Surprised by the news about NSA surveillance? Read this book!

A review of Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State, by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

Note: This review first appeared here on September 11, 2011 (yes, 9/11/11). In view of the recent news about the NSA’s Prism program and other widespread and long-standing efforts to amass personal information about the American public, I’m posting it again. This superb book deserves a far wider audience than it received in 2011.

If you treasure your freedom as an American . . . if you’re concerned about how the U.S. Government spends your tax money . . . or if you simply want to understand how our country is managed . . . you owe it to yourself to read this brilliant book. Alternately mind-boggling and blood-curdling, Top Secret America is the most impressive piece of investigative journalism I’ve read in years. Dana Priest and Bill Arkin have written a book that, in a rational world, would usher in an orgy of housecleaning through the far reaches of the Pentagon, the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and every other department, agency, or office that pretends to be involved in strengthening our national security.

Even then — even if we somehow reined in the known alphabet agencies — we would only be scratching the surface. Here’s Priest writing about the work of her co-author: “After two years of investigating, Arkin had come up with a jaw-dropping 1,074 federal government organizations and nearly two thousand private companies involved with programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence in at least 17,000 locations across the United States — all of them working at the top secret classification level.” There is an additional three thousand “state and local organizations, each with its own counterterrorism responsibilities and jurisdictions.”

Perhaps there’s one saving grace in this brouhaha of activity. Priest again: “Post 9/11, government agencies annually published some 50,000 separate serialized intelligence reports under 1,500 titles, the classified equivalent of newspapers, magazines, and journals. Some were distributed daily; others came out once a week, monthly, or annually.” There is so much “information” generated by the counterterrorism establishment that senior managers frequently ignore it all and instead ask their aides to talk to people to find out what’s really meaningful.

Don’t be mollified by the belief that all this activity is carried out by designated intelligence agencies. The nation’s warriors have their own alphabet-soup of agencies, departments, and units devoted to the same ends. The Pentagon created a major new entity called the Northern Command headed by a four-star general (the military’s highest rank) to protect the “homeland.” However, the Northern Command has no troops of its own and, to take any action, must ask permission from the leaders of each state’s National Guard and other agencies on whom it depends for personnel.

Priest and Arkin clearly take a dim view of all this:

• Many, if not all, of the Federal Government’s most closely guarded secrets are vulnerable to theft through simple file-sharing software installed on 20 million computers.
• The Director of National Intelligence, a new position created in 2004 to coordinate the work of the 16 major U.S. intellgence agencies, possesses no power to do so and is frequently ignored by them. But his staff numbers in the thousands, and they hold forth from a new, 500,000-square foot office building.
• The degree of duplication in the national security world is chilling. “Each large organization [engaged in counterterrorism] started its own training centers, supply depots, and transportation infrastructure. Each agency and subagency manned its own unit for hiding the identities of undercover employees and for creating cover names and addresses for them and for their most sensitive projects. Each ecosystem developed a set of regional and local offices.”
• Duplication of effort runs so deep that there are three separate lists of “High Value Targets,” one each for the CIA, the Pentagon, and the super-secret Joint Special Operations Command (the people who killed Bin Laden). And “at least thirty-four major federal agencies and military commands, operating in sixteen U.S. cities, tracked the money flow to and from terrorist networks.”

The depth and quality of Priest and Arkin’s research is unexcelled, and their writing is brisk and easy to read. The book benefits from the straightforward, first-person approach Priest adopted. It’s written largely from her point of view, with Arkin’s contributions as a researcher noted in the third person.

Dana Priest has reported for the Washington Post for more than 20 years. She won the George Polk Award in 2005 for reporting on secret CIA detention facilities and the Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for uncovering black sites prisons. Her exposure of the deplorable conditions at Walter Reed Army Hospital helped the Washington Post win another Pulitzer in 2007. She deserves another Pulitzer for this illuminating book.

Bill Arkin served in U.S. Army intelligence in 1974 to 1978 and had worked as a consultant, political commentator, blogger, activist, and researcher for a number of progressive organizations before teaming up with Priest to write the widely-acclaimed series of Washington Post articles on which this book was based.

Drones, mercenaries, and targeted murder: the new strategy of the CIA

A review of The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth, by Mark Mazzetti

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

When Chou En-Lai, then #2 to Mao Tse-Tung, was asked for his perspective on the historical meaning of the French Revolution, he is said to have replied, “It’s too early to tell.”

As we’re beginning to understand now, George W. Bush engineered a revolution of a different sort in the misguided steps he took to “end terrorism” in the years following 9/11. The country’s military establishment gained trillions of dollars in new spending within a decade, and our intelligence agencies (16 of them at last count) mushroomed in size. Even more important, the White House profoundly changed the rules under which both the Pentagon and the CIA operated, layering onto an already bloated military-industrial complex additional hundreds of billions of dollars in contracts to private companies, enabling the Pentagon to operate virtually at will, even in countries where the U.S. was not at war, and shifting the CIA’s strategy from gathering intelligence to “enhanced interrogation” to killing suspected terrorists — all without making changes in the Pentagon’s procurement policies to reflect the passing of the Cold War more than two decades ago.

In The Way of the Knife, Mark Mazzetti sums up the situation as follows: “Prior to the attacks of September 11, the Pentagon did very little human spying, and the CIA was not officially permitted to kill. In the years since, each has done a great deal of both, and a military-intelligence complex has emerged to carry out the new American way of war.”

As Chou En-Lai would clearly agree, the long-term impact of these dramatic policy changes is impossible to see. Unmistakably, though, the values embodied in our Federal government changed under George W. Bush — and Barack Obama has continued on the same course into his second term, even stepping up the use of drones for targeted murder. This doesn’t bode well for a U.S. foreign and military policy supposedly grounded in humanistic assumptions.

Mark Mazzetti makes an important contribution to exploring the near-term consequences of one of these phenomena in The Way of the Knife, which dissects the massive shift in CIA priorities from the Clinton era to the Obama Administration. The “secret army” of the book’s subtitle is the CIA’s paramilitary capability that sends Navy SEALs, Army Rangers, or, increasingly, mercenaries on secret missions around the world and uses drones to murder terrorist suspects. Mazzetti focuses much of his attention on the dysfunctional American relationship with Pakistan and to a lesser degree on the secret wars in Yemen and Somalia. However, he makes it clear that the U.S. is now conducting undeclared wars in a great many more countries — and hiding that information from the American public. “The residents of the Oval Office have turned to covert action hundreds of times, and often have come to regret it,” Mazzetti writes. “But memories are short, new presidents arrive at the White House every four or eight years, and a familiar pattern played out over the second half of the twentieth century: presidential approval of aggressive CIA operations . . . “

In touching on the highlights of the CIA’s history from its founding after World War II to the present, Mazzetti reveals the agency’s schizophrenic attitude toward the use of calculated murder in its operations.

For many years, especially under the directorship of Allen Dulles in the 1950s, the CIA was little more than a reincarnation of its predecessor (where Dulles got his start), the OSS of “Wild Bill” Donovan. As we now know, the CIA was involved in overthrowing governments (Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Chile in 1973, probably among others) and in frequent attempts to assassinate heads of state, including Patrice Lumumba (Congo), Fidel Castro (Cuba), Nho Dinh Diem (South Vietnam), and Salvador Allende (Chile). When all this nefarious activity came to light in the 1970s in the landmark Senate hearings headed by Senator Frank Church, then-President Gerald Ford outlawed assassination and the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, which included most of the agency’s bad boys, was shackled by unsympathetic new directors named to clean up the mess.

By 2001, the OSS-inspired use of paramilitary operations and targeted killing that had dominated the CIA in its early years was ancient history to the new generation who had already advanced into positions of leadership. The radical course-shift demanded by the Bush White House turned the agency upside down again. And the dramatic expansion of the drone war by CIA director Leon Panetta (“the most influential CIA director since William Casey during the Reagan administration”) completed the transition of the agency into a paramilitary force.

The Way of the Knife is thoroughly researched and skillfully written by a Pulitzer-winning reporter for the New York Times. The book’s highlights include the protracted tales of several colorful figures caught up in the unfolding of the secret wars, including former top CIA official Dewey Clarridge, a Virginia horsewoman named Michele Ballarin, and several senior Pakistani intelligence operatives. If you’re interested in the ups and downs of the U.S. intelligence establishment, you’ll find this book just not essential reading but entertaining as well.

I’ve read and reviewed a fair number of other books on closely related topics in recent years. Among these are Wild Bill Donovan: The Spymaster Who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage by Douglas Waller here, Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State, by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin here, Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America’s Secret Campaign Asainst Al Qaeda, by Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker here, and The Longest War: Inside the Enduring Conflict Between America and Al-Qaeda, by Peter L. Bergen here. Top Secret America is the most dramatic and most important of this lot.

The Tea Party may not be what you think

A review of Steep: The Precipitous Rise of the Tea Party, by Lawrence Rosenthal and Christine Trost

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

If you know nothing about the Tea Party other than what you’ve picked up from the daily news and a magazine article here and there, chances are excellent that you’ll learn a great deal from reading Steep. Here are just a few of the insights I gained from this superb collection of scholarly articles that examine the Tea Party from the front, the back, upside down, and sideways:

• There is, really, no such thing as “The Tea Party.” The term encompasses thousands of organizations at the national, statewide, and local levels that at any given time may well be found squabbling with one another about ideology, tactics, or just plain personality differences. I knew about the proliferation of groups but not about the diversity of views among them.
• The Tea Party phenomenon first surfaced less than a month after Barack Obama’s inauguration as President in 2009 — yes, less than four years ago — as what one scholar calls a “test marketing” campaign backed by money from the Koch Brothers and mainstream Republican operatives such as former Congressman Dick Armey, which we all knew very well at the time. However, the movement spawned by this intentional investment in destabilizing the fledgling Obama Administration grew so quickly and with such spontaneity that its original backers soon lost control. Whatever else it might be, the Tea Party is a grassroots phenomenon.
• Unlike the Christian Right before it, the Tea Party brought few new voters into the Republican column. As several of the authors in Steep make clear from their studies of a wide variety of poll results, the Tea Party is populated largely by Right-Wing Republicans who usually vote, anyway. (They also tend to be white males at or nearing retirement age.) The Tea Party brought passion to the Republican grassroots base, providing the necessary motivation to draw more foot-soldiers to the conservative cause.
• The old John Birch Society, which we all thought had gone the way of the Cult of Isis in the 1960s after William F. Buckley, Jr. consigned it to purgatory, somehow managed to resuscitate itself and become engaged in Tea Party activities. So did former leaders of the White Citizens Councils, the militia movement, and other assorted cranks, kooks, and eccentrics and the delusions they brought with them. Since nearly one-half (44%) of Tea Party adherents professed to believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim and was not born in the United States, using the term delusional is not out of line.

The most intriguing chapter in Steep is University of Michigan political science and women’s studies professor Lisa Disch’s, in which she “advances a counterintuitive argument: The Tea Party movement is sparked, in part, by the threat its supporters perceive to their share in two key programs of the liberal welfare state [i.e., Social Security and Medicare]. Tea Party politics is conservative, but its supporters’ material commitments and even aspects of their rhetoric place them in a liberal genealogy.” Disch argues that, during its first two decades, Social Security was explicitly racialized — farmworkers and domestic workers were specifically excluded from benefits (and guess who they meant by that!) — and that for decades afterward Social Security was seen as largely a benefit to white people, even after the coverage was broadened. “This makes Tea Party mobilization a ‘white citizenship’ movement: action in defense of material benefits that confer ‘racial standing’ in a polity that purports to deny precisely that — special standing based on race . . .  [T]he Tea Party movement belongs to liberal America even as Tea Party rhetoric denounces liberalism and liberals denounce Tea Partiers.”

Since I’m not bound by the strictures of academic “objectivity” (whatever that is), I can sum up all this information with my own conclusion: The Tea Party is the latest and the most extreme expression of the Right-Wing Republican movement that has been growing since its inception in the 1940s and 1950s in McCarthyite anti-Communism, the John Birch Society, and Southern opposition to civil rights, and in the backlash to the New Left, feminism, and the anti-war movement. Though the Tea Party is heterogeneous in many ways, and its focus nationally has been on advancing the Republican agenda of small government and rolling back taxes, the overwhelming majority of its adherents also embrace the social politics of the Christian Right (anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-women’s rights) and the suppressed but all too real racial resentment that has been the centerpiece of the Republican Party’s Southern Strategy since the days of Richard Nixon.  

As I write this, however, I wonder whether anyone but historians and political scientists will care much about the Tea Party five years, or even a year, from now. It remains to be seen what impact the Republican losses of 2012 will have on the spirit and the cohesion of the Tea Party.

Steep is a product of the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies at the University of California’s flagship campus, edited by Lawrence Rosenthal and Christine Trost, the Center’s director and associate director, respectively. More power to them!

A glorious new novel from Michael Chabon, set in my neighborhood

A review of Telegraph Avenue, by Michael Chabon

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

If you’re thinking that this is the story of Berkeley in the 60s, when Telegraph Avenue entered the national consciousness with marijuana and teargas, you’ll soon find that your expectations are off by several decades and a couple of miles. Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue is set farther south, on a less familiar stretch of the eponymous street that straddles South Berkeley and North Oakland, and the events in the book transpire in 2004, even though they have roots in the 70s.

The most notable aspect of this comic novel is Chabon’s showmanship with words, which cascade down the page in glorious profusion, evoking image after image. I’ve never before seen so many similes and metaphors crammed onto a single page, but again and again — and Chabon isn’t showing off, he’s conveying an intense reality in spectacular Technicolor and 3-D. (Well, maybe he was showing off a little with one run-on sentence, a whole chapter, that rivals anything in Faulkner or Joyce.) Though Telegraph Avenue is packed with humor, I found myself marveling at the language instead of laughing, and I come away from reading the book with vivid images of Chabon’s unforgettable characters and a smile on my face rather than memories of laughing out loud.

The themes in Telegraph Avenue include birth and death, loss and betrayal, the glories of fatherhood, teenage angst, the continuing challenges of interracial relationships, and the intensely present power of music in the lives of so many Americans. Chabon lays bare these themes in the lives of four forty-something residents of the Telegraph Avenue corridor: two Caucasians, Nat Jaffe (jazz fanatic and co-owner of Brokeland Records, which sells old vinyl) and his wife Aviva Roth-Jaffe (dean of Berkeley midwives); and two African-Americans, the on-again off-again couple of Archy Stallings (co-owner of Brokeland Records) and Gwen Shanks (Aviva’s partner in Berkeley Birth Partners). In the ups and downs (mostly downs) of these four interconnected lives, and a full cast of extraordinary secondary characters who surround them (including Barack Obama as a State Senator), Chabon explores his themes with a sure hand.

Telegraph Avenue works for me on every level. Once again, Pulitzer-Prize-winner Michael Chabon has proven himself to be one of the most extraordinary storytellers and wordsmiths at work on Planet Earth today.

Chabon’s work has been enthusiastically received from the very start of his career with The Mysteries of Pittsburgh in 1988. His previous novels also include The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), The Yiddish Policeman’s Union (2007). Of Chabon’s seven novels, I’ve now read those three as well as Telegraph Avenue, and all were outstanding. And I’m proud to say that Michael Chabon is my landsman (as my grandfathers would say), a fellow Berkeleyite.

The best books I’ve read so far this year

You have to wait until December to see a list of “best books” in The New York Times Book Review, but right here in this space you can see my list for the first six months of 2012! Of course, it’s a short list, and quite specialized, since there are lots of categories of writing that hold no interest for me. And I don’t limit myself to books that were published after January 1, 2012 (though most were). After all, I’m not The New York Times. But, for what it is, here goes, in no particular order . . . with links to my reviews in this blog.

Nonfiction

The Passage of Power, by Robert A. Caro. Volume 4 in The Years of Lyndon Johnson. Robert Caro’s masterful portrait of Lyndon Johnson’s early days as President.

Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power, by David E. Sanger. Barack Obama’s foreign and military policy viewed from the inside.

The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets That Change the World, by John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan. The power of unreasonable people, and how they’re changing the world.

The Self-Made Myth, and the Truth About How Government Helps Individuals and Businesses Succeed, by Brian Miller and Mike Lapham. A brilliant contribution to the public debate about politics and the economy.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander. One of the most important books published in English so far this century.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, by Katherine Boo. A searing look at poverty in India that reads like a novel.

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World, by Daniel Yergin. Daniel Yergin’s superb new book: a brilliant survey of energy issues.

Infinite Vision: How Aravind Became the World’s Greatest Business Case for Compassion, by Pavithra Mehta and Suchitra Shenoy. Aravind: A social enterprise with scale and impact to match Grameen Bank.

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann. Astonishing new evidence about the Americas before Columbus.

Trade Fiction

They Eat Puppies, Don’t They?, by Christopher Buckley. Washington and Beijing get what they deserve in this satirical novel of politics and diplomacy today.

The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi. One of the best science fiction novels I’ve ever read.

The Orphan Master’s Son, by Adam Johnson. An unsparing tale of life in the living hell of North Korea.

Incendiary, by Chris Cleave. A wrenching portrait of the human cost of terrorism.

The Fear Index, by Robert Harris. A taut thriller about the world of multibillion-dollar hedge funds.

A Theory of Small Earthquakes, by Meredith Maran. A first novel from a brilliant nonfiction writer.

Mysteries and Thrillers

Mission to Paris, by Alan Furst. A truly superior novel of espionage at the dawn of World War II.

The Midnight House, by Alex Berenson. The Pentagon and the CIA take a lot of punishment in this novel of rendition and torture.

Harbor Nocturne, by Joseph Wambaugh. Joseph Wambaugh’s latest paints Los Angeles in many clashing colors.

The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection, by Alexander McCall Smith. An exceptional tale of Botswana’s #1 Ladies’ Detective Agency.

Buried Secrets, by Joseph Finder. A thriller that explores the intersection of high finance and high crime.

The Ghosts of Belfast, by Stuart Neville. A grim story of war and betrayal in Northern Ireland.

The Bridge of Sighs, by Olen Steinhauer. A fully satisfying murder mystery set in post-war Europe.

Breakdown, by Sara Paretsky. Sara Paretsky’s latest detective story hits home.

Believing the Lie, by Elizabeth George. Elizabeth George’s latest Inspector Lynley novel, unpredictable as always.

The Silent Oligarch, by Chris Morgan Jones. A refreshingly original new thriller that explores international intrigue with minimal violence.

Agent 6, by Tom Rob Smith. A superb suspense novel set in the USSR, Afghanistan, and the U.S.

Barack Obama’s foreign and military policy viewed from the inside

A review of Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power, by David E. Sanger

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

When I voted for Barack Obama in 2008, I expected a great deal from his Presidency — much too much, it’s clear in hindsight. What I didn’t expect was that as President he would exercise U.S. military power almost as aggressively as George W. Bush. As the subtitle of this excellent book hints so broadly, the apparently anti-war candidate Obama quickly morphed in office into a resolute, hands-on Commander in Chief.

In his campaign, Obama had “promised to restore traditional American ‘engagement’ by talking and listening to America’s most troubling adversaries and reluctant partners. His supporters saw a welcome turn away from the ‘with us or against us’ black-and-whites of the Bush years. His critics saw naivete and softness. Both have been surprised. This is a book about those surprises.”

In practice, Obama learned that his brand of engagement yielded little more than vitriolic rhetoric from Iranian mullahs, North Korean generals, and the Pakistani military. What has proved far more effective are the actions he could take consistent with his more sophisticated view of American power: a massive increase in drone attacks in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia; the country’s first-ever (known) use of cyberwarfare in a targeted attack on Iran’s nuclear program, along with increasingly brutal sanctions on the country and its government; the ever-growing use of Special Forces in operations such as the murder of Osama bin Laden; and a pronounced “pivot” from Europe to Asia in combating the rise of China, as exemplified by the opening of a new military base in Australia. While ending U.S. participation in our “war of choice” in Iraq and beginning the pullout from Afghanistan, President Obama has sharply stepped up our use of the weapons of war in a growing number of undeclared and sometimes undercover hostilities.

Make no mistake about it: Barack Obama has made an idelible mark on the U.S. military and intelligence services, sharpening their missions and reshaping their priorities, and all while forcing them to live within more limited means. And anyone who might be tempted to think that Obama acted this way out of weakness needs to understand that great extent to which he made decisions at crucial times in the face of opposition from nearly all those around him — in giving the green light to the Navy SEAL mission to kill bin Laden, and in deciding to ask Hosni Mubarak to resign. As Sanger writes, “‘He personally basically overrode just about his entire government,’ said one official in the room, noting that Gates and Clinton were still actively opposed, ‘Look, this is what I’m going to do,’ Obama said, according to notes of the meeting. ‘I’m going to call [Mubarak] now.'”

All this, and more, comes to light in the five sections that form the backbone of this book. Sanger writes about each of the leading hotspots in turn: Afghanistan and Pakistan; Iran; Egypt; China and North Korea. This is truly world-class reporting, informed by sources at the very highest levels of the U.S. government.

Sanger concludes, “It is too early to know if the emerging Obama Doctrine — a lighter footprint around the world, and a reliance on coalitions to deal with global problems that do not directly threaten American security — will prove a lasting formula. His effort at ‘rebalancing’ away from the quagmires in the Middle East toward the continent of greatest promise in the future — Asia — was long overdue. But it is a change of emphasis more than a change of direction. Obama proved her was adaptable to new realities, what James Fallows rightly called ‘the main trait we can hope for in a president.'”

If you’ve ever wondered what it might be like to be a 30-year veteran of The New York Times and serve as its Chief Washington Correspondent, read this extraordinary book with an eye on those sources, both named and anonymous, and their revelations, which pop up seemingly on every page. You’ll see, then, how very deeply embedded in the fabric of official Washington is this one newspaper — a newspaper that serves as the source of an extraordinary proportion of the stories that make their way onto evening news broadcasts and the front pages of other papers around the world. In laying bare the pattern of Barack Obama’s surprisingly aggressive use of military power, Confront and Conceal is just as effective in revealing David Sanger’s unusually high-level access at the White House, the CIA, and the Pentagon.

Van Jones: Making sense of the Tea Party, the Occupy Movement, and Barack Obama’s shift from candidate to President

A review of Rebuild the Dream, by Van Jones

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

I always knew Van Jones was smart, but I didn’t know just how smart until I read Rebuild the Dream. In recent years, Jones has emerged as one of the most charismatic and outspoken younger leaders of our time. This book proves he has also become one of the most insightful, too.

We live at a time when far too few of us can make sense of what’s happening around us. With the incessant noise of the news media, our full immersion online from dawn to dusk, and the endless distractions of entertainment reflecting a thousand subcultures, it’s all too easy to just lie back and let it all happen, convincing ourselves that no one could possibly perceive meaningful patterns in this donnybrook we call contemporary American life. Jones does, though.

In Rebuild the Dream, he asks — and answers — three questions:

• “What can Americans who want to fix the system learn from the movement for hope and change that united around Barack Obama in 2008 — and from its collapse after he entered the White House?
• “What can we learn from the Tea Party’s equally impressive capture of the national debate in 2009 — and its successful pivot to electoral politics in 2010?”
• And what can we learn from the startling success of Occupy Wall Street in elevating economic inequality to the top of the political agenda in 2011 — and of its failure to translate that success into the electoral arena?

Rebuild the Dream has been greeted as a call to arms to progressives, an exhortation to reenergize ourselves for the November 2012 elections. That’s true, so far as it goes. But this book is far more valuable for its clear-eyed analysis of today’s political scene. Van Jones has devised a simple analytical framework through which we can see — clearly — the similarities and differences among the Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party movements and the 2008 Obama campaign and its aftermath. If Rebuild the Dream is useful as a guidebook for activists determined to swing the pendulum back to the left, in the long run it will be an even better resource for historians and social scientists attempting to understand this tumultuous era in American history.

However, simply as a call to arms, Rebuild the Dream is compelling: “The time has come to turn things right side up again and declare that America’s honest, hard-working middle class is too big to fail. The aspirations of our low-income, struggling, and marginalized communities are too big and important to fail . . .  The American Dream itself is too big to fail.”

I’ve known Van Jones for more than a decade, first through the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, which he founded in Oakland in the mid-1990s, and later through Social Venture Network, of which we we were both members. Van also co-founded the online activist organization Color of Change and later, reflecting his turn to environmental activism and his passionate belief that the environment and the economy both benefit hugely by creating “Green Jobs,” he founded Green for All. Along the way, he also managed to write a New York Times-bestselling book, The Green Collar Economy. Having accomplished all this, however, Jones is nonetheless best-known for his six-month stay in the White House as Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise, and Innovation to President Obama.

It is clearly no coincidence that Color of Change is credited with triggering the successful boycott of Glenn Beck’s hysterical outbursts on Fox News that was responsible for his leaving the network, and that Beck in turn was a central figure in the Right-Wing smear campaign that drove Jones out of his job in the White House.

Jones is a Yale-educated attorney who was born and raised in Tennessee. He is African-American. He is also a very good person to have as a friend. You’ll find an extensive biography of Van Jones here.

The New Jim Crow: One of the most important books published in English so far this century

A review of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

These are facts:

• The number of Americans with criminal records is approximately 65 million.
• The highest incidence of the use and sale of illegal drugs is found in communities characterized as White.
• The percentage of federal prisoners convicted of violent crimes is 7.9%.
• The total number of Americans now in prisons and jails or on probation or parole is 7.4 million.
• The greatest increase in funding for the War on Drugs took place during the Administration of Bill Clinton.

How many of those facts were you aware of before reading this post?

If you can honestly say you knew them all, go to the head of the class. If you’re like me, however, chances are you found at least some of them to be surprising — despite the fact that I think of myself as generally well informed. And if you now read Michelle Alexander’s groundbreaking book, The New Jim Crow, you’ll come across a never-ending list of surprises about our country’s vaunted criminal justice system.

For example, “The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid.” (OK, this is one I already knew. But it never ceases to shock me.) In this extraordinary book, Prof. Alexander explains how this came about largely as a result of the so-called War on Drugs; how the country’s criminal justice system has been warped to the point of nonrecognition by a series of Presidential actions, Congressional legislation, and Supreme Court decisions; how the system of arrests, prosecution, conviction, and sentencing really works now; and the catastrophic consequences of this sequence of events for our cities, our African-American and Latino communities, and ourselves. The New Jim Crow is one of the most important books published in the English language in a great many years, because it dispels so many of our cherished illusions and takes no prisoners in naming those responsible or in proposing remedies.

For starters, “The United States now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, dwarfing the rates of nearly every developed country, even surpassing those in highly repressive regimes like Russia, China, and Iran.” The number of prisoners of African-American and Latino descent is wildly out of proportion to their share of the general population, and the War on Drugs accounts for the lion’s share of the difference. Despite the fact that the incidence of drug use and drug sales are about the same among whites as they are among people of color, “In some states, black men have been admitted to prison on drug charges at rates twenty to fifty times greater than those of white men.”

Alexander demonstrates, step by careful step, how this happened, starting in 1982 with Ronald Reagan’s announcement of the War on Drugs. First, legislation proposed and passed by the same politicians (Democrats as well as Republicans) who opposed the civil rights movement) elevated drug offenses far above their previous levels — beginning three years before the introduction of crack cocaine and a nationwide increase in drug use. Next, state and local police have been granted significant financial incentives to arrest large numbers of drug users (not, as TV and film presentations might suggest, “drug kingpins”) and insulated from charges of racism in targeting drug use in inner cities rather than in neighborhoods largely populated by whites. Prosecutors as well as police have been given free rein by a series of Supreme Court decisions to operate as they will, in the absence of any legal representation for the accused, and to justify their actions (such as excluding blacks or Latinos from juries or overcharging to force plea-bargain confessions) using even completely absurd or “silly” reasons. (Don’t believe this? Read the book!) “Almost no one ever goes to trial. Nearly all criminal cases are resolved through plea bargaining.” Those few who do go on trial frequently face all-white juries and sentencing rules hemmed in by federal legislation that requires judges to impose the harshest possible sentences — even a life sentence for a first-time offense!

Simply possessing modest amounts of marijuana has turned millions of Americans into felons serving years in federal penitentiaries, barred for life from voting or serving on juries, shamed by their families, forced to pay fees for their own parole or probation (including drug tests), excluded from public housing, and discriminated against by most employers. Is it any wonder so many return to prison?

Alexander’s thesis is brutally simple: “Like Jim Crow (and slavery), mass incarceration operates as a tightly networked system of laws, policies, customs, and institutions that operate collectively to ensure the subordinate status of a group defined largely by race.” And we all pay the price.

Plumbing the depths of Republican pathology

A review of Republican Gomorra: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party, by Max Blumenthal

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

Not a day goes by that national news reports don’t prominently feature the “Tea Party,” the creation of former Republican Congressioinal leader Dick Armey and the wealthy Right-Wing donors behind him. Those of us who disagree with the fundamental tenets of this made-to-order “grassroots movement” — and that’s a huge majority of the American people — tend to gnash our teeth, roll our eyes, and perform other uncomfortable physical acts whenever we learn about some new outrage from this motley collection of dopes and lunatics.

It wasn’t always so, though. Remember the “Religious Right?”

Barely two years ago a young, award-winning journalist and blogger named Max Blumenthal — son of Sidney Blumenthal, late of the Clinton White House — published an examination of this earlier incarnation of Republican extremism. His book, Republican Gomorra, was a New York Times bestseller and was warmly welcomed by readers who had scratched their heads in consternation over the peculiar beliefs and irrational antics of this seemingly all-powerful movement as it moved to gain dominance in the Republican Party. Blumenthal’s psychosocial analysis, grounded in the work of Erich Fromm, delves deeply into the psyches of many of the movement’s leaders, most notably James Dobson of Focus on the Family and Rick Warren (yes, the Rick Warren who gave the invocation at Barack Obama’s inauguration). .

Now, don’t make the mistake of confusing the Religious Right with the Tea Party, which are uncomfortable bedfellows and mutually inconsistent in many key ways. For example, it was Dobson and his allies who were behind the ouster of Dick Armey from his leadership post on Capitol Hill, finding that the Congressman, whose priorities revolve around federal spending, was not sufficiently supportive of the social agenda of the Religious Right.

Blumenthal, bowing to Erich Fromm, likens the Religious Right to the authoritarian movements that seized control in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. Dissecting the ideology and public practices of this allegedly “Christian” movement (which is hardly Christian in any meaningful way, so far as I can see), Blumenthal finds that its beliefs boil down to beating children into submission when young so that they will be obedient followers of the movement’s father figures as they get older. Not surprisingly, as Fromm so convincingly showed, this practice leads to numerous pathologies. It helps to explain why the Republican Party has been upended by so many lurid sex scandals in recent years. And if you think for one minute that this analysis is exaggerated, check out Dobson’s books (Dare to Discipline, The Strong-Willed Child).

This is a lively and fascinating book based on five years of interviews with the luminaries of the Religious Right, and it’s worth reading today despite the fact that its narrative ends with the election of Barack Obama. The Religious Right may no longer hog the headlines, but there’s no mistaking its continuing hold on so many of the levers of power.

Counterstrike: Essential reading to understand the U.S. war in Afghanistan and Pakistan

A review of Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America’s Secret Campaign Asainst Al Qaeda, by Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker

@@@ (3 out of 5)

One of democracy’s most remarkable characteristics is the sheer volume of closely guarded information that can be reported and published without resulting in jail time or torture for the authors. Counterstrike, a remarkable bit of longitudinal reporting by two veterans of the New York Times, brings to light a host of insights and behind-the-scene details about America’s decade-long campaign against Al Qaeda and its affiliates and imitators.

The principal theme of Counterstrike is how in the course of the past decade “the government’s force of professional counterterrorism analysts has grown from a group small enough to know each other’s phone numbers to a vast army linked by supercomputers processing thousands of bits of data in nanoseconds.” And, by no means incidentally, spending tens of billions of dollars in the process.

Schmitt and Shanker reveal without editorial comment the strong contrast between the management styles of our last two Presidents: “While Bush showed an apetite for tactical and operational details — [for example,] the number of spies working against Al Qaeda in Pakistan . . . — Obama wanted to understand the strategic nature of the threat and demanded to know when his personal orders were required to break through resistance across the intelligence and security community to make things work at the tactical and operational level.” The bureaucratic squabbles, most notably during the tenure of Secretary of Defense Runsfeld, are another theme that stands out.

However, the overarching theme of Counterstrike is the gradual maturation of American counterterrorist policy in the opening decade of the 21st Century, shifting gradually from one bent simply on using brute force to kill or capture terrorists to a much more sophisticated and broad-based policy of deterrence drawn from the playbook of the Cold War. As Scmitt and Shanker report, “Deterrence — updated, expanded, even redefined — is now official American policy for countering Al Qaeda and its affiliated terrorist organizations.”

At first blush, deterrence might seem futile against an enemy willing, even eager, to die for his beliefs. However, as Schmitt and Shanker reveal, there is a wide range of tactics available to delay or prevent terrorist attacks. Among these are multi-faceted techniques such as cyberwarfare to disrupt the communications and financial transactions of the Al Qaeda network and creative actions by local CIA or military officers. (In the most amusing of the latter, American officers first set high bounty prices on Al Qaeda commanders, then lowered them to imply that the terrorists’ importance had declined; soon, to prove their continuing importance, the terrorists revealed their locations by striking out against the Americans in impulsive and foolhardy ways. The result is that they were then either killed or captured.)

So, there is considerable substance in Counterstrike. The discussion of how deterrence policy evolved into the U.S. strategy against Al Qaeda is especially illuminating. Unfortunately, the structure and writing style don’t enhance the reader’s experience. The book is slow going, consisting largely of one long expository paragraph after another, relieved only by lengthy quotes from some of the hundreds of individuals the authors interviewed. Schmitt and Shanker might have benefited from a few lessons in nonfiction writing by a master of the craft such as Tracy Kidder, Erik Larson, or even Bob Woodward.