Awaiting Trump's coal comeback, miners reject retraining

(Reuters) 


https://www.reuters.com/article/us-trump...SKBN1D14G0

Quote:Despite broad consensus about coal’s bleak future, a years-long effort to diversify the economy of this hard-hit region (southwestern Pennsylvania) away from mining is stumbling, with Obama-era jobs retraining classes undersubscribed and future programs at risk under President Donald Trump’s proposed 2018 budget.

Trump has promised to revive coal by rolling back environmental regulations and moved to repeal Obama-era curbs on carbon emissions from power plants.

But hundreds of coal-fired plants have closed in recent years, and cheap natural gas continues to erode domestic demand. The Appalachian region has lost about 33,500 mining jobs since 2011, according to the Appalachian Regional Commission.
Although there have been small gains in coal output and hiring this year, driven by foreign demand, production levels remain near lows hit in 1978.

A White House official did not respond to requests for comment on coal policy and retraining for coal workers.

What many experts call false hopes for a coal resurgence have mired economic development efforts here in a catch-22: Coal miners are resisting retraining without ready jobs from new industries, but new companies are unlikely to move here without a trained workforce. The stalled diversification push leaves some of the nation’s poorest areas with no clear path to prosperity.

Federal retraining programs have fared better, with some approaching full participation, in the parts of Appalachia where mining has been crushed in a way that leaves little hope for a comeback, according to county officials and recruiters. They include West Virginia and Kentucky, where coal resources have been depleted.

But in southern Pennsylvania, where the industry still has ample reserves and is showing flickers of life, federal jobs retraining programs see sign-up rates below 20 percent, the officials and recruiters said. In southern Virginia’s coal country, participation rates run about 50 percent, they said.

Americans Are Officially Freaking Out

Almost two-thirds say this is the lowest point in U.S. history—and it’s keeping a lot of them up at night.

(Bloomberg)


For those lying awake at night worried about health care, the economy, and an overall feeling of divide between you and your neighbors, there’s at least one source of comfort: Your neighbors might very well be lying awake, too.
Almost two-thirds of Americans, or 63 percent, report being stressed about the future of the nation, according to the American Psychological Association’s Eleventh Stress in America survey, conducted in August and released on Wednesday.  This worry about the fate of the union tops longstanding stressors such as money (62 percent) and work (61 percent) and also cuts across political proclivities. However, a significantly larger proportion of Democrats (73 percent) reported feeling stress than independents (59 percent) and Republicans (56 percent).

The “current social divisiveness” in America was reported by 59 percent of those surveyed as a cause of their own malaise. When the APA surveyed Americans a year ago, 52 percent said they were stressed by the presidential campaign. Since then, anxieties have only grown.
A majority of the more than 3,400 Americans polled, 59 percent, said “they consider this to to be the lowest point in our nation’s history that they can remember.” That sentiment spanned generations, including those that lived through World War II, the Vietnam War, and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. (Some 30 percent of people polled cited terrorism as a source of concern, a number that’s likely to rise given the alleged terrorist attack in New York City on Tuesday.)

“We have a picture that says people are concerned,” said Arthur Evans, APA’s chief executive officer. “Any one data point may not not be so important, but taken together, it starts to paint a picture.”

The survey didn’t ask respondents specifically about the administration of President Donald Trump, Evans said. He points to the “acrimony in the public discourse” and “the general feeling that we are divided as a country” as being more important than any particular person or political party.

Yet he and the study note that particular policy issues are a major source of anxiety. Some 43 percent of respondents said health care was a cause. The economy (35 percent) and trust in government (32 percent) also ranked highly, as did hate crimes (31 percent) and crime in general (31 percent).

“Policymakers need to understand that this is an issue that is important to people, that the uncertainty is having an impact on stress levels, and that stress has an impact on health status,” Evans said, pointing out that the relationship between stress and health is well-established.

• And keeping up with the latest developments is a source of worry all its own. Most Americans—56 percent—said they want to stay informed, but the news causes them stress. (Yet even more, 72 percent, said “the media blows things out of proportion.”)
  
  

Oct 30 (Reuters) - The Federal Bureau of Investigation is investigating a $300 million contract that Puerto Rico’s government power company awarded to a U.S.-based energy startup, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The contract between Whitefish Energy Holdings and Puerto Rico’s bankrupt power utility came under fire after it was revealed last week that the terms were obtained without a competitive public bidding process.

Whitefish had more than 350 workers and 2,500 tons of heavy equipment on the ground for rebuilding electrical lines destroyed in Hurricane Maria, raising concern about Puerto Rico's management of federal disaster-relief funds to the island, the WSJ reported. (on.wsj.com/2zjM0vi)

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, multiple congressional committees and local auditors have begun requesting documents about the deal, according to the WSJ.

Whitefish and the FBI’s office in Puerto Rico were not immediately available for comments. (Reporting by Anirban Paul in Bengaluru; Editing by Anil D‘Silva)

https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-puer...SL4N1N55QR

• The primary conflict structuring the two parties involves questions of national identity, race, and morality, while the traditional conflict over economics, though still important, is less divisive now than it used to be. This has the potential to reshape the party coalitions.
  
• By making questions of national identity more salient, Donald Trump succeeded in winning over “populists” (socially conservative, economically liberal voters) who had previously voted for Democrats.
  
• Among populists who voted for Obama, Clinton did terribly. She held onto only 6 in 10 of these voters (59 percent). Trump picked up 27 percent of these voters, and the remaining 14 percent didn’t vote for either major party candidate.
  
• To the extent that the Democratic Party is divided, these divisions are more about faith in the political system and general disaffection than they are about issue positions.
  
• By contrast, Republican voters are more clearly split. For the most part, Trump and Cruz supporters look fairly similar, though Cruz supporters are considerably more conservative on moral issues, and notably less concerned about inequality and the social safety net, and more pro- free trade. Kasich supporters are the true moderates, caught in between the two parties on almost every issue, both economic and social.
  
• In both parties, the donor class is both more conservative on economic issues and more liberal on social issues, as compared to the rest of the party
  
• Democrats may be pressured to move further left on identity issues, given that both younger voters and the party’s donor class are quite far to the left on identity issues. If so, American politics would become further polarized along questions of culture and identity.
  

• An economic liberalism-conservatism index (which combines views on the social safety net, trade, inequality, and active government)
  

• A social/identity liberalism-conservatism politics index (which combines the moral issues index plus views toward African-Americans, immigrants, and Muslims).
  
  

Raw labor used to be valuable. It was how the crops on fields and in orchards were harvested. Raw labor was the commercial fisherman casting and pulling the nets, the stevedore lugging stuff from a ship onto the dock, the loader of freight between trains and trucks or transportation and warehouses and between warehouses and stores. This was also the person who did the unskilled work of construction and maintenance of highways, railroads, and canals. This fit the classification of 'unskilled workers'.

Slightly more skilled work, the semi-skilled work, implied assembling objects on a production line, driving vehicles or operating other machinery, or running a cash register. Maybe cleaning, which could also be unskilled. But such work as a rule required little training. This was semi-skilled work.

These workers were the proletariat of Karl Marx, the class that Marx contended would eventually dominate political life as economic orders became more sophisticated in technology and richer in the accumulation of capital. But the worker had nothing to offer except his toil, and capitalists could be relied upon to exploit the helplessness of the worker in his weak position of negotiation as the political order allowed. Owners of the assets would thus debase the worker as completely as possible with the aid of bourgeois governments that the capitalists dominated. This would end in a socialist revolution... yada, yada, yada... and with astute guidance from  vanguard leadership, workers would be in a position to see their world transform into the post-scarcity world of Communism, a world in which all human needs could be met easily, exploitation would be impossible, and people could develop their human qualities to the fullest. This Communism is not to be confused with the reality of Marxist-Leninist states such as the Soviet Union that called them selves 'socialist' states attempting to make the hard transition to Marx's ultimate Communist world of humanistic abundance.

Hey -- Marx established much of the language of social science, and we are stuck with it.

We all know that beginning in the 1950s in America that as unskilled labor became less important in the economy, high-school students got the admonition to not drop  out of high school. Raw labor was becoming less reliable as a source of work. Even semi-skilled work was beginning to be deprecated as a career choice. Manufacturing had always been seasonal and cyclical in its demand for assembly-line workers.  Skilled work was still sophisticated enough that one began to need a high-school diploma to enter an apprenticeship program. It still paid better than most white-collar work.

In recent years means have been found in which to greatly the number of people doing such tasks. Containers might be loaded at a factory so that they would never need to be opened (with a high possibility of pilferage) at a dock between an electronics plant in China and a retailer's warehouse in America. Even in retailing we find self-checkout that allows people to check out merchandise; no checker needs count cash, bag groceries or clothing items, weigh produce, or even approve a check or credit/debit/EBT purchase. We see ATMs supplanting bank tellers. Robots can now do the stereotyped work that assembly-line workers once did without the risk of someone getting carpal-tunnel syndrome or back pain.

So guess what happens? The demand for raw and even semi-skilled labor shrinks.

OK, so what about the lower-middle-class clerks who made a living pushing papers, inputting data, and filing? We need far less of that as computers do the work. Computers are even reducing the need for attorneys, mathematicians, and engineers!

Question: what happens if workers completely lose their value in an economic order, or find their value reduced to that of slaves or share-croppers? Do the remaining economic elites get to act with consummate arrogance, cruelty, and indulgence?

This is Dr. Todd Michael of Boulder CO aka Dr. Michael Abrams, a former emergency room physician, musician and psychologist who writes about the souls of the dying and about making miracles happen. I was looking through promo papers from the past sent to me for the Holistic Arts Fair, and found info on this guy. Amazing resemblance. And he's the same age as Neil, born in 1951. I don't know if he was born in October like Neil was. A long lost twin? This picture is from circa Year 2000.

https://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Angel-E...1585426717

Now the noise has died down and folks might get their phone calls through.  Also, the websites should work now.

Read here first : http://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/equifax-...our-credit


Why?  Equifax's fuckup has given ol'e Rags a gift.  For eveyone who gets a freeze, it costs the credit bureaus money 'cause they can't sell your data.   Millies might want to pass since their credit needs are more mobile and unpredictable.  [Buy/rent places to live, buy 1st car, open new credit cards, new data plans on fones, etc.]

Xer's :   Uh, these credit bureaus are using YOUR data and making a profit off of it.  Are you in that income stream?  I doubt it.  No freebies, duuudes/dudettes.





Boomers:   Boycott time!  Remember the 1960''s-1970's? 

Refresher here:  https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01018088





Ahhhhh yeah, man.  What was old, is new again.


#DisruptCreditBureaus

Yeah that's right and this isn't Alex Jones tier news either...though if one actually listens to him, he's not crazy he's just six months ahead of everyone else.

http://www.latimes.com/politics/essentia...story.html

Essentially this law makes attempted murder via virus no longer a felony, worse still it will lead to contaminated blood leaking into the medical blood supply.

I figured I'd leave this here.






I thoroughly enjoyed watching Ben Shapiro take a dump all over this song.

It has now been nearly five years since a mentally ill young person killed several in a school shooting in Connecticut. At the time of the Newtown Massacre it was revealed that the sharp decline in mental health services during the past three decades left a void which figuratively could have prevented tragedies such as this one. As we know, between then and the massacre in Las Vegas a few days back, there have been many more mass shootings, very often perpetrated by someone who was obviously mentally imbalanced at the time of the act.

Years ago many of those unstable individuals were housed in facilities such as sanitariums, away from the general public usually. Many of them were inhumane, virtually one notch above prisons. Many if not most of the inmates pretty much had life sentences. But at least there was shelter from the rain, wind and snow and got, as the saying goes, three hots and a cot.

The balance we seek between the quest for greater personal freedom and others in society that may need protection can often be elusive even though it can also be found within ourselves, meaning that we have the ability to create positive outcomes by redirecting our energy to suit our own wellbeing. Apparently the sanitariums and similar places in the past failed at this.

But now could be the time for a revival of sanitariums being that so many are being freaked out by the stresses of modern life, which I believe the information age and some our addictions to it have magnified. And I am sure there are many who find themselves unable to cope with the stresses of the cost of living and getting by today, with so many forced to live paycheck to paycheck or even more on a shoestring.

We need to hope that they will be more humane this time around, but such places at least can provide a communal living experience which is sorely lacking in modern life. Could what's old become new again?