Three freight trains speeding toward the same intersection are going to cause a heck of a pileup. They are population growth, loss of jobs and the corruption of the American political system.

Lin Yutang, a Chinese author who lived in America, once wrote that God creates humans with a bottomless pit- their stomachs. Every morning of our lives we wake up hungry. To satisfy our hunger there is only work, charity or crime.

That's why we need an economy that creates not just corporate profits or stock market averages but real jobs for real people. Only a sliver of the American population can live off corporate profits, interest and stock dividends. The majority needs jobs.

Moreover, the government welfare system needs Americans working in the private sector. The money spent on welfare, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and all the rest comes straight out of the paychecks of working men and women. If you doubt it, look at your pay stub.

In many parts of the world, it's already too late. Population has outgrown the carrying capacity of the land, outgrown the most optimistic economic scenario. It is not yet so in America.

Yeah, I know some people worship a new golden calf - technology. They think technology can solve any problem in the world. But these people are nearly always untrained in science and engineering. They nearly always prefer to read science fiction rather than science. Otherwise they would know that technology is not a god and that there are limits to what we can do with it.

Moreover, technology, like all human activities, is both good and evil. It has increased productivity and saved lives, but it has also killed millions of people and is now eliminating jobs via automation and globalization of production.

The timing is bad. While family-sustaining jobs are being eliminated at an unprecedented rate in the United States, the numbers of people who need jobs are increasing at an unprecedented rate. Since 1945, America's population has increased by 100 million. Today from legal and illegal immi-gration alone it grows annually by 2 million or more.

So we have two urgent tasks. We have to slow the population growth, and the quickest way to do that is to cut back the immigration. And we have to find a way, in the face of globalization and technological changes, to provide family-sustaining jobs.

"While family-sustaining jobs are being eliminated at an unprecedented rate in the U.S., the numbers of people who need jobs are increasing..." Otherwise, you Liberals better buy a gun, because when great masses of people are rendered economically surplus, you will see an increase in both crime and political violence and turmoil.

People are funny that way. As much as elitists would like them to, most folks just won't passively sit around and be content with a subsistence income, much less sit around and watch their children starve. Bad conditions put folks in a bad mood.

And this brings us to the third train - the corruption of our political system. At the very time when we have urgent problems to solve that will require wise and courageous leaders, the political system has become so corrupt it is incapable of producing such leaders in its present unreformed state.

Bill Clinton is a shameless demagogue, promise-breaker and sellout to big money. The man most Republicans think can replace him is Bob Dole, a lifetime career politician who doesn't even know what the problems are, who is himself a dishonorable opportunist and a sellout to big money.

The one man with courage and convictions, Pat Buchanan, the system crucified.

Reform of the political system is no longer a nice thing to do. It is an urgent necessity. As the greatest of all samurai, Mishima, has said, timing is everything. The convergence of population growth and reduced economic opportunity for average Americans will create one big explosion.

But I see the American elite as blind to reality and as arrogant as the old French aristocracy, which found out that it can be fatal to misread reality. □