The publicity stunt that was Trump Saves Carrier Jobs comes as he appoints people like Tom Price (for Health and Human Services) to work with Paul Ryan and Congressional Republicans to privatize Social Security and turn Medicare into a shitty health insurance program. The fine print of the Carrier deal still allowed the company to export 1300 jobs to Mexico, saving a 1,000, while getting $7 million in tax breaks. If Mike Pence thinks Indiana can afford to give away money like that, why not give the laid off workers $700,000 apiece? They might do more good with it.
Yet Trump still found time to tweet against flag burning, suggesting the unconstitutional measure of banning it and revoking the citizenship of offenders. (That Hillary Clinton as Senator had once proposed jail time and a $1000 fine for flag burners doesn’t make it a good idea; it just means that centrist Democrats suck.) This is classic Trump Distraction, and as Holly Wood points out at Medium, it’s class racist dog whistling, too.
To be clear, I am glad 1,000 people got to keep decent paying manufacturing jobs. I know too many people whose parents had had great careers in factories and retired well, but the next generation found themselves stuck in Wal-Mart, earning far less than their folks had earned. It’s pretty depressing. So you might think I would applaud Trump for his tactics; but it’s faux populism, it rewards corporations for half measures, incentivizes blackmail for future companies looking to depress factory wages or bust unions, and expects state governments to write off corporate taxes so local politicians can brag they saved jobs.
It does nothing to actually keep organized labor in good paying manufacturing work. It does nothing to bring that kind of work “back”. Because in the end Trump will be a tool of globalization. He belongs to a class of global billionaires who profit from exploiting labor as cheaply as possible. This is so nakedly obvious I am still gobsmacked that he gets a reputation among working class voters as their champion. He’s not. He will use racist tactics to divide the working class and set workers against each other, while selling out their collective interests to the owners and the bosses.
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