Now that Jon Corzine is still not in jail maybe you want to look at this again...

The View From Falling Downs

MONDAY, OCTOBER 31, 2011

The Rumpelstiltskin economy; spinning straw into gold till it doesn't work anymore

Jon Corzine has certainly had an illustrious career. CEO of Goldman Sachs in the nineties. Senator and then Governor of the Garden State till Chris Christie turfed him. Never quite made it onto the Forbes billionaire list but came close.

After Christie put the boots to him he ended up as the top dog at MF Global, one of those Rumpelstiltskin creations that don't actually do anything useful but manage to put their ownership group into 100 foot yachts and 6000 square foot upper east side apartments. MF Global declared bankruptcy today. The times they are a-changing.

But maybe not. Back in the '20's there was a Guelph boy who made it big in the major money centers of America, first Chicago, then Wall Street. His name was Arthur Cutten. The Cutten Club in Guelph bears his name to this day. Had that Rumpelstiltskin magic working for him. Made the cover of Time magazine in 1928. The local mythology has him making hundreds of millions while his competitors were doing their death dives from the towers of Wall street.

Had it all. The yachts. The fancy apartments. All because he had a knack for spinning money out of nothing.

Spent the rest of his life being hounded by the federal government. Died in the late thirties while under indictment for income tax evasion and other oversights. He's buried in the same cemetery in Guelph as my grandmother and my great grandmother. Just as dead as they are.

So there's really nothing new about all this derivatives and options and futures stuff. The Rumpelstiltskin economy. Real wealth comes from making stuff that works and doing useful things for other people. It will never come from being a more clever or crooked paper shuffler than the next guy.

That's been our downfall. We've been worshiping the crooked paper shufflers for far too long.

You can't bullshit welding

Made good time getting up here.

Eleven hundred and some clicks in twelve hours. That included an hour for lunch at a lovely spot overlooking the north channel in Thessalon, and an unscheduled stop shortly thereafter while a semi-literate cop took forever to write me a speeding ticket.

I used to think that would be a great job, cop. I even applied once, the City of Guelph Police Department. On the application there was a question, "have you ever been arrested?" and then they left a two-line space. I wasn't sure the best way to handle this, so in the space I wrote "see over."

Not that I was ever much of a criminal, but there was a fair bit of your normal late adolescent alcohol-inspired assholery.

I remember the first time I stood in front of  Hangin' Hank, infamous local judge and bon vivant down at the country club.

I learned a lesson that day that Conrad Black still hasn't figured out; while you might well be the smartest guy in the room, when you're standing in front of a judge isn't the time to let the room know it.

Subsequent visits to Hangin' Hanks workplace went a lot smoother, and I think eventually, as my adolescence dragged on, we grew to have a grudging mutual respect. It wasn't till years later, when I got to know one of the bartenders at the country club, that I learned Hangin' Hank was also known in some circles as Hammered Hank, and was on most work days as shit-faced sitting there on the bench as I was when I did the stupid stuff that led to my visits there.

So the cop thing didn't work out and I was forced, more or less by default, to continue my welding career. Welding is where you take something called an electrode, made of an exotic blend of alloys than I can neither spell nor pronounce, fry it up with a few hundred amps of electricity, and in the process join other metal things together.

What also happens in the process is that giant clouds of toxic smoke are created, which were then inhaled by everyone in the shop for the rest of the eight or ten or twelve hour shift. It was the norm in a place like the General Electric plant for the toxic fog to be so thick you couldn't see from one end of the shop to the other.

In the midst of that fog you'd see guys welding away, a little cigar-hole cut in the front of their welding helmets, cheerfully puffing away on a stogie. The health and safety do-gooders eventually put an end to smoking on the job, but they haven't figured out how to make non-toxic welding rods yet.

The best welding jobs, to my mind, were always the ones that involved the least welding. Back in the early eighties I was doing maintenance welding in sawmills on Vancouver Island. Most of the mills are closed now, but it was a great gig at the time.

You'd usually have hours of planning, fitting, re-fitting, head-scratching and general dinking around before you finally got to a five minute weld. And unlike a lot of jobs; judging, teaching, politicking, writing, stock market analysis, to name a few; you can't bullshit welding.

Which is not to say you can't do the job while half in the bag. Apparently there were times when Hammered Hank had to be carried from the bench to the judges chambers after the courtroom was cleared.

There was a guy I worked with at the drydock in Saint John who coulda give old Hank a run for his money. We worked the afternoon shift together, and Buddy would already have a good glow on when he turned up.

The first half of any shift at the shipyard was always a bit of a lost cause. We were working on the Canadian Patrol Frigate program and everything was top secret, which meant the guys on the day shift had to turn in all the blueprints before the end of their shift, and then the afternoon shift foremen had to go around handing them out again. That could often take till lunchtime, so a bit of a glow when you arrived at work was neither here nor there.

One of the perks of the shipyard was the Royal Canadian Legion located in the parking lot. How that came to be there is a long story.

Over the years, as the Irving family bought and then relentlessly expanded the yards, they picked up all the properties around. The Legion refused to sell. Eventually you had this huge parking lot with the Legion right there smack dab in the middle. Needless to say this was the spot to go for lunch. We'd all be honorary Legionnaires for half an hour and most guys would have two, maybe three beers.

Not Buddy. Three triples and three beer chasers for lunch. Every  day.

Now for me, that's not the time I want to be welding anything that matters. With Buddy it wasn't like that. His eye got keener, his hand steadier. He was famous for it. If there was a tough job anywhere in the yard they'd radio over to our section, and Buddy, well past three sheets as far as I was concerned, would be dispatched to get it done. Best welder I ever knew.

You can't bullshit welding.

And now, apparently, you can't find welders. Welders in Alberta typically make anywhere from $25 to $50 an hour. There's lots of guys, and some women too, around Fort McMurray making well over a hundred grand a year. And the job isn't nearly as dirty as it used to be.

So what are we doing to retrain our dispossessed mill-workers to take those jobs? Right next to nothing, that's what.

Instead, what the employers in Alberta are doing is lobbying the government to bring in foreign workers by the tens of thousands.

Now that's bullshit.

The bar tender told me that when Hammered Hank was ready to drive home after an eight hour shift at the country club, he'd call the cops. Two cruisers would show up. One would lead the way and one would follow behind as Hank drove home.

Never had an accident.