Re-think

Greetings good citizen,

As we start a New Year it might be helpful to re-think some of our beliefs (because the people pitching so-called ‘solutions’ have their heads up their asses!)

Thus is today’s offering a vivid example of precisely that phenomenon (I’ll explain after the excerpt.)

Robots Don't Destroy Jobs; Rapacious Corporate Executives Do

Worrying about automation distracts us from the real problem: misuse of corporate profits.

December 31, 2012 |

Americans are understandably upset about profits without prosperity. Corporate executives seem to be the big winners, while the middle class is declining and young people face a bleak economic future. How did this happen? It's easy to blame technology, especially the automation that supposedly displaces workers. But that's not the real story. The fact is that automation creates jobs. It's the misuse of corporate profits that is destroying them.

There was a time when high corporate profits meant bright employment prospects for most members of the US labor force. That relation between profits and prosperity was strongest in the immediate post-World War II decades when US corporations led the world in manufacturing, provided workers with career-long employment security, and reinvested profits in productive capabilities in the United States. For the past three decades, however, the pursuit of corporate profits has been at the expense of prosperity for an ever-growing proportion of the American population.

This disconnect between profits and prosperity began in the 1980s with permanent plant closings that cost production workers their middle-class jobs. It increased in the 1990s as major US corporations scrapped the career-with-one-company norm that had prevailed for salaried employees, and it became common even for college-educated people with a couple of decades of work experience to find themselves on the wrong end of the pink slip. Then in the 2000s, as US corporations accelerated the globalization of production activities, the jobs of all members of the US labor force, no matter what their level of educational attainment, became vulnerable to competition from qualified people in lower wage areas of the world.

The article ‘essentially’ asserts the truth, although it is a stretch indeed to think how automation ‘creates’ jobs (it always ends in ‘net’ job destruction, otherwise it wouldn’t be doable.)

Um, again, the sights are set a bit too low as far as pointing to the true culprits here as well. The front line supervisors do what they’re told, just as unit managers are merely glorified ‘yes men’.

You need to venture into the boardroom and then follow the link to Wall Street, that’s where these irresponsible marching orders originate.

It’s also where the legislation that permits such foolishness starts.

Want to find out who destroyed the US economy…look at who was behind NAFTA…and its primary champion, Ronald Reagan.

Funny how much of what is wrong with today can be traced back to the Reagan Revolution…and the ‘rise of the >One Percent.’

More disturbing are the commercials trying to sucker you into going back to school for a job that most likely doesn’t exist.

Have you seen the college ad that speculates we could ad 20 million new jobs if we only ‘prepared’ for them?

Sort of short for the fucking 230 million working aged people who need work, isn’t it?

This is what I mean, we need to strengthen our grip on ‘reality’ before we become reality’s ‘road kill’.

I’m pretty sure good citizen that the only place on the whole net that you will find pointing to this factor is right here…everyone else either clueless and doesn’t care or assumes you already know and have come to terms with it.

Speaking of the origination of irresponsible concepts we could ‘follow the money’ into the Ivory Towers of Academia to learn who is behind the Randite/Friedman school of economic idiocy.

Rumor has it ‘twas the renowned monopolist Rockefeller…funny (and not necessarily ‘humorous’) the things you can do with ‘money’…

Which only strengthens my case against the current laws governing the uses of money today.

In a ‘more equitable’ world assholes like Rockefeller would be unable to ‘buy legitimacy’ for his pet prejudices.

In a more equitable world you wouldn’t be able to buy the truth either…

But, naturally, I digress…
If I were to share one thing with you good citizen it would be the ‘awareness’ that those who lord over us as our ‘betters’ stopped caring about the welfare of society long ago and focus only on what is good, to and for, THEM.

The ‘fatal myopia’ that I have warned of repeatedly has become so widespread and rampant as to become uncontrollable.

Small comfort that will be when the preppers go on the offensive after squandering their store bought existence…

Again, money gone horribly wrong (but you won’t hear that from Faux News.)

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Sustainable

Greetings good citizen,

After a positive start and a generally positive performance put in by markets around the world, the Dow closed down 20 points today giving the NYSE a ‘mixed’ finish…the Nasdaq was also down but the S&P 500 was positive…

But this is trivia. None of it matters if we can’t feed ourselves or get what we need to where it needs to be, when it needs to be there.

Thus we will need to relearn the lessons of ‘redundancy’ and ‘backing things up’ when we implement our new, sustainable way of life.

And this is not a question of ‘if’, it is a question of ‘when’.

Because the day is (rapidly) coming when it will no longer be possible to pick up the phone and have a replacement what-have-you on your doorstep tomorrow.

The trains travel on a schedule and it won’t speed up just because YOU needed it yesterday.

While you’ll still be able to ‘occasionally’ catch the jet stream and cross the country in a couple of hours, it may take you more time than just riding the prevailing winds to get there.

Then there’s the altitude factor. A lot to be considered when you ‘ride’ the wind rather than just push your way through it.

If I’ve been on a kick lately, the ticking clock would be one of the mainstays. The days of society running on fossil fuels are coming to a close…quicker than you think.

Again, we are NOT ‘out’ but the ‘infamous they’ are going to start choking off the supply so people will, er, ‘get used to’ a future that has less available energy.

I can’t stress enough that the ‘transition’ from a fossil fuel driven society BACK to a more primitive way of life needs to be very carefully managed indeed.

As expected, the deficit and debt were both discussed in the first presidential debate on domestic policy. However, despite this year’s endless American summer and a devastating drought that won’t leave town , climate change wasn’t. What would you bet that it won’t be a significant topic in the final debate on foreign policy either? Only one conclusion seems reasonable: climate change has no place on this American planet.

So far, both presidential campaigns indicate as much. To a wave of laughter in the final moments of his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, Mitt Romney mocked the subject, linking it negatively to the president. (“President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet. My promise... is to help you and your family.”) Obama simply avoided the subject in his. And that pretty much sums up the situation to date.

Though opinion polls indicate that undecided voters want to hear the candidates’ thoughts on climate change, I’m hardly the first person to note that the subject has gone MIA in the campaign season. Noam Chomsky , the Nation magazine , Salon’s Andrew Leonard , and Joe Romm of Climate Progress , among others, have all commented strikingly on its disappearance. But here’s the curious thing: if American debt and deficit happen to be your worry, then climate change should be your subject.

In response to a question about the deficit in the first debate, Romney typically said , “I think it's, frankly, not moral for my generation to keep spending massively more than we take in, knowing those burdens are going to be passed on to the next generation and they're going to be paying the interest and the principal all their lives.” Not a bad point really. Who wants to pile an unbearable burden of debt on future generations who won’t be able to work their way out from under it?

Here would be my follow-up question, however: In that case, what’s “moral” about doing exactly that in terms of the planet -- ensuring the release of such quantities of greenhouse gasses that the global “debt” will increase staggeringly? And here’s the kicker: unlike a financial debt, the planet, the atmosphere, nature, physics will not, as Bill McKibben often points out , be prepared to negotiate a deal. If Argentina or even the U.S. goes bankrupt, there is always an imaginable path back. If humanity goes bankrupt on this planet, it’s another story entirely.

Maybe, in fact, the debates have it right: climate change isn’t either a domestic or a foreign policy issue. It’s the whole ball of wax. The total thing.

Um, don’t ask…yes I did steal the whole article…which I thought/hoped was longer.

Not that this isn’t important, it is!

Um, the climate is changing and we need to change with it.

That part that is debatable is whether or not WE CAN do anything about the sun burning hotter!

Ironically the only way to ‘temporarily’ fix that problem is ‘nuclear winter’ and we’ll have an extinction level event on our hands if we attempt that variety of ‘radical action’.

Green house gases are only part of the problem…and maybe the infamous they are focused on that aspect because it fits the ‘illusion’ we can do something about the problem.

Because the sun’s core getting hotter is just a fact of life and there ain’t a whole hell of a lot we can do make it ‘cool down’.

Worse, fixing our sun is a task so monumental in nature and we’d have to invent ALL of the technology to accomplish the task.

Because it doesn’t currently exist.

Not like we can call the next galaxy over and ask to borrow a couple of billion tons of anti-matter.

Fortunately I suspect our ‘immediate’ problem is the (artificial) end of fossil fuels and that the gradual (and largely unavoidable) warming of the sun itself can be adapted to.

It’s going to be fixing the global economy to accommodate the post peak oil world that we have to adjust to.

And sadly that requires ‘prying’ the levers of power away from those who wield power by virtue of their control over fossil fuels.

Which, ironically means the >One Percent…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Sustainability

Greetings good citizen,

For the third time this week I feel compelled to take AlterNet to the woodshed for (this time) ‘over-complicating’ what already exists!

Will the existing structures have to change? Yes, but we can take our time! Part of the ‘beauty’ of A Simple Plan is it DOES NOT attempt to ‘remake’ a failed world from scratch, overnight.

It takes what we already have and applies a different set of rules, the processes don’t change right away, nor do they have to.

Maybe the tree huggers will have a problem with that but Rome wasn’t built in a day so converting to ‘sustainable practices’ will probably take a while…(remember, How Long is a Chinaman!)

Worse, good citizen, they start off claiming capitalism is dead then they go right back to advocating unsustainable capitalistic principles and policies!

Ironically, most of these schemes share capitalism's biggest flaw, which is its inherent reliance on growth. As a business owner, it's very hard to say, "We're big enough now. Let's stop here." (Though some, like Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard, have done just that.) Most businesses have competitors who, if they're allowed to get bigger than you, will swallow you whole. If you don't stay big enough to compete, you don't survive -- and since the competitors are facing the same imperative, the race can never really end.

As noted, this kind of constant growth simply isn't sustainable on a finite planet. People will always trade -- it's an essential human activity -- but going forward, we need small-scale businesses that can stay happy and healthy without being pushed to grow. Worker ownership doesn't really address this problem, though relocalization, which roots businesses deeply in their own local markets, limiting their reach beyond those boundaries, may provide one natural brake on growth.

For many large and necessary enterprises (utilities; essential centralized manufacturing; big, capital-intensive tech industries; and so on) public ownership may be the only way to ensure that they grow no bigger than they need to be to fulfill their mission. If there are other solutions that will allow us to have complex enterprises minus the growth imperative, they're still lurking out beyond the horizon.

Read my words (because you can’t see my lips!) Share = Good, Own = Bad!

These idiots can’t seem to escape the artificial construct of ‘ownership’, it’s NOT ‘yours’ so get the fuck over yourself, Damn it!

And if you CAN’T abide by the need to ‘share’ what there is, we have a special place for you where you will be ‘free’ to accumulate all your little heart desires. (Not that there’s a lot there to accumulate, they don’t call ‘em the Bad Lands for nothin’.)

Think you’re gonna be the ‘big fish in a little pond?’ Think again, grabbing as much as you can for yourself is another way to secure a one way trip to ‘Me-ville!’

So don’t ‘obsess’ about the ‘competition’ because there WON’T BE ANY!

Commerce will no longer exist to enrich the ignorant sons of bitches that claim to ‘own’ it, commerce will exist to serve all humanity! The number one goal of sustainable society is to ERADICATE POVERTY!

A fact that appears to be MISSING from AlterNet’s, er, ‘proposal’ and something you’re NEVER going to see under capitalism.

I will once again point out that there is NO LACK of things that need doing, that is why A Simple Plan guarantees 100% employment (by literally ‘eliminating’ the ‘employer’!)

How fucking sad is it good citizen that capitalism RELIES on a certain level of poverty to keep the rest of the population ‘motivated’?

If one were to read the article with a critical eye one would see that these so-called ‘architects of the future’ sneer at the idea of ‘localization’ (and then proceed to distort it out of all proportion!)

I again ‘belabor the obvious’ when I point out that resources are not ‘evenly distributed’ around the planet, and that simple fact will, er, ‘dictate’ what a particular locality focuses on.

It is also ‘simplistic’ in the extreme to even allude to the idea of any locality being a ‘one trick pony’.

There will be a lot of ‘duplication’ but almost no ‘competition’ because the purpose of commerce is NOT to ‘compete’ but to ‘serve’!

I believe I have made it abundantly clear that our civilization, such as it is, is extremely mismanaged.

We do all of the wrong things for the wrong reasons. Now that there are more of us we must stop being so wasteful…and we also need to put the brakes on the damn multiplying!

Because it is becoming apparent that Mother Nature has already stepped in to correct this phenomenon.

Which is not to say she didn’t have some ‘help’ from some seriously mis-guided and more than a little deranged, er, ‘elites’.

Almost ALL married couples in Western societies are in ‘fertility programs’!

And their offspring are, er, ‘weaker’ than those conceived ‘naturally’.

But not to worry, after the kill-off kids will go back to having kids younger than they do now…should solve the problem. (Or so the seriously deranged seem to think…)

But that’s another ‘landmine’ our species is tap-dancing on without realizing it…and we can thank the ‘corporate owned media’ for our ignorance.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner