Much of the Trump momentum this week incentivizes auto and auto parts makers to cancel overseas plans for new plants and manufacture in the U. S. The scale of saved jobs is small but has public appeal. Like declaring you're for civil rights in North Carolina while gerrymandering districts to reduce the Black vote.
The price of supposed job re-capture is certain to be high. The President's first steps up the mountain of inequality include asking Foxconn--the largest manufacturer and assembler of computer parts in the world--to "think about" opening an assembly plant in Pennsylvania with as many as 30,00 to 50,000 new jobs.
Foxconn has employed millions of people the past five years---1.3 million people per year, mostly in China, with 300,000 workers just assembling Apples' I-phone. The horse of new jobs in the U. S. is long gone. Four years ago this blog documented Foxconn's notorious track record of exploitation of young peasants from the country side, housing them in on-site cramped barracks---80,000 at a time---with frequent worker suicides. It's still happening. The Wall Street Journal (8/21/16) reports six in one recent year, two this past year. The company is doubtless waiting for Pennsylvania to kick-in lots of financial subsidies from taxpayer pockets; like the subsidies cities pay to get their new sports arena built for billionaire team owners.
Last month the economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Sucman pictured the true size of the inequality mountain the billionaire president and his billionaire cabinet must climb.
The New Yorker last month noted the Piketty team's nine reasons for inequality. The first is: "The bottom half of the country has been shut out from income growth for 40 years."
Take time, gentle reader, to study the three graphs below released just a month ago. This is Trump's mountain to climb.
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"Those who cannot remember the past
are condemned to relive it" (Santayana)
After the 1963 MLK March on Washington there was a national glow similar to the Women's Marches last Saturday all across the country,. Different sound barriers were broken back then: that Blacks and Whites could actually march together; that a crowd of more than three Blacks would not riot. The march began surrounded by 6,000 troops because of that supposed article of wisdom in popular American culture. Like last Saturday's Women's March, the King march actually took on a picnic atmosphere filled back then with the throbbing music of Peter, Paul and Mary and Dr. King's "I have a dream" speech. How could anything go wrong after all that? Lots!
Within six months of the King March dominant white segregating America reasserted itself. Idealists became disillusioned. More segregated schools were built, Dr. King's marches in Chicago for fair housing attracted stone throwing mobs and death threats. Murders of civil rights workers were common, segregated schools were burned down by black kids who knew they were worthless; national guardsmen often occupied cities like Cleveland.
Many deaths and infamous assassinations followed in that era: Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, Dr. King, Bobby Kennedy.
Now, fifty-four years later, a dangerous strategy is falling into place as president Trump starts with half the country behind his anti media stance. While the giant Women's Marches were unfolding, the new President was speaking at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Although he recently had insulted the CIA with charges of practicing Nazism, the fix was in. They were Trump's allies. "It was chilling," wrote the Times' Jim Ruttenberg
"when Mr. Trump's assertion that reporters were "among the most dishonest people on earth" became an applause line for the crowd gathered to hear him speak in front of the memorial to fallen agents at C.I.A. headquarters."
By the same afternoon Trump's press secretary was berating assembled White House reporters lies and false reporting about the crowd size at the inauguration ceremony. So begins the potential to disenchant the idealism embodied in Saturday's fabulous Women's March.
Last Sunday morning Trump's White House Counselor, Kellyanne Conway, gave poised and devastatingly effective rejoinders to questions from Chuck Todd on Meet the Press, pointing to his own "alternative facts" such as the erroneous and untrue report that the bust of MLK, Jr, had been removed from the oval office. She also noted that media popularity was at 14 percent, below President Trump's 37 percent.
The quote above attributed to philosopher George Santayana was cited at the beginning of William L. Shirer's book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
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Correction: In my blog of January 17th I turned economist Anthony Atkinson into Atkins and also incorrectly attributed the quotation of Thomas Piketty to the New York Times, January 25, 2017 which was incorrect. The correct date was June 25, 2015.
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