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Sep 2Liked by Don Surber

You know what would help create manufacturing jobs? Darlington SC doesn’t have coal or iron ore. The are no rivers to provide hydroelectric power. It has sandy soil from an ancient beach created when the sea level was much higher. It does have a profitable steel mill with good paying jobs. Darlington has junk cars the mill melts with clean green electric power to make building products. That power comes from the H B Robinson Nuclear Generating Station, that has been operating safely and profitably since 1971. (The plant was built In 4 years by men with slide rules)

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In today's world common sense and reasoned logic are so passe /Tmitsss.

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The institutions of ‘higher learning’ have educated it right out of them. I beg the parents of my young grands to avoid them like the plague they have become.

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As Sam Cooke would sing about American manufacturing capacity, “Bring It On Home To Me.”

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Sep 2Liked by Don Surber

How could she get rehired when she evidently never worked there?

Your article today reminds me of what has happened to the greater Los Angeles area. Lots of things use to be made there from steel, cars, airplanes and I’m sure there is a lot more. But now not much is not made there but they have legal marijuana and homeless and lots and lots of crime.

Quite the trade off.

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We don’t need big cities anymore. They’re cess pools and money pits. All cities should be self supporting. No outside taxes!

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Sep 2Liked by Don Surber

The words of Ross Perot about the “giant sucking sound” of jobs leaving America for Mexico where labor was cheaper and there were fewer regulations with the inception of NAFTA back in 1992 ring so true today. That loud sucking sound has not gone away.

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MLR, he also said, "They're bribing you with your own money." That concept sails right over the heads of our dumbed-down population, which craves instant gratification and participation trophies. To them, cause and effect is more complex than physics.

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Gary - their parents are those who didn't want their children to have to experience the hard work and hardships they and their parents had

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Hickory, NC had a vibrant furniture industry and fiber optics. Both are gone.

Craftsman had a devoted following because they were still American made and Stanley-B and D, decided to buy the name only and outsource to China. Avoiding China when buying tools, sporting equipment, footwear is quite challenging. Watching the globalists and their chamber allies in Congress loot our country is very infuriating. So happy to see Trump pulling blue collar votes away from pols that have sold them out for so long.

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Danaher used to make tools for Craftsman and Snap-On at a plant here in Springdale, AR. They moved the operation to Taiwan.

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And, at least for Craftsman, the quality reflects the move.

For the price, I'll go to Harbor Freight for many tools.

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I swear I could crack a craftsman socket by looking at it. Put it on a ratchet and try to use it and it would crack before the torque was applied to the handle. Outhouses had better “products” than Craftsman after that point in ownership.

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To highlight the scenario of industry moving South and then overseas, my hometown of Jamestown, NY was a center of fine home and office furniture manufacturing. Several of my relatives including my mother had jobs in the furniture making industry. But then it moved South to places like Hickory, NC and Jamestown went the way of Akron and Toledo. I still get back there once or twice a year to see the relatives who are still there, but it hurts to see a once vibrant small city gone to seed.

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Sep 2Liked by Don Surber

We have the same problem in Maine. We used to have shoe factories, foundries, canneries, lumber mills, linen mills, woolen mills, paper mills. Now we just have Janet Mills and a Democrat kook legislature that is so left wing it makes Mills look like Ronald Reagan. The factory jobs started moving down south in the 50s and 60s, then overseas. Then the Canadians started flooding us with cheap subsidized lumber, lobster and potatoes. Now for some reason lumber is super expensive even though the whole state is trees. Toilet paper is a buck a roll even though it's still made in Gorham, NH. The potatoes in our grocery stores come from Idaho. Our signature industry, lobstering is in trouble due to federal right whale regulations. When I worked on a lobster boat 30 years ago off-road diesel fuel was 80 cents/ gallon, a barrel of herring bait was $25 and the boat price dropped to 2.00/ lb. when the soft shells started showing up in mid-summer. Now fuel is $3.99, bait is $200 and the price paid to the fisherman drops to $2.99 when the Canadians start dumping their lobster on us. Maine now has a seasonal service based tourist economy. Oh yeah, we also have legal weed. The price is crashing because of oversupply due to a gold rush mentality. I'm sure just like CO, the tax revenues are already shrinking. Even though southern, coastal Maine is booming we still have the 2nd lowest median income in the country after WV, the 4th highest tax burden, the most elderly population, the eighth worst economy, but some of the highest housing costs, electric rates and home heating costs. We also have a low unemployment rate, but a 59% labor participation rate. We have homeless people on the streets of Portland and living in the woods in small towns, a massive drug problem and an incompetent DHHS that is failing to protect children from abusive, drug addicted parents. We are letting in tons of illegals that we can't possibly afford to take care of and Mills wants 75,000 more, meanwhile we can't take care of our own poor. If Northern Maine became it's own state it would be by far the poorest state in the country. I feel like it won't get better due to the Democrat missionaries moving here from the failed east coast cities and still voting D because they reason that Maine is a blue state and look how beautiful, clean and crime free it is. They don't see all the hidden problems with the state that are not sustainable. Wealthy urban transplants don't care about high grocery and utility prices or high tax bills. They care about LGBT, racist names of places, changing the state flag and hating DJT.

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I grew up in Maine (Rangeley) and go back to visit every 5 years or so. Maine used to have Republican governors and legislatures. All the "hippies" moved there because it was so pristine and clean. I had moved out to “sail the seven seas”. However, the hippies wanted welfare, not jobs. When I returned after my stint in the Navy, Maine was an entirely different place. It was no longer home so I left, never to return other than to visit. Paul LePage tried to end the welfare but alas he was replaced by Janet Mills. My last visit to Maine was during covid. I ignored the signs to stay out. I felt like such an outlaw sneaking over the border in the middle of the night. Exhilarating!

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Breaks your heart! Such salt of the earth people. Hard working honest people.

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Maine’s beautiful. Love mid coastal Maine, Camden, Rockport etc.

Portland I don’t care for - woke, somewhat grimy downtown , and a lot of drugs. I got hit in a rental car two years back while driving the family to dinner (vacation) by a tweaker while getting on a freeway on ramp. Who rides a bike on a freeway on ramp? A druggie. Weird but true. He rammed the back passenger quarter panel, tumbled off his bike. I pulled over to see if he was ok. He was already up and riding away. Did about $3500 to the rental car. I drove back to the Air BnB and called the cops. Older officer came out and took the accident report. He told me that he was working a lot of overtime because the energy costs to heat his house in winter were so high he couldn’t afford it. He’s been a cop there for over 20 years. He cares for a disabled adult son by himself. I felt really badly for him.

Maine has a lot of natural beauty and the rural areas and small towns are charming. But you can see a lot of decay, empty commercial buildings in some of the towns , and yes, a lot of marijuana dispensaries. It became a standing joke on our vacations that the main roadside businesses in rural Maine were beauty parlors in peoples’ houses and pot dispensaries. You also have a very high cancer rate there, for which I have no explanation.

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Love vacationing in mid coast Maine, absolutely beautiful! Mt Katahdin also. Portland is a shithole. That's so funny about the in-home hair salons, my wife and I both laughed when we read that. They are as Maine as Allen's Coffee Brandy, the Champagne of Maine. (apparently surpassed now by Fireball) The cancer rate, who knows, radon, a formerly extremely high smoking rate, alcoholism, super hard well water, working in shipyards???

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Sep 2Liked by Don Surber

Portuguese author Antonio Lobo Antunes said that under Salazar's thumb the people of Portugal couldn't talk politics or even kiss in public -- but heroin was really cheap. Because if you were stoned you didn't have the energy to start a revolution.

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Sep 2Liked by Don Surber

I have memories of my mother calling from the bottom of the stairs “It’s Labor Day!” She had a different view of what her boys should be doing on Labor Day and it didn’t involve a trip to the beach.

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I assume you inherited her sense of humor.

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Sep 2Liked by Don Surber

POLL

Would McDonald's hire Kamala back? Another wife-beating question. It assumes she once actually worked there.

I had a machine shop for 30 yrs (until the feds, in their infinite wisdom closed me down). I always celebrated Labor Day with joy, by working and not being bothered by the phone.

And for the record- it was readin’, ‘ritin, and route 23.

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Yes,,, I noted that correction as well; from Hillbilly Elegy- a must read; then watch the movie. Compare JD Vance with the Minnesota wanna-be VP.... no comparison. Anyone with half a brain knows that one of these guys will be one heartbeat away from the Presidency. Make it JD.

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This is a great editorial post and a sad but true tale about our country. We used to build tangible goods that worked. The biggest industrial power in the world. Then the powers that be offshored as much as possible to arbitrage labor costs and got into the construction of financial Rube Goldberg contraptions- derivatives, zero percent interest rates, unfathomable underwriting of loans, to spit out billionaires. The politicians got to keep the gold dust they swept from the billionaire factory and the U.S. Treasury printing presses. The regular Joe got screwed for generations. In the process we are destroying the middle class. That should tell you everything you need to know about our ruling class, Democrat and Republican.

The country does one of two things now - limps along into more Socialism and its inevitable miasma of envy and misery or it pulls its head up and out of the Commie fantasy toilet and gets to work. I know things are bad in many parts of the middle of the country. You don’t get the boomers retiring or the tourists or the majority of the tech startups. These aren’t glamorous locations. Never have been. But reality is undefeated and high prices, technology evolution, financial markets too big to control permanently, and the American desire to be the best, which is not entirely dead among Americans who love America will force change.

Some people may need to move again. This has always been a country of mobile folks willing to go where the opportunity lay. It still is.

In Arizona industrial activity is booming. We led the nation in new manufacturing facilities last year. It’s not tired or glass, although Corning is building a plant out here I believe. It’s massive chip fabs and related suppliers . TSM ( Taiwan semiconductor ) is investing $65 billion dollars here. Intel another $20 billion dollars, etc. so the economy is evolving. Car companies, aerospace, all kinds of stuff is growing. The point is, as the man in the Monty Python Black Death scene says “But I’m not dead yet.”

https://youtu.be/Jdf5EXo6I68?si=gj85T8Ezd3x7VkH-

We aren’t dead yet. As much as the DC blob would like us to be. We have a malicious ruling class. They are deliberately destroying the country and Europe as well, because they stupidly believe it serves their interests. It’s madness and it’s evil. They need to be given pink slips. That’s what this election is about. That’s what the 2A is about if they try to keep shutting us up, lying to us, and restricting our natural rights. The Constitution, ever unpopular with the Commies, isn’t about what WE are allowed to do. It’s about what government IS NOT allowed to do. And we may have to enforce that law ourselves.

A criminal in power is still just a criminal.

There have been lots of unwinnable battles where the underdog won. David and Goliath is a thing. There have been unsinkable ships that hit icebergs and sank. The ruling class is dancing on the Titanic right now while their crooked politicians rearrange the deck chairs, and there are lots of icebergs looming in the dark. Just make sure you already have your lifeboat provisioned and ready to go. Because when that sucker goes down you don’t want to get dragged under. There will be regime change, one way or another. Let’s hope it’s peaceful.

But prepare for whatever these clowns have up their sleeves. We know from many events including but not limited to COVID,Ukraine, BLM , the border, the fentanyl, and the failed assassination of Donald Trump that they are not above murder and mayhem.

Trump/Vance 2024

Happy Labor Day. Time to sweep the trash off the shop floor.

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Vote Orange, it's the New Purple.

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Great post!

For those of us with a bit of cash and vision for the country, less busy from earlier careers and/or child rearing, there is a good opportunity to fund start ups too. Wherever we live.

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💯💯💯

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McDonald's couldn't hire Kamala "back" because she never actually worked there. You know freakin' dang well that if she had actually worked there, we'd already have the location of that franchise pinpointed, and we'd have already seen a slickly produced video feature/photo op with Kamala returning and being warmly greeted by the manager and the current staff.

They'd even have her don a McD outfit and get her behind the counter to serve an actor who was pretending to be a customer (all actual customers who were in the place that day would have been summarily rousted out and replaced by photogenic fake customers who exemplify "visible diversity", including someone in a wheelchair, a gay male couple, an interracial couple, and a lesbian in military fatigues).

It would be political gold. A photo of a smiling Kamala in her McD outfit would be featured above the fold in the NYT. Cover of TIME magazine. The story would be all over NPR. Kamala's one of us! Not like that silver-spoon Nazi Trump guy who never had to work a fast food job!

I think telling flat-out lies about one's past was normalized by FJB. He made so much stupid shit up and don't you know, it was just him being "relatable", doing it to be a warm-hearted guy who "embellishes" in order to connect with an audience. So now, we have two bald-faced liars lying about ridiculously inconsequential things as a matter of course.

Kamala and Tampon Tim are a perfect pair: blustery bullshitters, completely fake in every way.

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Sep 2Liked by Don Surber

Pretty hard to hire back someone you have never employed in the first place. I fear for this nation and pray THE GOOD LORD truly is giving America one last chance to return to morality and Christian teachings. As a working stiff all my life I was always bemused by the fact a holiday created for the working masses became a mini-vacay for suits while the peons kept the business open for business. Great food for thought and simple poll today(cat off?).Roll on Poca-Man and lead the pack to a MAGA 2024 election of PDJT/JDV in a victory too big to rig.

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Spot on Marlan. I pray the Lord gives us another chance. There are plenty of Godly people that still occupy this nation, though we aren’t in positions of power. Dear Lord, you spared nations if they found even a handful of your followers. Have mercy on us & this nation. We know you gave us this land hundreds of years ago & are still fighting to right this country.

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Sep 2Liked by Don Surber

I hope they will consider hiring her back cause after November she'll need a new job.

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If they did, she'd probably get fired (again?) since she doesn't want to do any real work.

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Even if she is in need of a job, McDonalds isn’t going to hire her to fry potatoes because she’ll want a couple hundred thousand dollar salary, full benefits, paid vacation and a staff of 47 people to do the work for her.

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I like your attitude!

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Sep 2Liked by Don Surber

Mr. Surber writes: "Oh, we still have 13 million factory workers. In 2022, they averaged weekly wages of $1,298.44. That’s almost what a teacher makes."

And one-half of what is made by the panhandler standing at the stoplight with a hand-drawn sign that says: "Hungry. Need food for my children. Please help." And it's all tax-free.

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The shoes…always check their shoes. An almost fail-proof method to spot the grifters.

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Good suggestion. I would not have thought of it, but it makes sense. Thanks.

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About that average weekly wage for the factory worker being $1,298.44 being almost what a teacher makes - shouldn't that be almost what a teacher makes in a month?

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sorry, I take that back - messed up my math!

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Great piece, Don. Yep, HW Bush talked about "The New World Order" and the rest of our political class has spent your wealth everywhere but here. Trump brought it back temporarily until they kicked him out and tried to kill him.

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Sep 2Liked by Don Surber

I got something to say. I've heard out of just about every politician mouth and other liars that "the American people deserve better. I say no. I say we get what we deserve. There was a time when the average 6th grade graduate could afford a family and a vacation every year and they ate meat three times a day and they could afford and did spend a major portion of their income on restaurants and play toys - motorcycle, boats, jet skis and snowmobiles as if as if as if the party would last forever. Our fathers and mothers taught us how to spend our money and now all the fun money is gone and we're broke. Not because the movers and shakers slipped on out the back door for places of more profit but because the 10% that each one owed himself wasn't saved and invested but spent on gigaws and now the rains come and were bitching cause its wet.

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“The Road Goes On Forever, And The Party Never Ends.” And yet, here we are. Sad.

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That's nearly biblical, isn't it? I've been wondering what I could have done to cause the Obamanation of America a few liars ago. No satisfactory answer except the one about getting what's good for us. Like that switch Mama made me go pull off a tree just before she whupped me with it. If it wasn't substantial enough for her, she stomp outside and get one more to her liking. :)

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I'm almost back to normal.? I'll get to go home tomorrow.

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Sep 2Liked by Don Surber

Bless you Rev and good health forward my friend .

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Steady as she goes, ol' paint! Saddle up and ride.

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