The always-fascinating Mickey Kaus reviewed Hillary’s coronation speech for Breitbart recently. I’m not going to recommend that you click on a Breitbart link — I don’t want to make this a partisan-politics website. However, Mr. Kaus offers a uniquely perceptive pair of paragraphs about the economy that I think make sense when viewed from either side of the aisle.
Quoth Mr. Kaus,
Also, the economy isn’t not working because our government isn’t working. The economy isn’t working the way it should because large tectonic forces within the economy itself are conspiring to lower the economic return to labor, especially unskilled labor. Those forces are technology, trade, and (yes) immigration.
Basically, trade outsources the jobs of the less skilled; technology automates them out of existence — and then we import millions of eager, cheap immigrants to perform the unskilled (and skilled) jobs that remain, as kind of a coup de grace to American workers. It’s not at all clear that politics — ungridlocked or not — can produce solutions powerful enough to significantly neutralize these forces (except maybe on immigration, where Hillary’s on the wrong side).
I can’t say I’d have written the first sentence that way — I’d probably have said “The economy isn’t working, and it’s not because of our government not working” — but the rest of it is simple and easy to understand. The future belongs to capital, not labor. If you don’t have a lot of capital, prepare for your children to be poor. The only way to reverse that is if all the poor people pick up rifles and decide to change the situation by force. And maybe that explains why gun control is such a priority for the government despite Mrs. Clinton’s assurances that we’ve never been safer in America.
First day of my short time matriculating in a management program:
“Remember, labor can always resort to violence.”
In “Return of the Great Depression”, the author of one of those scandalous books you pictured in a previous post laid bare the shell game that is the oversimplification of Ricardo’s comparative advantage: Since not all technologies and not all industries are the same level of labor- or capital-intensive, it necessitates the migration of people - migrating to places where the names, languages, legal traditions, music, beliefs are different - in pursuit of a cheaper widget to trade for cheaper gizmos.
Now, if you like your language, beliefs, and traditions - and, being ecumenical, all peoples of the Earth should love their language, beliefs, and traditions, because they are *theirs* - the demolishing of boundaries to make a global meringue of journeymen workers and economic refugees is not that appealing.
Or, in short, it’s not worth it to get cheap plastic crap at the Wal Mart at the expesnse of that guy in Ohio being able to make a decent living for his wife and three kids from making widgets.
As Ash said, “Good? Bad? I’m the guy with the gun.”
Let’s say Americans who have been rendered destitute by a dried-up low-skill labor market do decide to try and “change the situation by force.”
What exactly are they going to accomplish? Who’s getting shot?
Frankly, I don’t see a positive outcome whether we try to pound the square peg of large numbers of people who need some low-skill task to perform into the round hole of a world where those tasks are done cheaper by someone else, or we head full-steam into a future where we produce no real goods and anyone who can’t produce technological innovations is just a loser.
I don’t understand how our society could support the former, but I do understand how it could be torn asunder by the latter.
We could start with halting immigration. The past 30-40 years dwarfs any previous influx both in sheer numbers AND as a percentage of the population.
“What exactly are they going to accomplish? Who’s getting shot?”
It’s as simple as this. I’m not saying I recommend this, but I am saying it would work:
* Identify a few companies which have outsourced all of their manufacturing to elsewhere while retaining the white-collar stuff in the USA;
* Get twenty armed men to take the perimeter of one of those company office buildings at 2pm during the week;
* Chain the doors;
* Burn the place down.
Rinse and repeat until the jobs come back.
Alternately, you could close every port on the West Coast, by force.
Note that the “Occupy” people got shut down HARD when they tried to block ports. That should give you a sense of really matters to our globalist masters.
I have doubts this would do anything more than get 20 armed & unemployed people mowed down by the police and get some mid-level legal, finance, and IT people killed.
That would serve the same purpose, more or less.
The Pinkertons were pretty good at putting down individual labor uprisings. But in the end, labor won for a whole generation’s lifetime.
I think I’m with arbuckle, I doubt domestic terrorism would prompt much soul searching, as any moral point would probably be lost in the killing of a few hundred or thousand office workers who likely had little to do with outsourcing decisions. Blowing stuff up doesn’t usually result in one’s position being earnestly evaluated.
But I’ll bite anyway. So once we’ve burned down the headquarters of WidgetCo and ACME, and they’ve promised to move their factories from Elsewhere to Heartland, USA, where they’ll be paying every worker a comfortable American middle-class wage, are we to assume they’ll be able to make up for reduced profits and/or volume by creating more consumption via these new jobs?
I’m obviously no economist, but I don’t understand how purchasing power could sustain so as to be able to offset some businesses being top-heavy and built upon a foundation of unbelievably cheap manufacturing labor. Now, I can’t necessarily bring myself to say it would be a bad thing for such badly-structured organizations to fail, but it seems optimistic to believe that the average currently-employed person would get to maintain their standard of living, as it’s at least in part a function of the affordability of basic non-necessities.
To get a sense of what would happen if everything was made in the United States, look at the Fifties/Sixties economy, when that was in fact the case. People tended to own less, live in smaller homes, but there was considerably less income inequality.
The capital class argues that reducing the price of toilet paper by fifty cents justifies putting 50,000 toilet-paper employees in the USA out of work. In practice what happens is that the price stays the same and the extra money is used for financial manipulations.
In the fifties and sixties, there were about half as many people in this country who needed an occupation and possessions. I’m sure a similar balance between executive and labor classes could exist today if we’d never abandoned it in the first place, but I can’t envision a return to form without a scratch-rebuild. Cultural momentum increases with population, and don’t underestimate Americans’ unwillingness to accept less than we could give ourselves.
Businesses are run by people, and people are myopic and not particularly altruistic when push comes to shove.
The way we do business is a product of our national attitude, both for better and for worse. Again I agree things are out of whack, but political systems which attempt to force business to operate in service of a “greater good” don’t tend to end in a good place. That said, maybe we’re starting to see how this grand experiment will look when it ends.
“To get a sense of what would happen if everything was made in the United States, look at the Fifties/Sixties economy, when that was in fact the case. People tended to own less, live in smaller homes, but there was considerably less income inequality.”
for a few reasons:
1) we had huge pent-up demand for manufactured goods since production of consumer products was curtailed in favor of building military hardware
2) we were making stuff for other countries who were re-building after being bombed to hell and back during the war
3) the highest tax rate on regular income in 1955 was 91%, whereas now it’s 39.6%. Which is why I sneer at anyone who thinks the tax burden in this country is “horrible.” Yeah, higher taxes really stifled those “job creators” in the 1950s.
the biggest mindfuck of modern times is how we’ve let the wealthy convince the middle class that the poor are actually the root of all society’s problems.
Per capita GDP adjusted for inflation is higher then ever. It’s just not distributed as well. It doesn’t seem to unreasonable that the lower class could force some kind of redistribution thru violence. Basically we would have to sacrifice productivity for income balance. Or force companies into reinvestment that includes worker interest (you no kind of like they did briefly in the 50-70s).
GREAT photo ! .
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“Or, in short, it’s not worth it to get cheap plastic crap at the Wal Mart at the expesnse of that guy in Ohio being able to make a decent living for his wife and three kids from making widgets.” .
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This .
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It’s why I choose not to shop at wallymart , I feel it’s bad for America so I vote with my wallet .
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We’re going to lose this election cycle no matter which crook wins .
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-Nate
Don’t be so sure, Nate.
We know, or should know, who HRC is - read “Clinton Cash” by Schweizer - but Trump is as wild card - an enigma, the joker in the deck. Maybe the same, maybe crazy like a fox. But we at least have a chance for better with him
As for his chances, the DC editor of the solidly liberal Atlantic said on NPR that 97 out of 100 of his Midwest 2nd & 3rd cousins, many of whom haven’t bothered to vote in the past will all vote for Trump this time
If true the only chance HRC has is to convince Trump voters they have no chance so they stay home.
I will “pay my money & take my chances” with Trump.
I know many good people who at times have said things that make them look bad especially when taken out of context. And there are a lot of vested interests who are scared to death that Trump would disrupt their cushy status quo.
So I will take Trump, and pray that he is for real. At least with him there is a chance.
Two things I am sure of Volando :
trump will be our next President and I’ll avoid shopping at wallymart unless the financial tilt is deeply in my favor .
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-Nate
“So I will take Trump, and pray that he is for real.”
the fact that you say you have to pray for that says all I need to know.
Oh give me a break on that atheist shit. Don’t you have some intelligent argument to put forth, or are you stuck in ad homina forever?
I don’t disagree with the quoted diagnosis, but I also believe that government can be a part of the solution, if it responds to and engages technology to create new opportunities for people.
At the simple level, you have the “gig economy” that helps people find (hopefully) supplemental income. One could argue that apps like Uber increase transparency and efficiency in the market to such a degree that they reduce the price of labor to the bare minimum that the supply will accept. While that may not be good for your Uber driver, it surely gives economists and free-market fundamentalists a stiffy. Still, there’s a lot of potential for information sharing to allow people to find new sources of income for more labor- or skill-intensive tasks like artistry or craftsmanship that will create all sorts of new opportunities for people.
From a “making shit” standpoint, the proliferation of automation and 3D printing and the like does directly replace manual labor. But, again, it opens up all sorts of new opportunities. From a car enthusiast standpoint, imagine is your local indie mechanic can work with designers and visionaries to start producing his own Singer or Icon style restomods and replica vehicles or parts. You’ve seen this happen all over the firearms industry as any veteran with some mechanical aptitude can churn out AR-15 parts that the marketplace has seemingly limitless appetite for. Imagine all the opportunities that people will have when actually making things isn’t as capital intensive as it always has been since the industrial revolution. So for a working person, they can develop and apply skills rather than screwing widgets on an assembly line.
I know the Baruths hail from coal country, but there is also tremendous opportunity to replace our existing energy infrastructure with clean generation (both utility and homeowner scale), smart distribution, and efficient consumption.
Government has a role to play in all three of the above factors. In many cases, the government’s role is simply to create rules of the road and then get out of the way. Sometimes, government will need to put its thumb on the scale. Either approach, however, requires a good-faith engagement in working to solve the problem, rather than endless back and forth over social issues and bad-faith undermining of the role of government.
“I know the Baruths hail from coal country,”
New York and New Jersey, but yeah 🙂
“New York and New Jersey”
So would that be inside or outside of the bubble?
Well, we are both well outside the bubble now!
Brooklyn was outside the bubble back then.
Funny you should mention Uber. Uber was developed and implemented IN SPITE of government intervention, not because of it. In many locations, the local government is working against Uber in order to unfairly support local cab driver unions. In most every case, the govt. cannot get involved without unfairly tilting the scale, and in most cases deliberately tilts the scale to favor selected benefactors. The only thing the govt should do is get out of the way.
You also mention the firearms industry. Guess what plans the govt has there. Again, to punish the small volume specialty shops who offer the custom mods with excess fees and needless registration paperwork hassles. Obama just announced a new interpretation for the ATF that basically says if you modify a firearm, you are the same as a manufacturer and required to do all the necessary filing, registration, fees, and tracking paperwork that a full scale manufacturer must do.
Sorry about getting on my soap box. Rant over.
I agree that Uber was up against embedded interest’s many of which had become corrupt and bastardized. However instead of pushing the legal edge of these rules Uber has in many cases outright broken the law instead of simply lobbying for change which staying in the grey zone. The company has taken the position that if they don;t like a law they won;t play by it. To me this sets bad precedent and it scares me how well they have gotten away with it and even ignored what seems like reasonable compromise with local government (Austin TX) Pulling out and launching PR attacks on the towns instead.
“At the simple level, you have the “gig economy” that helps people find (hopefully) supplemental income. One could argue that apps like Uber increase transparency and efficiency in the market to such a degree that they reduce the price of labor to the bare minimum that the supply will accept. ”
I’m sure a lot of corporations would love to move to a “gig” economy, where we’re all “independent contractors” and responsible for buying our own health insurance and other expenses, and can have our wages jacked around on a whim.
There is no chance we will ever return to the glory days of manufacturing here in the USA. Technology has progressed to the point where once labor intensive jobs, are mostly no more. In an environment where a production line might have needed 7 people, 40 years ago, now only 2 are needed. Then you also have the mindset that everyone needs a college degree. I’m sorry, but your degree in advanced navel gazing has no practical use in the business world. Perhaps more folks should explore options in “the trades”. I know our company has difficulty finding, and keeping, skilled people. It’s not money that causes most to leave, it’s that actual WORK is involved. You will get dirty, sweaty and be tired at the end of the day. I guess some folks would rather have a job that has no future, low pay, no physical exertion, but a clean, quiet, environment.
In a race to the bottom, we seem to be pulling ahead.
There is a lot of work out there, even for the less-skilled, if one has some modest savings, drug-free urine, and the desire to pack everything up into a used Focus and go live in Flyover Country to get it. The problem is that there aren’t enough workers who fit that description.
Government could encourage savings by raising the interest rate to, you know, any actual number. Government could take meaningful steps to confront the opiate epidemic, perhaps by diverting resources from its own maw. Government could make job creation easier for employers large and small in a thousand different ways, not least of which would be enforcing the rule of law rather than using tax and regulation and prosecution to reward those who demonstrate fealty. But government will not, because life continues to be good inside the citadel.
The real question is, even if the US government weren’t standing in their way, would Americans still uproot themselves for work? I knew plenty of college grads who took minimum-wage service gigs in Portland or Chicago rather than demean themselves by staking a claim someplace less glamorous. And I right now work for a large employer with lots of high-wage full-time jobs available in Ohio small towns that metro-area job seekers won’t even deign to commute to, let alone move for.
You can force the factories to stay open, Jack, but if the work is hard or inconvenient I’m not optimistic you’re going to get enough applicants.
If we shut down the student-loan-industrial complex, you’d have a lot of people entering the workforce after high school instead of spending four years having their expectations unreasonably raised, I think.
saddled with kilobucks of (non-dischargeable) debt spent on a degree which does them no good in the real world.
Letting 18 year olds take out debt that can ruin the rest of their lives seems insane to me. All to get an education they may or may not use. And everyone tells them to go do it! I got a degree cause that’s what upper middle class kids like me did. Fortunately I was upper middle class enough where my parents just wrote the check for but not everyone has that luxury.
Might help. But we have a large pool of diploma-level employees as well and that workforce has its own issues. Not to pass judgment or to put too fine a point on it, but the women are mostly single mothers who will job-hop as the needs of their kids demand, and we struggle to find male applicants who can pass drug tests.
If you’re telling me the point is to get kids from quasi-nuclear families or a least a substantially stable, drug-free background with real career ambition thinking about ways to realize those goals without the alphabet soup at the end of their names, then maybe.
No argument about the student loan situation, but I went to college right out of high school (1976), stayed a couple years, fell in love, moved to Texas… long story short it took me 14 years to get that 4 year degree but I’m glad it did. it opened me to upper level management positions for which I otherwise would not have been eligible.
It aint for everyone, but to say expectations are unreasonably raised is a logical fallacy (sweeping generalization).
” If you don’t have a lot of capital, prepare for your children to be poor. The only way to reverse that is if all the poor people pick up rifles and decide to change the situation by force”
The “only way”?
Sorry, Jack, but I can’t buy what’s essentially the same argument that the deck is stacked against urban blacks.
The way not to be poor is to save your money so you can accumulate capital. In our modern world of plenty, extended poverty probably has more to do with values than with lack of opportunities. The same is true of wealth also. One thing that people who have made wealth have in common is that they generally lived well within their means while they were acquiring that wealth. No matter what socioeconomic stratum that you occupy, living below your means is how you save money.
Maybe I’m a romantic, but I still believe that if you build a better mousetrap, the world will indeed beat a path to your door.
Even if you can’t invent a product, you can be inventive.
My grandfather supported a wife, five daughters and two nephews as a junkman, dealing in paper and rags. If he could make a living dealing in things people throw away, an enterprising person today, with so many barriers removed by the digital revolution (the internet makes it possible for small businesses to reach a global market - globalism works both ways, and modern rapid prototyping makes product development not just faster, but cheaper by orders of magnitude), should be able to make their way.
You can start a landscaping business with a few hundred dollars worth of used movers and trimmers. Considering the cellphones and other expensive toys (and alcohol and drugs) that even the poor seem to be able to afford, spending $99 on a lawn mower at KMart shouldn’t be too much of a stretch.
Part of the problem is the “to get a good job get a good education, everyone has to go to college” credentialist society. The trades have been denigrated, shuffled off to Vo-Ed ghettos. Another part of the problem is that two generations of Americans have been indoctrinated to believe that “profit” is a bad word. Industrialists and entrepreneurs are seen as exploiters.
The “American Dream” used to include owning your own business.
When I look at my parents’ generation, who grew up during the depression and came to adulthood during WWII, I see a lot of people who dropped out of school as young teens to support their families and people who ended up in careers not of their choice.
You do what you have to do and there’s dignity in getting paid to dig ditches.
Good point. To a point. When your grandfather supported five kids on a junkman’s salary, cost of living was also a lot cheaper. Cost of living has increased dramatically since that time but wages have not. Not saying that there isn’t opportunity still out there who work hard and get after it, I certainly did despite being stuck in a tough situation. But the odds are more slim for everyone.
When I was twenty-twoish and about to start my senior year in college, I was a guest of a fellow roughly my age on his newish ski boat. He’d paid cash for it using the excess value of labor produced by his backhoe and 20-yard dump truck, which he’d bought on a four year commercial note. The backhoe reportedly had minimal automation and so could dig without attention some of the time… dignity in digging ditches, indeed. I’m still not sure why I didn’t drop out immediately, except that I was paying nothing like today’s tuition rates.
I’m almost finished paying off my student loan debt at $350ish a month after ten years. I was somewhat smart and got a business degree so had a decent chance at a job locally but went without a car for the first 2, then moved onto a well used Dodge Stratus for the next 2. Looking back, I agree, I wish I had just gone into a trade like plumbing or being an electrician. That said, having a 9-5 is a pretty great gig.
Your father was also working as a junkman at a time when there was and had been 0 or even negative migration to the US. Whether you are a lawnmower or a programmer, it is impossible to compete with people who are imported by the millions from third world countries and we should not have to.
I disagree. I live in a fairly desirable city in Colorado and the VAST majority of people mowing the lawns of my neighbors homes are white and drive large-ish pickup trucks but not the latest models. They seem to be doing just fine and are small one and two-people businesses, not employees of mega-landscapers.. In the winter they seem to shovel snow and/or do other landscape maintenance things.
Anybody can mow a lawn, trim an edge, and pull weeds. As someone said above you just have to be willing to sweat a bit and get dirty. It has to be healthier than sitting in a cube farm all day long and binging on a tech employers snacks.
I live in a large metro area on the east coast and lawnmowing, construction, retail, toll booths, IT staffing companies, road work, you name it, are all 25%-99% first generation immigrants. Just because it is possible to start a business in this environment doesn’t negate the truth of my statement.
Grant Hill said it better than me, when talking about the debate over creating a minimum age to join the NBA:
“”I always thought that it was the purpose of the union to protect its members, not potential members. I think if anyone gets left out, it’s the older players, guys who put equity into this league, card-carrying members paying their dues to the union. I would hope they would be protected.””
It was my grandfather and he and my grandmother themselves were on the tail end of a period of massive immigration to the U.S. They arrived in the United States in 1921, just before increasingly restrictive immigration policies aimed at southern and eastern Europeans and Jews were implemented.
A lot of the lawns in my neighborhood are cut by a company called Mow & Go, which also does snow clearing in the winter. It’s run by a kid who lives down the street with his parents who is in his early 20s. He started cutting grass when he was in his teens, and now employs at least a couple of crews and drives a nice Jeep Wrangler Unlimited. Most of his classmates at the yeshiva high school he attended have either gone on to seminaries or gotten regular 9-5 jobs. In ten years, the guys who went on to become rabbis and school administrators will be approaching him for charitable donations to support their institutions.
Even in a business like landscaping, which is labor intensive, there are still plenty of capital investments to be made. A company might be hiring illegals but they have to buy trucks and equipment at the same prices that their competitors who don’t employ illegals pay. If the kid down the street can compete, it’s not impossible.
They shut the doors when Anarchists from those regions started blowing shiite up and assassinating presidents.
We are probably approaching that again.
No assassination attempts on U.S. presidents were made by immigrants from eastern or southern Europe. The only assassination attempt in the period under discussion was the shooting of Teddy Roosevelt in 1909. John Schrank, who shot Roosevelt, was born in Bavaria but came to the U.S. as a child. As far as I know, Bavarians weren’t targeted by the changes in U.S. immigration laws in 1917, 1921 and 1924.
Anarchists had little to do with those changes, but race and ethnicity did. The sponsors of the 1924 immigration act were pretty clear about keeping out eastern and southern Europeans (read Poles and Italians) and Jews. Immigration from Asia and the Middle East was also pretty much cut off, though that was not the main focus of the 1924 act’s sponsors. Asian immigration had been severely curtailed earlier .Supporters of restrictions on the west coast were happy that the 1924 law institutionalized previous restrictions on Asians. Interestingly, and somewhat ironic in light of the current immigration debate, while the basis for the law was explicitly about favoring ” keeping American stock up to the highest standard “, i.e. excluding certain racial and ethnic groups, that law did not restrict Latino immigrants from Central and South America. The American labor movement supported immigration restrictions because of not wanting to compete with cheaper labor.
So it was about bigotry, racism, and economic competition, not anarchists.
“it is impossible to compete with people who are imported by the millions from third world countries and we should not have to.”
If we’re making general statements, why can’t natural born Americans compete with legally naturalized first generation immigrants?
Way to completely miss the point. I am not talking about capabilities, I am talking about numbers. I am sure that any given American could beat any individual foreigner in every arena from dick measuring to electrical engineering. I am guessing that you have never taken an intro to microeconomics, so let me break this down using simple words that you might be able to understand: as the supply of something goes up, its price goes down. That applies to literally everything, including labor.
I know you’re talking about numbers. Numbers and capabilities don’t each exist in a vacuum. In a saturated labor market, you need to be more capable and you’re going to have to accept less in return for it.
America was created upon an idea that if you are capable of building it, this is the best place to do so, as the freest society in the world with the greatest opportunities.
Again, we’re making general statements: Maybe you are better at measuring dicks or electronic engineering, but if you’re not better enough to make up for what you cost versus someone who came here legally, is trying to make a good honest life for themselves, and laughs at your idea of hardship, you lose.
To say as a country, “Nope! We’re full!” would be drastically shifting our purpose.
@RWB
What could your point possibly be? If the Constitution is famously not a suicide pact, the New Colossus damn sure isn’t. The past forty years dwarf any of the previous immigration waves in both absolute and relative terms.
My point is that this is where we seem to be; I’m not assigning positive or negative values to any aspect.
“If the Constitution is famously not a suicide pact, the New Colossus damn sure isn’t.”
I’ll go as far as to say the zeitgeist which produced them surely didn’t intend them to be, or foresee them becoming such.
In relative terms, our immigration figures (as a percent of the total population) are only just starting to approach the figures from the mid-1800s to around the 1920s. The raw numbers are way higher because, duh, there are exponentially more people on earth, many in the places one would naturally want to leave in favor of America. Personally, I’ve never understood how we could assume the natural trajectory of our most fundamental principles wouldn’t lead us to become at least 10.5lbs of shit in a 10lb bag after a while, it’s not like we shouldn’t have been able to see it coming.
We get wrapped up in trying to figure out the intent of the Founding Fathers, but it seems unequivocal that besides becoming President, there shall be no birthright granted to those born here that is not afforded to those who have immigrated legally.
Again, I’m not saying this is good or bad, just that abandoning this would be a big step.
Biggest key point comparing immigration circa 1800s to early 1900s:. There was no welfare state. No way no how will unskilled third world immigrants pay enough in taxes to support their weight in benefits and entitlemens, let alone ancillary costs like police, fire, etc.
Hell, we can’t afford them for the boomers.
I was referring to Mckinley/ Czlogsz.. 2nd gen Polish American Anarchist, and the Galleanist bombings, Palmer Raids, etc.
People may have been bigoted, but it took mass killings to shut the doors. Call it an excuse, but it’s what’s happening now.
Here is a blog post that I think summarises the current situation of the left. I must warn you that this is written by an old fashioned communist who is a bit to receptive to russian media outlets, but I think he hits the nail on the head with regard to why the working/lower middle class has given up on the left all over the west:
http://steigan.no/2016/07/16/the-problem-of-the-neoliberal-left/
“Racism and anti-racism are ideologies or ways of thinking, so the struggle transfers from the fight for the means of production to the fight for the minds. The evil ones are the racists and the good ones are the anti-racists. Moreover, the beauty of such a model is that the good ones are always allowed to define who are “the good guys” and who are the evil ones as well as what kind of racism you choose to fight – and what kind of racism you ignore or explain away.”
yup.
Look, I get that when you are a well-intentioned white person, charges of racism can be extremely frustrating. Most white people have no idea what is and is not racist, and default to a lowest-common-denominator approach where any and all discussion of any topic that even implicates race or acknowledges any type of cultural difference that largely conforms to race is simply taboo. This approach does no one any good, as any type of cultural discussion of race is immediately shouted down and stifled.
BUT. When you have the nominee of one of the two major political parties cap off a week of histrionic, spittle-spewing, paean worshiping of “blue lives” with zero acknowledgement of recent, highly representative wrongs perpetrated by police against black people, and you cap it off with a speech from an alternate reality about how immigrants and black people are going to murder you and your family, and how he is going to solve it all with “law and order,” it is properly terrifying for minorities. They can practically hear the MRAP’s turning over in the police department armory parking lot and the leather boots goose-stepping down main street.
There is racism and it is wrong. That the left uses it as a partisan wedge to get out voters is certainly paternalistic and a bit exploitative, but it is also a necessary reaction to the long-time dog whistles on the right that have only gotten more overt this time around.
13% of the population commits 50% of the murders. Are numbers racist?
Only when the numbers are pointed out.
no, but you are if you think the numbers alone explain everything.
No. No they don’t. Perhaps members of a group that represents 13% of the total commits 50% of all murders, however those members do NOT add up 13% of the population.
Your figures say that 1 out of 8 people of the entire population is a murderer, i.e. if there are 100 people present in a room, then 13 of them are murderers. There are plenty of ways of showing statistics and many of them are easy to represent wrongly. Your numbers aren’t even physically possible unless you are saying that the absolute cause of death of 1 out of 4 people is murder.
My comment was kind of a non-sequiter so I would like to withdraw it.
However Jim needs to learn some math. My numbers were ballpark figures. The real numbers for 2013 for percent of homicides committed by basically 6.1% (half of 12.2, for Jim) is actually 5685 (all perps) divided by 2698 (black perps) = 47.46%. Just to help Jim a little more, those 5685 perps killed 5723 victims, so I don’t think the leading cause of death is murder, outside of that town that Angela Lansbury lives in.
The racist numbers come from:
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/expanded-homicide/expanded_homicide_data_table_6_murder_race_and_sex_of_vicitm_by_race_and_sex_of_offender_2013.xls
“zero acknowledgement of recent, highly representative wrongs perpetrated by police against black people,”
This is something I’ve thought long and hard about covering on this site.
What happened to Eric Garner was, plain and simply, murder.
I’m less sure about Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin.
But the real question should be: Is what the media portrays about police/African-American relations truly representative? Do the police represent a larger threat to innocent black men than, say, lightning or traffic accidents? I haven’t found any statistics that even suggest a genuine (by which I mean statistically significant) issue with police killing innocent African-Americans. Yes, there have been multiple high-profile cases this year, but lightning kills 50-55 people a year in this country and yet we don’t consider it to be an “epidemic”.
The next question: Does Donald Trump need to acknowledge BLM at all? The reason that BLM has an issue with the competing meme “all lives matter” is, if I understand it correctly, because the phrase “black lives matter” is meant to convey the sentiment that “black lives also matter, and it’s not on us, the Black community, to talk about all lives.”
If we shouldn’t expect BLM to worry about “all lives”, shouldn’t the same thing be true about Trump? Shouldn’t he be free to say “blue lives matter” without paying tribute to black lives. the same way that Deray is free to say “black lives matter” without having to also say “black lives matter”?
Regardless of what you think about the above, thank you for contributing. Please continue to contribute.
Jack,
let me tell you about something. I live just north of Detroit. Between me and the city lie the Grosse Pointes, specifically Grosse Pointe Woods. Mack Avenue runs from near downtown Detroit, along the border of Grosse Pointe and Grosse Pointe Park, and through Grosse Pointe Woods, then into St. Clair Shores where it’s called Greater Mack. The GPW police have long (as in decades) been known to have code words for “certain people” driving through. One of their code words is “Nomad,” as in “Nigger On Mack After Dark.”
and this goes way back into the ’80s.
so yeah, what the media portrays isn’t that far off.
just because you don’t personally see it doesn’t mean it don’t exist.
I’ve spent plenty of time in Grosse Pointe. And from what I’ve seen, the police are the only thing standing between you and complete anarchy.
Well, I’ve lived here my entire life, so I rather think that trumps your “plenty of time in Grosse Pointe.” I’ve probably spent more time inside the city of Detroit (and I don’t mean downtown at NAIAS) then you have in Grosse Pointe.
Stats that typically float with those posted above claim 2x chance to be shot by police, white vs black perp.
Murder is a pretty strong word. Ask Mosby in Maryland; she may get disbarred for grandstanding.
The media portrayals of Martin and Brown were overly positive compared to what surfaced from their own social media pages and (in Brown’s case) surveillance video. Statements from the police involved and information related to their investigations was glossed over or nearly suppressed. The same thing happened with the more recent spate of shootings, presumably to avoid inciting riots. These men were no choir boys.
Regarding Brown, I wrote this at the time:
http://jackbaruth.com/?p=1705
There’s a Lincoln dealer in Grosse Pointe—can’t remember the name, but it’s right on the divide. Good part of town on one side of the street, bad part on the other. They cannot sell cars. Nobody with good credit will go there. In the words of the used car manager, “I’d kill for a 600 credit score to walk in here.” The cops have to patrol the lot 24/7 to keep cars from being stolen in broad daylight.
It’s like River North in Chicago. The whole fucking city is a festering shithole, but they manage to keep six blocks of it completely safe for drunk white women. Gee, I wonder how?
Thanks Jack. Given your breakdowns of cops speeding through strip mall thoroughfares I was wondering what your take on these recent police actions is.
I think your lightning analogy is flawed. While the focus of the movement has been on “black lives,” black peoples’ grievance is really much broader. It is about the persistent approach that police take towards black people, and how it adds up to a repressive effect. Philando Castile was more likely to be pulled over, and once pulled over, more likely to be shot while reaching for his license, simply because he’s black. Black people everywhere will tell you that they are more likely to be pulled over, less likely to be able to approach a police officer, etc. The trust and sense of protection that white people enjoy when they see a police officer simply does not exist with black people.
Moreover, lightning is an accepted force of nature. Police activity towards black people is a deliberate policy. Granted, it is often a response to crime that is pervasive in some black communities, and police officers are put in very difficult positions in order to protect society at large. I don’t want to come across as too critical of police officers, because I respect what they do. But you have to see the big picture is way off here. I don’t have to rely on media reports to get this information. I just have to speak with my black friends.
So when Giuliani got up there and ranted about how the police exist to protect you, the only people who identify with that sentiment are white people. I know many of these comments weren’t necessarily intended to be racist, but when you are running for president of ALL of America, you have to think broadly about how your words and positions will be interpreted by all. Deray isn’t running for president - he’s an activist articulating a cause. Trump is running for President, so, yes, it is reasonable to expect him to approach issues in a holistic manner.
Yes, we’re now 50+ years into the “Great Society” of paternalistic poverty alleviation programs that have arguably entrenched racism by creating officially recognized categories of how government treats people. The true emergency expedient circumstances of Jim Crow and Segregation are behind us, and we should rethink what Government’s role is in bridging racial divides. But we are also 40 years into the “war on drugs” and the “war on crime” - so-called “law and order” approaches of criminalizing and taking a very heavy-handed approach to a large majority of the country’s population. Just like dropping bombs on poor, economically repressed, middle eastern men is only going to exacerbate the problem of radicalization without other measures taken to mitigate the causes, sending more and more heavily armed police in to knock around some minorities isn’t going to solve the problem.
Which gets to the bigger issue: Trump isn’t concerned with solving the problem. He’s not concerned with thinking through the problem.
Liberal with impeccably politically correct opinions pays a huge premium and endures a long daily commute to live in lily-white suburb with people like himself.
Calls other people racist. The people who are especially racist are the police hired by said lily-white suburb with the mandate protect their property from the nearby mayhem.
So, the usual.
“Liberal with impeccably politically correct opinions pays a huge premium and endures a long daily commute to live in lily-white suburb with people like himself.”
thank you for so succinctly demonstrating why politics in this country is a stinking shit-hole. The instant someone disagrees with you on one thing, you immediately write them off as a “liberal” who is to be ignored.
‘s why i laugh when people complain about how “divisive” Obama is, or how “divisive” Trump is, or how “divisive” Hillary is. You know why we end up with “divisive” leaders and candidates? because that’s clearly what we want. we clearly want conflict. Otherwise the major media outlets wouldn’t just be filled with people screaming at the camera or each other. You want to know why we’re in the situation we’re in? Look in a fucking mirror.
Thanks, Bark. I’m glad you know more about this area than I do because you talked to someone at Bob Maxey despite the fact I’ve lived here for forty fucking years.
“well-intentioned white person”
Can I have this on a T -shirt?
I would get something like “I used to be a well-intentioned white person, then I had kids. You better tool up if you want to keep fucking with my kids.”
Jack - I love the site and I appreciate your political opinions, even though we disagree on some things. I think you are walking the line pretty well, but a a few more guest writers with a different angle might help keep the site fresh now and then. (I’m really not volunteering, but I wouldn’t mind it if you gave me some pointers for my writing.)
Does anyone know if there are short (or long) term incentive proposals out there that could combat this behavior as opposed to revolution? This is one of those posts that kill me because I like a bit more discussion around solutions…
As far as the bulletin responses here:
I understand there is frustration throughout the country with the shifts we have seen in the work place in the past 40-50 years, but all this ragging on millennials and their “useless degrees” is a bit over the top. No matter how many times it is blurted out on a message board, it just isn’t true for people who pursued something science/engineering/math related.
As I thought about it before posting, EVERY one of my classmates that has kept in touch with the help of Facebook has a job right now. Some better than others, but all 30+ working and living a decent life. Even the slackers from college years. We all graduated from a decent mid-west college with relatively high tuition, but well paying co-ops and tuition assistance for high school graduates with 3.0 GPA or higher. The majority of the group pursued engineering degrees of all disciplines, but there was a sprinkling of chemistry, biology and computer science as well.
I’d say about 50% had to leave the state of Michigan to make it work. I was one of those people. Sad, considering Michigan has wonderful universities, people and places to visit. A steadying stream of openings at Bosch, GM, Chrysler, Ford, Brembo, Lotus and many auto suppliers has me hoping that I can come back some day. There have also been some promising start-ups coming to market in other industries as well.
Am I drinking the Koolaid, or am I one of the people not drinking the Koolaid? I’m inclined to believe the latter considering every single generation has ragged on their successors in the exact same way because they get things done in a different manner. There have been countless articles in Forbes, Time, Life, etc. that note that there is no actual evidence to support those types of claims when scrutinized.
The economy isn’t working the way it should because large tectonic forces within the economy itself are conspiring to lower the economic return to labor, especially unskilled labor. Those forces are technology, trade, and (yes) immigration.
Going to do a argument by drive by and see if I can come up with any better points on the drive home :
Ever since 2008, the central banks have pumped something like $200 billion dollars / month in to the financial markets. Now, financial assets are worth more than ever but that hasn’t translated to the real economy - beyond the things that have turned into financial assets: commodities, housing, ect which have gotten radically more expensive.
Because private equity firms take the wealth from the central banks, and put it in new areas of the economy, buy things up and inflate the prices, and then go to banks and say “look at the prices of houses! We own 100k of them, can you give us some debt secured against our housing stock?” The banks oblige and the high asset prices turn into leverage for the firms to go buy up more stuff.
Rinse and repeat. Meanwhile, they rent out the houses and work as bad landlords because they don’t really care whether the neighborhood goes to shit and the people making the decisions live far away from any sheriff who would try to ‘encourage’ them to do a better job screening out bad tenants.
And then all this money goes into weird stuff because firms can’t park it in the government bonds which don’t pay for shit because the central banks need to keep interest rates low so they don’t mess up the relative value of the world currencies. And oh by the way, corporations can float super cheap bonds internationally or denominated in other currencies and use them as a cheap way to repatriate money or they can just float bonds and return the money to shareholders in the forms of dividends and buybacks. But like the Private equity money, the money never goes back to the real economy because it’s held by so few people who don’t really change their consumption when they get an extra 500k. They already have 8 cars they don’t drive, why buy a 9th?
And people who do have jobs see that capital is so important that they save and invest everything they can so when it comes time for their job to be made redundant, they can try to move to get a new job or afford some food before facing the concequcnes of unemployment in a country with relatively weak social safety nets.
Meanwhile, things like healthcare eats away at present consumption (with little to no value ad) and 401k fees / bank bailouts cost the average household something like 100k over 20 years.
And we wonder why working stiffs reject the “bright light of the future” when the last 20 years of developments have been rotten to the core.
Yes, this. Financialization is like mercury….it poisons everything.
I think those 20 armed men would do more good burning down a Davos or Bilderberg meeting, but you’d need 200 men. And guns. Lots of guns.
Ah healthcare, one of the reasons I can’t vote for Trump. He has decided to back the standard GOP tax breaks for health insurance as an actual solution. Out of control healthcare costs is one of my core issues and that’s not gonna cut it. Combine that with one of the few personalities and histories as bad as Hillary and well I don’t think he’s worth it.
Loving this discussion , I see lots of ideas and I like to hear things from differing viewpoints .
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“You do what you have to do and there’s dignity in getting paid to dig ditches.” .
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Well , not so much when it was done by hand , in January in rural new England .
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I guess it was better than the daily pulling tits and shoveling shit .
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Maybe .
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College just isn’t going to happen for some folks .
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No shame in being a Tradesman , but you’d best do the job right , not screw around like most I meet seem to do .
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Not everyone who’s realistic gets to live in a big house in Pacific Palisades , San Marino or Short Hills .
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Just not having to shovel snow nor live in a fucking trailer makes life good some some people .
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-Nate
Nate, let your comments never be undervalued.
I’m mostly responding cuz I’ve had some Tito’s, but(!):
Though I have an air conditioned office and a comfortable chair right now, my previous job was, very literally, digging ditches, mixing mud, and moving what needs moved in rural New England in January (and all of the other months including July, in which I always seemed to always be on baking rooftops and would have killed for a nice shady ditch.)
But, I was working with a family business, who produce a world-class product, and honestly I miss it pretty often. I don’t miss having a broken body come Friday, and I don’t miss having to drive a couple hundred miles a day, but labor can be as fulfilling as anything if you’re lucky enough to work with good people, and you’re willing to fully use whatever you’ve got.
I would edit this if I could to say I don’t have an office; I have a cubicle in an air conditioned office. I feel the difference is significant.
But the rest stands!
I have zero shame in being a mechanic , I began this career before I was 12 , I’d always felt I was born to it . beat Farm working in any case =8-) .
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In High School it was really hard to get into Auto Shop Class because , you know White with blue eyes and blond hair etc…..
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The things they told me were amazing and disgusting .
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I’ve never had the pleasure of working in an air conditioned Garage , not even the Dealers had that long ago .
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It’s funny , I was recently told my comments are worthless and I comment too often , I get off forum comments asking why I don’t comment more and how to do this or that etc…
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Can’t win for losing sometimes .
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-Nate
Your comments here are far from worthless… I cannot emphasize that enough.
Nate — I grew up on a farm and did ranch work as a teenager, then I got married and the story changed to being an aircraft mechanic. But there were about 5 years of car work in between, and I loved it. Even in the winter when cars would come in with snow melting off them and you stood under the car on a hoist to work on them. It was rewarding work. I felt like a doctor… Airplanes were a different breed and I loved that work as well (helicopters not so much but lots of those too). Point is, I was blue collar for years and never thought it was “less than.”
For the last 24 years I’ve flown a desk, as they call it, and frankly sometimes with what they pay me it doesn’t always feel like “good work.” I do good work, sure, but nothing has been as rewarding as changing water sets with a canvas and shovel, herding cattle into another field, working in nature, beating on German and Italian cars (and the occasional Japanese POS) and even bringing sick airplanes back to life. It’s tangible shit, where paper shuffling often doesn’t feel like it, even when you know the purpose is to ensure quality products that are safe and compliant. Policies and procedures for mechanics and inspectors to help ensure they do things right (if they follow the book).
It can be satisfying to write a complete maintenance program for a large airplane, a thousand pages of technical shit, organized and made sense of… and when it’s done you can see the fruits of your labor on the hangar floors. But I don’t hold wrenches any more for a living. Good thing at my age; I’m slower.
It took me 14 years to get my 4 year degree, what with a failed marriage in between and other life-stuff. Did I need that degree? Maybe not, but it did get me into management positions for which I may not have otherwise qualified.
So when you speak of being a mechanic, and having done so since you were 12 I can totally relate. it’s fascinating, rewarding stuff. Troubleshooting is mystery-solving. Oil changes are transfusions. Fixing an ignition or fuel system problem is making the heart beat properly again. And so on… My hat is off to you.
Don’t know why this got stuck in moderation. Sorry about that!
Good on you, Nate. Taking pride in work is something that’s not as common as it should be. I finally found a great mechanic who specializes in my favorite brand and it’s one of the biggest blessings in my life. He doesn’t get paid enough and there’s no way my tips are big enough for the work he does.
We gotta lead by example and show kids that taking pride in one’s work is Right Livelihood.
I’m 25 I went into trades on purpose despite having been accepted to multiple good colleges and parents willing to write most of the checks. I knew it’s what I wanted to do and still do. But when my family started the income wasn’t cutting it (ever try to pay for health care out of 14/hr check.) so I knew I could talk my way into a an office position and I did, and it was likely for the best for my family, but I really wish I could go back to working with my hands. But unfortunately my trade is not one with great income potential.
35 not 25
I hear you .
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I was a small business owner , had lots of fun but I also had a Wife and Son , no health insurance , luckily L.A. County gave help for that for Son and Wife , me I was left out in the cold , part of why I’m so broken up now .
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Nevertheless , I’m quite pleased with my life as a Journeyman Mechanic .
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I try to show my Teenaged Foster boys it’s possible to be successful , they’re kind of blindsides by all the media crap about ‘ you’re a looser unless you buy the latest and greatest crap right now ‘ .
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Too soon old , too late wise .
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-Nate
With you on a all of it Nate. Well said.
I have been waiting til Nov in expectation of watching pinko pch101 have to eat his words that I was an idiot for not believing all those polls he says guarantees Crooked Hillary will win by a landslide.
Um ;
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Volando ;
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Paul has asked us to be nice……
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Calling someone a name like that isn’t .
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-Nate
@jz78817
The same happens if you are a white face in a black neighborhood. I used to work in an area that was noted for drug dealing, prostitution, and other less than ethical enterprises. Being in charge of maintenance for a 3 shift manufacturing facility, I was often called when the night crews had problems. In the course of 4 1/2 years, at least 1/2 of the times I went to the facility, and left out at midnight or later, I was pulled over. Local police just assumed that the white boy had to be looking for crack, be it the walking or smokeable variety. Some cops were honest enough to admit, when I asked why I was being stopped, that “you don’t look like you belong here”. One of the lamest was one cop that pulled me over on my bike. After he waited for 2 more cars (I belong to an MC so he was scared I guess), I was then informed that the reason I was being stopped was that I cut off my headlight and took off from the cop. Trying hard not to laugh at this stupid statement, I informed the cop that if my headlight was off, then so was my ignition switch.
I was still there for another 25 minutes, request to search my bike (no), drug sniffing dog(no hit). Only thing missing was the helicopter overhead. And I was given a ticket for no reflector on my license plate when all was said and done. Total of 5 cops, a dog and 1/2 hour plus of time. I imagine it made the hookers life a little easier for that bit of time tho, so there IS that.
“I imagine it made the hookers life a little easier for that bit of time tho, so there IS that.”
That’s some Mary Magdalene shit right there. Doing the Lord’s work.
yes, I’ve even been told by a couple of Detroit police officers that they look for those things. being a young white guy with a decent car in the “wrong” neighborhood means you’re looking to make a drug buy.
but the fact that there is such a thing as “driving while white” doesn’t mean it’s on the same level as DWB.
I’m supposed to get a McLaren 570 late this summer. I’ve been thinking of all the completely inappropriate places in Detroit to take it for photo shoots.
I have a black friend who lives off of Dexter, near Davison (in a house that almost certainly was once the home of a relatively prosperous Jewish family back in the 1950s). He says that when I’m on his porch “it makes people around here nervous”. I raise an eyebrow and say, “Just who needs to be nervous around here?”
As an aside, there are a number of former synagogues in the area that have been turned into churches. One of the buildings had a verse from Psalms in bas-relief stonework, in Hebrew and in English. For some reason, the church decided to efface the Hebrew lettering by having someone smear cement over the letters, but they did the equivalent of painting a brushstroke over a pencil line, so you can still pretty much make out the Hebrew. They just ended up making the building look terrible and demonstrating their distaste for things Jewish.
Before Jew-hatred became a thing in some sectors of the African American community (like at Pres. Obama’s former church in Chicago), black Christians had somewhat of an affinity for [at least Biblical] Jews and Judaism. “Go down, Moses” and all that.
To be fair, the church that currently owns the synagogue building where I celebrated becoming a Bar Mitzvah still has Jewish symbols on it.
IT males no nevemind to me wkat you think you know based on just one thing I fe el i need to pray about in tía election. Believe me I feel I News todo pray.even more re: the othercandidate though for diferent reasons
Fricking iPhone apell checker.
I work in the engineering/construction industry in the Southeastern US. We design & build industrial manufacturing facilities for auto component makers, specialty chemical producers, that kind of thing. One of the most severe challenges our industry faces is the lack of skilled tradesmen. Specialty welders, crane operators, and other key roles are seeing their incumbent demographics approach retirement age. The problem is, kids coming out of high school do not see a skilled trades career as a destination. Even though you can become a certified welder for well under $20k (and there are plenty of companies willing to pay your fees & tuition for you), and make six figures after a relatively short time, kids just don’t want to do it.
To me, the question is, why is this? Is it because white-collar jobs are considered easier to perform physically? Is it because kids grow up with constant engagement with social media, smartphones, etc. and can’t imagine working with their hands, away from the comforts of the little cuties on Snapchat? Is it because their grandparents or parents had these types of jobs, and they think they need a white-collar job to show “progress”? Is it because our media fawns over Silicon Valley types and Hollywood, while devaluing work that is physically demanding? Is it because four-year colleges do a much better job of attracting young people (and their parents) to campus, and provide a more fun/fulfilling experience once school begins?
I think all of these are factors are contributors. But I’m actually going to lay most of the blame at the feet of Lloyd Dobler:
“I don’t wanna sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t wanna sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed, you know, as a career, I don’t wanna do that…right now I just wanna be with your daughter, sir.”
That’s the problem, Lloyd. You need to make something, or sell something, or fix something someone else needs. Sociology majors have literally nothing of value to offer to society, ironically enough.
Sociologists can certainly mentally masturbate about why certain things happen the way they do, and then proceed to pretend their “knowledge” has any truth for the social realities of the people they comment upon.
There are many factors at play. One is we have been pretty much teaching kids for years now they are somehow less if they don’t go to college, and telling them there is no other way to make a living. But the trades have also suffered wage problems was well. I actually know more people in trades then in office jobs. Most do OK but there has been even worse wage stagnation in the trades then in the office marketplace. My neighbor who is an E1 doing commercial wiring, tells me his income has been flat (without adjusting for inflation) for over a decade. I have met very few people in the trades (other then the ones who run their own companies) who make really good money at it. There are exceptions of course but it seems hard to plot that course when your a kid coming out of high school. How do you know being a lineman makes 70k a year vs 50k a year as an electrician, Or that if you had CAD training on top of the linemans training you could make more like a 100k a year doing field diagrams. I think we may want to bring in more paid apprenticeships ones that start in highschool but allow for moving from one to another if they don’t fit.
We also need guidance counselors and teachers that understand these fields and can point kids in the right direction.
Also when some one says you can make a 100k doing x make sure you understand the fine print in that. About a decade ago a trade magazine I read printed an average salary list for workers in my field at the time. I remember several shop owners I talked to laughing about it (60k I never pay more then 40k for them positions, sure it take 6 months to flll but why would I pay more). If your going to advertise these jobs to young people be truthful about it.
One more thought that goes more along to your point. Since I went to trade school at of high school the majority of my dealings with people for along time were with that of similar educations, with the exception of a few close friends that went to college. When I was in my late 20’s I worked for a large Insurance company. Pretty much everyone except me and one other guy had at least 4 year degrees and several had Masters. Most were under 40. These were the first people in my life that I had met that seemed to truly look down on manual labor, until that point I never quite understood that. One co worker wrapped it up nicely when we were discussed my driving dub 3k cars while he had a new lexus IS. I explained in detail my running costs and how much lower they were then even a cheap new car, he then asked what mechanic I used, and I told him I did 90% of the work myself, he then said “I’m smart I have brains why would I ever get my hands dirty”
yep. I’ve heard more than one (quite well known) comedian have something in their acts about “if your job requires you to wear a name tag, you’ve clearly made some poor choices in life.” Trades are viewed as work for dimwitted shit-kickers who couldn’t hack it at a university. “Success” these days is either 1) getting famous on TV/movies/YouTube/Vine or 2) writing the latest smartphone app for teens to send each other pictures of their junk.
I wear a name tag everyday to work, and I’m in the process of earning my second masters degree, and not the diploma mill kind either 😉
Every doctor and nurse in a hospital wears a name tag.
“Every doctor and nurse in a hospital wears a name tag.”
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Not _every_ Doctor ~ I’ve yet to see any Surgeons with name tags nor did my Father ever wear one .
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He was an Oncologist .
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Who went batshyte when I told him at an early age I wanted to be a Mechanic.
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-Nate
I’m reminded of Lindy, the mechanic in Boston who first taught me something about how to work on fancy cars. He dropped out of Boston College’s art history program before graduating - he’d gotten his girlfriend pregnant and decided to start and support a family.
Lindy was a truly extraordinary mechanic, of the sort who could figure out that thing that other mechanics had bodged up. He would frequently skip troubleshooting - just take the offending system apart and put it back together “the right way.” And then it would work - no new parts required! Lindy never stopped being an NPR-listening liberal intellectual. He just did it with a wrench in his hand. It probably helped him lure the Volvo (and Porsche, and Ferrari)-driving Boston clientele, so when I met him in the ’90s he was making just under six figures and supporting that family quite nicely.
Did not read all comments so this may be redundant, for which I apologize. But, Germany is a rich high-cost nation and it has a positively thriving industrial sector and (it seems) less of an opportunity gap than we do. According to the OECD, that sector still accounts for 30% of Germany’s GDP, which is quite high for a large developed nation.
If cost is really the main factor in winning the industrial race, how did German industry escape the fate that befell the industrial sector of other developed nations? I am not sure I have a complete answer, but german firms never really competed on cost first. They focused on quality (broadly defined) and innovation first and managed to keep their prices high. When you get $15k to $20k more for a 3 series than Camry, you can afford to pay higher wages.
My point is not to sell the merits of German business practices but to highlight that we are not necessarily doomed by the emergence of China nor by technological improvements. We just have to be smart and have the courage to look beyond the next quarter (for businesses) or the next election (for government).
Businesses come and go but the government is here to stay, so I would start by putting pressure on the latter to shape up. The state of k-12 education is shameful and that needs to change, because quality human capital is the cornerstone of wealth.
one of the reasons Germany was so welcoming to refugees and migrants recently is that they viewed them as a source of cheap labor.
German “Mittelstand” might be a place to look if you are interested in knowing some of the dynamics of the German economy in an effort to help understand the questions you pose… that and “Rhine Capitalism”.
If you are particularly ambitious, you can read about the Germany’s “Wirtshcaftswunder” or economic miracle following World War II… and the Marshall Plan was only a small part of it.
“Your comments here are far from worthless… I cannot emphasize that enough.”.
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Thanx Jack ~ that means a lot to me .
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-Nate
What’s wrong with the economy, high taxes and regulatory burdens designed to stifle it, while the highest taxes in the 1950’s were 91%, I doubt very many paid it, more likely they paid their lawyers and accountants to make the tax burden go away. In this country, we have so many abundant energy resources and no lack of precious metals, virtually every thing this country needs is here, the EPA and countless other bureaucracy’s keep everything in check, the hurdles are incredible, the media talk about fracking as if it was the new evil of the day and the UN is pushing a no meat diet. Release the tourniquet and watch the country flourish again. As for the illegal alien situation, that is as deliberate as the high taxes and regulatory hurdles, this is indeed meant to lower wages paid in the United States.
Trayvon Martin may not have been a choir boy, but he was shot by a megalomaniac wannabe cop neighborhood patroller who knew he wasn’t supposed to carry a gun or engage with suspicious people. Yet he took it upon himself to accost and challenge Martin, who was in a development where he was staying with family, and did so repeatedly.
In the end, Martin probably figured his life was in danger, and resisted the challenges from this wahoo cowboy neighborhood cop, whose name I won’t even mention as he deserves to be forgotten, not to become famous.
And when Martin turned and counterchallenged, the other guy figured his best chance was to make sure that there was only one side to the story…his.
Even if Martin was dealing weed in HS, as alleged somewhere, he still had every right to be where he was when he was, and the little tinhorn sheriff of the subdivision had way overstepped his bounds.
Unfortunately for Martin, his assailant got away with murder, at least in part because he had some BS story to sling about some family connection with the so-called justice system.
I left that state a long while back, and except for the beaches and a few people filed way back in my memory, I don’t miss it a bit. I can’t begin to count the number of times I was pulled over in my early twenties by cops for equipment checks, etc., just because I was driving a VW and had longish hair at the time.
The entire system of so-called justice in that state has been suspect for decades.
In one instance, a prosecutor who was head of the national prosecutors’ association at the time, was exposed for having withheld evidence that his key witness in the trial and near execution of a migrant worker father whose eight children had been poisoned. Not only did the man lose his children, probably to the key witness, who had been a prime suspect in another poisoning of several children in her care, but he very nearly fried for it, until somehow the truth came out.
A sheriff (probably more than one) was convicted of embezzlement of state funds.
A crooked narcotics cop was exposed, and a couple of dozen convictions based on perjured testimony were thrown out. Years later, the same cop was teaching criminal justice in a state college.
This is just a part of what I was incidentally aware of through friendships and/or newspapermen contacts.
Personally, I moved to NYC in my twenties, in order to feel safe at night. As dangerous as NYC could be at that time, I never felt like I was surrounded by danger one half as much as I did just riding down the road in Florida. Even got accused of being an outlaw biker, even though I have never been a member of a motorcycle club, simply because of the hair and the fact that I rode some big British iron at the time. Which was enough to get me a ticket for something like license plate light too dim.
As to the issue of black people, men in particular, feeling endangered on the streets, for the record I am white. One of my best friends for years was a black man who is a hard working and very good cook, and an all around nice guy. When I was younger, he and I rolled a lot, mostly just chilling and/or visiting friends.
And during the time he and I were in the same car, I got pulled over an average of at least once a week. When I was alone, nary a cop, and nary a roadside stop.
So yes, in case you are white and don’t believe it, the alleged crime of “driving while black” is a real thing. Real enough that it still pisses me off that I couldn’t even so much as drive to a bar or a restaurant with him without wondering if we were going to get pulled, and at a minimum put through the drill for twenty minutes to a half hour, or more.
ALL lives matter. But BLACK lives clearly have gotten the short end of the stick on a fairly consistent basis for some time, and still do. The movement has some hidden agendas I don’t care for, but the concept is real, and arises out of a real problem in our allegedly post-racial society.
BTW, Jack, the Norwegian article about class warfare vs. racial warfare was a good analysis.
Keep the audience looking at one hand, and they will never see what the other hand is doing to deceive you while you are focused where they want you to be focused.
Re: Trayvon Martin.
Too many young kids, black and white alike, want to be fake-ass thugs. Trayvon was a fake-ass thug. All of his social media shows it.
The problem is that Zimmerman didn’t realize he was a fake-ass thug. He thought that Trayvon was an actual thug. Had Trayvon been wearing a Lacoste shirt and pink shorts, nothing would have happened.
Sometimes, clothes really do make the man.
“Zimmerman didn’t realize he was a fake-ass thug. He thought that Trayvon was an actual thug”
Exactly, but why is that? He made some blanket assumptions about what he observed. Assumptions likely based on race and his own personal biases and worldview. That is a problem, and it’s also a problem that he created a situation where he had to use a firearm to defend himself.
I think it’s hard to justify “standing your ground” when you deliberately follow and confront somebody first, but obviously the courts disagree with me.
I’m also with Volando. To me, protesting that “Black Lives Matter” logically implies that “All Lives Matter”, hence why a group has to protest when they feel that their own black lives are valued less than all other lives in a society. The statement is a reminder of basic value, not a claim to supremacy.
If someone takes offense to “Black Lives Matter”, I’d imagine the offense is a manifestation of narcissistic injury 😉
yep. my high school years were when suburban white kids decided they wanted to be “gangsters” and started trying to dress the part. Oh, and (badly) speaking in a way to sound black. They really had no idea how stupid they looked.
Yes , they’re so much fun to make fun of in public….
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My favorite is to wait until they’re in a crowd then remind them that they can wear their pants around their ankles but what they wake up to - morrow , they’ll still be white…
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Then the laughter begins .
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-Nate
I usually hate posts of the “me too, I second that” type, but Nate, your insights and values are refreshing and encouraging to me on a consistent basis, and I expect that there are many more besides Jack and myself who feel that way.
Post on, and ignore the nay-sayers.
As the old saying goes, if you throw a rock into a pack of dogs, the one that yelps is usually the one that got hit.
Ok, are “VolandoBajo” and “VolandaBajo” the same person?
Matt wrote:
“…So when Giuliani got up there and ranted about how the police exist to protect you, the only people who identify with that sentiment are white people.”
And not even “all” white people.
There used to be a cop in our south Jersey town who had the balls to file a complaint against our former mayor, who was also the head of public safety, because the latter would slap a red light on the dash of his luxury Euro sedan and rush to roadside calls. Rumor was that he would intervene for friends, among other things, as well as that he enjoyed the adrenaline rush.
But he was endangering cops who were vectoring to the scene from multiple directions, when all of sudden they had another fast moving vehicle in the equation, that wasn’t on their radar.
He got busted down to the lowest rank, got his master’s in criminal justice about a year later, and moved on to greener pastures.
But in a candid conversation with him, whom I considered, and still do, to be a good and honest cop, he confided that about one third of most forces are serious and dedicated; another third are just collecting a check and working towards early retirement; and the final third are basically “bad apples”.
If that doesn’t make you stop and think, even if you think you have your white privilege card with all the endorsements, I don’t know what would.
And has anyone ever wondered why, if the police are so anti-drug, and if they like the argument that if you have nothing to hide you shouldn’t mind being searched, why are there no, or almost no, programs to test police officers for drugs, in spite of cases where, as in Philadelphia, narcotics police were caught supplementing their incomes by engaging in the business.
And given the kind of bodies (and attitudes) about one in ten or twenty of them in some areas look like ads for a Charles Atlas body building program, but complete with the stereotypical Barry Bonds “head the size of a pumpkin”, why don’t we ever hear about random testing for steroids in police forces. Especially since ‘roids can give people hair trigger like responses.
I have nothing but respect for the good and dedicated police. But you don’t have to look very hard to see that my policeman acquaintance has a fairly good analysis of the ratios of types on many forces.
I am the former. Not sure where and how the latter variant appeared, whether someone else mis-spelled it, or my new (to me) iPhone spell-checked me out into left field once more.
Haven’t had the opportunity yet to see how to turn off auto-correct, but as soon as I get around to it that POS “feature” will be relegated to a technological elephant graveyard.
I just noticed what happened as I was posting my last reply. Must have fat-fingered my name on the iPhone when I replied via it instead of my laptop, which had the correct version autofilled.
No, I have not, am not, and will not, pull a Bruce/Caitlyn move. So I also will not be changing my screen name from Volando to Volanda, in spite of that momentary lapse.
Thanks for catching that for me.
Got to admit Volanda does sound a bit suspect, however. At the very least, there would clearly not be correct gender agreement in the Spanish language, from which my screen name was derived: “Flying Low”…as in cruising quickly but quietly in my last year Aero series Panther, my Old Geezer ™ “real” car…a 97 Mercury Grand Marquis.
I could probably fit a Miata in the trunk of that thing. Not that I’d have much use for one.
Bruce Jay Friedman once wrote a short story in Esquire about an aging gentleman who was slowly watching his world slip out of existence, as evidence by the fact that they had stopped manufacturing the type of collar stay he had worn consistently for fifty years. I sort of feel that way about “real American RWD V8 family sedans”, both large and reasonably quick.
These days cars seem more like “you paid for this, and they gave you that.”
Once the Panthers are all gone, they won’t come back.
Out of the blue and into the black…
Meanwhile, I love cruising in my rolling museum piece.
Flying Low, and enjoying every minute of it, for as long as it, and I, last.
But it will be as Volando, and not as Volanda, now and forever. Except when Apple gets its technological fingers onto my keyboard.
Jack,
Martin may have been a fake-ass thug but so was Zimmerman, in clear violation of the community watch agreement he had signed, especially with respect to a no guns & no
apprehension policies, and he knew he was. And when Martin’s attempt to detain & question Martin started to go off track, Martin used ultimate force to ensure that his was the only version that got told. The first officers on the scene ignored Martin’s violation of the police force policy that Martin was to report his concerns to the dispatcher and to not engage with people like He assumed Margkn was.
Zimmerman liked to tout the fact that a close relative had been a member of the law enforcement power structure, so the investigating officers treated him as “one of us” and were prepared to give Zimmerman a self defense alibi pass.
It was only later that it came out that Zimmerman had zero authority to confront or detain Martin regardless of any suspicion he may have had.
In short Zimmerman got away with killing Martin simply because Zimmerman falsely deduced that Martin didn’t belong in “his” gated community.
Even if Martin dealt weed in HS and/or had gotten in fights none of that was relevant to Zimmerman’s fake ass vigilante thuggery.
Not saying Martinwas an angel, but dZimmerman was dead wrong and Martin was wrongly dead.
Consider the words of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit”. The problem did not disappear, it’s just that it has entered new venues.
No matter how you slice it Zimmerman was and is a bully and a thug.
There was a home invasion and there were frequent robberies in that neighborhood by young black men. He was doing what neighborhood watches do. However the interaction began it continued to a late thirties 5’8″ desk jockey dough boy having his head beaten into the concrete by a 17 y.o. 6’2″ football player. Somewhere between those points one of them escalated. Even without the Facebook thug play, who was that more likely to be?
“He was doing what neighborhood watches do.”
no, “neighborhood watches” are supposed to look out for suspicious activity and report it to the police. Not appoint themselves the police and go pursuing suspicious people, especially after being told not to by the 911 attendant. The guy was one of those wannabe cops, and really just seems like an all-around asshole:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/05/17/george-zimmerman-taunts-trayvon-martin-s-parents-they-didn-t-raise-their-son-right.html
@jz77817
Thanks for the support for my comment.
Sounds like he is still trying to justify his unpunished murder so at least maybe he still carries the burden of a guilty conscience underneath his layers of BS.
Holy shit! 105 replies!!! I don’t dare wade into this minefield. Jesus
Me neither!
LOLed at the chipmunk. Had me for a sec there.
I concur.
At the risk of revealing myself as an idiot, can I just say, late (and very drunk, again,) that this site induces some of the most civil and productive political discussions I’ve ever seen.
+1 for further explorations of broadly-applicable topics.
Being hit on the head lessons are next door.
Maybe you should do a political blog - everyone seems to enjoy this - maybe a weekly entry given the election season. We all need to vent a bit, ye know?
As for bringing American jobs* back - what would Hayek do?
*some jobs were never ours to being with i.e. electronics manufacturing, for example. Those were Japanese jobs that moved over to China. Take an automated printed circuit board assembly line powered by Fuji/Panasonic/Assembleon/Siemens machines and they spit out quality ISO 9001 products no matter where…even a drunk monkey can run it.
“My hat is off to you.”.
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Thank you Sir/Gentlemen .
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I was able to use my work ethic to good effect even after I began to do the paperwork end of things ~ most Shop Managers will always cheap out on all the supplies and tools , causing much grief , wasted time & money , injuries to personnel , on and on…
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I saved quite a bit of Taxpayer Dollars by not buying Chinese junk that broke after one use and so constantly needed replacing….
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Trying to get the brain dead bean counters to understand this simple concept wasn’t easy .
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Anyway , I’m old and crippled but I still love to spin wrenches , was doing so early this morning then got to ” test ride” my handiworks up the mountain .
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Too bad I can’t post a photo here as i took one @ Newcomb’s Ranch whilst having a nice lunch .
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-Nate
@Nate
Exactly right on penny wise, pound foolish bean counters.
The reason the M16 became known as the Jamming Jenny was because McNamara’s Whiz Kids insisted on skipping $5 worth of chrome in the chamber.
And they also figured that since USMC Amtraks were amphibious that they could run in a mixture of water and sand also, in the Mekong Delta.
They were wrong and they hadn’t done their homework. As a result 94% of our brother Amtrak unit from SoCal died in a single battle when their vehicles bogged down in riverine swampland leaving them literally (and I’m using that word correctly) — dead in the water.
RIP my brothers.
And as Billy Crystal used to say: “Don’t get me started!”
I’m sorry Volando ;
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I too lost many friends there , the ones that came back , were mostly damaged , some beyond repair .
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-Nate
@Nate
Thanks for the thought. Seems that war did more damage than most- not just s physically but spiritually and psychologically too. And not just to the direct participants but friends & family too.
The first war in which the US was so divided.
To the extent Vietnam was a misguided effort the blame should be aimed at the top. But much of the protesting was directed towards those who answered our country’s call and put their lives on the line, only to be scorned by half the country.
I have special admiration and gratitude for tunnel rats like my USMC buddy Henry.
Retired Marine Corps Gen. Smedley Butler’s article “War is a Racket” should be required reading in HS.
Eisenhower also nailed it when he was leaving the White House and he warned of the dangers of the military-industrial complex.
We have come a long wrong way from Paul Revere to Ambassador Stephens being hung out to dry in Libya, with a self-serving lie about a video.
It is time for change, for sure.
” The first war in which the US was so divided. “.
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Not entirely IMO.
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Pops spent much of WWI in Leavenworth and no , he wasn’t a criminal , he was a Doctor .
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Many of my Korean War Buddies came back with scrambled heads too .
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I can’t explain how much it pisses me off that anyone would hassle any Combat Veteran ! .
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They all deserve our eternal gratitude .
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“Retired Marine Corps Gen. Smedley Butler’s article “War is a Racket” should be required reading in HS.” .
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_THIS_ .
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I used to crawl into holes and do other amazingly stupid stuff but being a Tunnel Rat was/is a whole ‘nother ballgame , no thanx .
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-Nate