How to work 82 hours a week for less than minimum wage

Become an "independent owner-operator!"

That's right folks. You too can steer that big rig from coast to coast and hardly even get paid for doing it!

Let's visit with Richard Allen, who is featured in this WSJ article about new trucking regulations that will limit drivers to a 70 hour workweek.

Richard and his wife are owner-operators. They seem like law-abiding folks, so let's assume they only work the legal max of 82 hours per week. For that they each take home $25,000 per year.

That's under six bucks an hour!

That's what over-the-road Teamster's guys were making fifty years ago - without adjusting for inflation!

Anyway, that was then, this is now.

Modern America isn't about unions.

America today is about independent businessmen like Richard Allen.

Who killed Jimmy Hoffa?

It's always been assumed that Jimmy Hoffa was dispatched to his reward by Mafia elements concerned that he might regain the presidency of the Union and cut off their access to the pension funds, which by that time was seen as a mobster piggy-bank by some.

I've got another theory. No proof, but a damn compelling theory.

What if the the government itself was behind Hoffa's murder?

Everybody knows that Hoffa was one of a handful of union leaders who brought America's working class out of the dark ages and remade it as the American Middle Class.

The establishment positively hated him for it. Robert Kennedy made a life-long vendetta out of persecuting Jimmy Hoffa. And even though Hoffa managed to outlast Kennedy, the demise of Bobby didn't spell the end of the get-Hoffa campaign by any stretch of the imagination.

With Hoffa out of the way, look what's happened to American workers. Look what's happened to the Teamsters.

The Teamsters today are still negotiating eleven dollar an hour wages for their membership, just like they did forty years ago. Problem is, forty years have gone by.

You can't buy a decent roof for 20 thou anymore, or a decent ride for three thousand bucks. A gallon of gas is four bucks instead of twenty cents.

But Teamsters still drive down the highway for eleven bucks an hour!

Jimmy must be spinning in his grave.

Pot-addled blogger predicted fate of Twinky snacks

Hey, I just care about Twinkys!

But eleven months ago I pretty much predicted today's story about the fate of Hostess Brands. CNN reports that everything that Falling Downs claimed would happen has come true. Read the story.

With the connivance of the bankruptcy courts and the Teamsters Union, they have slashed wages, rolled back pensions, and cut the health care contributions.

What the CNN story does not report is that this entire bankruptcy was engineered by the hedge-fund "entrepreneurs" who control the company.

Just an oversight, I'm sure...

How to avoid saying sh*t when you're choking on it

I'm spending the afternoon going back and forth between the Nationwide race at Daytona and the news channels. My idea of a perfect day.

I like this Ali Velshi character who hosts a program on CNN called "my money" or "your money" or whatever. Turns out he's from Obama's tribe in Kenya, which took me by surprise because I thought I was googling a fat white guy. That new flat screen really does distort stuff sometimes.

Anyway, while Danica is slipping back in the field Ali's got David Frum on and they're having a chit-chat about the supposedly explosive new book by Charles Murray, Coming Apart.

Murray likes to make waves by writing books wherein he proposes ludicrous explanations for self-evident phenomena. Coming Apart focuses on the relative decline of America's working class since 1960. Oddly enough I've pegged the high-water mark for America's working class to the Teamsters Master Freight Agreement of that era. If Murray read this blog he wouldn't have had to write this book.

Frum apparently has a few bones to pick with Murray about his analysis of the decline of America's working class. He makes the point that there's really nothing new in Murray's book. He's right on that one.

Frum also makes the interesting point that there needs to be an analysis of why the lot of the working class improved so much from 1910 to 1960, and has been in a slow fade ever since.

Not once was the word "union" mentioned in the chat with Frum.

Exit Frum and here comes Ali's next guest, demographer-sociologist-all-round-smarty-pants Richard Florida.

Wouldn't you know it, but Velshi then has the exact conversation with Florida he just had with Frum, except he doesn't seem to realize it.

The conversation turns to how our society could turn tens of millions of shit jobs into good jobs. They dance around the problem for a few minutes. After exploring re-education and life-long learning and all the usual claptrap about the brave new world and the knowledge economy, they hit a dead end of sorts.

While any given individual can be educated for a high-skill well paying job, it just means somebody else is doing the shit job; the minimum wage stuff in nursing homes and restaurants and so on. How do we turn those into "good" jobs?

To my shock, Florida finally uttered the word "union". I was aghast!

The mainstream media is on the cusp of discovering something that's been painfully obvious for at least a hundred years;

UNIONS IMPROVE THE LIVES OF WORKING PEOPLE!