This Carbon Based Life

By David Glenn Cox

Can it still be called progress, if it does more damage to society than good? Amazon and Meta are laying off thousands of workers while still raking in billions in profits. Workers who, after five or ten or twenty years of service, are kicked off the prosperity bus, only so the boss can have a bit more. I can relate as they kicked me off the prosperity bus in 2008. In a thinning of the herd, the disposed of will never return to the same level of affluence they once had, ever, ever again.

That’s your reward for all your hard work and extra shifts filling in for an understaffed bonehead manager trying to make their numbers look good. After ten or twenty years, where can you go? There is always the stigma attached to being laid off. If you were any good, they would have kept you. As you carry your emotional baggage to bed, asking yourself on your pillow, what did I do wrong?

Nothing! You did nothing wrong except perhaps trusting. Trusting that if you tried your hardest and did your best, it would all work out for you in a Horatio Alger story. You were born in an age of greed and technology, where if you can be replaced. You will be replaced. Let them eat cake! Let them sleep in the streets! Let them eat dirt. I’m going to Mars! I saw an especially stupid commercial for some AI program. The woman said, “How can I keep up with my sales forecasts? Fortunately, with XYZ. I can do my sales forecasts with just the touch of one button.” Guess who is about to get laid off?

I was watching a documentary about the Chinese property bubble. The Evergrande property group was building and building and building. Borrowing money to pay off old debt and borrowing more money to pay off the new debt. The wheel stopped at $300 billion. In China, to purchase a home you put the down payment down first, and then they build your apartment. Evergrande went broke with some twenty million unfinished units. Unfinished homes with mortgages already attached.

These weren’t slaggereds or box boys, but urban professionals suddenly on the hook for a home that doesn’t exist. They organized and rebelled, refusing to pay their mortgages. The government responded by turning off their ID cards. They couldn’t hold a job or ride a train or book a hotel room. They were X’d out of society. They are homeless street people now. Moag demands his money and fuck you, if you don’t like it. Yes, but that’s China. What’s that got to do with me?

“God created war to teach Americans geography.”– Mark Twain

Americans only know about the countries we bomb. You took out thousands of dollars in student loans only to discover the future they promised you didn’t really exist, either. How is that any different? No, take backs or do overs. JP Morgan brags they only hire one in fifty applicants. There’s always Walmart, maybe. Some employers shy away from the overqualified applicants, certain they will leave once something better comes along. Did you say that you didn’t finish high school? Congratulations! Welcome aboard!

A two-tiered employment market. The few in the palace at Versailles, and the many begging in the streets. And as the many grow and corporations and billionaires don’t pay taxes. There is only one direction those burdensome social programs can go. The more unemployed there are, the lower the wage pressure. Yippee! Can it still be called progress, if it does more damage to society than good? But it is not just in China or the United Snakes, it’s going on all over the world.

We are quickly approaching Soylent Green territory, where less than twenty or twenty-five percent of the population are actually needed. What then? Suicide booths with pretty flower videos and soft music? Logan’s Run where they off you at forty? Choose your parents wisely. One of the big hold ups to building those AI data centers is the lack of qualified electricians. And after they complete the data centers, what then? Bye! See you later!

What do you really owe to a country that owes you nothing in return? Land of the free? You gotta be kidding me, man. Your only freedom is stuffed in your wallet. Why, if you have enough money, you can molest children and get away with it. You can traffic in cocaine and buy yourself a pardon. You can fire six thousand workers and laugh about it all the way home. It is a sieve of declining results that will eventually grind down to zero.

One of the newly unemployed is the architect for the Trump temple of grandeur or the tower of senile babbling. It’s Trump’s grand golden monument to himself. He doesn’t want his face on Mount Rushmore. He doesn’t want to share a puny mountain with four nobodies. He wants his own mountain. He wants it bigger! The great pyramid of Pennsylvania Ave. And all the big tech giants with needs in need of favors are before the administration glad to pitch in millions. (In billionaires we trust!)

But where are we going from here? What is the future going to be like for our children? If Capitalism offers only deteriorating returns, what good is it? The Republicans have a lot of good ideas for healthcare. Only, it’s taken them over ten years to write them all down. They gave us a hint, though, in their big, beautiful bastard bill. Slowly cut healthcare off for the little people. Slowly price them out of hospitals and nursing homes. Let them keep 100% of their puny little tips! They’ll like that!

It’s the new math! A Republican Senator offers it’s a $40 billion dollar farm crisis. The king of corruption offers them $12 billion or $11 billion in aid. 12 goes into 40. How many times? Feed the peasants just enough to keep them working, but not enough to make them whole. $300 + millions for a ballroom for a man who can’t even dance. But a pittance for those whom the king has single-handedly destroyed. Trump’s trade representative recently announced the other day. That China is not buying all those soybeans after all! But gee, it sure made for some great headlines back in the day, didn’t it?

China is broke; Russia is broke. Japan is broke and the United Snakes is broke. We are facing an economic tsunami. We must either tolerate tens of millions of Americans perpetually unemployed and struggling through greed and guile. Or eliminate a couple of hundred billionaires. What is morality, really? Starving millions and denying them a future? Is it wrong to kill a serial killer?

“Before this miserable system of wreckage has destroyed the life germ of respect and culture in our American people, let us save what was here, merely by having none too poor and none too rich. The theory of the Share Our Wealth Society is to have enough for all, but not to have one with so much that less than enough remains for the balance of the people.” – Huey Long