bye Hope, we'll find another
She’s smokin. I hope she goes into porn.
The Official Thread Dedicated to "Trump Winning"
- Thread starter Tim Steelersfan
- Start date
She’s smokin. I hope she goes into porn.
It's sad really. The constant barrage of accusations and slander day after day. No wonder they quit, everything they say is scrutinized down to the smallest speck of minutia until the job is no longer worth the effort required to keep your head above water.
The goal seems to get larger and more formidable every day.
Great read here.
On Wednesday you could hear howls of misery and disbelief coming from Democrats and Never Trumpers. What now, you may ask?
After all, the power and popularity of the president’s tax cuts has already hit. His rolling back of regulations and the killing of the ObamaCare mandate has already fueled an economic renaissance. What else could have made the morose even less amiable?
Was it the president continuing to smash ISIS? Or was it the leaked audio of Russian fighters in Syria complaining that a U.S. attack “kicked our a---- like we were little pieces of s---.”
It was actually the most debilitating news of all: The Trump campaign announced that 2016 campaign digital guru Brad Parscale is the 2020 campaign manager for the president’s re-election bid, confirming the happy likelihood that people will be saying the words “President Trump” until early 2025.
This news shouldn’t have surprised anyone. President Trump filed his campaign paperwork with the Federal Election Committee on January 20, 2017, the day of his inauguration.
But for those who have been living in the 24/7 Never Trump fantasy universe – working on their fake Russian dossiers and “insurance policies” to derail President-elect Trump from becoming President Trump – this fresh proof that he’s not going away dealt a blow like no other.
The frantic attempts during the past year by the president’s opposition to nullify the election were meant to achieve his removal from office, one way or another. Nope, didn’t happen.
With personal attacks and salacious rumors, they would bully and harass Melania Trump into leaving the president, ripping out his support system and making him ineffectual. Nope, didn’t happen.
Remember the idiotic obsession with the 25th Amendment to the Constitution? Thinking the Cabinet would declare the president “incapable of performing his duties” and remove him from office? Yeah, good for a laugh, but nope, didn’t happen.
Then there’s the arrest for treason, collusion with the Russians, more treason, dementia. Nope, didn’t happen.
And the Michael Wolff book would be the death knell to Trump’s presidency. Well, someone did leave the White House after that dumpster fire, but it wasn’t President Trump.
The president has not only survived the past year, he has thrived. He learned more about the swamp, made his machine even more powerful and effective by making changes when necessary, and adopted his own style without sacrificing his agenda or commitment to make American great again.
For those who thought they could make Donald Trump and his family miserable or afraid, the president’s commitment to another four years confirms they continue to underestimate the man and still don’t understand what the revolution of 2016 was all about.
The American people were told by President Obama that family-supporting, full-time professional jobs were over. The languishing punishment of working two-part time jobs, or living unemployment check to unemployment check, was the “new normal.”
Instead of the government celebrating a strong economy, the Obama administration touted driving Americans onto food stamps, and boasted about how many people were forced into ObamaCare, making even access to health care a pipe dream.
President Trump put his foot down on the degradation of the American people, and reversed course. The Heritage Foundation has announced that within just year one of President Trump’s first term, he has already accomplished an astounding 64 percent of the organization’s conservative leadership recommendations.
The Washington Examiner reports: “With unprecedented speed, the Trump administration has already implemented nearly two-thirds of the 334 agenda items called for by the Heritage Foundation, a pace faster than former President Reagan who embraced the conservative think tank’s legendary ‘Mandate for Leadership’ blueprint.”
“We’re blown away,” Heritage Foundation Director of Congressional and Executive Branch Relations Thomas Binion told newspaper. He said the president “is very active, very conservative, and very effective.”
Paraphrasing Binion, the Examiner article also states that the president “hasn’t just focused on one agenda area, but he and his team has pushed through administrative moves on foreign policy, deregulation, immigration, tax reform and health care, moves often ignored by the media.”
President Trump knew from the start he would run for re-election and win. His success in the first election wasn’t an accident of history, it was a statement for the future. As a businessman, he’s also not going to leave a job half done.
Even some Democrats are beginning to understand the extent of the Trump sea change. From the liberal magazine New Republic: “Last year, it seemed certain that he would be a one-term president – if he even lasted that long. But he has a plausible path to victory in 2020.”
He does indeed. Helping the president’s re-election chances is the constant meltdown of liberal leadership and their refusal to acknowledge reality. Right now the Democratic agenda for America consists of hating the president, hating tax cuts and working really hard to ban plastic straws.
President Trump won on an agenda of putting the American people first, a vision made possible only if you actually like the country and her people. Combine that with a businessman’s and patriot’s success at bringing back the American Dream and get ready for President Trump 2.0 in 2020.
On Wednesday you could hear howls of misery and disbelief coming from Democrats and Never Trumpers. What now, you may ask?
After all, the power and popularity of the president’s tax cuts has already hit. His rolling back of regulations and the killing of the ObamaCare mandate has already fueled an economic renaissance. What else could have made the morose even less amiable?
Was it the president continuing to smash ISIS? Or was it the leaked audio of Russian fighters in Syria complaining that a U.S. attack “kicked our a---- like we were little pieces of s---.”
It was actually the most debilitating news of all: The Trump campaign announced that 2016 campaign digital guru Brad Parscale is the 2020 campaign manager for the president’s re-election bid, confirming the happy likelihood that people will be saying the words “President Trump” until early 2025.
This news shouldn’t have surprised anyone. President Trump filed his campaign paperwork with the Federal Election Committee on January 20, 2017, the day of his inauguration.
But for those who have been living in the 24/7 Never Trump fantasy universe – working on their fake Russian dossiers and “insurance policies” to derail President-elect Trump from becoming President Trump – this fresh proof that he’s not going away dealt a blow like no other.
The frantic attempts during the past year by the president’s opposition to nullify the election were meant to achieve his removal from office, one way or another. Nope, didn’t happen.
With personal attacks and salacious rumors, they would bully and harass Melania Trump into leaving the president, ripping out his support system and making him ineffectual. Nope, didn’t happen.
Remember the idiotic obsession with the 25th Amendment to the Constitution? Thinking the Cabinet would declare the president “incapable of performing his duties” and remove him from office? Yeah, good for a laugh, but nope, didn’t happen.
Then there’s the arrest for treason, collusion with the Russians, more treason, dementia. Nope, didn’t happen.
And the Michael Wolff book would be the death knell to Trump’s presidency. Well, someone did leave the White House after that dumpster fire, but it wasn’t President Trump.
The president has not only survived the past year, he has thrived. He learned more about the swamp, made his machine even more powerful and effective by making changes when necessary, and adopted his own style without sacrificing his agenda or commitment to make American great again.
For those who thought they could make Donald Trump and his family miserable or afraid, the president’s commitment to another four years confirms they continue to underestimate the man and still don’t understand what the revolution of 2016 was all about.
The American people were told by President Obama that family-supporting, full-time professional jobs were over. The languishing punishment of working two-part time jobs, or living unemployment check to unemployment check, was the “new normal.”
Instead of the government celebrating a strong economy, the Obama administration touted driving Americans onto food stamps, and boasted about how many people were forced into ObamaCare, making even access to health care a pipe dream.
President Trump put his foot down on the degradation of the American people, and reversed course. The Heritage Foundation has announced that within just year one of President Trump’s first term, he has already accomplished an astounding 64 percent of the organization’s conservative leadership recommendations.
The Washington Examiner reports: “With unprecedented speed, the Trump administration has already implemented nearly two-thirds of the 334 agenda items called for by the Heritage Foundation, a pace faster than former President Reagan who embraced the conservative think tank’s legendary ‘Mandate for Leadership’ blueprint.”
“We’re blown away,” Heritage Foundation Director of Congressional and Executive Branch Relations Thomas Binion told newspaper. He said the president “is very active, very conservative, and very effective.”
Paraphrasing Binion, the Examiner article also states that the president “hasn’t just focused on one agenda area, but he and his team has pushed through administrative moves on foreign policy, deregulation, immigration, tax reform and health care, moves often ignored by the media.”
President Trump knew from the start he would run for re-election and win. His success in the first election wasn’t an accident of history, it was a statement for the future. As a businessman, he’s also not going to leave a job half done.
Even some Democrats are beginning to understand the extent of the Trump sea change. From the liberal magazine New Republic: “Last year, it seemed certain that he would be a one-term president – if he even lasted that long. But he has a plausible path to victory in 2020.”
He does indeed. Helping the president’s re-election chances is the constant meltdown of liberal leadership and their refusal to acknowledge reality. Right now the Democratic agenda for America consists of hating the president, hating tax cuts and working really hard to ban plastic straws.
President Trump won on an agenda of putting the American people first, a vision made possible only if you actually like the country and her people. Combine that with a businessman’s and patriot’s success at bringing back the American Dream and get ready for President Trump 2.0 in 2020.
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She quit because Trump chewed her out for telling the truth under oath, that she lies to the American People on Trump's behalf.
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To be fair, that is what "a source" said. You can pretty much make up and report anything you want if you get your information from "a source."
"A source" told us that 21Steelers21 was writing a book. Our source was 21Steelers21.
We wait...
...and wait
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Ya gotta love it! **** the globalists, America 1st!
President Donald Trump spoke out defiantly Friday against global criticism of his plan to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, seeming to welcome the idea of a trade war.
“When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win,” Trump wrote in an early morning tweet.
“Example, when we are down $100 billion with a certain country and they get cute, don’t trade anymore-we win big. It’s easy!” the president wrote.
We must protect our country and our workers. Our steel industry is in bad shape. IF YOU DON’T HAVE STEEL, YOU DON’T HAVE A COUNTRY! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 2, 2018
That is my President.
President Donald Trump spoke out defiantly Friday against global criticism of his plan to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, seeming to welcome the idea of a trade war.
“When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win,” Trump wrote in an early morning tweet.
“Example, when we are down $100 billion with a certain country and they get cute, don’t trade anymore-we win big. It’s easy!” the president wrote.
We must protect our country and our workers. Our steel industry is in bad shape. IF YOU DON’T HAVE STEEL, YOU DON’T HAVE A COUNTRY! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 2, 2018
That is my President.
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I have to say, Trump has lost me a bit regarding his thoughts on trade.
I also would be curious to know where the term "trade deficit" came from. I assume it was someone's attempt at political propaganda, but I honestly don't know if it was a media creation or a Dem/GOP ploy.
It should be obvious that omnibus trade deficit numbers are worthless ("We have a 100 billion dollar deficit with...").
Imagine a struggling laborer starts his own lawn mowing business and goes door to door in a gated community. He's able to sign up 20 wealthy clients for $200 a month. While he mows their lawns, he admires their Mercedes, swimming pools, marble fountains and other things he can't afford.
In a month, $4,000 have changed hands—all from the members of the gated community to the laborer. Naturally, the laborer hasn't bought a single thing from the residents. One used Mercedes was offered for $40,000, but our laborer couldn't afford it.
Therefore, the wealthy community is sadly suffering a $4,000 trade deficit with our poor lawn mower. Isn't he diabolical?
Being on the "wrong" side of a trade deficit just means that some other country makes stuff we want, and we can’t afford to buy it.
OK, that's just for the omnibus numbers. Imbalances in particular industries can require some response, and if other countries disadvantage US goods with tariffs, that should be dealt with. But even admitting that, I have to take issue with my usual allies on this point.
Erosion of free trade is almost never a good idea, whether we're dealing with a product or a commodity. Central planning, stacking the deck, in the long run creates inflation, stifles ingenuity, and cements whatever inefficiencies caused the non-competitiveness in the first place. If you're not "winning" I guess you can always change the rules, but in the long run the best strategy is just to be a better player.
I also would be curious to know where the term "trade deficit" came from. I assume it was someone's attempt at political propaganda, but I honestly don't know if it was a media creation or a Dem/GOP ploy.
It should be obvious that omnibus trade deficit numbers are worthless ("We have a 100 billion dollar deficit with...").
Imagine a struggling laborer starts his own lawn mowing business and goes door to door in a gated community. He's able to sign up 20 wealthy clients for $200 a month. While he mows their lawns, he admires their Mercedes, swimming pools, marble fountains and other things he can't afford.
In a month, $4,000 have changed hands—all from the members of the gated community to the laborer. Naturally, the laborer hasn't bought a single thing from the residents. One used Mercedes was offered for $40,000, but our laborer couldn't afford it.
Therefore, the wealthy community is sadly suffering a $4,000 trade deficit with our poor lawn mower. Isn't he diabolical?
Being on the "wrong" side of a trade deficit just means that some other country makes stuff we want, and we can’t afford to buy it.
OK, that's just for the omnibus numbers. Imbalances in particular industries can require some response, and if other countries disadvantage US goods with tariffs, that should be dealt with. But even admitting that, I have to take issue with my usual allies on this point.
Erosion of free trade is almost never a good idea, whether we're dealing with a product or a commodity. Central planning, stacking the deck, in the long run creates inflation, stifles ingenuity, and cements whatever inefficiencies caused the non-competitiveness in the first place. If you're not "winning" I guess you can always change the rules, but in the long run the best strategy is just to be a better player.
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It will be funny, though, if/when the Dems object. I don’t recall any outrage when Obama raised steel tariffs on China 522%.
I’m not a fan of tariffs but Trump is right that our country has been at the short end of the stick with foreign trade for far too long.
My guess is there will be exceptions exchanged for other deals.
I’m not a fan of tariffs but Trump is right that our country has been at the short end of the stick with foreign trade for far too long.
My guess is there will be exceptions exchanged for other deals.
Not really, because the gated community received $4000 worth of service. It would only be a trade deficit if they paid our hypothetical landscaper $5000 and only received $4000 worth of service. Our landscaper will hypothetically buy other goods and services from members of said community, such as gas from their gas station, a filling in his tooth, tires for his truck, an insurance policy, or a divorce from his wife.
Apples and oranges, too small of a sample.
I think Trump is just paying back the unions that helped him win some blue-ish states. A simple political ploy. Unions suck.
Major unions either endorsed Hildebeast or didn't endorse anyone (thereby tacitly endorsing Trump). Individual members may have voted Republican but the leadership is solidly in the Dem's back pocket. I'm pretty sure the FOP was the only large union that endorsed Trump.
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The bottom line to me on the tariff issue is the status quo wasn't good enough and something had to start to move the needle.
In order to do that Trump had to rock the boat and that is exactly what this is. Sure, people will get nervous and all the Chicken Littles in the media are going to have a field day telling the world that this will be the beginning of the end but I don't buy that. And if it starts to expose what our media continues to fail and report (like how advantageous Canada's trade agreements are with the U.S.) then let's use this rocking of the boat to start talking about the facts.
NAFTA has not been good for the U.S. but it's been great for Canada and maybe this is a shot across the bow to them because they aren't being cooperative in the NAFTA renegotiation. Who knows. I'm sure there is more to this than we know, but I think we all need to be reminded of the hardships Harley Davidson has selling motor cycles in Europe or the hassle any U.S. car manufacturer has getting cars to sell in Japan or China.
Those stories need to be told because for some reason all the media wants to tell us is how bad Trump is and how awful (all of a sudden) any type of trade war will be for our country (even if leads to correcting problems).
In order to do that Trump had to rock the boat and that is exactly what this is. Sure, people will get nervous and all the Chicken Littles in the media are going to have a field day telling the world that this will be the beginning of the end but I don't buy that. And if it starts to expose what our media continues to fail and report (like how advantageous Canada's trade agreements are with the U.S.) then let's use this rocking of the boat to start talking about the facts.
NAFTA has not been good for the U.S. but it's been great for Canada and maybe this is a shot across the bow to them because they aren't being cooperative in the NAFTA renegotiation. Who knows. I'm sure there is more to this than we know, but I think we all need to be reminded of the hardships Harley Davidson has selling motor cycles in Europe or the hassle any U.S. car manufacturer has getting cars to sell in Japan or China.
Those stories need to be told because for some reason all the media wants to tell us is how bad Trump is and how awful (all of a sudden) any type of trade war will be for our country (even if leads to correcting problems).
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Gary Cohn = Chicken Little
That said, it was the steel from Pittsburgh that helped win WWII. Fact jack.
Bingo. I live 30 miles away but the same story could be written here.
https://nypost.com/2017/09/16/the-d...medium=site buttons&utm_campaign=site buttons
By Salena Zito September 16, 2017
The day that destroyed the working class and sowed the seeds of Trump
CAMPBELL, Ohio — Forty years ago, on Sept. 19, thousands of men walked into the Campbell Works of Youngstown Sheet and Tube along the Mahoning River before the early shift.
Like every fall morning, they were armed with lunch pails and hard hats; the only worry on their minds was the upcoming Pittsburgh Steelers game on “Monday Night Football.” The only arguing you heard was whether quarterback Terry Bradshaw had fully recovered from the dramatic hit he took from a Cleveland Browns player the season before.
It was just before 7 a.m., and the fog that had settled over the river was beginning to lift. As the sun began to streak through the mist, the men made their way into the labyrinth of buildings where they worked.
In the next hour, their lives would change forever.
From then on, this date in 1977 would be known as Black Monday in the Steel Valley, which stretches from Mahoning and Trumbull counties in Ohio eastward toward Pittsburgh. It is the date when Youngstown Sheet and Tube abruptly furloughed 5,000 workers in one day.
The bleeding never stopped.
Within the next 18 months, US Steel announced that the nation’s largest steel producer was also shutting down 16 plants across the nation, including their Ohio Works in Youngstown, a move that eliminated an additional 4,000 workers here. That announcement came one day before Jones and Laughlin Steel Corp. said they were cutting thousands of jobs at their facilities in the Mahoning Valley, too.
Within a decade, 40,000 jobs were gone. Within that same decade, 50,000 people had left the region, and by the next decade, that number was up to 100,000. Today the 22 miles of booming steel mills and the support industries that once lined the Mahoning River have mostly disappeared — either blown up, dismantled or reclaimed by nature.
If a bomb had hit this region, the scar would be no less severe on its landscape.
“The domino effect of Black Monday went on forever,” said Gary Steinbeck of nearby Warren, Ohio. Steinbeck was working up the river that day from the rolling plant at H.K. Porter, which also later went out of business. “The word spread quickly. Back then there weren’t any cellphones or social media. Good news travels fast, bad news travels at the speed of light. We knew within the hour the guys down the river were hurting, we knew within a day families were hurting, we knew within a week the whole region was suffering,” he said.
“Those numbers only reflect the jobs that were lost in the plant; the ripple effect was equally devastating. Grocery stores, pizza shops, gas stations, restaurants, department stores, car dealerships, barber shops all saw their business plummet and they started closing,” said Steinbeck.
Labor activist Staughton Lynd (left) led a drive in the 1970s after steel factory closings to pressure DC to stop imports. Gary Steinbeck (right) is a former steelworker.Justin Merriman for The New York Post
Steinbeck was only 25 on Black Monday — but he said he knew then that the blow to his hometown would not be felt the same way in Washington.
News reports from the days and weeks following Black Monday showed that the White House, larger business community and economic experts were detached from the potency of what was happening here. They thought the overall economic impact was exaggerated, that it would not be the calamity Steinbeck and everyone else in Youngstown knew it would be.
“No one never calculated the cultural tragedy as part of the equation either,” Steinbeck said. “They didn’t just dismantle the old mills, they dismantled the societal fabric of what made Youngstown Youngstown.”
The Manhattan radical
At first the Mahoning Valley did not give up hope, none of them did. In fact they did something remarkable: The entire community fought back by forming a local initiative that consisted of faith leaders, local politicians and even a couple of radical activists, most notably Staughton Lynd, a formidable figure in the ’60s social justice movement.
“The response in this community took the country and the community members themselves by surprise,” said Lynd from his basement in his Niles, Ohio, home in Trumbull County.
On the night of Black Monday, Lynd remembers an emergency meeting was called by the Central Labor Union and a plan was endorsed to send petitions to President Jimmy Carter encouraging him to stop steel imports and put an ease on regulations that were hurting the industry. At the time, newer plants in China and Japan, which had better technological capabilities, were outstripping American production.
“By Friday over 100,000 signatures had been collected and chartered buses went to Washington to deliver them to the president,” said Lynd.
Three hundred men, local elected officials and faith leaders all traveled on five buses to the White House. The mood on the drive was somber, and the late Sen. John Glenn stood on the US Capitol steps, along with other elected officials, as the men waved signs that read “Save the Steel Industry.”
Carter never even bothered to send out an aide to receive the petitions when they arrived. Amazingly, the president, who was a well-known supporter of the working class, never even acknowledged them.
Lynd is flanked by hundreds of labor movement and anti-war buttons on the wall behind him. At 87 he is trim, soft-spoken and humble. As if in reflection of his Quaker upbringing, his home is modest, and so is he. He really doesn’t look the part of a ’60s radical.
‘The history of Youngstown cannot be told without saying we gave them one hell of a fight.’
- Staughton Lynd
Lynd came to Youngstown unconventionally. The son of noted sociologists, he grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, attended Harvard and taught at Yale, but his path here was never through an elite bubble. He was considered a radical peaceful protester who traveled to North Vietnam with the activist Tom Hayden at the peak of the war to object to it, lived in communes after he was asked to leave the Army and made a difference during the fight for civil rights in Mississippi by coordinating an alternative education system for blacks called the Freedom Schools.
Despite his academic pedigree, his radical outlook placed him in Chicago right out of law school with a wife, whom he’d met at Harvard, three small children and no job.
“We met some steelworkers from Youngstown, Ohio, who were like people I’d never met in my life. They were active in the American Civil Liberties Union. They opposed race prejudice, which was a very serious thing in that industry both on the shop floor and in the community at the time. My wife, Alice, and I felt that we were probably never going to meet people like this again in our lives. Why not move there, try to be helpful?” he explains.
Lynd, the Manhattan-born academic from Harvard, immediately became part of the fabric in the working-class community as a labor lawyer.
“I can remember it as if it were yesterday, the phones in the office were ringing before we even got in the door,” he said of Black Monday.
By the next day, the community had put together quite an effort with the so-called Ecumenical Coalition, which was local churches and six local unions. “Not much help from the national union,” Lynd said.
In the end, after years of fighting everything, they tried but failed, said Lynd. “All of these things we did just came together — not in a victory, but we gave them a hell of a fight. The history of Youngstown cannot be told without saying we gave them one hell of a fight.”
Youngstown sure died hard
Scant remainders of the Campbell Works of Youngstown Sheet and Tube still stand. Where 20,000 men once worked at its peak, now just 19 employees grind out a living in the vast, cavernous buildings along the river.
The old Campbell works is now Casey Industrial, and Paul Ulam manages the crew. To step inside the old rolling mill is to step back in time; almost everything is still intact. The machines are still standing, so are the men’s lockers, the cranes are still overhead and old wooden block floors are still lining the vast footage of the buildings.
“We have the original lathes. A lot of these machines were all original,” Ulam said. The 57-year-old lives right over the state line in New Castle, Pa. He applied to work here at the mill right after high school.
Working at Youngstown Sheet and Tube was a source of pride.Getty Images
“I came down here for my interview on Sept. 19, 1977. The guy at the guards desk told me to ‘Go home, kid, it’s all over,’ ” he said.
It was only in 2001 that Ulam was hired to work at Casey Industrial. His 19 men rebuild motors for the cranes that cling to the roofs of steel mills like giant praying mantises across the country.
“We do it for customers who still use them,” said Ulam, who supervises for the operation.
Outside, the only thing you hear is the long-long-short-long whistle of a CXS train as it approaches a cross signal — all of the other tracks that crisscross the compound are so overgrown with weeds, the rails are nearly buried.
The visual is haunting, the silence eerie. If you grew up around here, you still expect to see the dozens of smokestacks fill the skyline with plumes of white, you still expect to catch the scent of sulfur, you still expect to hear the roar of men and machines working or catch sight of the sparks made by the welders or the orange glow of molten iron.
The events of Black Monday forever changed not only the Steel Valley, but her people and eventually American culture and politics. Just last year the reverberations were felt in the presidential election when many hard-core Democrats from this area broke from their party to vote for Donald Trump, a Republican who promised to bring jobs back to the Heartland.
Even today, after the election, the Washington establishment still hasn’t processed or properly dissected its effects. Economic experts predicted that the service industry would be the employment of the future. Steelworkers were retrained to fill jobs in that sector, which was expected to sustain the middle class in the same way that manufacturing did.
It did not. According to a study done by the Midwest Center for Research, the average salary of a steelworker in the late 1970s was $24,772.80. Today, according to the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the median household income in the Mahoning Valley is $24,133.
There was also a push for Americans to be more mobile. Lose your job in Youngstown? Fine, move to Raleigh or Texas. No one calculated that the tight-knit people of Youngstown didn’t want to leave their town.
They liked Youngstown. To Washington and New York, that seemed odd.
“At its very heart were the tight-knit communities and neighborhoods that made up the Mahoning Valley. For generations, families lived within blocks of each other. I am the grandson and son of steelworkers, I took so much pride in everything I did at my job,” said Steinbeck.
“We all did. We had decent homes, maybe had two cars, we went on vacation to Lake Geneva or Lake Erie, as we made more money we bought boats, we went fishing and we traveled more broadly. We gave back to America’s economic engine what it gave us — a dignified way of life and investment for the future,” he said.
That way of life has been dismantled, he said. “People fell out of the unemployment statistics, they lost political power, they lost their juice,” he said.
Today the regional chamber lists the largest employers in the Mahoning Valley as the Catholic Diocese, the GM plant in Lordstown, local government agencies, regional hospitals and Youngstown State University. An estimated 64,321 people live in Youngstown, nearly 100,000 fewer than in the late 1960s.
Even so, “Youngstown’s decline is not a story of the decline of the people. They never gave up, even when they gave up. Not in their heart,” Steinbeck said.
For a man who has spent 40 years of his life trying to bring jobs back, Steinbeck has only one wish: “That young people understand what happened here, so the same mistakes do not happen again to their kids, or their kids’ kids.”
For a man who has spent 40 years of his life fighting for social justice, Lynd, too, only has one wish: that it be noted in history that Youngstown didn’t take this lying down.
“A steelworker named John Barbero once told me, ‘Youngstown sure died hard.’ It should be noted he said it with pride,” said Lynd.
https://nypost.com/2017/09/16/the-d...medium=site buttons&utm_campaign=site buttons
By Salena Zito September 16, 2017
The day that destroyed the working class and sowed the seeds of Trump
CAMPBELL, Ohio — Forty years ago, on Sept. 19, thousands of men walked into the Campbell Works of Youngstown Sheet and Tube along the Mahoning River before the early shift.
Like every fall morning, they were armed with lunch pails and hard hats; the only worry on their minds was the upcoming Pittsburgh Steelers game on “Monday Night Football.” The only arguing you heard was whether quarterback Terry Bradshaw had fully recovered from the dramatic hit he took from a Cleveland Browns player the season before.
It was just before 7 a.m., and the fog that had settled over the river was beginning to lift. As the sun began to streak through the mist, the men made their way into the labyrinth of buildings where they worked.
In the next hour, their lives would change forever.
From then on, this date in 1977 would be known as Black Monday in the Steel Valley, which stretches from Mahoning and Trumbull counties in Ohio eastward toward Pittsburgh. It is the date when Youngstown Sheet and Tube abruptly furloughed 5,000 workers in one day.
The bleeding never stopped.
Within the next 18 months, US Steel announced that the nation’s largest steel producer was also shutting down 16 plants across the nation, including their Ohio Works in Youngstown, a move that eliminated an additional 4,000 workers here. That announcement came one day before Jones and Laughlin Steel Corp. said they were cutting thousands of jobs at their facilities in the Mahoning Valley, too.
Within a decade, 40,000 jobs were gone. Within that same decade, 50,000 people had left the region, and by the next decade, that number was up to 100,000. Today the 22 miles of booming steel mills and the support industries that once lined the Mahoning River have mostly disappeared — either blown up, dismantled or reclaimed by nature.
If a bomb had hit this region, the scar would be no less severe on its landscape.
“The domino effect of Black Monday went on forever,” said Gary Steinbeck of nearby Warren, Ohio. Steinbeck was working up the river that day from the rolling plant at H.K. Porter, which also later went out of business. “The word spread quickly. Back then there weren’t any cellphones or social media. Good news travels fast, bad news travels at the speed of light. We knew within the hour the guys down the river were hurting, we knew within a day families were hurting, we knew within a week the whole region was suffering,” he said.
“Those numbers only reflect the jobs that were lost in the plant; the ripple effect was equally devastating. Grocery stores, pizza shops, gas stations, restaurants, department stores, car dealerships, barber shops all saw their business plummet and they started closing,” said Steinbeck.
Labor activist Staughton Lynd (left) led a drive in the 1970s after steel factory closings to pressure DC to stop imports. Gary Steinbeck (right) is a former steelworker.Justin Merriman for The New York Post
Steinbeck was only 25 on Black Monday — but he said he knew then that the blow to his hometown would not be felt the same way in Washington.
News reports from the days and weeks following Black Monday showed that the White House, larger business community and economic experts were detached from the potency of what was happening here. They thought the overall economic impact was exaggerated, that it would not be the calamity Steinbeck and everyone else in Youngstown knew it would be.
“No one never calculated the cultural tragedy as part of the equation either,” Steinbeck said. “They didn’t just dismantle the old mills, they dismantled the societal fabric of what made Youngstown Youngstown.”
The Manhattan radical
At first the Mahoning Valley did not give up hope, none of them did. In fact they did something remarkable: The entire community fought back by forming a local initiative that consisted of faith leaders, local politicians and even a couple of radical activists, most notably Staughton Lynd, a formidable figure in the ’60s social justice movement.
“The response in this community took the country and the community members themselves by surprise,” said Lynd from his basement in his Niles, Ohio, home in Trumbull County.
On the night of Black Monday, Lynd remembers an emergency meeting was called by the Central Labor Union and a plan was endorsed to send petitions to President Jimmy Carter encouraging him to stop steel imports and put an ease on regulations that were hurting the industry. At the time, newer plants in China and Japan, which had better technological capabilities, were outstripping American production.
“By Friday over 100,000 signatures had been collected and chartered buses went to Washington to deliver them to the president,” said Lynd.
Three hundred men, local elected officials and faith leaders all traveled on five buses to the White House. The mood on the drive was somber, and the late Sen. John Glenn stood on the US Capitol steps, along with other elected officials, as the men waved signs that read “Save the Steel Industry.”
Carter never even bothered to send out an aide to receive the petitions when they arrived. Amazingly, the president, who was a well-known supporter of the working class, never even acknowledged them.
Lynd is flanked by hundreds of labor movement and anti-war buttons on the wall behind him. At 87 he is trim, soft-spoken and humble. As if in reflection of his Quaker upbringing, his home is modest, and so is he. He really doesn’t look the part of a ’60s radical.
‘The history of Youngstown cannot be told without saying we gave them one hell of a fight.’
- Staughton Lynd
Lynd came to Youngstown unconventionally. The son of noted sociologists, he grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, attended Harvard and taught at Yale, but his path here was never through an elite bubble. He was considered a radical peaceful protester who traveled to North Vietnam with the activist Tom Hayden at the peak of the war to object to it, lived in communes after he was asked to leave the Army and made a difference during the fight for civil rights in Mississippi by coordinating an alternative education system for blacks called the Freedom Schools.
Despite his academic pedigree, his radical outlook placed him in Chicago right out of law school with a wife, whom he’d met at Harvard, three small children and no job.
“We met some steelworkers from Youngstown, Ohio, who were like people I’d never met in my life. They were active in the American Civil Liberties Union. They opposed race prejudice, which was a very serious thing in that industry both on the shop floor and in the community at the time. My wife, Alice, and I felt that we were probably never going to meet people like this again in our lives. Why not move there, try to be helpful?” he explains.
Lynd, the Manhattan-born academic from Harvard, immediately became part of the fabric in the working-class community as a labor lawyer.
“I can remember it as if it were yesterday, the phones in the office were ringing before we even got in the door,” he said of Black Monday.
By the next day, the community had put together quite an effort with the so-called Ecumenical Coalition, which was local churches and six local unions. “Not much help from the national union,” Lynd said.
In the end, after years of fighting everything, they tried but failed, said Lynd. “All of these things we did just came together — not in a victory, but we gave them a hell of a fight. The history of Youngstown cannot be told without saying we gave them one hell of a fight.”
Youngstown sure died hard
Scant remainders of the Campbell Works of Youngstown Sheet and Tube still stand. Where 20,000 men once worked at its peak, now just 19 employees grind out a living in the vast, cavernous buildings along the river.
The old Campbell works is now Casey Industrial, and Paul Ulam manages the crew. To step inside the old rolling mill is to step back in time; almost everything is still intact. The machines are still standing, so are the men’s lockers, the cranes are still overhead and old wooden block floors are still lining the vast footage of the buildings.
“We have the original lathes. A lot of these machines were all original,” Ulam said. The 57-year-old lives right over the state line in New Castle, Pa. He applied to work here at the mill right after high school.
Working at Youngstown Sheet and Tube was a source of pride.Getty Images
“I came down here for my interview on Sept. 19, 1977. The guy at the guards desk told me to ‘Go home, kid, it’s all over,’ ” he said.
It was only in 2001 that Ulam was hired to work at Casey Industrial. His 19 men rebuild motors for the cranes that cling to the roofs of steel mills like giant praying mantises across the country.
“We do it for customers who still use them,” said Ulam, who supervises for the operation.
Outside, the only thing you hear is the long-long-short-long whistle of a CXS train as it approaches a cross signal — all of the other tracks that crisscross the compound are so overgrown with weeds, the rails are nearly buried.
The visual is haunting, the silence eerie. If you grew up around here, you still expect to see the dozens of smokestacks fill the skyline with plumes of white, you still expect to catch the scent of sulfur, you still expect to hear the roar of men and machines working or catch sight of the sparks made by the welders or the orange glow of molten iron.
The events of Black Monday forever changed not only the Steel Valley, but her people and eventually American culture and politics. Just last year the reverberations were felt in the presidential election when many hard-core Democrats from this area broke from their party to vote for Donald Trump, a Republican who promised to bring jobs back to the Heartland.
Even today, after the election, the Washington establishment still hasn’t processed or properly dissected its effects. Economic experts predicted that the service industry would be the employment of the future. Steelworkers were retrained to fill jobs in that sector, which was expected to sustain the middle class in the same way that manufacturing did.
It did not. According to a study done by the Midwest Center for Research, the average salary of a steelworker in the late 1970s was $24,772.80. Today, according to the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the median household income in the Mahoning Valley is $24,133.
There was also a push for Americans to be more mobile. Lose your job in Youngstown? Fine, move to Raleigh or Texas. No one calculated that the tight-knit people of Youngstown didn’t want to leave their town.
They liked Youngstown. To Washington and New York, that seemed odd.
“At its very heart were the tight-knit communities and neighborhoods that made up the Mahoning Valley. For generations, families lived within blocks of each other. I am the grandson and son of steelworkers, I took so much pride in everything I did at my job,” said Steinbeck.
“We all did. We had decent homes, maybe had two cars, we went on vacation to Lake Geneva or Lake Erie, as we made more money we bought boats, we went fishing and we traveled more broadly. We gave back to America’s economic engine what it gave us — a dignified way of life and investment for the future,” he said.
That way of life has been dismantled, he said. “People fell out of the unemployment statistics, they lost political power, they lost their juice,” he said.
Today the regional chamber lists the largest employers in the Mahoning Valley as the Catholic Diocese, the GM plant in Lordstown, local government agencies, regional hospitals and Youngstown State University. An estimated 64,321 people live in Youngstown, nearly 100,000 fewer than in the late 1960s.
Even so, “Youngstown’s decline is not a story of the decline of the people. They never gave up, even when they gave up. Not in their heart,” Steinbeck said.
For a man who has spent 40 years of his life trying to bring jobs back, Steinbeck has only one wish: “That young people understand what happened here, so the same mistakes do not happen again to their kids, or their kids’ kids.”
For a man who has spent 40 years of his life fighting for social justice, Lynd, too, only has one wish: that it be noted in history that Youngstown didn’t take this lying down.
“A steelworker named John Barbero once told me, ‘Youngstown sure died hard.’ It should be noted he said it with pride,” said Lynd.
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I wish people would stop arguing Trump is the sole person in the whole world that wants to introduce protectionist trade policies.
Canada, Mexico, Brazil, EU, Russia, China and Japan (as well as every other country) has certain "protectionist" laws in their trade relations. They ALL do.
So **** off if you are stupid enough to believe the world is operating with total free trade and Trump and the U.S. are all of a sudden changing things. Obama did **** when it came to trade. So did Bush. While other countries exacted trade policies that hurt U.S. imports that competed with their home-grown companies, our leaders rolled over, did nothing and took the "moral high ground" that free trade was the "right" thing to do. A lot of good that got us.
Again, nothing is permanent. This tariff will not last forever. Different Presidents will handle trade differently and that's fine. Let them. But if we don't start re-enacting some trade barriers there is nothing for future Presidents to negotiate around. That's why some tariffs have to be brought back, just like interest rates have to be raised. We need to adjust away from the stripped down "open everything up" policies that Obama used to try to get us out of the recession or else we have no way to adjust or boost the economy in the future if things turn south.
Canada, Mexico, Brazil, EU, Russia, China and Japan (as well as every other country) has certain "protectionist" laws in their trade relations. They ALL do.
So **** off if you are stupid enough to believe the world is operating with total free trade and Trump and the U.S. are all of a sudden changing things. Obama did **** when it came to trade. So did Bush. While other countries exacted trade policies that hurt U.S. imports that competed with their home-grown companies, our leaders rolled over, did nothing and took the "moral high ground" that free trade was the "right" thing to do. A lot of good that got us.
Again, nothing is permanent. This tariff will not last forever. Different Presidents will handle trade differently and that's fine. Let them. But if we don't start re-enacting some trade barriers there is nothing for future Presidents to negotiate around. That's why some tariffs have to be brought back, just like interest rates have to be raised. We need to adjust away from the stripped down "open everything up" policies that Obama used to try to get us out of the recession or else we have no way to adjust or boost the economy in the future if things turn south.
Our trade deficit is huge. It's something like 80/20 and it has killed business, both manufacturing and retail. I'm all for a trade war. **** 'em.
Jimmy ******* Carter...legendary piece of ****. Second worst President of all time, after Ocommie.
The Dems/Libs/MSM don't understand that this is how Trump negotiates. To them the govt is so vitally important that they take every word literally like it's going to happen tomorrow.
Treasonous. The U.S. taxpayer has been subsidizing the world for a long time, and we've been sold to the highest bidder. Couldn't agree more, **** 'em. Another reason to rebuild American steel industry would be this:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...nearly-five-decades-ceo-to-quit-idUSKBN1GH2SM
Data fraud? We rely on imported steel and other metals for our military level projects? Who the **** thought of this? Who has the most to gain in our weakening?
America first. Trump has me scratching my head sometimes, but I'm thankful for him. Hildebeast would have completed the total ruin of our country.
Job creation saw another powerful month in February, with companies adding 235,000 positions, ADP and Moody's Analytics reported Wednesday.
The total again defied Wall Street expectations, as economists surveyed by Thomson Reuters were expecting payrolls to grow by 195,000. Growth actually decelerated slightly, as January posted an upwardly revised 244,000 from the initially reported 234,000.
February marked the fourth month in a row that private payrolls hit 200,000 or better.
Remember when Obama said that Trump won't bring jobs back, that they were gone forever and he doesn't have a magic wand? Stupid MFer.
The total again defied Wall Street expectations, as economists surveyed by Thomson Reuters were expecting payrolls to grow by 195,000. Growth actually decelerated slightly, as January posted an upwardly revised 244,000 from the initially reported 234,000.
February marked the fourth month in a row that private payrolls hit 200,000 or better.
Remember when Obama said that Trump won't bring jobs back, that they were gone forever and he doesn't have a magic wand? Stupid MFer.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-steel-to-restart-illinois-plant-operations-to-handle-demand-1520430223
U.S. Steel to Restart Illinois Plant Operations Amid Trump’s Tariff Plans
The company plans to call back about 500 employees
U.S. Steel to Restart Illinois Plant Operations Amid Trump’s Tariff Plans
The company plans to call back about 500 employees