Remember, Cassandra Was Always Correct 3
James Howard Kuntsler seems to be auditioning as Cassandra; he thinks we need to start paying attention to what’s really going on. A nugget:
Now there’s great fanfare over a “manufacturing renaissance” in the United States, based on the idea that the work will be done by robots. What kind of foolish Popular Mechanics porn fantasy is this? If human beings have only a minor administrative role in this set-up, what do two hundred million American adults do for a livelihood?
All I need to do to know he’s on to something is look at the rise in sea level in the past 50 years just over there near where I live.
Afterthought:
“Popular Mechanics porn fantasy.” Heh.
June 6, 2014 at 12:27 pm
I’m sympathetic to some of that but having looked at his stuff before, scratch a little and underneath he’s a right-wing libertarian, but who takes the “liberty” to frequently despise the current Republican Party. Successful author, true, definitely can write but the complaint about the transgender girl on TIME is just little and inappropriate. I suspect it was the beginning of a longer rant on the topic but he cut it off.
It’s a little backwards in that gasoline prices per gallon are now a major problem after the Great Recession wiped out a significant number of better paying jobs, replaced only by minimum wage work. Here where I live, I’ve always seen that a lot of the low wage workers don’t actually have cars. As for those I see on “government stipend,” meaning the women and families with their foodstamp debit cards and WIC checks at the market, many still don’t have cars, they’re working poor, and they walk and ride a lot of bicycles, take the bus and the light rail, neither of which are easy ways to go around here.
And a lot of people aren’t on a “government stipend.” I’m not. We’re just screwed.
So if he is an answer and I suspect he doesn’t, really, except in science fiction books, perhaps it would have been better to note that the notion of not paying any good sum for American labor started 30-40 years ago well before robot factory automation and that if you lived in the Rust Belt you saw it first hand. What he gets right is, yes, you can’t have a country as big as the US where hundreds of millions of people are thrown away because corporate America doesn’t want to pay them anything, can use automation domestically, and still chase the cheapest labor overseas. Violent social unrest could be an answer but I think it unlikely simply because of the make-up of the country and disunity. You can, however, have the world’s biggest banana republic with the biggest military in world history. Or something like Egypt, or something entirely unique, the American corporate fascist experiment with crushing poverty and dilapidation except in the special zones where the higher-tier servants live and work.
He insists the capital is no longer there to do anything. But it is. The government certainly has the money to do big things and it can make as money as it needs by virtue of our system and the dollar still being the world’s reserve currency. The will and political power to use it is just not there, it is, for example, rather being spent on the NSA and repositioning the arms profile of the Department of Defense.
http://kunstler.com/blog/2013/05/no-mo-pomo.html
There it is. The now common right-wing aggravation, intense rage, over the government printing money. In 2013.
June 6, 2014 at 10:13 pm
Even a blind pig finds an acorn once in a while.
For example.
June 7, 2014 at 2:09 am
“Government stipend.” That just lit me up. The guy’s an asshole. Nick him and ask who deserves what in America. Peddling sci-fi series of novels like all the preppers, writing dystopian tryptichs on the collapse and salvation by reversion to little self-sufficient fortresses. The very poor man’s Robert Heinlein, check “Farnham’s Freehold.” Government stipend, government shmipend, meant exactly as it was phrased as code and so taken.