Trump's Card

[Uncle Ethan]

Where are all the fuckwits who said Hillary would be worse?

[Lurgee]

Can’t remember if it’s a James Kelman or Tom Leonard poem, just a very short dry piece on a guy slipping on a factory gangway, falling into a vat of acid, his workmate pushing him under with a pole. Or Seamus Heaney on Harland and Wolff, where stout proddy hammers might well rain upon any taig down below. Those were the days, before ‘elf and safety innit.

It's a James Kelman short story (very short), called Acid (unsurprisingly) and the guy who falls into the acid is (I think) the older man's son.

[WOM]

In its entirety.

In this factory in the north of England acid was essential. It was contained in large vats. Gangways were laid above them. Before these gangways were completely safe a young man fell into a vat feet first. His screams of agony were heard all over the department. Except for one old fellow the large body of men was so horrified that for a time not one of them could move. In an instant this old fellow who was also the young man’s father had clambered up and along the gangway carrying a big pole. Sorry Hughie, he said. And then he ducked the young man below the surface. Obviously the old fellow had had to do this because only the head and shoulders – in fact, that which had been seen above the acid – was all that remained of the young man.

[Satchmo Distel]

Churn is the new normal. Revolving door is the new normal. Whether that's sustainable in an era where normal is a synonym for fucked, who knows? I don't see how Bolton can still be there by the end of the year given that he will upset the Russians, whereupon Trump pulls the plug. Almost as if Trump enjoys the hiring and firing dramas more than the actual running of things.

[ad hoc]

Bolton is described by John Nichols as "The most reckless and consistently wrongheaded extremist in American public life"

If Bolton is still in post by the end of the summer there will have been at least one nuclear attack on someone. Probably Iran

[sw2borshch]

To be fair, the vat of acid story is also told around Teesside as a bloke falling into molten steel.

Our dad also a tale about a fella losing a finger at the docks, being given it back by a colleague then hoying it into the Tees as, 'it's no bloody use to me now'. Our dad and his dad also lost part of the same finger working as stevedores weeks apart. Neither kept it.

[Gangster Octopus]

To be fair, the vat of acid story is also told around Teesside as a bloke falling into molten steel.

And in South Yorkshire.

[sw2borshch]

So Satchmo, it's 'but, narrative', then?

[WOM]

My dad was a tool and die maker, and half the guys he worked with were missing fingers from stamping press machines. One guy lost both hands because he taped down the dual-safety switch on his press (Meant to ensure that you and your partner had both hands free of the machine before the press came down. Apparently this slowed up your rhythm....).

[San Bernardhinault]

Oh, good grief. Trump is threatening to veto the spending bill and shut down the government because he's sad that he's not getting money for his border wall.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

My dad was a tool and die maker, and half the guys he worked with were missing fingers from stamping press machines. One guy lost both hands because he taped down the dual-safety switch on his press (Meant to ensure that you and your partner had both hands free of the machine before the press came down. Apparently this slowed up your rhythm....).

See, this, this here is the problem with all this bring back the golden age of the rustbelt nostalgia bollocks. Industrial jobs in the post war era were often incredibly dangerous or bad for your long term health, and the pay you got for them was less a wage, than inadequate compensation for the risks you were taking. Also a substantial proportion of the the jobs at peak employment largely involved lifting or carrying things, and were put at terminal risk by the invention of the forklift. I mean This is the future of the steel industry in the first world. It employs Fourteen people, where once it would have employed a thousand. It's something that kept me a bit distant from the story of Frank Sobotka in the second season of the wire. He was looking back nostalgically to an era before the invention of the cargo container, when people spent all day slowly unloading a cargo ship by hand. If Sobotka is 50, he's talking about the port of his childhood, rather then the port of his working life.

Something that is missing from the narrative of the coal miners strike and Thatcher, is that the Postwar Labour govts were incredibly enthusiastic about Nuclear power, because it would allow them to shut down the coal mines. There was no-one less romantic about the reality of working down a coal mine than a coal miner, or the child of a coal miner. Their plan would have been to shift from Coal fired plants to Nuclear, much earlier. It was the failure of nuclear that meant that coal hung on into the 80's when gas came along. And while the post war Labour Govts were motivated by the desire to free people from the tyranny of the mine best summed up in this Ewan mcColl song. Except their plan was that when Schooldays were over, you would go to college, and do something a bit less awful, a bit more productive than hitting a rock with a hammer and inhaling benzene dust. Unfortunately Nuclear didn't happen, and there wasn't a managed transition away from the mines, instead they carried on long past the point of economic viability, and instead of helping people transition to a more advanced and modern economy, the Govt literally declared war on them, and burned their economy to the ground, and sowed the ground with salt. Now in america coal mining is largely done by ripping the top off a mountain and scooping out the coal inside, and you can do it with seven people. Ensuring maximum profitability while guaranteeing maximum environmental damage.

[San Bernardhinault]

More holy fuck stuff. Trump apparently considered sacking John Kelly and becoming his own chief of staff.

It's so fucking ridiculous that I can't believe this isn't an April 1st story.

[WOM]

TAB makes a good point. There's immense nostalgia over here centred around "remember when we used to make stuff in this country?" They wax romantic over kettles and toasters and paint trays being manufactured. They gloss over the grinding repetition, mind-numbing boredom and repetitive-strain injuries that came from doing the same manual thing over and over again. And the mists of time stretch this heyday out for 'generations', when it probably lasted from the mid 1930s until the mid 1970s before becoming closer to what it is now. We still make things here, of course. Just not the bread and butter stuff that's been outsourced to China and sold through Walmart.

[anton pulisov]

It's all relative. If you are 64 and you are serving burgers at McDonalds, then yeah, you are going to look back with fondness to when you had a permanent contract, were paid a proper wage and pension fund for a job that produced real products.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Trump is signing the spending bill, after all.

May even be answering questions.

[Gerontophile]

There is an hour long interview (minus commercials) with Stormy Daniels on "60 minutes" on Sunday.

Expect no change.

Trump live has just busted into "The Price is Right" about the spending bill.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Trump really enjoying talking about the wonderful extra war planes he's buying.

Who could have seen this coming, eh?

[Gerontophile]

Does he always have a stiff neck?

[Tubby Isaacs]

Can we expect Trump to go anti-vax again, or has he forgotten about that?

[Tubby Isaacs]

Interesting stuff about rural America by a sociologist.

https://www.vox.com/2018/3/13/170538...ial-resentment

Lots of depressing stuff. Most of all

We found town managers and elected officials who were frustrated over the generalized anger toward Washington because it inhibited practical solutions from being pursued. These officials knew they had to secure grants from the federal government, for instance, but found it difficult to do that when local elections were won by far-right candidates.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Heh, and tell me was WOM Sr disappointed when WOM Jr abandoned the concept of good hard work, for fannying about in an office, or was that WOM Sr's most hearfelt wish?

An interesting point of comparison is the car industry. In the late seventies British Leyland employed 126,000 people making and had the capacity to make a million cars a year, though in practice it never came close to that, because these cars were relatively a lot more expensive back then, for some reason, but they still had nearly half of UK sales. Now Nissan in sunderland employ 7,000 to make half a million cars a year, and they are running at full tilt. Now this figure obscures that there are an awful lot more people employed at earlier stages of production in a lot of different countries, including in the UK. but this is the way things are. Cars are a lot better now in every conceivable respect, Cars are a lot cheaper now relatively speaking, people are richer, and so they sell more of them. The thing that is needed to complete this circle, is that the Nissan plant should then be paying a lot of tax on its profits, which the Govt then invests in the area, to help people who aren't working in the factory, to have 21st century jobs. That's where it breaks down. Companies pay no tax, and the underinvestment in the area leads to economic desolation.

The problem with this sort of Nostalgia, aside from being toxic bollocks, is that it takes its eyes off the prize. The aim isn't to have as many people as possible employed doing similar things to what people were doing 50 years ago, but to have the maximum people necessary to produce the maximum amount, as efficiently and cheaply as possible, and that industry then generates the Economic Activity, and Tax revenue to drive growth in alternative industries. All of Trumps coal and steel bollocks is like someone in the 50's running on a platform of bringing horsedrawn buggies back.

About a year ago I was chatting to John Fitzgerald, who is the son of Garret (our former taoiseach) and the now retired head of the Economic Social research institute, and he was chatting away about how he was doing work on the impact of education on employment in Ireland over time. And he said that the two big things he was finding was that the Irish Economic miracle starting in 1995, happened at the point when the majority of people leaving the workforce left school at 15, while the majority of people entering the workforce had degrees, and that this change was something that happened less suddenly in europe and north america in the 1950's and 1960's, which in turn lead to the two decades of sustained economic growth, which ultimately tailed off when that effect was diluted.

The Second thing was that having a workforce with a much higher average level of educational attainment, meant that employment bounced back an awful lot quicker after this recession than after our fun times in the eighties. If you had entered work at 16 and done an apprenticeship, in a very real sense you were putting all your eggs in the one basket, and hoping that this factory would still be going in much the same way in 50 years time. When that factory closed in the recession, the chances of another one opening that did the same thing was minuscule, and now you were going to be long term unemployed until you retired. (I think this is the basic premise of the Last of the Summer Wine. They're not retired at the beginning. They've just all lost their jobs and aren't going to ever get another one) Whereas if you have a degree, well one pharmaceutical company is much the same as another pharmaceutical company.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

It's all relative. If you are 64 and you are serving burgers at McDonalds, then yeah, you are going to look back with fondness to when you had a permanent contract, were paid a proper wage and pension fund for a job that produced real products.

But that's a matter of inadequate modern labour laws, inadequate govt investment to generate new types of employment, and inadequate investment in unemployment support and retraining, leading to a massive loss of human capital. The answer to these problems is not to vote for the people responsible, and who intend to make all of these problems much much worse. No matter how often they say "Hey, remember the good old days when the sun shone, your knees didn't hurt and you had all your hair? well we remember them too, and we'll bring them back."

[WOM]

Heh, and tell me was WOM Sr disappointed when WOM Jr abandoned the concept of good hard work, for fannying about in an office, or was that WOM Sr's most hearfelt wish?

My father told me, flat out, that I'd be going to university. It wasn't really up for discussion. He had no desire to see me working in a greasy toolroom for 40 years.

I probably mentioned this years ago, but when he was dying of lung cancer, he said "Yeah, it was probably the smoking. But it might have been because we used to machine enormous Kodak movie camera lens-housings out of big blocks of asbestos."

[Tubby Isaacs]

The thing that is needed to complete this circle, is that the Nissan plant should then be paying a lot of tax on its profits, which the Govt then invests in the area, to help people who aren't working in the factory, to have 21st century jobs. That's where it breaks down. Companies pay no tax, and the underinvestment in the area leads to economic desolation.

There's some interesting stuff in here on UK corporation tax.

https://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/9207

The UK, it seems, has a low headline corporation tax rate by international standards, but other places are more generous in giving tax allowances for new investment. That sounds like we've got the worst of both worlds to me.

Our debate on this sort of stuff is hopeless. If we created better incentives to invest, the papers would be full of "X had £500m sales and paid only <insert number> in tax". Politicians will promise to crack down on them and end "corporate welfare". Some of the same politicians will the next week be moaning how they can't give out "state aid".

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Is that basically the most canadian thing anyone has ever said? Wry understatement really seems to be the big thing up there.