06-28-2022, 02:01 PM
(06-27-2022, 10:50 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: My interpretation: this is but the first salvo of assaults on liberal legislation and USSC decisions from environmental protection to voting rights for people not in ownership of property to workers' rights to organize and strike to contraception. Trump's three grossly-unqualified, politically charged judicial stooges seem connected to a political cult that holds that the only rightful basis of political power is economic power. To put it crudely, it holds that "he who owns the gold makes the rules"... which is reasonable enough when one is using someone else's money in an effort to establish a profitable business, but if it is simply a pretext for plutocracy, then it is the dehumanizing principle behind feudalism, chattel slavery, and fascism.
Plutocratic rule assumes that the only people capable of creating prosperity are the ones who already have it, and that anything necessary for anything more than bare survival by workers is pointless. This also fits well with the ideology characteristic of MBA educations lacking as a rule in humanistic values and preparations, let alone with any ethical contemplation. We did well enough without plutocratic ideology beginning with the New Deal, and when we started to make steps in the plutocratic direction we got nothing but more disparity between the haves and have-nots.
To say that America did better in creating prosperity when the executives had some experience on the shop floor, teller row, switchboard, loading dock, or the mail room and had some idea of how things were for people stuck there is no exaggeration. Cracking the metaphoric whip harder and squeezing more out of people with more fear of job loss while pay is stagnant creates as much distress as it does to create wealth that will mostly be frittered away in the sybaritic excess of economic elites.
Need I also tell you that back in the old days the executives were generally people with long service to their employers, people who had shown their loyalty over years, and people too old to live the Good Life that MBA grads expect to enjoy by age 35. The old-time, GI-generation executives that I knew typically were married to their high-school or college sweetheart after nearly 30 years; they wore the sorts of suits that one would expect working people to wear to church on Sunday (yes, they were men, as it was still a male-chauvinist time, one aspect that I do not expect to see revert in the forthcoming Saeculum). Sports cars? They were too old for those. Weekend trips to the ski lodge or a week in Europe? Out of the question, and not only because travel was much slower in those days.
Here is my fear: the economic elites of America want super-cheap labor, captive markets, no welfare, heavier depletion of natural resources for quick profits, and exorbitant rent. After an abortion ban comes a ban on contraceptives. If the world goes to Hell in the next Crisis Era, then so what? That's the Crisis of 2010, and I can see that as consequences of overpopulation, resource depletion, and diminishing food supplies. Those elites are inordinately selfish and myopic.
Global warming will inundate many of the places that now feed a couple billion people and may cause desertification of much land that is now just moist enough to grow wheat. In the middle latitudes. wheat is the last crop on the moist side of a divide between semi-desert and barely-humid climates Examples include the Canadian Prairie Provinces, the eastern parts of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas; and in Europe most of Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Moldova, and Ukraine.
There's no technological fix for hunger, and hungry people upset with flagrant displays of conspicuous consumption by people devoid of conscience are exactly the ones to fall for Marxist rhetoric. Marxist ideology among its intelligentsia may be abstruse, but Marxist propaganda directed at semi-literate masses (and the optimum level of learning for a nasty social order such as a plutocratic nightmare is marginal literacy).
If we handle this Crisis Era badly, either solving nothing or -- worse -- regressing to an economic order that serves only elites while squeezing, bleeding, and brutalizing everyone else, then the next one will be a horror that will make World War II look gentle. The wars will be more destructive and the genocide more horrific.
I repeat -- global warming and overpopulation (and the two are connected) are crimes against humanity!
You mean Crisis of 2100 (78 years from now), right? I believe given humanity's current behaviour, we aren't fully ready to deal with what will likely be the showcase event of that time: full impacts of climate change. If things really do play out in the ways the theory claims (the 1T & 3T after Crisis nothing major happens), we will have totally missed our shot by decade end. Are 2Ts usually a time to fix issues that affect the world as a whole or more localised/national issues?