Trump's Con Revealed with Carrier Deal
Some people support Donald Trump because they are racists. Others look past his racism because they are hurting economically and hate crony capitalism and want to overturn the apple cart. Many of us understood Trump to be a bigoted fraud, but for those who bought into the notion that Trump is rough around the edges but in it for the every man, the Carrier story should be illuminating:
A viral video of a Carrier executive breaking the sad news to workers that their jobs were going to Mexico came to Trump’s attention. He adopted the promise to keep Carrier from outsourcing those jobs as a key cog of his stump speech (as it were).
Post-election, Trump claimed that he didn’t remember making any promises at all to those carrier Carrier workers. He insisted that Carrier was just a stand-in term for manufacturing jobs in general. But, he said that he was motivated to follow through on the promise he didn’t recall making when he saw a cable news story about a Carrier employee who was upset with him for failing to follow through. Being the benevolent leader that he is, Trump stepped in and announced that he had struck a deal to save 1100 jobs.
Because corporate media are whores for power on an all-encompassing mission to feign neutrality and not offend, they parroted Trump’s lies.
US Steelworkers Union Local 1999 President Chuck Jones clarified that the actual number of jobs saved is 730, as 350 of those jobs were never planned to leave in the first place. Though Trump kept 730 jobs in Indiana (and there’s no guarantee that they’ll stay more than a short while), 550 jobs of hardworking Americans are still being outsourced, as Carrier is still moving fan coil lines to Monterrey, Mexico.
Not only did Trump expose himself by misrepresenting the number of jobs. In his repeated riffs, Trump used tough talk about slapping 35% tariffs on multinational corporation that dare outsource American jobs on his watch.
Instead, Trump was swindled out of $7m – funneling money from of the pockets of Indiana tax payers onto the balance sheets of crony capitalists. Trump had leverage in negotiations because Carrier has government contracts. Rather than using the leverage that he may or may not even realize exists, Trump established a system in which companies simply need threaten to move any number of jobs in order to extort him, and by extension the American tax payer.
Trump is a terrible negotiator. He is a perpetual failure of a businessman. Drain the swamp? He’s appointing billionaires, Goldman Sachs executives, and former employees of George Soros to his cabinet. He said the wall is really just a fence and that he’ll deport or jail 2.5-3 million people - fewer than Obama. He’s not going after Hillary Clinton; he tapped a general who wants to go to war with Iran as his secretary of defense. It’s only a matter of time before Trump supporters come to the realization that he is a con-man whose only interests are his personal fame, fortune, and ego.
