Marc J. Dunkelman

You know, there isn't enough relief in big urban centers.

And so what you want to do is create these big centralized bureaucracies that are going to fix these problems.

So, you know, there's a guy named Mike Strauss who runs the

I think it's Mike Strauss who runs the Bureau of reclamation.

Like it's a bureaucracy that's inside the department of interior.

Like most Americans who aren't in agricultural places that depend on dams have never heard of that bureaucracy.

Um, uh, he, he's succeeded by a guy named, I think Floyd Domini in the, you know, in the 1950s and sixties.

Um, uh,

They are figures who are a piece like Robert Moses, who runs the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, and David Lilienthal, who runs the TVA, and Austin Tobin, who runs the Port Authority.

in New York City.

And, you know, these sort of really powerful figures are just sort of run across America, and they are generally revered.

Now, they wear, you know, they wear charcoal suits and fedoras, and they cross their arms like this, and they frown like the world, you know, like they hold the weight of the world.

But generally Americans, having seen what George Marshall did to defeat, you know,

the Nazis and right to just to make the world safe, like generally revered these figures.

Um, and like they are, they are willing to accept their wisdom.

And then something happens in the sixties and seventies.

And, uh, it turns out we discover that like these guys aren't, you know, the wise, uh,

sages that we presume them to be in all circumstances that they threw DDT on our crops and that caused birth defects that they, uh, they let, you know, pollution flow into the Cuyahoga river.

So it's the lid on fire that they did urban renewal and they did interstate programs that destroyed minority neighborhoods and that they sent us into Vietnam or Robert McNamara.

Like, so by the time it gets to the seventies, like these guys are like, uh,