matter of principle and preference rather than science. We will never be able to come up with a single model of schooling that works for everyone, because the needs and habits of students differ so dramatically. The reforms most likely to creative vibrant, creative organizations are those that are most freely consented to—those in which students, parents, teachers, and school leaders are all on the same page, because they have agreed in advance on the fundamentals.

Rather than aggressively imposing a single set of best practices on all schools, then, Hess argues for narrowing the scope of choices that are made by majorities, and increasing those made by smaller, self-chosen groups of common sentiment. Policy changes that insist on one way of compensating, training, and recruiting teachers, one way to use the school day or year, one way of organizing classrooms or defining what should go on in them—regardless of how they try to establish this uniformity—are steps in the wrong direction. “The frustrating truth,” Hess tells us, “is that there are no permanent solutions in schooling, only solutions that make sense in a given time and place.

“Rather than education reform again being, as in the 1980s, a matter of prescriptive state policies on teacher ladders and additional course requirements, or as in the 2000s, a matter of accountability systems and mandated interventions in low-performing schools,” he continues, “perhaps it is time for an agenda that creates room for problem solvers rather than prescribing solutions.” Much the same thing could be said about other reform favorites, such as the adoption of Common Core State Standards (a set of standards now approved, as of this writing, by forty-three states and the District of Columbia), a greater use of standardized tests, and “value-added” metrics of teacher effectiveness and merit pay. These may be great ideas in particular places and with certain groups of students. But we cannot be presumptuous enough to assume that they will work in all the nation’s schools.

The key to effective reform, Hess concludes, is ridding ourselves of the pipe dream that dramatically improved schools are just one silver bullet away. Instead of doubling down on a particular set of supposedly research-driven “best practices,” we should hedge our bets by allowing radical new models of schooling and eccentric and unproven ideas to gain entry into the system—while resisting any force, be it public, private, or philanthropic, that would foist a new orthodoxy on a system which has already seen far too many of them.

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

The post One Size Doesn’t Fit All appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Unwarranted Influence:
Dwight D. Eisenhower and the
Military Industrial Complex
by James Ledbetter
Yale University Press, 280 pp.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, however, the United States created a massive military geared toward intervention overseas. Critics charged that the permanent national security state went hand in hand with the rise of the imperial presidency and the steady erosion of the power of Congress and the courts. Others warned of the loss of individual liberties under a garrison state.

No president worried more about this fundamental change in the nations character than Dwight David Eisenhower. Eisenhower governed from the perspective that a nations security was directly tied to the health of its economy. He believed that if military spending rose too high it would ultimately undermine U.S. security, which he saw as a product of bothmilitary and economic strength. Eisenhower also worried that a permanent armaments industry was fundamentally altering the relationship between citizens and their government.

He spoke of this many times, both in private correspondence and in his public speeches. But in May of 1959, writes James Ledbetter in his book Unwarranted Influence: Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Military Industrial Complex, speechwriters Malcolm Moos and Navy Captain Ralph E. Williams met with the presidents brother, Milton, to begin planning for an Eisenhower valedictory speech. In Mooss words, Eisenhower was striving to reach tomorrows conscience, not todays headlines.

They succeeded. One line in particular has captured a place in the publics consciousness. The departing president warned his countrymen to be on guard against a military-industrial complex acquiring unwarranted influence in the halls of power. People typically refer to the farewell address as the military-industrial complex speech. Fifty years later, it is counted as one of the most important speeches of the twentieth century.

It is ironic, notes Ledbetter, that Eisenhower would be remembered for any speech, let alone one concerning the military and society. The general-president was known more for his syntactical challenges and malapropisms than for his stirring oratory.

Ledbetter, editor in charge at Reuters.com, provides a readable and well-informed argument for why the speech delivered on the evening of January 17, 1961, was different. The book explores the speechs history, and also looks forward, explaining why Eisenhowers warning about an unhealthy conjunction between the federal government, business, and the military still resonates.

The very utility of the phrase military-industrial complex (MIC), admits Ledbetter, comes at the cost of a precise, universally accepted definition. He applies a straightforward onea network of public and private forces that combine a profit motive with the planning and implementation of strategic policybut he explains that the idea of the MIC became for many a kind of standing populist receptacle for dissatisfaction. The elastic interpretation of the MIC, Ledbetter writes, has yielded some fairly exotic results.

It is understandable, he continues, why critics of the MIC have wanted to invoke Eisenhowers authority, or why his presumed prophetic wisdom appears that much more admirable every time a critic finds another pernicious aspect of the MIC. It is also unfortunate. Eisenhower was no liberalfar from it. And yet the embrace of the MIC by progressives and the antiwar left has overshadowed the elements of Eisenhowers speech that should appeal to conservatives. As a result, Ike has nearly been written out of the history of the Republican Party.

But now Eisenhower is back. National figures from President Obama to Defense Secretary Robert Gates have invoked Ikes words, especially his argument that the nations fiscal health is a national security concern, to draw support for their policies. Ledbetter shows why his relevance persists.
Ledbetter begins by placing the MIC within a broader intellectual and historical context, noting that some arguments along these lines have been conspiratorial, bordering on hysteria. During the Senate Munitions Inquiry hearings of 193436, North Dakota Senator Gerald P. Nye claimed that President Woodrow Wilson and the merchants of death had subverted American interests and wasted thousands of American lives on a pointless and unnecessary war. According to Ledbetter, historians have accepted with little fuss Nyes claim that the United States entered World War I for largely economic, as opposed to military or strategic, reasons, but his charges went well beyond what the then-available evidence could support. As such, Nyes most politically inflammatory charges proved highly controversial and helped derail [his] committees work.

The successful prosecution of World War II with support from the same industry that Nye had railed against provided a big boost to the MIC. In January 1944, Charles Wilson, the former president of General Motors and executive vice president of the War Production Board, called for the armed services and private businesses to work together, and to not be impeded by political witch hunts, or thrown to the fanatical isolationist fringe tagged with a merchants-of-death label.

Eisenhower shared these sentiments. (What, after all, was the alternative? That business and the military not work together in wartime?) Ike proved that he was no Gerald Nye by making Wilson his first secretary of defense. Although Eisenhowers farewell address tapped into some of the same concerns invoked by Nye in the 1930s, the presidents notions about the MIC were more sophisticated than Nyes. He also approached the problem from a very different philosophical foundation.

Take, for example, Eisenhowers concerns about protecting private property rights and individual liberty. Ledbetter traces this to the early 1930s, when then Major Eisenhower was assigned to the War Policies Commission, a panel created by Congress to explore the relationship between profit and war. The removal of the element of profit from war, Nye asserted in November 1934, would materially remove the danger of more war.

Ike doubted that this was true. He also recognized that separating profits from military industry would be detrimental to efficiency and corrosive to American values. To Eisenhower, the nationalization of private industries could only be justified in cases of dire national emergency. It would be unconscionable during peacetime.

Instead, Eisenhower aimed for balance. He worried that a failure to reconcile means (resources, public will) and ends (strategic goals) would pose as great a threat to the nations security as did the Soviet menace. [O]ur system, he said, must remain solvent, as we attempt a solution of this great problem of security. Else we have lost the battle from within that we are trying to win from without.

He reiterated this philosophy in his first State of the Union address in February 1953: Our problem, he explained, is to achieve adequate military strength within the limits of endurable strain upon our economy. To amass military power without regard to our economic capacity would be to defend ourselves against one kind of disaster by inviting another.

Another worry, also expressed in the farewell address, was that too many Americans were becoming dependent upon the largesse of the federal government. Eisenhower predicted that this would discourage people from scrutinizing growing state power too closely. To put it crudely, you dont bite the hand that feeds you. The end result is lots of push on the part of people who benefit from massive federal spending, and relatively little push-back from those who pay. Public choice theorists call this the problem of concentrated benefits, diffuse costs.

In short, Eisenhowers critique was fundamentally conservative. Ike appreciated the need for a strong military, but hoped that society would weigh these requirements against other considerations, especially the danger inherent in shifting resources from the private economy to the federal government.
Thefundamental conservativism of Eisenhowers critique was lost almost immediately after the speech as some within the antiwar left cast the military-industrial complex as evidence of the inherent flaws of modern capitalism. Anyone who invoked Eisenhowers warning, or even echoed the general-presidents words, might find themselves lumped together with the likes of C. Wright Mills and Tom Hayden.

Meanwhile, other liberals played a crucial role in the expansion of the MIC. Some of the most outspoken critics of Eisenhowers approach to national security were Keynesian economists such as James Tobin, Paul Samuelson, and John Kenneth Galbraith, who objected to Ikes fiscal conservatism. Liberal critics of Eisenhowers approach to national security in the late 1950s were objecting chiefly to his attempt to strike a balance between private consumption and public investmentthey thought the balance was weighted too heavily toward the former. They hoped that the federal government would play a far more aggressive role in fostering full employment, and they saw military spending as a potential engine for economic growth. Hence the concept, not always uttered in a pejorative way, of military Keynesianism, whereby the Pentagons budget becomes a thinly veiled jobs program.

Whereas the Keynesians thought this a useful by-product of a large national security state, Eisenhower viewed it as a threat to the Republic. Later scholars would call it the Iron Triangle. The persistence of an enormous military budget can be explained, in part, by the fact that defense workers protect their jobs by supporting politicians who steer money to their employers and by punishing those who do not. Military Keynesianism gives domestic politics a larger role in defense budgeting at the expense of international politics.

The MIC has created powerful, entrenched constituencies that always oppose reductions in military spending. Many weary policy analysts, Ledbetter notes gloomily, have concluded that military spending is simply the socially acceptable form of industrial policy in the United States. This loose alliance of the military with the business community and workers employed, directly or indirectly, by the military makes it likely that the Pentagon will prove as resistant to reform in the next few decades as it has in the past five.
It is axiomatic that defense spending rises during periods of great stress and public anxiety. Eisenhower faced down calls for massive spending increases after the launch of the Sputnik satellite in October 1957. After 9/11, Washington went one step farther, creating a new department ostensibly dedicated to the defense of the homeland. Some taxpayers might have been excused for believing that that was the job of the U.S. Department of Defense.

But Washingtons response to 9/11 shouldnt surprise. The foreign policy elite tends to equate spending on national security with security itself. It follows that those who place fiscal considerations ahead of the demands of the military necessarily threaten national security.

In the late 1950s, Democrats (and a few Republicans) assailed Eisenhower on those grounds. Henry M. Scoop Jackson, Missouris Stuart Symington, Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, and a young senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy, knocked Eisenhower for constraining the militarys budget and allowing fiscal considerations to shape the nations strategic objectives. They charged that the president was forcing the nation to fight the Cold War with one arm tied behind its back, and that his decision to shift resources out of the Army, especially, limited the nations flexibility to engage in land wars in Asia. Eisenhower responded by noting that he had no desire to replay the Korean War, and was confident that the nations nuclear arsenal provided a credible deterrent to Soviet aggression.

It rankled Eisenhower, Ledbetter writes, that Democrats and their allies in the military and intelligence communities were inflating and distorting military issues for political gain. He reserved special scorn, however, for industry trade journals. The feeling was mutual. In the opinion of the editors of Aviation Week, Eisenhowers economizing amounted to sacrific[ing] the relative position of the U.S. and the Soviet Union in favor of enjoying a few more years of the hedonistic prosperity that now enfolds our country.

This was more than a case of name-calling and political point-scoring. It ultimately boiled down to far more momentous questions about the nations purpose, and the nations priorities. By 1959, Ledbetter explains, Eisenhower had begun to see private military contractors as a self-interested, malign actor in the budget process. For the weapons manufacturers, the weapons were the end in themselves. For Eisenhower, the weapons were merely a means to an end, an end that combined security in the present day with the nations long-term fiscal health, which was an equally valid concern.

Such sentiments might strike many modern readers as eminently sensible, but todays neoconservatives, the intellectual descendants of the liberal hawks of the late 1950s, reject the suggestion that Americas fiscal circumstances require us to rethink our strategic ends. They are dismissive of deterrence and often, it seems, of basic geography. They say that we Americans can only be safe if the whole world is safe; that democracy in North America depends upon democracy in Southwest and Central Asia. They call for the U.S. military to drain the swamp, and would commit the nation to open-ended state-building crusades wherever terrorists might poke up their heads. Whenever a petty despot with a megaphone seems poised to seize control of any plot of land, the neocons are the first to call for intervention, though they are loath to do the fighting themselves.

Not much has changed, in other words, since Eisenhower uttered his fateful warning.
Eisenhower was not naive. He correctly anticipated that the military-industrial complexs influence over politics would be difficult to break. Twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Americans today spend more on the military than at any time since World War II, and more than twice as muchin inflation-adjusted dollarsthan when Ike left office.The general-presidentclearly failed toconvince his fellow Americans of the need to limit the militarysgrowth. For all practical purposes,the MIC won.

Or, at least, it has up to this point. The fiscal catastrophe facing the federal government, though a long time coming, has invited renewed scrutiny over the Pentagons budget. Eisenhower hoped that an alert and knowledgeable citizenry would constantly weigh the costs and benefits of national security policies so that security and liberty may prosper together. Even many Republicans now concede that in their search for spending cuts, everything, even the militarys budget, must be on the table. Although the military as an institution enjoys overwhelming support, a recent Reuters poll found that 51 percent of Americans support actual cuts in military spending, not merely the slowing of the rate of growth that Secretary Gates announced in January.

Strategic change is necessary if we are serious about bringing the Pentagons budget under control. The United States in 2011 could have a far smaller military if Washington were to embrace restraint, an approach to global affairs characterized by the minimal use of force combined with extensive economic and cultural engagement around the world. Such a shift makes sense on its own terms, and would be consistent with the wise vision set forth fifty years ago by Dwight Eisenhower.

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

The post Ike Reconsidered appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Triumph of the City:
How Our Greatest Invention
Makes Us Richer, Smarter,
Greener, Healthier, and Happier
by Edward Glaeser
Penguin Press HC, 352 pp.

But it didnt happen. The great crime wave of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s eventually came and ebbed, and urban America started coming back. And though Sun Belt metropolises like Las Vegas, Houston, and Atlanta dont look like old-fashioned cities, theyre definitely citiescrowded places with centers and peripheriesand not just random blurs of people.

The turnaround did not reach all urban centers equally. Many great American cities were founded as clusters of manufacturing enterprises, and even though U.S. industrial output is higher than ever, trade and technology means that fewer and fewer people are needed to run Americas factories. The result has been continued decline for many manufacturing hubs, often to the point where upkeep of the basic urban infrastructure has become an intolerable burden and the best hope for improved quality of life is some form of planned shrinkage.

But many metropolitan areasSan Francisco, New York, Boston, Chicagoinitially envisioned as manufacturing or transportation hubs have become thriving centers of the information economy. Meanwhile, much of the Third World has experienced explosive economic growth and massive new waves of urbanization. In a world where instant, cheap, global communication is possible, more people than ever are packing themselves into big cities.

Explaining all this is the main task of Harvard economist Edward Glaesers new book, Triumph of the City. Organized as a series of chapters, each of which is meant to answer a single question (Whats good about slums? Why has sprawl spread?), the book offers a popular treatment of Glaesers main findings in urban economics. The result is a book thats more meandering, engaging, and entertaining than one thats trenchant and polemical, but a few key themes do emerge.

One is that cities provide economically useful interactions between skills, education, and the information revolution. Theres still no better communications technology than the face-to-face chat, which is why people generally work in offices and important decisions get made in meetings rather than email chains. Thus while new information technology has made it possible to work in splendid isolation from the Yukon Territory, in practice the main impact has been to spur growth in info-centric industries. These industries, in turn, rely on pools of skilled workers, and that means cities that create a virtuous circle in which employers are attracted by the large pool of potential employees and workers are drawn by the abundance of potential employers. A company needs to be located someplace where qualified personnel are already living in order to expand, and skilled workers benefit from living in places with multiple potential employers. Firms come to Bangalore for the engineers, Glaeser explains, and engineers come for the firmsand this is equally true of Silicon Valley and programmers, Washington, D.C., and political journalists, and Boston and medical research. Consequently, an edge in skilled labor can give a city an entrenched advantage. As the share of the population with college degrees increases by 10 percent, Glaeser finds, per capita gross metropolitan product rises by 22 percent.

In the American context, this interacts with the reality that poor public schools are often a major driver of out-migration to the suburbs. This is why, Glaeser notes, education policy is vital for urban success. Unfortunately, what Glaeser has to say in this regard tends to be a bit gliba breezy two-page brief for the standard reform playbook of charter schools and performance pay for teachers that will do nothing to convince skeptics, but may close some eyes to the books more substantive insights.

Those insights are at their most important on the subjects of poverty and real estate development. The large concentrations of squalor visible in the worlds major cities tend to cast these places in a bad light. Casual empiricism can make it seem that cities and urbanization cause poverty. The truth is the reverse: while rural poverty is often more picturesque than slum dwelling, its considerably more severe. Cities attract the poor because theyre engines of economic opportunity. Glaesers research finds that in the United States, when you control for demographics, workers in metropolitan areas with big cities earn 30 percent more than workers who arent in metropolitan areas, and the effect is even bigger in poor countries. Higher living costs partially offset these increased earnings, but they also reflect higher wages driven by the higher productivity facilitated by dense cities greater scope for specialization and information transfer. And, crucially for the future of the planet, city dwellers smaller homes and shorter, less car-focused commutes lead to dramatically lower carbon footprints. Achieving progressive goals of economic mobility and ecological sustainability, in other words, requires bigger, denser cities.

And this, Glaeser is keen to argue, requires giving up on some sacred cows. He condemns the agrarian utopianism of those who sentimentalize rural living and fail to appreciate the environmental virtues of big cities, chiefly less driving and the greater energy efficiency of heating multifamily structures. He argues that conventional environmental impact reviews fail desperately by not considering the impact of not building new homes. Houston, he notes, has attained extremely rapid population growth largely because Houston-area authorities have chosen to allow people to build houses in the Houston area, attracting middle-class residents in search of affordable housing. Every time additional development in coastal California is blocked, the would-be inhabitants of the development dont vanishthey simply move to places like Houston, Phoenix, or Las Vegas, where sparser dwelling patterns and hotter weather then lead to higher carbon emissions. Excessive historic preservation laws have a similar impact, turning central cities into boutique areas that only the rich can afford. More broadly, Glaeser observes that over the past forty years, weve experienced a little-remarked revolution in property rights in America, shifting a paradigm where people could essentially do what they wanted with their own property to a system where neighbors have enormous power to restrict growth and change. This, combined with pervasive pro-sprawl bias in federal housing and transportation policy, is a disaster for our economy and our environment.

But while Glaesers overall thesis is compelling, his affection for tweaking liberals sometimes leads to questionable emphasis. Yes, historic preservation and environmental impact review can limit density. But they can also make cities more appealing and livable, and hence more attractive to employers and highly educated workers, which leads to economic growth that benefits everyone. Moreover, preservation and environmental review in Americas central cities are hardly the main barriers to a denser country. Consider the D.C. area. To accommodate 600,000 additional people, the city of Washington, D.C., which is relatively small and already fairly compact, would need more than 4,300 more people per square mile, nearly a 50 percent increase in population density. By contrast, increasing the population density of adjoining Montgomery County, Maryland, up to the level of nearby Fairfax County, Virginia, would achieve the same thing. Suburban jurisdictions are big, and small differences in policy there can have a huge impact.

Glaesers emphasis on preservation and environmental reviews also distracts attention from other measures that, in the vast majority of jurisdictions, are far more important in keeping densities low: minimum lot occupancy rules, bans on multifamily structures, mandated parking minimums, and so on all conspire to prevent efficient use of space. The argument that curtailing density is bad for the economy and the environment and tends to turn our most desirable locations into exclusive preserves of the rich may be persuasive; what is less clear is whether its in any particular jurisdictions interest to change.

Glaeser bemoans the fact that central Paris has become unaffordable to the nonwealthy, but its a situation that suits the wealthy just fine. Similarly, incumbent property owners in Manhattanespecially those who bought low in the late 1970s or early 80sbenefit mightily from curbs on new construction. Glaeser seems at times to assume that failure to understand the issues properly is leading to bad policy, but the real issue seems to me more likely to be bad incentives and bad institutions. A mayor might well come away from this book more convinced than ever that regulatory measures that limit density and make his town unaffordable to the poor are good ideas. Suburbs, in particular, do well by offloading the challenge of poverty to adjacent areas. A central challenge is for federal policymakers to do a better job of using the leverage at their disposalprimarily moneyto drive change. Washington is awash in proposals for one or another form of a national infrastructure bank, and the federal transportation bill is overdue for reauthorization. Either would be a good opportunity to tie federal money to local policy shifts that facilitate both density and affordability.

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

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But before we launch into yet another bout of tax reform, it’s worth asking a question: Why do we let the tax system get so cluttered in the first place? Obviously, elected officials love to use the tax code to reward interest groups and make social policy, and no power on earth could—or, really, should—keep them from doing that. But just as smart cooks learn to clean up as they go, shouldn’t it be possible for politicians to exercise a little discipline as they legislate, so that the tax code doesn’t become a complete mess and then require a vast emergency scouring?

I think it is possible, and to understand how, consider the drama that played out during the lame-duck session late last year. As you’ll recall, that extremely productive period was kicked off by a compromise between the White House and congressional Republicans to extend the Bush-era tax cuts for two years. Not everyone loved the deal. Liberals wanted the tax cuts for the wealthy to end. Budget hawks would have preferred that all the tax cuts disappeared. But the truth is that there would have been no compromise at all were it not for the fact that the Bush tax cuts had a peculiar attribute: an expiration date. Because the Republican Congress had passed them in 2001 as a budget reconciliation measure (in order to circumvent the normal need for sixty votes), the rate cuts were due to “sunset” in January 2011 absent a congressional vote to keep them going. And that gave the president leverage to demand concessions in return for supporting the upper-income rate extensions. He won payroll tax breaks and other short-term measures to stimulate the economy, plus a new sunset requirement that will provide him and the Democrats the chance to kill the tax cuts for the rich in late 2012.

The vast majority of provisions in the tax code do not operate this way. Once passed, the various deductions, credits, exclusions, deferrals, and assorted other preferences—called “tax expenditures” in budget jargon—just sit there more or less permanently, with new ones piling up on top of old ones and no mechanism forcing lawmakers to reconsider any of them. In this way, tax expenditures are akin to entitlements (like Social Security), and different from discretionary spending (like funding for higher education), which must be voted on in the annual appropriations process. Also like entitlement programs, tax expenditures have no budget: the amount we spend on them is determined by the number of qualified people or companies taking advantage of them. No surprise, then, that tax expenditures have grown considerably as a percentage of the overall federal budget since the last round of tax reform in 1986, while the share of the budget devoted to discretionary spending has fallen.

Now imagine if Congress imposed some kind of sunset requirement on every provision in the tax code, as the GAO and others have long suggested. It would force lawmakers to reconsider and vote on some sizeable portion of those provisions every year. That in turn would give reformers and budget hawks an opportunity to argue and organize against those breaks and compel supporters to expend political capital defending them. Perhaps most tax expenditures would remain so popular with the public or so protected by narrow moneyed interests that they’d survive the vote. But surely some would not. And those that did survive would at least have done so within a fair political process, in which the cost of each break was weighed against the overall demands of the treasury and the ever-changing needs of the country.

By itself, this one procedural adjustment wouldn’t solve all the problems with our tax system. But it would be a significant step toward long-term budget sanity. And it would change the nature of tax reform itself. Instead of something that occurs once a generation, when the political stars are aligned and the complexities of the tax code have become overwhelming, tax reform would be a continual process, a healthy, habitual practice, like washing the dishes before they pile up in the sink.

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In the preamble to its December report on how to wrangle Americas fiscal crisis, President Obamas deficit commission conjured the image of a family hunkered down around the kitchen table, making tough choices about what they hold most dear and what they can learn to live without. The attempt to make fiscal reform sound human sizedlike something out of a very special episode of The Waltonswas understandable, given the colossal abstractions that followedin the reports recommendations (Extend Medicaid drug rebate to dual eligibles in Part D; Move to a competitive territorial tax system). But at least one of the bipartisan commissions ideas did possess a kind of after-supper, intuitive appeal: cutting the federal workforce by 10 percent and freezing federal salaries.

In tough times, everyone understands downsizing. If the symbolism of belt tightening werent so powerful, President Obama probably wouldnt have announced his call for a two-year freeze on federal salaries in November. The actual savings associated with the move are fairly trivial in the grand scheme, but the signal was bright and clear. All of us are called on to make some sacrifices, Obama said to the cameras. And Im asking civil servants to do what theyve always doneplay their part.

The new Republican majority in the House has, naturally, been happy to take up this theme. In January, Representative Kevin Brady of Texas introduced the too cleverly named Cut Unsustainable and Top-heavy Spending (CUTS) Act, whose provisions closely mirrored the debt commissions plan for downsizing the federal workforce: a 10 percent cut through attrition, a three-year pay freeze. Then the Republican Study Committee, a congressional group crowded with Tea Party freshmen, upped the ante, calling for a 15 percent slash to the civil service amid a long menu of other spending cuts that, while drastic, would actually do little to ease the workload of the federal bureaucracy. In both cases, the sales pitch for gutting the civil service was more or less the same. Theres not a business in America thats survived this recession without right-sizing its workforce, Brady told the Washington Post after introducing his bill. The federal government cant be the exception.

The problem is that, as employers go, the federal government is in fact pretty exceptional. A corporation can shed workers and then revise its overall business strategy accordingly. A strapped city government can lay off a few street sweepers and then elect to sweep the streets less often. But federal agencies are governed by statutory requirements. Unless Congress changes those statutes, federal agencies mandatestheir work assignmentsstay the same, regardless of how many people are on hand to carry them out. Medicare checks still have to go out within thirty days of a claim, offshore oil wells still need to be inspected, soldiers in Afghanistan still need to be provisioned, Social Security databases still need to be maintained, and on and on. It raises the hairs on my neck when I hear people say weve got to do more with less, says John Palguta, a vice president for policy at the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit focused on the government workforce. The logical conclusion is were going to do more with nothing.

In practice, cutting civil servants often means either adding private contractors orin areas where the government plays a regulatory functionresorting to the belief that industries have a deep capacity to police themselves. (This idea, of course, has taken some dings in recent years.) And though contractors can be enormously useful, they too have to be, well, governed. You can cut and cut and cut and try to streamline the government workforce, but at some point you lose the ability to oversee the money that youre spending, and that puts everything at greater risk, says Don Kettl, dean of the University of Marylands School of Public Policy. The opportunities for program failureand waste of public dollars grow exponentially.

In other words, if Congress and the White House agree to substantial cuts in the federal workforce but dont also agree to eliminate programs and reduce services, the end result could be more spending and deficits, not less. Strange as it may sound, to get a grip on costs, we should in many cases be hiring many more bureaucratsand paying more to get better onesnot cutting their numbers and freezing their pay. Because in many parts of government, the bureaucracy has already crossed that dangerous threshold beyond which further cuts can only mean greater risk of a breakdown. Indeed, much of the runaway spending weve seen over the past decade is the result of our having crossed that line years agothe last time there was a Democrat in the White House, a divided government, and calls for slashing the federal workforce in the air.

One night in the autumn of 1993, Americans watching their bedroom TV sets caught an unusual appearance by Vice President Al Gore on Late Night with David Letterman. He had come to smash an ashtray. In an unlikely pop tutorial on the federal bureaucracy, Gore explained to the studio audience that any time a hapless federal acquisitions officersomeone in charge of buying stuff for the governmentfaced the thankless task of purchasing an ashtray, he had to pore through ten pages of bureaucratese to find out what specifications the thing had to meet. There were even mandatory instructions for ashtray safety testing. When smashed with a hammer, the official writ had it, the specimen should break into a small number of irregularly shaped pieces, no greater than 35. With that, Gore and Letterman gamely strapped on safety goggles and conducted an in-studio ashtray safety testall to lampoon the manner in which a fusty bureaucracy did its shopping.

Gores stunt was meant to promote a new White House initiative called the National Partnership for Reinventing Government. With the Cold War fading from the rearview mirror and defense spending ratcheting down, the brand-new Clinton administration wanted to seize their moment to modernize the government through a system of information-age reforms. (One example: giving civil servants the freedom to go buy office suppliesor ashtraysat their local Staples using a federal credit card.) Reinventing Governments noble, liberal aim was to restore public faith in federal institutions. But it also came to serve a more tactical purpose. As the Gingrich revolution swept Washington, Reinventing Government allowed the White House to politically outflank a GOP eager to gut the bureaucracy for the sake of gutting. A central argument for the initiative became, If you fix the process, you dont need the people. When the initiative tallied its accomplishments in 1998, at the top of its list was cutting the federal workforce by 351,000 civil servants.

One of the greatest targets of all those cuts was the Defense Departments acquisitions workforcethe lowly ashtray buyers, yes, but also the cadre of professionals who write the militarys more sophisticated contracts for goods or services, negotiate their terms, manage their execution, and audit their end results. This tribe of bureaucrats came under fire on multiple fronts. The biggest blow came not from Reinventing Government, but from the Republican Congress, which in 1996 ordered a 25 percent decrease in the Defense acquisitions workforce before the year 2000. With that plus other workforce reductions that had already taken place earlier in the decade, the number of Defense contracting officers fell by 50 percentfrom 460,000 to 230,000over the course of the 1990s.

It turned out to be a case of modernization gone horribly awry. At roughly the same time as the Defense contract management workforce was being hollowed out, the military was reorganizing itself around a vastly increased dependence on outside contractors. The balance of acquisitions was shifting from the relatively straightforward purchase of goods (Gores ashtray) to the more sophisticated enlistment of services (the rapid construction of a field power station). And the weapons systems that the Pentagon was buying were only becoming more technologically complex. If anything, the workforce needed beefed-up expertise. A lot of people in acquisition and procurement were people with a high school education, says John Kamensky, a senior fellow at the IBM Center for the Business of Government who was among the leaders of Reinventing Government. What we needed was people with degrees who knew how to manage contracts. But instead the workforce simply eroded.

The signs of impending danger were already apparent in 2000. Staffing reductions have clearly outpaced productivity increases, said a Pentagon inspector generals report that year, citing contract backlogs and rising costs. From there, things only got worse. First came the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, then the war in Afghanistan, and then the war in Iraq, all under the watch of a presidentGeorge W. Bushwhose administration favored the use of contractors wherever possible. Defense spending soared, but the diminished contracting workforce was largely passed over in all the hubbub. After 9/11, the Defense Department chose to increase war-fighter abilities, says Jacques Gansler, a former undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology, and logistics under Clinton. And yet in Iraq and Afghanistan we actually have more contractors on the battlefield than people in uniform.

In 2007, Gansler was appointed by the secretary of the army to lead a commission looking into the problem of contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. The commissions report called the buildup to the crisis a perfect storm: the workload of contracting officers had increased sevenfold in recent years, but their ranks had never recovered from cutbacks in the 90s. Essentially, the report said, the Army sent a skeleton contracting force into theater. The battlefield had become a complex, uncoordinated, and chaotic overlay of soldiers under command and private contractors roaming free. When the critical need is to get a power station running, and there are no resources to monitor contractor performance, the report said, only the contractor knows whether the completed work is being sabotaged nightly. For the military at war, the job of getting what it vitally needed from contractors had become a pickup game.

But perhaps the most ringing effect of the hollow acquisitions workforce is higher costs. Every year, the Government Accountability Office analyzes a portfolio of major weapons contracts to see how the Pentagon is handling its acquisitions process, and the past decade has seen a staggering trend of increased cost overruns. In 2000, the average weapons system contract ultimately cost 6 percent more than originally projected. In 2009, the average weapons program ended up costing 25 percent more. Cost overruns for that year alone amounted to $296 billion. Among the causes of the problem, the GAOs 2009 report cited shortages of acquisition professionals as well as degradation in oversight, delays in certain management and contracting activities, increased workloads for existing staff, and a reliance on support contractors to fill some voids.
The acquisitions nightmare is, unfortunately, not just a problem at the Pentagon. For years now, the FBI has famously (and expensively) struggled to create a centralized, web-based case management systemin large part, according to the agencys inspector general, because of weak government contract management. Or consider the case of the Coast Guard: after 9/11, when the agency was subsumed under the new Department of Homeland Security, its leaders secured $24 billion to refurbish the Guards badly antiquated fleet. But having been subject to the same 1990s personnel cuts as the Pentagon, the Coast Guard didnt even have a dedicated acquisitions department. So the agency seized on an innovative solution: Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin managed the contracting themselves. The result was a disaster (see Sunk Costs, November/December 2008). The extended hulls on a fleet of refurbished boats buckled, while eight large new ships that had been commissioned came in with serious design flaws, causing huge delays and cost overruns in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

In the realm of acquisitions, then, elected officials whittled down the ranks of key personnel just as the government was becoming strategically married to the use of outsourcingand just before a national crisis dumped a ten-year avalanche of work on anyone involved in managing contracts for the government. A decrease in the workforce coincided with an increase in responsibilityand a rise in stray costs. As it happens, an uncannily similar pattern has played out in the biggest regulatory failures of recent years.

Chronic manpower problems at the Minerals Management Servicethe office within the Interior Department charged with regulating offshore oil wellsstretched all the way back to the 1990s, when a long boom in deepwater drilling coincided with a bust in the agencys funding. In December of 1996, the year when the agencys budget bottomed out, the Houston Chronicle reported that offshore fires, explosions, and blowouts had increased by 81 percent in the years of heightening offshore oil extraction since 1992. Yet over the remainder of the decade, the frequency of surprise inspections took a nosedive and never recovered. Precisely when the need for regulatory oversight intensified, wrote the National Oil Spill Commission in its report this January, the governments capacity for oversight diminished.

The situation barely improved in the 2000s. The Washington Post recently reported that, between 1988 and 2008, the number of deep-sea oil extraction projects in the Gulf of Mexico increased tenfold. But the number of inspectors assigned to the region barely budged. By the time of last years Deepwater Horizon oil spillthe largest environmental disaster in U.S. historyMinerals Management had fifty-five inspectors matched against some 3,000 far-flung offshore facilities across the Gulfa ratio of 1 to 55.

Whats worse, those inspectors were woefully undertrainedthey complained of it themselvesand significantly underpaid. As oil companies moved into deeper and deeper water, their drilling technologyincluding the now-infamous blowout preventersfar outpaced the inspectors knowledge and the agencys technical regulations. Some inspectors noted that they rely on industry representatives to explain the technology at a facility, the commission report says. And at a time when even the industry struggled to recruit enough qualified engineers to staff its expansion, the regulator stood virtually no chance in the competition for talent. Minerals Management has difficulty recruiting inspectors, said the Department of Interiors inspector general in congressional testimony last year. Industry tends to offer considerably higher wages and bonuses.

Is it any mystery, then, why the Minerals Management Service failed to prevent a blowout in the Macondo Well 5,000 feet undersea? Quite apart from other huge problems facing the small agency (the conflicts of interest inherent in its lucrative royalty-collecting program, its place in a Department of Interior largely run by energy lobbyists during the Bush administration, and the much-reported culture of substance abuse and promiscuity in certain suboffices), its manpower issues alone would seem fatal enough.

Much the same pattern held in the Securities and Exchange Commissions oversight of the financial sector in the run-up to the financial crisis. In the early Bush years, SEC Chairman William H. Donaldson understood that his famously understaffed and outmatched agency was having to oversee increasing volumes of ever-more-complex financial activity. There was a real need to increase the staff, says Donaldson. We had to really fight to get that done. In addition to adding personnel, Donaldson created a central Office of Risk Assessment to monitor warning signals across the SECs various divisions. And he set about trying to hire a few brokerage and investment pros familiar with the kinds of innovative financial instruments then sweeping Wall Street (an uphill battle in an agency predisposed to hiring lawyers).

While Donaldson was playing catch-up by beefing up his staff, the SEC was also fatefully handed a key new responsibility. The European Union had just told Americas largest financial holding companiesthe likes of Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, and Lehman Brothersthat, if they wanted to keep doing business on the Continent, they would need to submit to consolidated supervision from an American regulatory agency. (Their subsidiaries were regulated by various agencies, but the holding companies as such were not.) And so in 2004 the five biggest investment firms crafted a voluntary arrangement with the SEC that afforded the regulatory agency unprecedented access to their books. But there was also a riskier side to the bargain: the deal significantly eased the limits on how much debt the major firms could take on, freeing up billions of dollarsusually held in reserve as an asset cushionto be invested in the kinds of exotic financial instruments that would become household names after the crash in 2008.

The SEC might have been able to handle this perilous and demanding set of new responsibilities had it continued down the road Donaldson laid out. But instead, between 2005 and 2007, the agency lost about 10 percent of its total personnel due to a hiring freeze, including 11 percent of its enforcement division. According to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, the new supervisory program over the big-five investment firms, which relied heavily on the firms own computer models and self-reporting, was troubled from the start. In the summer of 2005, Donaldson resigned and was replaced by the former Republican Congressman Christopher Cox, for whom the supervisory program was not a priority, according to the New York Times. Preoccupied with its own staff reorganization, the FCIC says, the supervisory program went more than a year without conducting a major examination.

All of this coincided, under Coxs leadership, with an agency outlook more generally in line with the Bush-era faith in laissez-faireoversight and industry self-policing. In a move that many have highlighted, Cox all but dismantled the Office of Risk Assessment that Donaldson had set up, reducing its staff to four part-time workers, according to Portfolio magazine. The exact places where you didnt want to make cuts were in the risk assessment and financial products area, says James D. Cox, an expert on securities law at Duke University (and no relation to the former chairman). In 2005 alone, enforcement cases fell by 9 percent.

By the time that Bear Stearns collapsed in 2008, by many reports the commissions staff was already badly demoralized. In an op-ed headlined Muzzling the Watchdog, three former heads of the commission wrote that the SEC lacks the money, manpower, and tools it needs to do its job. (Pathetically outmoded technology was another major problem.) You never have enough people, but if you could bump up enforcement levels, say, 20%, it would make a huge difference, a former senior counsel to the enforcement division named Bruce Carton told Time magazine. Tweaking policies wont replace more manpower and training.

If there were any place where the federal government might have had a fighting chance to fend off or at least ameliorate the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, it was at the SEC in the mid-2000s. Instead, the SEC divested itself of personnel and initiative. Consider the breathtaking consequences: not just the $700 billion bailout (most of which has been or will be paid back), but $400 billion in lost federal revenue as a result of the recession (thats in 2009 alone) and the $800 billion stimulus to get us out of it. Suddenly, shaving a few million dollars from the overhead costs of the SEC doesnt sound like much of a bargain.

The average voter may imagine federal bureaucracies as overstaffed, full of people leaning on their rakes and sharpening their pencils. But the truth is, most agencies are, if anything, understaffed. The government has grown tremendously in its spending and scope since the 1960s, and the population of the nation has grown by a margin of 100 million people, but the size of the federal workforce has remained remarkably static at about 2 million. Since coming into office two years ago, the Obama administration has bumped up staff levels by about 100,000, in part through in-sourcingbringing back into the civil service inherently governmental work that had been farmed out to contractors. If this leads to better management, it could well mean a stanching of some of the cost overruns and regulatory failures that have been causing the government to bleed red ink. Todays mindless demands for austerity, however, could reverse this trend.

This is not to say that there arent big bureaucratic reforms that need to be made that could lead to people losing their jobs. Many agencies, for instance, exhibit excessive layering in their management ranks (think job titles that start with deputy- or under-). And if Congress and the administration could agree to lift some of the outdated procedural requirements and redundant reporting demands that are the bane of the average civil servants life, it might be possible for agencies to fulfill their mission as well or better with fewer people.

But reforms like this almost never happen. Instead, what you usually get are demands like what were now seeing in Congress for across-the-board cuts in the workforce. This is often accomplished through attrition and incentives for early retirement. But the people most likely to walk away in those cases are the ones most confident of their ability to land a job in the private sectorin other words, often the best employees. Another method is to leave decisions about cutting up to the leaders of the agencies themselves. But as some veterans of Reinventing Government learned, that can have the effect of simply consolidating inertia in the managerial ranks. Headquarters isnt ever gonna cut itself, says John Kamensky. Headquarters cuts field.

Ideally, the White House ought to be able to keep agencies from playing such games. But just as agencies lack the manpower and expertise to oversee their contractors, the White House strains to oversee the rest of government. The Office of Management and Budget is meant to be the eyes and ears of the executive branch. But with its staff of about 500, it is simply incapable of knowing whats working and whats not out in the labyrinths of the federal bureaucracy.

The paradox, then, is this: if the aim is to reform the civil service in order to put a lid on federal spending, what we really need are targeted increases in the federal workforce. A wise first move would be to double the size of the OMB. More and better staff at revenue-producing agencies like the IRS would also make sense. The SEC will need a big boost in personnel in order to fulfill the new demands of last years financial reform legislation, which wisely calls for the agency to oversee derivatives trading and other potentially destabilizing aspects of the financial world. And our best hope for controlling the burgeoning costs of Medicare and Medicaidthe biggest drivers of long-term federal deficitslies in new, yet-to-be staffed bureaucracies whose founding is authorized in last years health care reform law.

But of course, Republicans have not only vowed to block funding for the financial and health reform laws, theyre also making demands to cut the federal workforce by as much as 15 percentall in the spirit of so-called fiscal responsibility. The idea that were somehow going to balance the budget by cutting the workforce is absurd, says John Palguta of the Partnership for Public Service. Its absurd for a number of reasons, but the biggest one is that, in todays government, cutting civil servants is bound to prove an exceedingly expensive way to be thrifty.

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Five months after the death of Esther Eppie Lederer in 2002, the bulk of her estatea sprawling Chicago apartments worth of furniture, photographs, papers, and memorabiliawent up for public auction with some fanfare in Elgin, Illinois.

Lederer, who was better known by the pen name Ann Landers, had for almost fifty years written Americas foremost newspaper advice column. With an estimated 90 million readers, the self-described nice Jewish girl from Sioux City, Iowa, was often counted among the most influential women in the United States. What was most remarkable about that influence was its breadth: she advised teenagers about pimples and presidents about missile defenseand the presidents often wrote her back.

Before her death, Lederer made clear that the Ann Landers pseudonym, which she had inherited in 1955, would die with her. But that did not prevent would-be successors from seeking to assume her mantle in more symbolic ways. On the auction block that November were Lederers writing desk and typewriter, on which she had composed her responses to correspondents like Desperate in Denver and Nervous in Nevada. When the bidding was over, an advice columnist named Dan Savage happily walked away with them. Today, the desk sits in Savages office in Seattle, where he serves as editorial director of the citys alternative weekly The Stranger and writes his own hugely successful weekly sex advice column, Savage Love. His correspondents have included a woman signing off as Fucking Asshole Idiot Losers (FAIL), who faced a very modern problem. My husband and I have a dont ask, dont tell policy when were apart, she began.

A few months ago, I hooked up with a guy on a business trip who said he and his wife have the same arrangement. He was lying. His wife found out and started harassing me on Facebook. I truly feel horrible. How can I know if someone is really in an open relationship when they say they are? I am so done.

Savage pointed out, The only way to verify that someone is in an open relationship is to speak to that persons partnerand as that would constitute telling, FAIL, it would be a violation of a dont ask, dont tell policy.

But even a couple with a please ask, do tell policy probably has a rule against 2:00 a.m. calls from drunken hotel-bar pickups. So youll have to trust your gut, FAIL, which failed you here. Just remember this on your next business trip: The further a married person is from home and the drunker that married person is, the likelier it is that that married person is lying to you.

Suffice it to say, Savage is not the most obvious heir to Landerss ultra-mainstream legacy. His columns answer a Chaucerian panorama of correspondents: gay Mormons, incestuous siblings, weight-gain fetishists, men yearning to be cuckolded, and otherwise ordinary Americans grappling with an extraordinary range of problems and proclivities. By the standards of a family newspaper, his advice is not only explicit but broad-minded to the point of being radical, encouraging people to embrace or at least tolerate previously unmentionable sexual inclinations in their partners, praising open relationships, and celebrating behaviors that might cause even the most intrepid reader to balk.

When he isnt offering advice, the openly gay Savage has also made a name for himself by serving as a kind of gonzo avenging angel for the nations sexual minorities. In 2000, he went on assignment for Salon.com to cover the presidential campaign of the Christian rights boutique candidate, Gary Bauer, while suffering from a bad case of the flu. After listening to one of Bauers harangues against gay marriage, Savage decided to pose as a campaign volunteer and infect the candidate by licking doorknobs, coughing on staplers, and slobbering on pens around Bauers Iowa headquarters, making that the subject of his dispatch. Then, in 2003, Savage went viral in a different way, after Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum compared same-sex marriages to man on dog relationships. In response, the columnist held a contest among his readers to redefine the word santorum as vividly as possible as a new term in the sexual lexicon. The winning definitionunforgettable and unprintablequickly spread so widely online as to eclipse the Google ranking of the senator himself. Which was, of course, the point. Santorum lost his seat in 2006. Landers, who struggled with accepting homosexuality and whose idea of tough language was kwitcherbellyachin, probably would not have approved.

And yet, Savage took pains to clarify that his purchase of Eppie Lederers desk was not meant as an act of desecration. While its highly ironic that the worlds smuttiest advice column will now be written at the same desk where the worlds most mainstream (and most popular) advice column was once written, Savage wrote, I intended no disrespect. Indeed, he said, he had been a devoted fan of Ann Landers ever since boyhood. And strange as it may sound, Savage is increasingly playing the kind of culture-bestriding role that Ann Landers once did.

After twenty years of churning out Savage Love, the Seattle writer can lay a legitimate claim to being Americas most influential advice columnist. He is syndicated across the world in more than seventy newspapersmainly alternative weeklies in the United Stateswith well over one million in total circulation. Online, he reaches millions more readers. He is a frequent contributor to the popular radio program This American Life, and a Savage Love television show on MTV is said to be in the works. His podcast has a higher iTunes ranking than those of Rachel Maddow or the NBC Nightly News, and his four books have sold briskly (a fifth is due out in March). And when it suits him, the range of his commentary has become increasingly broad. In the space of one columnthe one where he announced his purchase of Ann Landerss deskSavage offered advice to a thirty-year-old woman who wanted to sleep with a seventeen-year-old coworker (It would be illegal for you to GO AHEAD), fielded a question from a man with a childbirth fetish, and then, for good measure, advised the Bush administration to take a harder stance on Saudi Arabia.

Savages ability to mobilize legions of readers has also matured beyond the lobbing of incendiary Google bombs. Last fall, a streak of suicides by gay teenagers across the country inspired Savage and his husband, Terry, to post a video testimonial on YouTube. The two men recounted their difficulties growing up bullied and harassed, then held up their adult livesand happiness as a coupleas evidence that, for gay people living in America, it gets better. Savage encouraged other people to film their own testimonials and post them online under the heading of the It Gets Better Project. A torrent of videos poured in, first from Savages regular readers, then from various Hollywood celebrities, and then from leaders in Washington. Hillary Clinton was quickly followed by Nancy Pelosi and President Obama himself, who delivered the line, Every day, it gets better from the White House.

Its not every day that a sitting president takes cues from a sex columnist who once licked Gary Bauers doorknob. But for all his prowess as an advice writer and viral activist, Savages most lasting influence on American culture may ultimately register in a deeper and more enduringly significant realm: ethics. While he built his following by talking without fear or euphemism about the technical aspects of intimate life, Savage has moved inexorably over the years toward focusing on the moral ones. In so doing, he has carved a unique place for himself in the cultures discourse about sex. For years, there have been moralizing voices on the right standing athwart the rush of sexual freedoms yelling Stop, and there have been others whose policy is to remain nonjudgmental toward sex as a form of expression. Savage yields to no one in his sexual libertarianism, but he has not been content to relegate the ideas of right and wrong to cultural conservatives. Wading deep into the free-fire zone of modern sexuality, he has codified a remarkably systematicand influentialset of ethics where traditional norms have fallen away. The question is, into what kind of world do his ethics lead us?

As he tells it in the introduction to his first book, Savage Love: Straight Answers from Americas Most Popular Sex Columnist, Savage grew up in a home crammed with newspapers and porn. His grandfather, in whose apartment he lived, was a sportswriter for two Chicago dailies. His older brother stashed away copies of Penthouse and Playboy in the bedroom. He attributes his trajectory toward the advice-giving business to the combined influence of Ann Landers and Xaviera Hollander, who wrote the Call Me Madam advice column for Penthouse. He also eavesdropped on his mother, whom he called a one-woman support group for neighbors with problems that couldnt be taken to a priest. The sexual revolution was well and truly on, but in the Savage household, it seems, the distinctions of mid-century American propriety still held. Newspapers casually cluttered the front room, while dirty pictures lurked under the bed. There were problems for priests and problems for sympathetic neighbors, questions for Ann Landers and questions for Xaviera.

These distinctions will be at least vaguely familiar to most Americans over the age of thirty. Savage came of age in the Indian summer of American prudery. Before Savage was born, Alfred Kinsey had begun to vex the identification of moral and behavioral norms in a way that would reverberate through the coming decades. Upon close examination, the zoologist reported, it turned out that the sexual behavior of the human animalthe term is Kinseys, and the choice is significantis a good deal more varied than previously assumed. According to Kinseys sensational research, Americans were a lot gayer, more prone to cheating, and more sadomasochistic than the Archdiocese or the Tribune would ever want to acknowledge. Perhaps it was not the conduct of a few on the margins that had failed our moral norms, these findings suggested. Perhaps it was our norms that had failed us.

The ground beneath American sexual conventions was shifting dramatically, but the tremors only registered in mainstream culture with a considerable lag. In a 1967 column, Ann Landers published a teen sex test that posed a series of questions (Have you ever been kissed while in a reclining position? Ever gone all the way?) and assigned points to each one according to its gravity. By tallying up their scores, teens could find out whether they were pure as the driven snow, passionate and headed for trouble, or condemned. As time went by, however, more and more kids drifted toward the condemned end of the scale, and Landers had to update the testfirst in 1978, then again in 1996.

Landers made her accommodations, but she never did start addressing the emotional and practical difficulties of, say, having a husband who insists on dressing up as a woodland animal when making loveor who wants to deviate from strict monogamy with his wifes consent. Indeed, it was long difficult to find any cultural medium that navigated successfully between bashfulness and outright smut. Unless, that is, you lived in a city with an alternative weekly. Here was a publication format with one foot in the Tribune and one in the tattoo parlor. No dirty pictures, most likely, but plenty of news and events from the counterculture, an uncensored style book, and a bunch of personal ads aimed at gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals, all available for free at bookstores, coffee houses, head shops, food co-ops, and bohemian-friendly bars. A better setting and a more receptive audience for Dan Savages style of advice giving could not have been designed.

What was rather less obvious in 1991, when Savage took his place in the advice game, were the ways in which the explosion of online culture would finally break down the wall between the papers and the porn stash. Once adherents of every kink and fetish could find chat rooms, support groups, specially tailored erotica, and even social networking sites, two things happened: the culture suddenly appeared more sex-drenched than ever, and alternative media sources like the ones that published Savage Love could no longer get by simply serving as a bulletin board and instruction manual for erotic explorers. Savage, for his part, seemed to relish this moment of creative destruction, which all but demanded the sex columnist to perform a higher function. To those correspondents who still simply wanted to know where to find other people who shared their special hankerings, or who inquired after the meaning of some obscure sexual term, Savage impatiently pointed out the existence of Google. Instead, in his second decade as a writer, he has increasingly addressed himself to those correspondents troubled by the questions of right and wrong on the new intimate frontier.

Half my mail at Savage Love is from straight men and women who want to be reassured that their kinksfrom BDSM to cross-dressing to fucking animals (!)are normal, Savage wrote in 2007, echoing a note of exasperation he has sounded a few times over the years. Savage has made clear he is not primarily interested in adjudicating whether peoples bedroom proclivities lie on the safe side of normality. (What these insecure readers really want, it would seem, is an Ann Landers sex test, graded on an infinitely forgiving curve.) Likewise, proud fetishists looking for blanket approval from a back-slapping fellow deviant are just as prone to be disappointed. Savage does embrace a whole host of kinks. But for him, whats most important is that abandonment of inhibition should never entail an abandonment of personal responsibility. And as it happens, a column premised on its authors willingness to say what others wont say, and countenance what others wont countenance, has proven to be an ideal forum for probing the nuances of what we owe each other when the lights are off.

In 2000, Savage answered a letter from a fifteen-year-old boy who was using both meth and heroin and engaging in a regular mnage trois with his girlfriend and an adult man. The question the teen posed to Savage was not, needless to say, whether he should be having sex before marriage (or high school graduation). Nor, for that matter, was he asking whether it was advisable to take part in a legally risky threesome, or to dabble in hard substances. Rather, the boys question was whether he, a big hippie, had an obligation to tell the man, an avid anti-drugger, about his use of meth and heroin. Savage was not exactly affirming in his response:

You are an idiot. The drugs youre doing, young skank, are dangerous and, however careful you are with needles, sooner or later theyre going to kill you, he wrote. What should you do about your drug-phobic, statutory-rapist fuck buddy? Well, Id say that like any good hippie you should be open, honest, loyal, brave, and true. Tell him what the holes in your arm are all about, and give him the option of staying or going. You say you have feelings for this guy, and if thats the case, you owe him the truth. If thats not the case, well, then you might as well go ahead and steal his stereo and TV set now.

Savages advice here faintly echoes the presumptions against hard drug use and teenage risky behavior that prevailed in Ann Landerss day, but it pivots on the boys obligation to disclose any and all information of relevance to a sexual partnerthe first ground rule of Savages ethics. Full disclosure is a minimal standard, but one that many who have sought Savages advice fail to meet. This sounds more like a question for The Ethicist, a charming new advice column in The New York Times Magazine, but since you asked, Ill give it a go, he wrote in 1999 to a young man living with a woman he didnt love because he couldnt afford his own place. You are an asshole Youre allowing this woman to make assumptionsfalse assumptionsabout your intentions for your own gain. Meanwhile, he encouraged a correspondent with a long history of sexual infidelity to become an honest womanby telling her partners about her need to stray: Where there are no lies of commission or omission, SKANK, theres no deceit. And where theres no deceit, there are no boys whose hearts are broken when they find out they are being cheated on. The configurations involved in these questions, from simple cohabitation to three-way relations to old-fashioned cheating, are not at issue. The obligation of each questioner to be up front about what they want and do is what drives the ethical dilemma in each case.

The second rule in Savage ethics is autonomy. To a scruple-plagued feeder (someone aroused by the excessive eating of a partner, known as a gainer), he wrote that she and her boyfriend should negotiate an explicit power exchange contract where his diet and weight are concerned in order to keep their shared fetish within some reasonably healthy limits. All the same, our bodies are our own theyre ours to use, abuse, and since were all going to die one day, theyre ours to use up. A high-functioning regular heroin user (not quite an addict) wrote to ask whether drug use is a civil rights issue along the same lines as gay rights. After some hemming and hawing, Savage fell back on the same principle at work in the feeder/gainer scenario. Yeah, the freedom to use drugs can certainly be viewed as a civil-rights issue: Its about the right to control what you do with your own body, and that argument resonates with others advanced by gay-rights advocates and advocates of reproductive choice. Its not exactly a resounding endorsement of a junkie-rights movement, but its hard to withhold if recreational erotic weight gain is also ethically protected by self-ownership.

Reciprocity constitutes the third rule of Savages ethical worldview. A heated contretemps in his columnone of many over the yearsconcerned the relationship between low libido and monogamy. You can have strict monogamy or you can have a low libido, ladies, but you cant have both, he wrote, adding, Oh, and guys? You need to accept those tide-you-over blowjobs and handjobs just as cheerfully as she gives them. People who want to open up their relationships are told that the opening must work both ways, and Savage has spent more than one column teasing out what precisely constitutes a mutual departure from monogamy. He has even waded into the field of housework. If theres some semblance of balance, if theres cheerful reciprocity, then why not do his damn laundry? he tells a woman concerned about her otherwise-stellar boyfriends poor housekeeping habits.

Fourth, Savage has consistently advocated a minimum standard of performance for each partner in a relationship. His knack for turning catchy maxims into acronyms and abbreviations struck gold with GGG, a bullet-pointed ideal of mutual sexual satisfaction: Think good in bed, giving equal time and equal pleasure, and game for anythingwithin reason. Obstinate failure in these areas is grounds for one partner to DTMFA (Dump the Motherfucker Already). His metaphors, always vivid, can become straightforwardly commercial on this point. Oral sex is standard, he has repeatedly said. Any model that comes without it should be returned to the lot.

Underlying all of Savages principles, abbreviations, and maxims is a pragmatism that strives for stable, livable, and reasonably happy relationships in a world where the old constraints that were meant to facilitate these ends are gone. Disclosure is necessary, but not beyond reason. Honesty [is] the best policy and all, he advised a guilty boyfriend, but each of us gets to take at least one big secret to the grave. Stuck with a husband whose porn stash has grown beyond what you thought you were signing up for? Put it behind closed doors and try not to think about it. Who knows how many good relationships have been savedand how many disastrous marriages have been avertedby heeding a Savage insistence on disclosing the unmet need, tolerating the within-reason quirk, or forgiving the endurable lapse? In ways that his frequent interlocutors on the Christian right wouldnt expect, Savage has probably done more to uphold conventional families than many counselors who are unwilling to engage so frankly with modern sexual mores. A successful marriage is basically an endless cycle of wrongs committed, apologies offered, and forgiveness granted, he advised one very uptight spouse, all leavened by the occasional orgasm.

All the same, behind Savages pragmatism stand some fairly strong claims about how sex relates to selfhood. Whatever else he ends up advising a correspondent to do, Savage tends to insist that sexual inclinationsfrom high libido and a desire for multiple partners to very rare kinks and fetishesare immutable and even dominant characteristics of any personality. Some desires may be impossible to fulfill, others are flagrantly immoral, and most any can be destructive when pursued without regard for the kinds of ethical guidelines Savage lays out. But for Savage, no matter how we direct its expression, our sexual self is our truest self.

In recent years Savages moral elevation of sexual fulfillment has been bolstered by his embrace of popularized accounts of evolutionary biology, which purport to find our true human nature in the primordial past or in our evolutionary cousins, the randy bonobos and aggressive chimpanzees. Last year Savage cowrote one weeks column with the authors of Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality, calling their book the single most important book about human sexuality since Alfred Kinsey. It caused a stir among his readers, so he followed up with his own comments. What the authors of Sex at Dawn believeand what I think they proveis that we are a naturally nonmonogamous species, despite what weve been told for millennia by preachers and for centuries by scientists. Culturerepresented here by hectoring, fanatical preachers, and hectoring, misguided scientistsis a long postscript, an imposition on our true selves. People should live up to their monogamous commitments, which, after all, have the form of a mutually negotiated contract. But they should not expect anything unrealistic from themselves or each other, since such agreements, however binding, are unnatural. Sex will have its way with us one way or anothereither by shaping our commitments to the form of its fulfillment or by making us miserable. For Aristotle, we are what we repeatedly do. For Dan Savage, we are what we enduringly desire.

As it happens, this vision fits rather well in a society built around consumption. If Savages ethical guidelinesdisclosure, autonomy, mutual exchange, and minimum standards of performanceseem familiar or intuitive, its probably because they also govern expectations in the markets for goods and services. No false advertising, no lemons, nothing omitted from the fine print: in the deregulated marketplace of modern intimacy, Dan Savage has become a kind of Better Business Bureau, laying out the rules by which individuals, as rationally optimizing firms, negotiate their wildly diverse transactions.

Classical liberalism, however, may prove just as inadequate in the bedroom as it has in the global economy, and for many of the same reasons. It takes into account only a narrow range of our motivations, overstates our rationality and our foresight, downplays the costs of transactions, and ignores the asymmetries of information that complicate any exchange of love or money. For society as a whole, it entails a utopian faith in the capacity of millions of appetites to work themselves out into an optimal economy of sexa trading floor where the cultural institutions of domesticity once stood. And for the individual, it may only replace the old sexual frustrations with new emotional ones. People who think they are motivated only by lust may end up feeling love; people who forswear any strings may feel them forming; and perfect transparency may prove an ideal no less unattainable than perfect monogamy. I think of a heartbreaking letter in 2010 that illustrated many of these problems at once. A man who saw a woman every other week for four months heard from her, two months after ending things, that she had gotten pregnant and had a miscarriage. Savage was all but certain that the womans story was false. But regardless, he said, your emotional obligations to her ended when the relationship did, and your financial obligations ended with the miscarriage. Savages advice may have been practical, but it had all the warmth of a legal waiver of liability.

My own history as a reader of Savage Love is perhaps somewhat unique. Like many of my friends, I began reading his column in my early teens (in Madison, Wisconsin, where Savage got his start); and the deregulated world of intimate relationships that he writes about is the one where I grew up. Now, as an adult, I find myself in a line of work where I too occasionally counsel people about their relationships: I am a Lutheran minister. As a pastor in a young, upwardly mobile neighborhood in Chicago, I still read Savage fairly regularly. And often the questions he takes up are more relevant to the people in my pews than the arguments over contraception, cohabitation, divorce, and homosexuality that still roil some parts of the church. Those debates are largely over here on Chicagos North Side. I have yet to marry a couple that wasnt living together before the vows.

And even where resistance to these changing mores remains fierce, the goal of a happy sex life has come up in the world. For all the talk one finds in Savages columns and comment threads about Puritanism, repression, and sex-negativity, we live in a culture that is almost uniformly and explicitly devoted to sexual satisfaction as a very high, if not necessarily the highest, good. Advertisements for Viagra, Cialis, and Levitra air during prime time (Will you be ready? one of them asks), and even conservative Christians have a substantial niche-publishing industry catering to their intimate needs. Items that not long ago were either illegal or at least pretty challenging to acquire are now available in posh storefronts on Chicagos Milwaukee Avenue. This does not always reflect, as some would have it, a slouching toward Gomorrahan unequivocal decline in moral standardsbut often a more positive evaluation of the good that flows from sexuality expressed in happy and forthright ways. Its not so surprising, then, that a sex columnist of Savages scope and talent would hold the commanding heights of a culture that grants erotic satisfaction such a central role in its view of the good life.

On the big question of whether human sexuality is a destructive force to be minimally accommodated or a source of human flourishing to be properly ordered, there is surprisingly little disagreement. The debates that continue over pornography and open relationships are driven less by positive or negative attitudes toward sexual satisfaction per se than by differing views of how sexual satisfaction relates to everything else in life. And this is where Savages ethics make their most problematic claimsby separating and elevating sexual satisfaction above other things people value.

Consider the case of a correspondent from late in 2009. A straight male in his late twenties, the writer felt indicted by a distinction Savage had drawn in a recent column between being an honest nonmonogamous dude (HND) and a cheating piece of shit (CPOS). I have a girlfriend of several years whom I live with and love very much, he writes.

I have never been an HND; I have in the past been a CPOS (though not in this relationship). My girlfriend is lovely, supportive, and generally GGG, and though the sex is good, I have a significantly higher libido than she does and I would like to have a little more variety in my sex life. I want to be an HND, but I dont know how to broach the subject with the girlfriend without ruining our relationship. We are very open about our sex life and our relationship in general, but I think this is probably a next level topic that may not go over very well. How do I bring this up without screwing up our relationship beyond repair?

Aspiring Honest Nonmonogamous Dude

Savages reply is frank as always: I would encourage you to err on the side of screwing up your current relationship with an honest conversation about your mismatched libidos and your natural and normal desire for a little variety. Lies, damn lies, and statistics all demonstrate that, in time, one or the other or both of you will cheat. Better to toss that out there now, even at the risk of calmly winding down this relationship before you revert to form/CPOS, than to see the relationship explode after someone, most likely you, winds up cheating.

This Aspiring Honest Nonmonogamous Dude (AHND) takes greater pains than most of Savages correspondents to praise his girlfriend, not only in general but specifically with regard to their sex life. They have already spent several happy years together. He is anxious about his surplus of desire, but apparently nothing else. Yet that consideration trumps all others in Savages answer. Sexual compatibilityin terms of libido or in terms of tolerating nonexclusivityis the coin of the realm. Love, emotional compatibility, the possibility of a life together, not to mention irrecoverable years already spentthese must all be staked against the value of a fully deployed libido. But what, exactly, is the upshot of calmly winding down a relationship with a high risk of infidelity? Potential romantic partners, unlike firms in the classical free-market model, are not infinite in number, and a life of comparison shopping is not free of cost. If the aspiring HND dissolves this years-long transaction in order to find a partner who is just as lovable but less jealous, or who shares his libido at every point, he will likely have a lonely road ahead of him.

I wonder what he chose to do, ultimately, and how it has worked out. If there is something to treasure in the old, traumatized ideal of lifelong monogamy, its not that it demeans sexual fulfillment. Rather, its that monogamy integrates sexual fulfillment with the other good things in lifehaving someone to pay bills and raise children with, having a refuge both emotional and physical from the rest of the world. It is an ideal that is powerful even when it is not fully realized (as it rarely, if ever, is), not a contract voided by nonperformance. A worldview in which sex is so central to life that it may be detached from everything else and sought apart from every other ingredient of happiness presumes a world in which happiness itself can be redefinedin which people can be retrained in what they expect and accept from one another. To approach the libertarian ideal of human relationships, emotional shock therapy of the sort contemplated by AHND will be required. The promised land of natural, ethical, autonomous sexuality lies across a desert of self-mortifying trade-offs between sexual fulfillment and all the other joys and comforts of life.

It may be the case, as Savage likes to argue, that humans are not by nature sexually monogamous. The great apes arent, after all. But of course, neither are the great apes especially interested in negotiating power-exchange contracts, engaging in long conversations about the contours of open relationships, or, for that matter, answering the anguished letters of anonymous strangers. As has always been the case, the answer to civilizations discontents turns out to be yet more civilization. That is the tragedy of the human being in an age of proliferating options and stubbornly lingering dissatisfaction. The whole world may be normal at last, and yet to be good is as elusive as ever. Some things may not, in fact, get better.

The post Rules of Misbehavior appeared first on Washington Monthly.

On a bright January morning in 2010, at Broward College in Davie, Florida, about sixty police officers and other frontline law enforcement officials gathered in a lecture hall for a course on combating terrorism in the Sunshine State. Some in plain clothes, others in uniform, they drifted in clutching Styrofoam cups of coffee, greeting acquaintances from previous statewide training sessions. The instructor, Sam Kharoba, an olive-skinned man wearing rimless glasses and an ill-fitting white dress shirt, stood apart at the front of the hall reviewing PowerPoint slides on his laptop.

As he got under way, Kharoba described how, over the next three days, he would teach his audience the fundamentals of Islam. “We constantly hear statements,” Kharoba began, “that Islam is a religion of peace, and we constantly hear of jihadists who are trying to kill as many non-Muslims as they can.” Kharoba’s course would establish for his students that one of these narratives speaks to a deep truth about Islam, and the other is a calculated lie.

“How many terror attacks have there been since 9/11? Muslim terror attacks,” Kharoba asked the room. Silence. “Let’s start the bidding.”

“Over a hundred,” someone volunteered.

“I got a hundred,” Kharoba called back. Another audience member, louder now, suggested three hundred.

“Three hundred!” Kharoba declared.

“Over a thousand,” offered another voice in the audience.

Kharoba stopped the bidding. “Over thirteen thousand,” he said. “Over thirteen thousand attacks.” He paused to let the statistic sink in.

Kharoba belongs to a growing profession, one that is ballooning on the spigot of federal and state dollars set aside for counterterrorism efforts since the attacks of September 11, 2001. He is a counterterrorism instructor to America’s beat cops, one of several hundred working the law enforcement training circuit. Some are employed by large security contractors; others, like Kharoba, are independent operators.

Kharoba was born in Jordan, and he likes to intimate that members of his family are important tribal leaders. This lends a veneer of insider credibility to classroom remarks that might otherwise seem like off-color jokes. He showed the class some photographs taken in the Gaza Strip. “This is the Arab version of a line,” Kharoba told the students, gesturing to a photo of Palestinians rushing toward a passport agency. Then he showed a YouTube video of two uniformed men beating a nameless prisoner. “This is what Miranda rights are in the Arab world,” he said.

Fortunately for an adept American police officer, Kharoba said, jihadists telegraph their extremist intentions in altogether predictable ways. One only has to learn the signs. Take Mahmoud—Kharoba’s preferred name for a generic Muslim. Kharoba can tell whether Mahmoud is a Wahhabi (a member of a fundamentalist Islamic sect from Saudi Arabia) just by going through Mahmoud’s trash. There will be no pre-approved credit card offers, because interest is forbidden in Islam. There will be no brown wax fried-chicken bags, because fried chicken isn’t halal. For Kharoba, extremist Muslims are as easy to spot as American gang members.

“When you see a bunch of guys in red, what do you know?” Kharoba asked.

“They are Bloods,” responded the audience, many of whom deal with gangs regularly.

“When you have a Muslim that wears a headband, regardless of color or insignia, basically what that is telling you is ‘I am willing to be a martyr.’” There were other signs, too. “From the perspective of operational security, there are two things I am always looking out for: a shaved body and moving lips,” he explained. “Some of the Pakistani hijackers shaved their whole bodies in a ritual of cleanliness. If their lips are moving, these guys are praying. As they are walking through an airport, every second they’re going to be praying.”

America today is too politically correct to acknowledge the reality of Islamic fanaticism, Kharoba said. “Would Islam be tolerated if everyone knew its true message?” he asked the class. “From a Muslim perspective, do you want non-Muslims to know the truth about Islam?”

“No!” came the audience reply.

“So what do Muslims do?” Kharoba demanded.

“Lie!”

Kharoba strode forward to the front of the room, his voice slower now, more measured. “Islam is a highly violent radical religion that mandates that all of the earth must be Muslim.”

The class broke for lunch.

That afternoon, Kharoba offered more tips on how to detect violent Muslims. “You remember the Alligator Alley incident?” he asked.

He was referring to the events of September 13, 2002, when three Middle Eastern men at a Shoney’s restaurant in Calhoun, Georgia—one Jordanian, one Pakistani, and one Egyptian—were overheard talking about “bringing it down” to Miami. A nearby diner, one Eunice Stone, became alarmed and contacted the Georgia highway patrol. In what became a terrorist scare with national coverage, the police pulled the three men over on Alligator Alley, the long section of Interstate 75 that cuts west across Florida. For thirteen hours, the police combed the vehicle for explosives.

Kharoba projected a picture of Ayman Gheith, one of the arrested men, onto the screen. “The first thing is facial hair,” Kharoba said. “Do you see how the moustache is trimmed, and the beard is in a cone shape? It is very common to have this beard, and the moustache will always be the same, just like Muhammad.”

There is only one problem with the Alligator Alley case—a problem Kharoba never mentioned to the class. The incident was a false alarm. The “terrorists” turned out to be medical students on their way to a conference in Miami. They were innocent. After thirteen hours of interrogation, the police released them. Kharoba, however, taught the class that Ayman Gheith was a “textbook case” of Islamic fanaticism.

While his views are entirely his own, the fact that Kharoba is teaching this course at all reflects a sweeping shift in America’s official thinking about law enforcement and intelligence gathering. In recent years, the United States has become more and more committed to the idea of bringing local police forces into the business of sniffing out terrorists. In 2002, the National Joint Terrorism Task Force was set up to coordinate existing collaborative efforts among federal, state, and local law enforcement. And since 2006, the Department of Justice has been developing a program called the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative, through which local cops are meant to act as intelligence gatherers on the ground, feeding reports of suspicious activity to a network of data “fusion centers” spread out across the country. The system is scheduled to be up and running in all seventy-two of the nation’s fusion centers by the end of this year. But in order for the cops to play a role in counterterrorism, the thinking goes, they need to be trained. And that’s where Kharoba and his ilk—counterterrorism trainers for hire—come in.

The very idea of integrating local police into the nation’s counterterror intelligence efforts is a subject of debate among security experts. People at the highest level of law enforcement and intelligence—to say nothing of civil liberties groups—have concerns about the strategy. While the premise is perhaps intuitively appealing—particularly in a place like Florida, where several of the 9/11 hijackers took flying lessons—one danger is that the system will be flooded with bad leads. An increase in incidents like the mistaken arrests on Alligator Alley would only degrade police work, obscure real threats, and spoil relations between America’s cops and America’s Muslims—who have thus far volunteered some of the most fruitful leads in preventing domestic terror attacks.

It might be theoretically possible to ward off such an outcome if police could be provided with impeccable training. But one of the central problems is that the demand for training far exceeds the supply of qualified instructors. Even the CIA and FBI have had trouble finding people with the key skills to fill their ranks. For state and local law enforcement departments, the scarcity is even more acute. Into the void, self-styled experts have rushed in.

While expertise in counterterrorism training may be in short supply, money for it is not. Each year the federal government directs billions of dollars (no one knows exactly how much) in terrorism-related training grants to state and local governments. These funds cascade down into myriad training programs like the one at Broward College, where instructors like Kharoba ply their trade with only minimal supervision.

Sam Kharoba came to the United States from Jordan when he was seventeen to study computing at Louisiana State University. When the 9/11 attacks happened, he was working as a programmer. Noticing that the hijackers used multiple aliases, he became convinced that the American intelligence community was unequipped to deal with the multiplicity of Arab names. Kharoba quit his job and began work on a database of every jihadi website and name that he could find. “For nine months, I worked developing this database, with no income. I knew I could do it,” he told us. “It would be the best thing. I would solve a critical problem for the intelligence community, and then I’d call the Bureau, call the CIA, sell it for five million, and I’m done. I did my patriotic duty, and lived my American dream.”

Neither the CIA nor the FBI showed much interest in the database, though. Ten years later, Kharoba is still working on it. He fell into teaching by chance, in 2002, when the Community Oriented Policing Services Program in Louisiana invited him to give a talk. Kharoba had no professional experience in law enforcement, no academic training in terrorism or national security, and is not himself a Muslim. But as a Jordanian-born Christian he was able to turn his place of birth into a selling point. When we asked the dean of the Institute of Public Safety why she recruited Kharoba to teach there, her answer was that Kharoba “put the flavor of Middle Eastern culture into it.”

Kharoba is an especially colorful character, but he is in some ways typical of the kinds of people who have migrated into the police counterterrorism training business. Many have limited background in U.S. counterterrorism and domestic law enforcement, and little patience for the rules and conventions that govern both fields.

Quite a few have found their way into the profession by using their military experience to teach courses in how to respond to terrorist attacks. The trainer Joe Bierly, based in Riverside County, California, served twenty-two years in the Marines, “and another ten plus years in the black world, doing operations.” Bierly has a shooting range at his house, and practices every day. Most cops, he said, only go to the range, “what, once a year?” He doesn’t think American law enforcement is ready for the next terrorist attack. At the end of the day, he said, the question is this: “Can you run fifteen yards on a blood-slicked floor, take aim, and still hit the target?”

Richard Hughbank, another counterterrorism trainer, is a fourth-generation combat veteran on his father’s side. “Honestly, I kinda fell into it,” Hughbank told us when we interviewed him in November 2009. “I think most of us did.” The idea that fighting terrorism was a mission that might extend beyond his military career began to sink in when Hughbank was in Afghanistan. “A man I very much respect, with whom I turned the first five hundred people in to Guantanamo Bay, told me, ‘Richard, this is your future, this is your enemy.’;” Hughbank went on to found and became president of Extreme Terrorism Consulting, which provides counterterrorism training to law enforcement.

John Giduck was a practicing lawyer in the 1980s. Then, he says, during the late Gorbachev era, the American Bar Foundation dispatched him to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), where he met the head of the KGB for Leningrad. (“Putin’s boss,” he says.) They became fast friends, and Giduck began traveling frequently to Russia. He claims to have trained with multiple Russian special forces units, and to be certified by the “Vityaz Special Forces Anti-Terror School.” In 2004, Giduck traveled to Russia immediately after the Beslan school massacre and wrote a book called Terror at Beslan. It was published in 2005, and it raised Giduck’s profile, earning him a guest appearance on the Glenn Beck show in the fall of 2007. Among the book’s most sensational allegations is that the terrorists at Beslan systematically raped their hostages, a claim that no other primary source account has made. In the meantime, Giduck has also become an in-demand counterterrorism trainer.

Some trainers do have roots in law enforcement. In a major recent report on America’s efforts to use local police to monitor the population for terrorist threats, the Washington Post’s Dana Priest and William M. Arkin spoke to a counterterrorism trainer named Ramon Montijo, a former Los Angeles police detective and Army Special Forces sergeant. Like Kharoba, Montijo made sweeping generalizations about Muslims. “They want to make this world Islamic. The Islamic flag will fly over the White House—not on my watch!” he said. “My job is to wake up the public, and first, the first responders.”

Despite their different backgrounds, the counterterrorism trainers we interviewed have a remarkably similar worldview. It is one of total, civilizational war—a conflict against Islam that involves everyone, without distinction between combatant and noncombatant, law enforcement and military. “Being politically correct inhibits you,” Hughbank said. “I know Islam better than my own religion. Some things need to be called a spade.”

In Terror at Beslan, Giduck recounts giving a presentation on the 2002 hostage crisis at the Nord-Ost Theater in Moscow. After most of the terrorists were knocked unconscious by the gas that security forces pumped into the building, Spetsnaz, the Russian special forces, came through, methodically shooting each of the terrorists once in the back of the head. Giduck is convinced that as Americans we could do better: we could shoot them twice. Giduck writes of being alarmed when a policeman came up to him after the talk and said that not one of the cops in the room would ever have considered doing this. “I think the first thing we need to do is pass federal legislation exempting law enforcement from any civil or criminal prosecution, any liability at all, for what they do if there is a terrorist attack on U.S. soil,” Giduck writes. “In attempting to prepare the American psyche for the worst possible terrorist act—the taking and killing of children—we must all shed the veil of civility and luxury in which we conduct our lives.”

“The former military guys [working as trainers] are always looking at this thing from a battlefield perspective,” explains Jack Cloonan, a twenty-five-year veteran of the FBI who worked in the Osama bin Laden special unit from 1996 to 2002. “They are always looking at it as a U.S. military operation. But what does that have to do with sitting in the Bronx? Or trying to blend into society to carry out an attack? It’s just not related.”

And yet these trainers reach a considerable swath of law enforcement personnel. Of the half-dozen instructors we spoke to, most estimated that they had individually trained between 10,000 and 20,000 students over the course of the past five to six years. There are about 800,000 police officers in total in the United States.

When I look at the life of Muhammad, I get a very nasty image,” said Kharoba, pausing to look around the auditorium. The audience was silent. “I am talking about a pedophile, a serial killer, a rapist,” Kharoba said. “And that is just to start off with.

“Anyone who says that Islam is a religion of peace,” he continued, “is either ignorant or flat out lying.”

Frustration seemed to be burning in the air, and a cop—looking grim, anguished—spoke up. “From a law enforcement standpoint, what can we do?” he asked. “What do we do to deal with these people?”

“The best way to handle these people is what I call legal harassment,” Kharoba answered. “Start to identify who is coming into your area.” Go to the DMV and see who has applied for a driving license. Look at the owners of convenience stores. Corner stores are one of the principal ways Hezbollah launders money in the United States, he said. (The claim is not true.) “You only need one precedent,” Kharoba said. “Health inspectors, alcohol trade officers, these guys can turn a convenience store upside down without a warrant.”

Eventually the discussion turned to Islamic names, a subject in which Kharoba claims a specialty. There are two types of Muslim immigrants, Kharoba told the class: honest ones who Americanize their names, and those who use long Arabic names as a smokescreen. “If I pull someone over at a traffic stop,” said Kharoba, “I’ll ask for a couple of IDs. And if I see different spellings of a name, my Christmas tree is lit up. That’s probable cause to take them in.”

As a law enforcement officer in the audience pointed out, this is hardly true. People have different names for all sorts of reasons. Arabic names often include a long chain of references to ancestors, occupations, places, and relatives, and don’t readily fall into the pattern of first, middle, and last names common in the Christian West. A Muslim name on a passport might be rendered one way by an immigration clerk, and quite another by a desk agent at the local DMV. These differences are not illegal.

Kharoba was undeterred. He pointed out a laminated reference card that he had included in the course materials. With this card, an officer could see if a driver’s name follows the standard naming pattern for the Arabic world. If the police officer remained in doubt, he should call Kharoba, who has an unusual hobby: he collects phone books. Kharoba has a collection of Jordanian phone books right up until 1992. If a cop were to call up with a Jordanian name not shown in the phone book, Kharoba’s advice would be unequivocal. “Fingerprint him. Take him to prison.”

Kharoba reiterated the need to fight ruthlessly, sharing a story about the government of Syria quelling an uprising in Aleppo by shelling the city and killing more than 7,000 people. It’s a terrible story—but no such thing happened in Aleppo. It happened in Hama, a city about ninety miles to the south, in 1982.

Similarly, when we examined his manual, A Law Enforcement Guide to Understanding Islamist Terrorism, we found the claim that when the Muslim population of a country exceeds 80 percent, one should expect “state-run ethnic cleansing and genocide.” The examples given were Iran and the United Arab Emirates. Neither state has ever been involved in genocide. In fact, large sections of Kharoba’s guide turned out to be word for word the same as open-source materials found online—everything from publicly available Facebook pages to anonymously authored PDFs.

Though the federal government covers much of the cost of counterterrorism instruction, it has surprisingly little control over who is chosen to conduct the training. Structural problems abound. There is no unified system of expert evaluation or regulatory authority to impose quality control. The Tenth Amendment, which states, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people,” has been interpreted to mean that police powers, and officer training, are the preserve of the states. By design, state and local law enforcement is not the responsibility of the federal government, and neither is officer training. While the Department of Homeland Security offers certification, this only means that approved courses are eligible for DHS funds. If the course is paid for by other means—by a regional source, or by another federal department—DHS accreditation isn’t necessarily required. Even DHS money, once received by a state or local police department, can often be used for trainers without DHS accreditation.

Another theoretical gatekeeper to the world of training is at the state level. In many states, entities called Police Officer Standards and Training (POST) boards determine what should be taught both in basic training and in continuing education courses. However, POST approval does not entail evaluation of the content of each course. If an instructor submits a syllabus that lists appropriate topics and concepts, teaching accurate course content is that instructor’s job. Approval of the instructor, in turn, is usually done on the basis of a resume.

This is the case even with stricter states. Instructors in California must submit a course description, an expanded outline of the material covered, a budget, and—if the course involves such skills as firing a weapon—a safety plan. Under these criteria, Kharoba was deemed qualified.

There are also private accrediting agencies that supposedly vet trainers for competence and expertise and offer a kind of seal of approval. But many of these organizations sprang up after 9/11, and they often consist of little more than websites and a few names.

One of these accrediting organizations is called the Anti-Terrorism Accreditation Board, or ATAB, founded in 2001. ATAB promises that if you pay $695 for their certification (or $495 with a fee waiver), you will receive forty PowerPoints and over eight hundred books. Among ATAB’s promotional materials is a PowerPoint slideshow outlining current al-Qaeda tactics. One of the slides features a grainy picture of someone swinging a golf club and warns of “Golf Course Assassinations,” and the possibility of grenade attacks on the carts.

Richard Hughbank, of Extreme Terror Consulting, has taken ATAB’s more advanced course and become a certified master anti-terrorism specialist (CMAS). He provides ATAB with a glowing reference on its website, as well he might, because although the website doesn’t mention it, Hughbank is also the chairman of ATAB’s Standards Committee.

The certification chairman for ATAB is a man named Keith Flannigan. Flannigan claims numerous qualifications: a BA from Kent State University in 2008, an MA in psychology from the University of Frankfurt, likewise in 2008, and a PhD in philosophy from Northfield University—once again in 2008. However, the National Student Clearing House, a degree-verification service, was unable to find record of Flannigan at Kent State, nor did the University of Frankfurt find any evidence of attendance. When queried, Flannigan claimed that we couldn’t find his records because Keith Flannigan is not his legal name. Flannigan may well have a doctorate, for what it’s worth, from Northfield University, as it is run by the University Degree Program, described by Chronicle of Higher Education as “the granddaddy of diploma mill operations.”

None of this has stopped ATAB from gaining some important clients. For example, the U.S. Navy pays its personnel to get certified with ATAB. Why? “Any certification agency whose subject matter matches 80 percent or more of what the sailor does becomes eligible,” explained Keith Boring at the Navy’s credentials office. “Once the learning center and Navy leadership approves it, then we can pay for the exams.” To date, more than 2,000 Navy personnel (each presumably at the rate of at least $495, for a total of nearly $1 million) have been certified by ATAB.

Another way to gain authority as a counterterrorism expert is to publish a book. Richard Hughbank just published his first, The Dynamics of Terror and Creation of Homegrown Terrorism. John Giduck told us that his career got a significant boost from his book Terror at Beslan, which purports to be the most “complete and accurate” story of the Beslan school siege. We asked Giduck to clarify the sources for his most sensational charge: that scores of rapes occurred during the siege. Who were the alleged rape victims, and when exactly did these alleged incidents occur? In an email to us, Giduck didn’t provide much in the way of clarification but alleged there has been a public cover-up by both the terrorists and the Russian government. He did not explain why no other journalist among the dozens assigned to cover Beslan had managed to unearth such accounts.

“Who was raped? Give me one name and date,” said C. J. Chivers, a New York Times reporter and former Marine who published an 18,000-word narrative reconstruction of the school siege for Esquire magazine and won a 2007 National Magazine Award for his work. Chivers says he interviewed scores of hostages immediately after the event and in the following months and specifically examined Giduck’s allegations of rape. “There were no rapes at Beslan,” he says.

When we wanted to know more about Giduck’s time with the Russian special forces, Giduck wrote back to say that he had done a “series of trainings with Vityaz [a unit of Spetsnaz, the Russian special forces] at their special forces compound and training school on the Balashikha Army Base about 30 miles east of Moscow from 1999 to 2004” and had had close access to a series of elite Russian units, including Rus, another Spetsnaz division. When we made inquiries at the Russian Interior Ministry, we were informed that Giduck had not trained with Vityaz. Instead, he took a commercial course in extreme survival skills, with no counterterrorism component. Representatives from Rus said they had never heard of Giduck.

Even organizations cited for their high standards lack an adequate system for screening trainers. The best example is the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, known as FLETC. FLETC has been around since 1970, and it provides training to more than eighty federal law enforcement agencies—all of them, in fact, except for the DEA and the FBI. Its course development process, according to former FLETC curriculum developer Les Jenson, is stringent. “Subject-matter experts tear apart course proposals,” says Jenson. “They look at handouts, lesson plans, textbooks, and then they say to an instructor, We can accredit you if you make these changes.” FLETC can readily call on both in-house experts and outside contractors to evaluate course proposals and materials. In short, FLETC represents the gold standard for rigor in curriculum evaluations.

So did Sam Kharoba make the cut? Indeed he did. In 2004, Kharoba says, a FLETC training coordinator happened to hear him speak at a counterterrorism conference and was so impressed she invited him to teach sessions to law enforcement agents at FLETC headquarters in Glynco, Georgia. His courses were so well received that Kharoba was soon invited to teach senior instructors at FLETC. Those instructors then began, on an ad hoc basis, incorporating Kharoba’s curriculum into the courses they taught at agency-specific academies at FLETC. Kharoba told us that on March 15, 2005, he received an email from FLETC stating that they wanted to include his materials in the center’s basic curriculum.

As things turned out, though, the students of FLETC wound up being more skeptical than the school’s course evaluators. The same month that Kharoba was being invited to incorporate his material into the FLETC curriculum, FLETC received a complaint from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official named Muhammad Rana. Rana had been angered by course materials that included a handout describing “fundamentalist Muslims” as people with “long beards and head coverings” who, while “we call them radicals … are practicing true Islam.” Eleven out of fifteen members of the class submitted a letter in support of Rana’s complaint, and Rana took his case to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which ruled in his favor.

Perhaps embarrassed by the Rana incident, FLETC suspended the official incorporation of Kharoba’s course into the standard curriculum. However, once core FLETC classes are completed, officers and agents attend additional classes specific to their agencies, and as Les Jenson explained, “If an agency hired someone, it would be up to a specific agency to do the quality control.” Via this loophole, Kharoba continued to teach at FLETC for at least a year, from 2005 to 2006. The FLETC website continued to list “Islamic Culture and Names,” which is the name of Sam’s course, in its Fundamentals of Terrorism Training Program until January 22, 2010. That day, we telephoned to inquire about Sam Kharoba and received no answer. By the next day the information had disappeared from the website. Despite the fact that online archives show “Islamic Culture and Names” as part of the curriculum through 2008, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request about the course, FLETC maintains it has “no records.”

Though he is no longer a presence at FLETC, Kharoba continues to teach in other places. In November 2010, the St. Petersburg Times reported that the sheriff in Pasco County, Florida, planned to spend $45,000 of a $361,000 training budget teaching local officers how “radical Muslims groom their facial hair and wear their pants, as well as a ‘behavioral analysis technique to distinguish visually between moderates and radicals.’;” Those classes held at Pasco-Hernando Community College will be taught by Sam Kharoba.

In law enforcement training, student feedback is supposed to act as a check on questionable trainers. Positive course evaluations from police officers are central to the steady employment of those who would train them. The trouble is that most of the terror trainers stay in business precisely because their audience members, few of whom have any background in Islam, report favorably on the instruction they’re receiving.

Police attend classes like Kharoba’s for a variety of reasons. Local and state law enforcement officers must meet annual or biannual training requirements, a certain number of hours of which are slated for maintenance of “perishable skills”: things such as driving and shooting. Officers or their departments can generally pick the rest. Often, departments need a “go-to” person, someone who is a source of information on a subject such as counterterrorism. Attendees tend to be self-selected, motivated by an awareness of how little they know about Islam or a heightened concern about Islamic terrorism, and this can make them more inclined to be receptive to an instructor like Kharoba.

It also helps that the terror trainers are often entertaining. They engage their audience with questions, jokes, stories, and visuals. Like other trainers, Kharoba has a useful stage presence. “He kept an audience of police chiefs captivated,” said Phil Ludos of the Florida Police Chiefs Association. “That is not an easy thing to do.”

When we spoke to students from Kharoba’s class in Florida, many were enthusiastic. Olga Gonzalez, who is a TSA officer in Miami, told us she had taken several of Kharoba’s courses. “This guy is brilliant,” she said. “I can’t believe it: just like gang affiliations, you can distinguish between secular and jihadist Muslims.”

Such enthusiasm was echoed by dozens of Kharoba’s students and former students. On one occasion, we asked a student whether gangs—a more conventional subject of police attention—weren’t a more pressing issue for cops than terrorists.

“Yeah, the gangs are a threat,” answered the officer. “But they don’t have 1.5 billion members.”

Sam Kharoba says that in seven years of teaching he has done only one marketing function, because each training session leads to further invitations. Other trainers said similar things. If you are popular with cops, the word spreads; if you are not, you won’t last long. “It’s a very closed community,” Kharoba told us. “Cops are not going to read an advertisement, they are going to listen to friends.”

Were any cops skeptical of Kharoba’s teachings? Some certainly were. David McKaig, a deputy with the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department, enjoyed Kharoba’s class but noted that its lessons were not always applicable. “We have to uphold the rights of citizens,” McKaig noted. “You can’t violate the constitutional rights based on a hunch.”

But that doesn’t mean that trainers like Kharoba aren’t influential. “Now that I know these people might hate ‘the infidel,’ and be doing whatever they can to undermine the civilized world, I am somewhat leery of dealing with Muslims,” McKaig told us. “I go into their residences respectful but wary, which is not good in my position.”

When we attended one of Kharoba’s seminars in California, the training coordinator happened to sit in with us on the class. He too had serious reservations about the course, which he expressed to us and in a memo he later sent to his superior. His superior privately contacted some of his peers; to date, Kharoba has not been invited back to teach in California. But for both the coordinator and his superior, complaining to the agency that had provided Kharoba’s class—the Florida Regional Community Policing Institute of St. Petersburg College—was out of the question.

That’s because the course had been provided free of charge, through funding from the Department of Justice to the Florida Regional Community Policing Institute, and training coordinators around the country rely on such free courses to supplement state offerings. “Look, if we decide to say that he is full of shit, it would mean that we’re never going to get another class from those guys, because that is how cops are,” the California coordinator told us. “They’d say, ‘That rotten son of a bitch, after we’ve been so good to him and his friends.’;”

How to clean up the mess? Federal control is not the answer. For one thing, federal standards aren’t especially high. For another, constitutionally, law enforcement is the preserve of the states.

Moreover, there is no one-size-fits-all package for training. “What is relevant in a major city like Los Angeles may be entirely different than in Portland, Maine,” says Mike Rolince, who spent more than thirty years at the FBI, some of it working in counterterrorism. “And if you’re from NYPD or a Chicago PD and you have squads of officers and detectives working something, your budget and your training is significantly different than if you’re one of the majority of departments in the country that have less than thirty sworn officers.”

No matter what size the department may be, though, police need clear guidelines. Officers have to make decisions every day about when and how to apply the law, and when guidelines are bad or lacking, officers can go astray. In 2005, for instance, the Homeland Security and Intelligence Division of the Maryland State Police began secretly infiltrating a wide variety of activist groups—death penalty opponents, bicycle lane advocates, even a citizens group protesting utility rate hikes. Though not a single member of these groups was ever found to pose a security threat, troopers labeled dozens of them as “terrorists” and placed their names and files in a database shared by other regional law enforcement agencies. Perhaps worse, a subsequent state investigation found that no one in the Maryland State Police chain of command “gave any thought whatever to the possibility that its covert surveillance of these groups … was in any way inappropriate.” It is not hard to imagine that under the new Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative, countless innocent Muslim Americans could similarly wind up being questioned, documented, and even arrested by local and state authorities, and their names, fingerprints, and other personal information entered into FBI databases, where they would sit for years.

This is a civil liberties issue, but it is also a matter of police effectiveness. As Bill Bratton, who headed up the police departments of both New York and Los Angeles, explains, “There is a real risk as you educate people that you do not, in fact, educate—whether it is law enforcement officers or community—to the degree that you misinform or create a fear or bias that should not be there.”

Indeed, having a bunch of ill-trained local cops sleuth around for jihadists could jeopardize the very counterterrorism efforts the government is supposed to be conducting. For one, it is likely to generate a lot of white noise, forcing analysts to spend precious time sifting through useless information. It could also “dry up important sources of information,” warns Matthew Waxman, an associate professor of law at Columbia University, who has written extensively on the role of local and state law enforcement in counterterrorism.

In counterterrorism, as in most areas of intelligence and law enforcement, vital information often comes from those closest to the suspected perpetrators—from neighbors, friends, even family members. It was an anonymous handwritten note from an Arab American in Lackawanna, New York, a small city outside Buffalo, that led the FBI to arrest six men accused of comprising a sleeper terrorist cell in that city in 2002. In another case last fall in Portland, Oregon, a tip from the Muslim community led federal authorities to arrest in a sting operation a nineteen-year-old Somali-born American for intent to set off a bomb at a Christmas tree lighting ceremony. Ham-handed and overly aggressive behavior by local police toward the Muslim community could break the trust necessary for this kind of information to flow.

The demands placed on police will only increase in the coming years. The Nationwide Suspicious Activities Reporting Initiative asks law enforcement to interpret everyday incidents and decide whether they are indicators of terrorist activity. These decisions are then fed into a nationwide system. Merle Manzi, from the Michigan State University Intelligence Program, argues that requiring line officers to specify that a suspicious activity is probably related to terrorism doesn’t make sense: “The thing about checking a box about terrorism is that, is the officer on the street going to know it is about terrorism? Or will they just know that it is a peculiar thing, something out of the ordinary?”

None of this is to say that state and local police and other first responders cannot play a role where terrorism is concerned. It’s crucial that they be well trained to cope with terrorist incidents once they occur—for instance, to detect and cordon off areas that have been hit by radiological weapons. But intelligence gathering is another matter. Paradoxically, the best thing the police can do in the struggle against terrorism may be to not do “counterterrorism” but simply perform the duties they are already mandated to perform: serve the communities they live in, keep their eyes open for suspicious activities of all sorts, and build the links that result in tip-offs like the one that led to the arrest of the men in Lackawanna.

But regardless of what role cops on the streets should or should not play in fighting terrorism, the fact is that rivers of federal training dollars are already flowing, many of them straight into the pockets of instructors like Sam Kharoba. The training system clearly needs reform. Again, federal control is not the solution, but a first step would be for the federal government to issue voluntary guidelines on how states can best reform their oversight of counterterrorism training—since the most robust reforms will need to happen at the state level. State accreditation should be made mandatory for counterterrorism training courses—it often isn’t—and the accreditation process itself must also be toughened. There should be subject-matter experts who evaluate courses, and they should sit in on classroom sessions anonymously. If such a system of state-based oversight worked properly, then bad trainers would have their state accreditation revoked, and they would no longer be allowed to teach in the state. If states agreed to share lists of bad trainers, then the trainer would effectively be banned nationwide.

Time is of the essence. Within the next year, the Department of Justice plans to implement the Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative nationwide, and this will amplify the effects of the bad training being provided—unless the system is reformed quickly. It also behooves us to ask the fundamental question of what role beat cops should play in counterterrorism. But instead of a broader discussion, what we have now is a system that fails to police the ranks of those who train our frontline officers, while no one is paying attention. Apart, that is, from the police.

The post How We Train Our Cops to Fear Islam appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Georgeanne Mumm’s surgeon emerged from the operating room with welcome news for her worried family. He had removed her cancerous kidney, he said, and her outlook looked good.

The surgeon failed to mention, however, that he also had accidentally removed part of her pancreas, having mistaken it for a tumor. Nor did he mention that he had in-advertently cut the blood flow to her spleen, damaging it irrevocably. Only an emergency operation by another doctor the next day kept Georgeanne from dying right then and there.

Now the fifty-six-year-old Mumm sits alone in her trailer in rural Nevada. She is unable to work due to her disability but is still on the hook for about $300,000 in medical expenses related to her disastrous contact with the U.S. health care system.

Why do we keep hearing stories like this? Twelve years ago, the Institute of Medicine issued a landmark report showing that medical errors in U.S. hospitals kill up to 98,000 Americans a year. In 2000, another estimate, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which included fatalities resulting from unnecessary surgery, hospital-acquired infections, and other instances of harmful medical practice, put the total annual death toll at 250,000.

By that figure, contact with the U.S. health care system was the third leading cause of death in the United States, just behind all heart disease and all cancer. People responded to the alarm. Task forces were convened, congressional investigations launched, op-eds written. Yet as hard as it may be to believe, American medicine is, if anything, even more dangerous today.

In November 2010, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued a study that covered just the 15 percent of the U.S. population enrolled in Medicare. It found that each month one out of seven Medicare hospital patients is injured—and an estimated 15,000 are killed—by harmful medical practice. Treating the consequences of medical errors cost Medicare a full $324 million in October 2008 alone, or 3.5 percent of all Medicare expenditures for inpatient care. Another recent study looked at the incidence of avoidable medical errors across the entire population and concluded that they affected 1.5 million people and cost the U.S. economy $19.5 billion in 2008. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have estimated that almost 100,000 Americans now die from hospital-acquired infections alone, and that most of these are preventable.

People like Carole LaRocca are the human face of this travesty. One day recently I sat at the seventy-four-year-old’s kitchen table as she broke down in tears. She was weeping not because of the hospital-acquired infection that almost took her life, but because of the $3,676 bill she faced for the antibiotics she needed to treat the harm done to her by her hospital stay. Every month she pays $25 of her meager fixed income toward the debt, and is still hounded by bill collectors.

A cynic might say it’s no surprise that American medicine fails to put safety first, since doctors and hospitals often make money by treating those they injure. There is, however, also a deeper and more systematic reason for the continuing toll of injury and death caused by the U.S. health care system: we don’t know who’s failing and who’s succeeding. Plenty of U.S. hospitals have dramatically improved their safety performance. The best have virtually eliminated the deadliest hospital-acquired infections, even as lethal microbes have evolved to become more contagious and resistant to treatment. If every health care provider adhered to the highest standards of patient safety and evidence-based medicine, hundreds of thousands of lives could be saved, to say nothing of the billions of dollars spent on treating complications—but good luck discovering for yourself which hospitals are safe and effective and which aren’t.

That’s because the public, the payers, and the providers themselves typically lack access to the data necessary to make such a life-and-death determination. In the airline industry, if a pilot so much as accidentally makes a wrong turn moving away from the gate, anywhere in the world, the event is instantly recorded in global databases and scrutinized by government agencies and the industry itself. The knowledge gained from this continuous process leads to big and little changes in aviation protocol, equipment, and personnel. As a result, there was not a single airline fatality anywhere in the developed world last year.

In health care, by contrast, patient safety experts often remark that the death toll from medical errors in U.S. hospitals is equivalent to three jumbo jets falling out of the sky and killing all the passengers on board every forty-eight hours. But even the most egregious errors go largely unreported, and when they are reported, they are often buried and ignored. For the most part, all the public gets to hear about are industry-wide estimates and statistical averages of the kind presented above. Because we lack specific knowledge of where these injuries are occurring and under what circumstances, we can’t know precisely what to do about the ongoing catastrophe or whom to reward when specific solutions are found.

Fortunately, there is much that can be done—even by mere journalists willing to submerge themselves in some data. Not long ago, my colleague at the Las Vegas Sun, Alex Richards, and I set out to identify these cases of preventable harm and publish them. In Nevada, regulators require hospitals to submit a record of every inpatient stay, a policy originally intended to monitor costs. Based on billing records, each file provides a patient’s age, gender, and race, as well as the conditions diagnosed and the procedures received during his or her hospital visit. And in 2008, the federal government started asking hospitals nationwide for one additional piece of data. Stung by the money it was paying under Medicare to treat injured patients, hospitals were required to report with a “yes” or a “no” whether each medical condition was present when the patient was admitted. This makes it possible to identify how may patients acquired preventable injuries while at the hospital—problems like severe bedsores, bloodstream infections caused by central-line catheters, and falls that resulted in a broken bone.

Shaking the data out of Nevada’s state government wasn’t easy, and crunching through 2.9 million inpatient billing records was also involved, as well as interviews with more than 250 nurses, doctors, hospital administrators, and injured patients to make sense of it all—but we eventually prevailed and launched a five-part series based on what we discovered. (The entire series is available at www.lasvegassun.com/hospital-care.) Not surprisingly, given the picture that health care quality experts paint of the U.S. health care system as a whole, we found that the safety performance of Las Vegas hospitals was alarming. In 2008 and 2009, for example, we identified 3,689 Las Vegas patients who suffered preventable harm, including 2,010 who became infected by one of two nearly untreatable and often fatal bugs: methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus—better known as MRSA—and Clostridium difficile. In 354 of the total cases, the patient died in the facility. With the help of other public documents, we established that only about one in ten of these and other preventable errors was ever brought to the attention of authorities, as is required by state law, much less analyzed for lessons learned.

The real power in our reporting, however, came from the transparency and accountability it imposed on the local health care system. We published the total number of injuries and infections and their rates for each hospital in Las Vegas. Under pressure from hospital lobbyists, the Nevada state government had long refused to do this, as is common in other states as well. But we saw good reasons for naming names. So, for example, we posted a tool on the Sun’s website that allows users to compare the rates of MRSA and Clostridium difficile infections in different Las Vegas hospitals. As it turns out, the MRSA infection rates range from 24 per 1,000 discharges at Desert Springs Medical Center, to a “mere” 7.6 at Spring Valley Hospital, eight miles down the road.

To put this more-than-threefold difference into context for our readers, we published a series of accompanying stories pointing out that infection control is hardly rocket science. According to Dr. Peter Pronovost, a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and a national patient safety leader, prevention of central-line catheter infections involves little more than a simple five-step checklist:

• Wash hands.
• Wear sterile gloves, hat, mask, and gown and completely cover the patient with sterile drapes.
• If possible, do not place the catheter in a patient’s groin, where it can more easily become infected.
• Clean the catheter insertion site on the patient’s skin with chlorhexidine antiseptic solution.
• Remove catheters when they are no longer needed.

After Pronovost partnered with Michigan hospitals to study the effectiveness of the checklist, the reduction in infection rates saved an estimate $100 million and 1,500 lives over just an eighteen-month period. In 2002, Dr. Rajiv Jain of the Pittsburgh Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center introduced a commonsense method used throughout Europe to drive down the number of hospital-acquired MRSA infections: swab the noses of patients before they are admitted, and if they test positive for MRSA, isolate them from other patients. This simple protocol has reduced hospital-acquired MRSA infections by 59 percent at both the Pittsburgh VA and other hospitals that have followed its example. At some VA hospitals, MRSA infection rates have been lowered to almost zero.

It’s still too early to tell how the market share or quality of care at different Las Vegas hospitals may be affected by exposure to our bit of sunshine, but we’ve already seen the leaders of at least two institutions publicly reporting the errors and infections that take place in their hospitals and vowing to make improvements. Meanwhile, insurance companies can see the same broad disparities in patient safety, and some now use our data to pressure hospitals to improve quality. State regulators responded to the revelations by using our methods to verify our findings in the same billing records, and then launching investigations of the individual cases of patient harm. Transparency is a potent antidote for complacency.

Because of the lack of national standards for measuring and reporting harm to patients, we were unable to show definitively, with a few exceptions, that care in Las Vegas is any more dangerous than anywhere else. It’s telling that some leaders of the local medical establishment jumped on this point. “You’re looking at the problems in Las Vegas and saying there are problems here, no one is denying that,” said Dr. Ron Kline, president of the Nevada State Medical Association. “But the argument would be that those similar problems exist in other places. To some degree you can’t eliminate them.”

Unfortunately, this attitude is typical among health care leaders. When I showed our data about accidental surgical injuries to Dr. Jim Christensen, an allergist who also oversees quality improvement at Spring Valley Hospital in Las Vegas, he was nonplussed. “I see these all the time,” he told me. Asked if he had become inured to the problem, he said that surgery is “like working on the car with the engine going. Sometimes something slips, but they recognize the injury right away and repair it. As long as that doesn’t go beyond the published error rate, I’m fine.”

What these and many other like-minded health care professionals are saying can be put another way: Never mind that errors committed by individual hospitals might be leading to hundreds or thousands of annual deaths and injuries, or that safety measures put in place by other hospitals show that most of these casualties are avoidable; as long as the rate of medical error or infection at any given hospital is in line with the national average, that is good enough.

Kerry O’Connell, a fifty-four-year-old construction executive from Colorado, scoffs at this mind set. Several years ago he became infected with potentially lethal bacteria during surgery to repair a broken elbow. O’Connell says that it took weeks of procedures to flush out his wound, and months of infusions with potent antibiotics to kill the resistant bug, yet doctors and hospital administrators refused to accept responsibility for the infection. Meanwhile, they charged O’Connell and his insurance company $65,000 for the treatment. Galvanized by the injustice, O’Connell became a patient safety advocate and has adopted a clever prop to get his big point across. When he attends conferences on patient safety, he wears a name tag that says, “The Numerator.”

When people inevitably ask him what that means, he launches into the explanation. It’s easy to forget, he says, that even in hospitals where medical error rates are no worse than average, the numerator in that ratio—the number of actual people victimized—remains large and unacceptable. “I call infection rates sedatives for health care workers so they can sleep at night,” O’Connell said. “They keep tracking these rates and comparing to each other and saying ‘We’re not so bad.’ But the only thing that counts in the end is how many people got infected.”

If the airline industry and its regulators had clung to the same attitude, the average rate of airline fatalities would likely be little better than it was in the 1950s, when flying was at least three times as dangerous, on average, as it is today. It’s only human nature to call average good enough, particularly when what you are doing is difficult. Moreover, when people are engaged in inherently dangerous activities that they believe bring great benefit to society—whether it is serving their country in combat, or moving passengers at 600 miles an hour in and out of the wild blue yonder—it’s understandable that they tend to overlook or dismiss any avoidable harm caused by their actions. Dr. Thomas Lee, an associate editor at the New England Journal of Medicine and a professor at the Harvard School for Public Health, notes how this same process of moral disengagement affects doctors and hospital administrators. They are reticent to acknowledge patient harm, he says, because they’re too busy highlighting the diseases cured and lives saved.

To overcome this natural tendency toward moral disengagement—or what safety experts in other fields call “normalized deviance”—we need in health care what the airline and many other industries already have: a process for systematically recording specific errors and near misses and for making them widely known so that everyone can learn from them. Dr. Peter Pronovost, the safety expert from Johns Hopkins, recommends creating a similarly robust, nationwide system for spotting, measuring, and reporting instances or harbingers of harmful care, with spot audits of medical records to assure compliance. This was also a recommendation of the ground-breaking 1999 “To Err Is Human” report. Following the example of the aviation industry (and of the VA health system, incidentally), this system should also include a process that allows people who witness or commit errors and near misses to report them anonymously.

Public reporting will be bolstered, to a limited degree, under the fine print of Obama’s Affordable Care Act. The new law says that certain injuries and infections that take place in hospitals will be published on Medicare’s Hospital Compare website. Hospitals will also be rewarded or penalized according to how certain readmission rates and hospital-acquired injuries compare to national averages. (As this story was going to press, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services were formulating regulations that go further than any previous efforts, using both carrots and sticks to get hospitals to make care safer.) But here again, the mind set is not zero tolerance of error, but merely a focus on how different hospitals compare to the mediocre safety performance that pervades the industry. Moreover, the new law applies only to acute care hospitals, leaving out nursing homes and other long-term care facilities. It will only include harm to Medicare patients, a subset of the overall population. And the system will not be able to capture some of the most common types of injuries to patients, such as those caused by medication errors.

The provisions of the Affordable Care Act are a step in the right direction, but they don’t go far enough. Implementing and operating a nationwide system that captures all harm to patients also requires that the U.S. health care system at last move out of the nineteenth century and replace paper records with open-source, truly integrated information technology of the kind the VA has pioneered. Electronic medical records, if they are written in compatible, open-source computer languages, have the potential to form vast databases that researchers, regulators, and practitioners themselves can easily mine to spot dangerous or ineffective practice patterns. Unfortunately, though many health care providers are busy installing health IT using federal stimulus dollars, most are installing propriety software that will leave data locked in “black boxes” and that have limited value in promoting transparency. (For more information on this subject, see Phillip Longman, “Code Red,” July/August 2009.)

Done right, a fully digitalized and integrated medical record system would also by itself prevent many serious errors, such as the thousands that occur every year when pharmacists misread a doctor’s scribbled prescription. Lest you think such matters are no big deal, the Institute of Medicine estimates that the average hospital patient in the U.S. is subject to at least one medication error per day (wrong med, wrong dose, wrong time, wrong patient), and that the financial cost of treating the harm done by these errors conservatively comes to $3.5 billion a year. An integrated digital records system would also make it much easier to monitor and curb the overuse of treatments that are both costly and dangerous. For example, Americans are exposed to so many CT scans, many of them redundant, that, according to the New England Journal of Medicine,the resulting radiation exposure may be responsible for as much as 2 percent of all cancer deaths in the country.

With such a robust, data-driven system of safety promotion at last brought to bear in health care, average performance will no longer seem good enough. Health care providers, employers choosing health care for their workers, and patients seeking the best care will all demand more. The benchmark for any given hospital to meet would thus become what it should have been all along: the refusal to tolerate even one case of preventable harm to a patient. Without such demonstrable standards of performance, there is little hope that the quality of health care can improve—whether the system is “socialized,” “market driven,” or any combination thereof.

Some doctors and hospital administrators will object on principle. When O’Connell, aka “The Numerator,” asked his surgeon about the moral implications of billing patients for treatments made necessary by sloppy medical practice, the response he reports receiving was disheartening: “We’re like lawyers,” O’Connell recalls the surgeon saying. “We just provide services by the hour and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.”

Other medical providers live by a higher standard than this, yet many will still raise all kinds of methodological objections. They will say that their patients tend to be much sicker or older than those treated in other hospitals. Or that the reason their hospital has such high infection rates is that many of their patients come from nursing homes, where lethal bacteria are rampant. (In the case of our investigation, I always pointed out that we were reporting the infections that their own employees had marked as not present at the time the patient arrived, meaning they were acquired in the hospital itself.) And to be sure, certain risk adjustments do need to be made in comparing the performance of one hospital with another.

But these are adjustments that can be made, and made all the more fairly and definitively the more data we have about just who is receiving what treatments and with what results. In no other realm—certainly not any as inherently dangerous as health care—do we accept the argument that meaningful comparisons of results are impossible just because those being compared face somewhat different circumstances. Some airports have shorter runways and are more congested than others; some have to deal with frequent snow or thunderstorms, nearby mountain ranges, or lakes and rivers that attract unusual numbers of flocking birds. No two are exactly the same. Yet we don’t therefore conclude that there is no point in comparing the safety record of one airport versus another, much less say that it is acceptable for a certain number of people to be routinely killed on approach or takeoff. We demand that all airports, and everyone else involved in aviation, do what it takes to get accidents to as close to zero as possible, and that they use reams of performance data to make that happen.

Moreover, it’s not just the outputs of different health care providers we are concerned with, but their inputs as well. You say many of your infected patients are coming from nursing homes? Why not hold them to higher standards? Why are you not doing what the Pittsburgh VA is doing and testing all your patients for infection before they get out on the wards? Why don’t you have sensors in hospital rooms, as some hospitals now do, that sound an alarm if anyone exits the door without having first washed his or her hands? For that matter, why not take up the suggestion of Paul O’Neill, the former treasury secretary who pioneered industrial safety as CEO of Alcoa and is now a leading voice on patient safety: have a big sign posted at the front door of the hospital, as nearly all factories and construction sites do, that reminds workers as they come on each shift just how many days it has been since the last medical error or hospital-acquired infection? In short, just exactly what have you done to promote a culture of safety?

Experience has shown that when hospitals and doctors can answer that question forthrightly, and when they are open and honest about their mistakes and show they are taking steps to fix them, they are much less likely to face malpractice suits. In 2004 the University of Illinois Medical Center in Chicago began flagging cases of harm and unsafe conditions that could cause injuries—up to 7,000 reports a year. It also began admitting and apologizing for its mistakes, conducting investigations of harmful incidents that are open to patients and their families, and even offering financial compensation when necessary. The program has lowered the number of malpractice claims and the amount of payouts, while increasing trust and leading to hundreds of patient safety improvements. The hospital’s methods boil down to what any one of us would instruct a child to do when he makes a mistake: stop making excuses, and take responsibility. The facility is now considered a national patient safety pioneer, and its methods are being expanded through a federal grant to nine other hospitals in the Chicago area.

This is what current best practices in patient safety look like. They could be even better if consumers and medical experts had the data they need to determine each hospital’s progress in promoting safety. We know this works in other inherently dangerous industries. Why should health care be an exception?

We all understand that medicine is increasingly complicated and that hospitals are increasingly filled with patients who would have died years ago were it not for the wonders of modern medicine. But the Hippocratic oath says, “First do no harm.” Precisely because health care is becoming more and more complex, and therefore inherently dangerous, it will continue to cause more and more and more deaths and injuries until we put safety first.

The post First Do No Harm appeared first on Washington Monthly.

For those of us who came to Washington with John Kennedy, January was a time for both mourning and celebration. On the 20th, a ceremony commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of his inaugural speech was held in the Capitol rotunda. Congressional leaders spoke about how the challenge of “ask not” had affected them. I was struck by the fact that people whose speeches had rarely been notable for the emotion they aroused—people like Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and John Kerry—actually became quite moving when they described how they had been inspired by those words.

Washington at its best II

On the 22nd I attended Sargent Shriver’s funeral at a small Catholic church in Potomac, Maryland. Once again I was struck by the genuine emotion of the speakers as they praised the contagious enthusiasm Sarge brought to every task he undertook, and how the tasks he chose unfailingly involved service to his country, his church, and his fellow man. Bill Clinton summed it up: “He couldn’t have been that good—but he was.”

Washington at its worst

On the 24th, Angela Novello’s funeral was held in the chapel of the retirement home where she had lived outside of Silver Spring. Angie had been Robert Kennedy’s secretary before and during his service as attorney general and as senator. We had become acquainted during the 1960 campaign, and when I came to Washington the next year, it turned out we lived on the same floor of the same apartment building. And so began a lasting friendship.

During the seven years when Robert Kennedy was one of the most powerful men in the country, you would have thought that the number of Angie’s close friends had to be in the hundreds. Lobbyists, politicians, and reporters would all describe her as one of their pals: “Angie always takes my calls, and she usually puts me through to Bobby right away.”

But none of these close pals showed up at the funeral. Aside from her retirement home friends and her wonderful Italian family, originally from Calabria, I seemed to be the only male there. Women were a bit better represented. There were seven, including Ethel Kennedy and her daughters Kerry and Courtney. Still, when you remember the legions of pals she had in the ’60s, you realize just how cruel Washington can be. The Washington Post didn’t even deem her worthy of an obituary. Angie had a warmer heart and more common sense than most of us will ever possess. She deserved better at the end.

The ugly truth in twenty-one words

Earlier this year, I collected a series of headlines from the Wall Street Journal that tell the story of the economy in miniature: “Corporate Profits Are Up Like Gangbusters”; “On [Wall] Street, Pay Vaults to Record Altitude”; “Downturn’s Ugly Trademark: Lasting Drop in Wages.”

The man could lead

Sargent Shriver stands alone among government administrators I have observed in his determination to find out what his agency was doing wrong and to fix it. My job at the Peace Corps was to make sure he knew that bad news, even when it involved criticism of his own actions.

Shriver was also a great leader in other crucial respects. He inspired high enthusiasm and enormous effort from his subordinates. He also devoted careful attention to selecting them. He spent more time interviewing potential staff members than any other agency head that I’m aware of. And the selection of Peace Corps volunteers was done with such care, that despite the extremely daunting challenges that many of them faced—including the threat of deadly diseases, primitive living conditions, and having to create their own jobs—a lower percentage of volunteers quit before their term was over than under any future leader.

Don’t stick around

Shriver also understood that over time even good people can lose their dedication and become more concerned with promotions and benefits than with the agency’s mission. So he persuaded congress to put a five-year limit on Peace Corps employment. That limit is probably too tight, but Shriver was prescient in seeing the danger of tenure. It’s odd how an increasing number of people are becoming aware of the danger of tenure for public school teachers but unaware that the same danger exists for all public servants. That danger needs to be faced if we are to have better government. The truth is that, as things stand now, we have far too many civil servants who “work to the rule” and get excited only about issues involving pay and benefits.

The bakery-industrial complex

Veteran readers may recall we once had a feature called “Memo of the Month.” Its purpose was to publicize enough examples of bureaucratic prose to bring about reform in the language of government, especially in making it more concise. That we met with less than complete success in that mission is suggested by a memo that recently came my way. It is Military Specification MIC C 440 726C W W/Change. Its subject is “Cookies, Oatmeal; and Brownies, Chocolate Covered.” It is nineteen pages long.

Around the world in eighty beignets

Since Julia Child introduced us to French cuisine, food has gradually become very close to a national obsession. Hour upon hour of television time is now devoted to cooking and eating. Even the channels supposedly concerned with other matters, like travel, share the obsession. How do they manage to relate food to travel? By making the preparation and consumption take place in different cities and countries. It reminds me of the time when poker was the rage, leading the sports channel ESPN to justify its poker show by calling it The World Series of Poker. And the Travel Channel got into the act with the World Poker Tour. Travel has gotten so carried away with its new passion that its show 101 Tastiest Places to Chowdown actually seems to endorse gluttony.

We lost you at “bureaucracy”

I was delighted to read the Washington Post article on Barack Obama’s proposal to reorganize government agencies. Written by Karen Tumulty and Ed O’Keefe, it is a sophisticated account of the peril awaiting attempts to re-arrange bureaucracies. The fact that the Post article is exceptional, however, reminds me of another failed mission of the Monthly.

Our original purpose was to improve understanding of the way the institutions of Washington really worked. Though we have enjoyed considerable success with respect to lobbyists, the media, and the White House, we have by and large failed in our efforts to improve understanding of bureaucracy, perhaps because the subject makes most eyes glaze over. But I pray the reader’s indulgence in resisting the glaze for the rest of this column.

Stayin’ Alive

If there is one truth about bureaucratic culture that I am most desperate to get across, it concerns the survival imperative. Especially as government organizations mature, dedication to the performance of mission tends to be replaced by dedication to the survival of the official and of his agency. This means that protection of the agency’s budget becomes paramount. Otherwise the jobs of its officials are threatened. Next most important is growth of the budget, because it will increase opportunities for promotion.

The best way to avoid budget cuts is not to anger the groups that can make trouble for the agency with the congressional appropriations committee. Too often these groups are the mining, drilling, airline, and drug companies and the military contractors that the agency is supposed to oversee. And too often the public interest is not represented by equally strong voices. This, not the corruption that the media looks for, is the main reason that the agencies fail. Recent examples include the FAA’s long failure to crack down on the safety procedures of the regional airlines, the Minerals Management Service’s failure with British Petroleum, the mine safety agency’s failure to get Masseyto improve its safety practice in time to prevent the Sago disaster, and the SEC and Federal Reserve’s failure to prevent the Wall Street meltdown.

Misguidance

If the press mistakenly looks for corruption—or scandal, as with the SEC staffers who watched porn on the job—as the main cause of bad government performance, the White House and Congress are equally guilty of providing inadequate oversight of that performance. Congressmen, of course, are the ones pressed by the lobbyists to influence the agencies in the wrong way. They also tend to be so unaware of the inner workings of the agencies that they ask the wrong questions at hearings.

The patient exhibits a diminished executive function

As for the White House, it tends to be preoccupied with its own pet programs and attends to agencies not involved in these programs only when they attract headlines, which usually only happens after a Katrina or a Gulf oil spill.

This is why I endorse the recommendation that John Gravois is making in this issue that the size of the OMB be doubled. By giving the woefully understaffed OMB enough high-quality personnel to really monitor other agencies’ performance of their missions, Obama can not only protect himself and the country from future disasters but also make it possible for him to make the intelligent cuts in government spending that will not adversely affect the performance of essential functions.

If you’ve got the success stories, I’ve got the time

The tendency of most White Houses has been to cross their fingers and pray that nothing blows up on their watch. The question about Obama is whether he really wants to know what’s going on down below. When White Houses communicate with the agencies they are supposed to supervise, the most common purpose is to ask for good news that can be used by the president in the State of the Union speech and other messages.

I am convinced that White House pressure for good news was the main reason for the Challenger disaster. NASA officials were so desperate for Ronald Reagan to be able to boast about the first teacher in space in his State of the Union message scheduled for the night of the launch that they rejected—and indeed sought to suppress—warnings from Thiokol engineers about the dangers of launching in freezing temperatures.

And now for a political message from our sponsors

Have you noticed how the right wing is getting its message across through what used to be the relatively apolitical realm of corporate advertising? Consider the message of an ad from a group called Americans Against Food Taxes, which I gather is supported by the soft drink companies. The ad concludes, “The government is just getting too involved in our personal lives.” And then there is the worshipful celebration of Ronald Reagan in General Electric’s extensive television and print ad campaign on the occasion of his centennial, which seems to offer an unqualified endorsement of his presidency. Ronald Reagan was a nice man who inspired optimism. Otherwise, it seems to me that his presidency is only memorable—at least in good ways—for “Tear down this wall,” which was glorious, and the genuinely moving speech Reagan made at Omaha Beach in 1984.

Corruption, illegal and legal

When I suggested earlier in this column that corruption was not a major problem within the federal government, I did not mean it never happens. Any time a purchasing function exists, as it does notably at the General Services Administration, which buys everything from buildings to furniture for the rest of the federal government, there is going to be a strong temptation toward outright bribe taking. More common, however, is the selling out that occurs among senators, congressmen, and congressional staff in the hope of future employment by lobbyists or the industries they represent. This is also a significant problem at the Pentagon, where both military officers and civil servants are tempted to be excessively kind to contractors who might provide them with cushy jobs.

With a little help from their friends

Speaking of selling out, I invite your attention to a recent headline in the business section of the New York Times: “GOP Asks Businesses Which Rules to Rewrite.”

But the lung cancer is minty fresh

If you had any doubt that the tobacco companies are not among the good guys, consider how Lorillard is resisting a government ban on the menthol additive in cigarettes that is so heavily marketed to blacks and adolescents. David Kesmodel of the Wall Street Journal reports that Lorillard, which makes Newport, is “buying up a host of menthol-bashing internet domain names including MentholKillsMinorities.com, MentholAddictsYouth.com and FDAMustBanMenthol.com.”

The significance of this action is that it deprives advocates of the ban from having easy-to-find-and-remember places on the Internet from which to make their voices heard.

Bad news from Appalachia

Now for three stories from one of my favorite sources, the Charleston Gazette. One series describes how in West Virginia state and local police cover up misdeeds, including dangerous beatings. Another tells how Marshall University’s cover-up of the rape of a female student led to the rapist escaping punishment. Finally, an article by Ken Ward Jr., whose coverage of the coal industry has been so consistently outstanding, reports the death from cancer of Judy Bonds, who had fought the mountaintop removal that’s destroying or seriously damaging the environment in huge chunks of the state. Judy was not some outside do-gooder but a native West Virginian who had grown up in the hollows and worked as a waitress and as the manager of a Pizza Hut. She had to endure the anger of friends and neighbors who saw her as a threat to their jobs in the mining industry.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t

It’s tough to take stands like that in West Virginia. When Jay Rockefeller first ran for governor, he campaigned against strip mining, the precursor of mountaintop removal, and was soundly defeated. So it’s understandable that mountaintop removal is an issue that state leaders will not tackle. Similar problems exist with many other industries. The chemical industry has spent most of the last century threatening the people of West Virginia with a choice between the perils to their health from dangerous chemicals on the one hand, and the risk of losing their jobs on the other. Recently Bayer CropScience told the Gazette that it would “stop making, using, and storing the deadly chemical methyl isocyanate” at its plant near Charleston. But the company also said that the move will cost the jobs of 220 local residents.

One of the great tragedies of this country is that similar problems exist in almost every other state. Military contractors, for example, have been clever enough to spread their work out over several state and congressional districts, especially those of the congressional committees that affect defense, so that politicians have a stake in their prosperity. This of course means that state officials, including the congressional delegation, are unwilling to oppose expenditures for whatever weapon is being made locally without regard to whether it is dangerous or useless.

Commodity calamity

Here’s another reason why I recommend John Gravois’s article on the danger of understaffed agencies: the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, again according to the Journal, is “trying to swallow a huge expansion in its workload, without an accompanying boost in its budget.” Why should you care? The CFTC is all that stands between you and dangerous derivatives, as well as the speculators that drive up everything from corn to coffee to oil.

Hoosier hero, Tea Party zero

The only at-all-prominent Republican leader who seems to acknowledge the importance of regulation is Mitch Daniels, the governor of Indiana. As former head of the OMB, he also understands the value of performance—of how to make the trains of government run on time. But I fear the Tea Partiers, with their dogmatic and automatic antigovernment attitude, will never allow someone like Daniels to become president.

Make-believe = survival

In our last issue, I told you that most cables our diplomats send to the State Department are not read. Now comes confirmation from no less than the Secretary of State herself. Hillary Clinton is acknowledging, reports Lisa Rein of the Washington Post, that most of the thousands of reports our diplomats send to State “are never read.” Clinton, however, blames the problem on reports that the diplomats are required to write. What she does not acknowledge is that many of the cables are self-generated by the diplomats.

In my book How Washington Really Works, I explained the basic bureaucratic equation: “Make-believe = survival.” Writing memoranda and attending meetings are the activities that offer an official the opportunity to appear to be working hard and at the same time avoid trouble.

A similar truth applies to their bosses: “I have to confess, as a senator,” says Clinton, “when in doubt, order a report.”

This reminds me of a secret of Washington life enunciated by one of the great students of bureaucracy, the late Jim Boren: “When in doubt, mumble.” An important corollary is to accompany the mumble with the grave demeanor of a wise elder statesman.

The post The ugly truth in twenty-one words… The bakery-industrial complex… Make-believe = survival appeared first on Washington Monthly.