Here we are heading down the home stretch on another presidential election and faced with the same BS. Do I want to be taxed to death for another war of choice that fills the pockets of a pack of croneys or do I want to be taxed to death for another jolt to a bunch of dehumanizing, failed social programs?
Did I just unfairly pidgeonhole your favorite political party?
Gosh, I'm sorry. Maybe you should FORM ONE THAT MAKE SENSE.
Here are a few things to contemplate while you do that:
1. Peek Oil - Surprise, oil is a non-renewable resource. Our oil driven society is like a group of people who discover a huge warehouse full of food and decide that farming is for loosers. They SELL the food and look like business geniuses because they can make a bunch of money off of it. Then one day somebody sees the back wall of the warehouse while their pulling out a box of canned peaches. Everybody wants to crucify the guy and call him a liar (except a cadre of people who think the food from the warehouse has always sucked compared to fresh grown - which can't compete on price with free). Eventually everybody has to face that they have to FILL the warehouse before they empty to have a sustainable business/source of food. Unfortunately, it cost more to fill a warehouse than to empty one.
Bottom line - the economic miracle that makes double digit growth-obsessed free enterprise economics and/or utopian social program even appear to temporarily work is GOING AWAY. If you want your new "truth" to function, better find a sustainable source of energy as economically forceful as oil.
1a. Big yield food sources like the US corn crop are genetically engineered to depend completely on fertilizers produced from oil byproducts. While your solving the coming energy crisis you better solve the related food crisis.
2. Habeas Corpus matters and no one cares enough to repair it. Taking it away from a class of people such as "terrorists" is problematic. Since the function of Habeas Corpus is to partially to force the adjudication of an accusation all you have to do is call someone a terrorist and you've effectively removed the protection of habeas corpus thus removing the ability to clear the person of the classification as a terrorist. Yeah, I know it's more complicated than that but when you bottom line it that's what you get.
If you want to keep freedom you better figure out a way to make this issue more interesting than porn, Wii and fear mongering because Joe sixpack doesn't give a s**t about habeas corpus and your elected representatives KNOW IT. Getting it back will require renewed political force. Pardon me if the thought of Nancy Pelosi getting the Magna Charta resigned doesn't leap immediately into my "possible reality bucket."
3. Health Care - Shouldn't we look at what healthcare was like BEFORE it was broken? More on this later.
4. Global Competition - The reason we are getting our ass handed to us by China is actually quite simple. We decided to trade with a totalitarian dictatorship and the world followed us to their door. It's tough for a country full of people with rights and a roof over their head to compete with a country where people have few if any rights and live in polluted tenements and shacks. I can already hear the various China apologists describing the great triumph of capitalism and or state planning that is China. I can also hear all the anti-union guys grumbling about "them."
If you want a working economic & political system you need a more sophisticated approach to the dictatorship next door than to contract all your plowshares to them, borrow your childrens future from them and build their competitive capacity....
5. Technological Competition - Here's the other sorry story. All that efficiency that Greenspan used to go on about is driven by the REPLACEMENT OF HUMAN LABOR WITH AUTOMATION. I'm not a luddite and you shouldn't be either but if you want a working economy, body politic and society you might want to pay attention to the old HAL 9000 while your crowing about full employment. Most of the wealthiest businesses right now count machines as their primary source of labor. We have had the capacity to produce far more than we need for some time now but we still aportion the right to consume (money) by the capacity to produce (or to fund successful production and distribution - aka investment dividends).
How long can we keep that up? There's no invisible hand manipulating the economy in favor of John Henry. There never has been. You can only loan John Henry money for so long before the illusion that he's economically entitled breaks down. I'm a very capitalistic thinker but I have to admit that the thought that workers will always find a viable way to produce something competitive and useful feels more and more like stupid, misplaced faith.
This problem dovetails with this one....
6. We don't need all the s**t we buy here in the US. We don't need half of it. This may end up being good news in that we have a long way to fall (if we refuse to pay all that debt). But the growth we're addicted to is predicated on the continued growth in DEMAND. I hear all kinds of strange ideas about demand. Here are a few of them with my responses:
- The rising tiger of Asian demand will be the great economic engine of the 21st century. ...Great, how does that help the US? Does anyone really believe that China or India will run so low on productive capacity that they will buy things from us? The idea of Asian demand may comfort some people with capital to invest but I fail to see the positive for the US citizenry (or Europe of that matter).
- The falling dollar will inspire a new wave of local employment as our goods and services are again able to compete on the world market. ...Really? So what will we do here, get big influxes of capital to rebuild our manufacturing capacity? That money will come from our own healthy banking system? Maybe we'll find a way to match the enormous growth potential of Asia and attract global capital.... Maybe we'll get really lucky and China and India will become LESS STABLE as a result of all that tasty, comfy economic growth.... American's will have to both WANT American goods at American prices and have the CAPACITY TO BUY them.
- Uhm... Trickle Down Economics?!
- We are a bread-basket. There will always be demand for our food and food will grow increasingly expensive around the world. .... Hmm, okay but does that mean that we are all going to morph into some kind of agribusiness multiplier economy akin to the military industrial complex? I guess I've got some thinking to do on that one....
Okay, the list could go on but there is another related piece that your friendly neighborhood utopian has to deal with:
7. The Earth can't sustain American demand (or the growing Asian demand) for wonderful magic s**t. We haven't changed our basic model of disposable everything. We still maintain a collective jones for packaging. We are ecological vampires with the exception that we permanently kill our victims. I think part of the answer is to change the nature of our desires to be more in line with a sustainable world but the arbiters of our desires (media & advertising) live off the value chain of unsustainable product addiction we've come to know and "love."
I've run out of time. I'll resume this depressing list soon. After it I'll get to the part where the "angry middle" can do something about it.
Stay in the loop.
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