MPR Marketplace: Ads & Taxes Commentary October 9, 2002
Benjamin R. Barber
The ironies of public life in America! While our federal government is busy making expensive public preparations for war, state and local governments around the nation are busy trying to figure out how to survive cheapskate taxpayers and get anything done at all. Without a domestic Saddam Hussein to incite the taxpaying public into a frenzy of sacrifice, local officials are privatizing everything in sight, from schools and jails to parking meters and police cars. That's right, police cars. In the Florida Panhandle town of Springfield, town fathers have bought 15 squad cars for a buck a piece - on the condition that they carry advertising. McDonald's, Nascar, Taco Bell, Viagra, maybe even local law firms so perps being thrown up against car trunks and told to "spread 'em" can note the phone number of a nearby bail bondsman. One step shopping for felons. Actually, Springfield's police chief Sam Slay doesn't think it's THAT funny. "We really shouldn't have to do it," he told me, "but nobody wants to cough up the coins."
Cities and counties are desperate for revenues in times when most citizens seem to think of taxes as a form of extortion and prefer to let private vendors do the heavy lifting. In New York City, a pilot program begins on October 1 in which 500 ads will be wrapped around parking meter poles in my neighborhood on the West Side. If it succeeds, the city's 64,000 meters will follow. Two bits for ten minutes of parking, and 95 bucks a months to stick your ad on the meter pole. Revenues maybe, but not exactly in the spirit of the democratic commons.
It's happening everywhere. The Internet is now supported by scrolling billboards and pop-up ads, and no one seems to mind that what was once touted as a new electronic frontier for culture, education and democracy has become a virtual mall in which porn plays a bigger role than civics. Same deal for schools where TV ads from Channel One that kids are required to watch during class pay the cost of hi tech equipment for equipment-starved inner city high-schools.
Privatization and the accompanying commercialization of our public spaces is in truth a disaster for our commonwealth, whose currency is public goods. Above all, in a time of war we ought to recognize that citizens are more than consumers and the commons isn't common if it's privately funded. Or maybe it's time to get in the spirit of Springfield, Florida. If government is to become a vast billboard for private market vendors, maybe we should start selling ads for the upcoming war as well. Given that not too many of the Germans or Saudis who footed the bill for Kuwait are likely to be around to pick up the kazillion dollar tab this time around, why not charge it up to Coca Cola, Nike and Ronald McDonald? Just stick their brand logos on smart bombs and offer ad space on F-18 fuselages and the gas masks of our women and men in uniform. So that, like the winning Superbowl quarterback who lets us know as he leaves the field that he's "going to Disneyland", the paratrooper who whacks Saddam Hussein can boast to Larry King, "Last thing he saw before I blasted him was the 'Golden Arches.'"
From New York, this is Benjamin Barber for Marketplace.
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