Vol. 5 No. 1 (May 2006)
Uncommon Denominator
The Newsletter of the Commonweal Institute
www.commonwealinstitute.org
"A dangerous
ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of
the people than under the forbidding appearance of zeal for the firmness and
efficiency of government."
Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist,
No. 1
CONTENTS
Talking
Points: The monster under the bed
Wit and Wisdom: Global warming and the White House
Quoted! Condoleeza Rice
on
Check It Out: A history of political ads
Featured Article: "Chain Reaction: Do
Bookstores Have a Future?"
Happenings: Monthly round-up
Endorsements: Congresswoman Anna Eshoo
Get Involved: Spread the word; become a
contributor
TALKING POINTS
Imagine the following political cartoon. A young boy, in bed
in his cozy bedroom, a Dixie Chicks poster on the wall, clutches the top of his
American flag quilt and looks fearfully toward the door, where his father (in
cowboy boots) has just entered. "Daddy," the boy says, "I think
there's a monster under the bed." Indeed, there it is: a huge snarling
reptilian thing, all claws and teeth and scales, with the word
"Deficit" scrawled across its loathsome length. "Aww, that's nothin' to fret
about," drawls the father, "That's just the
puppy I brung home for Christmas."
Too blunt, probably, and perhaps unfair but this whimsical scene does convey
something of the dynamic that has emerged in American political discourse
regarding the federal budget deficit. That dynamic consists, on the one hand,
of a disingenuous, faintly paternalistic campaign to convince the public that
hundreds of billions of dollars of deficit spending doesn't really matter, and
on the other hand, of the willingness of Americans, in their eternal optimism,
to believe so.
So why should we view the deficit as more monster than puppy? Why does it
matter? How will ordinary Americans experience its tangible effects? These are
important questions to address because, on any given day, the deficit probably
seems so abstract and imponderable to most people. The public might intuitively
feel that large deficits are bad, but one rarely hears clearly articulated
explanations of why.
At the outset, we need to look at the argument that deficits are good because
they stimulate growth. This may be true, but only if we're talking about
relatively small deficits and/or relatively short-term growth. Currently, we're
facing massive deficits that threaten to undermine the long-term economic
health of the country, even though they appear for now to have purchased (as
promised) a sharp upturn in GDP growth. What Americans need to remember is that
the 5.3% growth figure for the first quarter of 2006, and the robust numbers
that will likely show up next year, are in a very real sense unaffordable.
Not only would it take as much as decade or more of implausibly fast growth to
pay off the debt we're incurring, but in the meantime the venom of heavy
deficit spending will be eating away at the tissues of the country's economy.
Here's how:
Huge deficits are bad because they crowd out private investment.
As the deficit rises, so do interest rates, because the government has to
compete with other borrowers for money, and therefore has to raise rates in
order to attract lenders (a.k.a. investors). So as interest rates rise, more
investors will put their money in government bonds, which have a specified rate
of return, as opposed to risking that money in the stock market. That means
that less money overall will be invested in the private sector and
particularly in those smaller companies that tend to represent the leading edge
of innovation. This is just a thumbnail sketch of a complicated economic
dynamic, but it does capture the prevailing wisdom of the last 15 years, among
both conservative and progressive thinkers.
Huge deficits are bad because they limit spending on useful programs.
This, of course, is precisely what many conservatives now intend; the days when
conservatives called for a balanced budget amendment seem like eons ago. The
Right's goal, as has been argued here before, is to undermine the federal
entitlement system and to make it politically difficult for progressives to
propose new programs and services, or to improve existing ones. There is
something terribly cynical about overspending in order to prevent spending, and
Americans might respond more negatively to if they had a better sense of where
their money is actually going, of what the relative dollar figures are.
To take a current example, the direct costs of the war in
$75
billion. All agriculture programs
$71 billion. The Department of Labor
$55 billion. Education
$15.4 billion. The space program
$11.7 billion. Section 8 vouchers for low-income families that need help with
housing
$6.5 billion. Head Start (which reaches about 60 percent of low-income
preschoolers)
$5-7 billion. The "War on Drugs"
$0. The "No Child Left Behind" act (an unfunded educational
mandate)
One
in seven Americans lacks health insurance. One in 10 American children lacks
coverage for basic vaccines. One wonders whether the American people would
continue to tolerate the deficit spending caused by tax cuts and war if they
really understood the good that that money might accomplish for themselves,
their families, and their communities. The progressive position must be to
emphasize fiscal responsibility and the importance of spending money wisely, in
the areas that will make life better for the greatest number of Americans.
Massive deficits that make life better for the wealthy and for the Iraqis, but
not for the people of
Huge deficits are bad because future generations will have to pay for
them. It's like inheritable credit-card debt. The bill always comes
due, and even if today's boomers don't have to pay for it, their children and
grandchildren will. It would be nice if we could grow our way out of debt
through a robust economy generating more tax revenues, but there are limits,
particularly when you consider the strain that an aging boomer generation will
place on Social Security and Medicare. Sending every American a small tax-cut
rebate check might seem like a nice gesture, and will certainly help with
buying some new clothes or fixing the car, but it should be seen as a sop, a
bribe, and an insult. The projected $354 billion deficit for 2007, along with
the hundreds of billions in the coming years, will not simply disappear after a
few years of economic growth. They threaten to saddle the country for a long
time.
The monster may be under the bed right now, but you can hear it stirring.
WIT AND WISDOM
"President Bush told reporters he won't see Al Gore's documentary about
the threat of global warming. He will not see it. On the other hand, Dick
Cheney said he's seen the global warming film five times, and it still cracks
him up." Conan O'Brien
"According to a survey in this week's Time magazine, 85% of
Americans think global warming is happening. The other 15% work for the White
House." Jay Leno
TALKING POINTS II
The phrase "personal responsibility" or "individual
responsibility" has often been taken by the Left as code for conservative
policies that reinforce the divide between the haves and the have-nots. That's
not surprising: the Right routinely invokes the phrase to imply that government
should not do much to help ordinary people, who should rather just help
themselves.
This is not the kind of "individual responsibility" I am interested
in here. But nor am I talking about the apparent alternative: abdicating
personal responsibility by trusting a cadre of elites to promote our best
interests through a variety of social programs and policies. Instead, I'm
advocating an understanding of individual responsibility that goes beyond such
traditional formulations, which tend to be more politically divisive than they
are constructive.
Viewed another way, individual responsibility is the privilege and
obligation exercised by citizens when they critically examine the spoken and
unspoken assumptions of any leader, institution, or corporate entity who would
presume to have their interests at heart. That's a demanding task, to be
sure, but one we must continually undertake if we are to preserve the
democratic ideals upon which our nation was founded.
The political and commercial mass markets of our culture advertisers,
politicians, the media spoon-feed their constituencies with technologically
slick, but intellectually and morally simplistic, pabulum. They seek to
condition us to act as sheep to turn over to them our money, our votes, our
leisure hours our loyalty. Yet the masters of these markets are abetted by
their target audiences! They thrive on our own personal interests, our
unacknowledged biases, our deep-rooted desires for these are
what give the culture industry, and its leaders, the power to shape our
perceptions and influence our behavior.
Individual responsibility, then, is a challenge to greater self-awareness and
heightened skepticism when it comes to the countless entities that seek and
demand our allegiance. To place too much of our collective faith in
individual leaders, representative organizations, or belief systems themselves
is to abdicate this fundamental human responsibility; it is likewise to
impoverish the minds and imaginations of future generations.
The corporate world supplies countless object lessons in how simplified or
misleading beliefs can come to dominate collective thinking. It's common, for
example, for popular culture to represent corporations in evolutionary terms,
as "organisms" seeking to survive and thrive in their given
environment. We should see this characterization for what it is, however: a
metaphor held over from 19th-century Social Darwinism. The metaphor of the
"corporate organism" suggests, dangerously, that it is
"natural" for corporate entities to eliminate workplace protections,
to reduce salaries and benefits, to lay off thousands of workers, to circumvent
environmental laws, and to crush smaller competitors. These strategies, we are
told, are simply a means of guaranteeing survival in a competitive, capitalist
economy. As it is in nature, so it is in business: only the strong survive.
Clearly, this metaphor is no longer adequate, for it confuses the natural and
the social, and conceals the ways in which governments protect corporations
from real competition. Corporations exist only because governments permit them
to do so. The legal, regulatory, and economic environment in which corporations
are born, live, compete, reproduce, and die is one created by human societies.
In a democracy, then, this means that corporations can only do what we the
people permit them to do.
Moreover, the Social Darwinist metaphor implies that morality does not have a
place in corporate behavior a dangerous idea in an age when individual
rights, environmental resources, and traditional social patterns are under
increasing pressure from global capitalism.
There are some lessons to be learned here from the "lost generation"
of the early 20th century. No generation, perhaps, better understood the
need for greater individual responsibility than this cast of critically-minded
rebels who founded the literary and artistic movement of the 1920s and 30s
known as "modernism," with its explicit injunction against the
mingling of politics and art. Advanced by intellectuals from around the
globe, and typified by experimental artistic forms, modernism critiqued
middle-class complacency, cultural dependency on mass media, and the rapidly
growing pop-culture industry what had become, in lieu of orthodox religion, a
new "opiate" for the senses.
Perhaps that's why nobody reads modernist poetry these days it's just too
damn much work. "Art for art's sake" neither encouraged people to see
art as merely decorative, without purpose, nor was it intent upon making a
sacred fetish of art. This movement was, however, producing art that would have
radical cognitive benefits by encouraging self-reflection, heightening
awareness, and kindling creative thought, so that all might see the world and
its cultures more keenly and more critically. When Wallace Stevens, for
example, wrote "
Modernism, then, offered a challenge to the intellect and a spur to
individual responsibility that is just as crucial today. That challenge was
not just to our leaders, not just to a political or cultural "elite."
The challenge was to individuals, to demand greater intellectual breadth and
philosophical depth, to be examples of the rational faculty available to all.
In its emphasis on the unorthodox, in its attempt to unsettle perception and
disorient the senses, the modernist movement was anti-authoritarian and
anti-totalitarian in spirit. Modernist writers, artists, and thinkers sought to
expand the popular perception of what constituted human "family,"
seeing it based not on genetic kinship, but on something larger call it the
human spirit, basic humanitarian principles, the capacity to reason, or
something else. Human relationships were held to be sacred, in contrast to
corporate, institutional, or political interests.
Given the conditions and contentions of our current political climate, we would
do well to reconsider what the exercise of one's individual responsibility
should mean, quite independently of the slogans and policies it has become
associated with. Among other things, it means questioning the sense of a
militarized "war on terror" based on the fear of such spectral
entities as "gathering forces" and "evil-doers." It means
resisting the perversion of language by which a "Patriot Act" divests
individuals of their civil liberties, by which the "Clear Skies"
initiative eases air-pollution regulations, and by which the "Healthy
Forests" initiative makes it easier to log old-growth forests. It means
educating ourselves about history and culture, so that we can better keep our
own cultural and historical moment in perspective. It means all this, and much
more.
Daily besieged as we are by individuals and organizations
seeking our allegiance, skepticism is our best defense, and our best
opportunity to preserve our autonomy in a world increasingly shaped by
institutional thought. As individuals, we have not only the right to do so, but
the responsibility.
Stephanie Hawkins
QUOTED!
Political differences in Iraq are "being overcome by politics and
compromise, not by violence and not by repression," making the country
"a tremendous pillar of stability through the Middle East....It's
wonderful to be here and to be a small part of that." Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, in a briefing with Iraqi
journalists who managed not to burst out laughing, as quoted in the Washington
Post, April 29.
CHECK IT OUT
Given the dismal sniping and insulting distortions characteristic of most
political TV ads, it's perhaps hard to imagine why a person would want to watch
more of them, voluntarily. But taken together, and abstracted
from their immediate context, they actually form a surprisingly entertaining
genre especially when we can view them at our pleasure, rather than
gritting our teeth or simply leaving the room while we wait for The Game to
come back on. They can also reveal more than they were originally intended to.
That seems to be the premise behind "The Living Room Candidate,"
a project of the
In addition to the TV clips themselves, "The Living Room Candidate"
provides historical overviews of each campaign, information on modern political
advertising on the Web, and good searchability.
And if you burn out on politics, the American Museum of the Moving
Image has created other online exhibitions, including:
"Pinewood Dialogues Online" "in-depth
conversations with innovative and influential creative figures in film,
television, and digital media."
"Computer Space" "provides a tour of some of the classic video
arcade games in the Museum's collection. The exhibition includes information on
the history of the games, and provides links to downloadable versions of some
of the games discussed."
"Shutters, Sprockets, and Tubes" "six animated interactive
tutorials that explain the science and technology behind movies and
television."
All in all, a
good site. Check it
out.
FEATURED ARTICLE
The following is an excerpt from Paul Collins's "Chain Reaction: Do
Bookstores Have a Future?", which
appeared in the May 22, 2006, issue of Village Voice:
"Earlier this month
the legendary Cody's Books in
"An editorial about the opening of another Borders superstore crammed with
lattes and Sudoku instead of Foucault and Zola? No.
Try a Carnegie Corporation report . . . from 1930.
"Chain superstores, notes Laura J. Miller's fascinating new study Reluctant
Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption (University of
Chicago Press), are the latest manifestation of a centuries-old struggle
between bookselling Davids and Goliathsa battle over
where Americans actually shop versus stores with, Miller tartly notes, 'a style
of retailing that Americans at least profess to miss'."
Click here to
read the whole article.
HAPPENINGS
On May 11, Dr. Katherine Forrest, co-founder of
the Commonweal Institute, addressed a community group at the San Carlos (CA)
ENDORSEMENTS
"There is an urgent need today for a think tank to research and develop
ideas and facts to inform the public and assist officeholders. The Commonweal
Institute's work is urgently needed and I welcome what they will do and the
impact they will have during one of the most trying times in the life of our
country." Congresswoman Anna G. Eshoo, D-
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© 2006 The Commonweal
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