Category: Society

The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal Offer Radically Different Versions – But What Is At Stake?

The New York Times front page story yesterday on the investigation into the firing of several US attorneys makes a clear case for Rove’s involvement: “Thousands of pages of internal e-mail and once-secret Congressional testimony showed Tuesday that Karl Rove and other senior aides in the Bush White House played an earlier and more active role than was previously known in the 2006 firings of a number of United States attorneys.”

Contrast page four of yesterday’s Wall Street Journal: “House Democrats turned over to federal prosecutors thousands of investigative documents Tuesday, alleging they are evidence of impropriety by Karl Rove and other Bush White House officials in the controversial 2006 firing of nine U.S. attorneys.” The report went on to say: “It remains far from certain whether the 5,400 pages of emails and other documents released Tuesday contain information that would help prosecutors bring criminal charges against Mr. Rove.”

The Times followed up today with an editorial that underscored the seriousness of the evidence, and urging Congress to continue its investigation, while the Journal’s editorial page was silent.

This could simply be rival efforts to spin the story in different directions, though it is startling to have such discrepancies. Are there other, more hidden motives at work here?

Rove, of course, now works for The Journal as a columnist. So he is one of them. On the other hand, it looks as if reporters for The Times may have had some help from Congressional staffers in sifting through the “thousands of pages of internal email” to uncover the significant nuggets of damning information. This is more than spin. It looks like war.

I have no inside information — which would obviously be helpful in figuring out what is going on here. But I can read some of the signs of what is obscured, and what I am picking up is that something more important is at stake here than just new evidence. Is it about putting Rove in jail? Are there those in the Obama administration who might not want to go so far? Are there others at risk from the investigation, bigger fish than Rove? Could this be designed to distract the Rovian republicans from the health care debates?

Stay tuned.

What Do We Get From Punishing the Poor?

There must be a reason we are ratcheting up the arrests and fines for loitering, drinking in public, jaywalking, littering, and sleeping under bridges. Barbara Ehrenreich notes the trend in Sunday’s New York Times: “In defiance of all reason and compassion, the criminalization of poverty has actually been intensifying as the recession generates ever more poverty. So concludes a new study from the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty….”

It’s mean, but it is also destructive, leading to what she calls a “mad cycle of poverty and punishment.” Some have argued that those fines are designed to raise revenue for local communities that are suffering from declining tax revenues. But a moment’s reflection makes it clear that the cycle also generates more expense for the governments that have to prosecute and incarcerate the offenders.

Perhaps the goal is to get rid of them, to re-gentrify the streets and parks so ordinary citizens are not discomforted by the sight of the poor. That not doubt is part of the reason, but I think it is worse than that: these developments do not just cover over the problem – they actually punish the offenders. It is as if, collectively, we are taking out our pain and frustration on those least able to defend themselves against it. We can’t so easily get the bankers and managers responsible for the toxic securities that have plunged us into this financial disaster, so where is our anger to go?

Moreover, we can justify singling out the poor because in the land of opportunity – where every man has a chance to be successful – those who failed have only themselves to blame. And, to be sure, most of those who fail do blame themselves. Guilt, self-recrimination, self-loathing and blame – these are the underside of the American dream. So why not join in and persecute them all the more?

It takes a crusader like Barbara Ehrenreich to get us to see how irrational it all is.

The Weakness Of the Strong

“Lloyd Blankfein, the Chairman of Goldman Sachs now asserts that Goldman’s survival was never in doubt. Other Goldman executives reject the notion that the bank was rescued at all.” (See Thursday’s New York Times, “Despite Bailouts, Business as Usual at Goldman”)

What are we to make of these statements? Not only did Goldman accept TARP money from the federal government, but Blankfein was earlier quoted widely as saying that Goldman was threatened by the rising flood waters of the financial crisis. So why would Goldman deny it had been at risk?

There are two possibilities: either they say it because they want us to believe it, or they say it because they really do believe it themselves. That is, either they want to appear that they were stronger than they were, or they can’t accept that they weren’t.

Perhaps they think that by publicly asserting their invulnerability to crisis they can change public perception – and history. Brazenly denying something you don’t want others to believe can sometimes work. There are a lot of “birthers” out there, for example, who continue to insist that Obama was not born in the U.S., and therefore is not a legitimate President. As Charles Blow reminds us today: “A Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll released last Friday found that 28 percent of Republicans don’t believe that Barack Obama was born in the United States and another 30 percent are still ‘not sure.’ That’s nearly 6 out of 10 Republicans refusing to accept a basic truth.” Goldman may be relying on Republican gullibility.

The other possibility is that the Goldman executives really do believe it themselves. Maybe they now think that asking for TARP funds was merely a way of procuring extra insurance at a time when it seemed prudent to do so, if not essential. Perhaps now they regret having seemed to show a weakness in the face of a danger they retrospectively dismiss.

Frankly, I suspect that they are too smart to believe that a bald denial would convince the world; certainly they are too smart to care what the “birthers” believe. Occasionally, the “big lie” will carry the day, but the people they interact with are too smart themselves, too competitive, and too informed to be taken in by such a crude strategy.

The more likely explanation is that they are fooling themselves, saying what they have come really to believe. They are known to be brash and arrogant, in general, easily persuaded of their superior intelligence and trading savvy. Moreover, the amount of risk they have been taking lately suggests that they still relish danger – perhaps even more so now that they know how far the government will go to keep big banks from failing.

One of the major things we don’t know we know about ourselves is how far we will go to protect our self-esteem. Most of us think we are more intelligent and attractive than we are, and Goldman thinks it is more successful than anyone else. They are aided and abetted in this, of course, by a financial community in awe of its profits and a government that constantly recruits its top executives. Goldman may not only be too big to fail, but too proud to be wrong.

The Army Is Finding It a Key To Survival

Intuitions, hunches, and hints turn out to be critically important, the army is discovering in Iraq, as it struggles with ambiguous and constantly shifting battle lines. Bits of information usually neglected by the mind — often not even noticed — can make the difference between life and death when searching for I.E.D.s, the improvised explosive devices that are the major weapon of Iraqi insurgents.

A major front-page article in the New York Times last week describes how the US Army is drawing on the discoveries of neurobiologists that show how only a fraction of the information the mind takes in reaches consciousness: “As the brain tallies cues, big and small, consciously and not, it may send out an alarm before a person fully understands why.” The trick is to pay attention. (See “In Battle, Hunches Prove to be Valuable.”

A couple of points stand out about the process. The major clues are more emotional than cognitive, according to Dr. Antonio Damasio, director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California. “We understand emotions as practical action programs that work to solve a problem, often before we’re conscious of it. These processes are at work continually, in pilots, leaders of expeditions, parents, all of us.” So the clue is not “out there,” but “inside,” in the body that feels the information it often doesn’t know it knows. As a sergeant quoted by The Times put it: “My body suddenly got cooler; you know, that danger feeling.”

A second point is that to reach the state of attention in which the clues are registered, you have to be in a heightened state of alertness — but you can’t be under too much stress. If soldiers take up the stance of predator, they are more likely to be tuned in to their key internal signals; if they feel like the prey, they can be too tense to notice.

The army is open to such new ideas because so much is at stake. The lives of soldiers can be saved through improved understanding. But the underlying facts are not just relevant to the army. Athletes, businessmen, scientists, traders – anyone who is engaged in high stakes and competitive efforts – can profit from expanding the kinds of information they absorb and paying more attention to how they are absorbing it.

This is something of a switch for all of us. Our culture prefers hard data, and it likes to chunk those “facts” statistically. We tend to rely on computers more than our emotions. But it is becoming more and more clear that in taking that path we are losing out on much that we don’t know we already know.

What the Ethicist Suggests

Randy Cohen, The New York Times resident ethicist, suggested over the weekend that Prof. Gates should sue Sgt. Crowley, not for profit so much as for greater learning. Here is his argument: “A trial . . . would draw increased attention, stimulate more news stories, create more teachable moments and inspire more conversation about issues of race and class that are of genuine national importance.” (See “Should Henry Louis Gates Sip or Sue.”)

What a bad idea. A trial might do some of those things, but, much worse, it would also reinforce the public’s belief that this is essentially a matter of right and wrong, and that the complexities of the issues involved could be – and should be – resolved once and for all. I am not saying that Gates has no right to sue, or even no grievance to file. I am saying the issues deserve more reflection and association than a judgment in a court of law.

It strikes me that “The Ethicist” typically passes pronouncements on a regular basis for people who have a hard time accepting ambiguity. “Tell me what to do” or “Tell me what to think” are the questions he intrepidly sets out to answer.  But if we want to know what we don’t know we know, we can’t so easily settle for an answer — or accept someone else’s opinion.