I’m just like everybody else, John Lennon once confessed. I fell for Paul because of his looks, then George came along and knew how to play lead guitar, and Ringo was Ringo, so we all ended up together.
Of course, there was a bit more to the founding of the Beatles than that, especially as regards Paul McCartney. From the afternoon in June 1957 when Lennon and McCartney first met as Liverpool teenagers, Paul — who could actually tune a guitar and remember all the words of songs — was always John’s musical equal and then some. As the years went by, their friendship deepened and their songwriting partnership blossomed to produce some of the most important and beloved music of the 20th century. They loved and fought with each other like brothers, but remained soul mates to the very end, as even Yoko Ono, Paul’s replacement at the center of John’s world, recognized. In the nightmarish hours immediately after Lennon’s murder in 1980, Ono made but two phone calls: one to John’s Aunt Mimi, the woman who had raised him, and one to Paul, the partner who, despite their many public and private spats, was still closer to John than blood.
Their music, after all, had changed the world. Both Lennon and McCartney took pride in that accomplishment, and each knew he could not have done it without the other. Their collaboration was like a love affair, Lennon once said, but the affair always had an edge to it. “It wasn’t resentment, but it was competitive,” Lennon recalled. Their affectionate rivalry not only drove Lennon and McCartney to write better and better songs over time, it propelled their astonishing musical evolution — taking them from the mop-top innocence of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” through the marijuana-scented folk-rock of “Rubber Soul” to the electronic trailblazing of “Revolver” and “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and finally to the towering majesty of “Abbey Road.”
As much as fans and critics liked to speculate over who was the greater genius, it was the Lennon-McCartney partnership that was the real point. “It’s like asking what’s the most important constituent in a sauce vinaigrette, the oil or the vinegar,” Beatles producer George Martin once said. “Both [John and Paul] were fundamentally important: One without the other would have been unthinkable in terms of the Beatles’ success.”
Which brings us to the enduring mystery at the heart of McCartney’s career, and of his new, authorized biography, “Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now.” For McCartney-bashers who dismiss him as little more than the pretty face John fell for all those years ago, the question to answer is, how could a supposed lightweight have stood up to the acerbic, bullying Lennon for so long, and indeed pushed Lennon to do the best work of his career? McCartney admirers, on the other hand, must somehow explain how a man who finished recording “Sgt. Pepper” at age 24 — 24! — and who authored such pop classics as “Eleanor Rigby” and “Penny Lane” could release piffle like “Your Mother Should Know,” “Martha, My Dear” and “Honey Pie.”
“Many Years From Now” doesn’t solve the riddle, but it does shed light, though sometimes inadvertently, on both sides of the question. The majority of evidence accumulates on the McCartney-as-serious-artist side of the ledger, which is hardly surprising in a book that is an autobiography in everything but name. Much of “Many Years From Now” consists of blocks of verbatim quotes from McCartney, and the rest of the text was written by Barry Miles, Paul’s personal and professional friend since the mid-1960s, when he and Paul co-founded the International Times, billed as Europe’s first underground newspaper, and the Indica Bookshop and Gallery, where John and Yoko met in 1966. Not once, however, is “Many Years From Now” referred to as an authorized biography, much less as a book over whose contents McCartney must have had veto power.
That said, “Many Years From Now” has to be considered one of the essential books on the Beatles. Cleverly titled, handsomely packaged, it is by no means the whole truth and nothing but the truth — “We don’t have to be too faithful,” McCartney says in the opening pages — but it is invaluable as an insider’s account of life at the eye of the hurricane that was the Beatles. This is how Paul McCartney remembers the events and personalities that revolutionized music and popular culture in the 1960s — or is it more how he wants the world to remember them? Acknowledging his reputation as “a PR man,” McCartney says, “Anything you promote, there’s a game that you either play or you don’t play. I decided very early on that I was very ambitious and I wanted to play.”
So call this book the Good News According to Paul. His main point, argued repeatedly and persuasively, is that he and John were creative equals who thrived on their differences, and that a less balanced relationship could not have survived the immense pressures exerted by the world and their own personalities:
“People always assume that John was the hard-edged one and I was the soft-edged one … but we wouldn’t have put up with each other had we each only had that surface. I often used to boss him around, and he must have appreciated the hard side in me or it wouldn’t have worked; conversely, I very much appreciated the soft side in him. It was a four-cornered thing rather than two-cornered.”
That went for the songwriting as well as the friendship. After recalling how John answered his lyric “It’s getting better all the time” with the line “It can’t get no worse,” Paul says, “The ricochet is a great thing … John was very special. And I think for him, I must have been special, because he’d have got rid of me. That’s the point about John. He didn’t suffer fools gladly.”
Another contention of McCartney’s that flies in the face of his cute image is that he was at least as avant-garde as Lennon, and sooner too. From 1965 to 1967, while John, George and Ringo were married and living in London’s stockbroker suburbs, Paul was a bachelor downtown, inhaling to the fullest the Swinging London scene of after-hours clubs, gallery openings and political and artistic fermentation. John was beside himself with jealousy, Paul claims, but — again the four-cornered thing — John welcomed Paul’s experimental ideas into the studio, notably during the recording of one of John’s masterpieces, “Tomorrow Never Knows.” Though commonly attributed to Lennon, the sound of manic seagulls that gives that song its biting, otherworldly texture actually came from tape loops supplied by McCartney, who had been using them at home to make what he called “little symphonies.”
All this is well known to close students of the Beatles, as are McCartney’s recollections of who wrote which parts of which songs. (Miles writes that John and Paul’s claims of authorship differ on only “Eleanor Rigby” and “In My Life,” but in fact Paul also asserts a larger role than previously known in the writing of “Norwegian Wood” and “I Saw Her Standing There,” among others.)
“Many Years From Now” does offer snatches of new information, including amusing, sobering, revealing stories about the Beatles’ fame, their wealth and their excursions into — what else? — sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. On the artistic front, Paul says Bach was one of the Beatles’ favorite composers, because “we felt we had a lot in common with him.” He recalls that when composing new material he and John would force themselves to write “a song a day, whatever happened,” working in three-hour stints. Because neither of them knew musical notation, their rule in the early days (before small home tape recorders) was, “If we couldn’t remember the song the next day, then it was no good.”
Girls, on the other hand, were not remembered the next day, no matter what; there were simply too many of them. McCartney describes the four Beatles “trawling for sex” during their first trip to the United States, in 1964: “When the pill started to happen, then all hell broke loose! Or all heaven broke loose, in our case … We were so pleased that we could finally get girls because in our teenage years it had been very difficult, and now they were throwing themselves at you and this was just very pleasing … It was always a one-night stand with whoever was around and wanted to party.”
And drugs? “You have to talk about drugs” when discussing the Beatles’ music, says McCartney. “If you don’t, you’re being wildly dishonest.” Pot was their ally of choice, a source of both giggles and creative stimulation, even when they were in the studio. The results speak for themselves, but apparently George Martin was astonished to learn, years after the fact, that the Beatles were high on marijuana not just occasionally but the entire time they were making “Sgt. Pepper.”
Of course, LSD also colored the lads’ perceptions in that period. Here, McCartney tells of the night he and John tripped together for the first time and he had visions of Lennon as “the absolute Emperor of Eternity.” Paul soon abandoned acid. But John carried on and, after hooking up with Yoko in 1968, slipped into a heroin addiction (hence his absence from many “White Album” sessions) that scared the other Beatles. “We all thought we were far-out boys but we kind of understood that we’d never get quite that far out,” says Paul, who suggests that John’s heroin use encouraged the emotional distancing and despair that later caused John to leave the band and break up the Beatles.
McCartney offers very forgiving accounts of his own sins: his bossiness, his unilateral announcement that the Beatles had broken up, his infamous lawsuit against the other three. Again, one-sidedness is to be expected in an autobiography, but it’s too bad Miles didn’t press him harder on these and other points. The Beatles’ “Anthology” film had the same problem — no one kept the stars honest.
Come to think of it, this may answer the McCartney riddle: In this book, as in his music, McCartney needs an editor — someone who can separate the brilliant from the banal, someone who, above all, can tell him no and make it stick. Paul had that kind of relationship with the other Beatles, especially with John, but since then he’s been his own boss, with decidedly uneven results. Late in the book, McCartney maintains he didn’t care about “being the leader” of the Beatles because he “always quite enjoyed being second.” That would come as news to anyone who worked closely with him. Most evidence suggests that the one person Paul McCartney could ever be second to was John Lennon, and the central contention of this book is that they were in fact equals.
But let it be; this is McCartney’s version of history, not the
definitive biography of the man, and despite its faults it’s a fun, occasionally illuminating read. Paul tells Miles at one point that he and John had to be two of the luckiest people in this century to have met each other. But try to imagine a world where songs like “Yesterday,” “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “Fool on the Hill” and “A Day in the Life” had never been written, and it’s pretty clear it’s we who are the lucky ones.
human rights, trade deals, secret campaign contributions and, most recently, stock market crashes — these are the issues that come to mind when Americans think of China. But so far we have overlooked what may be the real China problem: the environmental catastrophe rapidly unfolding there.
China’s environmental disaster threatens not only the Chinese people — who are dying in the hundreds of thousands every year from staggering levels of air and water pollution — but all humanity. With its gigantic population and booming economy, China can single-handedly guarantee that climate change, ozone depletion and other deadly hazards become a reality for people the world over.
In the back of our minds, Americans may suspect that China is an environmental wasteland — after all, we know what happened in the Soviet Union. But the truth has yet to be revealed in all its ghastly vividness, not least because of China’s restrictions on foreign journalists. I recently spent six weeks traveling unmonitored throughout China, interviewing everyone from senior government officials and scientific experts to unpaid workers and newly prosperous peasants. Everywhere, it seemed, the land had been scalped, the water poisoned, the air made toxic and dark.
Five of the 10 most air-polluted cities in the world are in China, and one of every four deaths is caused by lung disease. Yet coal consumption will triple over the next 25 years, making China the world’s leading greenhouse gas producer and all but dooming global efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by the 60 to 80 percent recommended by U.N. scientists.
Moreover, China’s infamous “one-child policy” has been withdrawn for fear of social unrest, and population growth is out of control. China claims it has 1.22 billion people — nearly one of every four humans on earth — but the true number is surely higher and growing by 15 million people a year. These people understandably want to join the global middle class, with all that entails: cars, air conditioning, jet travel, closets full of clothes and dire ecological consequences.
China’s government admits that its factories and smokestacks must be cleaned up, but it fears that doing the right thing environmentally would be political suicide. The problem is that faithfully implementing China’s environmental laws would mean closing thousands of factories and throwing tens of millions of people out of work, and the Party’s tattered legitimacy might not survive that. The transition to a private market free-for-all has caused much more social unrest than most outsiders realize, including numerous riots in recent months. Thus even top environmental officials accept that economic growth must take precedence over environmental protection for years to come.
“You cannot stop a billion people,” says one advocate who regrets the losses China’s rapid growth will cause to ecosystems around the world. But the scope of those losses can be influenced — if swift, decisive action is taken. Beginning with this week’s summit meeting in Washington between Chinese President Jiang Zemin and President Clinton, the Chinese environmental crisis must be elevated to the highest level of importance in the world’s dealings with China. With (self-interested) help from the United States, Japan and other wealthy nations, a program to install efficient equipment and processes throughout China’s energy system could reduce its energy consumption by 50 percent. But there is no time for delay or half-measures. As a government scientist in Chongqing, perhaps the world’s most polluted city, told me, “It is never too late to learn, but it is very late.”
The most important thing about this album is not the material from the Abbey Road vaults, playful and interesting as much of it is. No, what’s most exciting about the “The Beatles Anthology, Volume 2″ is the album’s new single. “Real Love” is the real thing, a genuine collaboration that recaptures the magic that made the Beatles the most important musicians of the rock and roll era. “Real Love” succeeds on its own terms — as an evanescent pop song you want to
hear again the first time you hear it — but it also serves as a worthy reminder of the extraordinary talents and creative synergy that enabled Lennon, Harrison, McCartney and Starr to produce music that delighted and transformed the world. The mystery is why “Real Love” wasn’t chosen as the single to launch the overall Anthology project last fall. “Free As A Bird,” the song selected instead, is pleasant but hardly a powerhouse. “Real Love” may not rank with
such masterpieces as “Penny Lane” and “Day Tripper” — how many songs do? But it fits very comfortably within the Beatles’ larger canon. Judged purely on grounds of quality, it would easily earn a spot on the band’s later albums.
The difference is, “Real Love” is plainly not the creation of young, avant-garde artists. The sensibility expressed in Lennon’s melody, and
especially his lyrics, is that of a mature, still hopeful but frightened man less concerned with screaming at life than surviving it. In fact, the genesis of “Real Love” appears to be “Real Life,” an earlier Lennon composition from the 1970s in which he describes himself as afraid to get out of bed in the morning. Ironically, it was from “Real Life” that Lennon borrowed the sweet, irresistible hook that seems certain to make “Real Love” a hit.
“Real Love” is a John Lennon song as unmistakably as “Julia” or “Dear Prudence” is, but it’s a Beatles single. Compare the Anthology version of
“Real Love” with that on the 1988 documentary film “Imagine,” and you’ll see how much the other
Beatles brought to the party. Lennon frequently had trouble keeping a steady beat — the other Beatles often teased him about it — and on the single you hear them diving into the breach to save him; Ringo’s drum wallops and Paul and George’s chugging acoustics and backing vocals give the song a groove that moves. The joy the others took in polishing up John’s song is obvious from the video for “Real Love,” which nicely conveys the Beatles’ collective soul with flash cuts that gradually merge those four famous faces into one.
The rest of the album is far from polished, which is, of course, the point. Highlights of the archives material on “Anthology 2″ include early takes of “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” “Yesterday,” “Norwegian Wood,” “I’m Looking Through You,” “Tomorrow Never Knows,” “Got To Get You Into My Life,” “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “A Day In
The Life” and “The Fool On The Hill.” To hear the Beatles move from one musical idea to another and yet another as they seek the ultimate expression
of a song is to realize that art for them was as much pursuit as arrival. The larger point is just how solid the Beatles’ collective artistic judgment was. In ways large or small, the version of a given song chosen for official release invariably outshines the drafts consigned to the archives. Listening to these works in progress is sometimes akin to watching a magician explain the mechanics of his trickery; part of you doesn’t really want to know. It’s a measure of the Beatles’ greatness that such deconstruction only affirms the splendor of their achievement.
If “Anthology 2″ has a weak spot, it is the paucity of studio chat and high-jinks that could convey the human interactions behind the art. There are moments: John’s daft warbling after forgetting the words to “Yes It Is,” the peals of giggles that doom an effort to add vocals to “And Your Bird Can
Sing,” Paul’s “Oh, shit” after reversing the lyric during an otherwise dead-on vocal for “A Day In The Life.” But these few exchanges only whet your
appetite for more. There’s plenty still secreted away inside Abbey Road. With any luck, it will find its way onto “Anthology 3,” due out later this
year.
They said it couldn’t be done, but the big news out of Washington these days is that Star Wars works after all. Back in 1983, when President Reagan announced his plan to build a “peace shield” to protect the United States from nuclear attack, the idea was criticized as a violation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty and a dangerous step towards a nuclear first strike.
A more mundane objection was that the system could not be built. To shoot down missiles hurtling through space at nearly 15,000 miles an hour may look easy in video arcades, but is fiendishly difficult in real life, like deflecting a bullet in mid-flight by hitting it with a bullet of your own. The American Physics Society concluded in a 1987 study that Star Wars was not only impossible with existing technology, but that ten more years of research was needed to learn whether it might ever be feasible.
Here we are, ten years later. Star Wars has been re-named “missile defense.” It is no longer touted as a shield against massive Soviet bombardment, but it can beat back a limited attack by lesser nuclear powers like China. That’s right, the technology works! At least that’s the message conveyed by recent press coverage.
Democrats and Republicans alike have been caught up in the Star Wars revival. In a widely-reported speech at the Coast Guard Academy on May 22, President Clinton announced he wants to spend $13.5 billion on research and development over the next three years and decide in 1999 whether to deploy the system. Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich are even more gung ho. Their Defend America Act aims to fully deploy the system by 2003.
Most striking about recent news coverage is how everyone — from the politicians to the reporters to the analysts they cited — takes it for granted that a missile defense can indeed be built, and that the choice of whether to do so right away or a few years from now is ours to make. The closest hint of a doubt came in a single sentence in the New York Times: “No system capable of (defending the nation from a missile attack) has been built.”
Now, I spent most of the past five years living outside the United States, so I thought maybe I had simply missed the news of a Star Wars breakthrough, just as I sometimes draw a blank on books and movies that came out while I was away. But it turns out there was nothing to miss. Missile defense remains a mirage.
According to independent experts, the systems under development have consistently failed even the so-called “strapped-down chicken” test: hitting a missile whose speed and trajectory are known in advance. Robert Park, a physicist and spokesman for the American Physical Society, thinks the systems could hit such cooperative targets eventually, though “there’s still a lot of work to do.” In the real world, however, targets take evasive action and are masked by decoys, and “then it becomes hopeless again,” says Park.
Rather than questioning the underlying falsehoods of missile defense, the press is content to ventilate at length Dole and Clinton’s differences on tactical questions of timing and budget. Small wonder, then, that many Americans apparently believe we already have a functioning missile defense system. Why not? For years, we’ve seen fancy graphics on television and in newspapers showing incoming missiles being intercepted and destroyed. And the media was only too happy to pass along Pentagon claims during the Gulf War about the stunning success of Patriot missiles against Saddam Hussein’s SCUDs. In reality, according to Theodore Postol, a professor of science, technology and national security policy at MIT who has analyzed official videos of the war against Iraq, “The Patriots were almost certainly 0 for 44 against SCUDs.”
The few news organizations that have suggested Desert Storm’s anti-missile defenses were flawed have suffered some consequences. When PBS’s “Frontline” mentioned the Patriot’s failures during an otherwise respectful broadcast in January reviewing the war, Raytheon, the manufacturer of the Patriot (and a donor to WGBH, the parent station of “Frontline”) mounted a “very aggressive” complaint campaign, says senior producer Michael Sullivan. Boston Globe reporter Dan Goulden says Raytheon threatened his paper with a lawsuit for reporting Postol’s findings.
Whether you call it Star Wars or missile defense, it has been a fabulously lucrative mirage for the corporate beneficiaries of the Pentagon’s lavish welfare program. It is also a politically expedient mirage for would-be presidents like Dole (who has to pass the far right’s litmus test on the issue) and Clinton (who needs the electoral votes of California, where much Star Wars money is spent). Of course, the role of the press should be to expose such illusions not contribute to them. But that is hard to do when one’s habits of mind and ultimate loyalties lie with those inside, not outside, the Washington
palace walls.
Quote of the day
What’s love got to do with it?
“The gay and lesbian community is marching down the wrong path and running a disastrous course. We don’t have public support. We don’t even have unanimity within the gay and lesbian community. We’ve got to get to A and B before we can get to E.”
– Keith O. Boykin, executive director of the National Black Gay and Lesbian Leadership Forum, on the push by other gay organizations to defeat the Defense of Marriage Act which would deny Federal government recognition of same-sex marriages. (From “Some Gay Rights Advocates Question Effort to Defend Same-Sex Marriage,” in Friday’s New York Times)
Before Pat Buchanan, there was Robert Reich.
Until the Dole campaign finally took the “go” out of the Buchanan crusade, it was the bellicose broadcaster who grabbed the headlines, doing what no
Democratic politician of the modern era has managed to do: put the hardships and
injustices facing American workers on the front burner of American politics.
It’s an achievement that must stick in Robert Reich’s craw. As Secretary of
Labor, Reich was supposed to be Bill Clinton’s point man on this issue. And
certainly Reich has spoken out, and fought, for workers since joining the
administration of his old Oxford classmate Clinton. But Reich’s efforts have 
never attained the visibility of Buchanan’s. In an interview with SALON,
Reich conceded the point, arguing, “It’s far easier to make headlines by
vilifying and demonizing, by casting blame, instead of doing the more
difficult work of coming up with solutions.”
No doubt. But Reich also faces a second problem, closer to home. As a Labor
Secretary whose progressive outlook places him on the leftward edge of the
Clinton administration, Reich serves a president who seems less interested in
the travails of ordinary workers than in keeping corporate America happy
through a program of deficit reduction, tight money and global trade
agreements. As the New York Times has noted (citing White House sources, no
less), Bill Clinton “has done more for the Fortune 500 than virtually any
other President in this century.”
With Buchanan now forcing politicians of all stripes to confront the
plight of American workers, it seemed a good time to visit Secretary Reich and
hear his side of the story. Reich has made news in recent months by
aggressively pressuring The Gap, Eddie Bauer and other large clothing
retailers to stop relying on overseas suppliers who pay workers sub-minimum
wages and impose inhuman working conditions. He has successfully cracked down
on companies who have illegally raided their workers’ pension funds. And throughout Clinton’s presidency
Reich has demanded that attention be paid to
the human consequences of an economy that is fantastically enriching the upper
crust while crushing the poor and turning America’s once-confident middle
class into what Reich calls “the anxious class.”
But Reich has wielded relatively little influence over Clinton’s
larger economic policy, which has instead reflected the Wall Street
perspective of Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, former Treasury
Secretary Lloyd Bentsen and Bentsen’s successor, Robert Rubin. Might this
change, now that Clinton is running for reelection? Clinton has reportedly
fretted in private that he must deliver “something for the common man” if he
is to “crawl through to reelection.” Is it time, then, for Clinton to bring
Reich off the bench and into the game?
Physically, the Labor Secretary stands a mere four-foot-ten compared to Pat
Buchanan’s six-foot-two, but when it comes to workers’ issues, Reich’s giant
brain and stout heart would seem to make him the administration’s best
possible match-up against the hulking Irishman’s pseudo-populism. Reich
knows how to sell his ideas. In television appearances (including a CNN face-off with Buchanan last Labor Day in which he more than held his own), he invariably speaks
in the quick, witty sound-bites producers love. In books and newspaper
articles, he writes with a verve and directness uncommon among government
officials.
For some reason, though, Reich spoke at a slow, deliberate pace in the
interview for this article, as if he were dictating to a secretary. He stayed
relentlessly “on message” and loyal to his president, skirting questions about
what specific steps, if any, Bill Clinton might take to stand up for workers
and regain the initiative from the Republicans in the economic debate. His one
flash of spontaneity came when I mentioned that his ideas for encouraging
socially responsible corporate behavior had been attacked from both the left
and the right. “Then I must be doing something right,” he chuckled.
Reich politely rejected any suggestion that the administration had been
caught flat-footed by Buchanan. “In his State of Union address, long before
Pat Buchanan scored well in the New Hampshire primary, the president called on
corporations to share with their employees not just the downside burdens and
risks of economic change but also the upside benefits and profits,” said
Reich. Not only has Clinton “been talking about this issue for many years,”
Reich added, he has tried to do something about it: by raising the minimum
wage, expanding the earned income tax credit, providing universal health
insurance, reforming the pension system, and supporting
low-interest student loans, school-to-work apprenticeships and other education
and job training programs.
To some, this list of initiatives may sound rather bloodless, especially when
compared to Mr. Buchanan’s hellfire attacks on corporate privilege and
callousness. Reich counters that, “Casting blame and indulging in the
politics of resentment may draw loud applause, but it’s irresponsible.
There’s no magic bullet for the insecurities, stagnating wages and widening
income disparities this country has been experiencing for the last 15
years. And anyone who suggests otherwise isn’t being honest with the American
people.” A second problem is that many of the initiatives Reich listed, such as the efforts to broaden health coverage and raise the minimum wage by 90 cents an hour, remain unfulfilled, victims of congressional Republicans’ opposition. Still, says
Reich, “We’ve accomplished a great deal, though there’s far, far more to do.”
Reich’s current favorite idea is a controversial one: offering
tax cuts to encourage corporations to treat their workers better. Reich first
broached the concept in the wake of AT&T’s announcement in January that it was
firing some 40,000 workers; IBM, Boeing, Sears, GM and many other
blue-chip companies had previously executed similar cutbacks. Lamenting these
job losses in an Op-Ed article in the New York Times, Reich pointedly asked,
“Do companies have obligations beyond the bottom line?” Reich argued they
did and made his case by exploiting a favorite theme of Bob Dole and other
Republicans: If entertainment companies are expected to forego the profits of
lewd and violent programming in the name of social responsibility, “what about
a corporation’s duty to its employees and its community? The sudden loss of a
paycheck can be more damaging to family values than a titillating screen
performance.”
The problem, continued Reich, is that under the rules of the marketplace,
AT&T “may have done exactly the right thing by its shareholders.” If
government wants companies to honor their social responsibilities, Reich
added, it must give them an economic reason to do so. Hence, Reich’s idea of
reducing, or even eliminating, corporate income taxes for firms that provide
workers with decent wages and benefits, upgrade their skills and remain in
their communities.
“The great transformation of the American workforce from the old
(manufacturing) economy to the new (information) economy is difficult and
costly,” Reich added in our interview. “Right now, individuals are bearing
most of the cost themselves, and government is picking up part of the tab. Why
shouldn’t the private sector bear some of the responsibility as well?”
Secretary Reich is not the only Democrat ventilating such ideas. Senators
Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico and Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and
Representative Richard Gephardt of Missouri have each advanced similar
proposals. Reich told me he hopes all these proposals will serve as “a
departure point for a national debate about corporate citizenship,” a debate
similar to the one over the role of government that has occupied American
politics the past 15 years.
Of course, no one has more sway over the national political conversation than
the president. Yet it is unclear whether Bill Clinton will take the lead on
this issue. While Reich is pushing his old friend in one direction, Clinton’s most senior economic policy-makers, Treasury Secretary Rubin and Council of Economic Advisers chief Laura D’Andrea Tyson, have argued that the focus must remain on Clinton’s
current economic agenda — in other words, a continuation of the centrist
consensus.
Any steps in Reich’s direction would undoubtedly antagonize the corporate community. The very idea that
corporations have responsibilities beyond producing profits and dividends is
anathema to the Wall Street Journal crowd. Conservative columnist William
Safire, who has been remarkably quiet about his former White House colleague
Buchanan’s corporation-bashing, nevertheless pounced on Reich’s tax incentive proposal with hysterical vengeance, dubbing it “The New Socialism.” From the American
Enterprise Institute, a Washington research group funded by big business, tax
expert Diana Furchtgott-Roth argues that telling corporations they shouldn’t
fire people is “the height of industrial policy” — a self-evident evil,
apparently. Besides, she adds, aggregate U.S. employment is steadily
increasing (even if the newly created jobs pay workers far less), so
“downsizing is not a national problem.”
At the same time, critics on the left question why taxpayers should subsidize the very
corporations who are putting so many people out of work. “A good start on
getting companies to do the right thing is to stop rewarding them for doing
the wrong thing,” says AFL-CIO spokesman David Saltz. Adds MIT economist Lester Thurow, “Essentially what they’re saying is, ‘We’ll bribe you to be good guys.”
The fact is, corporate tax rates have already been lowered substantially in
the United States. The corporate tax rate was 52 percent in the early 1960s;
today, it is 35 percent. Corporate taxes provided 25 percent of federal
revenues in the 1960s; they now account for 10 percent. When I asked
Secretary Reich whether additional corporate tax breaks made sense when
previous cuts had not produced the socially exemplary behavior he desired, he
replied that the alternative approach was to impose more regulations on
corporations; this he opposed because it “could be enormously inefficient.
The virtue of a tax incentive is that corporations do not have to seek it if
they don’t want to.” He added that the revenue losses from his tax cuts would
be recouped by “cutting corporate welfare,” a step recently promoted
separately by a bipartisan group of Senators led by Ted Kennedy and John
McCain of Arizona.
“Pat Buchanan may fade, but not the anger that fuels him,” wrote Reich in
late February. Bill Clinton is a smart enough politician to recognize he must
deal with that popular anger. After all, it was mass economic discontent that
enabled him to defeat George Bush in 1992, and Americans are hurting much more
today than they were four years ago. Reich and his congressional allies want
to address Americans’ anger by promoting corporate responsibility. But will
common folk struggling to keep their heads above water really accept a
strategy of using carrots rather than sticks against job-cutting corporations?
For his part, will Clinton endorse Reich’s proposal, thereby risking
retaliation from the business elite he has courted so faithfully?
Given Clinton’s allegiance to the
centrist consensus, says Jesse Jackson adviser Robert Borosage, the most likely scenario is that the
president “will talk more about this stuff as the campaign heats up but do
little and forget it entirely after Election Day.”
What does Clinton himself say? From the White House, spokesperson Mary Ellen Glynn says the president will
soon travel to California, where he will visit the Harmon corporation, a
family-friendly company that tries to keep its workers employed during hard
times. “This is something the president has been talking about for years and
years,” Glynn says. “And you’ll hear more about it in the next few weeks.”
Who is to blame for the plight of the “anxious middle”? And what should be done about it? Join the conversation in the Issues & Politics area of Table Talk.
In “The Naked Ape,” zoologist Desmond Morris observed that humans “tend to suffer from a strange complacency that …. we are somehow above biological control,” that our collapse as the planet’s dominant species is unthinkable. Morris, writing in 1967, was most worried about the perils of overpopulation, but his point applies equally well to the more recent discovery of global warming, arguably the greatest environmental threat of our time.
To the oil and coal lobbies, global warming does not exist. Self-interest can make even the most astute observers deaf and blind, not to mention dumb. But not all the time. As it happens, two of the most powerful players in the world economy, the global insurance and banking industries, are now coming to believe that their self-interest is incompatible with humanity continuing to pump six billion tons of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every year.
At risk, the financiers realize, are trillions of dollars worth of insured property and long-term investments. Most of the beaches on the East Coast of the United States could be gone within 25 years, according to a recent estimate of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a group of 2,500 scientists commissioned by the United Nations to study the problem. With over two trillion dollars of insured assets along U.S. coastlines alone, the threat to the insurance industry is plain. Add in the potential losses in other low-lying regions around the world, such as Amsterdam, Cairo, and the Rhine, Yangtze and Po river valleys, and the stakes become astronomical. Therefore, while world governments dawdle, leading banks and insurance companies, especially in Europe and Asia, may soon initiate a massive shift of international investment flows away from fossil fuels and towards solar energy.
The idea that giant corporations might lead the way towards a greener planet is anathema to many environmentalists. Yet the insurance and banking industries, it turns out, are taking advice from none other than Greenpeace — specifically an ocean geologist named Jeremy Leggett, who is one of the half-dozen experts most responsible for putting the climate change issue on the international agenda.
“In the years since the Earth Summit (held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992), environmentalists have come to despair about governments actually doing what they pledge to do,” says Leggett. The U.S., like most governments who signed the climate change treaty negotiated in Rio, will not meet the target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000.
However, a follow-up conference in Rome last December was extremely significant. Formalizing a decisive shift in scientific thinking, the Rome conference endorsed the IPCC’s view that “a discernible human influence” is contributing to global climate change. In other words, climate change should no longer be considered a mere theory that may or may not be borne out by future events. Man-made warming of the Earth has begun, said the IPCC scientists, and it’s bound to get worse. Indeed, 1995 was the hottest year in recorded history, according to preliminary data gathered by the British Meteorological office.
According to the IPCC, the average global surface
temperature will rise 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100 — the most rapid increase in the 10,000 years of human civilization — if greenhouse emissions are not reduced. Disruptions — droughts, floods and other climactic extremes — will become more frequent, claiming untold numbers of lives, destroying billions of dollars of property and endangering food production. Sea levels will rise, rendering low-lying regions uninhabitable. And how will the world community handle the 70 million refugees the IPCC expects global warming to generate?
A number of giant insurance companies already suspect global warming has cost billions. Swiss Re, the world’s second largest reinsurance company, blaming “giant storms” on global warming, says it has paid 400 million Swiss francs to Florida insurance companies in the wake of Hurricane Andrew. That hurricane’s total cost to the insurance industry: $17 billion.
“(Insurance companies) know that a few major disasters caused by extreme climate events could literally bankrupt the industry in the next decade,” says Hans Siders, director of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). No wonder Swiss Re and 42 other European and Asian insurers recently signed an accord with UNEP to address the climate change problem.
Banks are concerned as well. In a memo to fellow executives last September, Peter Blackman, assistant director of the British Bankers’ Association, warned that within the (20-40 year) “lifetime of loans granted today, climate change is forecast to have a dramatic impact….”
But Blackman drew his colleagues’ attention to a silver lining: “There are enormous opportunities to finance new environmental developments and the development of alternative energies,” he wrote. Leggett hopes that the banking and insurance sectors will use their tremendous leverage over world capital to kick start the solar revolution. He has a formidable ally: a 41-year-old German billionaire named Rolf Gerling, who heads Gerling-Konzern Globale, another of the world’s largest insurers. In February, Gerling’s publishing house will release a book Leggett edited, called “Climate Change and the Financial Sector,” which pulls together papers from banking and insurance executives who make the environmental and financial case for “beginning the diversion of capital flows away from carbon to solar.”
Although the solar transition will be driven by market forces, governments have a crucial role to play. “Governments have to help break solar out of the price trap,” says Leggett. “Until economies of scale can be realized, solar will still cost more than most fossil-fuel alternatives. It’s like photocopiers. In the early days, they cost thousands of dollars. Now they cost a couple of hundred dollars.”
History suggests that government procurement policies are among the most effective ways to prime the technological pump. In the U.S. in the 1960s, large-scale purchases of computers by the military lowered unit costs and sparked that industry’s take off. By twiddling a knob here and there, by spending not more but more wisely, governments the world over could do likewise for solar technology.
The banking and insurance industries could
hasten the transition by giving their clients incentives to avoid fossil fuels and other ecologically damaging practices — for example, by writing into a loan contract for a new office building requirements for energy-efficient design, lighting and building materials.
Can the human species bring its economic behavior into balance with the natural systems that make our lives on Earth possible? There is ample reason for pessimism, but occasionally there is good news. What gives the government-aided market approach to the solar transition such enormous power is the fact that capitalists will be vigorously pursuing their own self-interest rather than reluctantly obeying — or evading — government mandates. Even Shell Oil concedes that solar will be the world’s dominant energy source by 2050, so why wait? If the solar revolution arrives soon enough, the world of 2050 might not be such an environmentally nasty place after all.
