America is a sick society

[pbrower2a]

(10-05-2018, 01:20 AM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote:

(10-04-2018, 11:18 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Author Robert Kaplan answers questions from readers

My thoughts: The parochial, provincial, insular character of red America was revealed to Robert Kaplan on his tour of America, as reported in a PBS Newshour interview. It makes clear to me again how the red-state Trump voters have created their own suffering. It's the very anti-globalist, narrow-minded, pro-free market, anti-socialist, anti-diversity policies they have voted for for decades that keep them in decline, while the coasts and the university towns that are connected to the world thrive. And yet they keep voting to keep themselves in pain and in decline. In voting for Trump, the towns in the heartland have voted to make themselves even MORE cut off from the world, through erecting immigration and tariff barriers and empowering an American administration that encourages the rejection of knowledge and the understanding of other peoples. It is just the opposite course Kaplan says they need to take in order to recover. Can they wake up? Or must they be dragged into a better future through political victory OVER them?


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Jeffrey Brown:

OK, let's go to one more question.

Brandon Irwin:

Mr. Kaplan, you say in the book, "Americans, I find more and more each day as I travel, do not want to know the details about foreign policy."

Is this disconnect with foreign policy replicated around the world?

Jeffrey Brown:

You do — we should say you travel all over. You have written about many other parts of the world.

Robert Kaplan:

Yes, I do. Yes, I have got reported from 100 countries.

And in most, but it's — you only see it replicated in large, massive countries, continental-size, like the United States, where there's so much going on internally, that the outside world seems almost to disappear in a way.

But in many — Europe is mainly small countries, and even the biggest countries is small by our standards. But, in Europe, in Africa and the Middle East, people are much more connected to world events, I find, than in the United States.

It's almost as if you know intellectually that every place in the U.S. — the Oklahoma Panhandle has agricultural ties with cities in China and everywhere. You know all this intellectually, but when you actually see it, and drive across it, the continent is so big and variegated, that the rest of the world seems abstract almost.

OMG, what a case of stupidity.  Yeah, the global economy has one way to go, to destruction.  Let me lay it out.

Let's take the Oklahoma panhandle.  I know the place after all. The Oklahoma panhandle produces wheat and cows. The Oklahoma panhandle is also on top of the Ogalalla aquifer.  Now here's the joke. The global economy is mining that aquifer. Guess what happens when it runs out of water? You can only have a few cows per acre and do dry land farming because, no water, no irrigation.  Hahahahahaha.  The joke of the future is that link like a lot of other globalized shit's gonna come crashing down on fucking idiots like Robert Kaplan.  The moron can't see beyond his cloistered big city living.  Can't  morons see that mining water is a one way trip to oblivion?  I guess not, huh? Oh, and the cow farts in the stinky feedlots are a gas too, heheh.   Just think of all of that methane.

The American High Plains are steppe -- terrain that needs irrigation for productive farming. I can say this of farming: if the agricultural system fails, the whole economic order collapses. Famines kill social orders. Food shortages spark revolutions. A near-famine was the spark of the French Revolution; things must have looked great at Versailles, but economic elites always have ways to hide the nastiness of their social orders from themselves.

We have economic elites in this country who often have no idea of what the economic reality is outside of their cloistered world of unrestrained privilege. They ensure that people of talent never get a chance to compete with them. They have sponsored economic policies such as the nearly-flat income tax that taxes a struggling mom-and-pop firm as if it were Exxon-Mobil or Wells Fargo bank. The graduated income tax created niches for small-town banks, retailers, and restaurants. To be sure, there are economies of scale in advertising (which has nothing to do with tax policy) and tax compliance. The IRS can practically shut down a one-site store while it audits the business, but that is no problem for Wal*Mart.

I think we all know what people would be first to go to the figurative guillotine if America ever had a food crisis -- heirs, the executive nomenklatura, and of course their political flunkies.  

Quote:Mideast?  Yeah, I'm sure the folks over there are well connected.  They can't fucking help it after all. All of shitfuck Neocons made that happen. I'm sure they know about every bomb, aircraft, missle, etc. our  MIC has to offer. Well guess what? I bet they also think like like ole Rags does and hates globalization/Neocons.  After all, they experienced the nations getting wrecked, their infrastructure destroyed, family killed and the like. I also perfectly understand why IS lopped the heads off those Americans.  If some country did that to my family, fucking A, I'd like to lop some heads off with an AR-15.  Just shoot enough bullets at the neck and heads will roll, man.

The only Middle-Eastern country that has its stuff together is Israel -- sort of. Even there, economic inequality is severe.

Quote:Small towns?  The idiocy here blows my mind.  Globalization is what wrecked the economy there. We exported jobs and imported cheap shit in its place , yes because globalization. 

...and a tax system that has fostered mergers and acquisitions, the transformation of giant American corporations from manufacturers to importers, and the disappearance of small-scale manufacturing. Where I live in Michigan, the manufacturing is heavily in sweatshop suppliers to the auto industry that looks for ways to cut costs. Dairies have gone from being farms to veritable factories. Banking and retail used to be cottage industries, but the small-town department stores are long gone in favor of "Wally World".  

Quote:Immigration/borders.  Guess what? We need fewer people because resources are going to become scarce and we'll have our share of climate change refugees.  Charity begins at home, man.

...if climate change  gets as severe as it looks to be, then we will end up with huge numbers of internal refugees, as from Florida.  Global warming will inundate not only Philadelphia, but also the rich farmland to its north and west that made Philadelphia possible. It will confiscate property on a scale that Stalinist commies could only dream of -- and with large amounts of property render meaningless, it will create legal anarchy.

Quote: Besides, local resilience is a better way to go.  Problem is, is wrecks the profit stream of multinational corporations so that's why few know of it. Oh well, we'll get to it later after globalism crashes and burns.

The global elites do not want people to be resilient; they want people to be helpless and thus easier to exploit and fool, even to bring about fascism by playing up resentments. Bad as Trump is, he is as much a symptom as the illness.

Quote:Yeah, reds need to wake up to being screwed over by a facet of globalization being tinkle down economics and no regulations concerning workers, that being neoliberalism.

Blues likewise need to wake up to being duped into supporting cheap labor and the importation of more consumers and screwing over their concerns about mother earth and  poor citizens. Neoliberalism/Neoconservatism the true axis of evil of our times.

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The Regeneracy begins in earnest when people start turning to mass action instead of to tribalism.