It's 1984 and The Boss has out a KILLER new album: "Born In The USA." It goes platinum, plus. One of the charts is called "My Home Town." In it there's a lyric I want you to ponder, seeing as how it was written in 1984, over 25 years ago: "The foreman says these jobs are going, boys, and they ain't coming back." Not to your home town...
Why not? How did he know?
Fast forward to 2010, and pundit/critics like Thom Hartmann are touting a new orthodoxy to reclaim "our country" from the plutocrats, oligarchs, aristos, and their minions in the political and business classes. The key is to somehow 'return manufacturing/jobs' to the economy. Hartmann and others have a variety of schemes to accomplish this, but it seems to me that these pretty uniformly overlook, or simply ASSUME to have solved, a principle dilemma of the "we'll just rebuild" argument.
It is this: You're gonna need A LOT of MONEY to build and re-build the infrastructure which has gone to rust and ruin over the past 30 years. There is nothing left of the previous structures; they've been stripped to the walls. You'd have to start over again from scratch. You'd have to bring it up to speed, too: high-speed rail, super-diesels, mass trans, energy efficiency, everything ...But that is gonna cost a shit-pot of shekels; it's a beeeg investment.
And we already know the Gummint cannot do it; it's hamstrung by corporate interests which are still busily extracting every possible cent from the existing chaos, and so doesn't want to; so Gummint CANNOT invest the necessary resources.
And the corpoRats don't wanna rebuild ANYTHING. It wouldn't be a good investment. We're a "down-market" anymore. We have been hollowed out, and no it's on to the next apparatus for the corpoRat otherfuckers. They need "us" less and less as a market; they're just about done with "us."
1 comment:
You're right Woody.
We also can't go back to Industrial again. That's gone, we're on to Post-Industrial now. Only no-one's worked out what Post-Industrial actually means.
There's also the environment and resources which we're exhausting faster than ever.
And then there's the fact that the rest of the world is busy "developing" and overtaking us, meaning that (a) we are becoming less competitive against their work-forces and (b) since they have copied our model of "development" (or should that be maldevelopment?) they are now also gobbling up the world's resources and outcompeting us as the prices get ever higher and higher as they run out.
We're screwed!
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