Our Town & The United States of America

It's no secret I'm a living cliche at times and do enjoy the Sunday Morning Times, mainly its in-depth front-page reporting, and the always thought-provoking writing of their theater-turned-Sunday-columnist-culture-critic Frank Rich.

This morning, Rich provides insight into our collective national moment by highlighting the resurgent play, Our Town, the famous 1938 play performed by many talented and/or under-resourced theatres because it requires no set and a large cast of extras (a prescription for high school and community production if there ever was one).

But this morning Rich reminds us why the play is also enduring - its timeless call to a collective sense of ourselves and our nation, captured in these times by Barack Obama's famous refrain, "We are the United States of America," that has resonated with many Americans. Sometimes, though, we could do well to "remember" history so that we are not condemned...

Writes Rich:

“WHEREVER you come near the human race, there’s layers and layers of nonsense,” says the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.” Those words were first heard by New York audiences in February 1938, as America continued to reel from hard times. The Times’s front page told of 100,000 auto workers protesting layoffs in Detroit and of a Republican official attacking the New Deal as “fascist.” Though no one was buying cars, F.D.R. had the gall to endorse a mammoth transcontinental highway construction program to put men back to work.

He continues to frame our current moment with references to Warren Buffet, AIG, and Bernie Madoff:

We’re still working our way through the aftershocks of the orgy of irresponsibility and greed that brought America to this nadir. In his recent letter to shareholders, a chastened Warren Buffett likened our financial institutions’ recklessness to venereal disease. Even the innocent were infected because “it’s not just whom you sleep with” but also “whom they” — unnamed huge financial institutions — “are sleeping with,” he wrote. Indeed, our government is in the morally untenable position of rewarding the most promiscuous carrier of them all, A.I.G., with as much as $180 billion in taxpayers’ cash transfusions (so far) precisely because it can’t be disentangled from all the careless (and unidentified) trading partners sharing its infection.

Buffett’s sermon coincided with the public soul searching of another national sage, Elie Wiesel, who joined a Portfolio magazine panel discussion on Bernie Madoff. Some $37 million of Wiesel’s charitable foundation and personal wealth vanished in Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. “We gave him everything,” Wiesel told the audience. “We thought he was God.”

Rich argues next a fundamental point discussed on this site. The American economy has no hope of recovery until we see a massive return of jobs and job confidence to restore broad-based consumer-driven markets, the cornerstone of real estate spending and values as well. A primary driver of the severity of this current crisis is the concentration of so little of our collective national income in the vast middleclass and working Americans, which I personally define as those earning less than $250,000 taxable income per year. Rich:

The simplest explanation for why America’s reality got so distorted is the economic imbalance that Barack Obama now wants to remedy with policies that his critics deride as “socialist” (“fascist” can’t be far behind): the obscene widening of income inequality between the very rich and everyone else since the 1970s. “There is something wrong when we allow the playing field to be tilted so far in the favor of so few,” the president said in his budget message. He was calling for fundamental fairness, not class warfare. America hasn’t seen such gaping inequality since the Gilded Age and 1920s boom that preceded the Great Depression.

From the link behind "such gaping inequality" above is the following chart demonstrating the magnitude of the widening gap:

The chart shows the share of the richest 10 percent of the American population in total income – an indicator that closely tracks many other measures of economic inequality – over the past 90 years, as estimated by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. I’ve added labels indicating four key periods. These are:

The Long Gilded Age: Historians generally say that the Gilded Age gave way to the Progressive Era around 1900. In many important ways, though, the Gilded Age continued right through to the New Deal. As far as we can tell, income remained about as unequally distributed as it had been the late 19th century – or as it is today. Public policy did little to limit extremes of wealth and poverty, mainly because the political dominance of the elite remained intact; the politics of the era, in which working Americans were divided by racial, religious, and cultural issues, have recognizable parallels with modern politics.

The Great Compression: The middle-class society I grew up in didn’t evolve gradually or automatically. It was created, in a remarkably short period of time, by FDR and the New Deal. As the chart shows, income inequality declined drastically from the late 1930s to the mid 1940s, with the rich losing ground while working Americans saw unprecedented gains. Economic historians call what happened the Great Compression, and it’s a seminal episode in American history.

Middle class America: That’s the country I grew up in. It was a society without extremes of wealth or poverty, a society of broadly shared prosperity, partly because strong unions, a high minimum wage, and a progressive tax system helped limit inequality. It was also a society in which political bipartisanship meant something: in spite of all the turmoil of Vietnam and the civil rights movement, in spite of the sinister machinations of Nixon and his henchmen, it was an era in which Democrats and Republicans agreed on basic values and could cooperate across party lines.

The great divergence: Since the late 1970s the America I knew has unraveled. We’re no longer a middle-class society, in which the benefits of economic growth are widely shared: between 1979 and 2005 the real income of the median household rose only 13 percent, but the income of the richest 0.1% of Americans rose 296 percent.

Penultimately and for fun here, Rich doesn't miss the opportunity to pile on to the emperor clothes of CNBC and the righteous skewering by Jon Stewart shown earlier on this site. What's troubling is that the clips Stewart assembled were presented in full context and told a broader tale of CNBC and Wall Street insiderism that has become all-too-apparent now, and which CNBC is terrified to have revealed broadly.

Last week Jon Stewart whipped up a well-earned frenzy with an eight-minute “Daily Show” takedown of the stars of CNBC, the business network that venerated our financial gods, plugged their stocks and hyped the bubble’s reckless delusions. (Just as it had in the dot-com bubble.) Stewart’s horrifying clip reel featured Jim Cramer reassuring viewers that Bear Stearns was “not in trouble” just six days before its March 2008 collapse; Charlie Gasparino lip-syncing A.I.G.’s claim that its subprime losses were “very manageable” in December 2007; and Larry Kudlow declaring last April that “the worst of this subprime business is over.” The coup de grâce was a CNBC interviewer fawning over the lordly Robert Allen Stanford. Stewart spoke for many when he concluded, “Between the two of them I can’t decide which one of those guys I’d rather see in jail.”

Led by Cramer and Kudlow, the CNBC carnival barkers are now, without any irony whatsoever, assailing the president as a radical saboteur of capitalism. It’s particularly rich to hear Cramer tar Obama (or anyone else) for “wealth destruction” when he followed up his bum steer to viewers on Bear Stearns with oleaginous on-camera salesmanship for Wachovia and its brilliant chief executive, a Cramer friend and former boss, just two weeks before it, too, collapsed. What should really terrify the White House is that Cramer last month gave a big thumbs-up to Timothy Geithner’s bank-rescue plan.

Finally, Rich brings it brilliantly together so as not to ruin our Sunday morning coffee:

In one way, though, the remaining vestiges of the past decade’s excesses, whether they live on in the shouted sophistry of CNBC or in the ashes of Stanford’s castle, are useful. Seen in the cold light of our long hangover, they remind us that it was the America of the bubble that was aberrant and perverse, creating a new normal that wasn’t normal at all.

The true American faith endures in “Our Town.” The key word in its title is the collective “our,” just as “united” is the resonant note hit by the new president when saying the full name of the country. The notion that Americans must all rise and fall together is the ideal we still yearn to reclaim, and that a majority voted for in November. But how we get there from this economic graveyard is a challenge rapidly rivaling the one that faced Wilder’s audience in that dark late winter of 1938.

Entire Major Cities & States Unemployed

It's hard to get our minds around certain statistics like today's announcement that 598,000 (let's just say 600,000 can we?) jobs were lost just last month. This shows definitively that the horrific job loss trend is indeed accelerating. (Every American should be pressuring their congress-critters to pass a stimulus bill asap - it's already past due.)

To put this in perspective, it is as if the following entire major cities were put out of work just last month:

U.S. Cities with Populations around 600,000:

• Boston
• El Paso
• Milwaukee
• Seattle
• Nashville
• Denver
• Washington, D.C.

The following cities have far fewer than 600,000 people. Last month's job losses alone would have eliminated more than one job for every person in the following cities:

• Las Vegas
• Louisville
• Portland, OR
• Atlanta
• Sacramento
• Kansas City
• Cleveland
• Miami
• Omaha
• Oakland
• Minneapolis
• Raleigh
• Arlington, TX
• St. Louis
• Tampa
• Cincinnati
• Pittsburgh
• Newark
• Plano, TX
• New Orleans
• Orlando

Obviously this is not an exhaustive list, and remember that city populations include children, the retired, and others not in the workforce.

There have been over 2 million jobs lost in the last three months.

There are only four U.S. cities with populations greater than 2 million:

• Houston (2.2 M)
• Chicago (2.8 M)
• Los Angeles (3.8 M)
• New York (8.2 M)

There are only fifteen U.S. states with populations over 2 million.

And there are 26 -- yes, twenty six -- U.S. states with populations less than 600,000 - the number of jobs lost in the U.S. just last month.

We are not having an academic or ideological discussion in this country about the imminent need for stimulus.

When Elevators Attack

If I told you that someone was injured when their elevator fell from the 27th to the 25th floor before the emergency brake kicked in, you might ask, "What happened?"

But if I told you someone jumped off a 2-story building, you'd probably ask, "Did they survive?"

It's essentially the same thing though.

Granted, elevator travel really is the safest form of travel in the world. The best elevators in the world will only fall 6 feet, even if the suspension cables hypothetically snapped. There are redundancies upon redundancies, and aside from accidentally falling in an open door into the shaft, the danger couldn't be less given that the car travels along a fixed path cleared of all obstructions in only 2 directions.

But still, like anything, systems fail. When I first read of the failure in the linked article, I thought it would be a clear example of how our nation's aging skyscrapers are falling into extraordinary disrepair in an ever spiraling need for greater maintenance to fight against the ravages of physical aging. Skyscrapers weren't built to last 100 years on their own.

But the building in question, in downtown Houston, was only finished in 2003. Instead of being of comfort, it only alarms me more.

I am convinced that the era for central business districts consisting of dense roads and tall skyscrapers is fated for an end. Whereas prior to the telecom revolution, businesses required physical proximity for efficiencies of day-to-day business, this is just no longer the case. The falling costs of telecom technology, its rising efficiencies and capabilities, and the inevitably rapid rise of transit costs - auto or mass - point clearly to the future trend, which doesn't favor the downtown skylines of 20th century American triumphalism.

I expect that one day American history books will have a chapter with awesome skyline photos of American cities in the same way they now have photos of the 19th century American West full of buffalo herds roaming on open plains.

Whether it's an isolated instance of failure or not, this recent elevator failure foretells I think the kinds of infrastructure problems we are certain to see more as the next few decades unfold amidst ever-expanding telecom technology, rising transport costs, and declining urban and municipal tax bases.

Beyond that, how many horror stories like the following will the public tolerate?

From The Houston Chronicle:

On Dec. 9, DeRouen, who has been working as a contract consultant for Rosetta Resources on the 27th floor, said she finished work about 5:30 p.m.

“I pressed one, and it started free-falling really fast,” DeRouen said.

Sent airborne during the descent, she slammed hard into the floor when the elevator suddenly halted at the 23rd floor.

Her tibia bone tore through her leg between her knee and ankle, creating a long wound. Her ankle and toes on her left leg were fractured.

The elevator door wouldn’t open, so employees on the 23rd floor could not come to her aid as she pierced the air with screams, Boutros said. They kept her talking, though, worried that she might lose consciousness otherwise, she said.

It took a half-hour for help to arrive, Boutros said.

She has undergone several surgeries on her leg and will undergo at least two surgeries to repair the fractured lower vertebra and ruptured discs, Boutros said.

Oh, and there wasn't just one instance -- there was another one shortly after in the same building.

Both incidents are still under investigation by the landlord and its elevator contractors (and where are the police?), while the other elevators are still in operation. Naturally, many employees are taking 25 flights of stairs now instead of using the remaining elevators.

Just this week, roughly one month after the first incident still under investigation:

On Monday, Carleen Naumann, a sales representative for Besco Tubular, and Allan Keel, president of Crimson Exploration, were injured when an elevator dropped precipitously from the 27th floor to the 25th floor.

They were trapped in the elevator for a short time. Keel said he suffered a minor back injury and declined to be taken to a hospital.

Later, called ambulance
Naumann, of Katy, also declined treatment Monday. But she said she called for an ambulance after she got up Tuesday morning and her nose was bleeding. Her ankle also was hurting, she said.

Staff at Memorial Hermann Hospital in Katy determined she had fractured a vertebra in her lower back, she said.

“The elevator was flying. I thought we went down 15 stories. I was shocked to hear it was only two,” she said. “I was airborne and then it was as if we hit bottom.”

The nation's urban infrastructure problems are piling up so quickly from accelerating deterioration and a long history of deferred maintenance -- one day the costs of renewing the systems of the buildings, water systems, roads, fuel, and air will exceed the capacity of the nation to pay them. This is one of the biggest secrets in American municipal government and civil engineering. Few yet appreciate the full scope of the problem.

And if anybody else gets killed in their car from an exploding old gas main, or falls to their death in an open road hole from a water main break, or simply plunges into a river from a failed Interstate bridge, or especially if other cities see executives with bones sticking out of their legs or crushed vertebrae after an elevator falls two or three stories -- well, let's just say the suburbs and exurbs and rural areas will suddenly find new federal resources to support low-rise commercial development, and brand new sewer, water, electrical, and gas lines.

One day telecommuting won't be an HR incentive - it will be our way of life. It is destined to become the only affordable option for the nation's economy.