Supply Side Madness

And this demonstrates the huge disappointment digital economy leaders have been to all of us.  I understand they are all business types, with heavy emphasis on digital tech, stand for “progress”..

But they also are behaving like the J.P. Morgan’s of old, the “robber barons” who were the scourge of the 19th century economy.  These crooks dominated the economy until the Great Depression, that broke the public’s illusions about the “wonders” of mass production and of “the assembly line”.

Ford is a good example.  He is considered the father of the modern American automobile, but was a visceral opponent of unions.  The oil and coal industries same thing.  

The idea was then as it is not, maximize profits.  Find more profitable markets, ignore the labor that is making your riches possible, cut costs, drive up productivity; etc.etc.

And then the supply and demand cycle kicked in, the supply was huge, the demand dropped because the non union underpaid workers on the assembly line could not afford the products they were producing.

This is the same phenomenon almost 100 years later that we are seeing with Tesla  and with every other corporations  in America right now.

They have taken over the political process with the same lies they used 100 years ago, that unions were evil, that low wages were good and huge profits and salaries for themselves was the “promised land”.

Except it wasn’t.  Two products came of this:  1.  A huge division between rich and poor and concentration of wealth in a few; Depression.  2.  War.

Why war?  Really is is not difficult to see why.

War drives up demand.  It is what WWII did, ending the depression but killing 55 million in the bargain.  Then after the war, rebuilding and the growth of America’s middle class, caused a boom in consumer goods and growth of a thing called a “global economy”.  

And until about 20 years ago, this worked to spread the wealth so to speak.  And then, our business elite decided to make the whole damned mistake all over again!

The virgin economy of digital came on the stage, with its promise of democratic economic growth, spreading access to the digital economy to all.

And guess what, the robber mentality came into play once again.

Tesla , who also makes solar panels and batteries, who is the electric car guru, claims to be an environment champion, a “trust us” we know solar.

And yet, the democratization and equity spreading promise of solar panels is yet to be realized.  The CEO of Tesla is consumed with the idea of a tunnel in Southern California that will help in his commute to work, not in the selling of solar panels to the wider population.

And the demand side, is ignored for the supply side; with coming disastrous results.

Years ago, the leader of the auto workers in exasperation during negotiations shouted out, “You can continue cutting our salaries and cutting workers, you can continue making huge profits you spend our yourselves, my question is, once everyone else is broke who will buy your damned cars?”

Now its Oil, it’s the oil stupid.  We cannot produce the petroleum to run our economy anymore.  It isn’t there anymore.  Wind and solar are our only chance, coupled with yes, electric cars, buses and trains.  But this huge threat to civilization itself is ignored by the business elite.  They are deaf, dumb and blinded by greed.  

The  robber barons are consumed with cutting workforce to fight unions, who are working for equity to the digital economy.  Really they are fighting to drive demand up so the economy works.  

And what  we get are housing prices so high in the Bay Area that ordinary workers can’t live there.  So, rather than unionize and pay workers more, the idiots decide to fight the unions, cut demand to drive up supply; it’s  the same mistake that caused the Great Depression.

We did not have a paradigm template in 1929.  We could be excused as a species for being stupid.  We don’t have that luxury now.

The failure of our economy is, make  no I mistake about it, in the leadership of our economy.  And as long as they behave like Rockefeller, Henry Ford, and Morgan, we are doomed again to disaster.

True insanity I is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.