is grouchy old Don misremembering or lying or both?

[franksolich]

Don, the grouchy old primitive, posted some reminiscences the other day which struck me as rather, uh, unusual, but I'm not sure it might not be true.  Of course I myself remember the 1970s and 1980s, and general news about the automobile manufacturers of the time, but nothing specific.

But there's something in a recent tale by the grouchy old primitive that comes across like many of the tales told by the now-long-gone burdened primitive, the "TylerDurden" primitive.  Those who've been around long enough might recall that the burdened primitive was always blaming Reagan for his having been laid off from a good job down in Texas, compelling him to move back home to Michigan, where he subsisted in a menial job since then.

However, as it turned out, the burdened primitive had been laid off in 1978.....

Anyway, Don on Skins's island some day ago commented he had "lost money" during the Reagan years, which left most decent and civilized people speechless.  For anyone to have lost money during the Reagan-Bush-Gingrich-Bush prosperity, one had to have been incredibly stupid, just really stupid.

And now the grouchy old primitive has made an additional comment that doesn't past the smell test.

Before going any further, it needs mentioned that Don is 58, 59, years old, from Chicago.  He started working for an automobile manufacturer right out of high school, at the age of 18 years.  He worked hard, he saved his money, he kept his nose clean, and was able to retire after 30 years, in 2001, when he was still only 48 years old.

Nothing wrong with that, nothing at all.

The grouchy old primitive has always been a stalwart defender of corrupt machine politics, having voted the straight Democrat ballot all his life, figuring they'd always take care of him.  As events are turning out, however, Don, on a fixed income, is finding local and county taxes an onerous burden, and no doubt sooner or later he's going to have to take a job to make ends meet.

Corruption is expensive, but it's the grouchy old primitive's own damned fault.

Anyway, so he posted something the other day.  Not intimately, only broadly and generally, acquainted with conditions in the automotive industry during the 1970s and 1980s, I'm wondering if Don is confusing, either because of age or by deliberate lying, the 1970s with the 1980s, so as to take the blame away from Carter and put it on Reagan.

NNN0LHI  (1000+ posts)      Sun Sep-18-11 01:17 PM
Original message
 
I think we need kind of a retirement "amnesty" for people who are out of work and over 50

I think any long term out of work person in that age bracket should be offered immediate SS and Medicare retirement benefits if that is their choice.

Let me tell you why I think this. I was once one of the long term employed. During the 1980's I was laid off over 6 years total. Most of the time we would get laid off for a year and then called back for a month or two and then get laid off again. But the longest continuous lay off I had was just short of 2 years. And I was really hurting financially by the time I got called back. Didn't really lose anything because I never worked long enough to ever really accumulate anything. Lot of my friends lost their houses and everything. And I will never forget that. It did something to me. My attitude completely changed after the lay off that lasted almost 2 years.

But I was young then. 30 or so. And I was able to snap out of it enough to slide into retirement. If we didn't have 30 and Out where I worked I don't know what I would have done? Only thing kept me going was the dream of retiring at 48.

But the problem I see is we still have long term unemployed who are much older than I was going through this same thing right now and they don't have any option like I had to retire. What are they going to do? Something is going to have to be done.

Does this make sense? And I pulled the age of 50 out of the air. So if you are 48 or 49 don't get mad at me for using it as an example.

Don

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x1960856

From what the grouchy old primitive described, is this more representative of the automotive industry during the Carter years, or during the Reagan years?  Is Don misrepresenting actual events that happened during the Carter years, as having happened during the Reagan years?

[shadeaux]

I don't know anything about the north but during the 80s in the South, the oilfield went bust and a lot of people went without jobs, foreclosures were common, things got bad quick.

 

[franksolich]

I don't know anything about the north but during the 80s in the South, the oilfield went bust and a lot of people went without jobs, foreclosures were common, things got bad quick.

But this is the automotive industry, not the petroleum business.

(And I recall the petroleum business down south was going bad before January 20, 1981.)

It's a common habit of the primitives to misrepresent things that actually happened during the Carter years, as having happened during the Reagan years, and hence my question about the automotive industry.

[ChuckJ]

Lying is usually the safest choice if you have to choose whether a DUmmie is lying or misremembering.

[cmypay]

I vote that he is lying. My reasoning has nothing to do with the auto industry 80s vs 70s, but with his retirement. He started at the company at the age of 18 and retired at 48, but was laid off for a total of 6 years during that time. Under the union contracts that I am familiar with, seniority takes a hit any time a person is not working for 30 days or more. Therefore, he could not have retired at 48; he needed to make up those lost years, making him 54 when he became retirement eligible.  Unless, of course, the auto industry counted time not worked as time worked and somehow, I doubt that.

[franksolich]

I vote that he is lying. My reasoning has nothing to do with the auto industry 80s vs 70s, but with his retirement. He started at the company at the age of 18 and retired at 48, but was laid off for a total of 6 years during that time. Under the union contracts that I am familiar with, seniority takes a hit any time a person is not working for 30 days or more. Therefore, he could not have retired at 48; he needed to make up those lost years, making him 54 when he became retirement eligible.  Unless, of course, the auto industry counted time not worked as time worked and somehow, I doubt that.

That part, I've never been sure about. 

He retired after 30 years.  He had started right out of high school at 18 years of age.

I'm assuming then that he retired, then, in 2001, because as long as I've known Don, which is several years now, he's always been retired.

He might've retired in 2003 or 2004 or something, then, but I've known him since he first appeared on Skins's island, and he's always been retired.

[Tucker]

He's a lying sack of DUng.

First.

But the longest continuous lay off I had was just short of 2 years.

Then.

Didn't really lose anything because I never worked long enough to ever really accumulate anything.

If you're laid off longer than you actually worked, you lose recall rights. You would have to reapply for the job and we all know what that result would be.

[franksolich]

Okay, I have it on the word of a retired member of the United Auto Workers, an exact contemporary of the grouchy old primitive, that Don is taking events that actually occurred during the Carter years, as having taken place during the Reagan years.

He's either misremembering, or he's deliberately lying, misleading.

My source is available via personal message if one is curious; this is an exact contemporary of Don, in the same business, the same time, the same labor union.

I'm really tired of the primitives always trying to blame Reagan for things that happened long before Reagan was ever president; these lies have to stop.

[GOBUCKS]

Unless, of course, the auto industry counted time not worked as time worked and somehow, I doubt that.

Oh, you shouldn't doubt that at all. You need to spend some time inside a factory manned by the United Auto Workers . Check out the union drones lounging here and there, reading newspapers, working on (very simple) crossword puzzles. Note the odor of smoldering hemp rolling out of the men's rooms.

Among United Auto Workers, a high percentage of time counted as worked is actually time not worked.

It's one of the main reasons the Japanese were able to take over the auto industry.

[franksolich]

Lying is usually the safest choice if you have to choose whether a DUmmie is lying or misremembering.

Uh huh.

One has to watch, when the primitives talk about Ronald Reagan.

They have a bad habit of blaming Reagan for things that happened under Carter, or were first started under Carter.

It's sort of the same thing as blaming Lyndon Johnson for the Bay of Pigs; it's so long ago, and the years were so close together, it's easy to distort history.  And given that most primitives don't know history anyway.....

The next time the primitives whine about Reagan, see if I'm not right.

[DumbAss Tanker]

He's probably both lying and misremembering, they aren't mutually exclusive, after all.

"Automotive industry" takes in more turf than you might imagine, since from the worker's perspective if they were UAW they likely would call it that, even if someone else might call it "Working at an engine plant" or even "Agricultural machinery."

Although the Incompetent One set the wheels in motion, the actual deaths or plant closures of a lot of heavy equipment and ag equipment manufacturers took awhile to become inevitable, and did not occur until the early-to-mid 80s.

[USA4ME]

Oh, you shouldn't doubt that at all. You need to spend some time inside a factory manned by the United Auto Workers . Check out the union drones lounging here and there, reading newspapers, working on (very simple) crossword puzzles. Note the odor of smoldering hemp rolling out of the men's rooms.

Among United Auto Workers, a high percentage of time counted as worked is actually time not worked.

It's one of the main reasons the Japanese were able to take over the auto industry.

I've got a good friend who obtained his MBA at the Univ. of Chicago in the mid-70's, and he grew up in the Chicagoland area and was familiar with The Machine.  We were talking about the unions around 2 years ago when Dear Leader came into office, and he mentioned the 60/30 Rule, something of which I had never heard.  His explanation was that in order to obtain a work contract for your construction company or whatever you might have in the Chicago area, you had to grease the palms of the unions, and they called it the 60/30 rule.  You paid 60% of the total contract wages to whatever union you had to hire, they did 30% of the work, and you hired out the rest to non-union workers.  As long as the union got their cut, they didn't really care if you hired non-union to finish the job.

.

[NHSparky]

I don't know anything about the north but during the 80s in the South, the oilfield went bust and a lot of people went without jobs, foreclosures were common, things got bad quick.

 

And the big reason behind that is because oil prices dropped so far during the 80's that a lot of wells which were profitable at $30/bbl then, no longer were at $10-15/bbl. 

Same thing happened where I went to HS (Farmington, NM.)

[NHSparky]

He's a lying sack of DUng.

First.

Then.

If you're laid off longer than you actually worked, you lose recall rights. You would have to reapply for the job and we all know what that result would be.

Depends on several things.  For example, at my company, if you've got more than 5 years and you're involuntarily laid off, you can be subject to recall for up to 2 years, if less than 5 years, you can be recalled up to a year.  And of course it's last laid off/first to recall.  HOWEVER, if you get recalled, your time is bridged.

I seem to recall that's the way it was with the union guys at SCE when I worked there as well, but there's a few extra twists because they considered not only company seniority, but unit and job seniority as well.

[franksolich]

Well, my good friend Don visited here last night, just before I hit the sack.

This is what really happened to my good friend Don:

He began working in an automobile plant in 1971, at the age of 18 years. 

The '70s were wrought with at least three recessions, much civil disorder, and many strikes.

My good friend Don, being a youngster at the time, was on the bottom rung of the ladder, and so got laid off and stuff when the workforce was cut.

His life finally stabilized when my good friend Don was 30, which was in 1983.

That of course was the first year the Reagan tax-cuts took effect, leading to the longest-running expansion of the economy in American history, nine years or something without a single dip.

Everybody, unless a complete idiot or Taverner-type, flourished and prospered; as my good friend Don isn't an idiot or a Taverner-type, he did very well under the Reagan-Bush-Gingrich-Bush prosperity of 1983-2007 (with that minor speed-bump circa 1992).  My good friend Don waxed fat and prosperous.

Reagan of course had been president since 1981, but the recovery was retarded by the enormous mess his predecessor had left him (I for one at the time didn't think he could pull it off), and the obstructionism of the drunken old Tipsy O'Neill and drunken blob Teddy Kennedy delayed implementation of the good things Reagan wished to do, including cutting taxes so as to "grow" the economy.

And so Reagan wasn't to blame for the conditions that were in effect the first two years of his term; he hadn't yet had the time to pull America into a new direction.

And also of course the election of 1984 clearly and loudly demonstrated that Reagan's policies worked, he winning in a massive landslide.  (He had also won in a landslide in 1980, the year he defeated Carter, but everyone seems to forget that one.....even though it was a landslide.  Not quite as big as 1984, but still, historically, one of the largest landslides in American history--an exact repeat of 1932, Roosevelt beating Hoover.....and there were many similarities between Herbert Hoover and James Carter.)

My good friend Don just took events and experiences of the late 1970s and shoved them forward to the mid-1980s; all the primitives, when talking about Reagan, do that.

All the primitives do that, mixing up Reagan with Carter.

It's in the history books, folks.   

[zeitgeist]

My all time favorite liberal lies regarding Jimmah are:

1.  Carter was a Nuclear Engineer who was a Nuclear Submarine Commander. 

One myth correction, however. President Carter was a submarine officer, but he was not a nuclear engineer.

He graduated from the US Naval Academy in June 1946 (he entered in 1943 with the class of 1947, but his class was in a war-driven accelerated 3 year program) with an undesignated bachelor of science degree. Even if the Naval Academy had offered a majors program for his class, it is unlikely that it would have included Nuclear Engineering as a option – after all, the Manhattan Project was a dark secret for most of his time at Annapolis.

After graduation, Jimmy Carter served as a surface warfare officer for a two years and then volunteered for the submarine force. He served in a variety of billets, including engineer officer of diesel submarines and qualified to command submarines.

In November 1952, he began a three month temporary duty assignment at the Naval Reactor branch. He started nuclear power school (a six month course of study that leads to operator training) in March, 1953. In July 1953, his father passed away and he resigned his commission to run the family peanut farm. He was discharged from active duty on 9 October, 1953. According to an old friend of mine who served as Rickover’s personnel officer at Naval Reactors, LT Carter did not complete nuclear power school because of the need to take care of business at home.
http://atomicinsights.com/2006/01/picking-on-the-jimmy-carter-myth.html

2.  Carter lost to Reagan because George Bush conducted a secret mission to Iran (flying on a Blackbird) to get them to hold the  hostages until after the election. This would become known as The October Surprise.



3.  Amy Carter was the only child.  Not quite.  She was the only daughter.

Amy Lynn Carter (born October 19, 1967) is the fourth child and only daughter of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn Carter. She entered the limelight as she lived as a child in the White House during the Carter presidency.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Carter

Carter defeated Ford in a close election which Ford might have carried had he not issued a pardon to Nixon.   

 

[NHSparky]

Carter defeated Ford in a close election which Ford might have carried had he not issued a pardon to Nixon.   

Had the election been held a week later, Ford may well have won.