Joe Magarac Images

There are plenty around, but they are copyrighted so we had to make our own. Some people may ask whether Joe Magarac NEEDS a hard hat and safety glasses (since he is made from steel) but, given our background in industrial safety, we will have him set a good example. The “zero emission steel mill” is in Bethlehem PA, which underscores our country’s problem. (Click for full sized images)

Joe Magarac and steel factory

Joe Magarac at Bethlehem Steel

Joe Magarac Wants His Job (and his Democratic Party) Back

A New (and Old) Vision Statement for the Democratic Party

Larry Johnson’s No Quarter, PUMA (People United Means Change), Just Say No Deal, Clintondems.com, Steve Corbett’s Operation Turndown, and countless other organizations and individual Democrats are all saying “NO” to their party’s nominee. This year’s acrimonious primary underscores the widening division between the Democratic Party’s traditional base (middle class and often blue collar workers) and the party’s extreme left, as embodied by MoveOn.org.

So far, the above entities have the negative goal of turning down Obama, who is clearly out of touch with the party’s base. This blog introduces a positive vision statement that disgruntled Democrats and like-minded Republicans can use to save the United States from economic disaster–a disaster that will be certain if we do not stop and reverse the loss of manufacturing capability to China and other offshore competitors. Joe Magarac wants his job back and, to get it, he has to take his party back from MoveOn.org, George Soros, and their fellow travelers.

Joe Magarac is the Paul Bunyan of the steel industry, and he was originally a folk figure for whom both Hungarian and Croatian immigrants took credit. (U.S. Steel later adopted him as an advertising icon as “Joe, the Genie of Steel.”) “Magarac” is Croatian for “Donkey,” which probably relates to Joe Magarac’s work ethic–and it also happens to be the Democratic Party’s symbol. “Joe Donkey” can therefore represent not only the steel industry, but all manufacturing and extractive industries, and the blue collar workers who make them work. When Barack Obama talked about “bitter” small town Pennsylvanians who “cling to guns and religion,” he was talking about “Joe Donkey,” and it’s bad medicine to “disrespect” a giant steelworker with 21 electoral votes at his command!

Furthermore, according to some legends, Joe Magarac lies asleep in an abandoned steel mill, “waiting for the day that the furnace burns again.” This symbolizes the need to revitalize the United States’ heavy industries, which are the foundation of the country’s economic and military security. We can therefore add Henry Ford’s basic and unquestionable principles to our vision statement.

(1) Henry Ford made the United States the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth.

• This is a statement of proven results, as opposed to an empty slogan like “Hope and Change.”
• Ford’s industrial methods, which are now known as lean manufacturing and the Toyota production system (Taiichi Ohno admits openly that he learned about lean manufacturing from Ford), created the blue collar middle class that makes up the Democratic Party’s base.
• Ford’s industries were so productive that he reduced the work week to forty hours and five days. It was previously common for people to work six days a week, and up to twelve hours a day. Ford’s wages were so high, though, that workers made more in 40 hours than they previously made in 72.
• Ford’s industries (e.g. the Willow Run bomber factory) overwhelmed the Axis with an endless supply of weapons and munitions during the Second World War. A cartoon of the First World War, in fact, portrayed Henry Ford as the Kaiser’s most dangerous adversary.

(2) There are exactly three ways to create wealth: grow it, mine it, or make it.

• Houses are not sources of wealth, despite advertising pitches about how one can use one’s home as a “source of cash” with which to fund vacations, second cars, and so on. This illusion came crashing down like a house of cards in 2007, in which home prices actually dropped below the amount that borrowers owed on them. Joe Magarac creates wealth; dot-com stocks, investment banks, and so on do not.
• The stock market does not produce wealth. It merely exchanges ownership in enterprises that will hopefully produce wealth. As shown by the crashes of various financial firms, anything that does not actually mine, grow, or make something is a questionable investment, although poorly-managed manufacturing firms also can fail.

(3) A Square Deal for Workers and Employers

• Henry Ford summarized effective industrial and labor relations in one sentence: “It ought to be the employer’s ambition, as leader, to pay better wages than any similar line of business, and it ought to be the workman’s ambition to make this possible” (My Life and Work, 1922).
• Although Ford disliked unions (a major part of the Democratic Party’s base), he recognized that they were legitimate responses to “bosses who never did a decent thing for their employees until they were compelled” (My Life and Work, 1922). Ford’s own workers neither needed nor wanted a union until Ford turned management of his company over to executives who went against Ford’s own principles. As an example, Ford knew that laying off workers due to productivity improvements is the kiss of death to any lean manufacturing initiative, and he had a strict rule against it. By 1936, though, after Ford was no longer running the business, executives found ways to circumvent this rule without actually breaking it (per Upton Sinclair’s The Flivver King).

Does Henry Ford sound, well, Republican? After all, Ford also said,

When you get a whole country—as did ours—thinking that Washington is a sort of heaven and behind its clouds dwell omniscience and omnipotence, you are educating that country into a dependent state of mind which augers ill for the future.

This is absolutely true, and the consequences of such thinking are evident in Europe’s welfare states. As an example, employers are moving jobs out of France because France mandates 40 hours of pay for 35 hours of work (and there is even a story about French police whose job is to catch people who work more than 35 hours, for the purpose of fining their employers). Social Security is meanwhile proving to be a pyramid scheme, and our legislators have no real idea as to how they are going to fulfill the government’s obligation to everyone who paid into the system.

On the other hand, Ford would have had no tolerance whatsoever for corporate welfare. Protectionist laws that inhibit Americans from purchasing medications from legitimate Canadian pharmacies exist to enrich the pharmaceutical companies at Americans’ expense. This is corporate welfare at the expense of the American people.

In summary, Joe Magarac wants his job back, the United States needs to have him get his job back and, to do this, Joe Magarac needs to take back the Democratic Party. We therefore propose the name “Joe Magarac Democrats” for this movement.