I generally agree, wholeheartedly. "We are being levelled down"[1] isn't quite the same song, but similar tune.
There is enormous profit being made, and it's always less and less shared, but to some degree I do just worry that the economy has grown uncompetitive, that we've let costs of living spiral too high & that we (& much of the world) simply consume too much. Within the nation, we need some real redistribution. And some reforms, to our way of life at large, to figure out how to make like more affordable, how to sustain ourselves with less consumption & more sustainable medium & long term approaches.
Which relates somewhat to Reich's 1997 memoir after resigning as Clinton's Secretary of Labor, Locked in the Cabinet, where-in we never actually try to improve the system. Wikipedia[2]:
> In the book, Reich criticizes the Democratic Party as "owned by" business and Washington as having two real political parties during his tenure: the "Save the Jobs" party, which wanted to maintain the status quo, and the "Let 'Em Drown" party.
This article is good, but the topics facing us are also about more than labor power; the real crisis is about making the whole system work better & more efficiently, finding our root needs & going beyond neoliberalism to serve those ends better & more systematically. But yes, labor power is also a key component, & something missing, and Powell here is actively eroding it, back to the "let em drown" path.
For sake of comprehensiveness, I was going to chime in & say "I still agree, but also note that immigration is way down," which would affect labor supply considerably. But I just did some searching around online, and from what sources I can see that include 2022 immigration statistics, it seems like immigration has more than made up for lost time.
Sort of side note, but very much meta-on-topic; I'm reading American Midnight (2022) about the suppression of labor, progressives, & anything standing in the way of capital around WW1, and it's amazing & sad. About the economic & military, &
especially especially the social mobilization of a society towards war, and the grinding up of any force inconvenient towards this end.
The willingness of Americans to police, assault, vigilante, bully, spy, & shout down on anyone outside the perceived local mainstream is stunningly on display. And such a huge swarth of it was directly to the benefit of & often instigated by vast incredibly profitable industries & wealthy men. It's wild to see, 100 years latter, still such enduring & overwhelming hatred for the basic idea of a reasonable social contract, of having a decent livable society with a somewhat fair shake. Or looked at the other way: the idea that anything can get in the way of making money still seems unfathomable, impossible; the needs of the almighty buck, of the wealth-holders, still constitute a force majeure against the effort to make a nation livable & decent.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 17.6 ms ] threadThere is enormous profit being made, and it's always less and less shared, but to some degree I do just worry that the economy has grown uncompetitive, that we've let costs of living spiral too high & that we (& much of the world) simply consume too much. Within the nation, we need some real redistribution. And some reforms, to our way of life at large, to figure out how to make like more affordable, how to sustain ourselves with less consumption & more sustainable medium & long term approaches.
Which relates somewhat to Reich's 1997 memoir after resigning as Clinton's Secretary of Labor, Locked in the Cabinet, where-in we never actually try to improve the system. Wikipedia[2]:
> In the book, Reich criticizes the Democratic Party as "owned by" business and Washington as having two real political parties during his tenure: the "Save the Jobs" party, which wanted to maintain the status quo, and the "Let 'Em Drown" party.
This article is good, but the topics facing us are also about more than labor power; the real crisis is about making the whole system work better & more efficiently, finding our root needs & going beyond neoliberalism to serve those ends better & more systematically. But yes, labor power is also a key component, & something missing, and Powell here is actively eroding it, back to the "let em drown" path.
For sake of comprehensiveness, I was going to chime in & say "I still agree, but also note that immigration is way down," which would affect labor supply considerably. But I just did some searching around online, and from what sources I can see that include 2022 immigration statistics, it seems like immigration has more than made up for lost time.
Sort of side note, but very much meta-on-topic; I'm reading American Midnight (2022) about the suppression of labor, progressives, & anything standing in the way of capital around WW1, and it's amazing & sad. About the economic & military, & especially especially the social mobilization of a society towards war, and the grinding up of any force inconvenient towards this end.
The willingness of Americans to police, assault, vigilante, bully, spy, & shout down on anyone outside the perceived local mainstream is stunningly on display. And such a huge swarth of it was directly to the benefit of & often instigated by vast incredibly profitable industries & wealthy men. It's wild to see, 100 years latter, still such enduring & overwhelming hatred for the basic idea of a reasonable social contract, of having a decent livable society with a somewhat fair shake. Or looked at the other way: the idea that anything can get in the way of making money still seems unfathomable, impossible; the needs of the almighty buck, of the wealth-holders, still constitute a force majeure against the effort to make a nation livable & decent.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34566502
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Reich#Return_to_influen...