2002 – Jonathan Rowe

Book Review – Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth by David Bollier

Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth
by David Bollier
$26.00, Routledge,
260 pages, 2002

When our times finally come to rest in the history texts, I think they will be called the Age of Enclosure—the age of privatization. It is a time when everything has become a commodity, and everything is for sale.

The opinion establishment was in raptures over the resulting money gush. Now that the party’s over, they pine for a return. Yet as the concept of the market comes to define all human experience, so too does the market’s central paradox: the way it creates scarcity even as it produces abundance.

The Global Accounting Scam

Several months ago a professor at the University of North Carolina published findings that turned beliefs about the economy upside down. Health improves, he said, as the economy goes down. When the economy declines, to a point at least, deaths, smoking, obesity, heavy drinking, heart disease and some kinds of back problems all decline as well.

“Sounds unlikely,” said the New York Times. And indeed it is, by the standard reckonings at least. We all know that an expanding economy makes us better off — or do we? Another study, this one in England, found that shopping, which is the drive train of the entire economy, and which is supposed to make people feel good, actually can make them depressed. “For significant numbers, dissatisfaction is now part of the shopping process,” one of the authors said. (As though we needed a study to tell us that.)

Free Market Violence

I was surprised that Todd Gitlin chose to scold congressional Democrats for trying to tackle TV violence (“Imagebusters: The Hollow Crusade Against TV Violence,” Winter 1994). His insights regarding the media are astute, as usual. But his arguments against congressional action are mostly beside the point, and his superior and disparaging tone is not helpful. Gitlin dismisses concern about TV violence as a middle-class neurosis, a revival of the “iconophobia” that arose early in the century with the arrival of motion pictures. He ridicules senators addressing this issue as inferior intellects who aren’t up to facing real issues like gun control.

Well, so what if the people who raised the issue early in the century happened to be middle class? The question is whether they were onto something, which they were. Similarly, what difference does it make that some advocates of action on TV violence are not strong on gun control? Regrettably, Gitlin gets so stuck in the disparagement mode that he never gets to the real issue: Are there ways to deal with violence in the media that do not compromise free speech, do not give more power to government censors or expert panels, but rather give more power to parents and citizens generally?

The Promise of the Commons

Words are a form of magic. They conjure thought out of the confusion of experience, and they form the lens through which we see the world. Politics is largely a contest over words – over a version of reality. Those whose words prevail, rule; and those who rule choose the words.

Nowhere is this more evident than in economics. Though couched in the trappings of science, economics is basically a word game. Define anything produced as a “good,” and the debate is over before it starts. Who wouldn’t want more “goods?” Define “growth” to mean simply an increase in monetary expenditure, and you can claim economic “progress” even if much of that expenditure results from “goods” that are not so good – the obesity and medical bills arising from junk food, for example.

The Williams Way

Ted Williams’s body lies in a place called the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona, which freezes corpses for potential future use. His children are fighting over what comes … More

Book Review – The Divine Right of Capital by Marjorie Kelly

The Divine Right of Capital
by Marjorie Kelly
Berrett-Koehler Publishers, $24.95, 230 pages, 2001

It’s an old story: the child rebels against a parent and then turns out just like him or her. It can happen to a nation too, as Marjorie Kelly shows in her wonderful new book. The American colonists rejected Mother England and everything it stood for: aristocracy, special privilege, inherited wealth, the divine right of kings. Then they created a republic that—despite their best intentions—bred those very things, in the form of the modern corporation.

This is the back story in the Enron fiasco, the one the mainstream media won’t touch. Sure, we care about shareholders who lost their life savings. But what about the rest of us, our communities, and the planet? Kelly’s title is not facile populism. She means it. The modern corporation and its largest shareholders occupy a place in our society that royalty occupied in the one we supposedly cast off.

Tollbooths of the Mind

If one thing is central to the idea of America, it is the ability to breathe freely in the atmosphere of the mind. Thomas Jefferson was the champion of this ideal, and he saw that government was not the only threat to it. Taken too far, private property could shackle freedom, too, as the slaves from Africa knew only too well.

“If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property,” Jefferson wrote, “it is the action of the thinking power called an idea.”

Our Neglected Wealth

For a preview of the next big turn of the political wheel, we might consider a drama that is unfolding in the realm of computers and the World Wide Web.

For years, tech gurus touted the Web as a new frontier of freedom. Yet something very different has occurred. Fences and toll booths are going up all over. Marketers collect dossiers on us without our knowledge. Ads assault us at every click. The push increasingly is not to liberate information, but rather to contrive new ways to make us pay for it.

Relationship Between Silence and Progress

I suspect I’m not the only person who read about Father Llopis and thought, ‘Good for him.’ Probably I’m not the only one either who often wished that I, too, could jam the cell phones on a train, in a coffee shop or sometimes just walking down the street. So perhaps it’s time to ask some questions about those cell phones and noise and this strange thing the experts call ‘progress’ and ‘growth.’ I mean, what gives people who use cell phones and the corporations that operate them the right to fill our air with their noise? The air belongs to all of us. So how come those who want to fill it with their yakking and beeping get first dibs, and how come those of us who want to keep the quiet have to suffer in silence?

Here’s another thing. The device the priest used to block the cell phones in his church, it’s not legal in the US. Police departments use them, according to a manufacturer, and probably the Defense Department and the CIA, too, but you and I can’t. Why is it legal to use electronics to fill the air with noise, but not legal to use electronics to reject that noise? Why should those who trespass on our peace go free, while those who try to keep the peace could go to jail? It’s the same with the economy in general. It’s what’s happening with this whole big thing called ‘progress’ and ‘growth.’

Jeepneys are a Commuter’s Dream

Freedom can mean different and even opposite things. It can mean the freedom to emit muck into the air, for example, or the freedom to breathe clean air. In regard to transportation, it can mean the freedom to drive a car or the freedom that comes from not needing a car.

A beacon of that latter freedom is an unlikely place – the Philippines, a nation known mainly in the US these days for political melodrama and Muslim rebels. In the Philippines you can get virtually any place you need to go – from downtown Manila to the most remote rural barangay (village) – with little waiting and for very little money, without a car.