GOVERNMENTS: PART G
From Law and Order:
Jack McCoy: I don't make social policy.
Defense attorney: No. You just have to clean up after those who do.
The idea of disaster capitalism which we talked about last time, is hardly news, more as reiteration of the truth revealed over the centuries by kings who used their people as battering rams to break down the walls of enemy castles and keeps, of tribal chiefs and their allied medicine men who drove their people into battle for hunting grounds and kidnapping eligible women as mates. Often with the idea of affirming the chief's leadership and the "truth" of the medicine man's power with whatever god they were worshiping at the time. Just one example of past disaster capitalism from the US history books since that has been the focus of much of this post.
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/04/history-disaster-capitalism/
Fire
"Mrs. O’Leary’s infamously rambunctious cow did not kick a lantern into a batch of hay and start the Chicago fire of 1871. To this day, however, many probably still believe the story, even though the journalist who first reported it admitted a mere 20 years later that he’d made it up.
"It was a story that stuck because it meshed with the ethnic and social fears and prejudices of bourgeois Chicago. Irish and German immigrants then filled up the congested warrens of that Midwestern center of industry and commerce. Their customs, religions, languages, political beliefs, and proletarian status were alien and alarming—especially because that was the year of the Paris Commune, when proletarians took over the French national capital for two months. It was an event that scared the daylights out of the ‘upper tendom’ and broad stretches of the middle classes as well in cities and towns throughout the US.
"Chicago’s papers were full of stories about ‘petroleuses,’ ‘amazon-like women’ with ‘long flaming hair’ coursing through the streets of Paris hurling the equivalent of Molotov cocktails at the French National Guard. Could it happen here? That was the question. Impoverished immigrant workers were already raising a ruckus in mines and on railroads. Perhaps as in France, so in Chicago they would become conspirators and incendiaries. Perhaps the great fire that gutted the city was no accident. Even if it was, weren’t there those prepared to make malevolent use of it?
"Rumors of secret societies, revolutionary arsonists, and mass assaults on property circulated widely by word of mouth and through the Chicago media. So Mrs. O’Leary proved an especially apt scapegoat for the conflagration, fitting perfectly the temper of the time. She was, after all, ‘low class’ Irish at a moment when her immigrant countrymen were still despised as rustic potato eaters, bestial and good for nothing but back-breaking labor. It was also known that they were all too Catholic, notoriously fond of alcohol, and quite capable of terrorizing British landlords back home.
"Less talked about was the likelier cause of the fire: namely, the unimaginably congested neighborhoods of the poor, made entirely out of wood—houses, signs, and sidewalks, too. These had for years been the sites of frequent fires (two a day in 1870). Such frail structures became kindling for the flames that would in 1871 end up leveling downtown banks, businesses, and the homes of the rich.
"These fears leaped with the flames that were burning up the city, killing 3,000 and leaving 100,000 homeless, and in the days and weeks that followed they hardly subsided. Immigrant, poor, and proletarian, Chicago’s working class was held in deep moral suspicion. Believing is often seeing, so when an upper-class eyewitness looked here’s what he saw: ‘Vice and crime had got the first scorching. The district where the fire got firm foothold was the Alsatia of Chicago. Fleeing before it was a crowd of blear-eyed, drunken and diseased wretches, male and female, half naked, ghastly with painted cheeks cursing, uttering ribald jests.’
"Relief agencies, mainly privately run, were charged with aiding only the ‘worthy,’ and they were ‘deserving’ of help only after close inspection of their work habits, family arrangements, home economics, drinking customs, and so on. Civil War General Phillip Sheridan established martial law and was quick to fire on suspected looters, while enforcing a curfew to keep the ‘twilight population’ in check.
"At the same time, Chicago’s business elite, its civic leaders, and a remarkable roster of first-rate architects went about reshaping downtown Chicago into a modern hub of commerce and culture that they hoped would rival New York. Real-estate speculators made a fortune, although none were known to have been shot for looting. For some, in other words, the fire functioned as a fortuitous slum clearance/urban renewal program on speed.
"Angry working people marched against new restrictions on cheaper building materials, seeing them as discriminatory against labor and immigrants, as attempts to force them out of their city. They paraded to the Common Council, where they threw bricks through the windows while it dutifully passed the ordinances. For their efforts, the protesters were denounced as the ‘scum of the community,’ ‘mongrel firebugs,’ and likened to the Parisian communards, intent on establishing a ‘reign of terror.’
"The fire was out but only for the time being. The fires of social insurrection were still smoldering and would flame up again and again in the streets of Chicago throughout the rest of the century"
The Civil War in the US stood as the testament not to the power of good men freeing other people from slavery, something accomplished by Christian intervention as well as the cheaper machine labor market arriving, but as the testament of a superior industrialized North to overpower the slave labor industry of the agrarian South. Southerners trying to cling to their bigotry are also really trying to cling to a time when manual labor was a way to survive and hunting small game with sharecropping was a way of uneducated survival. That way of life is ded and attempts to defend it actually rush the USA faster into a place vastly worse.
President Trump has rushed through a slew of anti environmental policies decision and "Executive orders" the most important of which was a decision to crush the clean water acts and allow the pollution of fresh water sources in the sacred name of "Jobs."
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2017/07/a-jaw-dropping-list-of-all-the-terrible-things-trump-has-done-to-mother-earth/
16 February The stream protection rule, which prevented mining companies dumping their waste into streams, is axed under the Congressional Review Act. Trump calls it a “terrible job-killing rule.”
28 February Trump instructs the EPA to rewrite the ‘waters of the United States’ rule, which expanded the definition of the Clean Water Act to protect the water supply for around 117 million Americans. Many farmers, real estate developers and golf course owners opposed the rule.
2 March On 1 March, governors and attorneys general from several Republican-led states write to Scott Pruitt to request the EPA stop collecting methane emissions data from around 15,000 oil and gas operations. A day later, Pruitt says he has decided to oblige “after hearing from industry.”
15 March Trump announces a review of vehicle fuel efficiency standards that are designed to push down greenhouse gases and other pollutants. More than a dozen car company chief executives asked the president to revisit an Obama-era decision to mandate improved fuel economy by 2025. Pruitt calls the standards “costly for automakers and the American people.”
28 March A sweeping executive order penned by Trump orders a rewrite of the EPA’s clean power plan, which was Obama’s centerpiece climate policy, an end to the moratorium on coal mining on public land and the removal of climate change as a consideration when approving federal projects.
29 March Pruitt denies a bid to halt the use of chlorpyrifos, a widely used pesticide. The chemical has been linked to damage to the nervous system and last year EPA scientists said a ban was warranted. Household use of the chemical was phased out a decade ago but it is still used in farms across the US.
11 April A court grants an EPA request to delay the implementation of ozone pollution standards that were made stricter in 2015. The EPA intends to review the rules around ozone, which is created when sunlight reacts with pollutants from vehicles exhausts and other sources. Ozone can create smogs and can trigger a raft of health ailments, especially among children, the elderly and those with respiratory problems.
13 April The EPA pauses a regulation that curbs the dumping of toxic metals such as arsenic and mercury by power plants into public waterways. The Obama-era rule, set to commence in 2018, would’ve destroyed jobs, according to Pruitt.
27 April The EPA successfully convinces a US appeals court to halt a challenge by states and industry groups to an Obama administration rule aimed at reducing toxic emissions from power stations. Pruitt, in his previous role as attorney general of Oklahoma, had sued the EPA to stop the rule, which is known as MATS.
23 May A three-month pause is put on landfill methane rules so they EPA can “reconsider certain aspects” of the regulation. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas and is emitted from rotting garbage in landfills, as well as other sources such as agriculture.
13 June The EPA announces plans for a two-year pause on regulations that would reduce emissions leaks from oil and gas operators. The regulator acknowledges that pollution from the leaks results in “disproportionate” harm to children but proposes to go ahead with the suspension of the rule anyway.
27 June The EPA, along with the US army, proposes to scrap the clean water rule. This would reverse an Obama-era move that expanded federal government protections to the drinking water of around a third of all Americans. Pruitt said the rollback will provide “regulatory certainty to our nation’s farmers and businesses.” The announcement didn’t reference public health.
This will likely result in a record number of Flint, Michigan's in a few years, maybe sooner. And in a shortage of fresh water. Please recall that the longest running tyranny in history was in Egypt, where the Pharaohs controlled the single source of fresh water with their army.
Source quoted below Fortune magazine May 1, 2017, "China's 43 Billion Dollar Bid for Food Security":
The worst famine in history ran from 1959 to 1961 in China, killing roughly 34 million people. "The horrors were unimaginable-the elderly and disabled left to perish because they couldn't work; murder and cannibalism within families. Hundreds of millions of Chinese people today, including most of China's top leaders, survived that famine."
China has the worlds largest reserves of food: grain, corn rice and wheat. (Also pork: enough to control the price of the meat by releasing tons of it on the market. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/05/05/why-china-keeps-a-giant-stockpile-of-frozen-pork/?utm_term=.f02c9fa8face America which grows enough to be the world's largest exporter has no government stockpiles. Some religious sects like the Mormons stow other than what private citizens may have laid up.
When we eventually look at the judgements in the end times this will alarm you beyond understanding.
For now, it means something that should be very evident as we have proceeded. If you hadn't noticed, the US government will do almost nothing for its people by way of preparation for a national disaster and big companies will move in to make money on the dead bodies and on the living cheap labor afterward. And will be in total control of the food and water supply for the foreseeable future.
We will look back on our boring jobs and our high carb diets and cry as we have our one bowl of weak soup for the day. If we are young and strong enough to serve their purposes. Oh, and the big government will continue to be run by big business.
Meanwhile, back at the news story, China business giant, ChemChina had all the papers signed and governmental approvals on both sides to buy "Syngenta, the Swiss-based world leader in advanced insecticides, herbicides and other crop-protection products and the world's No. 3 producer of seeds." meaning they will have seed stored to grow crops AFTER a disaster and AFTER their supplies are used up. The writer in Fortune a business mag, quoted Fred Gale, a China expert from the U.S. Agriculture Department, as saying that the policy of massive storage of grain as being "a myopic view going back millennia." Or a common sense idea America hasn't had the sense to understand since super markets arrived and we began to think they were forever and only foodies make their own pasta.
All those moves, everything we have seen from China mean they are ready to keep that 200 million person advantage in their army despite all the destruction around them. Recalling an ancient rule from the 1950's: after nuclear war, there will be a ground war for whatever is left. That would surely also be the case after end times disasters.
Now all those new facts contrasted to that time before, a time kept in memory by TV shows and local myths, linked by Ronald Reagan to that time in the 1990's when The USA was the only remaining super power and everyone thought we would be that way forever. Here is Paul Krugman writing in 1999 in The Return Of Depression Era Economics.
"The humiliating failure of the Soviet Union destroyed the socialist dream."
We could have taken advantage of that and grown as a nation, reached out and tried to actually lift other nations up, but as we saw from the world bank example, we instead sought only ti enrich the rich and use available labor to make our big businesses even bigger. Evangelicals that should have known better sided with the American dream rather than the Christian mission. And so saw the
American Dream run into the round right into the ground beside the socialist dream. Sins instead of blessings were blended by all governments.
Which leads to the one thing Klein and Friedman and all the congresspeople and presidents and prime ministers may have considered without mentioning:
https://www.fastcompany.com/1695307/future-shock-40-what-tofflers-got-right-and-wrong
BY GREG LINDSAY
In the opening minutes of Future Shock, a 1972 documentary based on the book of the same name, a bearded, cigar-puffing, world-weary Orson Welles staggers down an airport’s moving walkway, treating the camera like a confidante. “In the course of my work, which has taken me to just about every corner of the globe, I see many aspects of a phenomenon which I’m just beginning to understand,” he says. “Our modern technologies have changed the degree of sophistication beyond our wildest dreams. But this technology has exacted a pretty heavy price. We live in an age of anxiety and time of stress. And with all our sophistication, we are in fact the victims of our own technological strengths –- we are the victims of shock… a future shock.”
Published in 1970, Future Shock made its author Alvin Toffler — a former student radical, welder, newspaper report and Fortune editor — a household name. Written with his wife (and uncredited co-author), Heidi Toffler, the book was The World Is Flat of its day, selling 6 million copies and single-handedly inventing futurism. The Third Wave followed a decade later, and a third dispatch from the future a decade after that. On the 40th anniversary of the book’s publication (which I wrote about yesterday), it’s worth asking why the Tofflers’ reputation seems stuck in the 1970s when their prognosis was more accurate than not.
“Future shock is the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time,” the pair wrote. The accelerating changes they predicted included the “electronic frontier” of the Internet, Prozac, YouTube, cloning, home-schooling, the self-induced paralysis of too many choices, instant celebrities “swiftly fabricated and ruthlessly destroyed,” and the end of blue-collar “second-wave” manufacturing, to be replaced by a “third wave” of knowledge workers. Not bad for 1970.
Their misses included such classic Jetsonian tropes as underwater cities, handing teenagers the keys to the family spaceship, and the doubling of the planet’s population in just 11 years. And don’t ask Heidi Toffler about the paper clothes we’d use once and throwaway like Kleenex. “I was wrong,” she said matter-of-factly at the book’s anniversary conference on Thursday. “But I was trying to make a larger point about a “throw-away society.” How many plastic water bottles did we throw away last year?”
And then there are the Tofflerisms:
“Change is not merely necessary to life — it is life.”
“Technology feeds on itself. Technology makes more technology possible.”
“The illiterate of the future will not be the person who cannot read. It will be the person who does not know how to learn.”
And still Heidi’s favorite: “Change is the only constant.” (I bet you’d forgotten who said that. I had.)
Perhaps it says something about the Tofflers’ reputation that while their contemporary Marshall McLuhan was adopted as the “patron saint” of early Wired,, the Toffler’s most ardent admirer among the digerati was AOL founder Steve Case, who read The Third Wave while in college and was captivated by the notion of the “electronic frontier.”
“Back then, nobody had PCs, and everything we take for granted wasn’t there,” Case told me at a dinner for the Tofflers Wednesday night, “but I remember reading it and thinking it was inevitable, and that really inspired me to start what became AOL five years later” in 1985. “There’s no question that was a seminal moment for me.”
But the Tofflers may yet find traction with a new generation of aspiring futurists. Parag Khanna, the 33-year-old author of The Second World and forthcoming How to Run The World has sought the Tofflers for advice and still marvels at their track record. “A few things that Toffler got right in 1970 that are still spot on today,” he said Thursday, “include the transience of our relationships with each other and with things, the prediction that people would become as comfortable with virtual and interactive environments as with real life, the genesis of cyborgs and artificial intelligence, the over-stimulation of children, the rise of ad-hocery — a term he coined — in business and horizontal rather than vertical corporate structures, and the prominence of super-empowered individuals. Obviously he didn’t pioneer all of these ideas, and of course didn’t invent artificial intelligence, but the book really shows an imaginative but grounded sense of what the possibilities for these technologies were and the impact they would have.”
"One reason the Tofflers seem stuck in the past is that we have yet to take all of their recommendations. “It really upsets me that people say we have to bring manufacturing back,” Heidi said. “We have to re-train people how to think! We can’t compete with second-wave manufacturing, and China is starting to realize it, too. Future Shock is about the process of change, and The Third Wave is about the structures of change. And so far we’ve proven incapable of designing the systems that prepare us for change.”
(And being unprepared for change means that the ruling class in any economy must make some sort of move to retain rule. As the old fighting of wars to unite the tribe thing. Will.)
"In that sense, we’re all still as woozy as Orson Welles."
We are subject to continued shock and awe by the very fact of change in our lives. We have gone from the horse and buggy and the art of war with a sword to supersonic flight and war with bombs that could destroy a quarter of a continent and the art of war with economics. The 24 hour news cycle makes the constant change a daily affair and the incessant tweet coverage of Mr. Trump reduces any idea of a quiet cycle to ash. Goodness, we have a totally unqualified person in the White House who has so far systematically destroyed as much of the work of the previous President as possible and has seen many of his own ideas crash and burn simply because he has no idea how to make a deal and actually pay a subcontractor in the Congress. I believe I mentioned once that when I started college the one computer on our campus occupied a full building and we had to learn to use punch cards to "talk" to it. Of course now I'm writing this blog on a computer that can rest on my desk, kitchen table or lap with computing power undreamed of in vacuum tubes and transistors, on an international network that lets this blog go the Israel, Russia, China and even the USA ;) . When I attended a high school debate summer camp at the University of Kansas, I took a 12 hour train ride there and a two day bus ride home. I can now fly in an airplane directly from Detroit to Houston to see my family there. To someone grown up in this age, no surprise. To someone my age, something I have come to accept. Took me a long time to get on a plane, though. Legendary football coach, commentator and man with his name on the most popular video game series ever, John Madden used to take the train to his various commentating gigs. A creator of future shock IN future shock.
Consider the notions of nostalgia and the desire of many voters to return to a mythic time of Golden Age TV in "Father Knows Best", a land that never existed and we begin to understand the appeal of Trump as candidate who wanted to "make America great again" which most older and nostalgic voters interpreted as "Put the white men in charge again." Looking at his cabinet you can see it was certainly what Trump meant. And we understand his need to continue to campaign to keep reinforcing the idea of going back against the tide of time and change. And to merchandise on the Presidency.
But now we need to begin to make connections between those separate subjects of capitalism, socialism, the rise of Kingdom Now and the health and wealth doctrines and that 200 million man army and that army of the north.
I site all those quotes to point out that Ford, a bigot on some things, understood the need for social awareness and the profit of "unprofitable" acts.
A Saturday Evening Post recap of the reaction to Ford doubling his employee wages and his own quotes will now be seen in the proper light:
But Ford had an even bigger reason for raising his wages, which he noted in a 1926 book, Today and Tomorrow. It’s as challenging a statement today as it was 100 years ago. “The owner, the employees, and the buying public are all one and the same, and unless an industry can so manage itself as to keep wages high and prices low it destroys itself, for otherwise it limits the number of its customers. One’s own employees ought to be one’s own best customers.”
THAT is the prime idea of entrepreneurial capitalism, when small innovative firms apply ideas for change and growth.
That great divide may best be defined by the circus and it's problems in the United States. The appeal of American circuses in the earliest 20th Century was that of side shows with so-called freaks like conjoined Asian twins which originated the misnomer Siamese twins, rarely seen animals and acts like tightrope walking (For a truly joyous look at that "performance art" see The Walk.), fire eating, sword swallowing, and trapeze performances. Movies and TV have exposed most of America to those acts and the sophistication created by communication has changed the watched event into a participatory one of social media and 3-D for audiences. Traveling circus audience's shrank and the fuel and labor cost of putting on the events grew so that the last big traveling circus in the USA closed it's doors last year.
But Cirque Du Soleil which is more like an arena band event for those with upper middle class cash is doing grand business in Vegas and larger cities with its acrobatic and animal acts couched in a notion of sophistication and elite entertainment. It thrives by being aimed at the rich and the middle class notion of the rich.
Like the competing circuses, the modern global economy is splitting to those who can afford it and the destruction of those who can't. In a few years reduced to being only for the wealthy because it will be the cause of the loss of better paying jobs in the countries they are selling to. In short, only the companies will do well, but not for long because soon they won't exist either because there will be no one there to buy their product. So this descending cycle shows two flaws in capitalism, One, that it can, if allowed unchecked, be the monster that consumes itself. and two, that, properly applied by the unthinking, it can create wealth that will also devour itself in greed.
From Law and Order:
Jack McCoy: I don't make social policy.
Defense attorney: No. You just have to clean up after those who do.
The idea of disaster capitalism which we talked about last time, is hardly news, more as reiteration of the truth revealed over the centuries by kings who used their people as battering rams to break down the walls of enemy castles and keeps, of tribal chiefs and their allied medicine men who drove their people into battle for hunting grounds and kidnapping eligible women as mates. Often with the idea of affirming the chief's leadership and the "truth" of the medicine man's power with whatever god they were worshiping at the time. Just one example of past disaster capitalism from the US history books since that has been the focus of much of this post.
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/04/history-disaster-capitalism/
Fire
"Mrs. O’Leary’s infamously rambunctious cow did not kick a lantern into a batch of hay and start the Chicago fire of 1871. To this day, however, many probably still believe the story, even though the journalist who first reported it admitted a mere 20 years later that he’d made it up.
"It was a story that stuck because it meshed with the ethnic and social fears and prejudices of bourgeois Chicago. Irish and German immigrants then filled up the congested warrens of that Midwestern center of industry and commerce. Their customs, religions, languages, political beliefs, and proletarian status were alien and alarming—especially because that was the year of the Paris Commune, when proletarians took over the French national capital for two months. It was an event that scared the daylights out of the ‘upper tendom’ and broad stretches of the middle classes as well in cities and towns throughout the US.
"Chicago’s papers were full of stories about ‘petroleuses,’ ‘amazon-like women’ with ‘long flaming hair’ coursing through the streets of Paris hurling the equivalent of Molotov cocktails at the French National Guard. Could it happen here? That was the question. Impoverished immigrant workers were already raising a ruckus in mines and on railroads. Perhaps as in France, so in Chicago they would become conspirators and incendiaries. Perhaps the great fire that gutted the city was no accident. Even if it was, weren’t there those prepared to make malevolent use of it?
"Rumors of secret societies, revolutionary arsonists, and mass assaults on property circulated widely by word of mouth and through the Chicago media. So Mrs. O’Leary proved an especially apt scapegoat for the conflagration, fitting perfectly the temper of the time. She was, after all, ‘low class’ Irish at a moment when her immigrant countrymen were still despised as rustic potato eaters, bestial and good for nothing but back-breaking labor. It was also known that they were all too Catholic, notoriously fond of alcohol, and quite capable of terrorizing British landlords back home.
"Less talked about was the likelier cause of the fire: namely, the unimaginably congested neighborhoods of the poor, made entirely out of wood—houses, signs, and sidewalks, too. These had for years been the sites of frequent fires (two a day in 1870). Such frail structures became kindling for the flames that would in 1871 end up leveling downtown banks, businesses, and the homes of the rich.
"These fears leaped with the flames that were burning up the city, killing 3,000 and leaving 100,000 homeless, and in the days and weeks that followed they hardly subsided. Immigrant, poor, and proletarian, Chicago’s working class was held in deep moral suspicion. Believing is often seeing, so when an upper-class eyewitness looked here’s what he saw: ‘Vice and crime had got the first scorching. The district where the fire got firm foothold was the Alsatia of Chicago. Fleeing before it was a crowd of blear-eyed, drunken and diseased wretches, male and female, half naked, ghastly with painted cheeks cursing, uttering ribald jests.’
"Relief agencies, mainly privately run, were charged with aiding only the ‘worthy,’ and they were ‘deserving’ of help only after close inspection of their work habits, family arrangements, home economics, drinking customs, and so on. Civil War General Phillip Sheridan established martial law and was quick to fire on suspected looters, while enforcing a curfew to keep the ‘twilight population’ in check.
"At the same time, Chicago’s business elite, its civic leaders, and a remarkable roster of first-rate architects went about reshaping downtown Chicago into a modern hub of commerce and culture that they hoped would rival New York. Real-estate speculators made a fortune, although none were known to have been shot for looting. For some, in other words, the fire functioned as a fortuitous slum clearance/urban renewal program on speed.
"Angry working people marched against new restrictions on cheaper building materials, seeing them as discriminatory against labor and immigrants, as attempts to force them out of their city. They paraded to the Common Council, where they threw bricks through the windows while it dutifully passed the ordinances. For their efforts, the protesters were denounced as the ‘scum of the community,’ ‘mongrel firebugs,’ and likened to the Parisian communards, intent on establishing a ‘reign of terror.’
"The fire was out but only for the time being. The fires of social insurrection were still smoldering and would flame up again and again in the streets of Chicago throughout the rest of the century"
The Civil War in the US stood as the testament not to the power of good men freeing other people from slavery, something accomplished by Christian intervention as well as the cheaper machine labor market arriving, but as the testament of a superior industrialized North to overpower the slave labor industry of the agrarian South. Southerners trying to cling to their bigotry are also really trying to cling to a time when manual labor was a way to survive and hunting small game with sharecropping was a way of uneducated survival. That way of life is ded and attempts to defend it actually rush the USA faster into a place vastly worse.
President Trump has rushed through a slew of anti environmental policies decision and "Executive orders" the most important of which was a decision to crush the clean water acts and allow the pollution of fresh water sources in the sacred name of "Jobs."
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2017/07/a-jaw-dropping-list-of-all-the-terrible-things-trump-has-done-to-mother-earth/
16 February The stream protection rule, which prevented mining companies dumping their waste into streams, is axed under the Congressional Review Act. Trump calls it a “terrible job-killing rule.”
28 February Trump instructs the EPA to rewrite the ‘waters of the United States’ rule, which expanded the definition of the Clean Water Act to protect the water supply for around 117 million Americans. Many farmers, real estate developers and golf course owners opposed the rule.
2 March On 1 March, governors and attorneys general from several Republican-led states write to Scott Pruitt to request the EPA stop collecting methane emissions data from around 15,000 oil and gas operations. A day later, Pruitt says he has decided to oblige “after hearing from industry.”
15 March Trump announces a review of vehicle fuel efficiency standards that are designed to push down greenhouse gases and other pollutants. More than a dozen car company chief executives asked the president to revisit an Obama-era decision to mandate improved fuel economy by 2025. Pruitt calls the standards “costly for automakers and the American people.”
28 March A sweeping executive order penned by Trump orders a rewrite of the EPA’s clean power plan, which was Obama’s centerpiece climate policy, an end to the moratorium on coal mining on public land and the removal of climate change as a consideration when approving federal projects.
29 March Pruitt denies a bid to halt the use of chlorpyrifos, a widely used pesticide. The chemical has been linked to damage to the nervous system and last year EPA scientists said a ban was warranted. Household use of the chemical was phased out a decade ago but it is still used in farms across the US.
11 April A court grants an EPA request to delay the implementation of ozone pollution standards that were made stricter in 2015. The EPA intends to review the rules around ozone, which is created when sunlight reacts with pollutants from vehicles exhausts and other sources. Ozone can create smogs and can trigger a raft of health ailments, especially among children, the elderly and those with respiratory problems.
13 April The EPA pauses a regulation that curbs the dumping of toxic metals such as arsenic and mercury by power plants into public waterways. The Obama-era rule, set to commence in 2018, would’ve destroyed jobs, according to Pruitt.
27 April The EPA successfully convinces a US appeals court to halt a challenge by states and industry groups to an Obama administration rule aimed at reducing toxic emissions from power stations. Pruitt, in his previous role as attorney general of Oklahoma, had sued the EPA to stop the rule, which is known as MATS.
23 May A three-month pause is put on landfill methane rules so they EPA can “reconsider certain aspects” of the regulation. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas and is emitted from rotting garbage in landfills, as well as other sources such as agriculture.
13 June The EPA announces plans for a two-year pause on regulations that would reduce emissions leaks from oil and gas operators. The regulator acknowledges that pollution from the leaks results in “disproportionate” harm to children but proposes to go ahead with the suspension of the rule anyway.
27 June The EPA, along with the US army, proposes to scrap the clean water rule. This would reverse an Obama-era move that expanded federal government protections to the drinking water of around a third of all Americans. Pruitt said the rollback will provide “regulatory certainty to our nation’s farmers and businesses.” The announcement didn’t reference public health.
This will likely result in a record number of Flint, Michigan's in a few years, maybe sooner. And in a shortage of fresh water. Please recall that the longest running tyranny in history was in Egypt, where the Pharaohs controlled the single source of fresh water with their army.
Source quoted below Fortune magazine May 1, 2017, "China's 43 Billion Dollar Bid for Food Security":
The worst famine in history ran from 1959 to 1961 in China, killing roughly 34 million people. "The horrors were unimaginable-the elderly and disabled left to perish because they couldn't work; murder and cannibalism within families. Hundreds of millions of Chinese people today, including most of China's top leaders, survived that famine."
China has the worlds largest reserves of food: grain, corn rice and wheat. (Also pork: enough to control the price of the meat by releasing tons of it on the market. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/05/05/why-china-keeps-a-giant-stockpile-of-frozen-pork/?utm_term=.f02c9fa8face America which grows enough to be the world's largest exporter has no government stockpiles. Some religious sects like the Mormons stow other than what private citizens may have laid up.
When we eventually look at the judgements in the end times this will alarm you beyond understanding.
For now, it means something that should be very evident as we have proceeded. If you hadn't noticed, the US government will do almost nothing for its people by way of preparation for a national disaster and big companies will move in to make money on the dead bodies and on the living cheap labor afterward. And will be in total control of the food and water supply for the foreseeable future.
We will look back on our boring jobs and our high carb diets and cry as we have our one bowl of weak soup for the day. If we are young and strong enough to serve their purposes. Oh, and the big government will continue to be run by big business.
Meanwhile, back at the news story, China business giant, ChemChina had all the papers signed and governmental approvals on both sides to buy "Syngenta, the Swiss-based world leader in advanced insecticides, herbicides and other crop-protection products and the world's No. 3 producer of seeds." meaning they will have seed stored to grow crops AFTER a disaster and AFTER their supplies are used up. The writer in Fortune a business mag, quoted Fred Gale, a China expert from the U.S. Agriculture Department, as saying that the policy of massive storage of grain as being "a myopic view going back millennia." Or a common sense idea America hasn't had the sense to understand since super markets arrived and we began to think they were forever and only foodies make their own pasta.
All those moves, everything we have seen from China mean they are ready to keep that 200 million person advantage in their army despite all the destruction around them. Recalling an ancient rule from the 1950's: after nuclear war, there will be a ground war for whatever is left. That would surely also be the case after end times disasters.
Now all those new facts contrasted to that time before, a time kept in memory by TV shows and local myths, linked by Ronald Reagan to that time in the 1990's when The USA was the only remaining super power and everyone thought we would be that way forever. Here is Paul Krugman writing in 1999 in The Return Of Depression Era Economics.
"The humiliating failure of the Soviet Union destroyed the socialist dream."
We could have taken advantage of that and grown as a nation, reached out and tried to actually lift other nations up, but as we saw from the world bank example, we instead sought only ti enrich the rich and use available labor to make our big businesses even bigger. Evangelicals that should have known better sided with the American dream rather than the Christian mission. And so saw the
American Dream run into the round right into the ground beside the socialist dream. Sins instead of blessings were blended by all governments.
Which leads to the one thing Klein and Friedman and all the congresspeople and presidents and prime ministers may have considered without mentioning:
https://www.fastcompany.com/1695307/future-shock-40-what-tofflers-got-right-and-wrong
BY GREG LINDSAY
In the opening minutes of Future Shock, a 1972 documentary based on the book of the same name, a bearded, cigar-puffing, world-weary Orson Welles staggers down an airport’s moving walkway, treating the camera like a confidante. “In the course of my work, which has taken me to just about every corner of the globe, I see many aspects of a phenomenon which I’m just beginning to understand,” he says. “Our modern technologies have changed the degree of sophistication beyond our wildest dreams. But this technology has exacted a pretty heavy price. We live in an age of anxiety and time of stress. And with all our sophistication, we are in fact the victims of our own technological strengths –- we are the victims of shock… a future shock.”
Published in 1970, Future Shock made its author Alvin Toffler — a former student radical, welder, newspaper report and Fortune editor — a household name. Written with his wife (and uncredited co-author), Heidi Toffler, the book was The World Is Flat of its day, selling 6 million copies and single-handedly inventing futurism. The Third Wave followed a decade later, and a third dispatch from the future a decade after that. On the 40th anniversary of the book’s publication (which I wrote about yesterday), it’s worth asking why the Tofflers’ reputation seems stuck in the 1970s when their prognosis was more accurate than not.
“Future shock is the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time,” the pair wrote. The accelerating changes they predicted included the “electronic frontier” of the Internet, Prozac, YouTube, cloning, home-schooling, the self-induced paralysis of too many choices, instant celebrities “swiftly fabricated and ruthlessly destroyed,” and the end of blue-collar “second-wave” manufacturing, to be replaced by a “third wave” of knowledge workers. Not bad for 1970.
Their misses included such classic Jetsonian tropes as underwater cities, handing teenagers the keys to the family spaceship, and the doubling of the planet’s population in just 11 years. And don’t ask Heidi Toffler about the paper clothes we’d use once and throwaway like Kleenex. “I was wrong,” she said matter-of-factly at the book’s anniversary conference on Thursday. “But I was trying to make a larger point about a “throw-away society.” How many plastic water bottles did we throw away last year?”
And then there are the Tofflerisms:
“Change is not merely necessary to life — it is life.”
“Technology feeds on itself. Technology makes more technology possible.”
“The illiterate of the future will not be the person who cannot read. It will be the person who does not know how to learn.”
And still Heidi’s favorite: “Change is the only constant.” (I bet you’d forgotten who said that. I had.)
Perhaps it says something about the Tofflers’ reputation that while their contemporary Marshall McLuhan was adopted as the “patron saint” of early Wired,, the Toffler’s most ardent admirer among the digerati was AOL founder Steve Case, who read The Third Wave while in college and was captivated by the notion of the “electronic frontier.”
“Back then, nobody had PCs, and everything we take for granted wasn’t there,” Case told me at a dinner for the Tofflers Wednesday night, “but I remember reading it and thinking it was inevitable, and that really inspired me to start what became AOL five years later” in 1985. “There’s no question that was a seminal moment for me.”
But the Tofflers may yet find traction with a new generation of aspiring futurists. Parag Khanna, the 33-year-old author of The Second World and forthcoming How to Run The World has sought the Tofflers for advice and still marvels at their track record. “A few things that Toffler got right in 1970 that are still spot on today,” he said Thursday, “include the transience of our relationships with each other and with things, the prediction that people would become as comfortable with virtual and interactive environments as with real life, the genesis of cyborgs and artificial intelligence, the over-stimulation of children, the rise of ad-hocery — a term he coined — in business and horizontal rather than vertical corporate structures, and the prominence of super-empowered individuals. Obviously he didn’t pioneer all of these ideas, and of course didn’t invent artificial intelligence, but the book really shows an imaginative but grounded sense of what the possibilities for these technologies were and the impact they would have.”
"One reason the Tofflers seem stuck in the past is that we have yet to take all of their recommendations. “It really upsets me that people say we have to bring manufacturing back,” Heidi said. “We have to re-train people how to think! We can’t compete with second-wave manufacturing, and China is starting to realize it, too. Future Shock is about the process of change, and The Third Wave is about the structures of change. And so far we’ve proven incapable of designing the systems that prepare us for change.”
(And being unprepared for change means that the ruling class in any economy must make some sort of move to retain rule. As the old fighting of wars to unite the tribe thing. Will.)
"In that sense, we’re all still as woozy as Orson Welles."
We are subject to continued shock and awe by the very fact of change in our lives. We have gone from the horse and buggy and the art of war with a sword to supersonic flight and war with bombs that could destroy a quarter of a continent and the art of war with economics. The 24 hour news cycle makes the constant change a daily affair and the incessant tweet coverage of Mr. Trump reduces any idea of a quiet cycle to ash. Goodness, we have a totally unqualified person in the White House who has so far systematically destroyed as much of the work of the previous President as possible and has seen many of his own ideas crash and burn simply because he has no idea how to make a deal and actually pay a subcontractor in the Congress. I believe I mentioned once that when I started college the one computer on our campus occupied a full building and we had to learn to use punch cards to "talk" to it. Of course now I'm writing this blog on a computer that can rest on my desk, kitchen table or lap with computing power undreamed of in vacuum tubes and transistors, on an international network that lets this blog go the Israel, Russia, China and even the USA ;) . When I attended a high school debate summer camp at the University of Kansas, I took a 12 hour train ride there and a two day bus ride home. I can now fly in an airplane directly from Detroit to Houston to see my family there. To someone grown up in this age, no surprise. To someone my age, something I have come to accept. Took me a long time to get on a plane, though. Legendary football coach, commentator and man with his name on the most popular video game series ever, John Madden used to take the train to his various commentating gigs. A creator of future shock IN future shock.
Consider the notions of nostalgia and the desire of many voters to return to a mythic time of Golden Age TV in "Father Knows Best", a land that never existed and we begin to understand the appeal of Trump as candidate who wanted to "make America great again" which most older and nostalgic voters interpreted as "Put the white men in charge again." Looking at his cabinet you can see it was certainly what Trump meant. And we understand his need to continue to campaign to keep reinforcing the idea of going back against the tide of time and change. And to merchandise on the Presidency.
While Western countries have been keeping up with birth control and using more and more robotics to replace manual laborers, China and India have been using their huge populations and cheap wages to undercut the robots' price savings. However:
How Much Do New Robots Cost?
Complete with controllers and teach pendants, new industrial robotics cost from $50,000 to $80,000. Once application-specific peripherals are added, the robot system costs anywhere from $100,000 to $150,000.
Ark investments suggests $250, 000 for start up with engineering costs and break evens for the substituted laborers costs (health care and such) : "In South Korea, Mexico, and China, where average factory wages are approximately $19, $6, and $2 per hour respectively, robots cover their initial investment over a longer time horizon, but still relatively quickly. A Korean manufacturer will break even in fewer than two years and in Mexico fewer than six years. In China the break even is approximately nine years."
No one ever seems to have asked the machines where they would shop for the cars they were building or the air conditioners or the furniture or the baby toys or even for groceries to eat or rather the electricity and fuel to power themselves.
Henry Ford was a successful business man with practical eye to business and people rather than Harvard MBA training. He pretty much created mass production by applying the idea of the assembly line in auto plants. Making a lot of the same thing over a short period of time then proceeded to make a lot of people rich and middle class. In the United States, we are a few generations deep in the family lines of the those who created the cars, then created the businesses to supply the cars with parts which created the business for oil and gasoline which created the business which created gasoline and the businesses which sprung up to distribute the gasoline and all that creating money for the workers who were paid smaller wages then, but wages commensurate with the price of items available to have an adequate living.
Henry Ford was a successful business man with practical eye to business and people rather than Harvard MBA training. He pretty much created mass production by applying the idea of the assembly line in auto plants. Making a lot of the same thing over a short period of time then proceeded to make a lot of people rich and middle class. In the United States, we are a few generations deep in the family lines of the those who created the cars, then created the businesses to supply the cars with parts which created the business for oil and gasoline which created the business which created gasoline and the businesses which sprung up to distribute the gasoline and all that creating money for the workers who were paid smaller wages then, but wages commensurate with the price of items available to have an adequate living.
Because Ford had other "better" ideas:
"The gifted man bears his gifts into the world, not for his own benefit, but for the people among whom he is placed; for the gifts are not his, he himself is a gift to the community."
Subject: Gifted People; Obligation of Talents; Service to Others
Source: Ford News, p. 2.
Date: 7/1/1922
Source: Ford News, p. 2.
Date: 7/1/1922
"Experience is the harvest of life, and every harvest is the result of a sowing. The experience which young people must crave is that of success in some service for which they are naturally fitted."
Subject: Education; Experience; Learning
Source: Ford News, p. 2.
Date: 4/15/1923
Source: Ford News, p. 2.
Date: 4/15/1923
"Our modern industrialism, changed to motives of public service, will provide means to remove every injustice that gives soil for prejudice."
Subject: Race; Injustice
Source: Ford News, p. 2.
Date: 11/1/1922
Subject: Race; Injustice
Source: Ford News, p. 2.
Date: 11/1/1922
A Saturday Evening Post recap of the reaction to Ford doubling his employee wages and his own quotes will now be seen in the proper light:
But Ford had an even bigger reason for raising his wages, which he noted in a 1926 book, Today and Tomorrow. It’s as challenging a statement today as it was 100 years ago. “The owner, the employees, and the buying public are all one and the same, and unless an industry can so manage itself as to keep wages high and prices low it destroys itself, for otherwise it limits the number of its customers. One’s own employees ought to be one’s own best customers.”
It might have been just another of Ford’s wild ideas, except that it proved successful. In 1914, the company sold 308,000 of its Model Ts—more than all other carmakers combined. By 1915, sales had climbed to 501,000. By 1920, Ford was selling a million cars a year.
“We increased the buying power of our own people, and they increased the buying power of other people, and so on and on,” Ford wrote. “It is this thought of enlarging buying power by paying high wages and selling at low prices that is behind the prosperity of this country.”
Meanwhile modern US business has taken "globalization" to mean "paying nothing to anyone for every kind of work and expecting the ones who are left to pay the steepest possible price and blaming labor costs that don't really exist and retirement funds most of which are gone to annuities for the expense and government laws that are occasionally enforced while their actual cost is more likely legal fees to avoid the laws. The end of more profits minus the expenses of labor costs and minus adequate service coverage seeming to trump (unintended but apt word choice) the idea that their workers should be able to afford the product. Ironically, China and India seem to have caught on and are developing buying power within their countries and in China's case in its economic satellites to develop them as markets. A new cat is catching mice for them.
The USA seems so intent on destroying its own work forces buying power to sell to countries who got wealthy by building their middle classes up but are now intent on destroying their buyer base by sending jobs to countries the don't pay fair wages and who will never be able to buy the upscale products because they don't make a living wage. It is the old picture of the snake devouring itself.
The USA seems so intent on destroying its own work forces buying power to sell to countries who got wealthy by building their middle classes up but are now intent on destroying their buyer base by sending jobs to countries the don't pay fair wages and who will never be able to buy the upscale products because they don't make a living wage. It is the old picture of the snake devouring itself.
In some ways, while the USA is plunging into big business capitalism, in which giant companies get most of the significant economic activities and warp the system to suit themselves making disaster capitalism and axillary offshoot, the Eastern kings seem to be more immediately willing to apply the state-guided form, where certain businesses are favored as winners. Some have turned their people into economic slaves to produce goods that enrich the political leaders of countries by syphoning from the much richer West but all are circling or diving directly into a worse form , autocratic capitalism, one supposedly state guided North Korea with its narcissistic communistic Kim Jong soon and his excesses of militarism would typify if they became capitalistic: Oligarchic Capitalism which exists "when, even though the economic system is nominally capitalist and property rights protect those who own substantial property, government policies are designed predominantly or exclusively to promote the interests of a very narrow,(usually very wealthy) portion of the population or, what may be worse, the interests of a ruling autocrat and his, or her, friends and family (in this instance, the system is better defined as a "kleptocracy)." {All definitions: Good Capitalism/Bad Capitalism by William J. Baumol, Robert E. Litan, Carl J. Schramm.}
kleptocracies
- : government by those who seek chiefly status and personal gain at the expense of the governed; also : a particular government of this kind
So that the ones under them feel like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfGM4l1G7qk
The governments of those armies are now engaged in similar economic ideals leading to a real feeling of futility. In the communist bloc, people who fought and died to bring some form, any form of liberation from the totalitarian kings and czars, lived long enough to see their children and grandchildren pressed into regimented dormitories and sweatshop conditions. Echoing the lyrics from, of all things, a Who song, "Won't Get Fooled Again" : "Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss." In the USA, business has been legally declared a person, so we can apply that definition to a West that thought it won the battle against tyranny in the the Reagan administration only to see those children and grandchildren reduced into voting for that type of capitalism wearing a phony rebellious mask.
The result is deeper divisions between the rich and the poor and the growing abolition of middle classes. Everyone not seen as rich, seen against the larger push of disaster capitalism, where those then unrepresented lower classes can be reduced to unimportant cattle to be herded into work camps or disaster camps to be allowed to die from disease or be repurposed to work as machines until machines can be built to replace them. People are not property but can be safely treated as such under the guise of disaster or the guise of serving the government or under the guise of serving for war production.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfGM4l1G7qk
The governments of those armies are now engaged in similar economic ideals leading to a real feeling of futility. In the communist bloc, people who fought and died to bring some form, any form of liberation from the totalitarian kings and czars, lived long enough to see their children and grandchildren pressed into regimented dormitories and sweatshop conditions. Echoing the lyrics from, of all things, a Who song, "Won't Get Fooled Again" : "Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss." In the USA, business has been legally declared a person, so we can apply that definition to a West that thought it won the battle against tyranny in the the Reagan administration only to see those children and grandchildren reduced into voting for that type of capitalism wearing a phony rebellious mask.
The result is deeper divisions between the rich and the poor and the growing abolition of middle classes. Everyone not seen as rich, seen against the larger push of disaster capitalism, where those then unrepresented lower classes can be reduced to unimportant cattle to be herded into work camps or disaster camps to be allowed to die from disease or be repurposed to work as machines until machines can be built to replace them. People are not property but can be safely treated as such under the guise of disaster or the guise of serving the government or under the guise of serving for war production.
That great divide may best be defined by the circus and it's problems in the United States. The appeal of American circuses in the earliest 20th Century was that of side shows with so-called freaks like conjoined Asian twins which originated the misnomer Siamese twins, rarely seen animals and acts like tightrope walking (For a truly joyous look at that "performance art" see The Walk.), fire eating, sword swallowing, and trapeze performances. Movies and TV have exposed most of America to those acts and the sophistication created by communication has changed the watched event into a participatory one of social media and 3-D for audiences. Traveling circus audience's shrank and the fuel and labor cost of putting on the events grew so that the last big traveling circus in the USA closed it's doors last year.
But Cirque Du Soleil which is more like an arena band event for those with upper middle class cash is doing grand business in Vegas and larger cities with its acrobatic and animal acts couched in a notion of sophistication and elite entertainment. It thrives by being aimed at the rich and the middle class notion of the rich.
Like the competing circuses, the modern global economy is splitting to those who can afford it and the destruction of those who can't. In a few years reduced to being only for the wealthy because it will be the cause of the loss of better paying jobs in the countries they are selling to. In short, only the companies will do well, but not for long because soon they won't exist either because there will be no one there to buy their product. So this descending cycle shows two flaws in capitalism, One, that it can, if allowed unchecked, be the monster that consumes itself. and two, that, properly applied by the unthinking, it can create wealth that will also devour itself in greed.
Then the USA and it's planning providers will have millions of unemployed people looking for some way to survive and governments having new ways to command them, after food shortages water shortages and distracting TV and Tweets and every mass media allowed, by the deceit that the other countries have robbed them of jobs so those countries must be invaded get the jobs back and that war will result in kings arriving at alliances . "Providentially", the US economy already has a quarter of it's businesses connected directly or indirectly to military spending. And then needing someone else to attack because there will only be jobs available in the larger war machine and no war to support the need for the jobs.
The great savior of capitalism, demeaned by oligarchic behavior, will suddenly be the god which turns on its worshipers and bites the hands off that have been taking from it.
(If that seems too much, please see our previous post on disaster capitalism)
And, inevitably, the sense of competition and the need to feed the military machines of all the countries involved will result in what seems to be a logical well reasoned outcome: total war which many businesses could profit from.
Now let's look at those segments of that total warfare again with all the concepts flowing on the background,
(If that seems too much, please see our previous post on disaster capitalism)
And, inevitably, the sense of competition and the need to feed the military machines of all the countries involved will result in what seems to be a logical well reasoned outcome: total war which many businesses could profit from.
Now let's look at those segments of that total warfare again with all the concepts flowing on the background,
No comments:
Post a Comment