This week BoingBoing reported on rogue archivist Carl Malamud’s address to the Gov 2.0 Summit 2010:

“Washington, D.C. has become a vast wasteland of computer contracts. The U.S. government spent $81.9 billion in 2010 on information technology and much of that money is misspent, crippling the ability of government to do the jobs with which it has been entrusted. How can we deal with a global environmental crisis or a renegade financial industry or rescue the vast works that lie fallow in our national libraries when the basic machinery of government does not work?”

This reminded me of a story they reported on last month, Washington Post’s two-year investigative journalism project, “Top Secret America,” whose thesis statement is:

“The government has built a national security and intelligence system so big, so complex and so hard to manage, no one really knows if it’s fulfilling its most important purpose: keeping its citizens safe.”

This is very interesting to me -  since we who do community organizing are constantly hearing state and local governments complain “we have no money” when we ask them to implement a new policy or legislation to address the housing crisis, employment, etc… at the same time as the intelligence/defense/infrastructure spending is skyrocketing… impoverishing Peter to pay Paul… if Paul is a bunch of shady corporations, and Peter is the people impacted by the U.S.’s history of racism and class warfare…

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