If you’re old like me, you’ll remember when this was a thing. The “thing” being the Berlin Wall, which was built around the western part of the City of Berlin. Berlin sat entirely in the Communist GDR (East Germany), but due to the postwar security agreements, Berlin itself was split between a Soviet occupation zone and an Allied zone. The Allied zone became West Berlin, which became a funnel for eastern Germans wishing to escape the Communist GDR. As a result, the East German Government eventually built the Berlin Wall to stop the defections. And it worked; the flood out of eastern Germany slowed to a drip. The “brain drain” of educated East German citizens slowed to a near-stop. But people still tried. Well over a hundred died trying to get across that wall.
And now, nearly 30 years since that wall came down, a sizable plurality of eastern Germans wish the wall was back up. Even with the (by numbers) lower standard of overall living. Even with the state security apparatus they used to live in fear from. Why? Mainly because of what they didn’t have to fear in their old country. Eastern Germans had childcare. They had jobs. They had decent places to live, for the most part. They knew they were going to eat. As the reunified Germany is a social welfare state, some of these guarantees remain. But a place to live and a job are certainly not guaranteed any longer, and the unemployment figures in the old East Germany remain in double digits in many areas, this long after the fall of the wall. The East Germans of the early 1990s were victims of the worldwide economic model of today, something I think could accurately be described as a “flea economy.” Let’s expand on that a bit.
A flea lives by finding a host and attacking it for blood. If that host dies, or sickens to the point where the blood isn’t readily available, the flea will leave for a different host. This is precisely what multinational corporations do in this day and age. Once they’ve sucked all the resources they can out of any given country and/or sickened the host with their pollution, they hop out of that region and into another one. They did it here in the US. They’ve done it in Europe. They’ve done it throughout North and South America. And now, Asia is the latest host for the parasitic corporate model. There is growing evidence that their time on China’s back is coming to a close, as they seek to attach themselves to new hosts in southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent. The parasites have also returned to Africa, not as slavers or plantation master this time, but as economic exploiters of cheap labor and lax environmental laws. The story of the West is going to be repeated in the East, and in Africa, and they are going to keep doing it until there’s no blood left anywhere anymore. The favored business model of the large corporation is parasitic and must fail.
But the favored employment model of capitalism as we now know it also must fail, and is failing. The parasites are automating at the same time they’re draining resources. Fewer and fewer workers are needed all the time, and that’s not just in the West. It’s everywhere. The Chinese have dealt with that problem by constructing, constructing, and constructing, to the point where there are now cities of gleaming apartment complexes that sit largely empty. Our way is a bit different, of course; here in the US, we’ve been content with the return of Depression-era homelessness and child malnutrition, while the parasites at the top enjoy a bounty like none ever seen before. Here in the supposed cradle of freedom, many jobs that were once filled by teenagers after school have been taken by people with great work histories and educations, simply because decent jobs for those people do not exist anymore. And in this era, even those lousy jobs are starting to disappear, as things like automated ordering are being rolled out at fast food establishments. You don’t need someone at the drive-thru speaker when you can make the whole order on your phone and just go pick it up.
It has to be rethought. All of it. The idiotic push for more tax breaks for the rich is going to cause an evisceration of payrolls, because the parasites don’t create jobs. And if there are no revenues for public sector jobs, THOSE jobs are also lost. There is no “trickle down.” There is only a “catch basin” where any tax cuts will simply sit, doing nothing. The flea economy is a failed economy. We have to realize it. And then, we have to do something that makes sense. As hard as it will be for a lot of people to swallow, the only thing that is going to work in an automation age is for the public sector to be greatly expanded. And to do that, we’re going to have to start taxing the rich again. And corporations will have to be taxed at a much higher rate than they’ve seen in at least 50 years. Those revenues can be used to educate children. To repair dangerous bridges in bad need of updates. To reopen rural hospitals that are closing at alarming rates. To clean up and to beautify the public spaces. To fully fund our underfunded police, fire, and emergency response apparatus.
We are heading straight for a “Mad Max” world if we don’t step away from the economic models we’re presently using. I assure you that Trump, who has never lived in your world, doesn’t give a rat’s ass. But is that the world you want to live in? The world you want your kids to inherit? If it isn’t, it’s time for you to get off your ass and get involved.