A Road Trip Through Rusting and Rising America, Thomas L. Friedman sucks Bill Clinton's cock.

[Democrats Off-Shored Your Jobs]

OAK RIDGE, Tenn. — In his dystopian Inaugural Address, President
Trump painted a picture of America as a nation gripped by vast
“carnage” — a landscape of “rusted-out factories scattered like
tombstones” that cried out for a strongman to put “America
first” and stop the world from stealing our jobs. It was a
shocking speech in many ways and reportedly prompted former
President George W. Bush to say to those around him on the dais,
“That was some really weird [stuff].”

It was weird, but was it all wrong?

I just took a four-day car trip through the heart of that
landscape — driving from Austin, Ind., down through Louisville,
Ky., winding through Appalachia and ending up at the Oak Ridge
National Laboratory in Tennessee to try to answer that question.

Trump is half right in his diagnosis, but his prescription is
100 percent wrong. We do have an epidemic of failing
communities. But we also have a bounty of thriving ones — not
because of a strongman in Washington but because of strong
leaders at the local level.

Indeed, this notion that America is a nation divided between two
coasts that are supposedly thriving, pluralizing and globalizing
and a vast flyover interior, where jobs have disappeared, drug
addiction is rife and everyone is hoping Trump can bring back
the 1950s, is highly inaccurate.

The big divide in America is not between the coasts and the
interior. It’s between strong communities and weak communities.
You can find weak ones along the coast and thriving ones in
Appalachia, and vice versa. It’s community, stupid — not
geography.

The communities that are making it share a key attribute:
They’ve created diverse adaptive coalitions, where local
businesses get deeply involved in the school system, translating
in real time the skills being demanded by the global economy.

They also tap local colleges for talent and innovations that can
diversify their economies and nurture unique local assets that
won’t go away. Local foundations and civic groups step in to
fund supplemental learning opportunities and internships, and
local governments help to catalyze it all.

The success stories are all bottom-up; the failures are all
where the bottom has fallen out.

I started in one of the bottomless places: Austin, Ind., a tiny
town of 4,000 off Interstate 65, which was described in a
brilliant series in The Louisville Courier-Journal “as the
epicenter of a medical disaster,” where citizens of all ages are
getting hooked on liquefied painkillers and shooting up with
dirty needles.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed
that Austin “contains the largest drug-fueled H.I.V. outbreak to
hit rural America in recent history.” Its 5 percent infection
rate “is comparable to some African nations.” Austin, the
newspaper noted, doesn’t just sit at the intersection between
Indianapolis and Louisville but at the “intersection of
hopelessness and economic ruin.”

I chose to go there to meet the town’s only doctor, Will Cooke,
whose heroic work I learned of from the Courier-Journal series.
Cooke’s clinic, Foundations Family Medicine, sits at 25 West
Main Street — opposite Marko’s Pizza & Sub, a liquor store and a
drugstore. Down the street was a business combination I’d never
seen before: Eagle’s Nest Tanning and Storage. It’s the Kissed
by the Sun Tanning Salon and a warehouse — both of which seemed
to be shuttered, with the space available for rent.

For generations Austin’s economy was anchored by the Morgan
Foods canning plant, but, as The Courier-Journal noted, “then
came a series of economic blows familiar to many manufacturing-
based communities. The American Can plant next to Morgan Foods
shut its doors in 1986 after more than 50 years in business. A
local supermarket closed. Workers left along with the jobs and
poverty crept up among those who stayed.”

Austin, Cooke explained to me, got caught in the vortex of
declining blue-collar jobs, leading to a loss of dignity for
breadwinners, depression and family breakdown, coinciding with
doctors’ and drug companies’ pushing painkillers, and with too
many people in the community failing to realize that to be in
the middle class now required lifelong learning — not just to
get a job but to hold one.

“Thirty percent of students were not even graduating from high
school,” said Cooke. “Then you take high unemployment,
generational poverty, homelessness, childhood abuse and neglect,
and cloak that within a closed-off culture inherited from
Appalachia, and you begin to have the ingredients that
contributed to the H.I.V. outbreak.”

Austin’s insularity proved deadly for both jobs and families.
“The close-knit, insular nature of the community worked against
it, with the C.D.C. later finding up to six people shared
needles at one sitting, and two or three generations — young
adults, parents and grandparents — sometimes shot up together,”
The Courier-Journal reported.

Lately, though, Cooke told me, the town’s prospects have started
to improve, precisely because the community has come together,
not to shoot up but to start up and learn up and give a hand up.
“The local high school has introduced college-credit classes and
trade programs so people are graduating with a head start,” said
Cooke. Faith-based and civic groups have mobilized, celebrating
social and economic recovery, providing community dinners called
“Food 4R Soul” and even installing community showers for people
without running water.

Addiction is often a byproduct of social breakdown leading to a
sense of isolation. Cooke feels hopeful because he sees the tide
slowly shifting as “social isolation gives way to community.”

“Only a healthy individual can contribute to a healthy family,
and only a healthy family can contribute to a healthy community
— and all of that requires a foundation of trust,” said Cooke.
“That kind of change can’t come from the outside, it has to be
homegrown.”

I shared with him the business philosopher Dov Seidman’s
admonition that “trust is the only legal performance-enhancing
drug.” Dr. Cooke liked that a lot and only wished he could
prescribe it as easily as others had prescribed opioids.

But just 40 minutes down the highway from Austin, I interviewed
Greg Fischer, the mayor of Louisville, a city bustling with
energy and new buildings. “That ‘Intifada’ you wrote about in
the Middle East is happening in parts of rural and urban America
— people saying, ‘I feel disconnected and hopeless about
participating in a rapidly changing global economy.’ Drug-
related violence and addiction is one result — including in a
few neighborhoods of Louisville.”

But Louisville also has another story to tell: “We have 30,000
job openings,” said Fischer, and for the best of reasons:
Louisville has “a vision for how a city can be a platform for
human potential to flourish.” It combines “strategies of the
heart,” like asking everyone to regularly give a day of service
to the city; strategies of science, like “citizen scientists”
bearing GPS-enabled inhalers that the city uses to track air
pollution, mitigate it and warn asthma suffers; and strategies
for job creation that leverage Louisville’s unique assets.

One job-creation strategy led to a slew of new businesses that
make “end of runway” products for rapid delivery by leveraging
the fact that Louisville is UPS’s worldwide air hub; “bourbon
tourism” that leverages the fact that Kentucky is the Napa
Valley of bourbon; a partnership with Lexington, home of the
University of Kentucky, has created an advanced manufacturing
corridor; and by leveraging Humana’s headquarters in Louisville,
the city has unleashed a lifelong wellness and aging-care
industry.

Show me a community that understands today’s world and is
working together to thrive within it, and I’ll show you a
community on the rise — coastal or interior, urban or rural.

I found more such communities as I moved south on Interstate 75
through Tennessee to Oak Ridge, home of the Manhattan Project
facilities where the enriched uranium for the “Little Boy”
atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima was produced.

Today, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which sprawls across
two counties, is still involved with nuclear weaponry, but its
supercomputer, one of the world’s most powerful, and its
hundreds of scientists help drive a broad array of research in
energy, materials science, 3-D manufacturing, robotics, physics,
cybersecurity and nuclear medicine — research it now actively
shares with the surrounding Appalachian communities to spawn new
industries and jobs.

Sitting on the spot where the K-25 Manhattan Project facility
once stood, I interviewed Ron Woody, county executive for Roane
County, where Oak Ridge is partly located, and Steve Jones, an
industrial recruiter hired by the city of Oak Ridge to seek out
companies interested in investing in the region or leveraging
spinouts from Oak Ridge’s labs. That kind of active
entrepreneurship is a new thing for Roane County, where
generations of people have known only a government job.

“Back in the 1980s you had the T.V.A. [Tennessee Valley
Authority], and it had over 50,000 employees. Now it has 10,000
employees,” explained Woody, so “we were not diversified in our
employment. We had to convince the public that we can’t rely on
the Oak Ridge lab and T.V.A. The Cold War is over. So our
communities had to make a big transition from a lot of
government programs to very few.”

It’s starting to work, said Woody, “but progress is slow.” One
of those success stories was luring a former three-time Tour de
France winner, Greg LeMond, to open a 65,000-square-foot factory
for his new company, LeMond Composites, for making lightweight
carbon-fiber bikes, based on new materials pioneered at Oak
Ridge.

“The research Oak Ridge has done is going to change the way we
make things,” LeMond explained to me, as we sat in his new
factory. “It is a really exciting future. My goal is that you
will be able to go on my website and design your own bike out of
carbon fiber.”

But just because there are workers looking for employment and
there are new jobs opening, it isn’t automatic that local people
work in those jobs, explained Jones, the recruiter. Because of
the opioid crisis, many people cannot pass the mandatory drug
test — and years of working for the government has left them
unprepared for the pace of today’s private sector.

“The two biggest issues we are dealing with are the soft skills
and passing the drug test,” explained Woody. “I thought the
problem was that people needed more STEM skills.” But that’s not
the case.

It turns out that it’s not that hard to train someone, even with
just a high school or community college degree, to operate an
advanced machine tool or basic computer. “Factory managers would
say, ‘I will train them and put them to work tomorrow in good
jobs” requiring hard skills, said Woody. “The problem they have
is finding people with the right soft skills.”

What are those soft skills? I asked. “Employers just want
someone who will get up, dress up, show up, shut up and never
give up,” Woody responded without hesitation. And there are
fewer workers with those soft skills than you might think, he
added.

When new companies come into the area today, noted Jones, who
grew up on a farm, they ask specifically for young people who
were either in a 4-H club or Future Farmers of America (now
called FFA) because kids with a farming background are much more
likely to get up, dress up, show up on time and never give up in
a new job.

Soft skills also include the willingness to be a lifelong
learner, because jobs are changing so quickly. For instance, the
Oak Ridge lab is partnering to embed top-level local technical
talent as entrepreneurial research fellows in advanced
manufacturing who want to start companies in this realm. Every
summer Oak Ridge’s M.D.F. — Manufacturing Demonstration Facility
— hosts 100 young interns to learn the latest in 3-D printing,
and its experts coach teams from local high schools for national
robotics competitions.

The beauty of 3-D printers is that any community can now go into
the manufacturing business, explained Lonnie Love, a corporate
fellow at Oak Ridge, as he showed me around the M.D.F., where
whole car bodies and car parts are being “printed” on giant 3-D
printers.

“Traditionally to make a car part you first had to build a die,
and those dies cost anywhere from $500,000 to $1 million to
make,” Love said. Every die consists of a female and a male die,
and the way you made a car part was to stamp them together.
There are hundreds of dies needed to make a car, and that was
why an assembly line for a new car model in Detroit could cost
upward of $200 million — and take two years to build. Sadly,
that die-making industry actually moved out of America to Asia
over the last 15 years, leaving only a dozen such companies in
the U.S.

No more. “Large-scale 3-D printing is enabling us to re-shore
that industry,” explained Love, who then offered this example:
“The Naval Air Station at Cherry Point, S.C., repairs all the
aircraft for the Navy on the East Coast. About a year ago their
head of engineering called me on a Monday and asked if we could
print a die mold for them and I said, ‘Sure, just send me the
digital model of what you want printed.’

“We got it by email that afternoon, and by Friday he had the
mold to make the new part. And it only weighed about 40 pounds
because with 3-D printing we could make it stronger but lighter
weight by hollowing out the inside. The following Monday he
calls and asks me how much did it cost and how long did it take
me to make? I told him it took me longer — and was more
expensive — to ship it to him than it was make it.”

Think about car dealers in the future who, instead of needing a
huge lot with hundreds of cars in inventory, will just custom
print the car you want. “Our only inventory is carbon fiber
pellets that cost $2 a pound, and we can make any product out of
them,” said Love. “You won’t need inventory anymore.”

Over the last 100 years, Love concluded, we went from
decentralized artisan-based manufacturing to centralized mass
manufacturing on assembly lines. Today, with these emerging
technologies, we can go back to artisans, which will be great
for local communities that spawn a leadership and workers able
to take advantage of these emerging technologies. We are going
to see a world of micro-factories, and you can see them
sprouting around Oak Ridge already.

“There’s a new wave of kids coming up who love this stuff,” said
Love. “We can create mini-moonshots all over the place.”

The same applies to the design of the parts. Thom Mason, the
director of the Oak Ridge lab, explained to me that high-
performance computing “allows you to design and test out all the
parts on the computer and only make those that you know will
work. It is totally speeding up the iteration loop of physical
manufacturing. You move all the trial and failure into the
digital world — so you don’t need to do all that costly tooling
of prototypes — and then go straight to manufacturing.”

But the state of Tennessee has also had its thinking cap on
about the fast world. In 2014 it decided to make tuition and
fees free for high school graduates who want to enroll in any
state community college or technical school — on the condition
that they maintain at least a C- average, stay in school for
consecutive semesters, contribute eight hours of community
service each semester and meet with a volunteer coach/mentor who
will help them stay on track to get their degree. Starting in
2018, Tennessee adults who don’t already have a two-year degree
will be able to go to any state community college and earn one
free as well.

I ended my little tour in Knoxville, Tenn., where I met with the
mayor at a restaurant in the newly rejuvenated downtown square,
a beehive of restaurants, public art exhibitions, theaters,
shopping and museums.

“Until the mid-1980s, the old economic development model here
was low wages and no unions. That model wasn’t sustainable,”
said Mayor Madeline Rogero, the first woman mayor of Knoxville
and a former organizer for Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers
union. “We wanted better schools, and you cannot build a great
school system on the back of low-wage workers. So we started
thinking about what are our unique assets and stopped selling
ourselves as a low-wage town.”

The whole region came together around that project and wove an
adaptive coalition that could draw in investors based on the
region’s strengths. It’s call Innovation Valley, the mayor
explained, and it markets the assets of the University of
Tennessee in Knoxville, Oak Ridge National Laboratory,
Pellissippi State and Roane State Community Colleges, the work
force skills in the metro area and available infrastructure that
can be utilized by technology companies. It also stimulated a
dialogue between employers and higher-learning institutions to
ensure they’re meeting the labor force needs of the future.

But there are real constraints that need to be overcome. The
region has a shortage of both manufacturing and back-office
workers. “We face the same work force development issues that
all metro areas in the U.S. are facing,” explained Bryan
Daniels, president of the Blount Partnership, one of Knoxville’s
regional development boards. “Our local law enforcement has
described the prison populations as having approximately 65
percent opioid-related inmates.”

It is vital, therefore, for the community to develop programs to
get this population back to being employable. At the same time,
said Daniels, the Knoxville region is exploring new ways to get
workers from outlying rural areas into the metro area labor
force and help them acquire the “educational attainment they
need to get their skill level up” for a modern economy. They are
even studying “public-private partnerships to provide
transportation for [rural] workers up to a two-hour commute
radius,” he said.

This is the real picture of America today.

It’s cities and regions rising together to leverage their unique
assets from the bottom up — living side by side with distressed
and lost communities where the bottom has fallen out. It’s not
your grandparents’ America, but it is also not Trump’s America —
that land of vast carnage and an industrial wasteland. The
picture is much more complex.

It’s actually Bill Clinton’s America.

Clinton once famously observed, “There is nothing wrong with
America that cannot be cured with what is right in America.”
That has never been more accurate — and necessary — than it is
today.

What is wrong with America is that too many communities, rural
and urban, have broken down. What is right with America is the
many communities and regions that are coming together to help
their citizens acquire the skills and opportunities to own their
own futures. We need to share and scale these success stories.

Only strong communities, not a strong man, will make America
great again.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/24/opinion/rusting-and-rising-
america.html

Comments:

canis scot Lex 4 hours ago
I do appreciate a good laugh with my morning coffee and this one
is one of the best in ages.

You are correct it is local leadership that has created a new
hope for communities, but you lied when you claimed it had
anything to do with Bill Clinton.

Clinton rebranding of Reaganomics allowed the recovery from the
Carter debacle to continue. Of course it took Newt and the
Republican Congress to balance the budget and put tax money back
in local hands. Local governments were able to finance their
recovery and restoration of health. Right up until federal
mandated programs strangled them and buried them in graves of
paperwork.

But let us look at those communities you discussed.

Where are the vital, thriving towns, villiages, and cities? Who
controls them? They are everywhere, right across middle America,
from coast to coast. They are led by hard nosed practical
people. Businessmen who reject or circumvent federal intrusions.
The exact same people that President Trump, the anti-federalist,
anti-strong man, seeks to empower.

Where are the failing disintegrating towns, villiages, and
cities? Who controls them? They are predominately bicoastal and
along the Great Lakes. They are surrounding the great hubs of
industry that were gutted by the NAFTA implementation programs
created by Bill Clinton. Run by liberals who ignore reality and
continue to tax business out of town and spend money on social
justice programs instead of infrastructure and people.

It isn't Clinton success.

[Democrats Off-Shored Your Jobs]

[Anonymous Remailer (austria)]

In article <c9bb379129d4fffa...@dizum.com>
Democrats Off-Shored Your Jobs <communist...@latimes.com> wrote:
>

Your obsession with cock sucking is noted.