Awaiting Trump's coal comeback, miners reject retraining

[pbrower2a]

It takes a truly evil group like the Republican party to cash in on these people's hopes and dreams for political gain while defrauding them year after year. It's truly sickening.

It also takes an evil man like Donald Trump to promise the impossible such as the revival of a moribund industry.

This horrid man would have gone to the macabre shell of the Packard Automobile Plant in Detroit and promised that Packard cars would make a comeback right in that place if people were stupid enough to believe him. (No automobile has been made there for nearly sixty years).

Appalachian coal is not coming back.  If President Trump is a 'friend of coal', he forgot to finish with the word 'barons'. He'd support huge subsidies to the coal business, but that would not ensure that there would be jobs.

[pbrower2a]

There is one key thing that everyone seems to be ignoring here: namely the other reasons why people don't retrain - the fact that you're leaving an industry that currently pays well (and a whole lot more than other employment in the area) for no guarantee in an alternative industry that might not pay as well, in addition to the fact that you're bringing no money in while in a retraining programme which is rather important.  This would suggest to me that the problem is more with the direction of Federal retraining programmes, and that focusing on the sort of skills and programme where you could blend together employment and training - almost like an apprenticeship in a way, where a person is still bringing in an income while learning a new field - with a guarantee with some kind of place for at least a time at the end you'd help to address those concerns.

Suppose that you had a well-paying job in the auto industry, but employment got shaky. Layoffs become more frequent and longer.  A machine is being designed to do your job, Would you consider learning the art of the barber? Or medical technology? Sure, it pays less...  But if you don't take the opportunity at age 35, what happens when you lose your job at 50? Retail sales or fast-food work? That's for kids who have yet to realize that such work is exploitation.

Real wages are falling in America -- foreign competition, automation, and the relative decline of manufacturing as a share of the economy.  

[pbrower2a]

You can't teach old dogs new tricks.

That's how snot-nosed young Progressives, many of whose idea of hard work is pulling an all-nighter studying for finals, view folks who have invested their bodies, health, and lives in a job that has been as much of a career for them as IT is for a computer nerd.

These folks don't know "their own best interests"?  Many of these folks own their homes.  The jobs they would be "retrained" for are nowhere near where they live.  If they could sell their homes, they couldn't get enough value to purchase something affordable in what would likely be a more expensive locale.  And that doesn't account for the age discrimination and the discrimination against the long-term unemployed that these workers would face in the workplace.

Information technology can be done anywhere. One of the biggest users of IT is Wal*Mart, situated  in the Mountain South. But let's all remember that the dwindling number of coal jobs is the contemporary equivalent of The Grapes of Wrath. The difference: the political culture is elitist and sadistic. It's Donald Trump this time instead of FDR.

The coal mining jobs are not coming back any more than that the Dust Bowl is likely to become a fruited plain again. 

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This is the most nightmarish era for white* people in America since the Civil War. Our economy has the enrichment of people like Donald Trump (rent collectors bleeding the middle class) above all else. We have never had more corruption and reactionary ideology as guides to political leadership. To spoof the state motto of Michigan: Si quaeris dictaturam incipiens, circumspice


Sometimes one must sell out cheaply just to get a chance to live in a new world in which landlords get 50% of your income for a single-bedroom apartment. We live in a pure plutocracy in which the elites have no responsibilities to the common man except in the better times of American history, and those elites have exactly the President, Congress, and most state legislatures in the first stage of doing their bidding. The rest of us will be obliged to suffer with a smile.

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Having faced my own set of difficulties, including difficulty getting and holding jobs, and loneliness that results from having no clue that those difficulties are not my fault, I am in the position at an age much like yours, in which I have no problems that an Afterlife or reincarnation wouldn't solve. I hold in contempt politics and culture made for morons.  If you want to know what politics made for morons is like, then recall this:

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You  guessed it -- Satan Incarnate, in Mein Kampf.

I prefer leaders who bring out the best in human nature, and that includes fostering wisdom, knowledge, principle, and overall competence. Someone who says "I love low-information voters"
will never bring out the best -- only the worst. 

I prefer also that people can get away with being snot-nosed progressives.   

*We are all in the same mess. But white people fell for Donald Judas Trump as others didn't. Others know what they face. White people are going to be completely shocked to find themselves just as victimized as those who voted more sanely as groups.

[pbrower2a]

I sympathize a lot with these coal miners. Not only were they sold the myth that coal jobs would return, but even if they didn't believe that what other options are truly viable for them? Yes, this one man in the article is 33, but what about the rest of the coal miners who're rejecting retraining? Making such a transition simply isn't easy, especially when you likely come from a long line of coal miners, you recognize that coal mining is the only decent paying job in your community, and you probably don't know anyone in or anything about these new fields. And if there are no jobs to be found in your local area, what're you supposed to do? Uproot yourself from a community in which your family may have lived for generations? Try to sell your home (good luck) and relocate to a costlier urban area? And not to mention the limited or total lack of income obtainable during retraining, which makes providing for a family incredibly difficult.

For many comes the need to give up on what were once reliable certainties that have become sure ruin. That could mean selling out one's most valuable asset (a house) and downsizing in  living conditions. No income during retraining?  There are grocery and 'dollar' stores; there are fast-food places. Getting the wife to work?

The best days of American life are probably over.   

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It is telling that Martin Luther King was planning on a tour of Appalachia  that never came to fruition because he got hit by a bullet from James Earl Ray. We can never say whether it would have been effective, but King recognized that the poverty of Appalachia was nearly as degrading and extreme as poor Southern blacks knew. Really, it is. Poor Southern blacks had never known prosperity. Poor urban blacks might have, only for the industrial jobs to vanish. Many of those poor urban blacks had participated in the Great Migration, abandoning the dire certainties of being field hands for working in the great factories of the Midwest. "Take 51 to Bloomington and 66 to Chicago" was good advice in Mississippi. But so was "Take 21 to Cleveland" either from South Carolina or West Virginia.

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Donald Trump offered a solution. It's a poor solution, one intended to intensify mass hardship so that elites can indulge themselves more. But sticking with the inevitable demise of coal country is one sure way to hurt one's children and grandchildren. Millions of black people have left the infamous Inner Cities for the suburbs, where the jobs and better schools are. It may be hard to see the wreck that is Detroit as evidence of progress, but as the Detroit jobs disappeared, the housing became worthless.

Yes, I hate Donald Trump. He has turned the American way of life from the slogan "You get what you pay for" into "You pay for what you get -- and oh, do you pay!" Bur he is not alone in making a nightmare of America. This man knows as little about manufacturing that he promises to bring back prosperity than he does about translating cuneiform inscriptions. He is the master of the Art of the Con, as is every demagogue who has ever existed -- and disappointed his early supporters.

Some people recognized this horrible man as a fraud very early. What began with me was the opinion "What is so special about this man of great claim but no technical expertise?" to my current disdain for him. But my life was miserable before he became President. By 2016 a plurality of Americans no longer believed in his ideology -- but he got the right votes.

His approval ratings show that many Americans who voted for him are gravely disappointed in him. One after another layer of potential support has peeled away. I cannot tell yet which layers of support those are. Industrial workers? Sure. There may be jobs, but no more industrial jobs are being created. The jobs opening pay near-starvation wages.

Donald Trump is a real-life Berzelius Windrip -- except that the bad President in It Can't Happen Here has no obvious professional background. (Berzelius Windrip was a druggist). We could be seeing Sinclair Lewis' novel on a great stage -- one extending from Nome (with a break for the North Pacific Ocean west of British Columbia) to Miami -- in real life.   
   

[pbrower2a]

I DO think that the decline in family formation and family stability IS, however, an important factor in both urban and rural poverty.  The likely long-term outlook and long-term outcome of a child in a low-income family with two (2) marital parents in the home, in general, is so much more positive than long-term outlooks and outcomes of non-marital families that it amazes me that we have to educate folks as to the advantage.  This is not to say that the worst two-parent marital family, riddled with abuse and dysfunction, is better than the best single-parent family with a positive role model as head of household, but it is very much true in the aggregate.  Rural AND urban poverty is, very much, driven by out-of-wedlock births and the decreased stability of non-marital households (again, in the aggregate). 

Incidentally, one reason I am for single-payer healthcare is that it has the potential to stop the practice of folks deliberately not getting married so that delivery of a child can be funded by Medicaid; the present system PUNISHES poor married folks who are in the situation of having a spouse being pregnant but being up a creek as far as medical coverage for the child goes.

Fuzzy, I think you were making a mistake many conservatives do by mixing up cause and effect. The explosion of single-parent households in the Inner City, both African American and Hispanic, have next to nothing to do with the welfare system. What really happened is the industrialization took away steady working class income jobs from such neighborhoods. Sadly, even in the seventies and eighties the whole first fire last hired situation came to roost. Not to mention where the focus of the industrialization was in heavily African American communities like Detroit, Gary, East St Louis, Etc.

The end result is that it made a generation of Inner City young black males unmarriageable because there was no economic system by which they could support a family. That same phenomenon spread to Inner City Hispanic communities soon afterwards, and now has started praying on Rural white communities we're out of Whitlock boroughs are dramatically growing and number for much the same reason.

I guess the big difference is that blacks and Latinos have long blamed, rightly in my view, economical E2 yes are overwhelmingly white. Rural White in contrast seem to primarily blame blacks and Latinos, and take a tax on Elite whites as an attack on all White's. Too many rural working-class whites in hard economic Straits still find more in common with purported billionaire Donald Trump then they do equally economically challenged blacks and Latinos on racial and cultural identity. And that's just damn wrong

When pay is low and uncertain, it is thoroughly rational to defer marriage and child-raising. It is also contrary to human  nature, and practices contrary to human nature are at best temporary measures. Human nature is what it is for good reason.

What has been true of urban blacks and Latinos is appearing in non-urban White America. Shattered dreams? Opiates and meth might provide an outlet. Is that new? No -- just a different group of people. Crime becomes more commonplace -- child abuse, petty thefts, and sex crimes.

I live in a hick town in the Midwest, and I can see the same sorts of poverty businesses that one expects in depressed areas of the big cities. Check-cashing places. Pawn shops. Payday lenders. Rent-to-own emporiums. I see stores closing only to remain vacant. But it's not only my town; it's in others nearby. This is rural America.

I look at this short German documentary (it is in German, but the visuals require no translation), and it looks (except that the victims of oppression are white) like what would expect from an East German propaganda piece from the 1970s  on how the monstrous capitalist system treats black people in Detroit or Cleveland. But this is a small city, the people shown are white, and it isn't the 1970s. This is now. If you can't understand the German speech, then you still need no translation of the images.

http://www.ardmediathek.de/tv/ttt-titel-thesen-temperamente/Armut-als-Familientradition/Das-Erste/Video?bcastId=431902&documentId=41946122

This is from ARD -- and not from "DDR TV".

Donald Trump won by offering scapegoats, but he cannot solve the problems that he was elected without valid solutions. Further enrichment of economic elites is likely to cause more economic instability and more distress.       

[pbrower2a]

But while one can get retraining one can get work, even if it is 'only' stocking shelves in a store. If one has been working in a coal mine, one has as much to unlearn for getting along in some other jobs, as in "appearance matters" and that the profanity that stays in the mine and does not leave is unacceptable in any job with even the slightest exposure to the public.

It is never easy to change careers, especially when the career pays less. But that is much more the norm in America. The glass ceilings are lower and even more rigid than ever. These are not good times.

[pbrower2a]

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That is the case for literally every kind of education/training in this country.

Indeed one of the signs of a bad educational institution is that it promises economic success after graduating. Corinthian Colleges (remember them? the for-profit trade schools that the Obama administration practically shut down by stopping government loans to attending schools whose graduates had a high rate of fault --  unlike schools with modest promises and modest costs like some inexpensive trade schools and highly-selective colleges and universities) typically promised a job upon graduation. Harvard can't make such a promise.