China, Secrets & American JOB

Years ago, I took my administrative skills to an employment opportunity with a professional man engaged in the sale of carbon products and alloys to the metals industry.  He represented Coke, of the bituminous kind, the sort that makes Clairton, Pennsylvania the location of choice for the air quality monitors of Allegheny County.  The year before I was born, in the Monongahela River Valley, 1948, citizens fell dead on the sidewalks, overcome by toxins in the air described as the "Donora Fog."  United States Steel had a plant in Donora where the Zinc Works spewed flouride into the "inversion" later blamed for the 20 deaths attributed to the incident.  Our family doctor, Bill Rongaus, who normally saw patients in his 6th & Thompson office for endless hours, led the ambulances on foot as a Health Department Board Member, into their homes and neighborhoods well into the middle of the night, and personally assessed the impact on his clientele.  "Thousands would have perished had the fog lasted another day," he observed.  I started school in 1955 and for the next eight years, walked the few blocks to one funeral home or another to pray the rosary in the presence of caskets holding the family members of my classmates.  My own father, a 33 year carpenter at the Zink Works, died in his early 50's after returning to work from his six-week vacation having earned his age + service "sabbatical" from the grind.  A year shy of retirement, dad had a "heart condition" for the final eight years of his life, having suffered a "heart attack" while completing a side job renovating a dry cleaning establishment - one of your serious chemical zones, I guess.

At "Alloys & Carbon," Frank Praznik organized the delivery of various sizes of coke produced in West Virginia to the mills along the river in Monaca.  In the course of getting online with the new-fangled internets, Frank expanded to suppliers beyond our local producers.  He arranged a boatload of what was called "Buckwheat" coke to be brought in from China at about the time he had given me a book to read about the history of Coke as it was part of the American Industrial Revolution.   The original tree huggers of Great Britain turned to coke as a salvation for the too-rapid exhaustion of the the forests for the fuel to smelt iron for the steel industry.  Many of the secretaries performing the administrative tasks to receive the imported coke shipment were the children of folks whose lives were tormented and prematurely ceased to breath in the unacceptable working and living conditions fostered by these coke ovens known as "bee hives."  To Frank, their objections were ridiculous, inasmuch as only Clairton and the Neville Island plants continued to produce these products.  Because of the Clean Air Act of 1955, US Coke Works could no longer use the bee hive production method and had developed a system of "scrubbers" installed in the exhaust stacks in all US Steel Mills to manage the air quality.  Homes were moved from coal burning furnaces to natural gas and propane further up river in Pittsburgh, but the people of Southwest Pennsylvania were now well aware of the quality of life issues that drove the Union movements in Homestead, PA in the last decades of the nineteenth century.  To them, the people engaged in the production of coke via known toxic-producing processes were subjected to working and living conditions that were unacceptable and objections were received FROM THE SECRETARIAL STAFF about the importation of the coke.  For Frank's money, the wimminz were well-intentioned, but he viewed the efforts of the Chinese was a first tier entry into the industrial process.  This was in 1997, mind you, barely fifteen years ago, but to the "men" of the metals industry who could buy, transport and deliver this product from the Far East, it was still cheaper than they could get it in the United States.  Detached and profit-driven, Frank would have readily fired those meddlesom gals had they been in his employ.  But I came to recognize the complaints of the Immigration Control supporters who are constantly told the undocumented workers taking our jobs stateside are willing to do jobs Americans won't do. 

remnants of the helicopter destroyed

Read the piece about the investigations into the Donora Fog and understand that it isn't the jobs Americans reject, but, rather the working conditions imposed upon them by employers indifferent to the realities of dangers and threats to residents and employees their processes pose.  Instead of responsibly and routinely initiating upgrades and improvements to their plants as they become available, they simply remove the skilled, higher paid labor to admit poorly trained, ignorant people desperate for jobs at the lower end.  These folks, just thankful for a job, are often further victimized by shake-down artists who demand a portion of their paychecks for the "protection" of any claim they had to a job of any sort.  Like the Chinese, these employers shrug off the technology available to provide the mutually respectful, highly motivating job opportunities for working people and their families.  Priorities being what they are, the issue with JOBS driving this economy into the ground has a parallel issue in the technology reported today to have been sold to the Chinese by the Pakistanis holding the remnants of the helicopter destroyed when the Navy Seals entered the Abbottabad Compound of Osama Bin Ladin.  While the Chinese engineers pour over the wreakage to conduct what is - essentially -  an autopsy of US "Intelligence," their citizens foment in a rise to challenge the qualities of life issues that drove Eastern Europeans to hang Henry Clay Frick in effigy at the site of the Homestead Strike in 1892.  While his own employer, Andrew Carnegie, was travelling to Scottland, the Mount Pleasant German was "doing the best he could" with his limited skills, to control the workers.  His boss was reputed to be "pro labor," and no doubt had the wisdom, social insight and appreciation for his employees to have been likely to have done a much more effective job of dealing with their uprising.  In his stead, because he had to travel to connect with his colleagues in the growing steel industry overseas, his "deputized" partner was the entity whose fortunes, like his own, were tied to the resolution of differences between the two sides.   One would think that Frick had both the incentive and the insight to reach a sensible agreement with his producers.  Instead of negotiating from a position of strength fostered by good will toward his employees, Frick operated from a mis-guided notion that intimidation and subordination would somehow enhance the profit prospects of his business.  He paid "detectives" from New York Pinkerton Agency to come in and level the strikers with violence and destruction.  Up to that point, only the symbolic representation of Frick himself was impacted.  The overbearing actions taken in retaliation, however, communicated his ignorance in no uncertain terms.

Which brings me to my daily "Howler" to Barak Obama, a no-holds-barred assessment of his skill set limits now providing the Chinese with yet another 'distraction' from the needs to develop their economy by diverting resources to "Intelligence" work to defend what they are acquiring.  Of course, China is both our banker and our biggest customer / supplier.  Their "production" methods get a wink and a nod from our own human rights lefties as the rakes continue to glut the accounts of the Kennedeys who sell their cheap goods in Minnesota.  At the Mall of America, tourists are walked along a corridor of corruption that links directly to profits and privilege with utter contempt for those whose jobs prevent them from being able to afford anything more than the exercise they get licking the windows.  If Michele Bachmann were Hillary Clinton, the left would be assaulting her for serving on the board of any of the hundreds of businesses who import Chinese product to stock the establishments in the mall.  Instead, she's appealing to the folks who are in the decided minority in MN, for reason and mutually respectful behavior.  I have alluded in the past to the communication I often receive from my deceased ancestors, and have no doubt that the Chinese know of what I speak.

Along with the input from members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians and the Crochet Club Amores, Brizzi's and Carbonnes to whom my grandmothers were related, I hear, from time to time, from departed spirits of underworld figures who thought they were smart but come to find out that they were but victims of their own callous indifference to their families' best interests.  As I have mentioned in previous posts here and at UppityWoman08, the MOB has electronics.  The Wise Guys who met their "eviction" from the underworld - from which there IS only one exit, stick around to kibbutz from the other side and look over my shoulder at my cards... They comment on how I play them, and sometimes, WHEN I FLAT OUT ASK FOR IT, they IM me with some sensible advice.  Always, always, always, these bytes of input from my "guys" reinforce the admission that their demise was the result of their own choice, something they, themselves did, to bring about their death.  Where they end up, they have alternatives, but not really choices.  They share with me that the better my decisions, the better my resultant choices.  What we don't always get is the taqiyya thing going on in our faces, obscuring pertinent factors that will ultimately misguide us.  So they invite me to enter the bird's eye, see how the land lies and adjust my course in coordination with their best wishes for me.  I get that, because I know that where they are is beyond material gain.  The only 'motivation' they have now is fun.  They have it "there" for certain.  They play at things one can do remotely and are - just as we bloggers, gamers and similar computer, phone, gps geeks, constantly testing new combinations of standards and traditions that, aided by technological advancements of the NASA funding, are exceptional fun.  The first time I put on quality headphones tapped into a radio/tape player while in the middle of a parking lot in Buckhead, on my roller skates, I "got it."  22 pinheads (rather minutes) past the hour, says Bill Hemmer on the morning Fox News, just as I typed that, and it reinforced the access they have to electronics.  I learned they can combine any / many things to convey their message to me and that reference to Pin Heads was an O'Reilley colloquialism telling me that the Long Island contingent of cucumber farmers was in touch.  OK, Guys, we'll play.  But for now, I've gotta get to the office and put the payroll together.  See yunz there.