Your Independent Journal from the Heartland
Corporate powers are telling us not to worry our little heads about the humanoid robotics they’re increasingly employing in America’s workplaces.
Yes, they concede, AI’s new generation of “thinking robots” will transform many jobs, but — like magic — they’ll also create better career opportunities for “the human element.” Really ... like what? Well, like taking care of all those machines! But wait — can’t a robot do that, too?
What’s playing out here is corporate hide-and-seek from the public. Having poured hundreds of billions into developing the technology for their dream of a workerless workforce, CEOs and tech investors are now desperate to deflect workers’ fury over the joblessness that awaits them. Thus, moneyed elites have mounted a soothing PR campaign, asserting that the AI bots will only replace repetitive, drudge jobs, “liberating” those human employees to do higher-value work.
That bubble of lies, however, is already being popped by reality. Many renegade CEOs and profiteers brag that their advanced bots are taking over sophisticated thinking jobs and doing top-level creative tasks. For example, The New York Times reports that Klarna, a multibillion-dollar company, is replacing more than half of its 5,000 employees with new robotics. Its CEO is not coy about the future of work, declaring “AI can already do all of the jobs that we, as humans, do.”
The designers of this Brave New World bluntly say their AI creatures are fast-coming for a wide variety of our jobs — and big investors are betting billions on them. Yet, both politicians and the media blithely accept the corporate deception that there is no need to talk about it — much less consider what to do about it.
In “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” Humpty Dumpty autocratically declares that “When I use a word, it means what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” But, says Alice: “The question is whether you can make words mean so many different things.” Humpty retorts: “The question is which is to be master — that’s all.”
Now comes Trumpty Dumpty, asserting that he and his government rethinkers are our linguistic masters. For starters, they unilaterally axed out three hallowed words that have historically expressed our people’s proud democratic purpose — diversity, equity, and inclusion.
This month, investigative journalist Judd Legum uncovered dozens of words that partisan Trump functionaries are perverting and purging in a bizarre authoritarian frenzy. Legum even found that NSA, a non-partisan security agency, has now banned its staff from using 27 common words, including bias and injustice. It’s as though Trump’s word police think censoring language will hide the ugly realities the words express.
Yet, the control of language is central to the entrenchment of totalitarian regimes, as George Orwell laid out in his bleak novel “1984.” He wrote about “newspeak,” “doublethink,” and other linguistic twists as mass propaganda tools that eliminated inconvenient ideas and provided new “truth” for the party faithful to spread. Such manipulation, Orwell says, creates “loyal willingness to say black is white.” Thus, we see the spectacle of Trump blindly signing an executive order titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship” — even as he blatantly censors speech and stomps on our freedoms.
So come on — speak up against such thuggish Orwellian tyranny! For information, go to National Coalition Against Censorship: NCAC.org.
Here’s something I had never given any thought to: the price of fire trucks. Plus, a worrisome fire truck shortage!
Huh? What would cause any town or city to run short of this essential piece of its community infrastructure? Answer: old-fashioned greed, coming from a modern-day monopolistic construct called “private equity.”
Essentially, this is a fast-money Wall Street scheme, encouraging very wealthy investors to buy up established businesses and either plunder their assets or consolidate several of them into a monopoly. It has targeted everything from health care to newspapers — and now, your local fire department.
Until recently, making and selling fire trucks was a competitive business, with family-owned manufacturers operating in every region of America. However, (as detailed by BIG, a unique newsletter investigating monopolies) about a decade ago a private equity outfit began an industry “roll up,” consolidating independent truck companies into a national conglomerate named REV Group. It now controls nearly half of U.S. fire truck sales.
What REV mainly revved up was its profits by doubling the sticker price for trucks to more than a million dollars each. Worse, REV increased delivery time for a local department’s order from about a year to as a long as four years, meaning old trucks break down and can’t respond to catastrophes. For example, the Los Angeles fire chief reports that in last month’s horrific wildfires, more than 100 of the city’s 183 fire trucks were out of service!
Fires are inevitable. Letting a handful of private equity speculators profit from fires is not. National and state antitrust laws already prohibit such greedheaded monopolization. So, here’s an idea: Enforce those laws! Learn more at the American Antitrust Institute: AntitrustInstitute.org.
Early in the Civil War, Gen. George McClellan’s Union Army was poised for a decisive victory over Confederate forces. But, inexplicably, McClellan wouldn’t attack! For days, President Lincoln ordered and even begged the general to move. But nothing — so the Confederates slipped away. In firing McClellan, Lincoln wrote: “If you don’t want to use the army, I should like to borrow it for a while.”
That’s what today’s grassroots Democratic Party activists are saying to their aloof campaign generals, who stay ensconced in Washington, refusing to deploy their ground troops in the field of battle.
The great strength of the Democratic Party is its army of volunteer door-knockers across the country who have the local knowledge, connections and lingo to relate to local voters. Yet, in the past 30 years, fat-cat donors and high-dollar consultants have taken over the “People’s Party” and abandoned high-touch organizing for high-tech “digital outreach.”
Thus, the Democrats’ passionate army of local campaigners is unused, only called on by emails to send more donations to fund Beltway consultants and negative political ads. As a friend of mine recently said in exasperation: “I wish the Democratic Party would stop asking for money and start asking me for ACTION.”
Well, change is coming, for the grassroots Democratic army has been taking charge in many areas and mobilizing itself! And in a huge advance, the party’s new national chair and its new chair of State Democratic Committees were both elected Feb. 1 on a bold program to move the party’s focus back to year-round, grassroots activism. After all, voters aren’t mere consumers of politics; they should be valued as the whole purpose of politics and its primary producers.
Jim Hightower is a former Texas Observer editor, former Texas agriculture commissioner, radio commentator and populist sparkplug, a best-selling author and winner of the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship. Write him at info@jimhightower.com or see www.jimhightower.com.
