Fortune is Time Inc.'s magazine of industry and business. Judging by its coverage and its advertisers, including the likes of Rolex and Maserati, the publication's subscribership is heavily composed of elites, who have great power in the business world and, of course, lots of disposable income, too.
So it's instructive that the magazine is returning to its roots, more and more often showing its high-end readers why current economic models don't work and aren't sustainable. It's the Spider-Man thesis: With great power comes great responsibility.
Henry Luce founded Fortune just before the 1929 stock market crash that triggered the Great Depression. According to Wikipedia, in the terrible economic years that followed, “Fortune developed a reputation for its social conscience, for Walker Evans and Margaret Bourke-White's color photographs, and for a team of writers including James Agee, Archibald MacLeish, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Alfred Kazin, hired specifically for their writing abilities.”
Now that the US and world economies look like near-Great Depression re-runs, the magazine appears to be returning to its wellspring of hopeful but cautionary tales. If you believe its reporting, many captains of industry are already know times are changing, fast, and they're working hard to transform their business models for a world that in just a few decades is unlikely to look very much like it does today.
Among themselves, many of the private manipulators of our economy know that the industrial economy is largely destructive and can't last. Even more telling, however, is industry's continuing message to the wider world (think, for example, of those BP “we're great” ads that still seek to greasily anoint the firm in the wake of its huge Gulf Oil spill) is that the current model is great.
Which is to say: What Republicans and conservative ideologues in general portray as an economic agenda is more and more regarded within the business community with a big wink and a grudging nod. Like conservative ideology in general, economic more-of-the-same rhetoric is mostly power-mongering and gamesmanship, not something even most (tea partiers excepted) of its progenitors any longer actually believe in.
Take the December 1, 2014 issue of Fortune, which closes with a column by Stanley Bing entitled “What the Dickens?” (as in Charles). Bing likens the “big game,” i.e. the economy, to gambling at a Vegas casino. It looks like fun, but you will lose money. “You're there,” Bing reminds us, “to feed the machine.” Then he lists ways that 21st Century capitalists are likewise feeding their machine, returning us to 19th Century working conditions. On Bing's list: Bad wages, crappy benefits, no pensions, lousy hours, no unions, no job security. Here's what he says about unions:
“Quite a few years ago, I was a non-union actor. You know what I made for eight shows a week? $87.50. There's a reason management hates unions. They're a pain in the butt. For them. That's why it will fight like hell for your “right to work.”
Now, some will note that Bing is but a columnist, and that these are his opinions, not necessarily those of the magazine's editors or publishers. However, besides the fact Fortune feels justified letting Bing rant at will to its well-heeled readers, the magazine's main editorial content is no less subversive. In the same December issue, readers, for instance, learn about developments in hybrid and electric motor cars and alternative energy systems. These developments are radically about to transform society, in ways that antidiluveans like Sen. Mitch McConnell still baldly oppose. And the cutting-edge analysis continues, issue after issue.
Among themselves, at least, the elites mostly trade in truths, rather than mere truthiness.
Read Fortune for a few months. Compare its coverage to prevailing conservative ideology and political power. As I did, you may perceive from this reporting that some of the most innovative and successful captains of industry increasingly must regard the Republican Party and its hold against progress like a crazy uncle to be hidden in the attics above their skyscraper penthouses. But if the G.O.P. is a S.O.B., it's their S.O.B., so for the most part they're stuck with each other.
Among themselves, the private-sector bosses of our economy (and, GOP rhetoric notwithstanding, they're not union bosses) already are putting more and more effort into fundamental transformation. But down in the trenches, that change still somehow translates into taking workers a century or more backwards in time, to much worse conditions. More troubling, among the elites this is all patently clear and openly discussed, even while great energy and effort goes into bamboozling the 99 percent of us into thinking otherwise about what's wrong, how bad it is, who is to blame, and how to fix it in the most egalitarian of ways. Like Edgar Allen Poe's great detective plot, these clues are hidden in plain sight.
Average Americans aren't going to be lining up in droves to read Fortune anytime soon, either the online version or printed copies on the rack at local free libraries (how long will those racks remain that way?). Which makes it all the more ironic that in the magazine's pages – and increasingly the pages of other special-interest media outlets – the real and rather lovecraftian economic game plan is out there. It may look utopian but masks a monster so evil that no one shall speak its name. Yet, the figuratively robed and hooded elites do speak its name within their cloisters, confident the rest of us won't make the effort to peer through their windows and observe their rituals. Indeed, they're so confident in their power that they haven't even bothered with drapes.
In the pages of Fortune, then, an underlying theme emerges. Ours really is the best of times and the worst of times. Unhappy consequences are converging on humankind in general and workers in particular. There is hope for and signs of a better, more sustainable technology that would benefit all, yet even in the most optimistic scenarios, no one of influence within the business world save possibly Warren Buffet and a small band of like-minded billionaires has advanced the idea that the good times won't be extended until policymakers address the problems affecting most of America and the planet at large. Their fixation on seeing this in terms of consumerism is, of course, a big part of the problem.
Regarding all this, the only words that come to mind are: God bless us, everyone. And, like Tiny Tim, I do mean everyone.