(09-16-2016, 12:08 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: One problem is the elites of both the center Right and center Left bought in early and aggressively to the "Flat World" / "electronic herd" / "plugged in world" bullshit of Thomas L. Friedman and others of that ilk. Such bullshit went along the lines of "we are globalizing, get over it" and "if only you join the electronic herd / retrain yourself, the rising tide will lift your boat too."
Well ... not so fast. Even the so called knowledge workers are in a race for the bottom, just like what has hit blue collar ones.
Middle-class techies and intellectuals believed that they could profit greatly from the technological world that would marginalize work but make gadgets and entertainment cheap and amazing. We would be able to exchange ideas as if we were college professors. Such, for a time, was a well-remunerated delusion. In the end, middle-class techies and intellectuals would themselves be marginalized just as had industrial workers. Then came HB-1A workers who could be imported to be paid like soldiers and live in barracks so that the profiteers of the tech industry could really make profits.
I don't have any problem with the techs from foreign countries so long as they get paid well; in fact I want them living the American Dream and joining our gene pool! But American-born kids are learning that they will have to compete with people on the exploitative HB-1A visas.
In the meantime, housing prices would skyrocket in places in which the techies and intellectuals congregated, high rents becoming in effect a tax that the urban landlords could exact upon those who got above-average incomes. Say what you want about opportunities for technical wizards, it is far easier to make money gouging such people for rent than to do hardware design or to create software.
Unlike public taxes for which politicians have some accountability for what they do with the revenues, real-estate gougers have few responsibilities to renters. Complain about the rent? There's always another taker, and one can always to to the rural Midwest where rent is cheap... but the opportunities are few. Does anyone with a college degree who has held a well-paying job really want to be a front desk clerk at a motel at Exit 317 on Interstate 69 in Indiana just because the living costs are much lower?
I can almost see the smear on those who make the easy money gouging us -- they tax, we have no representation, and they have no accountability. For the American Revolution one slogan was "No taxation without representation".
In many respects the 1950s were better (so long as one ignores polio, leaded gasoline, Blood Alley highways, McCarthyism, male supremacy, and the last few years of Jim Crow before its demise. The mass medium of television would kill Jim Crow dead. People lived in spacious, if austere housing with far fewer gadgets and far less software. That said, the housing of the 2030s will be stylistically austere because there won't be so much clutter. A reader or laptop will suffice for thousands of books and pieces of recorded music and video. Video screens might be gigantic, but they will often be concealed as something else, as behind a painting or cabinet doors. 1950s life was comfortable enough for middle-income groups that then included assembly-line workers. Take away the vile practices and replace the obsolete infrastructure and replace the 25" cabinet television (most likely black-and-white) with a television/computer screen and have one laptop per person to supplant records and books but add video and you might have the 2030s. Also go from debt-funded consumerism to the pay-as-you-go consumerism of the 1950s and the world will even seem mentally much like the 1950s, complete with the common man as a saver instead of a customer heavily in hock to loanshark lenders, and American political life will be much more placid and far less polarized.
Quote:There need to be controls and protections. The fact that Komrade Drumpf has been willing to at least mouth the words attracts many angry middle income people. I am not talking about the dysfunctional types of Hillbilly Elegy. I'm talking about hard working reasonably educated people. Where it went wrong was when the middle income white collar population started to feel the sting of globalony.
Government must mitigate the disputes that without check can balloon into conflict. Good government sponsors or at least imitates a wholesome give-and-take. Bad government serves the highest bidder, and we now begin to see how that works. This Crisis will have major reforms of the economic order or it will culminate in violent revolution.
Quote:To offer an alternative to demagogues like Komrade Drumpf, a politician with intellectual depth, and yet, attuned to the plight of the middle income silent majority, needs to step forward. Too late for this cycle. At best, we get Clintoon, warts and all. Worst case, we get Komrade Drumpf and a shop of horrors.
It is not too late. The Crisis will continue until that alternative arises or is forcefully and brutally precluded. Demagogue Don is practically everything wrong with America, and the rejection of his ilk by Americans or ejection by military force (coup or conquest) will make America much more livable, if for survivors only.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.