Detroit is the expected number one. But there are some surprises — Miami Beach and Atlanta — for wide disparities in wealth. The rest mostly display hollowed out heartland names, Kansas City, St. Louis, Memphis, Rochester, Indianapolis, Rochester, Buffalo, Milwaukee, Baltimore, Youngstown, Cincy, Rockford (home of Cheap Trick!) all familiar, sent into irreversible decline by deindustrialization. Interior cities in Massachusetts don’t share in any of the growth of the Boston mega-nexus where Harvard, MIT and big pharma reign supreme. It literally is two states.
Reading, PA, is included in the thirties, a once pretty city in the countryside suffering a steady loss in population and fortune since the bankruptcy of the Reading railroad, a coal and steel shipper in 1971. The other winner in Pennsylvania is Philly.
None of the cities listed show any real prospects, a reflection of how the American empire has geniunely declined on the domestic front. It is not a picture of a country poised for any type of recovery.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in 2014 that the number of opioid prescriptions outnumbered the number of people in 12 states. All 12 of these states voted for Donald Trump: Arkansas, Alabama, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and West Virginia.
Also, the continuing study of the counties in the Rust Belt states that flipped voters from Obama to Trump:
The question that persists six months after Mr. Trump’s inauguration is why six key states — Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, along with 220 counties nationwide — flipped from Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016. Why did these voters change their minds? These are men and women who are, in the main, still working, still attending church, still members of functioning families, but who often live in communities where neighbors, relatives, friends and children have been caught up in disordered lives.
Schuylkill County, where I grew up in Pennsylvania, was one of these counties.
And heroin overdoses were then unknown there. Not anymore.
In June, Schuylkill County Coroner Dr. David J. Moylan III said the possibility of 60 drug-related deaths is something he thought would be a reality in the county.
[In 2015], 26 people died in drug-related deaths. Twelve of those involved heroin and three were fentanyl related.
County coroner data as of Friday show of those 54 [2016 deaths] so far, fentanyl was involved in 27 of them.
I’ve made the argument before that opioid drug death and the lack of answer for it indicate the country is headed for very profound disruption and failure.
The accumulating costs of throwing half the country to the dogs in the 40 year slump.
Warren Buffett thinks the Republican health care bill has an alternative purpose: to help the already-wealthy make even more money.
The famed investor and world’s second-richest person had some choice words about the legislation currently being debated by the Senate, suggesting it could be called the “Relief for the Rich Act” during an interview with PBS NewsHour Tuesday.
My tunes, evergreen. Seriously. As good as Iggy & the Stooges, easy.
The unplugged version.
I gave up fighting. I’m with the tenor of the country. Take away my Medicaid. I am undeserving.
Remember, you can download the unplugged version for your gadget. Send it to a friend, even.
Now, please start a campaign to raise money for a Mitchell electric/acoustic guitar — 149 dollars at Guitar Center.
On a slightly more serious note: Can you believe this tuneage is fives years old and HAS ONLY BECOME MORE REAL? IT’S VIRTUALLY THE NATIONAL CREED.
I’ve not much to say about the return of the Red Scare as a substantial force driving the US. For the Democrats who refuse to accept their candidate was lousy, it’s a dog-ate-my-homework excuse. For everyone else in opposition, it’s a many-pronged effort to reignite the Cold War, potentially move toward starting a hot one with a nation still a nuclear superpower and a tool to stifle dissent and label anyone who fails to “see” it a Russian sympathizer, traitor and fool. An enemy of freedom, too. Keep in mind freedom here means freedom to shop.
Consider these words from President Trump at his February 16 news conference:
* “Look, it would be much easier for me to be tough on Russia, but then we’re not going to make a deal. Now, I don’t know that we’re going to make a deal. I don’t know. We might. We might not. But it would be much easier for me to be so tough—the tougher I am on Russia, the better. But you know what? I want to do the right thing for the American people. And to be honest, secondarily, I want to do the right thing for the world.???
* “They’re a very powerful nuclear country and so are we. If we have a good relationship with Russia, believe me, that’s a good thing, not a bad thing.???
* “By the way, it would be great if we could get along with Russia, just so you understand that. Now tomorrow, you’ll say ‘Donald Trump wants to get along with Russia, this is terrible.’ It’s not terrible. It’s good.???
Rather than being applauded and supported, such talk from Trump is routinely depicted as further indication that—in Krugman’s words—Trump “is in effect a Putin puppet.???
And how could President Trump effectively allay fears and accusations that he’s a Kremlin flunky? How could he win cheers from mainstream newsrooms and big-megaphone pundits and CIA headquarters? He could get in a groove of decisively denouncing Russian President Vladimir Putin. He could move U.S. military forces into more confrontational stances and menacing maneuvers toward Russia.
This, entitled by a line that everyone wishes they could have written: Trump Can Prove He’s Not a Putin Puppet by Blowing Up the World.
Add what you will in the noise about how Russia allegedly has taken over the US via the Trump administration but it’s developed into a most dangerous kind of bullshit. The increase in the defense budget desired by Trump — 54 billion — exceeds the Russian defense spending on its own.
War with Russia. Always a bad idea now turned into a supposedly good idea mostly thanks to the collapse of the Democratic Party’s many failures.
The past weekend was the 40th anniversary of the movie Slap Shot, now considered a classic. At the time of release it was more-or-less critically shunned. Over the decades opinions were revised upward.
There was a good deal of coverage of a celebration in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. For example:
JOHNSTOWN, Pa. — The streets of this small town are littered with relics from the iconic movie “Slap Shot” filmed here 40 years ago.
There’s the statue of the dog that, in the movie, saved the people of fictitious Charlestown from the 1938 flood. There’s the park in the center of town with the fountain where Paul Newman and Lindsay Crouse shared a memorable scene. There are familiar storefronts. The Aces restaurant is still in operation. The steel mills are still standing. Then there’s the Cambria County War Memorial ice rink.
People in this town take pride in the movie, but Johnstown is somehow different than it was 40 years ago.
It’s depressing.
The rust-belt town took a massive hit to its economy when Bethlehem Steel Corporation, America’s second-largest steel producer, closed its mill in 1982. The town’s population was well over 70,000, but after the mill closed, the downturn began.
“The steel mill left. The jobs left. The people left,” said Johnstown police Capt. Chad Miller.
No one embedded with the Hollywood royalty at tonight’s Oscars or even in the global television audience is likely to spare a stray thought for the worst injustice in the history of the Academy Awards, probably because almost no one shares the following opinion:
“Slap Shot??? got jobbed.
A loving cinematic monument to the raw essence of hockey, framed by the ribald lawlessness of the minor league game in the 1970s, the film that starred Paul Newman as an end-of-the-line player/?coach and Johnstown, Pa. as itself was released 40 years ago this weekend.
As you might never imagine from Saturday’s commemorative celebration in and around the Cambria County War Memorial, home of the long-defunct Johnstown Jets on whom Nancy Dowd’s rollicking script was not-all-that-loosely based, “Slap Shot??? was not Best Picture of 1977.
“Now make sure when you’re watching this, you’re drinking a grape and orange, but none of that stinkin’ root beer,” actor Dave Hanson said.
And back at the Cambria County War Memorial Arena, fans got the chance to meet and greet with the Hanson brothers and other cast members.
“It’s fun to talk to people all over the United States, I said, and Canada,??? actor Steve Carlson said. “It’s their favorite lines, their favorite movie.”
Carlson, one of the three famous Hanson Brothers, says it’s a very special event to be a part of.
“This is where one of the greatest sports movies of all time, you know, one of the greatest hockey movies of all time (was filmed,) so it’s great to celebrate it in a place that we started at,” Carlson said.
Dave Hanson agrees.
“It’s always a treat to come back here for any reason, but to be able to come back to help celebrate the 40th anniversary of “Slap Shot” is just a special treat,” Hanson said.
“Hey, the boys are back in town man. We’re putting on the foil,” Carlson said.
I’ve been storing up the energy to for a review of “Slap Shot,??? the Seventies movie with Paul Newman as the player coach of the Charlestown Chiefs (modeled on the Johnstown Jets) of western Pennsylvania. I have an old videotape and have had it on replay. “Slap Shot??? can also be viewed through the lens of America’s forty year slump, a movie framed at the time big business resurrected a devotion to unrestricted preying on its human labor, and — as it turned out — hundreds of millions of future livelihoods.
The backdrop for “Slap Shot??? is the perfect picture of it. The steel mill is set to close in “Charlestown,??? laying off thousands.
“Ten thousand people put on waivers,??? says Ned Braden (Michael Ontkean), the Charlestown Chiefs’ leading scorer, to Paul Newman, as both stand outside the steel mill waiting for a ride from Lily (Lindsay Crouse), Braden’s wife.
“What’s going to happen to them???? Newman, as Reggie Dunlop, the Chiefs’ player/coach asks.
It’s every man for himself, replies Braden.
Or the beginning of the root hog or die economy in the Rust Belt. Donald Trump should have marked it last Saturday.
“New bill [in] the US House of Representatives mandates minimum wage of H1B visa holders at $130,000,” reads the headline of an Indian business publication.
“India’s information technology (IT) sector will face temporary setback to move workers from India to the US with the bill …” it starts.
But the devil’s in the details which are still a bit unclear.
The problem with the tech industry and the granting of H-1Bs in the US is not that there haven’t been enough American workers with the skills. The argument was a lie.
The tech industry uses H-1Bs to hire younger foreign nationals, primarily from India, to replace older more experienced Americans who are paid more.
A few cases became notorious last year in which a big company, like Disney, used an outsourcing firm to hire H-1Bs to replace their American workers who were then compelled to train them for the jobs they were being severed from. Essentially, use of H-1Bs has always been about getting rid of American workers for cheaper labor as to improve the bottom line.
“Why do such low proportions of US STEM graduates land STEM jobs?” the man asks.
By boosting the salary to 130,000 this bill purports to stop that. The caveat is in the finer details which today’s stories don’t get at. Are there loopholes?
For example, for this to work I’d assume the 130,000 salary requirement would have to be applied across all categories of IT and Infosystem jobs which would mean no downward exceptions or wiggle room for entry level positions or jobs tortuously defined to select only for the young and foreign.
Anyway, the point is you’ll be able to sort of tell if it’s a good bill if the tech industry becomes seriously unhappy and lots of stories start showing up about how “Trump” or Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat (who’s generally been in the industry’s pocket), are throwing away the nation’s competitiveness because, again, there are supposedly NOT ENOUGH Americans with “skills.”
The bog standard swelled head tech industry cant
Posted originally to my Facebook page, here are some comments from the pro-outsourcers.
Having worked at this industry I have noted that barring a few American Universities, [the] rest dish out pretty average graduates. Silicon Valley can still afford $130K for average engineers while the rest of the country cannot. Does that mean that companies will stop eroding profits?? The answer is NO they will ship the job offshore. Trump should NOT have messed with the Tech industry. Tech industry is the only domain which keeps US ahead of the rest. He has to think of other ways to curb the body shoppers.
Personal experience, but I interviewed ~30 candidates at an engineering fair a couple of years ago. 29 were foreign nationals, and the one American by far had the worst skills. There absolutely is more foreign-born talent than American, if nothing else simply by the numbers of China+India graduating a far higher number of engineers than we do.
H1-Bs, always young and smart, just looking for a great life in the land of the free
Here’s where it gets ugly. The story that will predominantly feature in the mainstream will be on how the lives and/or dreams of H-1B applicants and current holders may be upended/ruined/spoilt by a revision of H-1B granting rules.
Karthik Sridhar and his wife recently sold their car and other assets in India, eager to start a new life in Silicon Valley. The founder of an artificial intelligence startup, who moved to Palo Alto, hasn’t seen his spouse and five-year-old daughter since last summer and was hopeful they could reunite this month in California …
“I’m trying to create jobs here,??? the 36-year-old said on Tuesday, sitting inside a busy co-working building in San Francisco where tech startups share office space. “Everything is up in the air now … We didn’t know there was going to be complete disdain for existing rules and regulations and policies.???
Here is his company. It’s typical tech industry/start-up pitchman’s stuff: “We send out a deeply personalized e-mail … super-intelligent backbone for e-commerce.”
But it isn’t until you get deep into the Guardian piece that you read about another kind of disdain for existing rules and regulations:
Critics of the H-1B program, including Democrats, have argued that reforms would be welcome given that research has shown that large contracting firms have exploited the program to deploy lower-paid contractors, which can hurt wages and displace US jobs.
And then it’s back to the “worst nightmares.”
The problem, as it exists, is that the US tech industry, corporate America, has very much made employment a zero-sum game. For someone to win, others must definitely lose. In fact, the Silicon Valley philosophy has always been some variation on it: Someone else must always lose for innovation and disruption.
And the story they have been allowed to program is that it is the American worker who is made to lose.
Yes, there are “worst nightmares.” They’ve been experienced by thousands, even millions, of Americans already. They’ve had their lives boiled down, assets liquidated, their futures blighted. When you include all the fine details, the Guardians’ subjects, although presumably good people, suddenly don’t seem the tragic figures after all.
It qualifies as yet another brainless meme of the moment, picked up and passed around like some convenient aphorism from the Bible, something that professes to explain exactly why Trump’s immigration ban is bad with as few words and troublesome thinking as possible.
Jobs is a poor, make that a wretched, choice. As a human being he was an obvious louse.
Jobs had no obvious interest in being decent to others. His iPhones are famously made in China in a giant complex (paradoxically owned by absentee Korean tech plutocrats) where the conditions were so bad workers committed suicide by jumping off the roof in desperation.
And here’s another kick in the ass: Steve Jobs and Apple were/are notorious abusers of the H-1B immigrants for specialty positions visa program. Along with the rest of the tech industry, they use H-1Bs to procure workforces of younger foreign computer engineers and programmers who can be paid less than older Americans they’ve been hired to replace. It much improves the bottom line.
So today, the tech industry is embarrassed and in pain, as it should be. You see, its CEOs aren’t the unbending democracy-loving geniuses they like to imagine themselves to be. They’re just lickspittles to power. Naturally, they’ll get over it. They’re nothing if not capable of blowing with the wind. [1]
Before the election they tended to see Trump as a long shot, an idiot, someone who couldn’t possibly beat Hillary Clinton. And they most noticeably chastised PayPal-billionaire Peter Thiel for his support of the candidate.
But after Trump was elected they changed their tune, crawling on their bellies for a big corporate tax break, for even more H-1Bs, for any bribes they could cadge. And so they’ve been caught flatfooted by Trump’s latest move, people not to be taken seriously when it comes to defending alleged American principles.
However, the immigration crisis is a moment when you can potentially see the American experiment’s possible end coming into sight.
In Volker Ullrich’s Hitler: Ascent 1889-1939, he describes a moment near the end of the book when Germany left the company of the world’s civilized nations. It was the Night of Broken Glass when chancellor Hitler’s minions organized a nationwide attack on Jewish businesses leaving windows on the street, property destroyed and odious art and graffiti on shop fronts.
It was at that point that Hitler’s regime doomed itself.
Truth be told, the United States we’ve known for the last fifteen or more years has been steadily accumulating atrocities globally, showing its will and readiness to leave the maintaining of a decent civilization to other better places.
Finally, the popular story this weekend has focused on all the fine-looking and smart young people caught in the network of airport Homeland Security holding areas. Who, among all the civil servants involved, rebelled and took no part. Of this, we did not read.
While these are compelling news stories they still leave much of the approaching storm unseen. There is, by example, the war crime perpetrated by US Special Forces in Yemen this weekend. Organized and strategized by President Obama, left to Trump to greenlight, a strike which slaughtered civilians, including an eight-year old girl, for the sake of so-called intelligence-gathering.
You could also read commandos “fought and killed female fighters of an al-Qaida affiliate in the raid Saturday in Yemen in which a team member was killed, three were wounded and three injured, the Pentagon said Monday.”
“[A spokesperson] said the SEALs saw the women running to fighting positions as the team approached an enemy compound in Yemen’s interior.”
[1]. As predicted, the tech industry blows with the wind. By late in the day they were all ready to jump to the defense (but not jump too high) of their H-1Bs the world over. “Googlers” even staged a worldwide walkout, a big 2000 strong. A paltry amount in the scale of Alphabet finance — 2 million in matching money — was pledged to the cause by Google corporate. By contrast, Google corporate spent 5 billion on a corporate stock buyback in 2016 — a predator economy stunt of no social value but popular with American big businesses.
Why, even Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook had great grandparents who came from Europe! I bet you didn’t know that! My grandparents came from Hungary. I bet you didn’t know that, either!
They are part of a growing movement in rural America that immerses many young people in a culture — not just conservative news outlets but also home and church environments — that emphasizes contemporary conservative values. It views liberals as loathsome, misinformed and weak, even dangerous …
While many blame poor decisions by Mrs. Clinton for her loss, in an environment like this, the Democratic candidate probably didn’t matter. And the Democratic Party may not for generations to come. The Republican brand is strong in rural America — perhaps even strong enough to withstand a disastrous Trump presidency.
Rural conservatives feel that their world is under siege, and that Democrats are an enemy to be feared and loathed.
Loathsome and loathed. There are no stronger words.
An interesting sidenote is that the column’s writer, Robert Leonard, references J. C. Watts, an exCongressman.
That’s Julius Ceasar Watts, an African American, who was a star football player for the Oklahoma Sooners.
There are two social tides running here, both bad for the Democratic Party.
“The psychological consequences [of 1930] were overwhelming. The trying experiences of the post-war period of turmoil and hyperinflation had left many Germans without the emotional strength to deal with an economic crisis that exceeded everything that had come before. An apocalyptic mood of hopelessness began to take hold, even among those segments of the populace that were not primarily affected by the Depression. Faith in democratic institutions and democratic political parties dissolved, and anti-parliamentary sentiment, already rife in the Weimar Republic, was given a huge boost. Those in power appeared to have no solutions to the crisis, and the more helpless they seemed to be, the greater the demand became for a ‘strong man,’ a political messiah who would lead Germany out of economic misery and point the way towards renewed national greatness.”
“Hitler’s campaign speeches followed the same pattern. He began with a polemic against the Weimar ‘system’ which he blamed for Germany’s decline and decay, comparing Western parliamentarianism to a ‘worn-out tailcoat.’??? Democracy, Hitler claimed, was fundamentally unable to solve Germany’s problems ecause it privileged the rule of the majority over ‘“the authority of personality.’ Hitler then went after the other political parties, which, he claimed, represented only special interests and never the people as a whole. ‘Twelve years of unlimited rule by the old parliamentary parties have turned Germany into an object for exploitation and made it the laughing stock of the entire world,’ Hitler thundered. The NSDAP, he told his audience, represented a ‘new popular German movement’ that overcame class conflicts and the selfish interests of specific social castes: “There is only one movement that recognises the German people as a whole, rather than individual groups, and that movement is ours.??? In this respect, the NSDAP was a model for what Hitler had in store for all of Germany: the creation of a Volksgemeinschaft, a racially defined ethnic-popular community. This Hitler defined as a form of social ‘organisation that no longer knows proletarians, bourgeois, farmers, artisans, etc. but rather is constituted by people from all parts of Germany and all groups of [its] population.’ The idea of the Volksgemeinschaft seems to have particularly fascinated Hitler’s audience. He could count on storms of applause every time he invoked it. The concept was inseparably linked with the promise of national revival …”
From my POV, the Democratic Party is a chicken with its head cut off. I keep getting emails from allegedly local Democratic Party forces. They’re to sign up for meetings to plan “resistance.”
The nearest ones are in Orange County, laughable when you see where Pasadena is. And the numbers are worse. Would you drive from northeast of LA to Irvine to meet with four people to discuss how to form a “resistance” in California. How about eight?
I suspect we don’t need to meet and clutch pearls together in California.
The party does need to find people, and not just the old usuals, to go out to the places in the states where they’re loathed. There will be psychological casualties in the war but they’re going to have to take the punishment and reverse some of the hostility. And they better get to it soon.
“Other Democrats, Obama said, have not been as visible in rural parts of the country and as such, the party has lost touch with those voters,” the President told NPR over the weekend.
“What I am interested in is just developing a whole new generation of talent,??? he said.
I agree with him. The young eventually might get the country out of its crisis of leadership. Tall order for short people, though.
On the other hand, I’m 60, white and my demographic isn’t dying quite fast enough, sorry to tell you sir. And the majority went for the other guy, although I didn’t. And the next age tier down went for the other guy too. And they’re going to be alive even longer.
So keep the enthusiasm over the young. But at some point the Democrats are going to have to junk the idea that they can keep throwing people like me away.
Case study: Here’s Old king Bill
“President-elect Donald Trump ‘doesn’t know much,’ former President Bill Clinton told a local newspaper earlier this month, but ‘“one thing he does know is how to get angry, white men to vote for him,’ ??? reads Politico.
The guy who once won “angry white people” in a landslide doesn’t realize he’s gone upside down.
Only Hitler, apparently, can speak truth to ex-power. Why? Because he’s Hitler.