2007 – Page 4 – Jonathan Rowe

City Repair: Social Permaculture in Portland

The drive from the San Francisco Bay Area to Portland Oregon, up Highway 5, passes through a splendid natural landscape and a diminished human one. There are islands of local particularity, yes. But along the highway one encounters an endless succession of Best Westerns, Taco Bells — you know the list. You drive six hundred miles and stay in the same place. After all those billions spent to defeat the Soviet Union, we have embraced its numbing uniformity, only with a higher entertainment quotient and a better paint job.

Then there’s Portland, which is trying to resist this commercial Sovietization and the social pathologies that go with it, Downtown the city has created Pioneer Square, which set a new standard for urban commons, and a host of kindred spaces. In the neighborhoods, meanwhile, there is the City Repair project, which is resurrecting a commons consciousness block by block. “Turning spaces into places,” is how the people there put it.

The Cosmic Cop-Out of “the Market” (with a Nod to Henry George)

Stephen Schwarzman is the chief executive of the Blackstone Group, which is one of those Wall Street operations that is described as a “private equity firm.” He was on the cover ofFortune magazine in February, which means he’s a pretty big cheese right now. He’s definitely big in my corner of the world. Blackstone recently bought up 14% of the office space in Marin County, California, through a leveraged buy-out of the owner. Leverage is debt. Leveraged buy-outs involve tons of it.

To get out from under this load, Blackstone is going to have to sell off quickly – ie “flip” — the office buildings here. That means more debt, more taxes – and most likely, higher rents. Blackstone will have built nothing and improved nothing. It simply will have taken existing assets and used debt to conjure money out of them. But don’t blame the Big Cheese for the higher rents in prospect, “Rents are only what the market will bear,” a local real estate man said. That’s what they always say, when something bad happens at least. “We didn’t do it. The market did.”

The Irrationality of “Economics”

Garrison Keillor says that if you go fishing with a member of the church in Lake Wobegon, you had better take two of them. Take one out in your boat and he’ll drink all your beer. Take two, and neither of them will drink any.

Sometimes we make better decisions together than apart. The presence of others can remind us that our own needs and opinions aren’t the only ones. It also can evoke our better natures, or at least restrain our worse ones; the compulsive eater eats alone. This is the wisdom of the New England town meeting. That salutary social effect can diminish as the scale increases, but it still can operate in a useful way. We support bottle bills even though, left to our own devices, we might be tempted to toss our own bottles into the trash. Or maybe it’s because we would be so tempted.

The Market’s Casting Call

It is a conceit of the Left that the corporate system keeps us underfoot through the sheer weight of economic power. Power it has, but there is more to it than that. The system couldn’t work unless we worked with it; that is, unless we internalized its narratives and values and so lent a willing – or at least conditioned – hand.

This happens most obviously in our assigned role as “consumers.” But it happens on the production side as well. There is a powerful moral drama that attaches to the producer side of the economy, and leads people to detach their enterprise and effort from the impacts of these upon the world. Until critics of the corporate economy grasp this – until they grasp how people can feel virtuous even when they are doing ill — they will continue to beat against a psychological stone wall.

The Vanishing Commons

The Vanishing Commons, a chapter from Inequality Matters: The Growing Economic Divide in America and Its Poisonous Consequences Edited by James Lardner and David A. Smith The New Press, spring … More

Hidden Vista: New Microsoft Operating System Means Toxic Trash for Third World

There’s an old dump in a municipality on the island of Negros in the Philippines. It hasn’t been used for years, and it’s been picked pretty clean. But when I was there a year ago I saw a small boy digging through the debris, in search of some remaining scrap that might fetch a few pesos. Such is the desperation of poverty in the Third World – a desperation that will be convenient for the people at Microsoft, though I doubt they have given much thought to the connection.

When the company launched its new Vista operating system in January there was the usual gawking over features. But Vista has a grim back end that Greenpeace and others have pointed out. By its very existence the new operating system makes the majority of the world’s computers obsolete, and therefore on a faster journey to the dump. Many of those dumps will be in Third World countries such as the Philippines. The result will be what one group called a “tsunami” of toxic electronic waste.

Sweat Voltage: How to Turn Consumption into Production

It is the perverse genius of the corporate economy to constantly find ways to sell us what we used to have for free. In nothing is this more evident than in the realm of bodily exertion. For decades – centuries really – this thing called “the economy” has been stripping away the physical activity from daily life. Eventually exertion itself became scarce, and something we had to buy. At the same time, corporations were turning food into oral entertainment and arterial junk, and pushing it at us constantly, thus making the activity deficit all the more pressing.

Ergo the need to buy from “health clubs”, the activity that once was built into daily life. The farmer’s plough became a Cybex machine, the walk to the station a treadmill. Where once we produced we now consume; and we internalize this process to such a degree that the ersatz version becomes more legitimate than the original. I once belonged to a YMCA in Manhattan where people would take an elevator to the 4th floor to use a Stairmaster. The strange alchemy of market culture had made the commoditized substitute more real somehow than just walking up the stairs.

GMO Seeds, the Green Revolution, and the Corporate Enclosure of Agriculture

The Straus Dairy near my town has gained a national reputation for innovation. It was the nation’s first organic dairy West of the Mississippi. It converts methane gas from bovine emissions into electricity. Just a few weeks ago, Straus announced that it has been certified as GMO-Free, which means that it uses no crops grown from genetically engineered seeds.

The Point Reyes Light, our local weekly, reported on this development in a way that was straightforward and informative. But the editor, who moved out here from New York and bought the paper about a year ago, took it upon himself to undercut the Straus family. He wrote a long editorial that contended that GMO crops not only are safe for humans and the habitat; more, they are necessary to feed a hungry world.

Commons Language: Provide the Words and They Will Speak

Language is a silent commisar in our political and economic life. What we can say – what we even can think about – is a function largely of the words that are available for us to use. “It is hard to focus the attention upon the nameless,” is how William James, the psychologist-philosopher, once put it. One big reason that the discourse of the commons is so deficient in our public life – and why there is so little awareness of the thing itself – lies here. Where are the words that we would use?

The vocabulary of the market is beyond extensive. It exists in such profusion that it is hard to tell where it stops and the rest of the language begins. Such basic terms as value, benefit, wealth, good, are suffused with market meaning and the astigmatism this includes. (Is the “value” of a tree or of a life really what an economist says it is?) It is a good question whether economics as we know it could have evolved without the English language to serve as host.

Anna Nicole and the Estate Tax

Our friends in the Yesterday Forever lobby continue to spin the estate tax as a “death tax”, as though the departed fill out tax returns from their graves, and as though a death tax – even if it were one — would be worse than the alternatives,which are life taxes. In truth of course, the estate tax is exactly what the name says – a tax on the estates that the wealthiest people pass along to their heirs. The departed don’t bear the tax; the heirs do. Which means it’s really a tax on trust fund babies, as opposed to people who work for a living.

If this strikes you as a bad idea, then you might consider the case of Anna Nicole Smith. Ms. Smith, who usually is described as a “former Playboy Playmate,” entered celebrityhood for a surgically-enhanced physiognomy, a marriage to an oil-rich octogenarian, and a proclivity – it was not quite a talent – for garish self-presentation. She died last week in her hotel room in Florida under circumstances that are still under investigation. It does not seem likely that the estate tax did her in, the Yesterday Forever lobby notwithstanding. It is conceivable however that a higher tax could have saved her.