Some uncomfortable truths
I am writing this article because there is something I need to get off my chest. We are facing some long term problems that I just don’t see us as a nation, or even as a species fixing. More below the fold.
1. Our jobs are NEVER coming back. After every major economic recession, contraction and depression we have faced in the last twenty years, the jobs we shed in the manufacturing sector didn’t come back as “knowledge jobs” as we were promised, or at least in the same numbers as would have been necessary to replace these factory jobs, rather what we saw was jobs returning, but service jobs, little able to support a family or have a future. Jobs that have little to offer besides barely making your basic ends meet, if you are lucky. Which leads me to my next point.
2. Wage slavery is real, and will only get worse. The number of people in the United States who are essentially “wage slaves” (IE only having enough to barely get by month to month, with little prospect for improvement in their situation) are increasing. The causes of this are numerous and varied, for which I will leave to a future article, but I will say that having a college degree, once a virtually guaranteed ticket to the middle class is now (depending on your mileage) either just about useless at best, and a millstone about your neck at worst.
3. American workers are obsolete. Outsourcing is a monster that has long since devoured our manufacturing industry; it has consumed our “knowledge jobs” like programming and engineering and has even moved into the field of law as legal consulting has started to move to India. America and the world will become even more stratified as permanent unemployment moves beyond 5% to 10% and becomes more like a quarter of our population.
4. The economy will NOT expand fast enough to provide work for everyone. When I speak of the economy, I speak of the global economy, which, barring a few areas that actually still manufacture goods for the world market, and have a considerably lower standard of living, this will not improve, but rather will get worse as automation and technology evolve further along, making people unnecessary.
5. America is becoming a “prison economy”. As unemployment continues to spiral out of control and protest and civil unrest increase, our citizens will find themselves either unable to compete with prison labor and unemployed, or imprisoned themselves as the incarceration industry plays an ever larger part of our manufacturing sector.
6. Our media is a wholly owned subsidiary of the 1%. Media of all kinds shapes our understanding of the world as messaging becomes more effective at influencing the dialogue of public opinion, which makes it easier to boil the frog in the proverbial pot.
7. Our environment can no not support the population we have on our planet right now, let alone the numbers we may have in twenty years, barring a sudden collapse in oil supply, speaking of oil. We depend on oil for everything, from manufacturing cheap goods, to fertilizing our field. Everything we eat, breathe, drink and depend on for life is soaked in oil. We are headed to a collapse, sooner rather than later.
8. When most of us finally realize what’s really going on, it will be too late. Money has completely and thoroughly corrupted political systems worldwide. We no longer have a two party system in this country; we have bad cop and worse cop. We eagerly go to the polling places to prevent crashing into the mountain only to elect someone who has us on less urgent but still fatal descent.
9. A large percent of our population is now unnecessary. As technology advances our society will increasingly become divided between the haves and the have nots. The haves will be very few, I suspect that our planet will be dotted with fortified cities comprised of the rich, and everyone who serves them and everyone else, when our planets economy, market and ecology collapse the world will be a different place, which leads me to my last point.
10. The rich will be protected. The people whose greed and malfeasance ruined the markets, threaten our society and ecology will be safely behind their walled enclosures with their recycled air and living high on the hog, while the rest of us not connected to our new hyper rich overlords will be caught in a world that will be very hostile to life as we know it.
Comments questions and or corrections welcome.