9/3/24

Tuesday, September 3, 2024

1965 Pope Paul VI publishes encyclical Mysterium Fidei

1967 Nguyễn Văn Thiệu elected President of South Vietnam under a new constitution

1978 Pope John Paul I officially installed as the 263rd supreme pontiff

2017 1.4 ton WWII bomb defused in Frankfurt, Germany with 60,000 people evacuated, the largest postwar

In bed at 9, awake at 3:07, up and about at 3:33.    

Prednisone, day 114, 10 mg., day 19/28  Diclofenac on my knee at 3:45.  Prednisone around 5:00 and morning meds at 6:20.  Breakfast at 8:45, All Bran w/ berries.

NAFTA,  Bill Clinton, Democrats, killing the New Deal, and the road to Trump and MAGA.   Bill Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement on December 17, 1992.  After ratification and some side agreements, Clinton again signed it on December 8, 1993, and the agreement went into effect on January 1, 1994.   Among the Democrats praised for getting the treat passed were Rahm Emanuel, Vice President Al Gore, chairwoman of Clinton's Council of Economic Advisors Laura Tyson, and Director of the National Economic Council Robert Rubin.  In this morning's NYTimes, there is an article by Dan Kaufman that really strikes home for Milwaukeans, How NAFTA Broke American Politics: Since its passage in 1993, the trade agreement has played an outsize role in presidential elections — which now often hinge on the three Rust Belt states it helped to hollow out.  The story focuses on the closing of the big Master Lock factory in Milwaukee, a company created by Harry Sorof in 1921.  The Sorof family sold the company in 1970.  His granddaughter, Bobby Soref, was one of TSJ's clients.  Excerpts:

The closure of its factory in March, where it made iconic locks for generations, represents the final stage in Milwaukee’s long unraveling as an industrial powerhouse, part of a larger phenomenon, fueled by NAFTA, that has taken place across the country, particularly in the Rust Belt states. NAFTA eliminated tariffs on trade among the treaty’s signatories — Canada, Mexico and the United States — allowing for the unfettered movement of capital and foreign investment. It ushered in an era of free-trade agreements that brought cheap goods to consumers and generated great wealth for investors and the financial sector, but it also increased income inequality, weakened labor unions and accelerated the hollowing out of America’s industrial base.

Milwaukee was once known as the “machine shop of the world.” In the 1950s, nearly 60 percent of the city’s adult population worked in manufacturing, a vast majority of whom held well-paying union jobs. In 1969, Milwaukee had the second-highest median income in the country. By 2021, Milwaukee had lost more than 80 percent of its manufacturing jobs (barely 5 percent of those that remained were unionized), and it had the second-highest poverty rate of any large American city, just one example of NAFTA’s profound impact on American industry and labor.

Deindustrialization has diminished the wealth, power and health of working-class Americans arguably more than any other single culprit. While deindustrialization has many causes — in a recessionary four-year period that ended in the early 1980s, a quarter of Milwaukee’s manufacturing jobs were wiped out — a central driver has been free-trade agreements with developing countries, of which NAFTA was the first. According to a study by the Economic Policy Institute, Americans without college degrees have lost nearly $2,000 a year in wages owing to trade with low-wage countries, even after accounting for cheaper consumer goods. The economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case have documented how the loss of jobs has led to falling life expectancy for working-class people: College-educated Americans can now expect to live eight years longer than those without a college degree. “I would put that down to deindustrialization combined with the lack of any political voice,” Deaton told me.

The passage of NAFTA remains one of the most consequential events in recent American political and economic history. Between 1997 and 2020, more than 90,000 factories closed, partly as a result of NAFTA and similar agreements. The coming presidential election, like the previous two, is likely to be determined by three of the “blue wall” states — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — which have all been ravaged by deindustrialization. In 2016, Donald Trump won those states, and the presidency, in part by railing against NAFTA (“the worst trade deal ever,” he called it). Exit polls showed that Trump won nearly two-thirds of voters who believe that free trade takes away American jobs. Ohio, meanwhile, which twice voted for Barack Obama, has increasingly become a Republican stronghold.

A 2021 study published in The American Economic Review found that counties dependent on the industries most affected by NAFTA experienced decreases in total employment of about 6 percent compared with those with little exposure. By 2000, the same study found, those counties had shifted significantly from Democratic to Republican.

The passage of NAFTA — along with other Clinton-era measures like the repeal of Glass-Steagall, a Depression-era law that regulated banks, and the granting of permanent most-favored-nation status for China, which allowed China to enter the World Trade Organization and ultimately cost the United States nearly four million jobs — signaled the Democratic Party’s move away from its working-class, New Deal roots. This decoupling was worsened by the damage to unions from NAFTA.  . .  [A]fter the passage of NAFTA, nearly 50 percent of unionization drives were met with threats to relocate abroad, and that the rate at which factories shut down after a union was successfully certified tripled.

Since the passage of NAFTA, the percentage of private-sector workers who belong to a union has fallen by nearly 50 percent, to 6 percent today. Recent studies have shown that union members are more likely to vote and less prone to racial resentment. Yet some members of the Democratic establishment came to embrace the party’s realignment. “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia,” Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, said before the 2016 election. “And you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” . . . .

For the plant’s Black employees, who made up more than 80 percent of the work force, the closing of the factory followed a particularly painful pattern. Milwaukee has been either the first- or second-most racially segregated large metropolitan area in the country for decades — but it was also once a place of working-class Black prosperity. In 1970, the city’s Black median income was the second-highest in the country, behind Detroit’s; its Black poverty rate was 22 percent lower than the national average. Nearly 85 percent of Black men between 25 and 54 were employed. Now it has the lowest Black median household income, the highest Black poverty rate and the widest racial disparities in prime working-age male employment of the country’s 50 largest metro areas, according to a recent study by Marc Levine, an emeritus professor of urban studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. 

Oren Cass, the head of American Compass, a conservative think tank, who is also a former adviser to Mitt Romney, is the intellectual leader of the “pro-worker” faction in the Republican Party, which includes JD Vance.  He recently wrote a mea culpa in The Times for ignoring working-class suffering and denounced the long stagnation of American wages. Yet Cass contributed to the chapter on labor in the Project 2025 initiative, a set of conservative policy proposals for the next Republican administration. It encourages Congress to consider banning public-employee unions, roll back child-labor protections and restrict overtime pay. Trump and Vance each oppose the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which has languished in Congress and would make it easier to form a union. The Trump administration threatened to veto the bill and said it would “kill jobs and destroy the gig economy.” 

While Trump has made gestures toward labor — the convention gave a prime-time slot to Sean O’Brien, president of the Teamsters, who denounced “greedy employers” and praised Trump for listening to critical voices, though he didn’t endorse him — his record as president tells another story. In 2017, at a rally in Youngstown, Ohio, which lost some 50,000 well-paying steelworker jobs over the previous 40 years, Trump promised that all the empty factories would be “coming back.” Two years later, the last large plant in the area, a G.M. factory that had recently employed nearly 5,000 people, closed. During Trump’s presidency, the trade deficit grew to its highest level since 2008, and his 2017 tax cuts incentivized corporations to offshore jobs by lowering the tax rates on foreign profits. According to Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, more than 300,000 jobs were lost to offshoring and trade during his presidency. 

During Trump’s presidency, the trade deficit grew to its highest level since 2008, and his 2017 tax cuts incentivized corporations to offshore jobs by lowering the tax rates on foreign profits. According to Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, more than 300,000 jobs were lost to offshoring and trade during his presidency. 

[From WaPo article by Michael Lewis, "The Canary": "When Chris arrived in coal country in 1976, there were roughly 250,000 coal miners in the United States. There are now fewer than 70,000. During this time, West Virginia has turned from the bluest state in the country to the reddest. “My idea about how society changes has changed,” he said.] 

Diclofenac, other drugs, heart attacks and strokes.  Pretty ominous warnings on Drugs.com. for people over 65 and diabetic.  What's an old diabetic and arthritic guy to do?

Thanatopsis.  While at Costco this afternoon to pick up some beef jerky treats for Lilly, currently on sale with a limit of 5 per customer, I thought of getting three bags and decided on two, wondering how long our dear Lilly will be with us.  I also intended to stop at the Port Washington SVDP to drop off my donated Allen Edwards 'lawyer's shoes,' part of my plan to start 'Swedish death cleaning.'  I went through the foolish thinking of 'should I save one pair for my burial?' before realizing how silly that thought is in light of my green burial pre-arrangements at Forest Home Cemetery.  No need for shoes in any burial. 

Anniversaries thoughts.  Mysterium fidei is about the 'real and substantial' presence of the body and blood of Jesus in the Eucharist.  It reminds me of the story of the post-Vatican II practice of having masses said in peoples' homes by 'hip' Catholics.  Such a couple had their parish priest over for dinner and mass one evening and gave him some raisin bread as the communion offering.  The priest was hip but not that hip.  He didn't know about raisin bread as Holy Communion but he didn't want to offend his hosts.  He resolved the conundrum when he came to the Offertory and  Consecration by saying "Take this and eat it, for this is, (sotto voce) except for the raisins, my Body."  

Did South Vietnam ever have a free, democratically and popularly elected president?  I don't think so.  We, the U. S. government,  installed Diem in office and he was assassinated by and succeeded by a a series of military generals.  The Vietnamese military generals and the United States struggled with each other for control of South Vietnam; both lost.

John Paul I's papal reign of 33 days must have been an instance when the Holy Spirit couldn't make up his mind, or perhaps he was distracted during the conclave.  We had 3 popes in one year: John XXIII, John Paul I, and Paul VI.

The nearly 3,000-pound bomb unearthed in Frankfurt is not the only unexploded ordnance lying beneath the surface in Germany, France, Russia, England, Italy, North Africa, Japan, etc.  Each one is an example that wars never end, even after the last combatants are long gone.  The bombs are just physical forms of the long-lingering ripple effects of wars, not entirely unlike the butterfly effect.  And in the hearts and minds of the people who are wounded by wars, combatants and non-combatants, there lie emotional and spiritual bombs that may explode and re-explode throughout their lives.

Come up from the fields father, here’s a letter from our Pete,

And come to the front door mother, here’s a letter from thy dear son.

Lo, ’tis autumn,

Lo, where the trees, deeper green, yellower and redder,

Cool and sweeten Ohio’s villages with leaves fluttering in the moderate wind,

Where apples ripe in the orchards hang and grapes on the trellis’d vines,   

(Smell you the smell of the grapes on the vines?

Smell you the buckwheat where the bees were lately buzzing?)

Above all, lo, the sky so calm, so transparent after the rain, and with wondrous clouds,   

Below too, all calm, all vital and beautiful, and the farm prospers well.

Down in the fields all prospers well,

But now from the fields come father, come at the daughter’s call,

And come to the entry mother, to the front door come right away.

Fast as she can she hurries, something ominous, her steps trembling,

She does not tarry to smooth her hair nor adjust her cap.

Open the envelope quickly,   

O this is not our son’s writing, yet his name is sign’d,

O a strange hand writes for our dear son, O stricken mother’s soul!

All swims before her eyes, flashes with black, she catches the main words only,

Sentences broken, gunshot wound in the breast, cavalry skirmish, taken to hospital,

At present low, but will soon be better.

Ah now the single figure to me,

Amid all teeming and wealthy Ohio with all its cities and farms,

Sickly white in the face and dull in the head, very faint,

By the jamb of a door leans.

Grieve not so, dear mother, (the just-grown daughter speaks through her sobs,

The little sisters huddle around speechless and dismay’d,)

See, dearest mother, the letter says Pete will soon be better.

Alas poor boy, he will never be better, (nor may-be needs to be better, that brave and simple soul,)

While they stand at home at the door he is dead already,

The only son is dead.

But the mother needs to be better,

She with thin form presently drest in black,

By day her meals untouch’d, then at night fitfully sleeping, often waking,

In the midnight waking, weeping, longing with one deep longing,   

O that she might withdraw unnoticed, silent from life escape and withdraw,

To follow, to seek, to be with her dear dead son.

Walt Whitman