This Carbon Based Life

By David Glenn Cox

Republican strategist Carl Rove says Americans are growing tired of Donald Trump. DUH! How do I apply for a job like that? The entire world is growing tired of Donald Trump. Trump admits his doctors have got him taking aspirin, due to his advancing age. Pure Trump speak, if he admits to taking aspirin he’s probably taking a shelf full of medications. He slowly ambled out on stage on New Year’s eve like father time. His wife Malaria was wearing a shiny silver designer gown, making her look like an upscale, well dressed baked potato.

Trump has underperformed and is over exposed. Rove says the public is tiring of Trump’s mean spiritedness and vindictiveness. His nasty comments and his desire to make it so by saying it’s so. There’s no inflation, I, Trump, have commanded it! Trump is abandoning putting troops in the streets because as a PR stunt it is a failure. His all too real attacks on boats and ships at sea are turning an entire world against the United Snakes.

Canada is purchasing Swedish Gripen fighter jets over F-35’s. Sorry, McDonald- Douglas it’s only eight billion dollars. You can make it up somewhere else. But there is a slight problem. The standard engine for the Gripen is a General Electric model and Canada wants nothing American. So a deal has been struck to use Rolls Royce jet engines instead. Sorry, GE. You can see the writing on the wall, can’t you?

Grandpa wants to build battleships because that’s the way they did things back in the good old days. But let’s talk about high technology. Ukraine has a list of Russian war criminals. Vladimir Putin just issued a decree saying Russian soldiers can ignore the decisions of the world court. But using telephone surveillance, Ukraine can follow their electronic footprints. Learning their habits and routines. Watching them from a thousand miles away. They know when they are sleeping. They know when they’re awake. They know when they order a pizza and when they go to the gym. And then they install a magnetic mine with a shaped charge to their cars and boom.

High-tech assassination, Big Brother is indeed watching you! The ghost of Christmas’ future. Floc cameras follow you down the street. License plate readers know your every move. Ring doorbell cameras see your comings and goings. In China, your ID card is your passport. Get in trouble with the government and they will turn you off. You can’t ride the train or rent a room. Americans have always been in love with their automobiles, but that love is now unrequited. Teenagers these days must be pushed into getting a driver’s license by their parents. Because it’s all too expensive.

Teenagers can communicate on their phones, who needs actual person-to-person contact? Getting a car means getting insurance and cars aren’t cheap anymore and neither is the insurance. Getting a car means getting a job, if you can. It means you work to keep the car, and the car keeps you going to work. And it isn’t like the old days where you could buy a cheap car and drive it for a couple of years. Consumer Reports recently published a list of the fifteen worst new cars. Ask yourself, how many new car models are there? Is fifteen half or a third of all new car models?

Fifteen new cars guaranteed to place you in peonage. All brands and all price ranges from Kia’s to Cadillac’s. Underpowered over burdened with technology that even the dealerships struggle to understand. Plastic parts, bad transmissions, rubber belts running in motor oil. The automobile has gone from a trusted friend to an untrusted adversary. It should come as no surprise when youth decline to participate. New cars are languishing on dealer lots unsold. The economic bargain is broken.

Wages haven’t kept up with prices for years. First time home buyers are now in their forties. Car repossessions and home foreclosures are surging. Let’s ask Carl Rove why? I bet he knows. But I’ll take a shot at it. Capitalism is failing, and it’s failing all over the world. And the march of technology means it is only going to get worse. Self-driving taxis and trucks. Automated warehouses means fewer workers will be needed. Time was when automation affected mainly blue-collar workers, but not so anymore. Who needs a sales manager, analyst or an accountant, when we have a program for that. It will set our sales projections and do the taxes all at the same time.

The scale of technological change is so rapid that over age fifty technology workers can be replaced by recent grads at lower wages with better outcomes. You were good in your day, old man. But that was two years ago, now you’re over the hill. Mega corporations, monopolies and technology have broken the employment contract. They have no obligation to you, the worker, but demand your total obligation to them. I saw a guy get fired for going water skiing on a vacation day. Obviously, a poor employee, who would rather go recreate than do his job. I learned at that company there was an inner sanctum of five or six insiders, and everyone else would eventually get fired in their turn.

Because of Covid, politics and Trump, corporations have been leaving China. Leaving an entire generation of Chinese workers in the lurch. Workers who did nothing wrong and played the game as you are supposed to play. There is a cultural joke in China which says, Today, you are an ambitious college student with a bright future. Tomorrow, you’re just another unemployed worker looking for a job. What future is there for workers?

It’s all bucks and Buck Rogers now. Corporations are borrowing money and spending every last dime on AI data center wishing wells. It’s all going to be so wonderful when supercomputers can do everything for everybody, all the time! Time was when your automated order took three seconds to process, but now, after spending forty billion dollars, they can process your order in one second. Ain’t that great? Ain’t that wonderful? But who will place that order? My poverty, our poverty, becomes a drag on the economy as a whole.

The economy can’t prosper if workers can’t prosper. There is no need to build cars or homes or communications satellites which no one can afford to purchase. No need for AI data centers to count up the losses. Socialism for the rich and hard capitalism for the poor. The president proposes twenty-five new battleships at a cost of fifteen billion dollars each. While health care subsidies disappear for twenty million Americans. Subsidies which could be supplied for less than the cost of one and a half battleships. Who are we defending? What are we defending? Why are we defending it? Guns to protect Elon’s fortune. Guns to protect Bezos’s fortune. Guns to kill rather than homes to live in? Jails to confine rather than schools to educate. Tax cuts for the rich and health cuts for the poor!

If only this were an accident. But alas, it’s not. Ask Carl Rove, he knows!

“When a condition or a problem becomes too great, humans have the protection of not thinking about it. But it goes inward and minces up with a lot of other things already there and what comes out is discontent and uneasiness, guilt and a compulsion to get something–anything–before it is all gone.”
― John Steinbeck