Known by the Company You Keep

You voted for a known con man awaiting sentencing for 34 felonies. You knowingly ignored the fact that those convictions were decided by 12 citizens who risked their lives to ensure that no American is above the rule of law. You have no integrity, no decency, and no values that can make up for your flaws. You voted for a man who was convicted for raping a woman, again ignoring the courage of a jury of whom half were selected by Trump’s lawyers. That is a clear statement of who you are, man or woman, and how little you care for a woman’s safety and her right to exist as an equal. Russia, especially Vladimir Putin, obviously exerts significant influence with Trump and every investigation by both the House, Senate, FBI, and CIA confirmed that. But you have no interest in US national security, do you? That certainly defines who you are in many ways. Trump is a known conman and incompetent “business man,” but his flaws and failures are just yours inflated to an international level, aren’t they? Robert Reich has cataloged “The 101 worst things about Trump’s shambolic presidency,” saving me the trouble of making a similar list. None of that is hard to find or verify, but you don’t care do you?

When I was a kid, when the sun was tiny and the moon wasn’t born yet, a common parental warning was “You are known by your friends” or ““You are known by the company you keep.” Supposedly the origin of that saying came from Don Quixote, “Here, quoth Sancho, the proverb hits right, Tell me your company, and I will tell you what you are. If your worship keeps company with those who fast and watch, what wonder is it that you neither eat nor sleep while you are with them?” You are known by the politics you follow, too. For the last dozen years Trumpers have been given slack with a collection of lazy, unobservant excuses: they don’t know better, “they are hurting,” the education system failed them, liberal elites don’t pay attention to their problems, and the list is inexhaustible. And it’s bullshit. I’ve lived among the people who voted for Trump for all of my 76 years and they are, as Hillary said, deplorable. They are lazy, uneducated by choice, emotional and anti-intellectual, timid and terrified, selfish, greedy, violent, and will be just as happy marching in uniforms toward any target they are aimed at as they are sitting in their living rooms cowering from the blue glow of their televisions. You can always identify them by their deep-set scowls and angry fear.

Another author did a fine job of pointing out the error in imagining there is some kind of thin shell of evil over mostly-decent Trump voters, “If Donald Trump happened because a significant percentage of our fellow citizens wanted him, and all his works, and all his empty promises, then there was nothing to be done. If 47 percent of the country wants fascism, then eventually it will get fascism. You can’t simply dissolve the people and elect another.”

Back in 2012, another Republican Trump-enabler, Rick Santorum, admitted, “We will never have the media on our side, ever, in this country. We will never have the elite, smart people on our side." Santorum was talking about intelligent, decent people in the media, but he was also right in the broader category of who fascists will never have on their side. Smart people rarely tend to also be treasonous, self-serving, uneducated, and gullible. Don’t get distracted by professions or degrees, as the 2nd of the Five Basic Laws of Human Stupidity clearly warns us, “The probability that a person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.” For example, 2022 Minnesota Republican Governor Candidate Scott M. Jensen is a Chaska, MN family physician. A “doctor,” right? But a really bad doctor whose own patients and other Minnesota physicians warned Minnesota voters that Jensen was a nutjob. Not only was Jensen an anti-vax nutjob, but he also over-prescribed opioids to his patients while pretending to be outraged at other physicians’ use of their “prescription pads.” Doctor, yes, “smart person,” not so much.

In my Rat’s Eye View blog, I have pointed out the many flaws in considering a collection of so-called professionals “smart” since 2007 and much of that early material came from my initial attempt to create a business management consulting website in 1999. From engineers in every profession to medical doctors to every sort of executive (government or business) to scientists and the arts, stupid people abound.

But even if they are a small minority of humans, there are 8 billion of us littering the planet and some of those humans are very smart. So smart, in fact, that I have often suspected our species is about to snap off another evolutionary branch. Those people have now witnessed inconvertible evidence that Trump voters are deplorable, unredeemable, dangerous fascists. Those very smart, very talented people are out there running every complicated aspect of modern life. They are the physicians, scientists, engineers, and public servants who once thought they were working for some “greater good” who now know the greater good would be to let nature take its course more often than not.

The deplorables will be unable to contain their glee at this most recent victory. They will self-identify without fear, loudly and proudly. When they need the services of the intelligent minority, I hope they see increasingly overwhelming obstacles. One million medical professionals left the field during the Trump covid massacre, either through death, retirement, or career change. There are few replacements in the supply chain and, regardless of Trumps delusions, far fewer foreign physicians from his designated “nice countries” will be interested in immigrating to fascist America. “Smart” doctors will gravitate to decent communities and rural America will continue to be abandoned. Trump will accelerate that by demeaning the sacrifice necessary to become a medical professional and directing even more resources to “unearned income” such as his tax breaks for the rich and vulture capitalism. More and more clinics are facing doctors nearing retirement and insisting on “no new patients” while new doctors quickly reaching patient capacity and being unwilling to accept a work load that demeans their profession and endangers the patients they have. It turns out that no matter how much you pay an equity capital anointed hospital executive, nitwits who majored in “business management” don’t know anything about healthcare and are nothing more than a grossly overweight albatross dangling from the neck of doctors and nurses. Medical professionals have less trouble immigrating to “nice countries” than any other group.

When Trump and his nepo-imbeciles are done privatizing NOAA, US climate scientists will largely be out of the business of formulating climate models so that a few of Trump’s corporate buddies can use the fragile remains of that agency to sell weather predictions to other corporate interests. You can safely assume that climate-impacted areas will continue to see insurance companies divest from home owner insurance and other government-regulated obligations, while Wall Street gamblers use that same data to short those same areas based on insider weather information. We saw a surprising number of US “smart people” move across the border to Canada in the first Trump regime. Vancouver is a hotbed or US techie immigrants and Toronto is the “New New York” for tech immigrants from all over the world.

So, revel in the fact that you “broke the system” for as long as that euphoria lasts. The problem with breaking something as complicated and intertwined as the very fragile United States of America is that you will never see anything like the country you broke again. A surprising portion of every state in the nation wants their state to leave the union. Trump’s election may mollify the non-productive, dependent red states, but if they leave the country won’t be nearly as effected as if the blue states jumped ship. Most of us wouldn’t miss Alabama-Mississippi-Arkansas-Louisiana-etc if those sad pieces of real estate disappeared into the earth’s core. Economically, they are all nothing more than a burden. Be careful what you wish for. There is no coming back from this sad victory. You have made it clear who you are, both by your actions and the company you keep. You will never again have the “fellow Americans” trust of the people you desperately depend upon. Once that bond is broken, it can’t be repaired and you are totally unprepared for the consequences. And there will be consequences.

“You can fix it.”

This morning in a conversation with an old friend, he brought up a question, “How many people do you think affected through your life?” L.A. “Arnold” Stevenson¹ was my first real employer and, probably, a mentor of sorts. He would have hated that label and I’m not particularly fond of it. Before Arnold, I had held several jobs from age 13 to 23, but my employers and bosses made no more of a mark on me than would have assorted drunks I might have met in a bar. Most of the people I worked for, before Arnold, knew no more about the organizations (loosely using that word) they led (laughably using that word) than anyone on the street at any given moment. Not only would I have not considered them mentors, they were mostly just obstacles to be gotten around in the process of doing my various jobs.

After about 5 months in a mediocre Dodge City Community College technology program, I realized that the instructor was out of things to teach me and, supposedly, there were 1 1/2 more years of classes that I needed to take for my associates degree. About the time I came to that realization, my wife announced that she was unexpectedly (to me) pregnant. She’d been listening to an unholy collection of Kansas idiot-relatives, both on her side and mine, and decided that having a baby would solve the problem of having to make adult decisions about what to do with her life. Of course, since someone had to take up that slack my own adult decision process went into overdrive.

I’d been working as a part-time electronics technician for a small manufacturing company in Dodge while I went to school and as soon as that employer discovered that I was sending resumes to competitors they offered me a slight salary bump and a large increase in responsibility and increase in hours. While I’d only been at that job for a few months, I was already the department’s “expert,” which was scary on multiple levels. The first level would be that I didn’t know squat about much of anything. I ignored that offer as long as possible and, eventually, my resume landed on the desk of the manager at Oswalt Industries in Hereford, Texas. He passed it on to Arnold, who was running the division’s electronic scales department and who was looking for a technician to handle the office and shop duties while he performed the field service responsibilities. After a brief interview, I was hired and we spent a day locating a place to live and went back home to gather our meager belongings, quit my job, say “goodbye” to our relatives and friends, rent a small U-Haul van, and move ourselves to Texas. I was barely 23 years old and had been on my own for 8 years and the sole support of our family-of-two for 4 years. And life was about to become incredibly complicated.

For starters, while my new employer had made a big deal out of their benefits, including health insurance, they didn’t bother to point out the fact that my wife’s pregnancy was “a pre-existing condition” that wouldn’t be covered. That would be a several-thousand dollar debt which I’d be paying off with my $2.35/hour salary; which meant a short work-week would be at least 60 hours and more often 80 to 90. Secondly, while I was a “star” with my previous employer I was a rank beginner with Arnold. About a week into my new job, he told me, “If I’d have known how little you knew when I hired you, I’d have never hired you.” I really didn’t know much, either. My previous employer had no service information for the products I’d been repairing and installing. I’d made one attempt to convince our prime supplier that I needed schematics and calibration information which had gotten me a reprimand from both my employer and the supplier’s CEOs. Arnold, on the other hand, had everything I’d asked for and a lot more for every electronic device we serviced. I’d hand-traced schematics for most of the circuit boards and while my drawings were better than nothing, they weren’t absolutely correct and some of my troubleshooting assumptions were wrong as a result. After a rough start, during which I expected to be fired practically every time Arnold came near me, I began to be useful and even got a small raise.

Once he decided that I wouldn’t be a waste of his time, Arnold became a constant education. His mantra was something like “Anything any engineer can design, I can improve on.” `That applied to everything from the components we used in circuit repair work to the processes we used in rebuilding electro-mechanical devices to the cable and wire routing on the equipment we installed and repaired. Arnold got his electronics training in the 1950s Air Force, where state-of-the-art electronics met mission-critical applications and at least one technician, Arnold, who never wanted a pilot to die because of something Arnold could have prevented. My on-the-job training with Arnold ended after about a year, because our idiot division manager had made Arnold’s life miserable by scheduling him in several places at the same time, often hundreds of miles apart, and by cluelessly undermining his decisions and authority. Arnold quit and started his own business and after a short pause, hired me to do his in-house repairs in my spare time. Almost immediately, my “spare time” began to produce a lot more income than my day-job. I started to avoid the telephone on weekends, so I could concentrate on the work Arnold gave me instead of the low paid work from my “real job.”

On occasion, I’d even do a field job with Arnold, even taking fake “sick days” to free up the time. One of those occasions was when he got a call from one of his customers to look at a newly installed “automated elevator system.” The system came from one of our worst vendors, C-G Systems (Colton, CA), who had installed a complicated half-analog/half-digital system that was intended to monitor, weigh, and deliver premixed cattle feed to feed trucks. Literally, none of the system worked when the C-G engineers packed up and left in the night, abandoning the feedlot owner with a million dollar non-functional system. Arnold brought me along for a walk-through of the new, deader-than-a-doornail facility and he immediately started identifying sections that he thought could be brought to life fairly quickly. This was 1972, when the most advanced digital “technology” available was TTL in 14 and 16-pin DIP packages and A-to-D circuits came from a very few, very expensive manufacturers. Neither Arnold or I had ever worked on digital logic to that moment. So, we took a bunch of notes and went home to do research. We both bought Don Lancaster’s TTL Cookbook, The RTL Cookbook, and Walt Jung’s National Semiconductor Applications books. And we spent a couple of weeks reading and experimenting with these circuits. Then, we went back and, section-by-section, we brought most of that system to life. There were areas that wouldn’t be practical or possible for at least another decade, but the grain mill could at least move grain, measure it, and deliver it by conveyor to the trucks.

Hereford, Texas was a tornado magnet and when the city got clobbered by tornado just past midnight on April 19, 1971, Arnold decided his family needed a tornado shelter. (The edge of the tornado passed by the house I was renting by less than 150’ and we slept through it.) So, Arnold grabbed a shovel and dug the outline of the foundation and walls a couple of days later. He and I dug holes for the walls and he lined those holes with plywood frame work and poured the concrete himself. Then, he rented a backhoe and dug out the basement, poured the floor, reused the wall plywood as a frame for the ceiling which he braced massively, and poured the ceiling and buried the structure. Over the rest of the spring, he finished that new basement/storm shelter into a terrific family entertainment room with food and water storage. Throughout the construction, the city inspectors harassed him for not using “approved” contractors. Every time they tried to ding him for a code violation, he demonstrated that he’d exceeded code by a wife margin and they backed off, pouting all the way.

Texas was never going to be a place where I’d be happy and even less so for my wife. Before our 2nd daughter was born, I’d started looking for a way out of that armpit, only a few miles from Dalhart, Texas where the “Willie and Joe” cartoonist Bill Mauldin once told a Rolling Stone reporter “If they ever give the world an enema — Dalhart is where they’ll put the tube.” Bill was wrong, Dalhart was much nicer than Hereford and Dalhart had a tiny fraction of the multiple sorts of pollution that Hereford generated. Arnold went above and beyond to help me relocate. First, he strongly recommended that I start my own business, like his, in Guymon, OK. We wanted to go further from Texas than that, so he put in several good words for me with a large equipment dealer in Central City, NE and that was the job I took. As part of that research we did for the grain mill, I had started working on a small mobile electronic scale of my own design and Arnold connected me to a friend of his in Garden City, KS who was running a larger scales servicing business and a small manufacturing operation. It took me a few more years to finish the design and when I did I handed it off to Arnold’s connection who produced it for a few years. A few years later, that resulted in a life-saving large royalty check at a critical time in my unemployed life and career.

I learned countless things from working with Arnold Stevenson. I owe him my career and, likely, the best parts of my life. From early on in my experience with Arnold, I started looking at every piece of electronic equipment as something that was probably designed by half-hearted, mediocre engineers and that could be improved along with being repaired. I learned that doing a job as well as possible was its own reward. I learned that just having a job isn’t enough; financially, personally, and security-wise. I learned that as soon as I got a job, I should be looking for the next one and getting myself ready to be able to do that next job. I learned that management is more often than not, useless and incompetent. I learned to depend on myself for education, training, security, and to always be looking to be ready for what comes next. I learned to collect educational resources from any place I find them and to assume that any education I get that is worthwhile is going to come from my own effort; often without any school’s assistances and totally from my own research and study.

Arnold died in 2006, back in Hereford after some time in his hometown of Garden City. When I passed through Hereford on my way to California, Arnold was in Garden City and I missed seeing him. The next time I was in Hereford was 2014 and too late. It is possible that I had talked to Arnold once or twice since we left Hereford. I know I certainly thought of him thousands of times between 1973 and . . . now and beyond. Anyone who has gone through a massive change in perspective, ability, experience, and insight has to owe several people for all of that. In many important ways, I think Arnold had more effect on my life than did my father. As a result of working with Arnold, I rewrote practically every life-lesson I’d absorbed between birth and age 26 when I left Texas. I had a lot more lessons to learn, but all of them were built on the 3 years I worked with L.A. Stevenson.

¹ L.A. "Arnold' Stevenson Garden City Telegram, The (KS) January 20, 2006

Feeding the Bears for Centuries

One of faux-conservatives’ favorite analogies and war-chants is the idea that “feeding the bears” and welfare are some sort of population drivers, while (of course) pretending to be pro-life and anti-abortion. Since faux-conservatism is rampant in rural areas, it’s a pretty funny “pot calling the kettle black” comparison.

Rural areas have been intentionally overrepresented, propped-up and subsidized by urban welfare, and have whined about being the underdogs while getting far more resources and support than their economic or social contributions deserve since the founding of this nation (propped up on the back of low population, rural state slavery). In the vein of :”it takes one to know one,” I suspect there is a sliver of self-knowledge behind this argument being made by people who absolutely can not take care of themselves and consistently have larger families that they can’t support than urban averages. Rural people are consistently easier to fool, which makes tossing them a few bones occasionally outrageously profitable.

The Dunning-Kruger arrogance of this bunch of ignorant rubes is always stunning. Without even basic the most simple K-12 science and mathematics to support their goober-beliefs, they will loudly and proudly argue against scientific consensus about man-made global warming, disease and epidemic management, the solar system and universe, evolution and biology, psychology and neurology, and, of course, even the freaklin’ shape of the planet.

The solution, eventually, will likely be the urban economic centers simply cutting off the money flow to rural areas. As populations continue to move toward urban areas, that will become increasingly easier. At any point in the past 100 years, it would have been painlessly easy to simply convert states like the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, and most of the southeast back into territories without federal representation. Their only threat would be to withhold paying federal taxes which would immediately be countered with zero’ing out federal payments and investments in those territories. The same could be done inside larger population states with equally dependent rural areas. Personally, I think this is more likely than the splitting of the nation into several smaller nations, but either way rural areas will quickly discover what it’s like to be “a dependent population unable to take care of themselves.”

 

The United States Is A Ponzi Scheme

Ponzi Scheme: a usually-illegal operation in which participants pay to join and profit mainly from payments made by subsequent participants. 

Humans have evolved to believe in one fallacy over all of the others: “If it seems too good to be true, it must be the truest thing of all.” As a species, once we humans have achieved some level of comfort we appear to become convinced that we have done something to deserve that comfort for the rest of our lives. That’s not just a problem in the USA, but everywhere there are people with “1st world problems.” Here in the USA we have taken that quality to extremes. 

Republicans harp at “entitlements” without bothering to look up the word to see what it actually means. They, of course, object to the working class entitlements like Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, Medicare and Medicaid, welfare, and anything that isn’t an immediate transfer of funds into the paws of our 1% and, even, the Russian 1%. They do not object to the corporate welfare and idle rich entitlements. Obviously, if you are rich you deserve to be so. God said so; Jesus, not so much. I, however, object to all entitlements that are unfunded. 

Take Social Security, for example. Washington D.C.’s Urban Institute, a non-partisan research institute found that “a two-earner couple receiving an average wage — $44,600 per spouse in 2012 dollars — and turning 65 in 2010 would have paid $722,000 into Social Security and Medicare and can be expected to take out $966,000 in benefits. So, this couple will be paid about one-third more in benefits than they paid in taxes.” That’s not an “unrealistic return on investment” over a half-century of work and interest accruement. 

My parents’ generation, the so-called “Greatest Generation,” really kicked Social Security in the teeth by voting themselves solvent after a lifetime of insane military spending and general economic foolishness. The Urban Institute found, “If a similar couple had retired in 1980, they would have gotten back almost three times what they put in. And if they had retired in 1960, they would have gotten back more than eight times what they paid in. The bigger discrepancies common decades ago can be traced in part to the fact that some of these individuals’ working lives came before Social Security taxes were collected beginning in 1937.” The reason we’re expecting Social Security to become insolvent any minute now is because the Greatest and Silent Generations paid themselves overtime salaries on part-time work. Of course, the other reason is that Republican Presidents since Nixon have raided the so-called Social Security “lock box” for every military boondoggle imaginable and if they couldn’t outright steal that money, they simply spent money that didn’t exist and attached the bills to the Social Security IOUs. Trump is doing that with his wall boondoggle. Best case, “Come 2034, so say the system’s trustees in their 2015 report, the trust fund will be exhausted and, absent a law change, they will be able to disburse only 75% of promised benefits.” Worst case, the whole US economic house of cards will collapse on itself and Social Security insolvency will be the least of our concerns. It has happened, often, in the country’s speckled history and is more likely to happen again than not. 

The two biggest money-sinks outside of actual earned, useful, and necessary “entitlements” are our grossly racist and unjust prison system and the military. People are making money out of the slave labor harvested in the prison system, but those people aren’t “the people.” The more than 2 million people in US prisons are generating a profit, but not for the public or government forced to live with the world’s most incarcerated public on the planet. The corporations harvesting slave labor, charging exorbitant prices for “services,” and providing labor to the for-profit and government administered prisons are one of the largest lobbies in a nation of monster lobbies. Just the prison phone services make $1.2 billion per year and they doing such a terrible job that PharmaBro Martin Shkreli is still running his old drug company from prison and Tweeting as if he were an actual human being not doing time for felonies far worse than many people doing far more time than this “white collar criminal.” The collection of corporate-welfare queens in the prison system run from commissary companies racking up $1.6 billion to the $3 billion for-profit bail system to the privately-held for-profit prisons that are not adequately monitored and whose income isn’t even known because they don’t have to disclose that information to the people, taxpayers, who are paying the tab. 

The War on Drugs is another corporate-welfare entitlement that involves local, state, and federal “law enforcement,” the for-profit prison system, a collection of para-military sub-contractors, drug enforcement equipment and weapons providers, and a variety of con artists who make buckets of money convincing the public that prohibition will actually work “this time.” As long as there are billions of dollars to be made selling illegal drugs, someone is going to be getting that money. The solution is to cut the legs out from under that profit motive by legalizing drugs, emphasizing education and providing safe and economical use for the small percentage of addicted users, and whatever is left to be described as “illegal” penalize at the source. 

Finally, the biggest cause of the nation’s insolvency is the vast and uncontrolled war spending. Like the drug business, war materials are a source of easy money with practically no quality requirements or practical purpose. The military-industrial complex has had exactly the kind of ride as the dope peddlers: low cost and outrageous profit margins. Worse, the Pentagon has no interest in making the slightest effort at controlling costs or making sure the public gets something for its money. The country has flushed somewhere between $5T and $15T down the post-9/11 war rabbit hole. The Pentagon, through incompetence, corruption, and laziness “misplaced” more than a few trillion dollars (total amount unknown); somewhere between $3 and $9T. Our current national debt is about $22T and the country hasn’t made a serious attempt at repaying any of that debt since Nixon started cutting taxes in 1971, but we really kicked the debt into overtime during Reagan’s fiscally irresponsible regime. Reagan paid lip service to shoring up the Social Security fund with his 1983 “reform act” (never believe any Republican tax modification is a “reform”), but he followed that up with massive deficit spending and liberal use of federal funds for a variety of money-wasting military projects. 

Obviously, the insane pensions paid out to military lifers—especially the officer classes—are just more of the same sorts of boondoggles taxpayers should not be tolerating. A grade-10 general makes $19,762.50 per month and will receive as much as 100% of that salary after 40 years of “service.” Considering the miserable job the military has done both protecting the country and being responsible with taxpayers’ money, I think they ought to be indentured servants after a few decades of leeching off of the public tit. When we say “thank you for your service” to these characters, we should be rubbing our sore assholes and walking bow-legged at the same time. Likewise, the variety of “injuries” ex-military people use to justify disability claims is amazing. Having taught at a college that actively recruited veterans with “disability college funding,” I’ve seen some pretty comical characters burning taxpayer money while avoiding working for a living. Worse, I’ve heard some of the strangest claims from veterans of my generation and, based on that, I can only hope Trump does succeed in privatizing the VA so that it can quickly bankrupt and be abolished. 

If we—meaning my generation the “Boomers”—don’t help solve these problems, our kids will solve them at our expense. Between the X-Gens and the Millennials, we are finally outvoted, demographically if not practically. In 2019, Millennials will outnumber Boomers. They could elect representatives whose only platform is balancing the budget by any means possible, including putting Social Security on pause until it is solvent. I cannot think of a good argument against that, in fact. My generation has been financially irresponsible . . . forever, since early adulthood. Today, half of the country’s bankruptcies are over-50. “Seniors are going into retirement still carrying debt, including mortgages, credit card debt and student loan debt. They are depleting their savings and retirement accounts just to make ends meet.” 

One of my many complaints about news reporting leading up to the Great Recession was all of babble about “more people than ever own homes,” when what they should have said was “more people than ever are in debt for home purchases”; two distinctly different things. Almost everyone I know in my generation has some to a lot of house debt and one of the most basic rules I know of is “you can’t retire until you own your own home.” “Own” your own home, not live in a property that is owned by a bank. If you not only don’t own your home, but you don’t own your car, recreational vehicles and/or boats, haven’t paid off your credit cards or, even, college debt, you not only are not ready to retire you have also demonstrated an inability to manage money like an adult. Our kids should take that information for what it is and stop listening to Boomers as if they were full-developed, educated adults. As the third generation of Ponzi Scheme suckers Boomers are not totally to blame for the economic mess the country is in, but we are likely to be the ones to take the fall for it. Based on the evidence, we won’t deserve much sympathy.

Who Is Sustainable?

As I’m writing this I am doing one of the least sustainable activities human beings have ever invented: a vacation cruise to the Caribbean in late January. I’m on a floating city with about 3,000 other old farts, burning tons of oil resources every few hours, consuming more food than many cities ten or one hundred times the population of this boat, creating nothing of use for anyone else on the planet, and we’re all pretending that we “deserve” this luxury because we managed to be lucky enough to be some of the world’s most wealthy people. We just left two islands, Aruba and Cascaras that are barely more sustainable than this boat. One of those two islands produces nothing but tourist attractions and the other is equally dependent on tourism plus water resources for a brand of booze that is incredibly water-intensive on a desert island that tears through energy and water as if the world were endless.

I live in a small Minnesota town, Red Wing that is barely more sustainable than those islands and this boat. Like all of the previously mentioned places, Red Wing’s residents are mostly oblivious to their dependence and like most of rural America they are even arrogantly clueless about how dependent they are on the rest of the country and world for their lifestyle. “We grow our own food, unlike the people in the cities,” they often argue. Growing corn and soybeans is not “growing your own food.” Corn and soybeans are food for animals and a particularly inefficient energy boondoggle. Just like the rest of the country, if the shit hit the fan and our system of interdependent reliance collapsed, most of rural America would fail in quick and spectacular fashion.

Oddly, the most sustainable community I have visited in recent years has been Detroit. Through corruption, incompetence, indifference, and lethargy, Detroit’s infrastructure and community completely collapsed in the wake of NAFTA, the Bush Recession, and the socio-economic upheavals of the last 25 years that is causing the auto industry to either reform or die (the outcomes, the winners and losers are yet to be determined). After neighborhoods collapsed and were abandoned, ransacked, and, eventually, knocked down and hauled away, urban farms sprouted up everywhere and became far more efficient, independent food sources than anything rural America has seen since the 1800’s. There are neighborhoods in Detroit that not only are capable of feeding themselves, but they produce enough food to export to the rich folks for a premium and profit.

Nobody ever said, “If you can make it in Red Wing you can make it anywhere.” One of the problems rural Americans haven’t had to face (yet) is the fact that talent, skills, and intelligence have been evacuating the countryside since the beginning of the Industrial Age. The smart kids leave and the dumb ones stay and reproduce, creating a growing dumbed-down rural population that becomes more dependent every generation. Every economic study I know of demonstrates that urban America economically props up rural America for diminishing returns and vanishing reasons. There will be an obvious outcome, eventually.

One of the lessons I learned from my manufacturing career was that engineers apply the Paretto Effect, sometimes unintentionally, to occupations. We first automate the jobs that are typically filled by assholes, eliminating the assholes and the places were their “participation” jams up production. For example, you might have thought that production line technicians would have been the last place for automation to appear, but it was among the first. Equipment and fixtures to perform final test procedures on assemblies and finished products were some of the first jobs to be automated because the people who gravitated to those jobs over-estimated both their skill levels and their necessity. Likewise, farming is experiencing the beginning of that effect as GPS, satellite weather monitoring, drone and robotic ground conditions observation, and robotic planting and harvesting equipment take over farming and farm jobs. In the very foreseeable future, the only commercial farm jobs will be high-tech equipment repair and “farming” will be managed from even greater distances; most likely from urban offices. At that point, rural dependence on urban support will be unsustainable and we’ll see even more rural communities dry up and blow away than in 1929.

The best possible scenario I can imagine will be that some rural areas will become like those Caribbean islands; tourist destinations that either learn to be incredibly tolerant and friendly or die. I got the feeling that Aruba was like one giant service business depending on positive Yelp reviews for its existence. It is scary-easy to imagine my current hometown, Red Wing, becoming one cruise ship-like entity living or dying by a few thousand tourist reviews.

Who Are the Job Creators?

Wingnuts want us to think the idle rich, corporate executives, military-industrial companies and the rest of the elite corporate welfare crowd are the "job creators." I don't think so. I came up with a game to test who is really economically important in the country and world. It's called "Who Can We Live Without."

First, let's play this game with the right wing crowd. If some blessed biological catastrophe were to happen to the caviar-eating crowd, everyone Romney and Bush have ever known for instance, what effect would that have on the nation's economy? All of the little rich kids who life on Daddy, Granpa, and Great-Great-Great-Granpa's money come down with a case of the mother-of-all diarrhea. The clowns to inhabit the top floors of the nation's corporate headquarters spend their last hours in the executive bathroom, emptying their money makers. The entire investment banking circus vanishes in a bubble of oily excrement. Most of the entertainment industry does what Hollywood usually does, makes shit, but this time no careers rebound from the disaster and we're left with independent artists for out diversions. Everyone who has eaten caviar (or some other rich asshole staple) in the last month is gone in a few weeks. How does that effect the nation's gross national product?

It's not like it's hard to find another CEO, so the loss of the executive class would result in a momentary burst of business productivity, until the usual assholes filtered to the top of the corporate toilet bowl and everything businesslike returned to "normal." Nobody but the people who serve the idle rich would know the rich douchebags were missing and those servants would probably find something useful to do fairly soon. The South's slaves ended up on the Detroit production lines after a few years of assimilation. George and Ann's butlers, maids, and gardeners can probably find productive work in time. Bankers just beg cheap (free today) money from the public and sell it back to us with interest. We can live without them. The difference between major stars and everyone else who plays an instrument, pretends to be someone else, or chases a ball in clown costumes is . . . not much. They will be replaced faster than we can forget their last performance.

If the right wing elite isn't mission critical to the country, who is?

How about scientists and mathematicians? If exposure to calculus and statistics caused aneurysms, how would that effect the economy? First, all of the rich people in the previous paragraph would be broke overnight if someone didn't manage their money, do their taxes, create tricky investment portfolios to maximize profits and minimize effort, and invent the products  and services that keep the 1% in control of 95% of the country's income. Without scientists and mathematicians, the idle rich would starve and have to find work asking if we "want fries with that?" The rest of us would be in trouble, too; especially if the US was the only country to have lost its scientists and mathematicians. We would go from being a shriveling first world economy to a third world disaster zone in a few months. Most of our productive industries would have seen their last new product and many wouldn't be able to continue producing their current products. The only competent federal government agency, the General Accounting Office, would become as stupid as the military and the military would be in capable of targeting anyone but Canada and Mexico and we'd have to drive the bombs to those places. Anyone but a wingnut can see scientists and mathematicians are job creators.

If we drop down the social ladder to the fastest vanishing career in the United States, farming, how does that play out if farmers and their support industries get Mad Cow and Corn disease and spend their last hours clawing at their skulls? The US food reserves are already lower than they have been for decades and fuel costs are likely to drive them lower. Doing stupid things like converting farm land to energy production (ethanol) will push this safety margin even closer to disaster. Even without killing off farmers and the ag industry, we might see the effect of these producers going away in the near future. Disregarding reality, if the food producers of the country vanished, so would most of us. With food reserves in the near-non-existent territory, most Americans would starve in a week. Grocery stores would empty on the first day and we'd eat our way through our personal reserves in a few days, those of us who have any. The streets would be on fire and the rioting would make the Civil War look like a block party. Obviously, farmers are job creators and life sustainers.

You can, hopefully, think of a few other occupations that are actually important to the country; medical providers, fire departments (especially forestry fire fighters), teachers, and the list of underpaid, overworked, unappreciated economy-critical jobs goes on. The ruling elite are not among that group. We can get along without them under any conditions.

Kill Welfare? Not the Parts that Feed Me

Everybody is crying over the deficit. The solution, according to practically every expert, is to cut the welfare strings that hold up dependent citizens. A recent Week Magazine article cited statistics claiming 45% of Americans don't pay taxes and nearly 50% of us are on "government benefits--Social Security, Medicare, Medicade, unemployment insurance, food stamps." The Teabaggers use this sort data to justify their existence and most of the Moon-Murdock conglomerate harps on "American dependence" as a sign of the Apocalypse.

As usual, the media is barking up the wrong tree. For starters, more than 1/3 of "employed" Americans work for local, state, and federal governments. Another big chunk of our citizens depend on government retirement benefits. A huge portion of what's left of industry in this country produces products intended for government consumption. The military, alone, chews up billions in American manufacturing productivity. Add the military crap we produce to sell to foreign governments (mostly those hostile to this country) and you have a lot of corporate welfare that always seems to be slipping under the media radar. [Since the media is a top corporate welfare recipient, that should be no surprise.] Top that with tax incentives, government grants and loans, and taxpayer financed corporate infrastructure and you have a very socialist nation that does a lot of whining about socialism. In fact, we may be the most successful socialist country in the history of the world.

Success, however, is something you have to work at and if you don't know what it is you're working for that becomes less productive. The Teabag Ladies' constant whine about their brand of social conservative fantasies is a distraction. Many, if not most, of the Teabaggers are on some form of government support; notably unemployment insurance and Social Security. Fighting against the system that feeds and houses you and your family is an odd sort of logic.

What would happen if we gave up our pretense of "traditional American values" and admitted, as a culture, that we are socialist, have been socialist since the late 1800s, and are likely to become even more socialist in the future? The most socialist beneficiaries in the country would go ballistic, for starters. Bankers and investment firms would fight this acknowledgment because it would threaten their pretense of capitalism. Banks simply borrow money from the public and loan it to the public at elevated interest rates. If we admit that banks provide no useful or necessary service that a national bank couldn't do better, thousands of inflated corporate executive salaries would disappear in a puff of logic. Financial speculation offers nothing but a lottery system slanted to benefit insiders, but if we decided to drop government support of that farce we call the stock market, more puffed-up salaries would be jeopardized and acres of propaganda would be generated to try and convince a gullible public that "you need us to keep your something for nothing fantasies alive." A significant portion of manufacturing in the United States is intended to provide products requiring  government support or outright purchase. Most of our military-industrial exports depend on associated government military grants and loans to the "purchasing" country. The auto industry requires government to build roads for their vehicles to travel. The entire medical products system (drugs and devices) depends on Medicare and Medicaid for paying customers.

The historic problem with actual socialism is that someone needs to do real work: grow food, build housing, fix broken stuff, and all of the actual production required to feed the inept and unnecessary bureaucratic masses. An obvious requirement of a successful socialist state is population control, but the usual way they mismanage that task is through wars and terrorism and purges and genocide. Maybe an honest socialist state would admit that the patriotic bullshit they usually spout is a cowardly way to get around population control. Maybe pigs will fly out of my ass and trees will grow golden apples.