What a herky-jerky mess our federal government is. What a bumbling klutz. It can’t manage health care. It can’t master infrastructure. It can’t fund itself for more than tiny increments of time. It can barely stay open. It shut down briefly on Friday for the second time in three weeks. Maybe it should just stay closed for good.
Let corporations pick up the slack! In fact they’re doing that already, with an innovation and can-do ambition sorely absent in Washington.
Three days before the latest shutdown, Elon Musk borrowed a launchpad previously used by NASA’s trailblazing astronauts to send his own rocket into space. It was the first time that a vessel of such might and majesty was thrust heavenward by a private company rather than a government agency.
It was also a roaring, blazing sign of our times, in which the gaudy dreams and grand experiments belong to the private sector, not the public one, and in which the likes of Musk or Amazon’s Jeff Bezos chart a future for our species beyond our stressed-out planet. NASA no longer leads the way.
Speaking of Amazon, it joined two other corporate giants, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase, to announce two weeks ago that they would form their own health care provider and try to solve the riddle that continues to stump lawmakers: dependable service at affordable prices.
Amazon also recently stole a high-profile educator from Stanford University, Candace Thille. Her hiring suggests that the company is poised to expand employee training to a point where Amazon is essentially filling in for public and private universities and grooming its own work force.
And Musk is not only reaching for the stars but also tunneling under the earth. A new venture of his, the Boring Company, is a response to the inability of public officials in Los Angeles to ease the region’s paralyzing traffic. Musk envisions a futuristic network of subterranean chutes. The first one is already under construction.
We Americans are living a paradox. We’re keenly suspicious of big corporations — just look at how many voters thrilled to Bernie Sanders’s jeremiads about a corrupt oligarchy, or at polls that show a growing antipathy to capitalism — and yet we’re ever more reliant on them. They’re in turn bolder, egged on by the ineptness and inertia of Washington.
“When there’s a vacuum, there are going to be entities that step into it,” Chris Lehane told me. “This is an example of that.” Lehane is the head of global policy for Airbnb, which ran a commercial this month that alluded (without profanity) to Trump’s “shithole countries” remark and promoted those very places as travel destinations. It spoke to another vacuum — a moral one — being filled by companies, many of which are more high-minded, forward-thinking and solutions-oriented than the federal government on immigration, L.G.B.T. rights, climate change and more. (...)
Corporations have long been engines of innovation, sources of philanthropy and even laboratories for social policy. But the situation feels increasingly lopsided these days. I’m struck, for example, by the intensity of conversation over the last year about what Facebook and its algorithms should do to stanch the destructive tribalism in American life. It’s true that Mark Zuckerberg’s monster has badly aggravated that dynamic, in part by allowing its platform to be manipulated by bad actors. But so has Washington, and we seem less hopeful that it’s redeemable and likely to shepherd us to a healthier place.
Although government spending has hardly dried up — the budget deal signed by Trump on Friday attests to that — and the federal debt continues to metastasize, there’s a questionable commitment to scientific research, leaving private actors to call many of the shots.
But companies’ primary concern isn’t public welfare. It’s the bottom line. I say that not to besmirch them but to state the obvious. Their actions will never deviate too far from their proprietary interests, and while tapping their genius and money is essential, outsourcing too much to them is an abdication of government’s singular role. What’s best for Amazon and what’s best for humanity aren’t one and the same.
Let corporations pick up the slack! In fact they’re doing that already, with an innovation and can-do ambition sorely absent in Washington.
Three days before the latest shutdown, Elon Musk borrowed a launchpad previously used by NASA’s trailblazing astronauts to send his own rocket into space. It was the first time that a vessel of such might and majesty was thrust heavenward by a private company rather than a government agency.
It was also a roaring, blazing sign of our times, in which the gaudy dreams and grand experiments belong to the private sector, not the public one, and in which the likes of Musk or Amazon’s Jeff Bezos chart a future for our species beyond our stressed-out planet. NASA no longer leads the way.Speaking of Amazon, it joined two other corporate giants, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase, to announce two weeks ago that they would form their own health care provider and try to solve the riddle that continues to stump lawmakers: dependable service at affordable prices.
Amazon also recently stole a high-profile educator from Stanford University, Candace Thille. Her hiring suggests that the company is poised to expand employee training to a point where Amazon is essentially filling in for public and private universities and grooming its own work force.
And Musk is not only reaching for the stars but also tunneling under the earth. A new venture of his, the Boring Company, is a response to the inability of public officials in Los Angeles to ease the region’s paralyzing traffic. Musk envisions a futuristic network of subterranean chutes. The first one is already under construction.
We Americans are living a paradox. We’re keenly suspicious of big corporations — just look at how many voters thrilled to Bernie Sanders’s jeremiads about a corrupt oligarchy, or at polls that show a growing antipathy to capitalism — and yet we’re ever more reliant on them. They’re in turn bolder, egged on by the ineptness and inertia of Washington.
“When there’s a vacuum, there are going to be entities that step into it,” Chris Lehane told me. “This is an example of that.” Lehane is the head of global policy for Airbnb, which ran a commercial this month that alluded (without profanity) to Trump’s “shithole countries” remark and promoted those very places as travel destinations. It spoke to another vacuum — a moral one — being filled by companies, many of which are more high-minded, forward-thinking and solutions-oriented than the federal government on immigration, L.G.B.T. rights, climate change and more. (...)
Corporations have long been engines of innovation, sources of philanthropy and even laboratories for social policy. But the situation feels increasingly lopsided these days. I’m struck, for example, by the intensity of conversation over the last year about what Facebook and its algorithms should do to stanch the destructive tribalism in American life. It’s true that Mark Zuckerberg’s monster has badly aggravated that dynamic, in part by allowing its platform to be manipulated by bad actors. But so has Washington, and we seem less hopeful that it’s redeemable and likely to shepherd us to a healthier place.
Although government spending has hardly dried up — the budget deal signed by Trump on Friday attests to that — and the federal debt continues to metastasize, there’s a questionable commitment to scientific research, leaving private actors to call many of the shots.
But companies’ primary concern isn’t public welfare. It’s the bottom line. I say that not to besmirch them but to state the obvious. Their actions will never deviate too far from their proprietary interests, and while tapping their genius and money is essential, outsourcing too much to them is an abdication of government’s singular role. What’s best for Amazon and what’s best for humanity aren’t one and the same.
by Frank Bruni, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ben Wiseman
[ed. See also: We’ve Trashed the Oceans; Now We're Turning Space Into a Junkyard for Billionaires]
