By PLS
Was “Brownie” given a script for his post-Katrina Senate testimony? To wit: take a fall and look ridiculous, but introduce the debate-defining concept, a skill at which Republicans have excelled recently.
Here is what the feckless Brownie testified: he couldn’t do his job as FEMA chief because the state of Louisiana and the city of New Orleans (note: both headed by Democrats) are “dysfunctional.”
Maybe I’m catching the despicable conspiracy bug, but his crony boss in the White House had already floated the idea that the Pentagon should be lead agency in responding to major hurricanes and earthquakes as well as terrorist attacks—meaning that the Army should be able to jump in, right away, without consulting local or state authorities, without the tiniest figleaf of an invitation.
In short, the President is suggesting that we should have a Disaster Czar.
This is not a comforting idea.
Reflect on the tactics of the US army on the ground in Iraq: kicking down doors, murdering journalists, cussing a blue stream, treating everyone like dirt. Iraqis have had to learn a harsh lesson. If they talk back, look unfriendly, demand to be treated with dignity, or simply fail to understand orders, they may get shot.
This sounds shocking. But martial law, anywhere, anytime, quickly deteriorates into swaggering arbitrary authoritarianism. Consider what is already happening right here at home under other czars who were created to provide firm solutions to desperate situations.
Take the Homeland Security Czar and his enabling Patriot Act. Read the wrong book and you'll end up locked up incommunicado. Behave like anything other than a humorless meek sheep, a serf sans all human and civil rights, during the airport inspection ordeal and you’ll be humiliated, strip-searched, maybe even arrested–and if you miss your plane, so what! OK. It’s only a day ruined, not death, but that’s no way to treat citizens of what we publicize as an exemplary democracy.
A footnote on the ludicrousness of the random search system: I’m an ex-diplomat with repeated top secret security clearances and totally risk free, as the passport swipe would have shown, but I was singled out to have my baggage (including–ha!ha!–twelve pairs of dirty hiking socks) searched in Geneva two weeks ago, before it could be loaded onto my Swiss flight to New York. The culprit: US regs. The Swiss official was embarrassed and very apologetic. Both of us knew the time-consuming, expensive little farce wasn’t making anyone safer.
As a justification for instantly federalizing disaster response, it has been pointed out (the dysfunctionality argument) that the Louisiana National Guard wasn’t on the job as quickly as it should have been. Not because of incompetence, though. Guard headquarters, like everything else, was flooded out.
Was Louisiana alone responsible for those breached levees? Or did the US Army Corps of Engineers and Congress and the President also have something major to do with their inadequacy? As in reckless budget-slashing and poor quality control, a pretty good example of dysfunctionality, if you ask me.
The Guard had other, more crippling problems, too. Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum, Chief of the National Guard Bureau informed Congress recently that the “National Guard has only a third of the equipment it needs to respond to domestic disasters and terrorist attacks and will require $7 billion to acquire the radios, trucks, construction machinery and medical gear required." Not only had the Guard been persistently under supplied with up-to-date equipment (in Louisiana they had radios so antiquated they couldn’t communicate with sophisticated regular Army radios), according to the New York Times on September 9, but units deployed to Iraq have taken their best equipment and left it there, causing Representative David Obey of Wisconsin to note that, “The President seems to think we’ll use the Guard and Reserve in Iraq and the Army in Louisiana,” which seems “backward.” It does indeed.
Meanwhile, over the President’s strong objections, Congress gave us a powerful Intelligence Czar. The legislative intent was to ensure that post 9/11 intelligence reporting would be depoliticized, that critical information would be shared and that the whole business would be directed by someone with the experience, guts and institutional clout to stand up to any president (like the one we’ve got) who only wants information that supports preconceived ideas and congenial policies.
But Donald Rumsfeld, this President’s Secretary of Defense, doesn’t like to share, according to the Times for Sept. 29. Having lost the battle to prevent existing Defense Intelligence entities from having to be subject to the new intelligence chief, John D. Negroponte, Rummie’s boys have evidently set up new intelligence cells under misleading names in various nooks and crannies of the Pentagon. Congress, having got wind of the duplicity, is showing signs of pique. Every once in a while even this sycophantic Congress gets a little worried about the Bush administration’s attempts to concentrate all power in Washington and in one branch of government.
In effect, the mere creation of a czar is no guarantee that the intended overseen will happily cede prerogatives to the overseer.
Let’s consider another czar. The Drug Czar. We’ve had one for a long time, with narcs kicking down doors in the middle of the night. Sometimes they kick down the wrong door. Sometimes they encounter non-suspects at the right address. Should a mystified, innocent citizen react with shocked indignation or make the wrong move (most of us don’t know how to behave when faced with armed enforcers), he or she is likely to be shot, sometimes fatally. Other innocents have died on the spot of heart attacks. Nor do innocents get compensation for houses wrongfully ransacked and damaged. And yet, while courtrooms and jails are overwhelmed with petty users and small time dealers, any and every illegal substance is available on “the street” 24/7. In fact, our czar-directed narcs are so frustrated by their lack of success that they’re reduced to hounding doctors who prescribe medical marijuana and the desperate cancer patients who take it.
Creating czars is a poor idea for many reasons. First of all, since a czar is an absolute ruler, the czar model is, by definition, incompatible with democracy. The mere choice of the term “czar” is an embarrassment.
Secondly, as we have seen, czars don’t work. Systems of evasion inevitably develop, even when the czar in question is a ruthless dictator.
Finally, czars and control freaks of all kinds are vulnerable because they are rigid, impermeable to change, hostile to new ideas.
A recent book by James Surowiecki helps us to understand why excessive centralization of power is self-defeating, a lesson the “stay-on-message” Bush administration has clearly ignored. In The Wisdom of Crowds Surowiecki contends that the group often reaches better decisions and solves problems more effectively than the brightest people listening only to themselves. Yes, we have all attended brain deadening committee meetings, but we also know that brainstorming works. Similarly when those directly affected by a problem are invited to participate in solving it, the solution is likely to be more appropriate, more fully accepted and thus more successfully implemented than formulae devised from afar–eg, by some sort of know-it-all czar.
No one denies that the present Bush administration is a hermetic operation, unreceptive to jarring ideas and quick to eject failed parrots, the very epitome of a closed corporation. It prevents, as far as possible, the publication of even mildly dissonant tax-funded reports, then massages to the point of falsification the science, no less, of reports that can’t be kept secret.
Control works, for a while. But reality is brutal. Now this tone deaf administration is stumbling on all fronts–Iraq, disaster response, social policy, corruption. Czars and presidents who consider themselves above the law, you see, suffer from hubris. They know what they want and govern from the fringe, so they don’t look, listen or consult broadly, which prevents them from making adjustments to their defenses or policies until it’s too late. Like the poorly tended levees of New Orleans, they crumble. So far as the Bush administration is concerned, it’s probably too late for a dose of James Surowiecki to do any good.
Some critics of John Roberts, now confirmed as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, suggested that he was too deferential to the executive power during his brief tenure on the Appeals Court. However, his swearing in remarks suggest that he knows better. For the good of the Republic, I sincerely hope so. This country cannot prosper with a czar in the presidency.