Tell It To Al

Manufacturing does not have to disappear from the American landscape.

Robert Hamilton offers proof.

Mr. Hamilton, a friend I’ve known since high school, is making auto parts out of a small shop in Waukegan, Ill. His injection molding company, E2 Manufacturing Group LLC, is making parts for Ford, Chrysler and Maserati.

Click here to read my column on MarketWatch.

First Hurricane Sandy, then a bunch of people in Spandex, blowing into town.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg cancelled the New York City Marathon, late Friday, amid mounting criticism that he was insensitive to people who are still counting the bodies and digesting the damage from Hurricane Sandy.

My hotel is filled with runners who came here from all over the world to run this race. Nice job stringing them along, Mayor.

It was a difficult call, I suppose.

On one hand, resources – including power generators and police officers – were being diverted for the race.

On the other, the race generates about $340 million in the city. And it would also raise money for the relief efforts here.

The course runs through all five boroughs, beginning with the absolutely devastated Staten Island and ending in Manhattan’s relatively unscathed Central Park.

Some runners had already dropped out of the race out of respect for hurricane victims. Others seemed completely oblivious to the damage.

It’s the tale of two cities.

For anyone staying anywhere above 40th street in Manhattan, it’s like the hurricane didn’t even happen. Below 40th, the power is out and the streets are eerie, and some parts of New York are still underwater.

What do you think? Should Mayor Bloomberg have cancelled, or should he have let the race roll on?

Kids these days.

Do they really need a bank to finance a lemonade stand?

When I was a kid, well, we didn’t have Young Americans Bank. We considered ourselves lucky if we could find a cardboard box large enough to use as a kiosk.

These days, it seems kids selling lemonade need everything from a regulatory compliance officer to a written business plan.

Click here to read my column on MarketWatch.

Many Coloradans are shocked to find “another Columbine” at their doorstep.

I am not among them.

Nothing about our culture – and the elements that seem to create gun-weilding monsters – seems to have changed since Columbine.

If anything, they’ve gotten more intense with the disintegration of our economy.

You see the statements people put out. Everyone is “shocked and saddened.” I am only saddened.

Click here to read my column on Marketwatch.com.

A colleague of mine shot this photo of a graffitied mail drop in New York City.

Murder the rich?

Has class warfare taken a more violent turn? Or is this just one idiot with a marker?

You’d think with the Internet and social networking, scrawling violent anarchist suggestions on public property would be obsolete by now.

Do rich people walk by this box and shudder?

Do rich people in Manhattan even know they are rich?

I mean, what income level qualifies one as rich enough to be murdered? $100,000 a year? A million a year? Somewhere in between?

I could imagine a fairly well-paid executive passing by and thinking, “Yeah! Kill the rich!” thinking, his boss.

We’ve heard warnings for years that the gap between the rich and poor was widening, and that violence has always been the result of this sort of thing, historically.

But most Americans do not want to kill the rich. They want to be the rich.

I mentioned a Michigan lottery winner who continued to use food stamps in my last column in The Sunday Wall Street Journal.

On Monday, she was arrested on felony  fraud charges and now faces up to four years in prison. Click here to read the details from the Associated Press.

Beyond the obvious outrage factor, this story raises a lot of questions for me.

How does someone get so lucky as to win the lottery, and then so unlucky as to be tailed by a dogged TV reporter while continuing to use food stamps with more than $700,000 in the bank?

Did she say to her friends, “Winning the lottery isn’t going to change me one bit,” and mean it, literally?

How is it that a food stamp recipient often has an extra buck or two to blow on the lottery?

This lady should be shopping in a whole new class of  convenience stores. But no.

Now, for most of us, the lottery turns out to be a voluntary tax on the stupid. Calculating the odds of winning a particular game is like trying to measure the distance between stars. The whole idea of the game takes advantage of the poor – making them believe in a path to easy riches. Maybe anyone receiving public assistance should be banned from playing.

I enjoy watching someone down on their luck winning a jackpot. I’d rather see some  food stamp recipient get the prize, than some millionaire. But seriously? Food stamps for lotto winners?  And if she’s convicted, this lucky winner might be getting some free housing, too.

The protesters picketing Bank of America on Chicago’s LaSalle Street outnumbered some of the Occupy crowds I’ve seen on that same block.

They claimed the giant bank was wiping out their jobs , but the story is complicated.

The bank they were protesting has become a target of national outrage.

Meantime, the banker they work for is a local outrage.

The company were they are employed provides work for 1,400 people around the Chicago area, about 1,000 of whom are Hispanic. If the company is shut down, HR executive Queta Ramirez, left, will be one of the people handing out the pink slips.

Click here to read my column on MarketWatch.

There’s nothing more American than blue jeans, except that most of them are made in China, Mexico and just about every place else but America.

The exception is Round House Workwear, which has been making making jeans in Shawnee, Okla., since 1903, when it began outfitting railroad workers.

The company gets its denim from cotton mills in Texas, and its buttons and zippers from a company in Georgia.

This week, I talked to David Antosh, a third-generation jeans makers whose grandfather acquired Round House in the 1960s.

He’s proof we can still make things in America – even in the textile industry which faded away in America decades ago.

“A lot of people assume that nobody makes jeans here in the U.S.,” Antosh says. “If it were impossible, we wouldn’t be here.”

Click here to read my column on MarketWatch.

If the Occupy Wall Street protest holds on to Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park through the winter, it’s going to be because of people like Lauren DiGioia.

I met DiGioia, 26, around midnight in a nor’easter as she took  care of protesters around her.

She’d had a long day dealing with everything from wet bedding to hypothermia, but she was still serving hot chocolate with a smile on her face, even as others left the protest for the night.

DiGioia says the trying life of protesting in the park is better than the life she lived before. She joined the protest about a week after it began on Sept.17 and hasn’t looked back. Click here to read my column on MarketWatch.

Yes, it’s noisy. Yes, it’s messy.

It’s no wonder neighbors near New York’s Zuccotti Park are getting testy about the Occupy Wall Street, but Skip Blumberg who lives a few blocks away from the protest, says anyone who moved into this neighborhood should have known it’s been the site of many a ruckus throughout its history. “You should see what it’s like when the Yankees win the World Series,” Blumberg said.

Click here to read my column on MarketWatch. And watch me discuss the movement on the Wall Street Journal’s web show: