TILTING at windmills.

• Author: Peters, Charles
• Position: Politics and current events - Column

Starting in 1977, Washington Monthly founding editor Charlie Peters began writing "Tilting at Windmills," a regular column of pithy thoughts on politics and current events, continuing long after he passed the editorship on to Paul Glastris in 2001. For our fiftieth-anniversary issue, we asked Charlie to bring back his column--and his distinctive knack for making sense of the present by drawing lessons from the past. "I've lived through a lot of history that many of our readers have not experienced," Charlie explains, "and I think the history as it's written sometimes fails to explain how it really was."

Very important people

A reporter friend tells me he was stopped by a guard as he tried to enter the Pentagon's VIP entrance for a scheduled interview with a top official. The guard kept my friend waiting in the hot sun until perspiration had soaked though his shirt. Finally, someone arrived to straighten things out and the interview proceeded. As my friend was leaving, the security official met him in the hall to apologize for the delay. My friend said it was all right; he just wondered why the guard had kept him waiting. The security official sheepishly explained, "It was because you didn't have staff." The meaning was clear: You can't possibly be entitled to use the VIP entrance unless you're accompanied by an entourage--or at least a briefcase carrier. Only in Washington!

Hearing aids

Do you find congressional hearings as maddening as I do? Democratic and Republican members alternate, each given only five minutes to ask questions. As we saw with the Mueller hearings, when a Democrat's question elicited useful information, it was immediately followed by a Republican effort to muddy the waters. A Washington Monthly alumna, Michelle Cottle, who is now a member of the editorial board of the New York Times, feels the same way, and has come up with a solution. Why not have five Democrats ask the questions serially, so that they can build a case, and then give five Republicans their turn? That way, the subject isn't constantly changing and you don't lose track of where the questions are heading. And if you don't like that idea, Michelle suggests opening the hearing with questions from a knowledgeable staff lawyer, before legislators have a chance to sow confusion. At the end of Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski's chaotic hearing, staff counsel Barry Berke was given thirty minutes to ask questions, during which he "sliced through Mr. Lewandowski's baloney, getting him to admit some lies and answer some concrete questions," writes Cottle. Unfortunately, this came too late to dispel all the fog generated by Lewandowski. It would have been far better if Berke's questioning had come first.

401(k) mentality

Recall the number of times you've heard a television anchor attempting to engage his or her audience in the latest Wall Street gyrations by saying, "Think of how it will affect your 401(k)." In fact, Patricia Cohen reported for the New York Times that roughly half of American households own no stocks, in 40i(k)s or otherwise. As of 2016, over 80 percent of all stocks owned by Americans belonged to the wealthiest 10 percent.

More recently, Cohen has reported that in the last three decades, the wealth of the richest 1 percent has increased by $21 trillion, while the wealth of the bottom 50 percent has declined by $900 billion. It's clear that a major factor in the creation of wealth is the ownership of stocks, and those who don't own stocks are the losers. These are all too often the same people whose wages suffer because corporate revenue increasingly goes into raising the value of the company's shares. This means that members of the investor class, who tend to be our educated elite, have become more interested in growing their shareholder value than increasing the wages of the worker.

The Census Bureau recently reported that income inequality is now the worst it has been since the bureau started tracking it. It's now much worse than in any European country. This is why I'm sympathetic to the wealth tax proposals from Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. And I am certain that American capitalism must change so that a greater share of corporate revenue goes to the worker and less to the shareholders and executives.

The culture of bureaucracy

This magazine was started by a group that worked with me in the evaluation division of the Peace Corps. We became convinced that we were discovering truths about bureaucratic culture that explained a lot about how Washington really works. An example was provided by the Vietnam War, which was going on at the time. The Pentagon was using enemy body counts as a measure of success. Our caution was that whenever a bureaucrat is given a...