An Early Letter From Max

Max, Gliding Down the Tubes.

I have an engaging friend Max Angst. Max is always sending me his thoughts on the event of our time and his perspective is so interesting I thought I’d pass some of his views on to you. A while back he sent me the following comments; I found them while going through some e-folders and I thought you'd find it interesting

I’m seventy years old and falling apart: but I’m not in half as bad shape as the United States. Let me quote from a column by David Broder in the Washington Post on the shape of the Federa;l Budget:

The Committee for Economic Development, a group of business and education leaders; the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal-leaning research and advocacy group; and the Concord Coalition, a bipartisan organization focused on sound fiscal policy, issued their first joint statement on fiscal policy. They called the current budgetary situation "the most fiscally irresponsible" in American history.

Now doesn’t that put a knot in your knickers. We get hype from Washington day in and day out telling us what a wonderful job they’re all doing, but the reality they’re screwing up the country’s economy big time. A few of us got suspicious when our jobs disappeared. ABC News Told us on July 29, 2004

Just as millions of American manufacturing jobs were lost in the 1980s and 1990s, today white-collar American jobs are disappearing. Foreign nationals on special work visas are filling some positions but most jobs are simply contracted out overseas. Almost 500,000 white-collar American jobs have already found their way offshore, to the Philippines, Malaysia and China. Russia and Eastern Europe are expected to be next. But no country has captured more American jobs than India
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Hey baby that could be you. Tomorrow morning your boss could kiss you bye bye. How are you going to feed the hungry mouths then. But it gets worse:Jeremy Rifkin, an expert on the future of technology tells us;

From the beginning, civilization -- as well as people's daily lives -- has been structured in large part around the concept of work. But now, for the first time in history, human labor is being systematically eliminated from the economic process. In the coming century employment, as we have come to know it, is likely to be phased out in most of the industrialized nations of the world. A new generation of sophisticated information and communication technologies is being introduced into a wide variety of work situations. These machines, together with new forms of business reorganization and management, are forcing millions of blue- and white-collar workers into temporary jobs and unemployment lines -- or, worse, breadlines.

Now stop and think. If the bosses are shipping jobs overseas leaving American workers high and dry, won’t they do the same when they can replace humans with machines. Their bottom line is all that matters to them Yet, a greater horror threatens us. Martin Res, the Astronomer Royal of Britain in his book OUR FINAL HOUR tells us:

The twentieth century brought us the bomb and the nuclear threat will never leave us; the short term threat from terrorism is high on the public and political agenda; inequalities in wealth and welfare get ever wider. My primary aim is not to add to the burgeoning literature on these challenging themes. But to focus on twenty-first century hazards, currently less familiar, that could threaten humanity and the global environment still more.
Some of the new threats are already upon us; others are still conjectural. Populations could be wiped out by lethal “engineered” airborne viruses; Human character maybe changed by new techniques far more targeted and effective than the nostrums and drugs familiar today; we may even one day be threatened by rogue nanomachines that replicate catastrophically, or by superior intelligence computers.
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Given all this what does Newsweek have on its cover this week: The Kobe Bryant You Don’t Know. What subject has filled the television news reports this week: Arnold Schwarzenneger coping cheap feels. What subject engrosses the most American today: Post Season Baseball Playoffs. You can fill a few hundred stadiums on any given Saturday in October with thousand and thousand of enthralled football fans but you cant get two hundred people working on the problems mentioned above. Hello! Is any body home?