Jonathan Rowe – Page 11

Recycle Circus: The Commerce of a Community

What is it about other peoples’ junk? Last Sunday was Recycle Circus, the day in our town when people clean out their sheds and garages and bring the stuff down to the community center, which is called the Dance Palace. Volunteers unload the pick-ups and spread the items out on the street. People have a ball sifting through the old plumbing fixtures, exercise equipment and lengths of gutter.

Some do get a little grabby. They hover near the trucks as they are unloaded, ready to pounce on cabinet or desk. It made me think just a little of the wealthy matrons from the suburbs who would throng the entrance of the original Filenes Basement in Boston, and descend like vultures upon the sale bins when the doors opened. But that wasn’t the dominant note. Recycle Circus isn’t just about stuff, or even mainly. It’s a community event, a kind of festival, when you just enjoy being out with others with the winter finally gone.

The Original Intent of the Postal Service

Before the internet there was the postal service; and nothing showed with such clarity the views of the Founders on the importance of a free flow of information than the way they conceived and developed it. The postal system they inherited was concentrated on the Eastern seaboard. At the time of the Revolution there were 67 post offices, all in major towns. By 1831 there were 8,700 post offices, spread through the hinterlands. It was the largest postal system by far in the entire world. Great Britain had 17 post offices per 100,000 population, France had 4; and the new United States had 74.

The Americans dropped early on the Old World notion that each post office should pay for itself. France closed any office that couldn’t generate $200 in revenue, by which standard 90% of the post offices in the U.S. would have closed too. In America, by contrast, the established offices subsidized the newer ones and the whole system grew. People had access to newspapers, which the system carried at a nominal rate. The subsidy was especially important to smaller papers, many of whose subscribers lived out of town. George Washington among others argued that all papers should go free.

Social Ecology: Prozac or Park Benches

There is an empty lot on the main street in my town, next to the bakery, a local hang-out. For years, people have talked about buying it to create a space for people to come and gather. But recently a friend and I said, ‘Why wait?’ We fixed up a couple of old benches and set them away from the street, under a tree, which seemed vaguely park-like. Within a week, people had moved the benches right up to the pavement, which is where they have stayed ever since.

Not long after the bench-moving, I happened upon a book called The Social Life of Public Spaces by William H Whyte {1}. Whyte spent much of his life studying how people use such spaces. He found that there are recurring patterns, a kind of economy of human interaction. Among other things, people like to sit near the flow of life, rather than in secluded corners – which is exactly what had happened in our commons.

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.