JeffBoat will close, riverside condos will proliferate, and we'll gather at the luxury dog park for a few bowls.

From NA Confidential on October 21, 2016:

Launching a barge is routine if you work at Jeff Boat (American Commercial Barge Line). After all, there's one each day, no champagne required. It's interesting to observe as a first-time viewer, as my Leadership Southern Indiana class did on Wednesday.

There are fascinating facts aplenty about ACBL/Jeff Boat, but this one does it for me: There's been a shipyard operating here continuously since 1834, as founded by the Howard family.

It flabbergasts me that as recently as the autumn of 2016, the narrative we were hearing during our segment at ACBL was one of unimpeded invincibility: 365 new barges per year, tugboats on the way, send us your trained welders ...and so on.

Now we're told the over-supply (and under-demand) of barges is such that it's cheaper to buy used than new, which seems to suggest that flooding the market with new barges might not have been such a good idea in the first place.

I don't know. As a skeptic, I can't help wondering whether there's an untold story here, like this closing always having been the design since ACBL acquired JeffBoat.

At the same time, the Ohio River shoreline currently occupied by the shipyard automatically becomes one of the hottest properties in the region for redevelopment, and perhaps greater than Colgate in Clarksville.

It boggles the mind. At least here in NA, we have an aquatic park. Like Rodney said on Caddyshack ...

 ... except for the welders, that is.

Jeffboat to shut down following rounds of layoffs, by David A. Mann (Louisville Business First)

Barge manufacturer Jeffboat LLC is set to close.

Louisville-based Teamsters Local 89, which represents workers there, was told about the closure last night after employees were informed, union president Fred Zuckerman said in an interview Saturday morning. According to Zuckerman, there are about 150 employees left at Jeffboat, but the operation will fully shutdown by the end of May. The union will start bargaining with management immediately to make determinations about issues such as severance, he said.

Management explained to the employees that a surplus of barges has meant that it's cheaper for Jeffboat customers to buy used rather than new, WDRB-TV reported last night.

"My relatives in Maine are deplorables. I cannot write on their behalf. I can write in their defense."

NAC modification of cartoon by Mr. Fish, from the article.

Bring out your dead ...

Denial is not a river in Egypt, although in Nawbany, you'll hear it played more often than "I'll Be Numb for Christmas."

We Are All Deplorables, by Chris Hedges (TruthDig via Common Dreams)

My relatives in Maine are deplorables. I cannot write on their behalf. I can write in their defense. They live in towns and villages that have been ravaged by deindustrialization. The bank in Mechanic Falls, where my grandparents lived, is boarded up, along with nearly every downtown store. The paper mill closed decades ago. There is a strip club in the center of the town. The jobs, at least the good ones, are gone. Many of my relatives and their neighbors work up to 70 hours a week at three minimum-wage jobs, without benefits, to make perhaps $35,000 a year. Or they have no jobs. They cannot afford adequate health coverage under the scam of Obamacare. Alcoholism is rampant in the region. Heroin addiction is an epidemic. Labs producing the street drug methamphetamine make up a cottage industry. Suicide is common. Domestic abuse and sexual assault destroy families. Despair and rage among the population have fueled an inchoate racism, homophobia and Islamophobia and feed the latent and ever present poison of white supremacy. They also nourish the magical thinking peddled by the con artists in the Christian right, the state lotteries that fleece the poor, and an entertainment industry that night after night shows visions of an America and a lifestyle on television screens—“The Apprentice” typified this—that foster unattainable dreams of wealth and celebrity ...

 ... I finished my book with a deep dislike for megachurch pastors who, like Trump, manipulate despair to achieve power and wealth. I see the Christian right as a serious threat to an open society. But I do not hate those who desperately cling to this emotional life raft, even as they spew racist venom. Their conclusion that minorities, undocumented workers or Muslims are responsible for their impoverishment is part of the retreat into fantasy. The only way we will blunt this racism and hatred and allow them to free themselves from the grip of magical thinking is by providing jobs that offer adequate incomes and economic stability and by restoring their communities and the primacy of the common good. Any other approach will fail. We will not argue or scold them out of their beliefs. These people are emotionally incapable of coping with the world as it is. If we demonize them we demonize ourselves.