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Although the year is barely out, we do have our first nomination for the spot to be announced in December 2013. With the Kinder Morgan Deal now on hold semi-permanently, even they are pointing to our hero of the year as the man most responsible for allowing the port to remain state owned….
I can say it was Julius Cephas who was behind almost every move to combat the loss of good jobs at our port. He is being pointed out as the villain by the capitalists at Kinder Morgan. In Delaware’s eyes, that elevates his hero’s stature even more…
In truth, he is no villain and knowing him, he will probably shun the acclimations being made by us common folk as being our hero. In his eyes, he was just doing what needed to be done because no one else was there at that very moment to do it, and as that task swelled, it took a lot out of him….
Capitalists always need a villian. But it was the “truth” which actually is what killed this deal. Kinder Morgan WAS going to cut back on jobs, and their change of heart and blaming Julius instead of others, points exactly to the core of their problem with our port… …
People in Texas, do not understand unions. They simply can’t fathom or understand how there can be an actual law that lets people strike and shut you down, whenever you try to pay them less.. In their eyes, you work for what they want to give you and if it is too little, ..humph. go elsewhere….
The second culprit (after the “truth”), was our office of economic development. We gave Kinder Morgan too many “eager” signals that set us up as being seen as an easy pick. They truly thought they could waltz in, pick up a top notch East Coast Port for a song, and we would eagerly give it up… Again, that was because everything was done in secret. Had a meeting been forthcoming in the very beginning, Kinder Morgan might have moved on earlier when it became readily apparent, that southern Texas practices do not bode well in the Northeast…
Of course, being a corporation, they will blame the whistle blower. (Ironic since the whistle blower of Enron works for them).. Of course. It is not like they find anything immoral in taking a state asset for a song, in firing those skilled dock workers, and replace them with some Spanish speaking Texans who never even heard of a union….
And Julius did blow that whistle. . Like Rose on the Titanic, he took the whistle off of Jack (pun intended), and blew softly at first, then harder, and harder. Gradually the sound registered on others ears….
Without Julius, Bob Marshall would not have pushed through Senate Bill 3. Without Julius, most of the links showing up in everyone’s blog, would have not been found. Without Julius, the case for protecting workers would not have even made the rounds of the Norman Oliver show….
There were many helpers. Bob Marshall, Nancy Willing, Norman Oliver, Norinda, Helene Keeley, Al Mascitti, Liz Allen, John Kowalko, and (an other blogger too shy to be mentioned here). When one looks back through all of them one sees from everywhere, there in the center of the universe, stands a normal human being just like us, known to most … as Julius.
There will come a time when a better deal will arrive. Could even be this year. There will come a time when a suitor who does care about Delaware, who does care about unions, about human beings, about those businesses on the outside, and who will want to upgrade the port for everyone’s interest, not just their own… And that suitor in this day and age, could even come from abroad. Germany is very committed to union labor, to the environment, to being a good neighbor…. There are a great many possibilities out there that are immeasurable…. We definitely dodged a Texas bullet with this one….
When that suitor arrives… Julius’s stature will be set in cement…. For he did nothing really Herculean, except argue the truth… He didn’t lie. He didn’t connive, He didn’t threaten….
That was done by our office of economic development. Instead and unlike them, Julius told the truth. He told the truth to anyone who would listen. He told the truth enough, so many “did” listen….
And that is why, he deserves this nomination as Delaware’s Man of the Year. I know it is early into 2013, but great things just do not wait!!….
You will hear smears that Julius tubed the deal… I saw the letter and it is already out on WDEL and the Delawareonline’s News Journal… But as an impartial blogger, I can tell you exactly what killed this deal.
It was “the truth”. The truth of what this deal would cost us Delawareans….. is what turned the tide and caused the outcry that rose up against it….
If Kinder Morgan really wanted this deal, they could have easily said… “we are expanding and putting 5 new berths out into the river. We are buying the port for the bargain price of $5 billion. We need those businesses outside the fence because the jobs we get, will soon be too big, we can’t do it ourselves. We will keep the union just as it is; Wilmington needs good jobs and we are going to do our part…. We are also going to contribute into an emergency fund to be used for any spill or environmental accident that takes place under our tenure….
Kinder Morgan could have done any of those things, … and didn’t…. The blame doesn’t lie with Julius after all…. Especially when you consider the following…
This Economic Council erred on Fisker Automotive. Then it erred on Bloom Energy. Then it tried to Kinder Morgan us out of our port….. Someone rushed in with a save to make sure that last one didn’t happen.
That person is now hereby nominated for Delaware’s Person of the Year…….
Today the rate is $7.25. Let us use Obama’s $9.00 an hour for calculations. The difference is $1.75.
So one guy working 4o hours a week, over one year?
$1.75 X 40 X 52 = $3640 per year.
If you business is fixed income, each $40 hour full time employee will cost you that much. $3640 per year. And don’t forget FICA, another $228. Rounding up, this minimum wage per employee will additionally cost roughly just under $4000 a year. ($3868)
On the Federal scale, whereas there are 6 million people as of 2009 working at the minimum wage, this increase boosts the national economy by roughly $24 billion dollars.
Estimates of how many of Delawares citizens work minimum wage are not kept, but if we take those making incomes under $20,000 and use that total which is 90,000, we get a state boost to our economy of $360 million…. Whereas all of that increased economic activity will not be applied to new hires, the potential is there to add 40 million hours of $9.00/ hour jobs, right here in Delaware’s market. That translates into 19,200 new full time new minimum wage jobs.
By raising the minimum wage,…. we exert pressure to create jobs.
Bottom line, we are in an economic crises; we can ill afford to miss this growth opportunity by not raising the minimum wage to $9.00/hour.
False…..
Manufacturing within the United States of America is near an all time high…..
Courtesy of Motley Fool
If you follow the blue line above you can see that manufacturing in the United States of America, has now reached the same level it was in 2005…. The current record was hit in 2006. (There it is also clearly visible: the rebound the current Democratic Administration occupying the White House has engineered.)…
You can also see that manufacturing jobs which held steady for decades, began plummeting the moment George W. Bush was sworn in and didn’t stop it’s free-fall, until President Obama put his hand on Lincoln’s bible….
Which means nothing really… Because it was completely out of the realm of either the Democrats and Republicans… It was computers and smart technology that put Americans out of work….
Robots don’t need smoke breaks, don’t do personal phone calls, and don’t go on strike for higher pensions… Computers make fewer mistakes, they don’t forget to carry over a place setting, and they don’t make a mistake by multiply instead of dividing…. It is not that American’s priced themselves out of the job market,…. it is that technology became so cheap, it became the process of choice…..
Our very rejoicing over the downward cost of a large screen LED TV or all the potential of a top-of-the-line 2005 desktop computer held in our hand, a computer from which we can even make phone calls, is also what took our manufacturing jobs and shoved them…..
They are gone. We can’t and don’t want them back….
No Republican will bring back jobs. Sorry Mitt. No tax break will bring back jobs, Sorry Mitch McConnell and Eric Cantor… We are in a major shift just like the Great Depression… Back then, it was agriculture jobs that evaporated. Grapes of Wrath all over again. Today, it is manufacturing jobs…. eaten by machines.
I wonder how many people reading this can actually remember back to when retailers used to close one day for store-wide inventory, often having large sales to clear out merchandise to facilitate human beings doing the counting? Seen any closures lately? It’s now done overnight(in hours) with scanners. Now multiply that labor saved over the course of an entire year, then times the number of outlets across the country, and you can begin to grasp the immensity of just how life has changed….
So, where do we go from here?
The obvious answer is that with so many people out of manufacturing jobs, we will have to find another field or jobs for them to work. If the jobs are not there, we WILL have to subsidize them.. Welfare in conservative terms… And since we are broke, we will need to tax the wealthy for that….
Now we’ve done this welfare thing before. It didn’t work very well. In fact, it wasn’t until we eliminated or corrected it, that we got people out into the workforce to become an asset to society.
So.. with that in mind, since we have to pay these people anyway to keep them employed, to eliminate the problems of crime, destitution, and decay that come from an indigent society, it seems to make a little sense that we pay them to work instead of paying them not to work. Now I’m no wise man, but that simply seems to be a no-brainer…
So here is a need where we actually do need government to step in, and to step up its spending of money on projects that actually do put people to work; that way we can have a much better life than what we would experience had we chosen to let them starve and fend for themselves, which would not be pretty.
Of course the wealthy will have to pay for it… They are the ones making all that extra cash by not hiring us….
Those living in Delaware know this is nothing new… We are used to the benevolence of certain billionaires who in love with this fair state, spent enormous amounts of their personal wealth to build the first four lane paved road in the nation, from the Maryland border north of Salisbury to the edge of Marcus Hook PA… It was an engineering marvel at that time, and not a penny of state delegated taxes was spent….
Simply put, that is how it was done in the past, and if they can’t or unwilling to part with their money now, obviously we need to tax them more and do it for them…. It just makes too much sense…..
kavips 