Nov" target="_blank" class="redactor-autoparser-object">https://www.miamiherald.com/ne... 04, 2020 · But to Hispanic voters in Miami-Dade, particularly Cuban and Latin Americans who fled dictatorships, heâs echoing a deep-rooted fear that Democrats lean â¦
President Trump will leave Washington this week politically wounded, silenced on social media and essentially unwelcome in his lifelong hometown of New York.
By migrating instead to Palm Beach, Fla., Trump plans to inhabit an alternative reality of adoration and affirmation. The defeated president will take up residence at his gilded Mar-a-Lago Club, where dues-paying members applaud him whenever he eats meals or mingles on the deck. He is sure to take in the same celebratory fervor whenever he plays golf at one of the two Trump-branded courses nearby.
In Florida â one of only two top battleground states Trump won in November â Trump will be living in a veritable MAGA oasis, to use the acronym for his âMake America Great Againâ campaign slogan. South Florida has fast become a hub of right-wing power brokers and media characters, and some of Trumpâs adult children are making plans to move to the area. (...)
Michael DâAntonio, a Trump biographer, said the presidentâs state of victimhood fits the narrative he has concocted for his entire life.
âThis is the end that he would have scripted for himself, actually,â DâAntonio said. âHe has always imagined himself as an embattled person. Heâs talked about life itself being a constant struggle for survival and how heâs surrounded by enemies .â.â. that the world conspires against him and that he is a lonely hero who is underappreciated and besieged.â
President Trump will leave Washington this week politically wounded, silenced on social media and essentially unwelcome in his lifelong hometown of New York.
By migrating instead to Palm Beach, Fla., Trump plans to inhabit an alternative reality of adoration and affirmation. The defeated president will take up residence at his gilded Mar-a-Lago Club, where dues-paying members applaud him whenever he eats meals or mingles on the deck. He is sure to take in the same celebratory fervor whenever he plays golf at one of the two Trump-branded courses nearby.
In Florida â one of only two top battleground states Trump won in November â Trump will be living in a veritable MAGA oasis, to use the acronym for his âMake America Great Againâ campaign slogan. South Florida has fast become a hub of right-wing power brokers and media characters, and some of Trumpâs adult children are making plans to move to the area. (...)
Michael DâAntonio, a Trump biographer, said the presidentâs state of victimhood fits the narrative he has concocted for his entire life.
âThis is the end that he would have scripted for himself, actually,â DâAntonio said. âHe has always imagined himself as an embattled person. Heâs talked about life itself being a constant struggle for survival and how heâs surrounded by enemies .â.â. that the world conspires against him and that he is a lonely hero who is underappreciated and besieged.â
President Trump will leave Washington this week politically wounded, silenced on social media and essentially unwelcome in his lifelong hometown of New York.
By migrating instead to Palm Beach, Fla., Trump plans to inhabit an alternative reality of adoration and affirmation. The defeated president will take up residence at his gilded Mar-a-Lago Club, where dues-paying members applaud him whenever he eats meals or mingles on the deck. He is sure to take in the same celebratory fervor whenever he plays golf at one of the two Trump-branded courses nearby.
In Florida â one of only two top battleground states Trump won in November â Trump will be living in a veritable MAGA oasis, to use the acronym for his âMake America Great Againâ campaign slogan. South Florida has fast become a hub of right-wing power brokers and media characters, and some of Trumpâs adult children are making plans to move to the area. (...)
Michael DâAntonio, a Trump biographer, said the presidentâs state of victimhood fits the narrative he has concocted for his entire life.
âThis is the end that he would have scripted for himself, actually,â DâAntonio said. âHe has always imagined himself as an embattled person. Heâs talked about life itself being a constant struggle for survival and how heâs surrounded by enemies .â.â. that the world conspires against him and that he is a lonely hero who is underappreciated and besieged.â
I agree with you about that Lazy. There have been politicians in the past who have occasionally hinted at and/or exploited cultural grievances: Reagan, Thurmond, Helms, Agnew, Nixon (".. a respectable Republican cloth coat"), etc., but none who have made it into such a powerful political tool until now. Sure Limbaugh, Fox News, Breitbart, and other Conservative outlets have been going on about it for years, but politicians didn't dwell on it so much. I also find the trend and the responses to it dangerous; addressing it with disdain or mockery cannot improve anything.
Sure, some of them couldâve been impoverished former coal miners, as so many pundits have described a certain sect of Trump voters. But these people werenât raging over the decline of the carbon-based economy. This was a riot about race and power. If there was economic anxiety, it was spurred by the riotersâ false notion that their place in the world is under threat. Americans who chose Trump were worried about losing their social status, their place in a country where white folks will soon be in the minority and where many women no longer seem to realize that men should be in charge."
Splitting hairs touting 'other' issues regarding Trump and Fox News' base is merely an inept distraction from this core belief. Lonely old men will always adore strong man tactics ... and invent a thousand different ways to defend it.
The rich part is that he is financially independent and was not bought and paid for and thus not owned, beholden to and neutered by donors (the swamp, the actual swamp) before he got into office, unlike nearly every other POTUS in my lifetime, save JFK. Trump didn't need the money, didn't need the job and could not be bought off. His methodology and thinking was not shaped by the traditional political patronage system. Rather as a builder and developer, he was a victim / target of that system. I have endlessly tried to make this point, but clearly I have failed to make it since I have to explain it once again.
Trump was never the “victim” of any system though it continues to be entertaining that you perceive him that way. He’s played the system and says as much and post-presidency we will see just how legal those manipulations have been.
It also floors me that you don’t think that pollution and global warming are related since this is the one thing that all science agrees on. To deny that is to deny the problem which is what you are doing. I guess I would need to know what you deem is “pollution” as perhaps our definitions may be vastly different.
Finally you go off on a tangent about me making a comment about blue collar Trump supporters. I guess that was to question whether I could speak about them at all. All I did was pose a question which was to ask blue collar Trump supporters (in this case ones that are independent contractors) that have been stiffed out of being paid in full on a job or paid at all... how they reconcile that with supporting Trump who has a long history of doing the same thing? I think that is a fair question and my personal experience with blue collar workers is immaterial to being able to pose it. You with your "blue-collar" perspective didn't attempt to answer it but preferred to dance around it. FYI, I'm asking the question precisely because I don't have the perspective or insight to answer it.
Let me rephrase the question then if I can use you as a proxy for a blue collar worker: How do you (kurtster) reconcile supporting Trump who has has a long history of screwing over people by non-payment of services rendered or significantly reducing the cost of services rendered through threat of litigation... with your own experience of having had it happen to you (or others in your orbit)? I don't expect an answer as you skirted it the first time but I figured I would pose the question in another way.
I will give you an answer. I will have to compose one that explains the world of construction, financing, contracting and subcontracting, supply chains, scheduling, contingencies, labor relations, zoning, government regulations and force majeure. It is a world of herding cats and dealing with every kind of people that you can think of and then some. It is a world of speculation, risk management and deadlines with bust and boom cycles. From that you will get the answer you seek. Unless you have worked in it and been there first hand, it is not at all like you see on HGTV. There are some here who work in the trades and know this world as well. I will let my reply stand up to their review.
You're gonna get this whether you want it now or not. So don't say never mind. You dared me not to answer asked for it.
Dear VV ..
The construction business.
Things have changed drastically in the past 10 years, so I’ll deal with it as it was for the decades prior and on the East Coast and how it came to be on the West Coast later on after the mid 1970’s, since eastern ways were just getting a foothold out west then.
You have all kinds of people involved, yet your main interest is in the “blue collar” (BC) sector more commonly known as the trades, right ? This is generally considered skilled manual labor. These technicians and laborers generally work by the hour, piece work or job contract. They are usually also associated with working for sub contractors or out of union halls. Many of these trades are dominated by one particular ethic group based upon the local region.
Traditionally these have been higher paying jobs because the wear and tear on the body shortened their work lives, so they in essence get their money more towards the front whereas occupations like teachers were lower paying because the work life was longer due to less wear and tear on the body, so in the long run, these cerebral jobs made more in the long run. The work can also be seasonal as in feast or famine. Example, a typical plumber in San Franciscowas billing at $25 per hour in the early 1960’s. Meanwhile a ditch digger was getting $2.50 hour maybe up to $4 at most. The work is also risky, dangerous and injury prone. Note the word risk. I worked at Broadbent’s Hobby shop while in high school (next to the Taystee Freeze) for $1.35 in 1969 and by 1970 I was getting $1.40. But I digress.
The construction business is mostly single large buildings or residential tract building. What they have in common is contract work for all the related parts of the process itself. Which also means that they have a defined beginning and end. The one job does not go on forever like in a factory. Another reason for the once higher pay is that this was essentially “on demand” work in addition to risky for the reasons already mentioned. In construction contract work, there is a bid, which if successful leads to a starting payout to a particular contractor so they can pay for labor and materials for a certain phase and the another payout midway to keep the balls rolling and then the final payout. It is a controlled cash flow system. This protects both builder and contractor. Not that one or the other is shady, although many are, but I’m getting ahead of myself. The job flow chart from the builder down runs through a project manager to a general contractor (GC) who is in charge of all of the subcontrators who do the various work performed by the various trades, carpentry, masons, steelworkers, plumbers, roofers, electricians, glasers, drywall, painters, interior finishers and exterior landscapers. My wife was a licensed GC in California prior to moving here 20 years ago and here was a jouneyman painter with her own painting / remodeling contracting business until she was permanently disabled in a car accident when she was hit by a cell phone using asshole driver.
Anyway, contractors are always hustling for that next job, for two primary reasons. Number 1 is to make money and number 2 is to keep a reliable crew together, with at times, the contractor breaking even just to keep a good crew together. It is all about cash flow. Generally speaking, all the participants who have decided to make a living in this business know how it all works and why it does and why it at times doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, people often do not get paid. That is the risk of being in this business. If the risk / reward is not right for someone, they generally move on to other more stable and predictable occupations.
There are many reasons for failure and collapse in the business as a whole. First off, it is almost always the first casualty of an economic downturn and generally the last to recover on the upswing. So that is the cyclical part of it. Builders often go bankrupt during economic downturns through no fault of their own. And when that happens, the people down the line, the contractors become creditors. However, there is one protection for the contractor and that is a property lien that is almost impossible to get out of. But they must wait for the property to be liquidated and change hands before any proceeds are divided, and that can take forever. At any rate, so long as to be meaningless when it comes to keeping a business afloat. That this option is available to contractors demonstrates the widespread instability of the business.
Then there can be unresolved work stoppages or supply chain interruptions that take too long to be resolved resulting in a failure in the project, with once again, contractors getting unpaid.
There is also the unlikely event of the failure of the bank financing the project which will cause the project to be uncompleted. However, we did have the Savings and Loan failure, for those that may remember.
Then comes force majeure, which if the clause is present in a contract, essentially allows a no fault bankruptcy, but a real bankruptcy nonetheless. Force majeure is not as uncommon as some might think. An act of war would qualify just as a weather event does. It is a pretty standard contract clause these days for good reason.
My father was an architect. In the beginning of his career, he did residential design / build / spec work. He had a 4 home unit residential complex going on Wildcat Canyon Road in 1961/ 62. Yes, the same Wildcat Canyon Road in the Berkeley Hills where the big fire started back in the 20’s by a faulty PG&E power line and burned down half of the town and has even recently been the starting place for several other major fires that have been in the news lately. He was always talking about that fire in the 20’s. He was also a townie. So getting back to the subject, we had one of the mightiest rain storms / monsoon to hit the Bay Area ever. The result was a mudslide into the backsides of all 4 units that basically stopped the job and caused our family to go bankrupt as he was a sole proprietor. Many family heirlooms suddenly disappeared. Things got real tight, it was tough being an 4th grader going through this, not understanding much of what was going on at the time. In this case, the builder / developer suffered the same as everyone else. Everyone lost out. I do remember it fairly well. My dad used to take me with to the job site where he had me picking nails and wood scraps for burning and all the wood I could ever want to build stuff, including forts around our house on the hillside it was built upon. I remember the storm as I had a paper route at that time. I went up the site a couple of times after the slide and saw the damage and understood how expensive it would be to cleanup and keep going, so I did have a grasp of the economic impact of this and got an early education about Shit Happens and the consequences and how these things are not personal. They are just real and suck.
So trying to wrap this up somehow … If you are in this business and are going to stay in it, you must have your eyes wide open and know full well that nothing is guaranteed. You are not always going to get paid, even though you should. I didn’t go down the rabbit hole of corruption and the intelligence of people involved although I can, if the above is not enough to make the case of how this business in nothing but risk and everyone knows it. A smart contractor will look at the circumstances and risks involved in working with a developer. It is more dependent on why someone went bankrupt or did not get paid, rather than how many times. They will look at someone like Trump with much different eyes than someone like you and judge his successes and failures with their perspective based upon inside looking out. You are just outside looking in. You are just looking at numbers without context. He went bankrupt X amount of times is all you look at and say he is a failure just based on these numbers alone. You just see him as someone who out hustled everyone. His failures in AC with the casinos. Was there an economic downturn involved at all ? What were the real mitigating circumstances ?
A builder is a problem solver by profession. There is a need and they provide the solution and have to fix any problems that may arise in order to finish the job properly and on time, if they wish to keep getting work. A contractor understands this as they also have the same job description, and can look both upstream and downstream with a learned eye and make their own insightful conclusions based upon performance.
A career politician does not fix anything. It is not in their interest to fix things. They only manage problems and try to keep them under control with the interest of maintaining power and control. And with the approval rating of Congress close to or in single digits clearly no one is surprised anymore. The system protects itself at the expense of its constituents. Someone from the outside had to come in. That someone was Trump. He is the nasty tasting medicine we all knew we needed but no one was willing to take, except for some of us.
Does any of this make sense and in some way answer your question ? If you made it this far ...
All of this is off the top of my head. I know a lot but I don't know everything.
Any contractors or trades people out there feel free to correct me on the parts of the biz I may have gotten wrong or left out.
Yeah, how anyone with a modicum of moral consciousness can support this human garbage is beyond me.
Talked to a disillusioned ex-lukewarm-Trump supporter last night. Here's how he put it:
When your plumbing is plugged up you can flush a cherry bomb down the toilet, and your pipes will open up . Trump was that cherry bomb. And now we need a plumber.
Location: Half inch above the K/T boundary Gender:
Posted:
Jan 16, 2021 - 4:48pm
Red_Dragon wrote:
islander wrote:
This is the part that baffles me. Even here you make some aside that he's not a 'city slicker'....
This guy: ??
For all their issues and problems, at least the Democrats are generally representative of the democratic causes. Mr. rapey with 5 kids by 3 wives and who knows how many dalliances that were consensual gets respect and deification because he utters the proper phrase? I get the desire to put in the judges they wanted, and they got that, but they would have had that with ANY of the other candidates in the primaries as well. Trump speaks to an ugliness that resonates with his base. I won't claim to know how big that base is and how well it resonates across all of them, but they do like his ugliness. The whole idea of 'owning the libs' is part of it. Now tell me again about who's disdain is driving voters? I heard many times (several from you) that 'trump is what you get when you act this way', and I sort of get that, but you don't get to get on the high horse about 'values' when you pick the ugliest possible candidate who represents none of your values and then deify him when there were other equally fine choices. Where is John Huntsman these days? What happened to Colin Powell? There are people on the right who can bring consensus as well, it's not just up to the dems to work toward the middle. If the right decides they are just going to throw poop around because they want to piss people off, then there isn't much incentive to work with them. Some people say you shouldn't negotiate with terrorists, that's some kind of a value or something.
Yeah, how anyone with a modicum of moral consciousness can support this human garbage is beyond me.
Towering over the graft, corruption, mendacity, and incompetence of Trump and his administration are the twin felonies of the child separation policy and the mishandling of the pandemic. Lives lost. Lives ruined.
Yeah, how anyone with a modicum of moral consciousness can support this human garbage is beyond me.
Talked to a disillusioned ex-lukewarm-Trump supporter last night. Here's how he put it:
When your plumbing is plugged up you can flush a cherry bomb down the toilet, and your pipes will open up . Trump was that cherry bomb. And now we need a plumber.
This is the part that baffles me. Even here you make some aside that he's not a 'city slicker'....
This guy: ??
For all their issues and problems, at least the Democrats are generally representative of the democratic causes. Mr. rapey with 5 kids by 3 wives and who knows how many dalliances that were consensual gets respect and deification because he utters the proper phrase? I get the desire to put in the judges they wanted, and they got that, but they would have had that with ANY of the other candidates in the primaries as well. Trump speaks to an ugliness that resonates with his base. I won't claim to know how big that base is and how well it resonates across all of them, but they do like his ugliness. The whole idea of 'owning the libs' is part of it. Now tell me again about who's disdain is driving voters? I heard many times (several from you) that 'trump is what you get when you act this way', and I sort of get that, but you don't get to get on the high horse about 'values' when you pick the ugliest possible candidate who represents none of your values and then deify him when there were other equally fine choices. Where is John Huntsman these days? What happened to Colin Powell? There are people on the right who can bring consensus as well, it's not just up to the dems to work toward the middle. If the right decides they are just going to throw poop around because they want to piss people off, then there isn't much incentive to work with them. Some people say you shouldn't negotiate with terrorists, that's some kind of a value or something.
Yeah, how anyone with a modicum of moral consciousness can support this human garbage is beyond me.
Not sure who you're arguing with. I think I covered the points you brought up, but them's some mighty high-fallutin' words there, may have missed a few nuances, me bein' so simple and all.
Trump is a result as much as a cause. The demagogue found his audience, but the audience was primed. He was ready with simple answers to complex questions. Those resonated for sure, but I think the media reaction to him drove some of his appeal. The talking heads were horrified and that read like an endorsement to people who have grown an intense distrust for those talking heads.
That's a lot of it but not all of it, as I mentioned at the start of the exchange. His stance on abortion (however insincere and inconsistent with his past statements) gave the religious right something to cling to, and I swear there are people ready to canonize Saint Donald. How they didn't see thru that pose still baffles me. I expect there will be volumes written analyzing that in years to come.
He exploited fears and myths whipped up about illegal immigration and trade, but he didn't create them. Those were bi-partisan effortsyears in the making.
Would he have had the same appeal if he were slicker? Don't know. We've have populist demagogues rise in prominence before, but seldom all the way to the top. Hell, one was a strong contender for the Democratic nomination just a few short months ago; we might repeat this conversation in four years if Bernie isn't embalmed in his own version of Lenin's tomb by then. And Trump came within a few combed-over hairs of winning the election, I'll remind you.
We aren't alone. The world went thru a wave of populism in response to the recent economic and immigration crises. Even them sophisticated Yurpeans fell for it. Maybe we can step back from the brink as a species before this madness darkens the whole planet.
This is the part that baffles me. Even here you make some aside that he's not a 'city slicker'....
This guy: ???
For all their issues and problems, at least the Democrats are generally representative of the democratic causes. Mr. rapey with 5 kids by 3 wives and who knows how many dalliances that were consensual gets respect and deification because he utters the proper phrase? I get the desire to put in the judges they wanted, and they got that, but they would have had that with ANY of the other candidates in the primaries as well. Trump speaks to an ugliness that resonates with his base. I won't claim to know how big that base is and how well it resonates across all of them, but they do like his ugliness. The whole idea of 'owning the libs' is part of it. Now tell me again about who's disdain is driving voters? I heard many times (several from you) that 'trump is what you get when you act this way', and I sort of get that, but you don't get to get on the high horse about 'values' when you pick the ugliest possible candidate who represents none of your values and then deify him when there were other equally fine choices. Where is John Huntsman these days? What happened to Colin Powell? There are people on the right who can bring consensus as well, it's not just up to the dems to work toward the middle. If the right decides they are just going to throw poop around because they want to piss people off, then there isn't much incentive to work with them. Some people say you shouldn't negotiate with terrorists, that's some kind of a value or something.
??
