Cannibal salami

There was a joke going around Guelph back in the day. I don't want to get into the particulars, but it suggested a link between Jimmy Hoffa's disappearance and the fact that there were several thriving salami makers in town at the time. By today's standards it would be considered, among other things, an egregious  ethnic slur.

I'd mentioned the joke to the Farm Manager recently, because we'd watched the latest Hoffa movie, which was very good. That plot has a lot more plausibility than the salami story. But somehow we got into a discussion about cannibalism and stereotypes.

I took the view that one reason the salami story has no cred is because everybody knows Italians are too European to indulge in such barbarity. The only place you'd ever find such a thing is among some African tribes, I ventured.

The FM called me on that stereotype, as she should, but it got us interested enough to mount a google search. What an eye-opener! Yup, they indeed had cannibalism in the heart of Africa, but damn near everywhere else at one time or another, including the heart of Europe!

Obviously, the taboo against cannibalism is a social construct, and like all social constructs, is by definition a tool of the oppressor. 

As we await the Great Reset, that rapture wherein Klaus and the Billionaires free us from capitalism, let's hope we are also set free from this archaic taboo.

We demand freedom!

WE DEMAND CANNIBAL SALAMI!!!

The Irishman

Right off the top, let me say that it's more than a little presumptuous to put out a three and a half hour movie. Really?

We were lucky to be watching on Netflix in the comfort of our home. I can't even imagine sitting in the multiplex, where you can't push "pause" for the multiple bathroom breaks you're gonna have in the course of the afternoon.

While it was certainly very well done, I think Scorsese et al are having their "OK Boomer" moment.

Pacino's Hoffa was, overall, on the sympathetic side. I've always been something of a Hoffa fan, so it was nice that in the end he was portrayed as trying to pry the tentacles of organized crime off "his" union.

People tend to forget that by the late fifties and throughout the sixties and seventies, truck drivers in the Teamsters pretty much set the benchmark for what working class pay and benefits could be.

Hoffa's biggest mistake, in my estimation, was in refusing to organize the independent owner-operators. That was a decision based on principle. Hoffa's position was that it wasn't the role of a labour union to negotiate a return on capital.

Sounds straight-forward enough. After all, owner-operators were "independent businessmen." But those independent businessmen cut the floor out from under the union jobs, and the rest is history.

Today, generally speaking, trucking is rightfully considered a shit job. Long hours, low pay, few if any benefits.

But back to the film. Robert De Niro did a masterful job not only playing the ageing Frank Sheeran, but standing in for all the other boomers doing their swan song here, including Scorsese himself. Scorsese got a little attention recently with an op-ed in the New York Times arguing that the 90-minutes-or-less adrenaline-drenched crap coming out of Hollywood these days isn't "cinema."


This is definitely cinema.

Gorsuch, Janus, Judas, and Jimmy Hoffa

My lefty friends tend to question our friendship when they hear me opine on Hoffa being the last great labour leader in American labour movement history.

What? He was mobbed-up out the ying yang! He was a thug! He was a crook!

Well, even if that's all true, so what? In his era, he was up against mobbed-up politicians, mobbed-up employers, private thug armies in the pay of the above, and a system that was designed from its inception to represent capital rather than labour.

He met that system on its own terms; with violence on the picket line. More often than not in the Hoffa era, the Teamsters prevailed. That's why being a Teamster meant living the American dream back in the fifties and sixties.

That's why Hoffa had to go.


Almost 45 years after that Lincoln dropped off Hoffa's corpse at the loading dock of a salami factory two hundred miles from Detroit, American labour awaits with baited breath the outcome of the Janus case. Every day we see multiple opinion pieces at Fox and elsewhere about how the greedy fingers of the corrupt unions are about to be pried from the wallets of America's working class.

Every day we see multiple opinion pieces in what's left of the lefty press. OMG, this is the final nail in the coffin for unions... the working class is screwed!


Here's my take, and I'm speaking as a life-long union guy who was at various times a member of the Steelworkers, the UAW, the IWA, the International Association of Bridge, Structural, Ornamental and Reinforcing Ironworkers, among others. I say, let Gorsuch give Janus his day.

If this kills Big Labour, good riddance.


Why do I say this? Because Big Labour long ago hitched their wagon to the Democratic Party. That may have meant something at one time, but as the Dems have moved ever to the right over the past two generations, Big Labour has failed to un-hitch. They have become accomplices of and stake-holders in a status quo that has immiserated the majority of American workers.

Getting rid of the status quo will allow American workers to start over.

Keep on truckin'

Next time you're talking to Norman Jewison, ask him about FIST.

I'm willing to bet he's gonna pretend he's not Norman Jewison from the moment you bring that up.

I was chatting with my old pal Janet today. We've known one another since high school days. She graduated. I didn't, at least not on the first go-round.

You'd think that high school diploma would have set Janet off on a magical journey to all the wonders that a diploma can bestow, at least according to high school guidance counsellors, and it might have, but then she got mixed up with my buddy Kipling instead.

Like all long term relationships, theirs was not without its highs and lows, its good times and bad, its court orders and gun battles... but the point is, they survived!

In the late '70's, for reasons that have never been made clear, Norman Jewison directed a film called FIST, an acronym for the strictly imaginary Federation of Inter-State Truckers. The movie followed the ultimately doomed exploits of Johnny Kovac as he tried to organize owner-operators against evil trucking companies, or in today's parlance, "logistics solution providers."

The greatest strategic failure of Jimmy Hoffa was to snub the owner-operators when they first went to the Teamsters looking for back-up in an attempt to organize. Hoffa's principled decision was that since the owner-operators owned their own trucks, supporting them would essentially leave the Teamsters in a position where they were negotiating a return on capital for businessmen. While that may technically have been true, it's not hard to see the flaw in the argument. Eventually the owner-operator phenomenon decimated not only the Teamsters Union, but the trucking industry itself.

FIST did a lot to glamorize the owner-operator crowd. Not that it needed a lot of glamorizing. In the mid-sixties Teamsters drivers wore their union jackets with the same cocky confidence that a full patch Hells Angel wears his colors today, and by God, the owner-operator was gonna have all that plus the allure of Marlboro-man-style good old American independence!

The freedom of the open road, plus being you're own boss! How could life get any better!

A number of my friends, including Kipling, went down that road. In fact, the only reason I didn't go down that road was because I couldn't secure a loan to buy a rig.

I was hugely disappointed.

From that high point in the middle sixties to today, trucking has more or less become a shit job. There are good reasons why there's a shortage of hundreds of thousands of drivers in the "logistics provider industry" today.

In an attempt to set that shortage right, the industry has reached out to different minority groups in order to give them a leg up. For a long time JB Hunt and many others sourced their driver pool from state prisons that offered driver training. Made a lot of sense in a way, and had some success, but all too often, after a couple of years of working insane hours for minimal pay, a lot of guys realized they were better off back in the state penitentiary!

The owner-operator segment of the market has been successfully played off against the company drivers and against one another for 50 years now. This could be resolved by uniting all drivers under one umbrella.

Jimmy Hoffa had the opportunity to do that, but chose not to.

Johnny Kovacs and many others have tried it since, including my friend Kipling. What inevitably happens is that even if the organizers succeed in getting half the guys to park their rigs, that just leaves twice as much work for the half that won't.

That in turn results in unfortunate incidents of cement blocks falling from interstate overpasses, and right away you've got 100% unified public outrage against the guys trying to unify the truck drivers in order to secure a decent living.

And so the downward spiral continues...

Why Jimmy Hoffa had to go

There's been an abundance of speculation about the whys and wherefores of Jimmy Hoffa's disappearance in 1975. The common theme is that Mr. Hoffa ran afoul of some of his more unsavory mob buddies and was sent to swim with the fishes.

Exactly why Hoffa's underworld connections would want to eliminate him has never been explained. Lending pension-fund money to mob-connected construction and real-estate outfits was a win-win. The Italians got loans they'd never get at the bank, and the Teamster's Pension Fund got a better return than they would have got at the bank.

The only losers in that arrangement were the banks!

It's a sad thing that Hoffa's legacy will forever be tainted by innuendo and conspiracy theories. The reality is that Hoffa was the single most important player in bringing America's working class into the middle class.

The pinnacle of Hoffa's career as a union leader arrived with the Teamster's Master Freight Agreement of 1964. Guys who drove trucks for a living were making annual incomes that, in today's money, would range from $75,000 to well into the six numbers.

The Teamsters, and the union movement in general, had momentum on their side. Guys wore their Teamsters jackets with pride, as well they should.

By 1967 Jimmy Hoffa was in jail.

As you well know, from the high-water mark of the middle sixties to today, it's pretty much been a continuous downward spiral for workers in America.

Who benefited from Hoffa's elimination?

Wouldn't that be the place to look when you're trying to solve the great Who Snuffed Hoffa mystery?

Whatever happened to militant unions?

There's yet another story out there concerning Canadians being sent home so foreign workers can take their jobs for less money.

Reading between the lines, it sounds to me that the sum total of what the International Association of Bridge, Structural, Ornamental and Reinforcing Ironworkers intends to do about it is bleat to the media about their tough luck.

That's it.

When you have a union leadership that gutless, it's no wonder international labour brokers are cutting their grass. Back in the day, had an employer even dreamt of forcing union ironworkers off the job in favour of foreign scabs, the jobsite would have been shut down immediately. Union leaders were willing to go to jail. Rank and file were willing to go to jail. Their jobs were something they and their fathers and grandfathers before them had fought hard to make into a well-paying blue-collar profession.

I cannot for a moment imagine such a scenario playing out in Jimmy Hoffa's Teamsters or Walter Reuther's UAW or even Bob White's CAW.

Look at the CAW today; when Caterpillar closed the London Electromotive plant, the union's response was to help their members fill out their EI applications.

We need a new generation of old-school labour leaders, men and women who know what they stand for and aren't going to buckle even in the face of prospective jail time.

The shit-bags and weasels who are conniving with the Harper government to flood the country with low-paid non-union labour are having a field day because nobody on the other side is willing to take a stand.

Those sixty workers sent home last week have the power to shut Kearl down. But they won't do it by going home with their tails between their legs, and they need the support of their union.

Working class

"I've never... dealt with such an unethical, immoral, disrespectful, highly profitable company like Caterpillar."

That was CAW chief Ken Lewenza when Caterpillar was busy turning $30/hr. jobs in London Ontario into $15/hr. jobs in one of the "right-to-work-for-less" states.

And what happened then?

Nothing.

Ken did the best he could to salvage whatever severance crumbs he could from the situation. The overall Caterpillar strategy of playing workers in one jurisdiction off against those in another was never remotely challenged.

Why not?

Workers in China have made huge gains in recent years. They have made such gains that within a few years Chinese wages will catch up to North American wages.

Why?

Because workers in China are not averse to tossing a factory manager from the plant roof from time to time just to let the management side know that they're serious.

Now I'm certainly not suggesting that we need to toss managers from the factory roof, but where all of the unions in North America have failed is in letting the other side know that they're serious. Back in the day, folks like Reuther and Hoffa were willing to go to jail.

That can happen when you're willing to assert yourself.

That can happen when you're prepared to say "no thanks, we're not ready to settle for crumbs."

A large part of the problem originates in the rank and file. I remember when I worked at Budd Automotive, where I was hired on my 18th birthday, guys would show up in dress shirts and blazers because they didn't want their neighbours to know they worked in a factory.

These were generally the same guys who, once they'd worked there a few months, would conclude that the union was holding them back.

Yup! They were slamming blanks into a press and pulling them out for five bucks an hour when the minimum wage was $1.50. The training for their job took about five minutes. But they hated the fact that they had union dues deducted from their pay!

There's still an awful lot of that going on. Well into the 1960's Newfoundland was happy to employ grade eight graduates to teach the grade one class. Now you need two university degrees to teach a grade one class. And you'll find teachers who truly believe that without their teacher union they could do better for themselves!

Yes! The government will happily double your salary if it wasn't for that damned union!

The truth of the matter is that there is no teaching job anywhere in North America that couldn't be done and done well by some eager recent graduate who is working at the mall for minimum wage and would see a $30 thousand annual salary with benefits as the pot 'o gold at the end of their rainbow.

Once we're in a mindset that accepts the logic of moving a job or replacing a worker just because somebody is willing to do that job for less, we're screwed.

And it is on this point that organized labour has failed us.

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.

Toronto Star "mafia" vendetta continues

The good folks at the Star seem determined to milk this one till the teats fall off.

Not that there's much to work with. A certain amount of spillover from the corruption probe in Quebec. Various Italian-Canadians who have had their pictures taken while holidaying in their homeland. But day after day the paper spills tanker-loads of ink on this non-story.

Which reminds me of a guy I knew who figured out how to send tanker-loads of gasoline across the US border, collect the excise tax refund, and then bring it back to sell at his gas stations. He wasn't Italian though, so I don't imagine the Star would be interested in the story.

I'm surprised they haven't globbed onto the REAL story behind the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa. Guelph was a hotbed of mafia activity back in the day. It was also the epicenter of small-scale salami manufacturing. Guelph is a mere three hours up the road from Bloomfield. Surely someone on their research team must have heard the rumors...

Jimmy Hoffa. A giant among union leaders. May he rest in peace.

But I digress. So far we've learned practically nothing from the Star's mafia expose other than 40 to 50 senior police investigators are on the file full time in the Toronto area.

Hmm... let's do some math. A constable first class in Ontario pulls down around 90k a year. These senior investigator types must be worth half that again. So they're spending somewhere around 8 or 9 million a year investigating the mafia and they're getting what?

Not much.

The Star does have some breathless coverage of the Quebec corruption scandal though. They even covered the Donny Brasco publicity stunt. That's where the Quebec investigators flew in the former FBI guy who infiltrated the New York mob thirty years ago. Apparently he has keen insights into what is happening in Montreal today.

And I've got Italians in my extended family who like to visit the old country now and then. I expect to see their pictures in the Star any day now.

The never-ending war on America's working class

The war on America's working class has gone on far longer than the war on terror or the war on drugs or the war on poverty.

The war on America's working class is the grand-daddy of all domestic wars.

The high-water mark of working class America's standard of living came with the Teamster's Master Freight Agreement of the late '50's. That agreement set a standard that spread out over all union contracts in all sectors of the economy.

It also attracted the attention of government. The Kennedy administration determined that the workers were getting too large a slice of the pie. All of a sudden Robert Kennedy was investigating corruption in what was then the most powerful union in the land.

It's been a downhill slide ever since. Where are unions now? A lot of your academic types want to pin the decline of unions to Reagan's destruction of the air traffic folks. That's because a lot of your academic types want to absolve the Kennedy administration.

And everone is keen to forget that unions created the modern middle class in America.

Jimmy Hoffa created America's middle class.

Beer-swilling blogger scoops major media outlets again

Well we’re clinking glasses all round here at Falling Downs today. The more erudite readers will already recognize the prescient nature of the insights generated by our unique brain trust.  We had Libyan missiles going through the Gaza tunnels months before major Israeli media picked up the story.

We miss the odd one too… turns out Gadaffi wasn’t really having a chess tournament with Shalit after all. But overall, this blog has a pretty interesting track record of getting on a story long before the professional journalism community even catches a wiff.

Why is it? Well, for starters we’re smarter. Secondly, we have better weed. Thirdly, we’re already unemployed so we don’t have to worry about losing our jobs if we give offence.

Back in October we brought you The Eurocrisis: guaranteeing massive profits for the bond vulture funds.  Almost three months later a major alternative news aggregator brings you this story:

There is mounting evidence that some of these investment funds are not even original lenders, but have bought Greek debt cheaply after the economic crisis had already hit precisely in order to be able to blackmail the country. Elsewhere in the world Jubilee Debt Campaign has called these companies ‘vultures’ – funds which buy up the debts of a crisis-hit country for small amounts of money, in order to be able to make large profits.
German daily Der Spiegel estimates that ‘speculative investors’ could account for an enormous €50 billion of Greek debt. Bloomberg reported that a fund called Saba Capital Management bought Greek debt at a price suggesting a 75% chance of default. Reuters reports the likelihood that funds have been “building up their positions in the past months” buying debt for 40% face value, and that the “bet had already worked for some funds” as Greece has paid out on smaller debts to get rid of the claims.

Who knew those journalists at Der Spiegel read The View from Falling Downs. Now if we could just convince them and their huge budgets to follow up on some of our other stories. 

Was Jimmy Hoffa’s last ride really in a salami delivery truck?

The trains just keep on coming

It's one train after another. Typically they're well over a hundred cars. A lot of the cars are container cars. Each rail car keeps at least two, three, or four trucks off the road. Every train that goes by means several hundred trucks aren't on the highway. The trains are coming through at three or four per hour. That's a lot of trucks.

Containers. Just one thing Jimmy Hoffa didn't see coming. Hoffa was one of the greatest labour leaders of the post WW II era. A lot of your so-called labour scholars would dispute this. All mobbed up, they say. So what, I say. He came from a tough time. The trucking companies were all mobbed up. Half the state governments were all mobbed up. Most of the other unions were at least somewhat mobbed up. He inherited a mobbed up union. When he disappeared he was working on demobbing it. The 1964 Teamsters National Master Freight agreement still stands as the high-water mark in terms of the relative standard of living of rank and file workers, with a few localized exceptions.

There was a rumour going around Guelph back in the day that one of the local salami factories disposed of the evidence. Hoffa arrived in town in the trunk of that Lincoln and left in a delivery van. I assume it was a joke. I hope so. I ate a lot of calabrese salami from the local shops over the years. Does have some plausibility, though. Guelph is just a few minutes off the 401. You set the cruise control at 85 mph, set your rum and coke on the dash, and you're in Detroit in about three hours. It'd be about the same going the other way.

Yesterday I did a few miles on the Trans-Canada. Went as far as Rossport. Exquisitely pretty place. Chatted with the young fellow at the local museum. Rossport used to have the biggest fishing derby in the world. No more. On the road I was following a skinny old biker with a long white beard on a great big Harley. Traded how-ya-doin's when we both stopped for gas. Nice guy. Had to be in his eighties. He was leaning that Road King into the turns like it was a cafe racer. May he live a thousand years.

So I think Hoffa's biggest mistake, other than thinking he was going to take on the Kennedys, who, while not necessarily all mobbed up by that point, certainly came from all mobbed up, was a decision he made, and made on principle, with respect to the phenomenon of owner-operators. An owner-operator is a guy who buys his own truck and then contracts with some shipper, or even better, a manufacturer or grower, to truck goods independently. It's the iconic "independent trucker" of folklore. Stalone made a movie about them. It's a great gig when it works. Not so great most of the time. Over the long term, it's a race to the bottom for the guys in the game. Say you have a load of turnips in south Ontario. You want to take them to Ohio, where they become rutabagas and are worth more money. The local Teamsters carrier will do it for a thousand bucks. Along comes Mr. Independent Trucker, who just went 120 grand into debt to buy a new Peterbilt. He offers to do it for $900. Great! You just saved a hundred bucks! That's just dandy. Then, out of the blue, here comes another independent who went 120 grand into hock three years ago, and he's a few payments behind; he'll do it for $800. Greater yet! Sooner or later some poor schmuck with a 20 year old Mack held together with duct tape and baler twine is gonna offer to move those rutabagas for just enough to cover his gas and maybe feed his kids for a few days.

The independents are well aware that they're in a race to the bottom, and they were well aware of it back in the sixties. Every time they try to organize, half of them park their rigs, and the other half have twice as much work. So the independents went to the Teamsters looking for support. Hoffa declined. His reason? As a union leader he didn't believe that it was his job to negotiate a return on capital. And these independents, when you get right down to it, are capitalists, are they not? Marx would have been proud of Jimmy. Today there are more independents driving trucks across America than there are Teamsters, and it's never been cheaper to get your rutabagas from Ontario to Ohio. Sometimes your principles can be your undoing.

The eighty year old biker reminds me of the last time I did this trip. Stopped at a little campground at Montreal River, so close to Superior that you could stand at the edge of your campsite and piss in the water. I'm there pitching my tent, getting the lawn chair out, starting the camp fire, getting settled. Gonna be a good night. Got the whole place to myself. Oops, here comes Mr. Biker, the full nine yards of Road King hard bags, trunk, the Mrs. in the queen seat.... surely to God he's not gonna... no...no..please...PLEASE DON'T TAKE THE CAMPSITE 2O FUCKING FEET AWAY WHEN THE WHOLE PLACE IS EMPTY!!! But he did. I hate when people do that. Anyway, it worked out. He was a real biker, real as in when people talk about gangs and stuff. From Montreal. Heading back after a business meeting in Winnipeg. His english was a little rough, but helluva decent chap. So he pitches his tent. It's twice the size of mine. He got a cooler out from somewhere. Next time I look he's walking around with a tackle box and a fishing rod. Oh look, they're starting a campfire too... they got firewood in the saddlebags? They've got nicer lawn chairs than me. How the hell does that happen? They're on a bike for God's sake! I was half expecting him to pull a canoe out of one of those saddle bags.

One of the localized exceptions were the building trades in New York City. Building trades unions everywhere in North America have done a pretty good job for their members, but these guys were doing way better than that. They had contracts for the shop stewards - I guess they call them business agents in the building trades, that had them paid their hourly wage anytime any of their members were on the site. Excuse me? That would be pretty much 24-7. It was. Good for them. And while I don't have a lot of fondness for Donald Trump, I was very impressed that he went out of his way to give credit to the building trade union guys in New York City when he wrote The Art of the Deal. A lot of people, when they get to where Mr. Trump got, seem to forget who did the actual sweat and blood labour that got them there.

Another localized exception to the Teamsters high water mark was what happened on the west coast when the IWA and the coastal logging companies went from piece-work to an hourly wage for the guys who cut the trees down. The main plank of the changeover was that nobody was going to be paid less than they'd made under piece-work, so overnight every bucker and faller was making an hourly wage equivalent to what the most productive among them had made under the old regime. That wage scale of course trickled down to the IWA members who had never been on piece-work in the first place. There are welders in southern Ontario today working for the same hourly wage that I made in my little IWA shop in Victoria over thirty years ago. That was a good gig. Good enough that Peter C. Newman had a shit hemorage about it in print; he was utterly aghast at the thought that mere forestry workers were doing the grand tour of Europe with their families, just like their betters in the front offices. I suppose he's breathing easier now.

I've been enjoying the clean air and the trains and the view and walking paths my POW grandaddy walked. But I miss Falling Downs. I'll be heading back soon. The grass is probably a foot high by now.

I wonder what's in all those containers? I'm guessing the eastbound containers are mostly plastic shit from China and the westbound containers are mostly empty.

The trains just keep on coming.