Once again Donald ducks out of a debate. This time to stage a rally at a non-union auto plant in a lame effort to show his support for "working-class Americans." Only what followed was the usual gobbledygook we have come to expect from Trump. After all, how can you be a Republican and pro-union? His opponents went to great lengths siding themselves with the auto companies at the debate, blaming the UAW strike on Biden, who actually joined the picket line on Tuesday. It was hard to tell from Trump's crowd how many were actually auto workers.
At this point, it amazes me that any working-class American supports the Republican party. The GOP has done everything possible to undermine their income, safety standards, health care and pensions in the name of record corporate profits. Republicans made Michigan and Wisconsin into "Right-to-Work" states so that companies no longer have to hire union workers. It was only this year that Michigan repealed this law after Democrats retook the state legislature in 2022. Yet, Trump still won a number of blue-collar districts in 2020, which shows that working-class Americans continue to vote against their best interests based on their loathing for gays, feminists and communists, which literally have no bearing on their lives.
I've been reading the obituaries, so to speak, for Rupert Murdoch who has ceded control of his media empire to his son Lachlan. At 92 he doesn't have too many years left and seems to want to make it as unfettered as possible from the gigantic mess he left behind. Kara Swisher was on Amanpour last night and said that he is almost singularly responsible for making conservative media into a hate-filled crucible that has energized a mostly elderly demographic, including her mother, to blame all the world's ills on marginal groups that are seen as a threat to society. It was like Murdoch used the movie Network as a template for his media empire.
By turning everything upside down, it is almost impossible for people to now differentiate fact from fiction. I ran into this on facebook where a conservative friend posted a meme in which Zuckerberg apparently labeled fact checking "just opinion." I say apparently as it is a pretty sloppy meme. I tried to be polite and pointed out that fact checking is the only means we have of trying to correct the many false stories circulating through social media. Not surprisingly, I was labeled a libtard and a communist by her angry friends. They seem to believe they should be free to say anything they want on social media and that fact checking is a form of censorship. Well, I said, does that mean teachers are libtards and communists too?
At least Zuckerberg tries to keep some sort of editorial control over facebook. Elon Musk no longer believes in any. He recently posted on X that he has disabled the general option to report misleading electoral information, a move that has drawn sharp criticism with many elections ahead worldwide. Most countries do have laws against spreading misinformation. Not the US of course. Ronald Reagan saw to that back in the 1980s when he undermined the Fairness Doctrine. Many felt this paved the way for tabloid journalism like Fox News and our current social media.
Reagan was also a big union buster, as presidential hopeful Tim Scott pointed out at the debate. The South Carolina senator whole-heartedly supported the way Reagan came down on air traffic controllers back in 1981, and believes auto companies should do the same with UAW workers, turning it into a catch phrase, "you strike, you're fired." It may be a "simple concept" but one that doesn't work that well in reality. It's hard to come up with new workers on such short notice as Hollywood found out when its writers went on strike. After five months the studios and Writers Guild of America finally reached an agreement, which is how these things generally work out, usually to everyone's benefit. You might call this collective bargaining, a fundamental right of all Americans.
Unfortunately, we have become so far more removed from normal dialog, thanks to Fox and social media, that it is impossible to have a polite conversation anymore. Participants very quickly resort to hyperbole and other forms of rhetoric to loudly make their points, as we saw in the latest GOP debate. There is no attempt to actually deal with issues, we just use them as springboards to vent our grievances.
No one is better at this than "Donald Duck," as Chris Christie called him. When he starts foaming at the mouth you never know what will come out of it like "windmills kill whales," which quickly become popular memes. Trump really hates alternative energy, being the big oil guy, that he will come up with any excuse to go after wind turbines or solar panels. I suppose he worries that environmental activists might ground his airplane, which he flies around in like its Air Force One. Most of his devotees still consider him the commander-in-chief, referring to him as Mr. President.
Unfortunately, these "meme-able" moments come to dominate the news, as Andrew Neil pointed out on Amanpour. Of course he regaled in such headlines when he was editor of the Times of London, one of the many papers owned by Murdoch. Now he tells us we should call out Trump harshly. Not allow him to get away with these soundbites just because they boost television ratings.
This kind of fractured environment makes it very difficult for anyone to get more than a few minutes of airtime to legitimately present their grievances. The UAW is right to question why workers see so little of the record profits reported by auto companies. The Big Three are forecast to make a staggering $32 billion in profits this year alone. A 40% hike in wages is not too much to ask, even if it may seem absurd to a guy like Tim Scott.
The biggest problem is that the American auto companies remain slow to change. EV's are still a novelty to them despite record sales worldwide. They continue to produce the same clunky automobiles with most of their profits generated through their financing services. I suppose for this reason they don't feel they owe the assembly line workers anything.
Unfortunately, the UAW has taken aim at EV cars themselves, fearing that producing more electric cars will result in layoffs as there are less parts in an EV car than there are in a typical internal combustion engine car. One would imagine the volume of production would more than make up for the lack of parts, if this is even true.
Not surprisingly, Musk jumped in but not in the way you would imagine. He railed against the pay raise and work week demands as bankrupting the Big Three, not the reticence to switch to EV auto production, which the Biden administration has been promoting. You even wonder why he cares as it would only increase demand for his non-union cars.
None of it will soon matter as attention will drift to something else. We don't need any more new cars with nearly 300 million registered vehicles on the road in the US. Certainly not ones with internal combustion engines. Also, it is cheaper to convert your old ICE car into an EV car with conversion kits than it is to buy a new EV car. A typical conversion kit runs between 8 and 10 thousand dollars. The typical EV car around $40,000. If you want a Tesla prepare to pay upwards of 70 grand. Of course there are more and more used EV cars on the market but not enough go around.
However, strong biases remain and this was what Trump preyed on. He blamed the auto workers' plight on EV cars despite the simple concept that this is the only direction auto makers have to go given the greatly increased demand. A large part of our grievances stem from our unwillingness to move forward, and no one better epitomizes this intransigence than Donald "Duck" Trump.
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