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NPR

What d’you want to hear on NPR?

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For several months, I’ve been participating in a series of National Public Radio surveys, which are always kinda fun and make me feel like I have some tiny voice in…somethingorother.

Today’s survey asks what kind of economic news we’re hearing and what kind we want to hear. At one point, it inquires what proportion of national news we’d like, what proportion of stories about individual citizens, what proportion of local reporting.

I guess I’m an awful crank, but you know…I could do with a lot fewer human-interest pieces. Today, for example, NPR focuses on the life and hard times of Ms. Sylvia Martinez, whose luck has been flowing downhill since she was laid off a $52,000-a-year job. “Fifteen days from homeless,” she’s victimized by a fire in an apartment above hers, which leaves her few belongings soaked and the ceiling down in the living room. She’s unsuccessfully assayed suicide, her grown daughter has fled (taking Sylvia’s grandchild), and on and on.

It’s not that I’m not sorry for the lady. It’s that I don’t think wallowing in stories like this serves any purpose. We know, already, that things are tough all over. Breathes there one American citizen who doesn’t have a relative, friend, or acquaintance affected by the collapse of the Bush economy? If we haven’t seen the equity in our homes disappear, if we’re not making payments on a mortgage that exceeds the value of the asset underlying it, if we’re not out of work ourselves, we certainly have enough people in our own lives who have been hurt by this disaster to understand what it means on a human level.

Please, dear NPR: Take your reporters off the sob stories and assign them to local coverage. Get rid of some of the gab-fests and replace them with in-depth local news programs. As newspapers close and local television and radio news stations deliver little more than advertorial and infotainment, we need professional, responsible, investigative reporting on the local level. We need news, real news, on all levels: international, national, and local.

Do you listen to NPR? If so, what would you like to hear more of? Or less of?

Slow Money: Countercultural thinker may have something…or not

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I stumbled across Woody Tasch on NPR yesterday afternoon, when NPR’s All Things Considered ran a segment on his “slow money” concept, as it applies to a small organic dairy farm in upstate New York. It’s basically a variant onpeer-to-peer lending, or disintermediation, which cuts out the lending institutions with which we are presently feeling disgruntled.

The idea has a certain postmodern (or Depression-era?) charm. Like small-town bankers, we will all lend money to our friends and townspeople, here in the global village. Tasch’s take on it, however, is intriguing: that the speed with which financial transactions fly around the planet is a weakness in the global economy, because there are “structural limits to the power of industrial finance.”Speaking in favor of a simplified market, Tasch observes that “most recently, the subprime mortgage collapse signals the limits of ever accelerating, ever more complex, derivative-driven financial markets.”

He argues that the make-big-money-fast model, organized from “‘markets down’ rather than from the ‘ground up,'” works in favor of environmental degradation and, where food is concerned, brings us chemical-laden food, obesity, and hunger. Tasch focuses on socially responsible food production, suggesting that capital should be steered toward small, local, environmentally friendly farms and businesses.

It would be good to see organized support of farms that produce high-quality food all over the country. Wouldn’t it be awesome to have access to this kind of dairy product at a nearby market? Assuming, however, it came at a price one could afford…

Possibly if more financial support materializes for operations that produce organic foods, milk from grass-fed cows will become available at something less than $20 a gallon.
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