Jobs – Abrams Dicta

On election night I posted a statement on facebook that said “I now know what January 30, 1933 was like.” This was a reference to the date when Adolf Hitler first came to power in Germany. Some people questioned my reasons for making the statement. This blog post gives more of the reasoning behind my concerns and feelings.

For Many The Campaign Watch Party Turned Into a Frightening Upset, but is there really a need for concern?

Are the implications of the recent election as bad as many are saying? I think the answer is that the implications are worse than most Americans have ever imagined. We are facing a social, political, and economic perfect storm that I truly believe has the potential to bring genocide to the United States.

While Donald Trump has certainly fanned and exploited the flames of discontent among rural white voters, he is hardly the cause of their distress. For more than a generation the American middle class, especially those who worked in manufacturing and are not college educated, have been losing ground and in the process losing hope and purpose. Meanwhile, there has also arisen a fetishistic gun culture that no longer sees firearms as hunting tools, but as symbols of power and security with a special focus on near military grade weaponry. This gun fetish has been reinforced and made more dangerous by those who claim a nonexistent constitutional right to resist governmental authority through armed rebellion shrouded in claims of patriotism.

Over 1,000 anti-government militia groups are operating in the United States today

This false idea of a right to armed resistance against our own government has permeated conservative culture and given rise to militia groups who are actively training for war against their fellow Americans. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Since 2008 antigovernment militias have grown rapidly in the United States and now number nearly 1,000 different groups that are armed, actively training, and just waiting for an excuse to start shooting people. It is only a matter of time until these groups find their cause for violence. Just days before the election we saw the jury trial and acquittal of armed members of the Bundy miliita who occupied federal lands at gun-point, and who had previously engaged in an armed show-down with federal agents who were trying to execute a judicial order. Thus, it appears that armed resistance to the rule of law in the United States has become acceptable.

For decades, the conservative call has been that America cannot reach it’s true potential due to liberals, democrats, immigrants and those who refuse to work, but want to rely upon government handouts. This message has morphed into an increasingly intolerant message of bigotry, racism, homophobia, and xenophobia that captures all but the conservative white Christian community.

It was these emotions, insecurities, and prejudices that Donald Trump tapped into during a campaign that resembled more of a reality television show than a competition of ideas envisioned by the founding fathers. By insulting and humiliating the established politicians, by ignoring truth for the sake of maintaining a narrative, he mobilized the forgotten and angry in our nation.

The Republican Party Now Holds Overwhelming Influence on All 3 Branches of Government

To understand the full implications of this election, it is important to look beyond the presidency (Executive branch) and it impact upon the legislative and judicial branches. It is my impression that people often view the president as all powerful, while ignoring the greater power and authority given to the legislative branch. After all, it is the legislative branch that passes laws, determines the budget, raises and lowers taxes. The current election has delivered a government where the Presidency and the legislative branch (House and Senate) are Republican controlled. There is no Democratic majority anywhere in government to force compromise. Furthermore, with one vacant Supreme Court seat, and more expected, there is an expectation that the Supreme Court will be packed with young highly conservative Judges who will impact American jurisprudence for decades to come.

This is where the danger lies. No political party can deliver nirvana no matter how unrestrained it can operate. This is one reason dictatorships so easily slide into genocide, they need a scapegoat. Additionally, Donald Trump cannot possibly remedy the distress of the disappearing middle class and make good on his promise to return jobs to America. Granted, he might persuade some manufacturing operations to return to the United States, especially if he removes environmental protections and gives them a free tax ride, but that’s not going to create jobs because manufacturing, which is increasingly robotized, no longer creates many jobs.

This gets to the actual crisis that we’re facing and why things can go so badly. The threat to the American middle class is not foreign labor, it’s technology which is automating jobs out of existence at an ever-accelerating rate. We can see this in just about every industry: the website airline check-in that displaces the airline counter employee; the self-checkout at the store that

Loss of working-class opportunities leaves many angry and disillusioned.

displaces the cashier; the device on the restaurant table that lets you order food that displaces wait staff; intelligent farm equipment that displaces agricultural workers; the ATM and bank websites that displace bank employees; and e-readers that displace printers and bookstores. The future for employment looks even more bleak as we watch the development of self-driving vehicles which will displace truck and taxi drivers. Technology is even being developed that will eventually lead to robotic surgery.

Understand, when jobs go the impact is much greater than loss of a paycheck. For working-class Americans jobs are identity, they give meaning and purpose to our lives. Employment provides opportunities for social engagement and create a sense of being valued. We often hear the phrase that we should be “a contributing member of society”, which means, securing employment. The identity of middle class American is that of a worker.

So, what happens when Trump is unable to deliver the nirvana that he has repeatedly promised in his campaign rhetoric? What happens when not only doesn’t he deliver, but things continue to get worse for the middle class? What then?

I think we saw the answer in the campaign, Trump will find a scapegoat to vilify. There will be a group, or number of groups who will be blamed for the unsolved problems. There will be no “the buck stops here”, instead it will be tried and true conservative refrain of “Everything will be great except for those people”, and the vilification will begin. We saw Trump go to this time and time again during the campaign as he vilified groups such as calling Mexicans rapists, denouncing a respected Federal Judge of Mexican heritage, he spoke of banning Muslim immigration, he mocked the disabled, he bragged about sexually assaulting women, and he ended his campaign with a profoundly antisemitic advertisement. Short of a Willie Horton ad, he left no stone of bigotry unturned. I have no reason to believe that he won’t repeat his xenophobic scapegoating when the going gets tough during his presidency, which will inevitably happen.

The increasing economic inequality, along with the vilification of whatever group is chosen by Trump and other Republican leaders, the proliferation of militias and military style weaponry, and the decline in the rule of law are setting the stage for a genocide that could be both massive in size and scope while also destroying the fabric and integrity of the nation for generations to come. It is only a matter of time before hateful rhetoric, anger, ineffective government, and access to weapons designed for killing people results in mass violence and social chaos. Moreover, there will be little government incentive to stop it because the excess population of displaced workers will have no economic value to the nation and the victims are likely to be political opponents of the oligarchy power structure.

I’m sure there are those who read this who will write me off as simply a disgruntled liberal. Maybe history will prove them right. I hope so. However, I would remind you that so many who died during the Holocaust did so believing such a thing was impossible in Germany, a nation with a strong history of rule of law, education, and philosophy. Like the United States today, Germany was faced with massive economic disruption and an ineffective government that was defined by strife rather than action. The German middle class was disappearing and the people chose a political outsider who appealed to prejudice and nationalistic patriotism. In the United States today, the stage has been set for a repeat of history and we can only hope it takes a different course. Of course, the future remains unwritten, but there are storm clouds brewing in our nation and the problem is, if we follow the path of history, there may not be time and opportunity to find a safe haven.

The United States, indeed the entire world, is undergoing a massive economic and social change that our leaders have failed to recognize. Two of the symptoms of this change are increasing unemployment and the decreasing value of labor. These symptoms are not merely the result of economic cycles or government tax rates, but are a more permanent reality of a world undergoing massive transition. Any politician who stands before the people and says that they are going to stimulate economic growth which will create jobs and revitalize the middle class is either a liar or absolutely clueless.

All signs point to words like Disrupt, Shake Up, Challenge, Evolve and Change to symbolize disrupting the status quo with new ideas and technologies — We are going through a massive economic and social change that few seem to recognize.

The reality is that technological changes are displacing labor at an ever increasing rate such that it is foreseeable that jobs as we have known them for the past 150 years are going away. Economic growth no longer equates to job growth, but to technological investment and implementation.

Don Tapscott, an author and authority on innovation, who I heard give an incredible talk at Legal Tech a few years ago, recently published an article in the Harvard Business Review in which he discussed what he calls the dark-side of the technological revolution. In his article he asserts, and I agree with him, that:

“structural unemployment will be the biggest public policy issue for decades.”

Structural unemployment is unemployment resulting from industrial reorganization, typically due to technological change, rather than fluctuations in supply or demand. In other words, it doesn’t go away simply because business picks up. It is static and there is little government can do, short of outlawing technology, to cure it.

This concern about structural unemployment was echoed in a lecture by then Lincoln Electric CEO John M. Stropki that he presented at the Chautauqua Institution in 2011. Lincoln Electric is a 120-year-old company located in Cleveland Ohio that is the world’s leading producer of welding equipment. The company is non-union, but promises its workers employment for life. During his presentation Mr. Stropki pointed out that in the past 40 years manufacturing employment in the United States has declined exponentially, but that the percentage of our National Gross Domestic Product coming from manufacturing has hardly declined at all. In other words, we’re producing more goods with less people. He was very candid in his assessment that manufacturing jobs are being displaced by technology and will not be returning. There is simply no tax break or other government intervention that will change this reality.

Tom Worstall, a contributor to Forbes magazine recently wrote an article addressing the myth of the decline in United States manufacturing and wrote:

“It is absolutely true that manufacturing as a percentage of the US economy has fallen. But that’s not because manufacturing itself has shrunk, that’s because other parts of the economy, most obviously services, have grown faster than manufacturing. It is also true that manufacturing employment has dropped precipitately. But to decry that while production is still rising is to be most foolish. For having rising output combined with falling employment is generally regarded as a good thing. Labour, workers, are a cost of making something. An input into the system. And if we get more out of the system while putting fewer resources into it then this means that our system is becoming more productive. And another name for the system becoming more productive is that we’re all getting richer.”

I think that Mr. Worstall is incorrect in his assessment that we’re all getting richer. The unemployed workers who make up the rapidly shrinking American middle class are not sharing in the rewards of the increased productivity created by the technological displacement of the jobs. Instead, they’ve been economically and socially side-lined

Thanks to Uber, with a car and a cell phone you can be in the Taxi business.

We are facing the daunting challenge of incredible social and economic change resulting from the end of employment as we have known it for generations. I predict that in the future most people will not have the long-term relationship with employers that we’ve known in the past. Instead, most will be working some sort of freelance/independent contractor, if at all. Consider that technologies such as Uber, Elance, and Airbnb now allow the average person to enter industries that previously took a great deal of capital to enter. Of course, even some of these newly created industries are probably also doomed. Self-driving vehicles are currently in development and will likely displace the Uber driver. I suspect occupations such as truck driver and taxi driver will be obsolete in a generation. Even highly trained technical occupations such as medicine are vulnerable as we develop robotic surgery and computer programs that are already reading imaging reports such as CAT scans and X-rays better than human physicians.

In my own profession of law, I suspect that we are seeing the last generation of paralegals. Document automation, interactive case management software, and virtual assistants are rapidly taking the place of legal secretaries and paralegals. For lawyers, the prospect is better, but not especially bright. Highly systemized technology driven firms are dominating the market in the areas of Bankruptcy, Social Security Disability, and Personal Injury law – all of which used to the bread and butter of small and solo practices. Additionally, geography is becoming less of an issue in legal practice with electronic court filing, telephonic appearances by lawyers and witnesses (even for trials), and video conferencing all remove the necessity that a person utilize an attorney local to the community where the Court is located.

This prospect of employment going away isn’t just an economic change, but a disruption of the social structure that has existed in western culture for generations. Our occupations aren’t just how we make money, but they also provide us with a large portion of our identity, a sense of usefulness and purpose, and create access points to the larger world. Thus, we’re not simply facing an economic crisis, but an existential one as well. The question in my mind as I watch people seeking to lead, such as our presidential candidates, debate the issues is when we will acknowledge the new reality we live in and start working to find meaningful solutions rather than simply looking back towards prior glory days and trying to rework the solutions of the past.

President Donald Trump….A Tempest Released?

It’s the Technology Stupid!