America is a sick society

[Ragnarök_62]

(10-05-2018, 02:15 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: "Panarchy. No system can be understood or managed by focusing on it at a single scale. All systems (and SESs especially) exist and function at multiple scales of space, time and social organization, and the interactions across scales are fundamentally important in determining the dynamics of the system at any particular focal scale."

Sounds like the wholism I was discussing with Bill the Piper. Yes, I'm a green and I like resilience. As above, so below

Maybe Kaplan has a blind spot, as conventional globalists tend to have. Maybe he just didn't mention free trade and all the exported jobs. His tour sure is revealing, but what does it reveal? Can the small towns hope for the return of the old jobs? How can they connect with the world? Maybe through resilience? Free trade did have a bad effect on the heartland's old towns. Of course, before Trump, they voted for that free trade too, along with the rest of neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism, over and over again, and would again too probably.

He's right ultimately when he says "all I could think about is, how to bridge the divide is, we can't go backward, we can only go forward, because the only future is global." And it's going to be hard to bring down the corporations from their perch enough so that the people aren't screwed by going global. Corporate globalism is the problem. It's going to take a much more skillful regime in the USA than we have had yet to fix it. It seems unlikely. Maybe these towns will just have to close up, and the people move to globalized places where they can benefit from the new economy.

That would be hard too without the social and regulatory support which they have voted against all this time and have been destroying all these decades in the name of self-reliance and fundie religion. Maybe the younger ones can move away or bring the world home, and maybe get on-line and learn the skills which the globalized blue-state companies want to hire. Meanwhile, as living standards rise around the globe, exporting jobs will become less attractive to US-based corporations in coming decades.

Immigration is the wrong target, as I keep telling you. Poor immigrant workers are not doing the jobs that the people in the small towns want to come back. Trump wants to bring in the elite workers who take American jobs instead. He just wants to keep out the people of the non-white races from shithole countries he doesn't like. And the heartland has voted to keep them out all these years too, and voted to blame the other races for the poverty which the neo-liberals and their dog-whistling politicians have imposed upon them.

1.  Small towns don't need to have old jobs return. Since lots of high tech jobs can be done remotely, it doesn't matter where you live. Folks can have the benefits of small towns like no traffic, cheap housing, and fresh food, once agriculture has to scale down. <-  Big AG is doomed by resource depletion like all things big. Oil will get more expensive.  Oil won't run out, but it's gonna cost.   So, the young ones can get on-line and learn the skills of whatever sized companies , chuck cars even, and enjoy a less hectic small town life. Yeah, cars are so over rated. Tesla's a joke. Why mess with cars when one can replace big ugly freeways and airports with train stations for regular and light rail? Meh on corporations. The way I see it, there are no US based corporations. All big corporations are transnationals that owe no allegiance to  anyone but the bottom line and need a smacking by anti trust laws.  

2. I'm not worried about corporate globalism lasting. It's gonna collapse due to climate change, population overshoot, and mass poverty. It's a one way trip to a new dark ages man.

3. I just want my little country to escape as much of the mess as possible. That means fewer people to match the carrying capacity. 

4. Jobs no Americans will do. That's dumb.  If you shut off the cheap labor, companies can either raise wages and improve working conditions so Americans will do the jobs or else they can just shut down.  It's their choice and since they fucked over American workers, tough shit to them.  I'd pick lettuce if I got paid $30.00/hr plus benefits. Lettuce prices go up, but oh well. This is what I keep telling you. There's no need for more people, because resources will become more scarce. I don't want to import elite labor either. If companies want to do business here, they need to support our education system more.  They sure as hell need to have a must do reason to do that.

5. There will be no need to connect to a world that's like a petri dish full of bacteria.  Humans ain't no different. We'll keep breeding until our population crashes in our own waste. Trump's a bit off wrt shithole.  The whole world's becoming a shithole full of microplastics, fertilizer fueled red tides , and just plain trash.  Trump is off wrt shit holes. The whole world is becoming a shit hole. The US is a literal shit hole due to homeless problems, Mr. Trump. The flood tide of human shit means the whole world is a shit hole. Now that's one thing that's global, human shit, all over the place , regardless of race, it's something whether we like it or not we'll have to embrace, face to face.