If you’re familiar with the lyrics from Bruce Springsteen’s song Youngstown, you might have had the same experience I had while reading Farai Chideya’s latest piece for FiveThirtyEight. The article looks at what’s happening along the eastern border of Ohio where support for Trump is strong. As a point of departure, it features Allan Banner, an Ohio construction worker who recently went back to work operating heavy machinery.
Banner, 66, grew up on a farm in Liberty Township, Ohio, between Youngstown and Warren, that his family has owned for nearly 200 years.
Here’s how Springsteen’s song begins:
Here in northeast Ohio, back in eighteen-o-three
James and Danny Heaton found the ore that was linin’ Yellow Creek
They built a blast furnace here along the shore
And they made the cannon balls that helped the Union win the war
Long roots in eastern Ohio.
A sense of rootedness in the Mahoning Valley community is connected to how Banner views work. He said his great-great-grandfather cut timbers to support the roofs of the coal mines; his father and grandfather worked in the steel industry. Banner and his brother worked union jobs in road construction and rebuilding or tearing down steel mills.
Here’s the next verse of Springsteen’s song:
Well my daddy worked the furnaces, kept ’em hotter than hell
I come home from ‘Nam worked my way to scarfer, a job that’d suit the devil as well
Well taconite coke and limestone fed my children and made my pay
Them smokestacks reachin’ like the arms of God into a beautiful sky of soot and clay
This is the history of the region for people like Allan Banner, and both he and Mary Theis [an 81 year-old entrepreneur also featured in the article] describe well what’s happened to it.
Trumbull County is “a great area because the cost of living is very low,” [Banner] said, “but it’s very low because there’s not great jobs here.”
…“When [Trump] talks about negotiating, I know what he means because I’ve been able to negotiate so many deals for people,” [Theis] said. “I know it’s never going to be the same with General Motors or Packard, but with Donald Trump negotiating on trade, maybe we’ll get some of these jobs back.”
Her grandchildren went to college and are doing well. But she worries about other young people in the area, saying, “For some of those who didn’t go to college, who are in the trades, they need jobs, too.”
An analysis by the Pew Center found that the area lost 42% of its manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2014, and the result has been an increase in low-income adults.
Here’s how Springsteen described this area back in 1995 when he wrote Youngstown.
Well my daddy come on the Ohio works when he come home from World War Two
Now the yard’s just scrap and rubble, he said “Them big boys did what Hitler couldn’t do.”
Yeah these mills they built the tanks and bombs that won this country’s wars
We sent our sons to Korea and Vietnam, now we’re wondering what they were dyin’ forFrom the Monongahela valley to the Mesabi iron range
To the coal mines of Appalachia, the story’s always the same
Seven hundred tons of metal a day, now sir you tell me the world’s changed
Once I made you rich enough, rich enough to forget my name
Springsteen has long been a tribune of the overlooked working class. His father was chronically underemployed and found jobs over the years in factories, a rug mill, as a prison guard and even drove a cab.
Of course, Springsteen hasn’t concluded from his experiences that the folks of eastern Ohio should seek salvation from the Republican Party or certainly someone like Donald Trump. The only time I’ve managed to see Springsteen in concert he was playing a free concert in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art to help the candidacy of Barack Obama.
Unfortunately, as Chideya discovered, the Trump supporters blame the wrong people and things for their plight.
Banner supports Trump because he believes the candidate will be the best at “getting the government out of the way” of business, and dealing with immigration.
“If we weren’t giving welfare to people that are coming in across the Rio Grande or other places,” he said, “then they’re not going to come except those that are actually coming to work.”
…The International Union of Operating Engineers Local 66 covers part of Ohio and western Pennsylvania. The union is officially supporting Clinton, but like many of its members, Banner is supporting Trump.
“A whole lot of my union brothers have said they are supporting Donald Trump,” said Banner, who has taken three years of college classes in accounting, but does not have a bachelor’s degree. “They like what Trump has to say; he doesn’t hold back.”
He also says he thinks Trump will eliminate some of the environmental regulations that have affected industries in the region. And he says that, although some union members are worried about Trump’s mixed record on using union labor, he doesn’t share those concerns because he believes in Trump’s entrepreneurial success.
Now, I think there’s a lesson in here for Democrats. These voters ought to be their voters, but they’re drifting into the arms of a demagogue who peddles hate. If Trump wins Ohio it will be because these voters put him over the top. And it’s not enough to call them stupid or racist. At some level, they know who is and who is not working to protect their jobs and improve their communities, and the results speak for themselves. More of the same isn’t going to work for them, so they’re throwing caution to the wind.
Now, Hillary Clinton has thought about this. For example, you can go to her website and find a very detailed plan for revitalizing coal communities. But, for whatever reasons (Benghazi, email, pneumonia), it isn’t breaking through.
Honestly, though, compare what she’s offering to Trump’s plan to build a wall and tell me which candidate is more likely to improve the future for these communities.
Maybe, just maybe, a ‘very detailed plan’ isn’t sufficient to sell anything, ever, and never has been in the history of humans.
Maybe we need to actually appeal to emotions.
(And if they believe Trump will help them more than Clinton, they might not be stupid, but they are rubes.)
She needs to declare that, if elected, she will seize ownership of the commanding heights of the economy, in finance, production, and distribution, in the name of the workers.
The rest is just technique.
The problem is we really don’t know how to do transition assistance.
I am sorry, DXM, but I do not believe that HRC can do that. She cannot even make that promise because she is deeply in debt to the Big Corps, and if she did make it very few people would believe her. If she actually tried to do it, the sitting Permanent Government…Republicans and Democrats in the federal legislature plus the big opinion makers in the media…would treat her as an outlier and a traitor to their cause. Her presidency would sink like a stone in a rancid pond. No amount of “technique” would keep it afloat, let alone “seize ownership of the commanding heights of the economy, in finance, production, and distribution, in the name of the workers.”
Yer dreamin’.
It’s a nice dream, I will admit.
But…just like Obama’s “Peace Presidency”…it ain’t gonna happen.
Watch.
AG
Hillary is Wall Street, and Hillary is Big India, and Hillary is all the offshoring you have ever heard of. She has taken millions for her own pocket from them, and the Clinton family will be billionaires after The Glorious Restoration, in which Queen Hillary will return from Exile, to restore the Rightful Heir to the Thrown. To keep the money, the pimping will continue.
No American job is safe from Big India with Hillary running the outsourcing pipeline.
Yes, Big India, forcing American companies to outsource jobs and forcing Congress to increase the number of H1B visas. That’s not how this happened.
Since you don’t seem to have a fucking clue, Hillary is the one who called herself the Senator from Punjab. She is planning on giving green cards to all foreign STEM grads, while our kids get jobs at Starbucks. WAKE THE FUCK UP!
I didn’t write about Hillary and I don’t care if you vote for her or not.
Policy is something I’m willing to discuss and I’m open to changing my mind about the effects of immigration (not just illegal right?) on the working class provided you cool down a bit. Otherwise, I’m wasting my time.
If we’re educating foreign STEM students doesn’t it make sense that they stay here and contribute?
For some reason kids are not gravitating to the trades jobs you’ve mentioned. Why is that? It’s not purely about the competition.
We educate hundreds of thousands of US STEM workers.
Take my son’s former roommate Dan. He graduated from a major midwest university in architecture. He finished in 2014. He is now in restaurant management.
Gee, you think “Why would an architect go into restaurant management?” Because the jobs in many areas are given to H-1Bs. There are websites where H-1B petitions can be checked. However, it is difficult to get “architect” narrowed down – it is a term used for building architects and for computer system architects.
That being said, in 2015, there were
14,785
architect H-1B requests
IN FUCKING 2015.
Not all of those were satisfied. But a lot of them were. And my son’s roommate did not get one of the jobs filled by H-1Bs.
Hundreds of thousands of jobs.
And here is the kicker. The US GOVERNMENT GIVES TAX BREAKS TO COMPANIES THAT HIRE OPT (foreign worker extensions to college, kind a baby H-1B) and H-1Bs. They don’t pay certain taxes, which are effectively reductions in employer costs. Plus the H-1B is an indentured servant – they cannot quit or move to other employers. There is a pretend “requirement” to pay “prevailing wages”. Of course, the “prevailing wage” in CA is about 50% of the prevailing wage. It’s a big pile of crap. It’s a huge lie of a program.
They don’t hire H-1B scabs because they are good. They are hired because they are cheap.
Yeah, this makes sense although based on the idea that it affects many more people than just your son’s roommate.
I think we should probably restrict the numbers of international students we accept and reduce the H-1B pool.
The argument used to be that we were educating too many foreign students and then losing them when they returned to their countries. I agree that we should certainly prioritize citizens when it comes down to jobs and who gets them .
We certainly agree on that.
At my alma mater, U of I-UC, they have made a major bet on Chinese. About 20% of the undergrads are now Chinese. This is up from 2 % 15 years ago. Who lost in the process? IL residents. 18% fewer students from IL now go to U of Illinois in 2016 than did in 2000. That many thousands of students.
Supposedly this has held down tuition. What a huge crock of shit. Tuition is $10K/year, and is more expensive than at some private schools. That’s instate.
Here’s another shocker – I haven’t evidence for this, but I have heard that foreign students get priority for on-campus jobs, since they can’t work in town. So, you can’t even get a work-study job if you are an IL resident. It goes to some Chinese.
My daughter roomed with a Chinese girl in her freshman year. Everything was great for Sem 1 – we had the girl to our house for Thanksgiving, etc. In Sem 2, the Chinese all became insular, and reverted to standard Chinese contempt for Americans, Japanese, Koreans, anyone/thing not Chinese. None of the Chinese were talking to their American roomies at the end. None have remained in touch.
That’s the acculturation working.
Twas ever thus, dataguy. You are a cliche.
How impressive. You have found a new name to use. So, you could call me an asshole, or a racist, or a bigot, or a Know Nothing.
They are all ad hominims. You have a slightly elevated version of the argumentum ad hominim approach.
It’s still an invalid rhetorical device. You can’t discuss the issues I discuss, so you call me a name.
You and Trump are on the same level. Congratulations.
Look, all I’m saying is that you’re representing a type. A very recognizable type that has arisen in reaction to every wave of immigration into this country. They speak the same even when separated by a century and a half.
Now, maybe those folks had a point that Chinese railroad workers were arrogant and insular and unassimilated and taking jobs from Americans. Maybe they should have cut off Chinese immigration, as they eventually did.
But let’s be clear that we’ve been here before and heard your arguments before. And if you want to be a mold-stamp reactionary, that’s fine. We can debate your reasons, just as we debated them in the 1850’s.
French labor has been in the streets on and off this yr over Hollande’s neoliberal attack on Centralized Bargaining. He has made a crispy critter of himself politically, but I would guess he’ll get a soft landing.
Centralized Bargaining preserves the wage income in a category across an industry, preventing a Walmart from using selected hires to reduce an $800 job to a $400 job.
This would allow immigration (which is the pillars, plural, of our civilization) without tears. It would not stop underground/off the books abuses, but it would be a big step.
Where is that in the progressive states?
○ Donald Trump and the Resurgence of the Know Nothings
That late California chapter of KNs grew from the use of Chinese construction workers as strikebreakers–quite common on railways and in mines in the 19th Century.
In 1886, they proposed a briefly popular platform calling mainly for the exclusion of Chinese and other Asians from industrial employment.
The way to restrict the number of international students is to tie federal student loans accreditation to schools keeping their populations of international students below a certain percentage.
We also have a problem with foreign nationals buying up properties in our cities thereby driving the housing prices way up. That is an issue, however, that will probably need to be solved at the state and local level though through some sort of legislation that requires local residency to buy local properties.
Yes, this bothers me as the purpose of state schools should primarily be to educate state residents. It seems schools want the higher tuition from international students. This isn’t good policy.
I think foreign nationals are only part of the rise in housing prices. We should be reforming zoning policies to build more housing.
The problem is that many state universities have now discovered that foreign students pay full freight, and often do not complain.
They are often found to be 1) cheating frequently and 2) incompetent and 3) unable to speak the language of instruction (English) well enough to succeed.
But they displace state residents.
25% of my HS class went to U of I-UC (flagship state school). When my 2 children went there (2004-2008), 5% of their class went. That’s wrong. The purpose of a Land-Grant University is to provide instruction to the residents of the state, not the resident of China.
So far you have explained that Chinese students, as a group, are
insular,
arrogant,
cheaters,
incompetent,
monolingual,
hold contempt for non-Chinese,
don’t speak to non-Chinese,
These are AS A GROUP according to your posts. As in ‘all’.
All anecdotal, no links on any of your posts.
No fucking wonder your daughters room mate was not speaking to her after coming over for Thanksgiving.
.
that left a mark.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/heavy-recruitment-of-chinese-students-sows-discord-on-u-s-campuses-14582
24413
“At first glance, a huge wave of Chinese students entering American higher education seems beneficial for both sides. International students, in particular from China, are clamoring for American credentials, while U.S. schools want their tuition dollars, which can run two to three times the rate paid by in-state students.
On the ground, American campuses are struggling to absorb the rapid and growing influx–a dynamic confirmed by interviews with dozens of students, college professors and counselors.
Students such as Mr. Shao are finding themselves separated from their American peers, sometimes through choice. Many are having a tough time fitting in and keeping up with classes. School administrators and teachers bluntly say a significant portion of international students are ill prepared for an American college education, and resent having to amend their lectures as a result.
In a recent computer engineering class, Mr. Shao sat quietly in the back of a large lecture hall, dividing his time between Chinese social media on his smartphone and a lecture by Dave Nicol. He doesn’t remember ever asking a question in class.”
The irrational and prejudicial, even parochial, Democratic notions of easy assimilation are basically evidence of stupidity.
“Rebecca Karl, a professor of Chinese history at New York University, puts it more starkly: She says Chinese students can pose a “burden” on her lectures, which she needs to modify for their benefit.
Many Chinese students “are woefully underprepared,” she says. “They have very little idea what it means to be analytical about a text. They find it very difficult to fulfill basic requirements of analytical thinking or writing.”
The unhappiness appears to be mutual. Lingyun Zhang, 25 years old, came from Beijing to study business at Oregon State University. She landed in an accounting class with 11 other Chinese students and four Americans.”
One of my colleagues, active in the anti-H-1B area, is married to a CHinese woman. He speaks fluent Mandarin. He is unwilling and resistant to the liberal stupidity of the greatness of all foreign workers. He teaches CS and knows that he must REDUCE the level of his lectures for the Chinese. The H-1Bs are NOT the “best and brightest”. They are cheap indentured servants who cannot ask for raises.
“Other schools, such as Miami University in Ohio, have considered raising some English-language requirements to ensure students have strong enough listening and speaking skills to engage in classroom discussions.
That strategy, though, has seen mixed results elsewhere. In 2012, the University of Pittsburgh raised its minimum score on the Test of English as a Foreign Language, or Toefl, from 80 to 100.
Juan J. Manfredi, vice provost for Undergraduate Studies at Pitt, says he decided to make the change after meeting with a student who had been struggling academically and discovered he couldn’t communicate with the student without a translator. The result was a 25% decline in the number of international students who enrolled.”
Chinese work and socialize with other Chinese. They don’t improve their English. We considered hiring an Indian guy, but since he basically couldn’t follow conversations in normal English, I declined to offer him the position. As an academic, I listen to a lot of Chinese and Indians. 50% should not be here, due to their inability to speak and understand English.
Thanks. Unlike you, I am able to google and find stuff. I dumped a lot of stuff at the bottom of the blog comment section.
The laziness and intellectual non-rigor of your “holy foreigner” position is kind of appalling, really.
The lust for international students sometimes gets obscene.
“In state after state, one of the ways public colleges and universities are balancing their budgets is by aiming to admit more students from out of state (who are charged much higher tuition rates). In theory, this means more revenue for the entire university, although critics have warned about weakening the ties between public universities and their own states.
In California, where public higher education has experienced cut after cut, the choices are particularly difficult. For the spring semester of 2013, the California State University has told campus leaders they may not admit any Californian students to graduate programs. Given that tuition covers only a fraction of the costs of these students’ education, the university said it couldn’t afford them.
But the system said its campuses could admit out-of-state students, since they didn’t cost the state money. Many campuses simply adopted the rule across their institutions, but as the Bay Area News Group first reported, Cal State’s East Bay campus decided to give departments the option to admit applicants from out of state (primarily international students) while rejecting Californians seeking to enter programs in January.”
So, in other words, CA residents WERE SPECIFICALLY BARRED from entry into grad school in CA schools.
Put the emphasis and dollars more on educating our own students. Some technical majors like computer science are impacted at both community colleges and 4 year universities. This means that all qualified applicants cannot get into the major, even if they are students in good standing in the university because there is further competition to snag the limited number of places.
You have NO FUCKING IDEA about who is going to the trades. Have you EVER even TALKED to a trades worker? I knew many in 2009, when we were fixing up our house in IL.
They didn’t like illegals. Because illegals steal their jobs.
“I’m not in the trades, but I talked to some seven years ago'”.
Now I will generalize those conversations to include ALL tradesmen, everywhere.
God, the bullshit that gets posted here these days.
I’ve been ‘in the trades’ for 45+ years. And I’m still working.
.
I am in an area experiencing a building boom. I know several contractors. They are having a hard time recruiting and keeping people to do hard labor–roofing, hand excavation, etc. Ditto for folks we know who own or manage restaurants. No one wants the scut work. Recent immigrants, legal and illegal, are desperate for work and willing to work. I see this every day. It’s not merely anecdotal.
Big India has got her own problems with neoliberalism being forced on them by Modi.
On 2 September 2016, an estimated 150 million[1] to 180 million[2] Indian public sector workers went on a 24-hour nation-wide general strike against Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s plans for increasing privatization and other economic policies.[3] A total of ten trade unions participated.[4][5] Many government-run locations and transportation services were closed. The strikers also protested in favour of social security, universal healthcare, and an increased minimum wage.(wiki)
The seventeenth general strike since India adopted its new economic policy in 1991 – has been the largest ever. That Modi has been willing to use guns on citizens, too. Worrisome.
Wow, Davis, you haven’t said that a thousand times before! It’s almost like you repeat the same tired snark every time you don’t want to engage an idea … which is always! Woooo! It’s a good thing Boo is cracking down on trolls, huh?
I’ll admit, though, I like that to you, the very concept of ‘appealing to emotions’ is the equivalent of a wild leftie screen. Unpossible! There’s no way that a professional political campaign with $300 million can appeal to emotion of all things! No amount of money can buy unicorn-flavored gummybears, you hippy!
Hey Steggeles, what’s this all about. How silly, really. And who are these trolls ‘Boo is cracking down on’? Do you have a private, direct line to the owner of this blog. I love the fawners here who are so tuned into BooMan. Flattery will get you nowhere. ‘Deplorables’. The lady really knocked the ball out of the park with that piece of startling arrogance.
Now now, I can personally attest he has engaged non-sarcastically at least once on this blog.
Only if it’s about the politics of Maine.
Yeah, Truman tried something like that.
Didn’t work out so well.
A very good piece on Clinton’s Coal plan in the New York Times focused on the effectiveness of the money set aside for transition assistance for tobacco farmers that came out of the smoking lawsuits.
It didn’t really work very well.
About 30 years ago I was at a K School forum on Youngstown Ohio. The movie “Shout Youngstown” was shown, and the Robert Reich gave a talk.
At the time he was a neo-liberal, and he talked about the need for transition assistance for steel workers.
On no issue have I become more skeptical than transition assistance. Sounds great – and well meaning liberal wonk types push at solution to problems created by trade.
But to someone with a family to support transition assistance just it is a joke.
Since the China MFN deal we have lost 35% of all manufacturing jobs in this country. Many were union, those that replaced them were not.
It is actually an extremely important topic, and one liberals should be devoting a lot of time to.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/29/us/politics/coal-country-is-wary-of-hillary-clintons-pledge-to-hel
p.html?_r=0
“transition assistance”/displaced worker “re-training” programs, i.e., disappointing (and to nobody more than displaced workers who complete such programs and still can’t land a job at the end, even in the field they just “re-trained” for). Think I heard reporting along those lines fairly recently somewhere on public radio.
Which exposes problem
a. excluding (e.g., from cost/benefit analyses and/or the bottom line) as “externalities” many real, significant, actual costs (e.g., ecological, human health impacts); and
b. unquestioningly accepting the dogma of Endless Economic Growth, which is unsustainable in the long term because whenever it’s been achieved in the short term, this has depended on spending down the legacy of our natural capital instead of living sustainably on the available “ecosystem services” produced by healthily functioning ecosystems. But at least as fundamental as that is
5. the bass-ackwards organizing principle of our entire economic system, wherein humans are seen to exist to fulfill the needs of economic entities instead of the economic system (and societal and governing systems beyond that) existing for the benefit of actual humans (and only valid to the extent they advance human well-being . . . for all humans comprising the society, not just a minuscule minority). I’m convinced meaningful work (as opposed to a “job”) — work an individual can see inherent value in and take satisfaction from doing well — is a basic human need, like nourishment and shelter. But our economic system doesn’t recognize that, and our societies provide little opportunity for fulfilling that basic need (and the less so the more “advanced” they are) for a large portion of humanity. (It was not always so.)
Or, to quote Winwood/Traffic again:
[The “Auto Format” function here sure isn’t very smart! Except at defeating attempts to make it format reasonably, that is. At that, it’s genius!]
Got my degree in economics and geography, can confirm.
I would add:
-that the entire system is driven by the vanity and and mind-blowingly extreme levels of greed of a small group of people who essentially consider people like you and I to be little better than more useful cockroaches.
-the simple, obvious answer raising the international floor of the cost of doing business. Real labor and environmental protections could take the place of companies’ ability to sue governments to make sure those same costs don’t exist.
-the group-think against this is incredibly calcified. The history of the institutions involved is deeply rooted in the class history of those who benefit the most from the current arrangement.
-ultimately this is held in place by the gun, in places where the work has gone, under conditions that are by and large not significantly better than slavery in the grand sweep of things.
O/T: always liked that Frank Herbert quote for your signature line. Have read the Dune trilogy, but not that one. You’d recommend?
Please comment more often.
I think the basic problem is that since giving up on the post-war full employment policies, the solution of government providing demand for labour is to far out left to consider. If the government employed people to for example build and repair infrastructure or re-tool societies to reduce carbon emissions, you would also have a clear picture of jobs you need the government to re-train for. And how many you need.
But since the government providing demand is to far out there, the rest of the tools just don’t work.
There is a very real connection between these “retraining grants” from taxpayer sources (fed and state) and the open scandal of the for-profit tech school market.
Retraining is a huge huge con. First, the retraining is almost always for IT and other STEM sector jobs. H-1Bs, OPT, and other visas have devastated that sector. Second, the retraining puts you at the bottom of the ladder, if you can even get a job. You might have been making a middle-class middle income, but with retraining, you go back to the income tier of the college grad. That sucks.
Besides the main thing that job visas do is allow employers to replace older workers with younger ones. If you get retrained, you are usually an older worker. No jobs for older workers. It’s the modern way.
Billmon:
“Neoliberalism firmly in the saddle” for electoral politics until voters in the New Dem coalition experiences the same fate of all those Old Dem white, working class males. It’s all just another version of divide and rule and exploit.
Your link to Farai Chideya wasn’t correct. Here it is for those who read beyond the post.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trumps-base-is-blue-collar-his-voters-looking-for-a-return-to-be
tter-times/
HRC’s plan sounds a lot like the all the other failed plans at least on the surface and it’s going to get watered down and fucked by congress. So if I’m in their position I don’t see how it would particularly help me.
Kick out cheap labor and labor gets more scarce and more valuable. That’s what Trumps plan would tell me in their shoes.
Martin,
Am curious what your thoughts are on this interview Ezra Klein did with Arlie Hochschild.
http://player.fm/series/the-ezra-klein-show/arlie-hochschild-on-how-america-feels-to-trump-supporter
s
Just finished listening to it and something about her perspective seemed naive and needed some push-back….and yet there was another aspect that rang very true – the need to see our political enemies (now) as human beings.
I keep thinking of Wendell Berry’s thinking about how we typically see people too often in generalized terms. It’s short-sighted to to not see the particulars – the human individuality there. Arlie in the interview speaks to that.
It interests me how to fight the political battle to make this country a better one while also dealing with the seemingly opposed tension of treating our conservative (and often offensive) neighbors as human beings.
“And it’s not enough to call them stupid or racist. At some level, they know who is and who is not working to protect their jobs and improve their communities, and the results speak for themselves.”
These two sentences are contradictory, BooMan. As you develop elsewhere in the post, they’re supporting Trump because they don’t know “who is and who is not working to protect their communities.”
No one really is, at least on a serious enough level. They’re mainly represented by Republicans, especially since 2010, and the Dems have limited ability or appetite to serve people who don’t support them. They got health care. They haven’t gotten much else.
O good god. Neither one will do a damn thing that will actually help these people. This drivel has got to stop.
Several commenters above remarked that the Democratic Party is doing nothing for white working-class voters. Yet as Digby has remarked repeatedly, Democrats retain lots of working-class support when you consider the US working class overall. There is a racial/ethnic aspect here, obviously. So I’m not sure what people here are thinking…I doubt Hillary Clinton is going to propose programs aimed at white working-class communities in eastern Ohio, say, that are somehow race-conscious. She is, as Booman notes, offering proposals. Trump is offering “I’ll kick their asses”.
I just looked up US Census Bureau data for Youngstown and learned that the town is pretty much half white, half black, while in Ohio as a whole, the black population is about 11 percent. More data look up: Obama won about 62% in Mahoning County in both 2008 and 2012. Now, I haven’t found anything about the racial composition of the voting population there, but if I extrapolate from the overall census figures to say that voters are roughly 50% white, 50% black, and suppose that Barack Obama won a huge majority of Mahoning County black voters, similar to the rest of the US, then I would have to conclude that Mr. Obama only won something like 25% of the white vote there. Put another way, if I’ve used the correct demographic data and done the math correctly, then I have to conclude that the white population of Mahoning County voted overwhelmingly for the GOP presidential candidate in both 2008 and 2012.
There seems little doubt that black people in Youngstown have shared in the economic downturn. Yet unless they’re radically different than the overall African American population, they’re not on the Trumpmobile.
Maybe the deal is just that angry white people want to kick asses. Maybe they’ve been “Reagan Democrats” for awhile.
Damn. I did screw up something: Mahoning County overall has a significantly lower percentage of African Americans. A quick recalculation indicates that Obama got about 50% of the white vote in the county.
Digby doesn’t know SHIT about working class voters. She is nothing but a granola smoking limousine liberal. You know, she is what Phil Ochs talked about in “Love me, I’m a liberal”. She is a complete fool.
I don’t know what it will take to shake up the Dem establishment so they truly pay attention to the needs of the blue collar union workers. IMO, the Dems are going to see defeat in this election in some states that still have the remnants of a blue collar worker group. The Dem establishment doesn’t court the union vote anymore because they think they have enough professionals to make up the difference. Losing the votes of lifelong Democrats is not smart politics.
“The split between labor leaders and union members lies at the center of Trump’s potential path to the White House, which includes winning over a swath of Rust Belt states from Pennsylvania to Ohio, thanks to his cross-party appeal among traditionally Democratic union workers.”
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/07/26/why-these-union-members-and-lifelong-democrats-are-
voting-trump.html
Democrats have their heads so far up their butts they think the sky is brown. Unions work when the SOURCE of LABOR is restricted. Democrats want more illegals. That means an INFINITE PIPELINE of workers. That is the death of unions.
Every successful union has busted the fucking scabs. The Democratic plan is MORE SCABS. That’s really stupid.
And exactly how do Democrats get the message that they need to hear across to them after 25 years of me-too-ism?
How do you get across to people who understand that the powers that be have decreed austerity instead of prosperity that blacks and Hispanics are not a threat to their jobs?
The Democratic policies beginning in 2007 and continuing until this years’ Democratic National Convention have brushed aside anyone who has criticized trade agreements, criticized austerity, criticized the puny infrastructure investments. Because it … was… practical.
Now you’re saying that it wasn’t so practical after all. That Democrats are up the Mahoning River without a paddle. That it is this and not the fact that Ted Strickland is a poor candidate that is driving the coming failure in the Senate.
Now tell us again about Bernie Sanders.
Hillary’s plans are not breaking through because the media want ad revenue not a stable country. The more ad revenue the better. Calling Trump out for what he is will not maximize ad revenue.
People are in information holding cells until the election. You better pray for GOTV effectiveness in spite of the Clinton campaign on the Democratic side.
Because it still seems that the Democratic establishment doesn’t want the responsibility of winning the election in a landslide. They might have to do something besides take lobbying money.
Most of you have no fucking idea about Youngstown. I do. Youngstown – my wife worked there, in a credit union associated with the Packard Electric plant, from 1989-1997. Great job. She made more than I did at the time. She still is a little resentful that we left the area, and she left that job.
Youngstown is Jim Traficant – you know, the only guy with a more disgusting hair piece than Trump. He’s in jail now, due to corruption, but he was extremely popular.
Working class people view the Democrats and they see the Democrats pimping for illegals. Illegals compete with working class people for jobs. They steal skilled trades jobs from American men. Working class men who don’t go to college used to be able to get a good job roofing. They would start on the crew, and after they figured out what the fuck it was all about, they would get their own business. Or in yard work. Or in sheet metal-duct work. Or in mudwork. All of those trades have been stolen by fucking illegals, and if you don’t think WWC voters understand that, you don’t know shit.
The other incredible stupidity of the Democrats is that they think that all lower class people should have SOLI-FUCKING-DARITY. This is the stupidest fucking thinking I have ever heard. There is job competition, and the illegals steal the jobs that American kids used to get.
The longer Democrats pimp for illegals, the more WWC voters will run from them, never to return, and will be voting and helping Trump. Trump doesn’t take the PC crap. He tells it like it is.
He had H-1B victims at his rallies. Hillary has promised to give more fucking jobs to H-1Bs. That’s almost enough for me.
Ah, right. That explains it.
Ever been to Youngstown? No, didn’t think so.
Nope, but I doubt its much different from Janesville, WI. Believe it or not.. I was far more sympathetic for the white working class until I read your comments. You’re far too angry and its a warning for the dark side of populism.
I know Janesville. I grew up in the NW suburbs of IL, and my mom is from Grayeslake, IL. We own a house in Brandon, WI (between Ripon and Fond du Lac). All my wife’s people are from that area – Slinker, Wauwatosa, etc.
They are similar, so you’re right about that.
The main difference is that Youngstown is the dead bones of a vast industrial area – between NW PA (steel) and NE OH (cars), there were a lot of industrial jobs. Now, there’s a lot of meth.
And what Obama wants to do, and what Hillary will do, is give even more jobs away with the TPP.
The Democratic Party has done NOTHING for working class people since Jimmie Carter. The Clinton Administration is the reason that the rural areas now vote Republican. Thanks to Bill and NAFTA, which BILL FUCKING SIGNED, our entire manufacturing industry is now in Mexico. And millions of working class people lost their jobs.
Little wonder they vote Republican. What have the Democrats done in 36 years? Nothing. Not a single fucking thing.
Dataguy has been posting on this topic for years, and has gotten very little support here for his position on immigration, even though it seems to me that he is exposing a fundamental problem with dem. policy. Politically, support of the hispanic community seems to require a soft touch on illegal immigration, but there is no question that this immigration has put downward pressure on job opportunities , wages, in the trades,and in restaurant and hotel work. There’s a reason Trumps stance on immigration is so popular among the WWC; and I don’t think it’s all (or even mostly) because of racism. Of course, kicking all the Mexican workers out or building a wall is ridiculous, but there are saner approaches to the issue that the dem.s refuse to consider, I think because they want Hispanic votes. I think that’s the wrong approach, and I wish someone was talking about real solutions to the problem.
But that his dogged insistence on using the pejorative “illegals” makes me turn away from engaging him in a discussion. As does his insistence on linking almost everything back to NAFTA. NAFTA has issues but the loss of manufacturing in this country is not solely or even mostly attributable to NAFTA. Jobs were moving to low cost countries BEFORE NAFTA. “Roger and Me” came out in 1989, 5 years before NAFTA was signed.
More than jobs moving to low cost countries, though, automation has taken away our manufacturing base. The example I always like to use is look at the opening credits of “Laverne and Shirley.” All of those people working line jobs in a beer facility? Are now done by machines.
Now this is not to say NAFTA doesn’t have its problems. The biggest one is related to our stupid policy of corn subsidies. Our cheap corn flooded the market driving many a Mexican farmer out of business. They then turned north to look for work. Those who didn’t do that turned to raising marijuana or poppies. We should end our stupid policy of subsidizing corn, which is not a labor intensive crop, and instead subsidize labor intensive crops like citrus, etc. That would raise wages to the point where citizens would be willing to take them.
As for H1-B visas I agree those need to be curtailed but Donald Trump for all of his talk does not walk the walk. He hires both H1-B and J-1 workers for his businesses.
The hollowing out of the lower middle class (the upper middle class is doing just fine, thanks) is certainly a complex issue, caused by many different factors: automation, out-sourcing of manufacturing (exacerbated by poorly-crafted trade agreements), competition from cheap immigrant labor, bad tax policy, de-unionization, inattention and gridlock in Washington, to name a few. Neither party is really advocating realistic solutions for the problems these people face. I think dataguy is right to focus on this, even if his language is sometimes intemperate. Both Dem.’s and Repub.s have thrown this constituency under the bus IMO, so they are now Trump voters. Some of them might have voted for Sanders.
You don’t seem clear, what the fuck is going on here, Boo. The “trades” are NOT MANUFACTURING. The “trades” are skilled trades: carpentry, sheet metal, mud, bricklaying, you know, all those trades that are now stolen by illegals.
Get up on the lingo, eh.
Hard to help people who don’t even know how to help themselves.
Seppuku isn’t really an effective strategy. From an economic, political, or physical point of view.
Thinking you are lashing out at forces you don’t understand and can’t control in a nihilistic fashion will never end well.
What does a two year old accomplish in smashing her favorite toy in a temper tantrum? Or a 10 year old boy in taking his football and going home?
There’s an immense amount of immaturity in the American electorate (mainly in Trump/Johnson/Stein/Bernie voters).
Card check seems like something that would empower unions and give these people a voice. One reason white conservative working class people view unions poorly and statically is that they perceive them as weak on the issues that would make a difference for them and strong on the issues they despise (affirmative action, corruption).
Here’s a staggering number:
“Erik Hurst, an economist at the University of Chicago, was delivering a speech at the Booth School of Business this June about the rise in leisure among young men who didn’t go to college. He told students that one “staggering” statistic stood above the rest. “In 2015, 22 percent of lower-skilled men [those without a college degree] aged 21 to 30 had not worked at all during the prior twelve months,” he said.”
From the Atlantic.
Where did these jobs go? A lot of these jobs have been taken by illegals.
We have a population of 330 million. Huge numbers of men are not working. Since 2008, the number of men on SS disability has gone up 3x. Vast stretches of rural mid-south (KY, TN, OH) are unemployed. There is opiate and alcohol addiction. There is suicide.
Thanks, Bill Clinton, for NAFTA.
“Since 2008, the number of….”
Gee, I wonder what happened in 2008 to jack those numbers up? Is that when NAFTA went into effect? No? Golly, whatever could it have been, then?
Actually, that’s when Obama, the great jobs creator, got in. And the increase is since 1985
Since 1985, low income – 2 million on disability 1985 to 7 million 2010
Former workers – 3 million to 10 million.
Where did those jobs go? Who has taken those jobs?
In the same period, illegals have risen from 3 million to 12 million.
Odd how those numbers line up, eh?
Ah, so the financial collapse, the decimation of the housing industry, the anemic recovery thanks to Republican resistance to effective measures to counteract all that — none of that matters, it’s all Obama’s fault.
Got it.
Another discussion about Chinese students at US Universities:
https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2015/10/19/professors-experience-unprepared-chinese-students-es
say
The ignorance and cluelessness of most liberals, who have never actually worked with Chinese, or really any other foreign students or professionals, is kind of appalling. The internationalist prejudice, which is a forced or required blindness, basically is a prejudice against US students in actuality.
Chinese student cheating is a huge industry. They have great difficulty with normal methods (like studying and mastering the material) due to language problems. So there is cheating. The TOEFL is ROUTINELY compromised.
What is the TOEFL, you ask? Well, that’s the problem right there.
google “chinese student cheating university”
You get a lot of hits. Because it’s a huge huge problem.