Have you seen George Ure's "take" ??
"Manufacturer's Resource Wars". This will be a 30-40 year period getting underway during George Bush 1"s tenure, where the industrialized nations of the West launch energy and resource "crusades". These crusades are being driven by a lifestyle and economy that has failed to come to terms with four key unsustainable trends:
A growing mountain of debt: The Debt load of the U.S. is now 3 times GDP. We not that a debt load of 2.7 times GDP toppled the US into the Great Depression of the 1930's, and the even higher load today will likely topple the entire West into a Greater Depression spanning the next 10-15-years.
The second driver is the passing of Peak Oil, which is forcing American corporations to act in morally questionable, and in some cases such as the pending Nigeria bribery case pending against Halliburton, potentially illegal ways.
english.aljazeera.net
The third driver, of course, is the "blow-back" from our ill-advised adventures in places like Afghanistan and our cultural imperialism. In the Islamic world it is not forgotten that the Christian West invaded the Middle East with devastating results in ancient times. Today, the term jihad is applied to a broad spectrum of open actions such as the aforementioned bombings in places like Iraq and the not-so-sublte deliberate infiltration of radical Islamists into the U.S. with the purpose of sabotage by sleeper cells: washtimes.com.
The fourth driver, which we explored for subscribers this past weekend, is that Western economics has failed to provide a mechanism to share the benefits of automation, a trend likely to accelerate as robotics evolve more quickly. The only way improved efficiency of automation is shared is through lower prices (labor is cheapened by machines, resulting in deflation) and through a return on investment to owners of robots. The thought problem is this: If only one person were to own all automation in the world, drying up ownership, how would displaced workers be paid to buy the resulting goods, except through wealth transfer mechanisms such as taxes?
So it is that when we see stories like this morning's piece from Reuters announcing that chain store sales are down because of the unusually harsh weather, biz.yahoo.com, we sit back from our resume hustling and reflect on the larger problems of the world. Specifically, an economic system that has bumped up against global size limits.
In order for Western Capitalism to function as a healthy system, it needs expansion room and resources. Constrain either and you tank the economy, or as the present period of economic history suggests, you foment wars and grab resources in hopes of avoiding the Greater Depression that now threatens.
While free-for-all capitalism was great for building America, and would have worked for sustaining America without massive people-replacement strategies like outsourcing/jobjacking, mass production, and robotics, the emergence of people-replacement calls for a new kind of economics. |
