2001 – Jonathan Rowe

Our Factory of Need

The beliefs we most need to question are generally the ones we don’t notice, because they are so embedded in the drone of daily life. Wars and disasters tend to have unforeseen consequences for this very reason. They disrupt the drone, and so prompt questions that wouldn’t arise otherwise.

No beliefs are more entrenched in the United States than those regarding the economy. A couple of weeks ago I saw a banner headline in the local paper. “San Francisco Retailers’ Plea: Shop ‘Til You Drop,” it said. “Economy needs holiday spending.”

Clotheslines

My friend John Francis maintains that we must be the change we want to see. When he witnessed an oil spill in San Francisco Bay in the early 1970s, he swore off motorized transit for almost 20 years. When he saw people spouting opinions but not listening, he stopped talking, too, so that he could learn to listen better.

John walked and listened all the way across the United States, and down most of South America as well. He observed how changes in himself rippled out into his surroundings. Since he wasn’t talking, family and friends had to communicate by letter – a small step, as it were, for literacy. Since he walked everywhere, others had to adjust their pace to his. Life slowed down where John went. So, when we first spoke about recent events, it was not surprising that John didn’t dwell on feckless jingoism and the rest. Instead, the talk turned to clotheslines.

Bush’s War on Children

Washington is awash these days with avowals of concern for children, especially on the Republican side. Whatever the issue, it’s really about the kids they say. President Bush referred to children 11 times in a single speech — on tax cuts no less. In a speech on federal money for churches — excuse us, “faith based initiatives” — the count was up to 35 (not counting “kids” and the like.)

“The values of our children must be a priority of our nation,” Bush said in a budget speech in March. But exactly what values was the President referring to? He gave the impression it was the traditional ones of hard work, abstemiousness and the rest. But look more closely at the administration, and a different meaning emerges.

Is the Corporation Obsolete?

Colossus: How the Corporation Changed America Ed. Jack Betty
Book Review

Washington Monthly
July 1, 2001
By Jonathan Rowe

It is a sign of immersion that the thing immersed doesn’t notice. The fish, famously, is not aware of water. Dick Cheney and George W. Bush cannot see past their allegiance to the oil industry because it’s all they know–their water.

So it is with the corporation. Over the last century and a half, the corporation has become the dominant institution of American life, the “envelope of existence,” as one writer put it. It defines work, entertainment, politics, transportation, the way people think about their bodies and the world. Increasingly it dominates the cognitive environment of daily life. For all the kvetching about government, the corporation permeates our lives in much more basic ways.

The Hidden Commons

My wife grew up in what western experts call, not without condescension, a “developing” country. The social life of her village revolved largely around a tree. People gathered there in the evening to visit, tell stories, just pass the time. Some of my wife’s warmest childhood memories are of playing hide and seek late into the evening while the parents chatted under the tree — or on a neighbor’s porch, which was another version of the same thing.

The tree was more than a quaint meeting place. It was a productive asset — an economic asset in the root sense of that word. It produced a bonding of neighbors, an information network, an activity center for kids who ran and played and invented their own games. It provided a bridge between generations. Older people could be part of the flow of daily life, and children got to experience something scarce in the US today — an unstructured and noncompetitive setting in which their parents are close at hand. In the US we spend hundreds of billions of dollars on everything from community centers to kiddie videos to try to achieve those results, with great inefficiency and often much less positive effect.

A Misguided Quest for ‘Productivity’

A nation measures what it values, and the way it measures goes far to determine where it goes. We need to pause often, therefore, and consider the litany of economic statistics the government and media parade before our eyes. These just might hold hidden agendas and paths that, if articulated, we might choose to avoid.

An example came a month or so ago with the release of the latest “productivity” statistics from Washington. It seems the nation’s productivity fell by a whole tenth of a percent (although it was revised later). The news prompted hand-wringing and dark prognostication over impending economic decline. “Productivity drop alarms analysts,” the headline in my local paper declared.

Turning Kids into Capitalists

The campaign to abolish the estate tax shows the strange priorities in Washington these days.

Some 20 percent of American children live in poverty. Roughly 40 percent of all families have no financial assets to speak of, which means little for their children’s education. Yet Washington is obsessing over the relative handful of kids who must endure the estate tax. The place has become a virtual Wailing Wall of concern for trust-fund babies.

Reassigning Tim Russert

Those who offer suggestions to the Washington media need not worry that their advice will be taken. The mental grooves here are worn too deep, and self-importance serves to set them in concrete. The only cause for hope is that time still passes. In journalism, as in physics, bad ideas generally don’t concede; they succumb to a new generation. As the current Washington guard inches towards its golden years, there is at least a possibility that something new will push through the concrete. We might be wary of high tech “cures” for aging. Do we really want another 200 years of John MacLaughlin and George Will?

So for the record, as it were, here are nine suggestions the media will ignore.

Every Baby a Trust Fund Baby

Estate taxes are a problem that most Americans would like to have. Not many do. To qualify, one has to have a nice piece of change–at least $1.3 million for a married couple and, taking loopholes into account, more like $5 million. At present fewer than 2 percent of Americans achieve that kind of affluence. Some 40 percent die with no assets at all to leave behind for the kids and grandkids.

That’s the problem today: too little wealth at the bottom and in the middle, and not too much burden on the wealth at the very top. The fortunes of the Rockefellers and Fords have survived through generations, despite the estate tax. New fortunes are arising at a staggering pace even though the estate tax looms. But the wealth of most Americans has not increased in a corresponding manner. On the contrary, for the lower 40 percent, net assets have declined by some 75 percent over the past two decades.