Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Debt Horizon

A Jobs speech is coming. No, not from the company with the largest market capitalization, Apple, no -- Steve Jobs is gone. No, a speech from Obama on jobs.

What, do you suppose, a government can do to spur job creation? I am hardly one to know...but I do know that the postal service is set to shave several tens of thousands of people here by 2012. Apple created jobs for the same reason the postal service is hemorrhaging -- a change to a digital economy where no one has to work anymore, where pixels on computers represent the only wealth many of us make claims to...and in my little opinion, pixelized wealth that many of us are making the same claims to.

That a company that produces toys is the largest, most valuable company in the U.S. is telling. Admit it -- iPhones and hot-shit apps are nothing but electronic adult toys (not electric adult toys, he-he). I traveled the East Coast for 2.5 weeks and Lake Comanche for Labor Day weekend without one of these toys while I absolutely required a company like Exxon-Mobil, the company who recently lost the top spot to Apple.

No, we can't find jobs here because we intentionally fuckered them away over the past thirty years, as we migrated from citizen to consumer; as we accepted warehouse mass-merchants at the edges of our towns over myriad local in-town businesses; as we gained an excess 35# on average through the consumption of factory-scaled subsidized dairy and soybeans while requiring 1,500 more calories a day just to get the base level of nutrients we needed in 1975 due to over-fertilization and can't afford double digit health care increases; as we gamble away our wealth today and future tomorrow by building casinos and family entertainment destinations instead of investing it into our own communities.

We've not only a whole generation, but multiple generations, who are now adorned with random tattoos (as some odd display of status? of prestige?) along with attire resembling either the nursery or prison. Whole generations who have lost the capacity for meaningful work. Most jobs are no longer craft in this nation -- all that's available are those that support the ongoing consumption of toys, recreational drugs, or jobs that support the directing of said consumption into landfills -- forklift operators at K-Mart or chip-sealers for the acres of unused WalMart parking lots.

As if Obama wanted to spend $1.6 trillion more every year than the government takes in, but he has to to keep the system from falling apart, while the consumer continues to be funneled towards that debt horizon, the end game of an economy based on ever expanding credit. It's neither Obama's fault nor is it Bush -- it's the American consumer, who cheerfully lost his own job building quality toaster ovens at $16 an hour to a Chinese factory worker making total pieces of shit for a tenth of that. The 600,000,000 of us who were sheltered from limitless cheap labor behind the bamboo and iron curtains have now refused to accept that there are another 5.9 billion who strive for a lifestyle with indoor plumbing, cooking fuel and basic transportation. The American consumer, who refuses to pay $55 for a good domestic toaster oven at a local merchant that would last two decades, and instead climbs into his foreign made SUV and drives on subsidized roads to the WalMart to buy a $19.98 imported piece of shit every three years.

The jobs speech will come and go, with no meaningful results.

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