My grandson graduates from college tomorrow! First to do so. Next day the kiddle heads off to Ireland to pick up and carry for eldest granddaughter who's spent the semester there. Everyone home for Christmas, yay! And two will have kissed the Blarney Stone. . .
The Hard Truths of Trying to ‘Save’ the Rural Economy [Click] The thing that particularly strikes me about this article is the author's historical myopathy; he seems to think that depopulation of the countryside is a recent phenomenon--starting only 25 years ago or so. It seems to me that it has been going on for more like a century and a half--ever since the deflationary spiral following the Civil War, exacerbated later by the mechanization of agriculture. Such lack of perspective [knowledge?] has long seemed to me typical of the New York Times, which is why I will not subscribe to it.
It's also unfortunately typical of people under about fifty. If it didn't happen in the past five years, or at the very least when *they* were teenagers, then it didn't happen. Such shortsightedness is not merely irritating, but it seems to me quite dangerous.
I've read the article and it's not about agriculture at all. I quote: "After World War II, small town prosperity relied on its contribution to the industrial economy. The census considers Price County, Wis., to be 100 percent rural. Still, over a third of the jobs there are in manufacturing, from building industrial machines to assembling trucks. Auto parts manufacturers in West Point, Ga., draw workers from all over Troup County. Overall, manufacturing employs about one in eight workers in the country’s 704 entirely rural counties. That’s more than agriculture, forestry, fishing and mining combined and second only to education, health care and social assistance, which includes teachers, doctors, nurses and social service counselors. Most of those jobs are government funded." At one point it briefly looks at agriculture and concludes that, like oil and gas production, it is too heavily mechanized to matter in the ways the article is addressing.
I think the article is distinctly myopic in identifying tech jobs as the only ones that could change things. It wasn't tech jobs that let Chicago and Pittsburgh put the collapse of the steel industry behind them. And based on my personal experience, there are many, many jobs that can be done from a home-based office located anywhere in the country with adequate connectivity. The article says people like me would be less productive in rural areas due to lack of interaction with people doing the same sort of job, but it completely ignores the very real existence of on-line communities.
Just to say that the countryside up my way is NOT being depopulated, but quite the opposite...unless you are talking about wild animals, songbirds and honeybees, thanks to people from outside Vermont coming here to buy good land and over develop it. We moved to this house in 1986. In the mid-90s the town dropped its town springs in favour of city water. Worst mistake ever. Now the town could accommodate more housing. Since then, a road went in with a score of single family homes, and some 8-plexes. Then the field behind our land acquired 16 townhouses; the field across the road is now occupied by two roads bearing developments of duplexes and single family homes. And now, on the last remaining side, a developer bought a house and land, put in a road beside the house to the back property and is putting in two more houses...one of which will be visible from our back porch, which formerly only viewed our yards and woods. Worst of all, this latest builder has seen fit to topple a small forest, log out what he could, and rather than pay a little to haul the brush to the place that burns brush to make fuel, or at least chipping it for same, has been making massive bonfires and smoking out the neighborhood for weeks. Small wonder Wil and I can't get over this respiratory illness!
At any rate, in my view, less is more.
Next Spring we will plant a few more trees, to cover the house, and we'll plant more wildflowers for the bees. Vermont has lost at least 6 species of Bumblebees over these same years.
That sounds similar to what happened where I grew up. North of town it it looks much the same as it used to; south of town the population has increased very obviously. When house prices went way up in the San Francisco Bay Area, people, particularly if they were retired, sold out and bought near my home town. That drove up house prices for those who were already there. The principal benefit is that the new residents had few children. The number of students remains about the same, with about three times the tax base, so the school district is well funded. Another very big change was when the lumber mill (a very big one) was closed; it had been the mainstay of the economy. The big company that had bought it blamed the tree huggers, but they had not managed the land well, and were making bigger profits in their building supply stores selling wood from Canada. But tourism was increasing considerably when the mill closed. Most people would prefer a productive job, but a job in the tourist industry is better than nothing. The flatlanders have not been all bad, but it is a lot of change. And now global warming has destroyed the kelp forest ecosystem; not something one will see driving by, but it cuts deep.
Alan
Come to think of it, I remember seeing something about making little bee residences for some that don't live in hives--cut grooves in the surface of a piece of wood, cut it in half and join the pieces to make long round holes, and put them out for the bees. We have carpenter bees here--like bumblebees, but they nest in rotten wood.
Events where I grew up pretty much followed the article's outline. When I was born, the major source of jobs was the Cotton Belt railroad. Second was retail and probably third was the factory that made most of the country's archery equipment. Then cam WW II and a major arsenal about 12 miles out of town. Population almost doubled between 1940 and 1950. Three(?) major paper mills opened in the 1960s. Big economic boom. Don't know about population, but the article is about the economy, not population except as the economy drives it. I believe it was in the 1980s that the paper mills closed and southeast Arkansas became one of the most economically depressed areas in the country. So how do you go about saving Pine Bluff?
I don't know, Bill. The little town--village or hamlet--where I lived my first few years withered away after WWII when many of the young men who had been in the service and seen the bigger world didn't come back. And visiting the part of SW Ontario where my grandfather was born, after studying the area as it had been, was rather depressing. Where there had been one small town after another, often within sight of one another, with churches, schools, hotels, stores, post offices, and you name it, there are now just occasional houses and barns. My family's house is still there, but as we were visiting, the big barn across the road was being torn down. The town is gone. One other remains, which has little if anything to attract folks from the city. The graveyard my great great (I think that's right) grandfather founded is still there, and still being used. The church he founded is gone. There's lots of farmland, worked by very few people. And that is common all across the continent. Heck, they don't even need drivers for the tractors these days. But a lot of those old jobs were pretty bad. I just don't know.
On the other hand, the township where my ancestors first settled in North America, where they had to make farmland out of primeval forest, is being swallowed up by Greater Toronto.
Alan ~~ The question the article raises is, "What can we do to alleviate the economic hardship that afflicts so much o rural America?" Is your answer, "Those people's economic hardship doesn't matter?" I don't see you even acknowledging the question.
Thanks, Alan. Yeah, the Root Center has some of those. It's not just my area that has seen the decrease, though, it's the whole state. That's especially sad because so many of us here are careful to keep organic. It's a huge problem, with the loss of so many bee species.
Linking doesn’t seem to work properly, so I am copying entire, from talkingpointsmemo.com ====================== THE DOOR RUDY OPENED Josh Marshall
If you listened closely today Rudy Giuliani suggested that negotiations over building a Trump Tower in Moscow may have continued up until election day 2016. I heard him say this in real time but I confess I wasn’t quite cynical enough to grasp the implications. At least not immediately. Let’s start by watching the video, which you can see here.
The moment when Giuliani conceded negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow could have gone as late as election day 2016. pic.twitter.com/xgIQorXmzg
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) December 17, 2018
The precise wording is important. So here’s the transcript of that exchange.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Did the president – did Donald Trump know that Michael Cohen was pursuing the Trump Tower in Moscow into the summer of 2016?
GIULIANI: According to the answer that he gave, it would have covered all the way up to – covered up to November, 2016. Said he had conversations with him but the president didn’t hide this. They know …
STEPHANOPOULOS: Earlier they had said those conversations stopped in January, 2016.
GIULIANI: I don’t — I mean, the date — I mean, until you actually sit down and you look at the questions, and you go back and you look at the papers and you look at the — the — you’re not going to know what happened. That’s why — that’s why lawyers, you know, prepare for those answers.
When Giuliani refers to “the answer he gave” he is referring to Trump’s written answers to questions posed by the Special Counsel’s Office. Giuliani is asked about whether President Trump knew the negotiations continued through the summer of 2016, rather than January 2016, which was the earlier claim. Giuliani replies that Trump told Mueller that the negotiations may have continued through November of 2016.
It’s unclear from Giuliani’s words if this was only the continuation of the negotiations or talking specifically with Cohen about them. What’s key, though, is that when forced to answer the question directly with potential perjury charges at stake he was unwilling to say the negotiations ended at any time prior to November 2016, which in theory actually takes it beyond election day.
Was this just an awkwardly worded response? Apparently not. CNN followed up with Giuliani and he stuck to his answer. Giuliani says Trump doesn’t remember the exact dates so just answered in general. “Up until November 2016, they could have had a conversation about Trump Tower Moscow, and it went nowhere.”
Given the gravity of this admission, it would be silly to assume this is just a matter of hazy memory. It almost certainly means the negotiations, in some form, did continue through that date.
CNN has an additional piece of information. Trump’s lawyers have apparently “balked at answering any questions that ran past the election because they believed they could argue the transition period after Trump’s victory was covered by executive privilege.” In other words, November may not be the actual final possible date the President gave. It may simply be that the President refuses to answer any questions after November 8th, 2016 because his lawyers argue that executive privilege applies as soon as he was elected President, rather than after he was sworn in in January 2017.
In recent weeks the line has been that the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations didn’t end until the summer of 2016. But I’ve always been skeptical of conceding this point. We know they continued at least until that point. We don’t really know they ended then. And given the serial lies about this question there’s no reason to assume otherwise. Giuliani has now told us pretty clearly they continued at least through the end of the election. =================================== And then there is this:
QUITE A STATEMENT Josh Marshall
Rudy Giuliani says collusion is not a crime and in any case the collusion ended before the election.
Rudes: "Collusion is not a crime. It was over with before the election." pic.twitter.com/YHAj8SyZK1
Gotta watch out for those freudian slips, Bill; "low degree" rather than "law degree" is about on a par with my occasional rendering of "Clinton" as "Clingon." [grin]
A Guide to All 17 (Known) Trump Investigations [Click] And then there are the civil suits arising from his conduct before he was elected—as memory serves me, there were about seventy of those.
This sounds like O’Rourke will not be running. [Click] Buttigieg might be running, but I don’t see that he has a chance. Lamar Alexander will be retiring from the Senate in 2020, so that will provide an opening for a Democrat in Tennessee.
Got the results of my blood tests. All fine except my potassium is a bit low. So I'll be getting potassium chloride the next time I'm at the grocery store. It'll add a bit of the salty taste I sometimes miss.
My grandson graduates from college tomorrow! First to do so. Next day the kiddle heads off to Ireland to pick up and carry for eldest granddaughter who's spent the semester there. Everyone home for Christmas, yay! And two will have kissed the Blarney Stone. . .
ReplyDeleteYAY! indeed! Have a happy, all. But that Blarney Stone must be pretty darn cold right now.
DeleteOh, Puddle, what a milestone! *hug*
DeleteWonderful! 🎓👨🎓
DeleteAnd now a new adventure begins!
At last, divestment is hitting the fossil fuel industry where it hurts[Click]
ReplyDeleteThe Hard Truths of Trying to ‘Save’ the Rural Economy [Click] The thing that particularly strikes me about this article is the author's historical myopathy; he seems to think that depopulation of the countryside is a recent phenomenon--starting only 25 years ago or so. It seems to me that it has been going on for more like a century and a half--ever since the deflationary spiral following the Civil War, exacerbated later by the mechanization of agriculture. Such lack of perspective [knowledge?] has long seemed to me typical of the New York Times, which is why I will not subscribe to it.
It's also unfortunately typical of people under about fifty. If it didn't happen in the past five years, or at the very least when *they* were teenagers, then it didn't happen. Such shortsightedness is not merely irritating, but it seems to me quite dangerous.
DeleteI've read the article and it's not about agriculture at all. I quote: "After World War II, small town prosperity relied on its contribution to the industrial economy. The census considers Price County, Wis., to be 100 percent rural. Still, over a third of the jobs there are in manufacturing, from building industrial machines to assembling trucks. Auto parts manufacturers in West Point, Ga., draw workers from all over Troup County. Overall, manufacturing employs about one in eight workers in the country’s 704 entirely rural counties. That’s more than agriculture, forestry, fishing and mining combined and second only to education, health care and social assistance, which includes teachers, doctors, nurses and social service counselors. Most of those jobs are government funded." At one point it briefly looks at agriculture and concludes that, like oil and gas production, it is too heavily mechanized to matter in the ways the article is addressing.
DeleteI think the article is distinctly myopic in identifying tech jobs as the only ones that could change things. It wasn't tech jobs that let Chicago and Pittsburgh put the collapse of the steel industry behind them. And based on my personal experience, there are many, many jobs that can be done from a home-based office located anywhere in the country with adequate connectivity. The article says people like me would be less productive in rural areas due to lack of interaction with people doing the same sort of job, but it completely ignores the very real existence of on-line communities.
1800-1990: Changes In Urban/Rural U.S. Population [Click]
DeleteWikipedia: Urbanization in the United States[Click]
Population Reference Bureau: Fifty Years of Demographic Change in Rural America [Click] Seems like a pretty comprehensive view of causes and trends.
Just to say that the countryside up my way is NOT being depopulated, but quite the opposite...unless you are talking about wild animals, songbirds and honeybees, thanks to people from outside Vermont coming here to buy good land and over develop it. We moved to this house in 1986. In the mid-90s the town dropped its town springs in favour of city water. Worst mistake ever. Now the town could accommodate more housing. Since then, a road went in with a score of single family homes, and some 8-plexes. Then the field behind our land acquired 16 townhouses; the field across the road is now occupied by two roads bearing developments of duplexes and single family homes. And now, on the last remaining side, a developer bought a house and land, put in a road beside the house to the back property and is putting in two more houses...one of which will be visible from our back porch, which formerly only viewed our yards and woods. Worst of all, this latest builder has seen fit to topple a small forest, log out what he could, and rather than pay a little to haul the brush to the place that burns brush to make fuel, or at least chipping it for same, has been making massive bonfires and smoking out the neighborhood for weeks. Small wonder Wil and I can't get over this respiratory illness!
DeleteAt any rate, in my view, less is more.
Next Spring we will plant a few more trees, to cover the house, and we'll plant more wildflowers for the bees. Vermont has lost at least 6 species of Bumblebees over these same years.
That sounds similar to what happened where I grew up. North of town it it looks much the same as it used to; south of town the population has increased very obviously. When house prices went way up in the San Francisco Bay Area, people, particularly if they were retired, sold out and bought near my home town. That drove up house prices for those who were already there. The principal benefit is that the new residents had few children. The number of students remains about the same, with about three times the tax base, so the school district is well funded. Another very big change was when the lumber mill (a very big one) was closed; it had been the mainstay of the economy. The big company that had bought it blamed the tree huggers, but they had not managed the land well, and were making bigger profits in their building supply stores selling wood from Canada. But tourism was increasing considerably when the mill closed. Most people would prefer a productive job, but a job in the tourist industry is better than nothing. The flatlanders have not been all bad, but it is a lot of change. And now global warming has destroyed the kelp forest ecosystem; not something one will see driving by, but it cuts deep.
DeleteAlan
Come to think of it, I remember seeing something about making little bee residences for some that don't live in hives--cut grooves in the surface of a piece of wood, cut it in half and join the pieces to make long round holes, and put them out for the bees. We have carpenter bees here--like bumblebees, but they nest in rotten wood.
DIY bee houses for solitary bees (UK version):
Deletehttp://www.foxleas.com/make-a-bee-hotel.asp
Events where I grew up pretty much followed the article's outline. When I was born, the major source of jobs was the Cotton Belt railroad. Second was retail and probably third was the factory that made most of the country's archery equipment. Then cam WW II and a major arsenal about 12 miles out of town. Population almost doubled between 1940 and 1950. Three(?) major paper mills opened in the 1960s. Big economic boom. Don't know about population, but the article is about the economy, not population except as the economy drives it. I believe it was in the 1980s that the paper mills closed and southeast Arkansas became one of the most economically depressed areas in the country. So how do you go about saving Pine Bluff?
DeleteI don't know, Bill. The little town--village or hamlet--where I lived my first few years withered away after WWII when many of the young men who had been in the service and seen the bigger world didn't come back. And visiting the part of SW Ontario where my grandfather was born, after studying the area as it had been, was rather depressing. Where there had been one small town after another, often within sight of one another, with churches, schools, hotels, stores, post offices, and you name it, there are now just occasional houses and barns. My family's house is still there, but as we were visiting, the big barn across the road was being torn down. The town is gone. One other remains, which has little if anything to attract folks from the city. The graveyard my great great (I think that's right) grandfather founded is still there, and still being used. The church he founded is gone. There's lots of farmland, worked by very few people. And that is common all across the continent. Heck, they don't even need drivers for the tractors these days. But a lot of those old jobs were pretty bad. I just don't know.
DeleteOn the other hand, the township where my ancestors first settled in North America, where they had to make farmland out of primeval forest, is being swallowed up by Greater Toronto.
DeleteAlan ~~ The question the article raises is, "What can we do to alleviate the economic hardship that afflicts so much o rural America?" Is your answer, "Those people's economic hardship doesn't matter?" I don't see you even acknowledging the question.
DeleteThanks, Alan. Yeah, the Root Center has some of those. It's not just my area that has seen the decrease, though, it's the whole state. That's especially sad because so many of us here are careful to keep organic. It's a huge problem, with the loss of so many bee species.
DeleteLinking doesn’t seem to work properly, so I am copying entire, from talkingpointsmemo.com
ReplyDelete======================
THE DOOR RUDY OPENED
Josh Marshall
If you listened closely today Rudy Giuliani suggested that negotiations over building a Trump Tower in Moscow may have continued up until election day 2016. I heard him say this in real time but I confess I wasn’t quite cynical enough to grasp the implications. At least not immediately. Let’s start by watching the video, which you can see here.
The moment when Giuliani conceded negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow could have gone as late as election day 2016. pic.twitter.com/xgIQorXmzg
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) December 17, 2018
The precise wording is important. So here’s the transcript of that exchange.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Did the president – did Donald Trump know that Michael Cohen was pursuing the Trump Tower in Moscow into the summer of 2016?
GIULIANI: According to the answer that he gave, it would have covered all the way up to – covered up to November, 2016. Said he had conversations with him but the president didn’t hide this. They know …
STEPHANOPOULOS: Earlier they had said those conversations stopped in January, 2016.
GIULIANI: I don’t — I mean, the date — I mean, until you actually sit down and you look at the questions, and you go back and you look at the papers and you look at the — the — you’re not going to know what happened. That’s why — that’s why lawyers, you know, prepare for those answers.
When Giuliani refers to “the answer he gave” he is referring to Trump’s written answers to questions posed by the Special Counsel’s Office. Giuliani is asked about whether President Trump knew the negotiations continued through the summer of 2016, rather than January 2016, which was the earlier claim. Giuliani replies that Trump told Mueller that the negotiations may have continued through November of 2016.
It’s unclear from Giuliani’s words if this was only the continuation of the negotiations or talking specifically with Cohen about them. What’s key, though, is that when forced to answer the question directly with potential perjury charges at stake he was unwilling to say the negotiations ended at any time prior to November 2016, which in theory actually takes it beyond election day.
Was this just an awkwardly worded response? Apparently not. CNN followed up with Giuliani and he stuck to his answer. Giuliani says Trump doesn’t remember the exact dates so just answered in general. “Up until November 2016, they could have had a conversation about Trump Tower Moscow, and it went nowhere.”
Given the gravity of this admission, it would be silly to assume this is just a matter of hazy memory. It almost certainly means the negotiations, in some form, did continue through that date.
CONTINUED
ReplyDeleteCNN has an additional piece of information. Trump’s lawyers have apparently “balked at answering any questions that ran past the election because they believed they could argue the transition period after Trump’s victory was covered by executive privilege.” In other words, November may not be the actual final possible date the President gave. It may simply be that the President refuses to answer any questions after November 8th, 2016 because his lawyers argue that executive privilege applies as soon as he was elected President, rather than after he was sworn in in January 2017.
In recent weeks the line has been that the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations didn’t end until the summer of 2016. But I’ve always been skeptical of conceding this point. We know they continued at least until that point. We don’t really know they ended then. And given the serial lies about this question there’s no reason to assume otherwise. Giuliani has now told us pretty clearly they continued at least through the end of the election.
===================================
And then there is this:
QUITE A STATEMENT
Josh Marshall
Rudy Giuliani says collusion is not a crime and in any case the collusion ended before the election.
Rudes: "Collusion is not a crime. It was over with before the election." pic.twitter.com/YHAj8SyZK1
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) December 16, 2018
Rudy is SO far in over his head...
DeleteIMHO
Geulianni is supposed to be a lawyer, is he? I wouldn't want him defending me in a jaywalking case. The man's inarticulate.
DeleteI agree with Cat. Giullani may have a low degree, but he thinks and acts like a politician.
DeleteGotta watch out for those freudian slips, Bill; "low degree" rather than "law degree" is about on a par with my occasional rendering of "Clinton" as "Clingon." [grin]
DeleteJohn Dean unloads on Trump via Twitter [Click] And how.
ReplyDeleteA Guide to All 17 (Known) Trump Investigations [Click] And then there are the civil suits arising from his conduct before he was elected—as memory serves me, there were about seventy of those.
90% Say Trump Hasn’t Received the Message[Click]
Against Trump Visiting the Troops [Click]
The Bigger Failure Exposed by Jazmine Headley’s Arrest [Click] A good, thoughtful essay. I particularly liked the quotations from George Orwell, which were unfamiliar to me.
Facing Charlottesville's savage, racist history has the power to save us [Click]
Ah well, Alan. We should have known there was something major wrong with Beto. When something seems too good to be true, it usually is.
ReplyDeleteThis sounds like O’Rourke will not be running. [Click] Buttigieg might be running, but I don’t see that he has a chance. Lamar Alexander will be retiring from the Senate in 2020, so that will provide an opening for a Democrat in Tennessee.
ReplyDeleteOnly Republicans Don’t Want Action on Climate Change [Click]
Trump Demands Stop To Emoluments Case As State AGs Subpoena 38 Witnesses [Click] Sounds like panic to me.
ReplyDeleteGot the results of my blood tests. All fine except my potassium is a bit low. So I'll be getting potassium chloride the next time I'm at the grocery store. It'll add a bit of the salty taste I sometimes miss.
ReplyDeleteBill--I looked to see if there were livestock salt blocks with potassium supplementation, but evidently there are not. [grin]
DeleteMueller Releases Michael Flynn Interview [Click] “unbelievably damning”
ReplyDeleteRussian Disinformation Targeted Robert Mueller [Click]
PR Nightmare: Trump Golfs While His Secret Service Agents Work Without Pay [Click] Trump might have to put off his golf vacation if he forces a government shutdown over his border wall. But he loves his golf, so that might mean no shutdown.
ReplyDelete