Kay made an excellent point in the morning thread that I want to amplify because it’s so important. Democrats need to stop accepting the bullshit Republican framing that the “working class” is white and male.
Every single time Trump says “coal miners” our response should be “home health aides”. Allowing [the GOP] to claim the mantle of “people who work”? That’s just dumb. Stick up for your workers! The first way to do that would be to insist they exist.
Just ONCE I would like to see a Democrat NOT limit worker events to Teamsters and construction trades. I mean, Jesus. Go to a fucking nursing home! There’s workers there! They look a hell of a lot more like our voters, too.
We, Democrats, are BAD at this. The response to Republicans and media elevating male white workers in traditional blue jobs with the implication being that our voters are all either college professors or, I don’t know, unemployed, shouldn’t be “we must not talk about work”. We have AN ARMY of our workers. No one ever talks about them.
Not every Democrat is guilty of this, but too many are. And sometimes there’s a knee-jerk tendency to bristle when a politician talks about the working class because the assumption is they must mean white men. I’ve been guilty of that myself, and it’s bullshit. I’ll try to do better.
There was a Chicago Tribune article last year which pointed out that more people work at Arby’s than in coal mines. There are also about twice as many people who work at theme parks or car washes than coal miners. Last year, the retail sector shed more jobs than there are coal miners, but Trump doesn’t have a plan to shore up that industry. I wonder why? Maybe because many retail workers are female and/or nonwhite?
There are about 3.6 million K-12 teachers in the U.S., largely women, and their employment conditions and pay suck so badly that many went on strike, even in deeply red states. Where’s the plan to address that? Betsy DeVos doesn’t have it; Kamala Harris does.
Trump is of the same era of the media figures and politicians who conflate the working class with white males — lunch-bucket humpers like Tweety, who will never get over the “Reagan Democrats” in 1980, even though a not-insignificant portion of those voters are dead.
That zombie framing was resurrected with a vengeance in 2016 when Democrats lost Rust Belt states, supposedly because Hillary Clinton didn’t show up in Michigan to fondle auto-making assembly line equipment (not true).
Anyhoo, most working class voters are Democrats, and our candidates should be talking about the work they do. Some of them already are, and I hope it catches on. We need to break this deeply destructive framing.
JPL
I stand with Kay!!!!!
rikyrah
Raising the Angela Davis Power ? to Kay
????
rikyrah
Da phuq ? ?
Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) Tweeted:
Why won’t AG Barr charge a terrorist caught plotting to kill Trump critics?
The judge has “grave concerns” about Hasson, who planned to kill Nancy Pelosi, Democratic presidential candidates, and other Trump critics. But Barr refuses to bring charges. https://t.co/kcvk010zko https://twitter.com/JoeNBC/status/1121563086874447872?s=17
hitchhiker
Problem is, it doesn’t have anything to do with work.
The framing of “working class Americans” as white miners and factory workers is a direct appeal to the glorious post-WWII era and nothing more. It’s not about what these people do as opposed to what other people do today. It’s about an era where being American meant living in a system that worked for white men.
It’s the loss of that system that’s the subtext here. What makes those rallies and ads so powerful to certain people (cough, my boomer brothers & their wives) is that they call up a time when it was settled fact that America won the war because America had principles and guts and a can-do spirit.
That’s what they like. And they experience any pushback against “their workers” as pushback against that idealized version of the USA.
rikyrah
Armando (@armandodkos) Tweeted:
@ThePlumLineGS is correct- soon the choice for House Dems will be confrontation or capitulation. It’s gonna be about opening an impeachment inquiry. I predict capitulation (via the vote him out argument.) https://t.co/UYfI2geuCb https://twitter.com/armandodkos/status/1121786147892551680?s=17
mrmoshpotato
Yup. Working at a store, driving a cab, cleaning office buildings after hours – all work.
I’d like to see a building that manages itself after it’s built regardless of what businesses are in it.
mrmoshpotato
@hitchhiker: What do your brothers think of the tax brackets back then? I’ll happily have those reinstated (adjusted for the times of course).
Miss Bianca
@hitchhiker: I think you’re on to something here. But also still think we as Democrats could and should take Kay’s points and run with them.
rikyrah
chris evans (@notcapnamerica) Tweeted:
2020 is going to be all about culture wars. Republicans can’t win on policy so this is what they will do.
The challenge with Kamala Harris is that they will say she’s trying to turn the rest of the country into liberal California.
Needs a VP from the midwest. https://t.co/gyc7DB26tL https://twitter.com/notcapnamerica/status/1121812940049592322?s=17
Frankensteinbeck
@rikyrah:
Thanks to Trump, a whole lot of people who used to not care will flock to Kamala Harris if she promises to do that.
ByRookorbyCrook
@rikyrah: I’ll take that comparison. We should all be as lucky as “liberal California”, a booming economy, solid safety net and leader in Climate Change effort. Own it. Liberal government works.
gene108
There’s an inherent bias in thinking “women’s work” is just something women do to make some extra money on the side, while a “man’s work” is really what supports the family. If the women stopped working, there’d be no harm, because the man’s income is what’s supporting the family.
I had a high school English teacher, who told me teacher’s pay is so low, because it was deemed to be “women’s work” and women didn’t really need the money, since they’d get married and their husband’s would support them.
I think a lot of the view of working class stems for decades old sexism, which has deeply permeated into our economy and has largely gone unchallenged.
Jodabbler
The entire coal industry employs fewer people than Arby’s, but there’s no legacy of folky protest songs about Beef and Cheddar or curly fries.
Jess
Not saying you’re wrong, but of course the “Blue Collar Worker” term refers more to a culture than a job. This is what Dems are often clumsy about addressing, focusing on rational things like pay and health care instead of irrational things like Archie Bunker patriarchy. It’s the threat to the latter that resonates with Trump voters.
Kraux Pas
It doesn’t help with retail that it’s often described as an “after-school” job. There’s this assumption that we don’t need to pay people a wage they can live on or…afford school…because they can just fall back on their parents. This may have been true at one point, but now plenty of people in these jobs are older and supporting families.
After being “convinced” by my parents to leave a good paying job at a unionized supermarket, it took me a decade to get back to making the same money I had been. I now work in retail pharmacy as a technician and after a certification, I was able to break away from the minimum wage for a while. Now the minimum is catching back up with me and we’re losing Sunday time and a half “in exchange”.
My workplace has been getting steadily more female over the last decade. Plenty of my coworkers are moms trying to get by on roughly the same pay I do. It’s only sufficient for me because I have boyfriend to help with the rent and no kids. I can’t imagine how everyone else subsides.
I defend the ACA regularly on the help it provides working people, expands Medicaid so you can get it with more income. It puts more private plans in reach with subsidies. GND will be similarly helpful to workers. We should beat on this regularly
mrmoshpotato
@rikyrah: When hasn’t the Republican party been about anything but this “culture wars” crap?
What ideas do they have to lift up those who need help? When has it been anything but “Repeal (taxes, regulations, healthcare, rights) and go fuck yourself?”
Betty Cracker
@hitchhiker: No doubt, but we shouldn’t help them maintain that fantasy. More people live in the real world, and when we center white males as the only workers who count, the subtext is that our voters’ work doesn’t matter.
hitchhiker
@Miss Bianca:
The issue is that we’re fighting against a mythology that’s deeply comforting, imo. When we upset the mythology, we become the enemy. I think the task is to expand the mythology so that we can own it, too, and not be seen as trying to trash it.
This is what the resistance to a multi-cultural America is really about — it’s a resistance to what’s been framed as a trashing of those lost days when we all felt proud of our country.
The reason that framing has so little resonance with people under about age 35 is that they have no direct experience of it. Some of them have bought the notion that the wonder of America has been taken from them by people who hate white men, but they’re in the minority.
Anyway, I think that’s the subtext of every political ad now, whether we like it or not. MAGA got at a very raw thing for a lot of people. They want the fantasy more than anything, even more than they want better jobs or healthcare for their kids.
Jess
@hitchhiker: Exactly.
gene108
@ByRookorbyCrook:
Counterpoint: California is expensive to live in. Has a housing crisis. Has a massive homeless population, with very few shelters compared to other parts of the country. San Diego had a Hepatitis A break out, because so many homeless people were defecating in the streets.
California has good points, but it isn’t utopia. There’s enough out there that conservatives can twist it into a place, where the rich have it good and everyone else suffers, which is just the height of liberal hypocrisy.
Brachiator
Probably not. Neither Republicans nor Democrats get it. You cannot easily shore up jobs in areas that are being transformed by technological changes, automation, the shift from brick-and-mortar to online shopping. And you don’t want to.
Targeting specific groups or industries may gain you some votes, but is not always good economic policy, which often should be more focused on macro-economic issues. And of course, Trump doesn’t know anything about economics anyway, and is supported by his base because they are dopes, and by plutocrats because he gave them huge tax cuts.
Teachers are not universally doing badly. And again, throwing a bone to teachers may get you some votes, but may also alienate other voters. People who are not teachers, but who have lost jobs or have not seen raises in years are not necessarily going to be happy to see money rain down on teachers, no matter how beneficial this might be. And why is raising teacher pay a federal issue?
I agree here that you need to show the diversity of work force. And be careful not to fall into implications of a zero-sum game in which one group must lose in order for some other group to win.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
always been my theory, see also nurses
Mary G
I believe that one reason why California turned so blue in the last couple of decades is this very issue.
Starting with Cesar Chavez and the farm workers Democrats have defined work much more broadly. Even this week I have seen ads showing a guy sitting on his heels in a field bending over to pull a bunch of radishes with each hand, tying them up in two seconds flat and using his knuckles to scoot up a couple of inches to the next ones in his rows. Anyone who’s ever gardened can relate to how hard that work is.
Mixed race groups of teachers and healthcare workers are universally portrayed in ads. A hospital screwing over its janitorial employees and nurse’s aides is also screwing over its much more educated blond white RNs and both are represented together.
Groups of teachers are the same. It works!
rikyrah
Marching Onward to President Harris in 2020 (@Marching_Onward) Tweeted:
Bernie Sanders brought his lazy ass to a black women’s forum and didn’t have ONE policy to help black women.
When asked what has he done for us?
That bitch said, “I voted for Jesse Jackson,” a MAN.
How the fuck did that help WOMEN?
Bernie is literally stupid. https://twitter.com/Marching_Onward/status/1121712336538988544?s=17
?BillinGlendaleCA
@hitchhiker: There were no Boomers alive at the end of WW2.
gene108
@Jess:
Most of the gatekeepers of our public discourse are still older white men, who want the Archie Bunker fallacy. I thin the post-2016 examination really showed how much of the news cycle has been controlled by old white men, with many of them guilty of abusive behavior towards women.
It’s hard to change that Archie Bunker nostalgia, when it gets so widely reinforced by the media.
This really needs to change, in order for Democrats to make a break through. Right now, trying to address issues of home healthcare workers, retail workers, etc. is seen as some form of “identity politics” and not the reality of this is where most people work today.
tobie
@rikyrah: yes, this is what is crazy making in this story. Barr won’t let the prosecutors charge Hasson with attempted murder or attempted acts of terror. Dems should do a trial impeachment run with Barr first.
Doug R
US solar power employs more people than oil, coal and gas combined.
Jess
@gene108: Yes, excellent points! We need to work on a powerful counter-myth, IMHO.
Kraux Pas
@Doug R:
But you forgot the important part. Does it make more money for shareholders?
gene108
@Brachiator:
I think Democrats have decided state governments are failures, which are not able to get their shit together, so the Feds have to step in and fix shit.
The proposal for the Federal government guaranteeing low-cost to free access to state funded colleges and universities is a similar phenomena.
A few decades of bad policy decisions by states will be rewarded by the Feds throwing money at certain parts of the state governments, so they can keep implementing bad policies, with little to no consequences for the people making those policy decisions.
Mary G
@tobie: This. The administration’s “fuck you” response to supoenas needs to be responded to with impeachment proceedings of every member of the cabinet involved and start with Barr.
James E Powell
I wanted to follow up on something @Brachiator said in the thread below
How soon? The fact is that, politically, these people, their times, and their rhetoric are forgotten except as nostalgic images. What is recalled is often at odds with what was going on at the time.
And something happened in the roughly ten years between JFK’s assassination and Nixon’s resignation. Actually, a lot of things happened. But there was definitely a major shift in worldview. Since then the idea that we must restore things, that we must look to the past has been dominant. For sure, some things are forward looking, tech products mostly. But political arguments tend to be rooted in the past.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Just at NBC: Tweety Matthews, Tom Brokaw, Mike Barnicle, the ghost of Tim Russert: All Baby Boomers with crippling daddy issues. I don’t know much about Matt Lauer’s and Brian Williams’ backgrounds, but it wouldnt’ surprise me if they fit the model. Also– and this certainly covers Williams– the cult of the military grounded in a guilt/inferiority complex for never having served themselves, and never having had a “good war”.
and since we’re talking about Archie Bunker, two relevant jokes I remember from that show, from over forty years ago:
Archie: “I was one of the first guys in the neighborhood to enlist after Pearl Harbor!”
Edith: “Yeah, right after you was drafted.”
Archie: “Nobody ever protested and marched in the streets to get me a job!”
Edith: “No, his uncle got it for him”
Eric U.
I’ve been to coal mines at shift change. There are very few people working in a typical mine. Maybe about 20. The mine owners want to reduce that number as much as they can and there are tech efforts to do that. I suspect that robots will take over relatively soon if we don’t give up on coal. The local limestone mine put in a conveyor and got rid of most of the truck drivers that had been removing the stone from the mine.
TenguPhule
Pentagon set to expand military role along southern border
Slippery slope, down they go.
First the non-combat personnel get a waiver….
Mary G
@rikyrah: And I voted for Jesse Jackson too. THIRTY YEARS AGO. Every time I hear Bernie talk like this I hear Janet Jackson singing “What have you done for me lately”? It’s an ongoing earworm.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Yes, everyone in California and New York are what…living with their parents? Perhaps our conservative betters can explain how those two deep blue states are like 90% of the nation’s economy and yet filled with nothing but slackers on the government’s cheese and ivory tower academics, because you know how notoriously socialist Silicon Valley and Wall Street are.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Oh that’s easy! The people who run those companies in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street are conservatives. QED
TenguPhule
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
And yet somehow they get away with exactly that come election season.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@TenguPhule:
Um, serious question: doesn’t this violate posse comitatus? The military can’t have a domestic law enforcement role unless under a lawful declaration of martial law
rikyrah
About those talking about ” unity “.
This thread here??
https://twitter.com/threadreaderapp/status/1121802703213158400
Cheryl from Maryland
THIS. Let’s focus on the jobs we HAVE NOW. Indeed, many of them used to be respectable adult jobs and now have been reduced to part-time high school/dilettante/extra money jobs due to bad policy, semantics, tech love, and greed. My husband’s grandmother held her family together from the 1940s to the 1960s with a retail job at a Target-like store. I had teachers in elementary school in the 1960s who were able to live off their salary. My husband worked part-time retail at Marshall Field’s in the 1980s where his fulltime co-workers were people with families and were homeowners. I had a summer job at a branch bank where ALL of the fulltime tellers and management were people with families and homes. I have a friend whose father was a waiter at a high-class restaurant in San Francisco — he was able to have a house, a stay at home wife, proper retirement and family. Our government and mores chase long gone factory jobs instead of working towards ensuring current workers are properly paid and acknowledged as important workers for our country.
TenguPhule
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??:
Technically, no. They’re “segregating” (oh the fucking irony) the military personnel from direct contact with migrants as much as possible.
But yes, this is one step closer to normalizing military forces for domestic “security” purposes.
Brachiator
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Clerks (secretaries), teachers, nurses, often used to be mainly men. Same with waiters.
But the research noted in a 2016 NY Times article may still be accurate.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@gene108:
How many of the serious people in media lost their jobs because of the Me Too revelations about their rape habit? It’s was really shocking how out of step with the rest of society TV and Film is.
And Trump is a real life Archie Bunker, sans the military service which at lest made Bunker tolerable I suppose that’s why the odd vacillation in the Media about Trump, they are in shock about how loathsome their icon of a real man is.
West of the Rockies
In television commercials, the go-to American worker is a stubbly, hard hat-wearing white dude, a farmer, and, occasionally, a weary waitress.
I’d like to see a road-weary adjunct instructor, an urban legal aid worker, a tollbooth operator, or a barrista.
burnspbesq
@ByRookorbyCrook:
Amen. If we have to have a 70+ white guy in the race, why can’t it be Jerry instead of Sanders or Biden?
trollhattan
@Kraux Pas:
The sun is a hippie plot, and we punch hippies. Punch the sun!
Currently in California: renewable sources filling 56.4% of electricity demand; solar accounts for 74.8% of renewables.
TenguPhule
At least a little good news today.
trollhattan
@burnspbesq:
Jerry hit 81 on the 7th and frankly, is tired of You People.
Belated happy birthday, Jerry!
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@TenguPhule: Yes, well far to many Democrats are far to nice and refuse to accept that when the Republicans start throwing mud the Dems will just get blamed as part of the problem no matter how civil and above it all the Dem is.
David Broder didn’t invent Broderism, I’ve seen plenty of people tsk tsk and blame someone who got attacked for being in fights all the time. That’s hardwired into a lot people so it’s real easy for the media to sell that. Pelosi seems to get it that if she makes Trump hurt at lest he will learn to fear her because otherwise the media will just call her a bitch when he attacks her.
burnspbesq
@gene108:
True, but at least California acknowledges its problems and is trying to fix them, even though some of them are insoluble except by draconian and probably unconstitutional means.
James E Powell
@hitchhiker:
Agree completely. And it is a very difficult thing to do. I’m trying to recall a major shift in the mythology that wasn’t a product of catastrophe.
gene108
@Cheryl from Maryland:
Another myth, which I want to punch Republicans in the throat for saying, is “bringing back good paying factory jobs”. Why? Because the only reason factory jobs paid well, after WW2, was a decades long labor movement fighting for better wages and working conditions, which finally hit pay dirt, with FDR and the Democrats, in the 1930’s, when labor unions were finally given legal standing.
Union busting Republicans aren’t the reason those jobs paid living wages, with good benefits and a pension.
They want to take credit for policies they have opposed for decades. And act like those benefits for workers just came into existence for shits and giggles or something.
Fuck ’em.
TenguPhule
Via the FTFNYT
Fuck Rosenstein. He’s chosen his boot to lick.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@trollhattan: Plus Solar is that fancy science stuff that makes the pundit’s brain hurt. They didn’t become a pundit to waste their thinking and learning things like some luzer.
gene108
@burnspbesq:
I was just highlighting talking points I have heard used against CA, with regards to drag its image down with the general public.
It’s a level of what-about-ism that’d be deployed, if someone ran on the basis of the “California Miracle”, i.e. CA’s transformation from a financially struggling state to one with a surplus and booming economy after after the state government raised taxes.
gene108
@TenguPhule:
I wonder if Nouman Raja were white, would he have been convicted?
JPL
@burnspbesq: By the time of the election rolls around Bernie will be 79, Biden 78 and Trump 74. I hope that Biden hurts Sanders more than the other democrats running.
Oh and Elizabeth Warren will be 71.
TenguPhule
Jeremy Corbyn declines invitation to state banquet for Donald Trump
TenguPhule
@gene108: I’d like to think so.
jl
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Being a neurotic bigoted and clueless old white dude with mommy and daddy issues seems to be a requirement for getting a gig as a pundit on big broadcast and cable public affairs shows. That kind of person was amusing on old sitcoms, but when they are the gatekeepers of what is considered legitimate public policy discussion, they cause problems. I’ve been sick of them for decades (and oddly I am a white guy, but jeez, they are so ignorant and bigoted) and, they won’t god damned go away!
@James E Powell: Thing often forgotten about FDR and Truman, is that they would talk about wanting to reach across the aisle in the spirit of good faith cooperation, AFTER they kicked some ass and won some elections big time. A lot of Democrats need to go read up on some old campaign speeches and watch some clips of those two.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@trollhattan: Yup, happy b-day to Gov. Moonbeam.
TenguPhule
JFC, Trump’s NRA speech is fug bucks nuts.
tobie
@TenguPhule: Rosenstein licks GOP boots, and the NYTimes still carries water for the GOP. Note the dishonest phrasing in the passage you quoted:
Nary a word that McConnell and Ryan blackmailed the President and said that if he mentioned the Kremlin’s operation, the GOP would scream that Obama was putting his thumbs on the scale for Hillary.
A propos the theme of this thread: the only ad from the 1970s I really remember is the one from the Int’l Ladies Garment Workers Union. Love the unconscious New Yorkism — “we work hard, but who’s complaining.”
geg6
@gene108:
That mindset is operational everywhere. If a woman is working, that work is, ipso facto, “women’s work.” When I was at the local community college, my co-workers in my department were both men and women. None of the women ever made as much as the men. And my supervisor thought he was very woke because he paid the women more than he paid me. His reason for that? I was single with no children and had a boyfriend who made very good money. My last five years there I didn’t get a single raise even though I had excellent evaluations. He told me I didn’t need the money as much as the men or even the other women because they had families. And, of course, my boyfriend could take care of me. The fact that he wasn’t paying my rent or utilities or for my food (except on date nights) didn’t seem to occur to him. Nor did my my seniority, experience or education. I got a $20k raise when I left that job and got my current one twenty years ago.
TenguPhule
And Pence is almost as bad.
Kent
Hillary won the working class vote in 2016. Pretty overwhelmingly. I suspect she even won the working class vote in swing states like PA and MI.
But I guess most of those working class voters don’t count according to the pundits.
Betty Cracker is exactly right.
Betty Cracker
@Brachiator:
Tell that to the asshole in the Oval Office. He’s the one saying we can go back in time. I don’t think any Democrat is proposing turning back the clock, but if we’re going to bemoan the fate of workers, how about we discuss the millions displaced in sectors other than the auto industry, construction and coal? How about we at least acknowledge their existence? That’s the point.
I linked Kamala Harris’s plan in the OP. I think it’s a sound one. YMMV.
Like you just did with teachers? Okay.
TenguPhule
@tobie: Rosenstein was comparing himself to John Adams later on in the article, Comey wasn’t the only one who thought he had the noblest dick around.
The Moar You Know
@gene108: As a native, thank you. It is not all free beer and Skittles here in the Republic. We have problems and they are not pretty ones, and our housing situation has gone from “elitist” to “rank class-war savagery”. And I say this as one of the winners in that game. If we don’t get housing that people can live in, NOW, we are going to implode as an economic power within a decade.
We have other issues but that’s the worst. Nobody in the nation should be looking to California as a model on how to do much of anything.
trollhattan
Apparently, marrying into the world’s best-known crime family means surrendering both your soul and considerable I.Q. points. Ladies and germs, Lara Trump!
TenguPhule
Biden is done.
Next candidate please.
TenguPhule
@The Moar You Know:
To be fair, your environmental laws are pretty good.
Kent
@geg6:
Most of my working life has been in government and education where salaries are very formulaic. Your salary is pretty much just based on seniority and education. To the extent that some men get paid more it would be because they are more likely to take on extra paid duties like coaching. That is not to say that there isn’t sex discrimination but to the extent that it exists, it is more in the area of promotions rather than salary. And perhaps more importantly, in the area of who gets groomed for promotions. Which is really what matters in terms of who gets promoted to administrative jobs in education and who gets promoted to higher level managerial jobs in government.
For other professions though, I think the case is different. My wife is in medicine and I think faced substantial pay discrimiation from the good old boy network in her previous position. Not so much in her current position with a large HMO where pay is more formulaic (but not promotions).
Brachiator
@Cheryl from Maryland:
Unfortunately, you can’t.
Sometimes it’s just changing society.
I was recently knocked out by a recent BBC News story about the decline of the high street shopping area in Northampton.
My mind staggers trying to imagine a shopping district that goes back to the year 1235.
But it is not greed or bad policy that is killing high streets in the UK or closing down shopping malls in the US. There has been a large scale shift in the ways that people shop, how they buy and pay for goods. And it is doubly unfortunate that wages are often stagnant for remaining jobs.
I absolutely believe that the government has a role to play in helping to relieve the shock these changes cause. But the government cannot arbitrarily prevent change and save jobs or even industries that disappear.
jl
@rikyrah: @gene108: California is just leading the nation (again). The continuing growth in income and wealth inequality, the continuing record setting profit margins for big corporations, and the complete and utter disaster that is the horribly low rate of investment in existing and new residential housing to provide shelter for the population is a national problem. Residential investment was wrecked in the second half of the housing boom, further wrecked by the great recession, and the mess has never been fixed. Financial and real investment market messes like that are the real costs of the crummy financial policy of the Great Recession, not whether the feds made an accounting profit on the bank bail out (that is peanuts).
People all over the country are as likely to recognize the problem of unaffordable rents and home prices and be interested in solutions as fall for BS over the dystopia of liberal California. They can see the same problem looming from their crappy studio apartment.
Warren can explain it. The increasing superannuated white male bigot and sexist geezers who BS at us over the TV machine loved it when Bill Clinton explained shit. If it weren’t for their sexism they would love it when Warren explains. And she knows this stuff ten times better than Big Dawg every did (though he surely thinks he knows more than Warren, which is false).
Redshift
And of course, West Virginia has way more healthcare workers than coal miners, but they still voted for the guys who want to destroy the ACA.
The Moar You Know
They are. When I was a kid (1970s) the air in Los Angeles was the color of urine. You can see it in the TV clips and movies of the time. Now it’s not, and I haven’t had an asthma attack in decades.
There are a lot of things we do well here, but taking care of our “working people” is not really one of them. That’s a problem nationally, but California is not in any way an improvement over most other places in this country.
Ruckus
@gene108:
You and @hitchhiker: are actually saying the same thing. It’s a way of life. OK it was a supposed way of life back in the 50s. The war was over, prosperity was happening, sort of, men were getting back to work, women were being pushed out of jobs and back into the home – where of course they belonged doncha know, and Ike was president. The rest of the world was for the most part not all that industrialized or in tatters so the US was on top. The war had been won and all was right with the world.
Women were pushed back into women’s work – home, kids and teaching. Blacks were in their place and english was the spoken word. In hind sight, if you squint real hard with one eye and have the other closed, didn’t live then or have dementia, it was great. In reality it wasn’t all that and a bag of chips. What it was, was better than WWII.
I’m half convinced that republicans keep calling for/having wars, to have something to recover from and be able to look better. Cause otherwise…..
mad citizen
Here here! I am SO phucking sick of hearing about coal miners. This recent article states that 86,000 people in Indiana work in clean energy jobs, and 700K in the Midwest. I’m sure that’s a hell of a lot more than the coal industry. https://www.nwitimes.com/business/local/lake-county-ranks-third-statewide-in-clean-energy-jobs/article_31ea2c8c-915b-5ee0-9e31-c546b181d9a0.html
VeniceRiley
@trollhattan: I’ve seen Brian Williams welcome Andrew Sullivan on to make the same point about US here twice – Even when the topic wasn’t immigration. No other guests and no pushback from Brian at all. Just a mike drop scare at the end of the show that we’ve got to stop immigration from the browns or we cannot stop old whitey from voting for fascists. IIRC BW is Canadian, and Andrew is a Brit. So ….
Spot on, Betty and thanks for this post, BTW. We should definitely be fronting our own workers. maybe those fat factory effers could stand to see a few million commercials of a nursing home aide grinding for a living.
trollhattan
@Brachiator:
Even before Amazon’s ascent US had a vast oversupply of retail square footage. Effectively, every new mall–strip, regional, discount–can only succeed by draining business from competing malls. We have decaying and empty malls all over the place, and we’re a growing metro area.
Somewhere in that tidbit lies a potential resource to help the housing situation.
Redshift
@gene108:
True, but it’s not just current bias, it’s a long-running inequity. Teachers were paid more when the profession was male. “Clerk” was a professional job, then it became “secretary,” a lower-paid women’s profession. Early computer programming was clerical work with comparable pay, then it became predominantly male, and it became a highly-paid professional job. (There’s a lot more to that story.)
Aleta
Joy to Sanders: What are you doing to win over … black women voters? Sanders: Dem. party has got to be united … This is no time for petty divisiveness … This is a time to come together …
Shorter version:
J: What are you doing to win over black women voters?
B: Everyone unite behind me.
J: And for black women? B: Huh? J: Black women.
B: Black women our campaign our administration. Okay?
(= You got that? That good enough for you?)
If he can’t answer the direct question, refuses to hear the issue, can’t divert his programming, is rude about being reminded …
Just how are people with concerns going to be a part of that administration?
And what does he mean “will be an integral part of my campaign.” He’s campaigning now, He’s been preparing it for two years.
Change is always for the future, never in the present.
tobie
I gather the Family Leader organization has invited all Democratic candidates to its forum in Iowa. All candidates should say no to Bob Vander Plaats Christianist organization. O’Rourke said no today. Buttigieg says he’s considering. I don’t know if any of the other candidates have responded yet.
Is the Iowa caucus a same-day registration event or do you have to be a Democrat to participate in the Democratic caucus? If anyone can declare their party affiliation on caucus day, I can understand Buttigieg’s strategy. I don’t like it but it would be effective.
jl
@The Moar You Know: You have a great attitude for winner/ What’s yorur damn problem?
In terms of annual income needed to afford a two bedroom home or apartment adequate to raise a family, the whole US is rapidly catching up with California, and New York. So, yes California has had special problems in affordable housing for decades, but the mess now is just as much state specific issues that are being made worse by very worrying national trends, as it is a unique California thing.
Edit: the very worrying national trends in unaffordable housing may be the reason the GOP quickly backed off of portraying AOC’s complaints about the high cost of housing as being elitist coastal whining. Too many people across the country were sympathetic to her complaints.
Kay
@Redshift:
Yup. So let’s have a rally at a hospital, surrounded by our hard-working medical assistants :)
I love the idea of doing a campaign ad with an adjunct instructor at a community college trudging home from a hard day’s work, underpaid, unloved, unrecognized…but very important!
trollhattan
@Aleta:
Hell, he really never stopped in 2016 so it’s at least four continuous years on the stump.
Brachiator
@Betty Cracker:
I said before and say again: Trump doesn’t know anything about economics anyway, and is supported by his base because they are dopes, and by plutocrats because he gave them huge tax cuts. Everything that comes out of his mouth is bullshit. He does not have, will never have, a coherent economic policy because he is a stupid asswipe and because he kneecaps anyone in his administration who might have a brain.
Trump made a fetish of coal miners and Harley Davidson. Pointless bullshitting. The Democrats should be able to blow away Trump on this issue with all but the hopelessly dense.
Including teachers with other workers, fine. Pointing out that it is really the Democrats who represent and have always represented the majority of US workers, excellent. Singling out teachers or any other group for special assistance is not necessarily good strategy.
I think we agree much more than we disagree.
geg6
@Kent:
I’ve worked in education my entire career. They may say that they base their salaries on formulas, but the supervisor still decides who gets what salary and raise. I worked at the community college for nine years. For five of them, I didn’t get a raise. Even at my current job (where, I must say, things are much more equitable), raises are on a sliding scale. If the highest raise in a particular year is a 4% increase, your supervisor decides whether you get the highest raise or something less. There is a floor that they can’t go below, but if your supervisor decides to screw you, he or she can.
Kay
Remember when Republicans did that “you didn’t build it” thing with business owners and then someone pointed out that way more people are employees than are bosses and they had to do all that fake soul searching about how they had turned into the Party of Bosses, on or around 2012? We could do the same with “hardworking”. This is what THEY think, that white men are the only valued workers. It’s not what we think.
Ruckus
@hitchhiker:
The fantasy is better than real life. It’s a fantasy for a reason. The fantasy is that you will be better than someone else by dint of supporting the conservative agenda. And that’s always been a lie, because the conservative agenda has always been to protect the wealthy, who are of course the creators of everything, jobs, prosperity, comfort, structure…… It’s all bullshit of course but that’s the sales pitch and always has been, the promise of a better life while in the background where you can’t see it someone is robbing you blind, of prosperity, of a future for your kids, of education…..
Plato
@Brachiator:
Nice concern trolling as usual. Rethugs can go literally to treasonous levels but when dems should do something for the common good, they should tread carefully lest they ‘overreach’, is that it?
Betty Cracker
@Brachiator: I suspect we do agree more than we disagree, which is why I find your “rebuttals” to points other people haven’t made puzzling. It’s not just me — you did the same thing at #77 in response to Cheryl, who also didn’t insist that the government “prevent change and save jobs or even industries that disappear.”
I don’t think her point was “bring back bank teller jobs” — it was that people who worked as tellers, shop clerks, waiters, etc., used to be able to live on those wages, and people in comparable jobs today can’t. My point wasn’t that Democrats should prop up Sears so shop clerks will have jobs, it was that we shouldn’t talk about employment trends exclusively in terms of jobs most associated with white men.
Martin
I think a lot of this is missing the point. The focus on coal miners is part of a focus on demonizing non-white workers, but it’s also a way to shift the consequences of automation onto the need to address climate change.
For the better part of a century we had a system that did an okay job of keeping wages in line with broader economic realities (inflation, cost of living, etc.) because for that period of time, you could substitute ‘labor’ for ‘economy’ because the only way you got economic output was through labor, and there weren’t a hell of a lot of multipliers you could put on a worker. Yeah, Fords workers could be 50% more productive than GM, but that’s not really all that much. Automation changed that.
50 years ago if you wanted to double output, you doubled labor, maybe a bit less by restructuring the task but paying some higher wages. That applied the same for coal mining as for home health care. That’s not now. Now you hire another robot, a bigger computer, some smarter software. That works pretty well for coal mining as it turns out, and no so well for home health care. But the point is that when economic output was tied to labor, labor was afforded some natural protections. And arguments around the national economy were quite a bit simpler. More output meant more jobs. It was impossible not to. But now you can get output without labor which means you can pit the part of the economy that can scale without workers against the part of the economy that can’t. Home health care is ‘inefficient’ because it can’t keep up with a machine learning algorithm that made it so that humans no longer need to read and data enter checks (that convenient take a picture of a check to deposit it eliminated thousands of jobs), so it’s harder for home health workers to argue for a larger slice of the wage pie, simply because some other industry figured out how to eliminate workers.
The risk of siding with one industry against another is that you don’t control the fate of that industry. As soon as you focus on home health workers, you invite yourself into the same trap as those who sided with coal miners. Instead we need to decouple labor as being a proxy for output. I think workers get at a personal level that economic growth doesn’t necessarily make them better off, but just today – economy grew at a record pace. But what does that mean? We think it tells us something about jobs and wages, but it doesn’t. But on the campaign trail, in the press, everyone will insist that it does. Same for the stock market going up, etc. Democrats need to stand against this simplistic economic model. They do, but in a really shitty way that doesn’t help educate voters, I think because they don’t know *what* to do. So they yell and scream about millionaires and billionaires without any model for what would work better. For how taxation should shift off of labor and on to output. For how our measures maybe shouldn’t be GDP, but poverty or wages or whatever. Bernie is utterly unequipped to do that. Warren is probably best equipped, but even she seems a bit too biased toward a 90s model (better than a 1950s model) rather than a 2020 model – which is much different.
They need to do this with considerable urgency. When (not if) autonomous trucking lands, that’s 6 million people out of jobs just from that one innovation. It will make a bunch of new jobs, few of which will be filled by those displaced workers. Huge economic spoils will go to people other than those 6 million. GDP will climb while 5% of the nations workforce faces unemployment or massively reduced wages. If democrats go to bat for the truckers over the coal workers, what will their answer be a few years later when their jobs evaporate? Dems need to deal with the larger economic realities here.
Ruckus
@gene108:
Like all fantasies utopia never exists.
It doesn’t in CA as you say, but in a lot of ways it is better. And in some it’s worse. What is a big problem is that we all compare one place to another and there are always better and worse things about any two places to compare. CA has a positive tax outflow which means CA is more productive overall than places without that. People are willing to live shoulder to shoulder because prosperity is available. One still has to work at something to have it, and not everyone gets there but overall it is easier.
WhatsMyNym
@trollhattan:
Did you think somebody should tell Fox Business host Stuart Varney that Germany is not in Western Europe? It’s part of Central Europe.
trollhattan
President* Manbaby accidentally gets something right. Naturally, while contradicting himself from before.
Yutsano
@WhatsMyNym: Eh. It’s considered part of western Europe mostly because of attitude. Central Europe is more Austria and Hungary really.
clay
@TenguPhule:
What’s in the ellipses? I don’t trust sentences with a big set of ellipses in the middle like that.
Leto
Trump’s tax cut was a disaster for some Gold Star families, but it’s a symptom of a larger problem
Plato
Kirk Spencer
On the economy/jobs thing, I’m going to pull out my broken record.
We are well into the transition from what I call a supply economy. Basically, from “you must toil to produce your daily bread” to “less than 5 percent of the population is sufficient to feed the world.” Note that percent includes a lot of support (transport, storage, etc) and even then it’s in decline. And food is just the obvious.
As long as we’re of the mindset that ‘you must toil to earn your bread’ we’re screwed by not enough jobs for too many people. But getting the mindset of “everyone gets the basics so they can produce wonders” is going to be a multigenerational task.
It’s not just food. It’s everything automation can affect. So attorneys who used to get major chunks of billing for research see that reduce due to digital materials and expert systems. Librarians see the reference and cataloging desk shrink. Accountants no longer do everyone’s taxes, nor are they required for basic business bookkeeping. There’s a national shortfall of ~50,000 truck drivers in the US today so they’re getting extraordinary pay and incentives. And the companies paying those are also pushing hard for the autonomous truck even if it’s “just” for the main routes, because there are still attorneys and accountants and librarians for the ‘harder tasks’.
Health care shouldn’t feel exempt. Telemedicine is creeping into the system. Japan’s working HARD on robots to provide assistance to the elderly – and some rehab work as well.
It won’t be fast. It won’t be total. But within a handful of generations we’ll have a society where only a tiny fraction needs to work to care for everyone. The only question is what sort of society will it be?
Ruckus
@James E Powell:
The view in a rear view is always better because we have a hard time remembering the bad stuff. People talk about the nostalgia for the past, say the 1950s. The late 40s and the 50s were a time that many of us were born and we didn’t see WWII. We didn’t even hear about it because a lot of people didn’t want to talk about it. In a lot of cases memory of the time is hollow, a shell of a time. And that means that the memories that are there are the better ones, of the time, not of the past. And the people my age, 70ish are the parents of adults with kids. And there are a number of people who are 20-25 yrs older but they are getting fewer and fewer every day. Those memories of a “better” time are all old and most likely distorted. The older economy is probably seen as better, even though it wasn’t. The cities are seen as less crowed, because they were far less. If you can read the theme here, life isn’t the same as people who were adults in the 50s and 60s often think it is because their lives often haven’t changed or they can’t understand the differences. And the differences are that the world is getting more crowed, travel is far, far easier than it was, and there are ways to make a living that didn’t exist 50-60 yrs ago. And it was only about 100-120 yrs ago that the world changed far less and far slower than it has in the last 50. And people don’t do change as easy when they get old and locked into habits of a lifetime and looking forward is much less satisfying than looking back.
Betty Cracker
@Martin: I think the only Democrat who is seriously making massive impending job losses the centerpiece of his campaign is Andrew Yang. I believe concepts to address the scenario you describe, like universal basic income, will come up in this campaign in a more prominent way than in years past, where the solution was always “retraining” which will be wholly inadequate, as you point out. You’re right that it’s long past time we address this looming earthquake and rethink work, taxation, etc. But I don’t think discussing wages, etc., for nurses, teachers, etc., NOW is missing the point — why not all of the above?
Martin
@ByRookorbyCrook:
Sort of. Let’s deconstruct two things: one that CA is good at, which Democrats are disinclined to support, and one which CA is bad at, which Democrats are inclined to support.
The first is silicon valley and why it’s here. Half of it is our investment in education. That’s all good. But the other half is that CA is a far more capitalist-focused state than almost any other in the US. We have very little regulatory capture here. What industries does CA protect? Not many, as it turns out. Agriculture writ large, but not a specific subset of it. There’s not really an orange lobby to speak of in the way that Iowa has a corn lobby. Instead, the state has a pretty good sense of kicking markets opening and encouraging competition. And sometimes it blows it (2000 electricity crisis). So CA is very capitalistic, but not very corporatist. Somehow that makes us socialists by GOP thinking. But a lot of Dem voters are at the very least capitalism skeptical, if not outright hostile. But that’s one of CAs greatest strengths.
The second lesson is the housing and homeless problem. These are fairly classic collective action problems to solve which the most liberal parts of the state have utterly failed to cope with. One downside of increased home ownership is that it becomes a place to build equity. I have nearly a million dollars of equity in my house, so I have a million reasons to not want low income housing built across the street from me. The issue is whether or not I have a say in the matter. In most of CA, residents do have a say. We have a lot of local government power. Homeowners have more rights than in most other states. But as it happens, liberals are just as much NIMBY assholes as everyone else when you get right down to it, and we often chase pet projects as a way of avoiding bigger problems that we don’t have popular answers for. SF is banning plastic straws, but it’s totally cool to leave a plastic syringe on the street. We know that around ¼ of the GHG emissions from the state comes from leaf blowers and other 2 stroke engines, and we’ll do these big complex automotive emissions programs, but we won’t ban 2 stroke engines because of gardening and construction. It’s a big problem with an unpopular solution that’s being ignored.
I think liberals do learn the wrong lesson a bit too often, and I think there’s a timidity to dealing with certain categories of big problem. I’ll just point to the Mueller report there. In SF, you just need to build housing, but the liberals in the city can’t get out of their own way because they equate providing adequate sunlight to a park with someone living under a bridge.
Kayla Rudbek
@trollhattan: they are going to convert a plot (close to my house) that has two large retail stores into condos/apartments. I wish that they would do a similar thing by my office – I think that some of the empty office/retail space has been vacant for nearly a decade. I don’t understand how the landlord can manage to pay the property taxes…
Brachiator
@Plato:
No.
Martin
@Betty Cracker: I’m not sure UBI will work as an argument because it doesn’t dispel the larger economic myths and instead steps into a space that is too easy to call ‘welfare’. I think UBI is somewhat inevitable, but there’s a path to finding that space, and Democrats including Andrew Yang aren’t walking it. You can’t just jump to the end, because then it just becomes a patch, and not a real solution.
Wapiti
@rikyrah: 2020 is going to be all about culture wars. Republicans can’t win on policy so this is what they will do.
And the corporate MSM will aid and abet.
Gravenstone
@The Moar You Know:
I dunno, using the recent progress in CA as indicative of what happens when the voters kick Republicans en masse to the curb and they can no longer obstruct progress might be a useful object lesson.
Brachiator
@Betty Cracker:
Then I misunderstood what she meant when she said “Let’s focus on the jobs we HAVE NOW.”
But it’s been a long day.
I didn’t address this at all, even though I am not sure that it is entirely true, except to note the general issue of wage stagnation. But I don’t know what the answer is to this. However, I know that the Republicans have no clue, and anything they offer would make the problem worse. Also, since I am still catching up on the various candidates, I couldn’t even say how well or whether any particular Democratic candidate has addressed this.
But my separate, independent point, not a rebuttal to any commentor here, is that I want to see what the Democrats have to say about larger macroeconomic policy, and see this as more appropriate to the federal government.
And again, I absolutely agree here and never said anything against this point.
Kay
If you say to a regular person “we don’t talk about your job because “jobs” is actually a Right wing rhetorical device than means “a certain culture” they will think you are insane. I mean, it’s true but does it matter to them? You’re still not talking about their job. I’m proposing that rather than moaning that we can’t drop the baggage of all these weighted concepts that have history we just put down the suitcase and walk on. “Work” will stop being about white male work when we decide it is no longer about that, and say so, and keep saying so. You can’t stop doing something unless you actually stop.
Who cares if Tweety says the only real work is lunchbuckets? That’s not true. We’re free as birds to talk about all the other workers.
Martin
@Kayla Rudbek: One legitimate problem with how to address housing is that urban planning has gotten completely flipped on its head. There used to be pretty stable patterns of transit between different city functions (residential, shopping, offices, etc.) that are increasingly getting fucked up. I think that cities that had good mass transit have held on better. Cities with street malls are doing better than those without as consumers give preference to walking spaces over driving ones. In the Northampton case above, it’s also a change to what that retail looks like. Our outdoor walking malls are expanding, but our indoor ones are collapsing. One is a social space and the other isn’t, and the makeup of the retailers reflects that. But that means the spaces people want are spaces without cars, and the US is just not equipped for that. We’re learning to rezone of the fly. My city is almost all mixed use construction going in – first floor service retail and apartments/condos above. But they’re still trying to figure out how to make those first floor businesses work. Paris has the benefit of a metro and a culture of walking. My city doesn’t.
I think the US is responding particularly poorly to this.
Kay
You know, it isn’t even true in all these “rust belt” states they’re always yammering about. I live here. The biggest employer here is not an auto plant, it is a hospital. So I get it- they’re talking about something other than jobs- white people or culture or whatever the fuck they’re on about, but that still leaves all the people at the hospital who no one is talking to.
rikyrah
@Mary G: !
????
Ruckus
@Aleta:
Communism has always been about the future. How great it would be if only…. everyone would just do as I say? How much better it would be for everyone if only….. the world worked as I envisioned? How’s that going for all the communists of the world?
It’s never worked that way because the world obviously doesn’t work that way. It seems it’s just luck that most pieces of everything fell into place about 90% or more of the time in human history.
BS only has bullshit about anything because that’s all he’s ever had.
It sounds good if you don’t listen closely or better, at all, and it always sounds like your example. Which of course was asked by a black woman, so it has far less value so he doesn’t even have to actually listen or consider it as a reasonable question. I mean he answered the damn question. Besides how can you question his point of view. He’s an old white man, that makes him always right.
rikyrah
@gene108:
Nope ?
Neldob
I have only started this thread but it makes Andrew yang (?)s ideas look pretty good. The basic minimum income seems simpler than a minimum wage, and would cover a lot of issues potentially.
Aleta
Thanks to Kay and BC and commenters for focusing on who we talk to and about wrt working class. Jeez, 9-5 backed by Llily Tomlin and Dolly Parton and Fonda was a success back in 1980 when it intentionally brought up one kind of (white) working class women (and harassment).
The use of split shifts by co.s (and now states and feds) are out of control, and really destructive to workers and their families. Service window people are sent home for 1.5 – 3 hours in the middle of their daily shift, to lower wages. Waitresses, delivery receiving, receptionists ….
Brachiator
@Leto:
Thanks very much for the link on this. I don’t think the Republicans and the Trump administration was thinking about veterans at all when they made this tax law change.
That is, these fools weren’t thinking at all, and were only focusing on how the change to the “Kiddie Tax” would help rich people. This shit is just unfair and stupid.
Hell, I don’t think the Kiddie Tax was meant to be applied to this type of income.
Another example of Trump screwing over veterans even though he claims he cares about them more than any president ever.
Kay
I’m both amused and disgusted that Trump seems to be panicking about the measles outbreak. He better panic. He’s incompetent, he hires low quality hacks, and he fed these lunatic anti-vaccers red meat.
It’s all reality tv and fun and games until people start dying. Then you need a president. We don’t have one. Watching this clown try to fake his way into some kind of adult response is appalling. This is why people build credibility. Because sometimes they need it. If Sarah Sanders, liar, stepped in front of a podium and told me there was a national emergency I would wait for someone credible to verify. They didn’t bank it so they don’t have it.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Needy Imen the boneless has been on a rampage of name calling all day and I noticed that that one of Trump’s lapdogs in Congress made an officer to Rep Cumming over one of the subpoenas. Sounds like we are at the Trump flinches stage in the current cycle.
trollhattan
@Kayla Rudbek:
It’s a great question. Speaking from what I’ve seen in places I’ve lived, sometimes they’ll take losses on property A to offset profits on property B (or B-Z, helps to know who the owner is and how much they own elsewhere); sometimes they’re biding their time until the asset is fully depreciated; and sometimes they’re “land banking” waiting for a turnaround in value, so they can either redevelop or sell it. If the neighbors have to put up with a decaying eyesore in the meantime, tough.
Millard Filmore
@Kraux Pas:
Is that why its so hard to find a fast-food restaurant, like McDonald’s, open during school hours? //
Ruckus
@Martin:
A very good point.
And I’m as guilty as anyone. Decades ago I was an employer. Not a big one, 4-8, specialized employees. Paid well, at the top of the area pay scale to entice and retain workers. And then found that a couple of new machines that took one person to run, me, could be purchased at a price that could be repaid easily. No more people off sick, no more health care and workers comp insurance increases every year that could not be captured by price increases, new work that paid better, automation was better for the bottom line and my health. Of course the world can’t have me getting ahead in any way and didn’t, with a natural disaster, but still the concept was there and I reached for it. Others have done the same and been rewarded.
The goal of a job, of employees and of business is profit, that you make more than you spend for what you need. Right now a lot of workers are not getting their share and a lot of that is the reason you stated. We are in an every faster rate of change, of jobs, of life, of population, of, well everything than we have ever been in history. We’ve created a lifestyle and are now destroying it because we don’t recognize that and because we refuse/don’t know to admit it.
Kayla Rudbek
@Martin: my office is walking distance to at least one Metro stop, so I’m not sure what the problem with getting businesses in is. It took forever to get a drugstore within walking distance of my office and the Metro stop, which should have been an absolute no-brainer considering that it was also close to high-rise apartment buildings.
Sab
@Aleta: My son-in-law was working 60 hours a week cooking at a fancy local restaurant chain. They liked him, so they worked him at three of their different locations. But each was a separate legal entity, so he was only a part-time worker at each. So no benefits.
trollhattan
@Brachiator:
The Khans proved gold star families don’t mean shit and by extension, veterans. Republicans are happy to use them for props, of course.
“I like people who weren’t captured.”
–Cadet Bone Spur
trollhattan
@Sab:
Ugh. Surprised they didn’t declare him an independent contractor.
Sab
@Kay: I am 65. I had measles as a toddler., as did my slightly younger brother. I don’t remember it at all, or chicken pox, although I still have scars.
My 68 year old sister remembers it vividly. Locked in the house with the blinds drawn, with a splitting headache, a high fever, and
itchy rash, and two sick younger siblings
Kayla Rudbek
@trollhattan: It makes absolutely no sense to me that there’s empty office space within walking distance to a large federal agency and a Metro stop. There are either some really good tax deals with the city, or money laundering in my arrogant opinion.
Amir Khalid
Football report: Liverpool lead their visitors, bottom-of-the-table Huddersfield Town, 3-0. First goal by Naby Keita in 15 seconds, second goal by Sadio Mane in the middle minute of the half, third goal by Mo Salah in the last minute of the half.
schrodingers_cat
What exactly is a lunch bucket? Do people bring their lunch in a bucket? Eat it in bucket? I have never seen one IRL. Is it like the lolrus bucket, is it blue?
Ruckus
@Kayla Rudbek:
Across the street from my new place is being build multi story houses. A lot of home in a small footprint, with out the overwhelming need to mow something. Reminds me of old Boston, row houses but without back yards. This used to be a K-Mart and it’s parking lot.
There is still land in CA, it’s just not in a lot of big plots or near the big established areas. Nor are those areas all that near jobs that pay well enough to pay for the building of new homes. A lot of the housing market in the LA area came about after WWII and so is now 70 yrs old and getting near replacement needs if it hasn’t been properly maintained, which a lot hasn’t.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@schrodingers_cat: See images here.
My father carried a black one like the first two pictures.
Kay
@Sab:
I had chicken pox too. My younger children were immunized. The photos of babies with measles just make me cringe. I have this vague, fuzzy memory of lining up in the hall at school for “shots”. Did they do them in public schools? Maybe it was a tine test? Anyway. Start that again. It was very efficient .
schrodingers_cat
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Its not what I think of as a bucket though. Thanks.
Sab
@schrodingers_cat: I am not old enough to remember actual lunch buckets or pails (if they ever actually existed) but I do remember lunch boxes. Those were smallish metal boxes, slightly smaller than an 8×5 sheet of paper about three inches high. They were metal, with a handle, hinges and a clasp, and everyone from tiny school children to adult men working in factories and on job sites carried their lunch in them. The adult ones also had a thermos inside. The kiddy ones had cartoon characters on the outside.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
As always he lies. He lies about everything. It’s like breathing to him. He doesn’t even seem to understand that he’s lying. He speaks about what pops into his tiny brain when it does, but it gets scrambled going in and coming out. So it’s not consistent and it’s almost always a lie. The easiest way to see everything he says is that it’s a lie, because the only time he speaks in any way truthful is if someone puts words in his mouth.
We do ourselves a disservice when we think that he even has the concept of true or false. He doesn’t.
Neldob
@Ruckus: and we can look to riverside to see a lot of terrible housing developement along with the necessary traffic problems due to lack of planning.
Brachiator
@trollhattan:
God, this was ugly, despicable. And we saw how bad Trump would be. He never backed down from insulting the Khans, or apologized. He kept fronting the lie that he cared about veterans. His staff and the GOP leadership covered for him. Any editorial objections were ignored. And Trump’s rabid fans cheered and defended him, even though they also claimed that they loved America and the military.
It amazes me that McCain’s daughter, the one who appears on The View, clearly despises Trump, but still defends him and Republicans on other policy.
And some idiots think that the Khans or Dead John McCain are exceptions. But Trump clearly has no real concern for any veterans.
ETA:
@Ruckus:
RE: He doesn’t even seem to understand that he’s lying.
He understands. He just doesn’t care. He cares about himself, his ego, his reputation and sometimes his family (and especially his daughter).
Sab
@Kay: I remember the polio sugar cubes.
I also remember actually having mumps. My siblings just got headaches. I got the full ballooned lymph nodes. My mother tried to give me comfort food ( stawberries and orange juice) before she knew what I had. Hurt like hell going down my sore throught, and I have hated them ever since.
Ruckus
@Sab:
I’m slightly older than you and remember all the diseases of being young at that time. I spent 5 yrs after the measles with encephalitis, which may be why I’m going through things now. And may be why many “aging” diseases are far more prevalent now than they used to be. Well that and medicine is far advanced over what it was 50-70 yrs ago and the average age has advanced, some of which is due to kids not dying at the same rate or in infancy.
Sab
@Brachiator: Isn’t Meghan McCain’s father-in-law (Doug Shapiro) in trouble now for (alleged) corruption at Department of Interior?
Ruckus
@schrodingers_cat:
It was at one time an actual bucket, because that was the way to carry things, water, lunch, etc. Then it became the lunch box, then disposable paper bags, I think now it’s mostly fast food.
Martin
@Brachiator: I don’t even mind that Trump is unaware or doesn’t care. But I’m willing to bet damn near every pickup owner with a POW/MIA sticker voted for Trump even after that statement about McCain. They have no excuse.
Martin
@Ruckus: Since that mainly applied to jobs like construction – roach coach. They’re having a bit of a Renaissance now.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
He may have understood at one time. I think he no longer does or at least not on a conscious level. He’s like a wounded, cornered animal who lashes out at anyone, anything he perceives as a threat, which in his mind is almost everyone else and his perception of the world is so warped that he has little to no idea what reality is. For him reality is he is the best. As this clearly isn’t close to the truth or reality that most of the rest of us see. So he may be true to himself, but that has no connection to physical, rational, moralistic, legal value. And it even has little connection to political reality. It’s just that his political party has lost the plot along with him as well.
Ruckus
@Martin:
It applied to a lot of other blue collar jobs, mostly before I was born. But yes roach coaches were the thing in my younger days, but how much are they out of more populated areas?
BTW lunch buckets became lunch pails then lunch boxes, depending on where you lived. Not sure they were ever lunch buckets in my life time, at least in LA.
Martin
@schrodingers_cat: It’s a dabba. In the period being reminisced about it was metal and had a curved lid to accommodate a cylindrical thermos. Soup or coffee in the thermos, sandwich or other easy to eat thing in the bottom. Here’s a good photo of one and in use: http://fortune.com/2015/09/17/lunch-office-work-day/
What it really refers to is people that do work too far from a restaurant, who usually don’t get long lunch breaks, or don’t earn much. Blue-collar work, basically.
Small coolers are popular now – or a roach coach – a food truck that usually hits large construction sites twice a day – early morning and afternoon. In the old days (19th century) they really did look a lot like dabbas. Galvanized round metal pail with a lid and handle attached the pail at its most basic. But many had 2 or 3 or 4 tiers exactly like a dabba would. Usually wider and not as tall to make them less tippy (the notion of delivering these en mass as they do in India was unheard of, so there was no pressure to make them in any way uniform). This was back in the old days when you’d go down into the mine for 12 hours or more and would need to bring down 2-3 meals.
Brachiator
@Ruckus:
I disagree. But if this is true, and not just metaphorical, then Trump is clinically insane. Why the fuck is he still president?
The Republican leadership is getting what they think they want by riding Trump’s coattails. They haven’t lost the plot. They found an express train to getting their wretched tax and social policies enacted.
Martin
@Ruckus: I see a roach coach at least twice a day here in OC. Not a foodie truck but an honest to god roach coach. Their menu is a little less bacon and eggs and a bit more chorizo and eggs, but it’s no different otherwise. We have plenty of restaurants and the like here, but they’re crowded, and they often don’t open early enough. The advantage of the truck is that they’ll roll in at 6:30, and they’re fast – no hipsters asking for soy mocha whatevers. And also, when we build a neighborhood, it’s hundreds of homes with no retail infrastructure in place yet. Even hitting McDs is going to take a while to get to. But lots of folks with old-school lunch boxes as well, themos and all. Tends to be more common with contractors doing renovations who tend to be a bit more migratory.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
1. Because the people he’s surrounded himself with are as delusional as he is.
2. Because his party is as delusional as he is and isn’t what a political party is supposed to be, a vision of the people that belong to it. The republican party has become a scam, both to the country and to the majority of the people that belong to it.
3. Because of the process that a president is removed from office in this country and because of item #2 above. Millions of people voted for a delusional racist moron, because they thought a delusional racist moron would make the country what it used to be. And he’s doing that, but not by plan but by incompetence.
When I say they have lost the plot I mean that they are not interested in having an operational government, they are only interested in having a racist empire that they can loot for all it’s worth. And many members of the party members don’t understand or care about this. The rest think it’s a great idea. Even if it hurts them, it will hurt others more. And that’s worth it to them.
sgrAstar
@TenguPhule:
“John Adams! ?I know him….?”
sgrAstar
@jl: In SF we are being slaughtered by nimbyism. It’s absolutely infuriating. People contest every effort to make improvements. SF is tiny, densely populated, and full of residents who will fight every effort to build affordable housing or expand the network of Navigation Centers for the homeless. UGH.
Procopius
You think so? Surely, they used to be, and not all of them were white nor male, but if you read Al From’s description of the origins of the Democratic Leadership Council (which means most of the Party Nomenklatura now) you’ll see that they made a deliberate decision to abandon unions and the labor movement in general, because they wanted the big donations. You think that hasn’t been noticed? I do agree, though, that it is the height of foolishness to be talking almost exclusively about “attracting the white working class.”