Progress

Check out the pretty highway tractors at the website Cabover Kings. I'd link you to it but I've had my linking privileges lifted by Google algorithms.

There's diesel trucks there that used to haul freight of all kinds from coast to coast. Coast to coast means through the Rocky Mountains, through the Appalachians, and everywhere in between.

Here's what's fucky, to my way of thinking.

Pretty much any truck you see there has less horsepower and less torque than you'll find in a typical V-8 pickup truck at your local Ford, GM, or Dodge dealer.

Around here, that power is generally used to get one guy or gal to their job.

Fifty years ago, that power got 20 tons of freight through a mountain pass in the Rockies.

That's progress for you!

Canadian Trumphobia not as bad as originally feared

Here's a story from CBC that says Canadians are making more trips to the USA since the election of you-know-who. That figures. Canadians tend to be a smug and hypocritical lot. They may despise that vile man in the Oval Office, but Girl Guides aside, they're still gonna cross the 49th if they can save ten bucks on a tank of gas.

On a related note, here's a point of view on the Muslim ban that hadn't occurred to me. Seems that within hours of its implementation the high-traffic freight crossings from Ontario into Michigan and New York State were getting seriously bunged up.

Here's why; back in the day, when the Teamsters were a serious outfit and the vast majority of drivers were members, driving truck was a respectable career. If you were a Teamsters driver in the middle sixties you were solidly "middle class" income wise.

There weren't a lot of guys named Mohamed in the Teamsters at the time.

Thanks to fifty years of deregulation and union-busting, truck-driving has become a shit job, and you know who takes those. As has always been the case, the recent immigrants end up in the shit jobs. When the Irish were recent immigrants, they got the shit jobs. Same with the Italians, the Ukrainians, the Poles... everybody started out at the bottom of the ladder.

When my dear Daddy got off the boat in 1956, his first job was shovelling coal at Kloepfer Coal in Guelph -  with a hand shovel, not a power shovel.

Guess who you're likely to find behind the wheel of the typical big rig today? That's right - a recent immigrant, and a lot of those guys have Muslim names.

So Mohamed pulls up to US Customs with a 52 foot trailer loaded with a million dollars in auto parts from Linamar or Magna. Customs guy notices driver was born in Somalia.

"Ya'll park that rig in the lot over there and come in for a chat, Mohamed."

Well guess what? If the driver isn't crossing that bridge, the truck ain't either!

That million dollars in auto parts is heading for a Ford or GM or Toyota or Mercedes plant somewhere. Thanks to the magic of JIT and all that stuff, those car plants cripple up pretty quick.

Team Trump may take their sweet time returning calls from lawyers for the ACLU, but they pay attention right smartly when lawyers from GM and Ford are on the line. By the end of day one dozens of those trucks were parked and Team Trump knew they had a serious problem.

Judge James Robart's overturn of Trump's travel ban was actually a huge face-saver for Team Trump. Anything else you're reading is just spin and optics.

MSM crybaby wants to credit Bush and Obama for Ford jobs in Michigan

Daniel Gross has a lament on view at Slate decrying the possibility that President-elect Trump might possibly have something to do with Ford Motor Company's decision to scrap their plan to "migrate" all small car production to Mexico.

According to Gross, this is the result of market forces that have been at work for many years. His so-called argument in support of this thesis makes no sense whatsoever. American companies have always moved production to low-labour-cost jurisdictions for one and only one reason; low labour costs! That's not rocket science, Mr. Gross!

And also, can Slate not afford to pay somebody to proof-read this stuff before it hits the web? I'm pretty sure even a blinkered self-censoring mainstream writer like Gross knows that it's not "...Ford... pushing production of the Chevy Cruze to Mexico..." That embarrassing!

But the major flaw in his thesis is this; the alleged market forces that have been at work for years would have been manifestly evident last September when Ford announced the move to Mexico.

If that's true, why did the management brain trust at Ford not notice until after Trump won the election?

Ford Motor Company to "migrate" all small vehicle production to Mexico

Hard to believe that Ford's CEO would actually deploy the word "migrate" to describe his company's on-going commitment to the destruction of manufacturing in America.

Yup, Ford factories don't move because ruthless greedbags make cut-throat decisions to further plump up their already record profits. No, it's much more organic than that... they migrate, like a migrating caribou herd, or migrant workers or something.

Mr. Fields is gonna have to have a serious chat with Mr. Trump about that wall Trump wants to build. It's gonna prevent Mexican migrants from heading back to Mexico to take all those jobs Ford is shipping out of the USA.

And what a timely story to rebut all those revisionists who claim that American manufacturing jobs are being destroyed by automation, not by "free trade" agreements. If, per Barry Lando and many others, it was really automation and robotics that was killing American jobs, Ford would have been more than happy to build a new automated plant in... Detroit?

But no. CEO Fields is migrating Ford production to Mexico. Lando et al want us to believe that's got nothing to do with Mexico's exponentially lower manufacturing wages and everything to do with robotics.

Bullshit!