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Books, Culture, Economy, Janesville

Considering Janesville: An American Story (Part 7 of 14)

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This is the seventh in a series of posts considering Amy Goldstein’s Janesville: An American Story. In this post, I’ll cover five chapters from Part Three (2010) of Janesville (Labor Fest 2010, Project 16:49, Figuring It Out, and Bags of Hope).

Goldstein describes the year’s Labor Day parade in Janesville through three politicians’ public personas:

Since this is an election year, political candidates are out marching in full force. In his trademark Kelly green polo shirt, with his wife and blond kids in tow, Paul Ryan is a familiar figure, running for a seventh term as his hometown’s congressman….

If Paul’s conservatism, his distaste for Obama’s ideas, is cloaked back home in Janesville in a genial demeanor, Scott Walker is emerging as a firebrand. His campaign issues a statement today that derides, with stinging rhetoric, what the president is saying in Milwaukee: “Obama’s spend-o-rama stimulus-fueled $810 million boondoggle train . . . It seems like every time the president opens his mouth, he spends another $50 billion of our money to ‘create jobs’ but instead we continue to see spiraling unemployment….

In this gathering political storm, on this sunniest of days along Main Street, another figure marches in the parade, too. He is wearing a white polo shirt and khakis, a baseball cap over his gray hair. And he is being trailed by two guys holding up each side of a large campaign sign whose slogan is devoid of pizzazz: “Tim Cullen. Effective for Us.”

Poverty produces homelessness, and homeless adults mean homeless children. Janesville develops a program to address growing dislocation affecting young people:

some well-meaning people in town and in Beloit formed a Homeless Education Action Team. And the team thought up Project 16:49. The name comes from Beloit, where 16:49 is the number of hours and minutes between the end of one school day and the start of the next. The point is that these hours and minutes can feel like an eternity to kids without a safe, steady place to do homework, eat supper, or go to sleep. Sixteen Forty-Nine is also the name of a documentary that has just been finished by an aspiring local filmmaker. It is a work of art and advocacy. Its purpose is to smash through the community’s denial about the homeless kids in their midst. And on a Thursday evening in mid-September, the documentary is having its premiere….

The school system has more than four hundred homeless kids this year, many more than before GM closed. The hardest cases are the “unaccompanied youth,” the government’s polite term for homeless kids trying to fend somehow for themselves.

(More information about the Project 16:49 documentary may be found online.)

For a successful tech school graduate, placed into a job in corrections, there are second thoughts:

Some days during those six weeks, Barb had to tamp down a question in her mind: “Is this really what I want to do?” Still, rough as some of it was, the academy was school. The academy classes were even held at Blackhawk. And Barb knows by now how to be in school. She came out the far side of the criminal justice academy with a state certificate that made her a full-fledged correctional officer….

one day, with Christmas coming soon, she suddenly sees her life in a new way. She sees that she spent fifteen years at Lear playing the game, staying somewhere she wasn’t happy, just because the money was too good to leave. Maybe she is too intelligent, too educated now, to play the same game again. Maybe toughness is recognizing what isn’t working in your life and fixing it. Scared though she is, Barb does something she has never done at any job since her very first job as a teenager. Without any work in sight or a clue what will happen next, she decides to leave. Barb turns in her Sheriff’s Department badge.

Toward the end of 2010, a family that had not previously received charity, but formerly had offered it, finds that necessity alters one’s outlook when the charity program Bags of Hope delivers food to their door:

Tammy doesn’t know who put her family’s name on the school system’s food drive list. But on this December morning, gazing upon her twelve Bags of Hope, she decides that any day when groceries show up at their house is a good day.

Previously: Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

Tomorrow: Considering Janesville: An American Story (Part 8 of 14).

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 5.7.17

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Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of sixty. Sunrise is 5:39 AM and sunset 8:03 PM, for 14h 23m 28s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 89% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}one hundred eightieth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1864, the Battle of the Wilderness ends: “the fighting on May 5-7, 1864, produced nearly 30,000 casualties without giving either side a clear victory. The 2nd, 5th, 6th and 7th Wisconsin Infantry regiments fought at the Battle of the Wilderness.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Adam Ozimek, in Sorry Nerds, But Colonizing Other Planets Is Not A Good Plan, contends that whatever benefits of colonizing  other planets, it will always be cheaper to maintain this one properly: “In November, Stephen Hawking warned that humans needed to colonize another planet within 1,000 years. Now, six months later, he’s saying we have to do it within 100 years in order to avoid extinction. There’s a problem with this plan: under almost no circumstances is colonizing another planet the best way to adapt to a problem on earth….We also worry about the level of carbon dioxide we humans are creating. But there’s nothing we could do to earth’s atmosphere to make it as bad as Mars, which is both extremely thin and also 96% carbon dioxide. Not to mention a significantly lower level of gravity. Whatever we’d have to do on Mars to make the atmosphere habitable would be more easily done on a very very ruined earth. Even if an asteroid were to strike earth it would very likely remain more habitable than Mars. For example, consider the asteroid that struck the earth 66 million years ago creating the Chicxulub crater and wiping out 75% of plant and animal species on earth, including the dinosaurs. Well that disaster still left 25% of species that survived, all of whom would die instantly on the surface of Mars.”

Jack Ewing reports Inside VW’s Campaign of Trickery: “Media reports on the scandal have usually focused on Volkswagen’s original sin: the company’s decision in 2006 to equip its diesels with illegal software. But the most costly aspect of the wrongdoing for Volkswagen may have been the cover-up that the company orchestrated after regulators first became suspicious. The following reconstruction, based on interviews with dozens of participants and a review of internal Volkswagen documents and communications, shows that the cover-up spanned years and lasted until days before the company’s lies were exposed. Volkswagen employees manipulated not only the engine software, but also generated reams of false or misleading data to hide the fact that millions of vehicles had been purposely engineered to deceive regulators and spew deadly gases into the air.”

Dan Bice reports that Hacked records show Bradley Foundation taking its conservative Wisconsin model national: ” The records make clear the Bradley Foundation no longer simply favors groups promoting its signature issues: taxpayer-funded school choice and increased work requirements for welfare recipients. It now regularly funds nonprofits that are, among other things, hostile to labor unions, skeptical of climate change or critical of the loosening of sexual mores in American culture. More important, the foundation has found success by changing its fundamental approach to putting policies into reality. The Bradley Foundation is paying less attention to Washington, D.C. Instead, it is methodically building a coalition of outside groups aimed at influencing officials in statehouses from Pennsylvania to Arizona.”

Aria Bendix observes that In France, the Predictable [Release of Hacked Emails] Has Finally Happened: “The parallels to the 2016 U.S. election are striking: Both occurred days before an election. Both were carried out by hacking the personal and professional email accounts of campaign staffers. And both were directed at more establishment-friendly candidates—not their conservative opponents. While the perpetrators of the Macron hack haven’t been identified, numerous intelligence agencies have expressed confidence that Russia was behind the hacking of Clinton’s emails during the 2016 U.S. election. Russia is also said to have targeted the French electoral process, as well as elections in other counties where the leading candidates have been critical of Vladimir Putin, the Russian president. Russia denies any such actions. But U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Putin ordered interference in the U.S. election to favor one candidate—though it said there was no evidence to suggest the interference was successful. Arguably the most important insight from the intelligence report was summed up in a single sentence by The New York Times: “This will happen again.” After witnessing the efficacy of its cyberattack on the U.S., the report said, Russia was preparing for future hacks on U.S. allies…”

Saturday Night Live cold open last night teases about the announcement that MSNBC co-hosts Joe Scarborough & Mika Brzezinski are a couple (and, in fact, engaged):

The point of their MSNBC show, of course, is that Scarborough and Brzezinski represent ideologically different (and presumably unconflicted) points of view. Whether that will continue one cannot say.

In my own case, I’m happily married, but even if it were otherwise, I could yet confidently declare that I hold no romantic feelings for any officials of Whitewater’s municipal building (nor they for me).

Books, Culture, Economy, Janesville

Considering Janesville: An American Story (Part 6 of 14)

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This is the sixth in a series of posts considering Amy Goldstein’s Janesville: An American Story. In this post, I’ll cover five chapters from Part Three (2010) of Janesville (The Last Days of Parker Pen, Becoming a Gypsy, Family is More Important than GM, Honor Cords, and The Day the White House Comes to Town).

What was left of Parker Pen, by that time a logo-imprinting operation run by Sanford, closed in in 2010. Goldstein recalls however, that decades earlier Parker Pen once made pens in Janesville, and played a key role in the city’s industrial life:

….members of the Parker Pen personnel department chose graduating seniors to hire by coming right into Janesville’s only high school at the time. The Parker personnel people brought along a test of dexterity and speed that it offered to any senior who wanted to try it. Most of the students who took the test were girls, because the understanding in town back then was that young men lucky enough to be offered a General Motors job would go to the assembly plant. And young women lucky enough to be chosen by Parker Pen would go to work at Arrow Park, a clean, friendly factory in which the making and assembling of pen parts required fine motor skills.

If Parker had once meant something to Janesville, then one can be sure that she once many something even to the most prominent in America:

“In May of 1945, the treaty of German surrender that ended World War II in Europe was signed with a pair of Parker 51 fountain pens belonging to General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, who held up the two pens for the cameras in a V for victory.”

When GM closes in Janesville, with little prospect of comparable wages nearby, some Janesville workers take GM jobs in faraway cities:

By this winter, hundreds of Janesville GM’ers have morphed into GM’ers working far from Janesville. Their UAW contract gave them these transfer rights. Nearly two hundred are working at a General Motors plant in Kansas City—so many that people in town now joke that Kansas City has become Janesville West. Almost 140 are at a plant in Arlington, Texas—Janesville South—which is still turning out the Tahoe SUVs that Janesville had made. So far, fifty-five have transferred to Janesville East—Fort Wayne, Indiana—to assemble Chevy Silverado trucks, which are so popular that the plant is adding a third shift and is sending job offers to sixty-seven more Janesville GM’ers….

They stick with GM jobs farther away because the re-training classes they’re taking can’t get them jobs in the Janesville area:

one day, Matt and a bunch of the GM’ers learning to climb utility poles with him decide that it is time to stay after class and ask their instructor, Mike, a tough, pointed question: If they stay in school to graduate, will linemen’s jobs be waiting for them or not?

….[the re-training instructor] starts by laying out the benefits of electric power distribution. But the more he talks, the more he feels he needs to be a straight shooter with these guys who already have lost so much. The truth is, he has to admit, not many of his Blackhawk graduates got jobs last year. The outlook still isn’t great. Jobs exist in the utility field but not many of them in southern Wisconsin. He tells them they might end up in the Dakotas or Texas or somewhere in the Southwest.

Blackhawk Tech hires a motivational speaker for a graduating class in 2010, a woman who went from making jelly in a factory to making millions selling cosmetics, before using her singular experience to inspire others:

She gives a lot of motivational speeches. When she takes center stage at the Dream Center, in an elegant cream-colored suit with ruffled lapels, she aims her words straight at this morning’s unlikeliest graduates, including Barb and Kristi, who had never expected that a recession would steal their factory jobs. “There were many reactions, I’m sure, to the dire circumstances facing the economy of this community,” she tells the graduates. “Many people complained, many people cried, many people gave up. Some waited for things to go back to the way they were. . . . But there were a vital few that decided to create a new future for themselves and this area. They decided to use the economic obstacles as an economic opportunity. Those people were all of you.”

Goldstein reminds us, though, that all of you were once many more:

Blunt though she is, there is a piece of the story that the American-Dream-in-a-suit commencement speaker leaves unspoken. Many of the former factory workers who turned to Blackhawk veered off course before today. Of the laid-off workers who arrived at the college in the fall of 2008 with Barb and Kristi, nearly half left without finishing what they’d begun. Of the three hundred or so who, like Barb and Kristi, aimed for an associate’s degree—the highest degree that Blackhawk offers—just over one third will stick around to finish within a few years. And of the thirty-one laid-off workers who began to study criminal justice with Barb and Kristi? Just half are collecting diplomas today or will graduate next year. Such bumpy outcomes are not unusual at two-year colleges in general….

In fact, at Blackhawk, more of this first wave of laid-off workers finished their studies than did their classmates who hadn’t lost a job. Still, the point unspoken in the Dream Center [an auditorium] today is that, even when people desperate for a job try to retrain, as the Job Center has been encouraging, they don’t always succeed.

We hear again, in Chapter 23 (The Day the White House Comes to Town), about a visit from a federal official to Janesville’s Bob Borremans, who runs the Job Center in town, with other locals in attendance. Goldstein describes the aftermath of the meeting, from Bob’s vantage:

And Bob? After working so hard to arrange the visit, he soon feels exasperated. Montgomery [the federal official] had a goal of ensuring that each stop on his listening tour got some help from the government. For Janesville, though, it turns out that the supposed red tape cutters have no scissors. As Montgomery is leaving the government, a young man who works in the Labor Department is instructed to add Rock County to the communities for which he is to serve as a liaison. Bob presents this young man with the eleven grant ideas to which Montgomery listened at the UAW union hall. Bob asks for advice on which federal agency would be the best place to pursue each idea, expecting that the liaison can be an advocate and a conduit, shepherding these ideas to the right places to help open fresh spigots of federal money. Except no advice arrives. No money flows.

Whatever happened, by the way, to that federal official, Edward Montgomery, who left his post in 2010 with an unfulfilled goal of each auto-making community getting help?

He’s still at the job that enticed him away, serving as dean and professor of the McCourt School of Public Policy, Georgetown University.

Previously: Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

Tomorrow: Considering Janesville: An American Story (Part 7 of 14).

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 5.6.17

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Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of fifty-nine. Sunrise is 5:40 AM and sunset 8:01 PM, for 14h 21m 08s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 93% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}one hundred seventy-ninth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1937, the German airship Hindenburg catches fires and is destroyed while  attempting to dock in Lakehurst, New Jersey. On this day in 1915, actor and filmmaker Orson Welles is born in Kenosha.

Recommended for reading in full —

David Frum explains How the Obamacare Repeal Could Cost Republicans the House (and, of all things, make single-payer more likely):

Eliot A. Cohen contends that Rex Tillerson Doesn’t Understand America: “Tillerson’s idea that in foreign policy American interests and American values are two separate things, the first mandatory, the second optional, reflects a misunderstanding of our past (not uncommon in this administration) and of the essence of our national character. The United States is surely the Manhattan skyline, the Kansas plains, the redwood forests, the Mississippi river. But it is, far more importantly, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Gettysburg Address. You could cut down the forest or dry up the river and the country would be infinitely the poorer for it, but it would still be the United States of America. If Americans jettison the Bill of Rights and the ideas enshrined in it, they become a different country altogether..”

David Uberti reports that Gannett newspapers are hiding an important local story: “The big news? More reductions in the ranks of journalists at some of the titles owned by the Virginia-based media conglomerate. The scope? Gannett executives refuse to say. Newsroom cuts have long been a fixture among publicly traded newspaper companies, particularly Gannett, which announced in October 2016 that it would trim 2 percent of its total workforce—equivalent to more than 300 employees. But the corporation has foregone such transparency with its latest round of cutbacks, which come a week after a quarterly earnings report in which publishing revenues fell more than 10 percent compared to the same period last year, excluding acquisitions.”

Cleve R. Wootson Jr., Peter Holley, Lindsey Bever and Wesley Lowery report that Texas police officer who killed black teen could spend rest of his life in prison: “Roy Durwood Oliver, a patrol officer in the Dallas suburb of Balch Springs since July 2011, was released on $300,000 bail. While dispatched on complaints about drunk teenagers at a party last weekend, Oliver fired his rifle at a car full of teenagers who were leaving, according to investigators, killing Jordan Edwards….“After reviewing the findings I have made the decision to terminate Roy Oliver’s employment with the Balch Springs Police Department,” Police Chief Jonathan Haber told reporters Tuesday evening. “My department will continue to be responsive, transparent and accountable.”

Ruta Grasyt observes that Neil deGrasse Tyson Tries To Make Fun Of Cats On Twitter, Gets Totally Destroyed By One: “Recently, American astrophysicist, author, and science communicator, Neil deGrasse Tyson just wanted to be funny on Twitter, but things turned the other direction… More specifically, right in his face! Tyson’s supposed-to-be-funny tweet read: “Evidence that Humans are smarter than Cats: We don’t chase Laser dots on the carpet. We’re not afraid of Vacuum Cleaners.” Everything would’ve been all right, but then a cat named Bitches responded to Tyson’s tweet and, we must say, he totally destroyed him! Keep on scrolling to see what Bitches wrote….”

(Bitches the Cat and I follow each other on Twitter, and anyone familiar Bitches could have easily predicted the outcome here: she occupies a deservedly lofty place in the Twitterverse, and was sure to win this exchange.)

 

Books, Culture, Economy, Janesville, Politics

Considering Janesville: An American Story (Part 5 of 14)

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This is the fifth in a series of posts considering Amy Goldstein’s Janesville: An American Story. In this post, I’ll cover four chapters from Part Two (2009) of Janesville (Blackhawk, Ahead of the Class, A Plan and Distress Signals, and The Holiday Food Drive).

Goldstein’s not polemical, and her descriptions are more subtle than they would be for those who are more acerbic. Yet in these chapters, one finds unmistakable signs of how she feels about the (false) promise of many job training programs:

Training people out of unemployment is a big, popular idea. In fact, it may be the only economic idea on which Republicans such as Paul Ryan and Democrats such as President Obama agree, anchored, as it is, in an abiding cultural myth, going back to America’s founding, of this as a land that offers its people a chance at personal reinvention. The evidence is thin that job training in the United States is an effective way to lead laid-off workers back into solid employment. Still, there is a lack of political consensus that the government should invest in creating jobs, and there is very much a consensus that it should help displaced workers go back to school.

Others might have said this more pointedly, but she says it plainly, and plainly enough.

An anecdote about Matt Wopat, a laid off auto worker and son of a retired auto worker, shows how oddly unfocused job-counseling is:

Matt took a test called JobFit that gauged his learning style (visual/verbal, it turned out), his numerical skill (rapid grasp of numerical information), and his sociability (comfortable working with a group or individually). Matt was then issued a “Career Compatibility Passport,” which told him that he would be equally adept as a database developer, a podiatrist, or a registered nurse—his best fits out of a list of fifty occupations for which he was well suited, with horticulturist and software engineer not far behind.

Next to a box indicating that he was being recommended for a training program, a Job Center caseworker handwrote about Matt: “Currently undecided.”

Wopat wants a job, and both he and society would benefit if he had one, yet a program that recommends wildly disparate occupations as equally suitable will hardly be of much help. There’s something both sad, infuriating, and vacuous in the results the Career Compatibility Passport provides.

Worse is the local conceit, though, that the work of a banker Mary Willmer and billionaire building-supply magnate Diane Hendricks through Rock County 5.0 will be more than a drop in the bucket. Here’s the Willmer and Hendricks effort:

Just before Halloween, they decide the time is right. Rock County 5.0 has not yet reached the goal of $1 million in private support. But it is $400,000 along the path. Respectable. And the project now has five well-defined, five-year strategies to buttress its 5.0 name: persuading local companies to stay and expand, attracting new businesses, offering special help to small businesses and start-ups, preparing real estate for commercial uses, and forging a workforce that employers will want to hire. This is the hopeful vision of Rock County from a business-centric point of view: moving beyond Janesville’s automotive identity.

Remember, though, that to keep the plant, alone, mostly public entities were willing to offer the “biggest incentive package in Wisconsin history” (“The package adds up to $195 million: $115 million in state tax credits and energy-efficiency grants, the $20 million that Marv Wopat pushed through the county board, $15 million from the strapped Janesville city government, and $2 million from Beloit, plus private industry incentives, including from the businesses willing to buy out the tavern in the assembly plant’s parking lot. And that isn’t counting concessions worth $213 million that UAW Local 95 is willing to sacrifice in exchange for retrieving jobs.”)

The point isn’t that government should have offered so much (after all five times the amount left winning bidder Orion, Michigan with much less than that for which she bargained).

The point is that it is hardly credible that Janesville’s private sector was so poorly capitalized that it could only offer 0.5% of what state and local entities offered. (Indeed, at the time of the Rock County 5.0 innaugural announcement, a partial offer of only $400,000, or 0.2%, of hundreds of millions in public offers.)

Goldstein knows as much, that in 2009 Rock County 5.0 isn’t what it’s touted to be:

“It will change the culture within Rock County, long-term,” Mary is quoted as saying….

This is a victory for Mary. And yet, from her perch at M&I Bank, she can’t escape noticing unmistakable signals that some members of her community are having a hard time keeping their lives glued together.”

A hard time, indeed.

Previously: Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4.

Tomorrow: Considering Janesville: An American Story (Part 6 of 14).

Cats

Friday Catblogging: Shop Cats of New York

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If you’ve not yet done so, I’d recommend picking up Tamar Arslanian’s Shop Cats of New York (with Andrew Marttila, photographer). Hilary Hanson’s post Adorable Portraits Explore The Lives Of Big-City Shop Cats describes the book and the felines it features. (The video above is from the Facebook page for the book.)

If there’s ever been a town that could use lots of shop cats, it’s Whitewater.

(In my own case, there’s almost always a feline nearby when I’m writing, often at the very edge of my notebook or keyboard. I’m a member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and one of their banners – the one that I use – sensibly includes a cat in the illustration promoting bloggers’ legal rights.)

Needless to say, I’ve no personal or financial connection to Arslanian; hers is simply a fine book, to read or to give as a gift.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 5.5.17

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Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of sixty-three. Sunrise is 5:42 AM and sunset 8 PM, for 14h 18m 47s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 74.9% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}one hundred seventy-eighth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

It’s Cinco de Mayo, commemorating the Mexican Army’s victory over the French at the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862, under the leadership of General Ignacio Zaragoza. On this day in 19671, Alan Shepard became the first American to travel in space, reaching an altitude of 116 miles.

Recommended for reading in full —

James B. Nelson reports that Former Chicago Bear Jay Cutler could be calling Packers games for Fox Sports: “Peter Schrager, a senior national writer for FoxSports.com, tweeted that Cutler has been hired by the network and “will join Kevin Burkhardt and Charles Davis in the booth this season.” Cutler, 34, was released by the Bears in March after 11 seasons. He has not been signed by another NFL team.”

Lena H. Sun reports that Anti-vaccine activists spark a state’s worst measles outbreak in decades: “MINNEAPOLIS — The young mother started getting advice early on from friends in the close-knit Somali immigrant community here. Don’t let your children get the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella — it causes autism, they said. Suaado Salah listened. And this spring, her 3-year-old boy and 18-month-old girl contracted measles in Minnesota’s largest outbreak of the highly infectious and potentially deadly disease in nearly three decades. Her daughter, who had a rash, high fever and a cough, was hospitalized for four nights and needed intravenous fluids and oxygen. Salah no longer believes that the MMR vaccine triggers autism, a discredited theory that spread rapidly through the local Somali community, fanned by meetings organized by anti-vaccine groups. The advocates repeatedly invited Andrew Wakefield, the founder of the modern anti-vaccine movement, to talk to worried parents.”

Jacey Fortin writes that In Flint, Overdue Bills for Unsafe Water Could Lead to Foreclosures: “Following a water crisis that saw sky-high levels of lead contamination in Flint, Mich., many homes in the city still do not have access to safe tap water. But that doesn’t mean they’re not being charged for it. And if they can’t pay in time, they may lose their homes. The city has mailed 8,002 letters to residents in an effort to collect about $5.8 million in unpaid bills for water and sewer services. If homeowners do not pay by May 19, property liens are transferred to tax bills, which begins a process that can end with residents losing their homes unless they pay their outstanding bills before March 2018.”

Vann Newkirk observes The American Health Care Act’s Prosperity Gospel: “What’s a religious philosophy mostly pioneered by wealthy televangelists and megachurches got to do with pre-existing conditions and Medicaid reform? The beliefs of some evangelicals connecting wealth to God’s favor became intertwined with faith healing, and both rose to new heights in the television era on the backs of men like Oral Roberts. While it became part of the cults of personality around the generation of Pat Robertsons and Peter Popoffs that followed Roberts’s lead, faith healing was also undeniably a policy statement. It at least partially rejected the role of science in public health and encouraged a view that faith, virtue, and good works could be enough to secure healing. And although the furthest extremes of the prosperity gospel often bring to mind church scandals, thousand-dollar suits, and parish helicopters, the basic idea that a healthy life was also a sign of favor fit right in with the gospel’s defense of riches. Health is wealth. The prosperity gospel sold by televangelists fit—and fits—so well in many American homes because it mirrors the established national secular ethos….”

(Whether religious or secular in origin, the prosperity gospel is a distortion of traditional Christian teaching, and is most easily understood as a Christian heresy. (1* As he passed by he saw a man blind from birth.a2* His disciples asked him,b “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”3Jesus answered, “Neither he nor his parents sinned.” Jn 9:1-3a.)

NASA just got its closest look at Saturn yet — here’s what it saw:

Books, Culture, Economy

Considering Janesville: An American Story (Part 4 of 14)

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This is the fourth in a series of posts considering Amy Goldstein’s Janesville: An American Story. In this post, I’ll cover five chapters from Part Two (2009) of Janesville (Rock County 5.0, The Fourth Last Day, Bidding War, Sonic Speed, and What Does a Union Man Do?).

Goldstein describes the formation of Rock County 5.0 in this section of the book, and it’s generally as favorable as a pro-business conservative could hope or a progressive could scornfully dismiss. But there are parts of the discussion to please no one. Banker Mary Willmer hits upon Rock County 5.0 rather than a Janesville-based effort and it’s a revelation to others in the county:

Then, in a moment of unanticipated clarity, Mary glimpses the answer. The only way this campaign could succeed, she tells John [Beckord of Forward Janesville], “is if we get our arms around this whole county. Not Janesville, not Beloit, but the whole county and really make a bold statement.”

Goldstein’s overly subtle here, but it’s clear: Willmer’s clarity is unanticipated, perhaps for her and for anyone else in the area. The banker hits upon a county-based effort that might not have been so unanticipated elsewhere.

Later readers get a fuller explanation of the organization’s name:

By the time she speaks, the barely born, public-private, Janesville-and-Beloit-together campaign that she and Diane are leading has a name: Rock County 5.0. Five key strategies. A five-year plan to heal the economy. She sketches all this out, placing more emphasis on how critical it is than on how difficult it will be.

We’re well past five years now, and from the our time this plan doesn’t seem so revolutionary, but rather more like far too many other five-year plans, albeit with less state coercion…

Mention of Mike Vaughn, a worker at a GM-dependent Lear plant, says something about the relationship between industrial work and college studies:

At forty-one, Mike is a plainspoken man with close-cropped dark hair and an earnest manner. He had applied to General Motors right out of high school but never got the call, so he went to U-Rock for a year. Feeling unfocused, he left for a cook’s job in the Mercy Hospital kitchen. General Motors still wasn’t hiring, so eventually he followed his brother, DJ, into Lear.

It’s not the first time in the book Goldstein’s observed that UW-Rock County is a place where prospective workers who could not immediately find jobs at GM or Lear attended until something came up at one of those plants. It’s a sign that there’s not a clear divide between the two choices, at least not in the Janesville area. For some students there, the plants were the primary choice; college was a secondary one.

In 2009, in closed session (“[t]his is not a fact that the public will know right away”), Rock County offers millions – twenty million – in a bidding war with other cities (Hill, Tennessee, and Orion Township, Michigan) that have plants for which they’re fighting. GM’s condition, however, is terrible:

It is the first time the [county] supervisors have met in the ten days since General Motors disclosed that Janesville is one of three U.S. assembly plants still in the running to manufacture a next-generation subcompact car, which the company is hoping will help reverse its fortunes. GM’s fortunes have just crashed to a once unimaginable low. At 8 a.m. the day before it disclosed that Janesville is a finalist, and despite $19.4 billion in loans that the U.S. Treasury has ended up pumping into the company, General Motors filed for bankruptcy in a Manhattan court.

GM’s past strength, and 2009 weakness, no doubt makes it worse for bidders: they recall what they once had, and GM will take as much as it can get, without the slightest compunction.

Goldstein recounts that the public package to keep GM is vastly more that one county’s contribution:

When U.S. automakers decide where to manufacture new products, they have come to expect that the states and communities they are considering will present enormous dowries in the form of tax breaks and other financial gifts. So, a few days after the Rock County supervisors quadrupled their offering to General Motors, Wisconsin sends off to the company its final economic incentive package to try to land the new small car for Janesville’s assembly plant. The package adds up to $195 million: $115 million in state tax credits and energy-efficiency grants, the $20 million that Marv Wopat pushed through the county board, $15 million from the strapped Janesville city government, and $2 million from Beloit, plus private industry incentives….

There are also huge labor concessions (“[a]nd that isn’t counting concessions worth $213 million that UAW Local 95 is willing to sacrifice in exchange for retrieving jobs”) adding up to the “The biggest incentive package in Wisconsin history.”

On 6.26.2009, GM chooses to build compacts in Orion, Michigan. Astonishingly, Michigan offered (in total) five times as much as Wisconsin. (Auto workers there, for all the incentives, don’t do as well as they’d hoped: “40 percent of the workers were paid $14 an hour. Many parts were shipped from South Korea. The engines came from Mexico. And in another innovation, some parts suppliers began working right inside the Orion plant. Their average wage: $10 an hour”).

Hard to say which party was the biggest winner in the bidding war, but GM would be among anyone’s top picks.

Previously: Parts 1, 2, and 3.

Tomorrow: Considering Janesville: An American Story (Part 5 of 14).

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 5.4.17

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Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of sixty-two. Sunrise is 5:43 AM and sunset 7:59 PM, for 14h 16m 24s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 64.2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}one hundred seventy-seventh day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1864 the Wilderness Campaign opens in Virginia, with the “2nd, 5th, 6th, 7th, 19th, 36th and 38th Wisconsin Infantry regiments and the 4th Wisconsin Light Artillery participated in this series of bloody battles.” On this day in 1873, Wisconsin politician (holding office as governor and later U.S. senator) John James Blaine is born.

Whitewater’s Fire Department has a scheduled business meeting at 5:45 PM, and her Landmarks Commission is scheduled to meet at 6 PM.

Recommended for reading in full —

Jane Chong, Quinta Jurecic, Benjamin Wittes explore Seven Theories of the Case: What Do We Really Know about L’Affaire Russe and What Could it All Mean?: “In this post, we start with an overview of the facts known today, and we then put forth seven different theories of the Russia Connection case that might account for those facts. We present these in ascending order of potential menace, from the most innocent to the most alarming. In doing so, we attempt to narrow the field of discussion—or at least provide a disciplined framework for assessing the possibilities—and give readers guidance as to what to watch for as investigations on both the legislative and executive sides move forward. We’ve confined our overview of the facts to those most directly related to Russia’s interference in the election and the possible links between Trump associates and the Russian government. There are plenty of details we’ve left out—notably statements by Trump associates and the President himself that have had the effect of kicking up dust and confusing the public conversation about L’Affaire Russe….”

Michael J. de la Merced and Nicholas Fandos report on Fox’s Unfamiliar but Powerful Television Rival: Sinclair: “Sinclair, which has little name recognition but beams local television stations into a quarter of American homes, covers plenty of standard local news, including fires, shootings and traffic. But it has also used its 173 television stations to advance a mostly right-leaning agenda since the presidency of George W. Bush. Fox, the media conglomerate controlled by Rupert Murdoch and his sons, has long dominated conservative political discussion with its Fox News cable channel. But Fox News is in disarray after several scandals. In the last weeks alone, Fox News lost its biggest star, Bill O’Reilly, and one of its most senior executives, Bill Shine. With Fox News on the ropes, Sinclair, already the largest owner of local television stations, is looking to expand. Until last week it appeared to be closing in on acquiring Tribune Media, the second-largest owner of such stations. If completed, the deal would expand Sinclair’s footprint from mostly smaller markets to some of the country’s largest cities, including Chicago and New York.”

George Will contends that Trump has a dangerous disability: “It is urgent for Americans to think and speak clearly about President Trump’s inability to do either. This seems to be not a mere disinclination but a disability. It is not merely the result of intellectual sloth but of an untrained mind bereft of information and married to stratospheric self-confidence….As this column has said before, the problem isn’t that he does not know this or that, or that he does not know that he does not know this or that. Rather, the dangerous thing is that he does not know what it is to know something.”

Rick Romell reports that Dollar stores grow as other retailers shrink: “there’s one type of retailer for whom the bell isn’t tolling: Dollar stores – those downscale outlets filled with everything from underwear and laundry detergent to frozen pizza – are thriving. And Wisconsin appears to be targeted for accelerating growth. Dollar General, by far the largest of the three major chains in the sector, recently opened a 1 million-square-foot distribution center in Janesville. The development comes as the company plans 1,000 new stores this year alone, pushing its nationwide count to more than 14,000. That probably will give Dollar General more U.S. locations than McDonald’s. It already has about as many as Starbucks.”

For Star Wars fans, :

Books, Culture, Economy, Janesville, Politics

Considering Janesville: An American Story (Part 3 of 14)

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This is the third in a series of posts considering Amy Goldstein’s Janesville: An American Story. In this post, I’ll write about five chapters of Janesville (Change in August, To the Renaissance Center, Mom, What Are You Going to Do?, When One Door of Happiness Closes, Another Opens, and The Parker Closet).

In chapters 5 through 9, Goldstein gives readers slices of life in Janesville from the summer through fall of 2008 (between when the GM plant’s closure was first announced, but before the last Tahoe rolled off the line in December).

Alyssa and Kayzia Whiteacre are trying to explain why their father is home during the day in August:

All of a sudden, even though they can sleep in a little during these lazy August days, their dad is home for breakfast….whatever is happening, it must be touchy, and if he wanted them to know, he’d have told them. So they take turns asking their mom little questions. “We’re trying to figure this out” is the kind of answer she gives. Not much help. So it is from the news and from a couple of friends that they piece together that their dad must have had a bad enough anniversary date that he’s part of the GM shift that’s already been laid off. What they deduce is correct. He was hired on May 29, 1995, handed a referral by his father. Both their dad and mom grew up in the security of GM wages, in the same way that Alyssa and Kayzia and their brother, until this summer, have been doing.”

Meanwhile, a combination of Democrats and Republicans try to keep the plant open:

In this conference room, each team member presents, in a tidy mosaic, the case they have rehearsed for why GM should continue production in Janesville. Paul [Ryan] knows [GM executive Troy] Clarke well, speaks to him on a weekly basis. Paul’s mosaic piece is a reminder to Clarke that he has fought on Capitol Hill for General Motors’ concerns about its pension costs. Tim[ Cullen]’s pitch is the compelling fact that, at Janesville, the cost of producing each vehicle is lower than at a plant making the same SUVs in Arlington, Texas—a newer plant that no one is talking about closing. Finally, the governor sums up the case: Wisconsin stands committed to preserving its relationship with General Motors. And, to fortify the seriousness of that commitment, the state and Rock County and Janesville and the local business community are honing a large package of economic incentives to induce GM to stay. General Motors is, everyone in the room knows, planning an inexpensive subcompact car model as a corporate coping mechanism in this awful recession. Wisconsin will, the governor [Jim Doyle] says, make it worthwhile for the company to trust its oldest assembly plant to manufacture its newest little car.

Most telling in this part of the book (with a chapter on a local banker and another on a community clothes & supply closet), however, is Goldstein’s account of Bob Borremans, who runs the local job center. Goldstein explains Bob’s work, in the face of thousands of impending layoffs, as he creates a resource guide:

Having long prided himself on staring down problems, though, Bob is pleased with a move he already has made: creating a guide to all the resources in town that can help people who have been thrown out of work, or who will be soon. He felt a take-charge satisfaction as he and some of the Job Center’s staff started contacting the leaders of organizations across Rock County to ask permission to include them in the new guide. Organizations that dispense help with job training, consumer credit, housing, health care, literacy, food, bouts of depression, bouts of addiction, bouts of domestic violence—two hundred far-flung, help-offering organizations in all.

Goldstein describes how Bob adds his own special touch, too:

So on page A8 of the guide was a box with the heading, “What to Do After a Layoff.” The box had fourteen bullet points, the first of which contained a crucial antidote to lost-job paralysis. “Don’t Feel Ashamed,” the heading of this first bullet point said. “Being laid off is not your fault.”

And scattered through the guide were words from Americans renowned for the challenges they confronted….from Helen Keller: “When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.”

Bob may be well-meaning, but Goldstein applies her blade at the end of chapter 8:

Bob believes, catastrophe might prove to be unbidden opportunity to help people find the work paths that would have suited them all along. Sure, people will need to retrain for this new work, but that’s his specialty, and he can help them go back to school while waiting for jobs to emerge on the far side of this recession.

If only it were so easy…

Previously: Parts 1 and 2.

Tomorrow: Considering Janesville: An American Story (Part 4 of 14).

Development, Environment, Local Government, WGTB, WHEN GREEN TURNS BROWN

Waste Hauling Into Whitewater

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WGTB logo PNG 112x89 Post 75 in a series. When Green Turns Brown is an examination of a small town’s digester-energy project, in which Whitewater, Wisconsin would import other cities’ waste, claiming that the result would be both profitable and green.

A few years (and seventy-five posts) ago, I began consideration of a local proposal to haul waste into Whitewater. Those posts became a series, with background work and discussions with people from across Wisconsin.

Last night, Whitewater announced publicly the results of a study on whether a supposed initial waste hauling plan might be feasible, using the Baker Tilly firm. The municipal government commissioned the study in March 2016, and the firm returned an opinion to the city in October 2016 that it would be infeasible.

I used the months since last year’s commissioning to read yet more, speak with others outside the city, and simply wait for the next local development. It seemed prudent to use the time patiently and productively.

The single most important result for our city is that this plan to haul waste into Whitewater will not go forward. That’s the right outcome for this community, and today this city is better off for the decision of her common council, and announcement of her city manager, to end the project.

Locally, I’ve sometimes been asked what I think of this city staff’s support for the project. It’s fair to say that there is a fundamental disagreement on the science of the project. Now or ten years from now, the case against waste hauling into Whitewater will rest on sound fiscal, economic, and environmental bases. Should a proposal arise again, as one heard predicted last night, one may be assured that the case against will be as strong, and fought even more vigorously.

I’ll not take the course of the wastewater superintendent and extend the local discussion gracelessly even at its conclusion; pride is a poor foundation for policy.

Each day one meets the world anew.

Many thanks to so many in town who were encouraging. We’ve a lovely town.

To those from across Wisconsin with whom I have productively corresponded & met, and from whom I have received analyses, studies, and sound insight: I am indebted to you. There are visits eagerly to be made, with correspondence and calls until we see each other again. There’s so much good work that you can and will carry out. You’ve your own efforts ongoing in your communities, and of course you’ve an ally here in all that you do.

It’s mild in Whitewater today: a good day, I think, for residents in this small and beautiful city.

City, Local Government

Term Limits, Briefly Considered

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There was a discussion last night at the Whitewater Common Council about term limits (if any) for appointees to city boards and commissions. The discussion followed a briefer one on 4.18.17.

I mentioned yesterday that this would be an interesting agenda topic, and it was. It’s worth noting that although I thought there should have been advance notice in the press about it, I don’t have a single strong opinion on this matter. Instead, for me it’s ambivalence: not indifference, to be sure, but rather conflicting sentiments. (Yesterday’s post described the topic as historical: “reflections not of where Whitewater’s going, as much as where she has been (and where she is)”).

The matter has been referred to a community involvement committee within the council, and they’ll consider options. One can write at greater length when there’s a proposal to consider.

Two quick points for now:

1. Remarks about the city needing to do more for those who have volunteered strikes me as right. Term limits or not, most committees have a useful role but not a particularly ideological one: volunteering should be rewarded. Whitewater, on her own, can easily come up with ideas for acknowledging committee and board members, including ones who currently receive less recognition.

2. It’s true that expertise matters. It may not matter everywhere equally, but it does matter. The trick here – one that could not be solved in brief remarks – is how to assess and select based on a broad understanding of expertise. It comes in more than one form, and extends beyond formal academic credentials to experiences in past or present work. Too much emphasis on formal work will be counter-productive.

Any discussion of expertise, of whatever kind, has to be done in an understated way to avoid creating unnecessary offense.

(It’s worth noting that in the ten years I’ve been publishing FREE WHITEWATER, I’ve not once held myself out as an expert, touted particular academic credentials or accomplishments, or professional work. There’s no fixed route to expertise; it’s for that reason that tribunals have discretion in certifying experts.)

It seems to me a general truth that in all communities one finds many sharp and capable people. Indeed, I am convinced that most people are sharp indeed, and that society could not function half so well if it were otherwise. One many need instruction of various yet particular kinds, but of natural ability one sees abundance all around, of any race, ethnicity, or gender. 

This means that to give reasonable form to an acknowledgement of expertise will take some review. Unlike what should be the overdue but easy fix of acknowledging existing committee members (internally done), a plan for evaluating expertise should look to what other communities have done successfully (an external review).

Critically, any plan this city might adopt regarding expertise, tenure, term limits, etc., must be neutral concerning gender, race, or ethnicity. No one would intentionally wish otherwise, but it’s necessary to avoid inadvertent yet nonetheless impermissible barriers to participation on those bases.

Whitewater is sure to have more discussion on the topic. Our community is more than capable of crafting a solid approach.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 5.3.17

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Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of sixty-two. Sunrise is 5:44 AM and sunset 7:58 PM, for 14h 13m 59s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 54.8% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}one hundred seventy-sixth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1936, Joe DiMaggio makes his major league debut with the Yankees, batting ahead of Lou Gehrig. On this day in 1898, Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, whose family settled in Milwaukee, and where she graduated from Milwaukee Normal School (now University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) is born.

Recommended for reading in full —

Charles F. Gardner describes the Bucks season in review: Reason for optimism: “Despair could have taken over a team that had lost 12 of its last 14 games and appeared headed for another draft lottery appearance. Instead, the Bucks finished the season with a 20-10 record in their last 30 games and reached the playoffs as the sixth-seeded team in the Eastern Conference. It was a remarkable turnaround that the Bucks hope they can carry into next season and beyond. How did they do it? Coach Jason Kidd got major contributions from rookies Thon Maker and Malcolm Brogdon, starting both of them in the final month of the season and in the playoffs.”


Drew Harwell and Matea Gold report that While in White House, Trumps remained selling points for ‘very special’ Philippines project: “Investors looking to buy a condo at Trump Tower in the Philippines would have found, until this week, some high-powered video testimonials on the project’s official website. There was Donald Trump, in a message filmed several years before he was elected president of the United States, declaring that the skyscraper bearing his name near the Philippine capital would be “something very, very special, like nobody’s seen before.” Then there was his daughter Ivanka Trump, now a senior White House adviser, lavishing praise on the project as a “milestone in Philippine real estate history.”

Jugal Patel and Henry Fountain report on an astonishing (but disturbing in fundamental ways) possibility, that As Arctic Ice Vanishes, New Shipping Routes Open: “As global warming melts sea ice across the Arctic, shipping routes once thought impossible — including directly over the North Pole — may open up by midcentury. But high costs may keep the new routes from being used right away. The amount of sea ice covering the Arctic Ocean has declined sharply each decade since the 1980s, according to measurements taken each September when the ice is at its minimum. Older, thicker ice is disappearing as well. Scientists say global warming is largely responsible for the changes. Parts of the Arctic are warming twice as fast as elsewhere.”

Conservative Jennifer Rubin asks How did Ryan’s Faustian bargain with Trump work out?: “How did things work out for Ryan? He has signed onto a spending bill that Clinton would have liked (Planned Parenthood funding, no wall, domestic spending restored, a little bit — but not enough — defense spending). He has not gotten health-care reform. His chances of obtaining tax reform are slim. Other than a Supreme Court justice and some deregulation, virtually nothing on Ryan’s agenda — one Trump was supposed to share — seems likely to come about. By ignoring fundamental questions of competency and character, Ryan vouched for a man who echoed Russian agitprop and encouraged Russian cyber-mischief during the campaign and who continues to deny the existence of mounds of evidence proving Russian efforts to meddle with our election. Ryan enabled an administration that has a bevy of ties to Russian officials, originally hired as national security adviser a man acting as an agent for foreign governments and still employs an aide (Sebastian Gorka) with ties to Hungarian fascists. Surely Clinton, for all her faults, wouldn’t have done all that.”

How is Whiskey Made? Here’s how:

Books, Culture, Economy, Janesville

Considering Janesville: An American Story (Part 2 of 14)

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This is the second in a series of posts considering Amy Goldstein’s Janesville: An American Story. In this post, I’ll write about the prologue and the first four chapters of Janesville (Prologue, A Ringing Phone, The Carp Swimming on Main Street, Craig, and A Retirement Party).

Janesville, Wisconsin’s manufacturing story reaches back far before General Motors produced its last SUV at the local plant on 12.23.2008 (a Tahoe “LTZ, fully loaded with heated seats, aluminum wheels, a nine-speaker Bose audio system, and a sticker price of $57,745 if it were going to be for sale in this economy in which almost no one anymore wants to buy a fancy General Motors SUV”). Still, it’s the plant’s closure – and really what that closure has meant to Janesville – that surely drew Goldstein. If GM had reopened the plant (or closed it only briefly), then there’d be little here that drew the attention of a national reporter. Janesville is, in this way, a story of loss and attempted recovery.

Goldstein’s Prologue presents Janesville’s two manufacturing titans:

The first was a young telegraphy instructor in town named George S. Parker. In the 1880s, he patented a better fountain pen and formed the Parker Pen Company. Soon, Parker Pen expanded into international markets. Its pens showed up at world leaders’ treaty signings, at World’s Fairs. Parker Pen imbued the city with an outsized reputation and reach. It put Janesville on the map.

The second was another savvy businessman, Joseph A. Craig, who made General Motors pay attention to Janesville’s talent. Near the close of World War I, he maneuvered to bring GM to town, at first to make tractors. Over the years, the assembly plant grew to 4.8 million square feet, the playing area of ten football fields. It had more than seven thousand workers in its heyday and led to thousands of jobs at nearby companies that supplied parts.

Her early chapters describe – in a seemingly supportive way – three contemporary residents as they learn about the plant’s closing. The first is Paul Ryan (in A Ringing Phone), and although Goldstein describes Ryan without express criticism, here description conveys that he didn’t see the closing coming, despite his prominent role (even then, although more so now, of course):

[Ryan] has made a point of nurturing relationships with the company’s top brass. When Rick [Wagoner, GM Chairman & CEO] is in D.C., Paul meets him for breakfast. Nearly every week, he talks with Troy Clarke, president of GM North America. So he certainly is not oblivious to the facts that GM has been faltering since before the recession, gasoline prices just past $4 a gallon are on the brink of an all-time high, and the Janesville Assembly Plant is churning out full-size, gas-guzzling SUVs whose popularity has fallen off a cliff.

Paul is aware of these facts, and yet, lately, as General Motors’ fortunes have been falling and falling, his private conversations with Rick and the rest of the brass have yielded no whiff of concern that the assembly plant’s future is in peril.

So it is hard for him to absorb what Rick is telling him: Tomorrow, General Motors will announce that it is stopping production in Janesville.

For an instant, Paul is stunned.

Subtle, but damning nonetheless: on this reading, despite breakfasts and repeated phone calls with executives, Ryan gleaned nothing about the plant’s closure.

Chapter 2, The Carp Swimming on Main Street, begins with an account of Bob Borremans, and Goldstein describes him in a way that offers a clue to what she thinks of some job-training programs:

Bob has been the Job Center’s director for five years. For almost a quarter century before, he was an administrator at Blackhawk Technical College, the two-year school that provides most of the job training in town. As a young man, he had been a mild, back-of-the-room kind of guy until the president of the college noticed in him a spark of creativity, promoted him to be a vice president, and helped him find his voice, which over the years grew more and more outspoken. Sometimes even now, months past sixty, his trim beard gone white, Bob thinks that people who knew him when he was young wouldn’t recognize the person he has become.

Call it arrogance, call it what you want, Bob sees himself as a fix-it guy—the adult in the room, the one with a doctorate who can take on a project and do it better than anyone else.

One could call it arrogance, and it’s Goldstein who’s doing the calling. (I’d not disagree with her on the point.) It’s a clue she’s left us, about where she might be going…

Chapter 3 looks back to Joseph Albert Craig’s success in persuading GM to build a plant in Janesville, how that plant switched from tractors to automobiles, and other ways in which Janesville kept auto production going. (Creative labor-management relations in the 30s prevented violence that beset other GM plant during the 1936–37 General Motors Sit-Down Strike.)

Chapter 4, A Retirement Party, describes the impending retirement of longtime GM worker Marv Wopat around the time that GM announces the closing:

The morning of the closing announcement, Marv awoke to a call from a friend making sure that he’d heard. As soon as he hung up, Marv phoned his GM’er kids, his son, Matt, and his daughter, Janice, right away. He did not want them to find out from anyone else. He was the one, after all, who had taught them while they were growing up that the assembly plant was the best place for a steady job with good pay. And even though the situation was scary now, no doubt, Marv began in those very first calls to his kids to impart his conviction. Just because the company says it is closing Janesville, no reason to think that the plant won’t end up getting a new product instead. Even if the plant shuts down for a while, he figured, it will reopen. It always has.

Now, under the Schilberg pavilion, Marv wants to believe that everything will work out okay.

So he does not say out loud a thought burning inside him: Matt and Janice may not have the opportunity to work at the plant long enough to retire.

One can be cold about many things, and yet find these words genuinely moving, conveying as they do Wopat’s natural concern in the face of powerful, uncertain forces.

A few words about Goldstein’s second chapter, The Carp Swimming on Main Street. That chapter draws its title from flooding in southern Wisconsin around the time the GM plant closing was announced:

By Wednesday, June 11 [2008], eight days after GM has unleashed the impending economic disaster, the National Weather Service predicts a natural disaster by the weekend: the worst flooding of the Rock River since the government began keeping track. Volunteers and jail inmates fill more than 260,000 sandbags. The sheriff calls in the Wisconsin National Guard. More than seven inches fall in Wisconsin and Iowa onto land still soaked from a harsh, snowy winter….

It exceeds a hundred-year flood. The county estimates the damage at $42 million….

The Rock River rushes so hard and so high that it washes fish off course. Carp are now swimming on Main Street. Near the street’s northern end, in the flooded parking lot of the United Way of North Rock County, the carp find a favorite new spawning ground. Hearing about the misdirected fish, people in town regard it as a spectacle, not a disaster. On the first dry land above the flooded street, despite the damage all around, people of Janesville—and some tourists, too— gather for days, snapping photos and laughing and cheering as the hundreds of yellow carp swim by.

There’s a Whitewater connection to all this, beyond GM. The City of Whitewater (and partner public entities) received a grant in 2009, totalling $4.7 million dollars, due to the loss of automotive jobs and the 2008 flooding:

September 7-September 11, 2009

….$4,740,809 to the Whitewater Community Development Authority, the University of Wisconsin Whitewater, and the City of Whitewater, Wisconsin, to fund construction of the new Innovation Center and infrastructure to serve the technology industrial park, including a road linking the project with the University of Wisconsin’s Whitewater campus. The goal of the project is to create jobs to replace those lost in the floods of 2008 and those lost from recent automotive plant closures. The Innovation Center will serve as both a training center and technology business incubator and will be constructed to meet Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) green building certification standards. A portion of the project’s cost will be funded through EDA’s Global Climate Change Mitigation Incentive Fund. This investment is part of an $11,051,728 project which grantees estimate will help create 1,000 jobs and generate $60 million in private investment.

See, Whitewater’s Innovation Center: Grants and Bonds.

What I wrote then (“Every part of this description of the grant’s goals is astonishingly inapplicable to the use and value (such as it is) of the Innovation Center that Whitewater is actually building”) is more true today, as nothing of benefit to afflicted workers has or ever will come from the building. It’s nowhere close to meeting its estimate.

When Janesville’s residents absorbed the loss of their factory, while watching those carp swim by, there cannot have be one rational person among them (or anywhere) who would have foolishly thought that Whitewater’s eventual use of those millions would produce a result near the estimated value.

Goldstein remembers Janesville’s past; it’s the least that I can do to remember Whitewater’s.

Previously: Part 1.

Tomorrow: Considering Janesville: An American Story (Part 3 of 14). more >>