Matt Taibbi is always an interesting voice when he appears on cable news and more than an interesting read. Last week or early this week he chose as his topic David Brooks.

It is a good read but I wish to do other things with it in this post.

I could have just lambasted rush 'the nazi' Limbaugh and wasted seven hundred words on that skunk. It is so easy to do so when Mediamatters.org is there with some poor staffer who has to listen to this piece of crap for three hours five days a week.

Now we all know that rush especially is fodder for the liberal fires. I mean this week alone he claimed:

Haiti does not deserve any money.

Obama is an idiot with regard to Mideast Peace Intitiatives.

Goes ahead and attacks the Jews: To some people, banker is a code word for Jewish; and guess who Obama is assaulting?  He's assaulting bankers.  He's assaulting money people.  And a lot of those people on Wall Street are Jewish. So I wonder if there's - if there's starting to be some buyer's remorse there."

Then he goes a head and claims to be the one voice brave enough to stand up to Obama and stop health care reform right in its tracks.  http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201001210034

Rather than go through the Brooks piece line by line, I figured I'd just excerpt a few bits here and there and provide the Cliff's Notes translation at the end. It's really sort of a masterpiece of cultural signaling -- if you live anywhere between 59th st and about 105th, you can hear the between-the-lines messages with dog-whistle clarity.  Some examples:

This is not a natural disaster story. This is a poverty story. It's a story about poorly constructed buildings, bad infrastructure and terrible public services. On Thursday, President Obama told the people of Haiti: "You will not be forsaken; you will not be forgotten." If he is going to remain faithful to that vow then he is going to have to use this tragedy as an occasion to rethink our approach to global poverty. He's going to have to acknowledge a few difficult truths.

The first of those truths is that we don't know how to use aid to reduce poverty. Over the past few decades, the world has spent trillions of dollars to generate growth in the developing world. The countries that have not received much aid, like China, have seen tremendous growth and tremendous poverty reductions. The countries that have received aid, like Haiti, have not.

In the recent anthology "What Works in Development?," a group of economists try to sort out what we've learned. The picture is grim. There are no policy levers that consistently correlate to increased growth. There is nearly zero correlation between how a developing economy does one decade and how it does the next. There is no consistently proven way to reduce corruption. Even improving governing institutions doesn't seem to produce the expected results.

The chastened tone of these essays is captured by the economist Abhijit Banerjee: "It is not clear to us that the best way to get growth is to do growth policy of any form. Perhaps making growth happen is ultimately beyond our control."

TRANSLATION: Don't bother giving any money, it doesn't do any good. And feeling guilty about not giving money doesn't do anyone any good either. In fact, you're probably helping by not doing anything

http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2010/01/18/translating-david-brooks-haiti/

Now if you are not familiar with the NYT's Brooks, this man claims to be a voice of reason. By the way I included this one and only take by Matt today to give you an idea where he went with this wonder in essaying by the elite conservative.

You see Brooks will lambaste idiots attacking My President for birth certificates and he will attack Sarah Palin's for ignorance. Which is all right and good. But he also anwers some questions for me.  My primary question is:

Why do sane people back conservative politicians knowing how those pols will vote? These sane people know that they will defend against the minimum wage. They also know that conservative will vote against reining in bastard corporate cheaters and against meaningful regulation.

We all know that the right will vote against anything that benefits 60-70% of our population; that they will mask certain legislation that pretends these types of benefits but the laws enacted will simply fill the corporate oligarchy's pockets. But I digress.

Forget Haiti for a second. Not in real life of course, but ignore the direct references to Haiti in Brooks' essay.  Take this sentence for instance:

There is nearly zero correlation between how a developing economy does one decade and how it does the next. There is no consistently proven way to reduce corruption.

See it goes back to arguments from the thirties to this new decade. Wasting your tax dollars on the poor and ignored has no correlation to reducing welfare fraud or helping people who need help.

Going back to Matayra's blog, you might say that you can give a poor person a fish dinner, but teach him how to fish and he will develop mercury poising.  Again, I digress.

Hercules said that the gods help those who help themselves. As Matt is pointing out here, the reasoning does an awful lot to alleviate guilt. So its better to go to the malls with your money and support the troops.

The second hard truth is that micro-aid is vital but insufficient. Given the failures of macrodevelopment, aid organizations often focus on microprojects. More than 10,000 organizations perform missions of this sort in Haiti. By some estimates, Haiti has more nongovernmental organizations per capita than any other place on earth. They are doing the Lord's work, especially these days, but even a blizzard of these efforts does not seem to add up to comprehensive change.

This second 'point' of Our Miss Brooks is interesting.  Usually, the conservative 'intellectual' is saying that government is the worst instrument for helping the poor and the weary masses. Here he actually lambasts private religious groups for wasting their time and money on people who do not count.  I have heard this argument right from Falwell's mouth (god damn his soul) and from Robertson's mouth (okay, god damn his soul also since Robertson has signed his own pact with the devil for a hundred million dollars)

I mean consider this. The same argument could be made against building a homeless shelter in Watts. You are not treating the real problem. The real people being intentional indigents who could just as easily live under bridges where they belong--which is okay as long as they do not hang out on Hollywood Blvd. or Times Square.

Third, it is time to put the thorny issue of culture at the center of efforts to tackle global poverty. Why is Haiti so poor? Well, it has a history of oppression, slavery and colonialism. But so does Barbados, and Barbados is doing pretty well. Haiti has endured ruthless dictators, corruption and foreign invasions. But so has the Dominican Republic, and the D.R. is in much better shape. Haiti and the Dominican Republic share the same island and the same basic environment, yet the border between the two societies offers one of the starkest contrasts on earth -- with trees and progress on one side, and deforestation and poverty and early death on the other.

As Lawrence E. Harrison explained in his book "The Central Liberal Truth," Haiti, like most of the world's poorest nations, suffers from a complex web of progress-resistant cultural influences. There is the influence of the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile. There are high levels of social mistrust. Responsibility is often not internalized. Child-rearing practices often involve neglect in the early years and harsh retribution when kids hit 9 or 10.
We're all supposed to politely respect each other's cultures. But some cultures are more progress-resistant than others, and a horrible tragedy was just exacerbated by one of them.

So many interesting points here.

First he picks up on Monahan's Culture of Poverty, a tome written in the 60's. I mean are we to believe that the Dominicans pray to the correct god and Haitians do not. DAMN VOODOO.

I recall a book written shortly after Senator Dan's book entitled The Poverty of Culture--referring to the concept of culture being used as a tool to keep the peasants from revolting.

Brooks is actually saying that these poor people do not give a damn about their own children--so why should we. This same argument is used against people of color as well as poor whites. I mean I hear the echo of many of Strom Thurmand's best speeches here.

Black men wont marry their women. That is the real problem. Never questioning the statistic that over 40% of 16-26 year old men of color are IN PRISON FOR CHRISSAKES.

Well they should have planned things better. Check out George Will's argument that people of color have AIDS because they like anal intercourse, sometime. I think he found that truth in Federalist Paper #123.

Fourth, it's time to promote locally led paternalism. In this country, we first tried to tackle poverty by throwing money at it, just as we did abroad. Then we tried microcommunity efforts, just as we did abroad. But the programs that really work involve intrusive paternalism.
These programs, like the Harlem Children's Zone and the No Excuses schools, are led by people who figure they don't understand all the factors that have contributed to poverty, but they don't care. They are going to replace parts of the local culture with a highly demanding, highly intensive culture of achievement -- involving everything from new child-rearing practices to stricter schools to better job performance.

It's time to take that approach abroad, too. It's time to find self-confident local leaders who will create No Excuses countercultures in places like Haiti, surrounding people -- maybe just in a neighborhood or a school -- with middle-class assumptions, an achievement ethos and tough, measurable demands.
The late political scientist Samuel P. Huntington used to acknowledge that cultural change is hard, but cultures do change after major traumas. This earthquake is certainly a trauma. The only question is whether the outside world continues with the same old, same old.

DOES THIS TYRANT UNDERSTAND THAT ALL FOUR OF HIS ARGUMENTS LED TO FIDEL CASTRO FOR CHRISSAKES?

Check out this link from 1849's blog. http://www.democracynow.org/2010/1/20/journalist_kim_ives_on_how_decades

This might give someone like Brooks, whom we all know is the most prescient as well as best read conservative, some pause. It is a damn wonder that a hero like Che or Fidel did not take over the entire country of Haiti.

People, I actually saw Michael Medved  (No, he is not the Russian President, his DNA just arises from the same source) the other day on CSPAN giving some speech describing the wonderful things corporations do.

And he used another trick that conservatives like. Well 70% of all Americans have at least one DVD player. My son bought me one for xmas. It cost $42.00. I saw the sticker. (Seany is like that, hahaha)

I cannot wait to hear that people are so busy masturbating to the movies in their DVD players that children no longer get proper attention.

All I can say is that I wish that Medved's parents and Brooks' parents had used proper birth control at the times of the duo's conception.