What does a TRUMP presidency look like?

[jimmy olsen]

There won't be enough construction workers to rebuild Houston

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2017/08/28/houston_might_not_have_enough_construction_workers_to_rebuild_after_harvey.html

Enough Construction Workers to Rebuild Houston After Harvey

By Daniel Gross

Will there be enough workers to fix this?

The disaster that is Tropical Storm Harvey is still ongoing. It will be some time before the waters recede and the effect on Houston can be fully assessed. But it is already clear the damage to property will be immense. Tens of thousands of structures were impacted by floodwaters. Eventually, Houston will require massive cleanup, demolition, and reconstruction of individual homes, large buildings, and infrastructure.

The first concern will be the financial resources necessary: Will insurance companies cover all the losses, and how much of them? How will the federal government's heavily indebted flood insurance program come up with the cash to pay claims? And how much additional assistance will the federal government provide?

There's another problem: a lack of human resources. It takes a lot of labor to remove debris after a storm and then reinstall Sheetrock and drywall, rebuild floors, and fix electrical and plumbing systems. The work is resistant to automation. And it is but one way in which Houston, which was poorly situated to deal with a hurricane, may also be poorly situated to recover from it.

The issue is that the United States is suffering from a shortage of workers generally, and specifically from a shortage of workers with some of the necessary skills to assist in disaster recovery.

Let's review. With the U.S. economy having created jobs for a record 82 months, there are 146.6 million people with payroll jobs. The unemployment rate is 4.3 percent. At the end of June, the Labor Department reports, there were a record 6.16 million jobs open in the U.S. (That compares with about 4 million in August 2005, when Katrina hit.) Put another way, it's harder to find labor in the U.S. right now than at any point in recent history.

But that's not the whole story. There are particular shortages in the types of trades that get called into action after a disaster. America's construction labor force has undergone a sea change in the past decade. When the housing bust came, hundreds of thousands of roofers and other skilled and unskilled tradespeople were laid off. Because the recovery was remarkably slow, many went on to find work in different industries. Many construction workers had come to the United States (legally and illegally) from Mexico and Central America to work in the boom years, and in the bust years some of them went home. Others were deported. And in recent years, the flow of new potential workers has slowed down significantly. The result: As the U.S. housing and construction recovery has chugged on, it has become more difficult to hire construction workers. In June, there were some 225,000 open construction jobs in the U.S., up 31 percent from June 2016.

All over the United States, in Colorado, in Nebraska, and elsewhere, construction companies have been complaining that they can't find enough labor to do their job. The National Association of Home Builders reports that 77 percent of builders are facing a shortage of framing crews while 61 percent are grappling with a shortage of drywall installation workers and 45 percent report a shortage of weatherization workers. The problem is particularly acute in Texas, where the housing industry has been powered by consistent population and job growth and whose service industries are disproportionately reliant on immigrant labor. Last fall, as the Wall Street Journal reported, "In Dallas, the King of Texas Roofing Co. says it has turned down $20 million worth of projects in the past two years because it doesn't have enough workers."

In the aftermath of natural disasters, first responders and recovery crews flood the zone on a temporary basis. But reconstruction, cleanup, and recovery requires many thousands of workers who can stay for many months or more. FEMA Administrator Brock Long told CNN that "FEMA is going to be there for years." Houston will require a surge of employment—tens of thousands of people. It will have to find places for them to live, since so much of the housing stock is damaged. And it will likely have to pay them above-market wages, because it will need to lure them away from existing jobs.

And given the Trump administration's hostility to Latinos and desire to ramp up deportations, it's unlikely that what worked in previous disasters will work again. Back in 2007, the Washington Post reported on a Tulane and University of California, Berkeley, study that found some 100,000 Hispanic workers thronged into the Gulf Coast region in the wake of Katrina, many of them undocumented.

Houston will need a similar migration for it to recover. In 2017, from where will those workers come?

[garbon]

Get it, Seeds!

[CountDeMoney]

Oh yeah, I'm the guy you want on your roof.

[garbon]

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/29/stormfront-neo-nazi-hate-site-murder-internet-pulled-offline-web-com-civil-rights-action

Stormfront: 'murder capital of internet' pulled offline after civil rights action

One of the oldest and largest neo-nazi sites on the internet, the white supremacist chatroom Stormfront, has been thrown off the open web by its hosting provider.
Stormfront has been described by the anti-hate group Southern Poverty Law Center as the "murder capital of the internet". The group pointed out that "registered Stormfront users have been disproportionately responsible for some of the most lethal hate crimes and mass killings since the site was put up in 1995. In the past five years alone, Stormfront members have murdered close to 100 people."

As of Tuesday morning, Stormfront.org was unavailable, with the site's domain registry recording that its hosting provider Network Solutions had issued a "hold" on the address.

Stormfront's removal comes a week after a letter, informing Network Solution's parent company Web.com of the neo-nazi site's infractions of the its usage policy, was sent by the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a civil rights organisation formed at the request of John F Kennedy in 1963.

The group, which has been writing to Web.com repeatedly since early July, repeated its request of the company to take "immediate action" against Stormfront.

Becky Monroe, the director of the group's Stop Hate project said: "Since its creation, Stormfront has been consistently recognised as a site for racial hatred ... a representative sample of posts on the site refer to interracial couples by slurs, share racist caricatures, or otherwise dehumanises minorities by referring to them as 'creatures' or 'ethnics'.

"It is clear that Stormfront's reason for existing is to advance hateful racist ideologies in undeniable persistent violation of the acceptable use policy of Web.com."

The letter closes by giving a deadline of August 28, the same day Stormfront lost its site.

"Especially in the wake of tragic events in Charlottesville and the spike in hate crimes across the country, Stormfront crossed the line of permissible speech and incited and promoted violence," said Kristen Clarke, executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

The move follows the downfall of the Daily Stormer, a far-right news site which was dropped by multiple service providers after it published an article smearing the victim of a far-right terrorist attack in Charlottesville, Virginia. Eventually, the site was forced to move to the so-called dark web due to the lack of companies willing to work with it publicly.

As with the withdrawal of the Daily Stormer's domain by GoDaddy, the decision of Web.com to pull its support for Stormfront will likely prompt a game of cat and mouse for the site, as it attempts to re-register its domain name with new registrars, many of whom will also choose to refuse to serve the forum.

Don Black, a former Ku Klux Klan leader who has operated stormfront.org since 1995 said that he was seeking counsel and that: "I can switch to another domain, but it might wind up the same way."

It will also prompt a new round of debate over just how critical private companies are to free speech on the internet – even when the free speech is on the part of white supremacists and neo-nazis.

"This is a really terrible time to be a free speech advocate," Jillian York, director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation told the Guardian on Monday.

Web.com did not reply to a request for comment.

[The Brain]

What do you need to set up your own hosting provider?

[derspiess]

DON'T ANSWER GUYS

[viper37]

What do you need to set up your own hosting provider?

lots of time, lots of money, lots of servers all accross the world to seed up access for a few million users.

Good thing it's down, even if it has some drawbacks.

[Jacob]

Seems Trump is impressed with the crowds at his Texas rally.

During his visit to Texas in response to Hurricane Harvey, President Trump told a crowd gathered outside a Corpus Christi firehouse, "What a crowd. What a turnout," according to media reports.

Trump had met with local officials inside the firehouse. Corpus Christi was among the cities hard hit by the Category 4 storm.

Shortly after arriving Tuesday morning, Trump said in a press conference he hoped the response to Harvey would serve as an example in future disasters.

"Nobody has seen something like this," Trump said, flanked by First Lady Melania Trump, and Gov. Greg Abbott. "We won't say congratulations. We don't want to do that. We'll congratulate each other when it's all finished."

The president said he hoped citizens would look back at how government officials handled Harvey five or 10 years from now and say, "This is the way to do it."

http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local/article/President-Trump-visiting-Corpus-Christi-Austin-12132704.php

[Syt]

At least he's doing better than Obama during Hurricane Katrina. Err ....

[The Brain]

They have a good point. You can't have GOP in the White House.

[Valmy]

Do they really have a record of what a Senator from Illinois was doing during Katrina? Heck what was Trump doing during Katrina?

[Jacob]

Do they really have a record of what a Senator from Illinois was doing during Katrina? Heck what was Trump doing during Katrina?

It's a thing - trying to pretend Obama was the president then. Apparently someone thought it'd fool the ignorant, and it seems it might be working.

[garbon]

http://thehill.com/homenews/media/348400-melania-trumps-office-slams-media-for-worrying-about-her-shoes-during

Melania Trump's office slams media for focus on her shoes during Harvey trip

First lady Melania Trump's office on Tuesday morning fired back at reporters who criticized her attire while heading to Texas to visit the areas damaged by Hurricane Harvey, saying it is "sad" that some people are concerned about fashion during a national disaster.

Trump's communications director in a statement released to CNN ripped reporters for being "worried about her shoes" during an "active and ongoing natural disaster."

The statement from Trump's office comes after a score of media reports earlier emerged centering on the first lady's stiletto-style shoes, which the Mirror called "the most inappropriate clothes imaginable" in a headline.

"The First Lady was savaged for donning aviators and a towering pair of stiletto heels as she began the journey today," the article reads.

"The President didn't do much better - donning a cream-coloured pair of trousers that appeared to resemble golfing chinos under his rain jacket."
Other news outlets were less critical but still focused on the Trumps' choice of clothing.

The Daily Beast pointed out Melania Trump's "sky-high stilettos" in a headline, and mocked the first lady by suggesting she had "waterproofed" the shoes before heading off to Houston.

"To be fair, they are very good shoes. But are high stilettos really the best footwear for visiting an area that is experiencing massive flooding?" The Daily Beast asked in its article.
...

Good on her office.

[CountDeMoney]

Jackie would've never worn that.

[Eddie Teach]

Do they really have a record of what a Senator from Illinois was doing during Katrina? Heck what was Trump doing during Katrina?

Probably golfing.