Sunday, December 17, 2023

SOCIALISM FOR WALL STREET - THIS IS HOW IT WORKS - General Motors Laying Off 1,300 Michigan Auto Workers After Raking in Millions from State’s Taxpayers

 

THE BELOW WAS PERPETRATED BY GAMER LAWYER BRIAN DEESE WHO WORKED OUT OF THE BIDEN REGIME FOR BIDEN'S BIGGEST PAYMASTER BLACKROCK.

That included the bailout of General Motors and Chrysler, based on a 50 percent cut in the pay of all newly hired autoworkers.

 Biden, long known as Delaware’s “senator from DuPont,” Biden served on committees that were most sensitive to the interests of the ruling class, including the Judiciary Committee and the Foreign Relations Committee. He supported the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, a milestone in the deregulation of the banks, and other right-wing measures. After nearly four decades in the Senate, Biden became Obama’s vice president, helping to oversee the massive bailout of Wall Street following the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent restructuring of class relations to benefit the rich. That included the bailout of General Motors and Chrysler, based on a 50 percent cut in the pay of all newly hired autoworkers.

 

THE OBAMA - BIDEN 'BAILOUT' OF G.M., WHICH COST

WORKERS HALF THEIR WAGES EVEN AS MGMT HAD

MASSIVE BONUSES APPROVED, WAS ORCHESTRATED BY

BLACKROCK'S GAMER LAWYER IN THE BIDEN WHITE

HOUSE BRIAN DEESE. 

BLACKROCK IS BRIBES SUCKER JOE BIDEN'S BIGGEST

BRIBESTER! JUST AS LARRY FINK WHAT THE PIG GAMER

LAWYER JOE BIDEN WILL DO FOR A COIN!

Biden, long known as Delaware’s “senator from DuPont,” Biden served on committees that were most sensitive to the interests of the ruling class, including the Judiciary Committee and the Foreign Relations Committee. He supported the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, a milestone in the deregulation of the banks, and other right-wing measures. After nearly four decades in the Senate, Biden became Obama’s vice president, helping to oversee the massive bailout of Wall Street following the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent restructuring of class relations to benefit the rich. That included the bailout of General Motors and Chrysler, based on a 50 percent cut in the pay of all newly hired autoworkers.

 

General Motors Laying Off 1,300 Michigan Auto Workers After Raking in Millions from State’s Taxpayers

LANSING, MI - FEBRUARY 21: General Motors Chevrolet Traverse and Buick Enclave vehicles go through the assembly line at the General Motors Lansing Delta Township Assembly Plant on February 21, 2020 in Lansing, Michigan. The plant, which employs over 2,500 workers, is home to the Chevrolet Traverse and Buick Enclave. …
Bill Pugliano/Getty Images

General Motors (GM) will lay off more than 1,300 auto workers across Michigan right after the Christmas holiday, executives announced this week. Those layoffs come even as GM raked in hundreds of millions of dollars from the state’s taxpayers through deals with Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D).

In two separate state filings, GM executives said they are laying off 945 auto workers starting January 1, 2024, who are currently employed at its Orion Assembly Plant in Orion Township, Michigan.

The layoffs at the Orion plant are the result of GM’s delaying its conversion to produce Electric Vehicles (EVs) like the Chevrolet Silverado EV and GMC Sierra EV.

At GM’s Lansing Grand River Assembly/Stamping plant in Lansing, Michigan, executives said 369 auto workers will be laid off starting January 1, 2024, through March of next year. The layoffs come as GM ends production of the Camaro.

Employees attend an event celebrating the 3 millionth vehicle produced at the General Motors Co. Lansing Delta Township Assembly Plant in Lansing, Michigan, U.S., on Friday, Feb. 21, 2020. (Jeff Kowalsky/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

In January 2022, Whitmer announced a massive financial agreement with GM, which ultimately saw Michigan taxpayers footing an $824 million bill to have the automaker promise to invest billions in auto jobs across the state.

“GM’s $7 billion investment in Michigan — the largest in their history — will create and retain 5,000 good-paying jobs and enable us to build on our legacy as the place that put the world on wheels,” Whitmer said at the time.

As part of that agreement, GM promised to convert its Orion plant to produce EVs with a $4 billion investment while investing millions in the Lansing plant. The agreement vowed to create 4,000 auto jobs in Michigan.

GM CEO Mary Barra said at the time that the investments “would not have been possible” without Whitmer’s helping shore up taxpayer money to give the automakers big tax breaks.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here


United Auto Worker: 2020 Democrats’ Will ‘Destroy Union Jobs’; Trump ‘Only Person Defending’ American Workers

JOHN BINDER

A 25-year union worker with Ford Motor Company says President Donald Trump is “the only person defending” American auto workers while 2020 Democrats propose an environmental agenda that will “destroy union jobs” for the middle class.

In an op-ed for the Detroit News, United Auto Worker (UAW) member and Ford employee Melinda Rowe called out 2020 Democrats for their “zero-carbon” agenda that will further decimate the United States’ auto industry in states like Ohio and Michigan.

The Green New Deal agenda of Democrat presidential candidates like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Rowe writes, would mean more profits for multinational automaker CEOs and fewer jobs for American auto workers:

GM and the other big auto companies want to make a full switch to electric vehicles, which would allow them to slash union jobs. As any autoworker can tell you, combustion engines are difficult to build, requiring more manpower and skill than electric motors. That’s why auto workers earn such good wages: It’s not easy to engineer a controlled explosion under the hood of a car. [Emphasis added]

When Democrats claim to support organized labor but also advance a radical environmental agenda that would destroy union jobs, they make it abundantly obvious that their support for union workers is merely rhetorical. [Emphasis added]

Trump is the only person defending the interests of union members against the combined forces of Democratic politicians, car company executives, and UAW leaders who care only about advancing their own interests over those of the hard working men and women of their industry. [Emphasis added]

Rowe detailed how executives at U.S. automakers have fallen in line with the Democrat agenda of eliminating fossil fuels, noting that such a move to fully electric vehicles will allow corporations to cut back their workforces more than they already have, saving them labor costs at the expense of U.S. communities.

“We saw a clear example of this in the UAW-GM negotiations, when GM proposed building a car battery factory near the plant that it recently closed in Lordstown, Ohio,” Rowe writes. “The battery plant would likely employ several hundred workers, whereas the Lordstown factory supported more than 3,000 union jobs. The battery plant will also only pay workers between $15 and $17 per hour, about half the $30 per hour that workers earned at the Lordstown factory.”

 

John Binder @JxhnBinder

 

 

"Nobody had our backs in office, not Democrats or Republicans. I’m tired of being sugarcoated and being robbed in the process." https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/06/02/laid-off-gm-workers-in-ohio-fed-up-with-ruling-class-nobody-has-our-backs/ 

 

 

Laid Off GM Workers Fed Up with Ruling Class: 'Nobody Has Our Backs'

Middle-class Americans who have been laid off by GM in Lordstown, Ohio, are fed up with the country's ruling class in Washington, DC. 

breitbart.com

 

83

6:00 PM - Jun 2, 2019

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50 people are talking about this

 

Rowe writes that it was “no coincidence” that General Motors (GM) has closed five American manufacturing plants and laid off 14,000 workers as they manufacture electric vehicles in China.

Warren, among other 2020 Democrats, has also pledged a nationwide ban on fracking which would likely increase oil prices and potentially lead to additional layoffs for American auto workers.

American manufacturing is vital to the U.S. economy as every one manufacturing job supports an additional 7.4 American jobs in other industries. Decades of free trade, with deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), have eliminated five million manufacturing jobs from the U.S. economy and resulted in the closure of 50,000 manufacturing plants.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder

 

Krugman Admits He and Mainstream Economists Got Globalization Wrong

BY TOM OZIMEK

Paul Krugman, Nobel-prize winning economist and avowed champion of free trade, admits he and his colleagues got a few things seriously wrong about globalization, in particular around its downside impact on local labor markets.

“We missed a crucial part of the story,” Krugman wrote in a Bloomberg article in October, referring to members of the so-called “1990s consensus,” mainstream economists who worshipped at the altar of free trade.

According to his article, the consensus economists failed to measure adequately and properly account for the impact of globalization on specific communities, some of which were disproportionately hit hard. This despite the fact that models predicted, and figures later showed, that free trade was a net gain in terms of both jobs and wages in the broader American economy. Generalized gain but localized pain.

“Opening to trade increases the size of the economic pie by a few percent and yet shrinks some slices by 10 or 20 or 30 percent,” said David Autor, an MIT economics professor who wrote a groundbreaking paper on the disruptive impact of integrating China into the global economy and whom Krugman cites in his article.

“The benefits, in general, will be small and diffuse and broadly shared,” Autor said in an interview for the Institute for Fiscal Studies. “So lower prices of consumer goods, more variety of goods, perhaps a faster rate of product innovation.”

“However, the individuals who are in the sectors that become directly exposed to competition, they’re almost necessarily going to shrink,” he continued. “Those impacts tend to stay localized. Instead of wages falling just a little bit for people who have manual-dextrous skills, we see big job losses for individuals at those plants. Then the whole communities that surround them kind of—I don’t want to say implode, but they go into something of a state of decay.”

‘Hyperglobalization’

Aware of the pain of the working man and distressed by the backlash against globalization, Krugman, who now pens op-eds with tart titles like “The Roots of Regulation Rage,” is on a sojourn of shame.

Pit stops along the route include a February lecture in Australia headlined “What Did We Miss About Globalization?” and the October article mentioned above in Bloomberg titled “What Economists (Including Me) Got Wrong About Globalization.”

Krugman gives a conference at the university in Monterrey, Mexico, on March 13, 2014. (Julio Cesar Aguilar/AFP/Getty Images)

Those tuning in to Krugman’s proclamations of penitence will certainly hear mea culpa, but also caveats.

While admitting to errors, Krugman remains fundamentally pro-free trade and is loath to be seen as throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

“I frequently encounter people who have a story they’ve heard,” Krugman said in Australia. “They sorta kinda think they know what happened to economics. The story is ‘Well, economists used to think that trade is good for everybody and now they’ve learned that it actually has downsides and is much more problematic.’ It’s a good story, and it fits people’s desire to see the orthodoxy and the establishment receive its comeuppance. But it’s almost exactly wrong.”

The correct way to think about the issue, Krugman argues, is that the problem was less with globalization as with something far more nefarious that he calls “hyper globalization.”

Krugman says the out-sized downside impact of globalization-turned-hyper globalization is to regard the phenomenon as factors sparking a perfect storm.

The first factor: a paradigm shift of the international trading profile from “intra-industry trade among similar countries” to importing goods from countries with a massive labor-cost advantage.

The second factor was the acceleration of the process via technology, especially containerization. That coupled with an eager embrace of free trade by policymakers egged on by overconfident intellectuals who hadn’t thoroughly done their impact assessment homework.

Factor three, lack of policies in place to help people cope with massive displacement as entire industries disappeared, and whole communities were devastated.

“The hyper globalization is this changing environment that in some ways set the stage for the turmoil we’re now experiencing,” he explained during his lecture in Melbourne.

“Consensus economists didn’t turn much to analytic methods that focus on workers in particular industries and communities, which would have given a better picture of short-run trends,” Krugman wrote.

“This was, I now believe, a major mistake—one in which I shared a hand.”

Graphic showing exported goods as share of GDP, a proxy for international trade, or globalization, as described by Paul Krugman in his lecture in Melbourne. (CC BY/Our World In Data/Modified by T. Ozimek to show periods of ‘globalization’ vs ‘hyper globalization’)

Former labor secretary Richard Reich praised Krugman’s newfound humility, saying it’s high time the celebrated economist ate some crow.

“I’m glad he’s finally seen the light on trade,” Reich told Michael Hirsh of Foreign Policy.

“How rare is that?!” Autor echoed Reich’s praise of Krugman’s contrition.

‘The 1990s Consensus’

“It’s clear that the impact of developing-country exports grew much more between 1995 and 2010 than the 1990s consensus imagined possible,” Krugman wrote.

The consensus economists Krugman talks about posited in lockstep that when it comes to international trade, the freer the better.

This attitude is exemplified in his 1997 article in the Journal of Economic Literature, in which Krugman stated, “If economists ruled the world, there would be no need for a World Trade Organization. The economist’s case for free trade is essentially a unilateral case: a country serves its own interests by pursuing free trade regardless of what other countries may do.”

International trade redistributes incomes. It is a game with winners and losers, but—according to that consensus belief—the gains that accrue to the winners more than offset the losses borne by the losers. The idea is that the rising tide lifts all ships except for the least adaptive, which sink.

“This is a hugely good thing from a global perspective,” Krugman said at the Melbourne lecture, referring to the overall effects of free trade across the globe, “but not from the point of view of everybody.”

Low-skilled workers are hit hardest, and some stay down for the count.

In a 2005 college textbook on economics, Krugman and co-author Maurice Obstfeld wrote, “Owners of a country’s abundant factors gain from trade, but owners of a country’s scarce factors lose … [C]ompared with the rest of the world, the United States is abundantly endowed with highly skilled labor and … low-skilled labor is correspondingly scarce. Meaning international trade tends to make low-skilled workers in the United States worse off not just temporarily, but on a sustained basis.”

In his lecture, Krugman explains that bouts of globalization before “hyper globalization” were characterized by an exchange of similar goods between similar countries, with comparative advantage based on a range of factors, including specialized know-how and availability of primary inputs.

But the very nature of international trade underwent a sea change when low-labor cost countries like Bangladesh, China, and Mexico began to export manufactured goods to the West en masse.

‘China Shock’

David Autor’s paper “China Shock” (pdf) is widely hailed as having enlightened consensus economists to how egregiously disruptive aspects of globalization have been, both in terms of jobs lost and wages depressed.

Krugman, in his lecture, tipped his hat to Autor and quoted from “China Shock.”

“China Shock is a shorthand term for the very disruptive integration of China into Western trade,” Autor told the Institute for Fiscal Studies. “Specifically, in the context of the United States, it refers to China’s joining the World Trade Organization in 2001, and the surge of Chinese exports that this catalyzed. One way to see this is in 1991, about a quarter of one percent of all U.S. goods consumption was produced in China. By 2007, that was about 5 percent. So that’s a twenty-fold increase.”

Krugman said the explosion of trade between rich and emerging countries pulled down the wages of specific categories of workers.

“It’s clear that that kind of trade is a depressing factor on the wages of workers without lots of formal education,” Krugman said. “It’s just bad economics to deny that that’s a factor. The question has always been how important is it. And in the 1990s, many people, myself included, tried to estimate the impact of North-South trade on income distribution and came up with significant but modest numbers. Something like maybe a 3 percent decline in real wages of non-college educated workers caused by growth of international trade.”

Without specifying a number, he added that this figure later turned out to be higher, though not by much.

In regard to jobs lost, Krugman cited “China Shock,” saying that imports from China from the late 90s to the eve of the 2007 financial crisis, “displaced about a million jobs in the United States.”

He argued that over a million jobs were created over the same period, and the net effect on the economy in terms of employment was positive.

“No doubt a million jobs were created elsewhere,” Krugman said, “but they weren’t the same million jobs.”

“I keep on running into people who believe that economists think that free trade is good for everybody. That’s never been what models say. That’s never been what economic analysis says.”

He added that people in import-competing industries will be the hardest hit and that “if you have large imports of labor-intensive products, then workers without college degrees are likely to be hurt.”

“Growth in trade typically produces losers, perhaps substantial groups of losers.”

Autor said the pain to American communities from China-related trade came not just from slashed manufacturing jobs, but difficulty adapting and finding employment in different sectors.

“It turned out to have been much more disruptive than people had anticipated, both in terms of the amount of job loss in manufacturing; but also the difficulty people have had adjusting to that in terms of re-employment—in terms of re-employment and re-gaining jobs and prior earnings levels.”

Autor said when China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, “we saw very rapid decline in manufacturing in sectors in which China had rising comparative advantage, mostly labor-intensive production like shoes, textiles and other goods.”

He said workers who lost their jobs at the time not only were unable to find other work quickly, they “suffered sustained earnings losses.”

“In general, areas where manufacturing was going on, saw overall economic decline and malaise.”

While economists often resort to sterile-sounding terms like “disruption” and “malaise” to describe the impact on communities, it often takes politicians to give “hyper globalization” a human face.

‘American Carnage’

President Donald Trump, in his inaugural address, translated malaise into a searing buzzword.

“This American carnage stops right here and stops right now,” Trump said on July 20. “Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation.”

President-elect Donald Trump is sworn in as President at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 20, 2017. (Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images)

Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, who had a hand in drafting Trump’s inaugural speech, used still another buzzword to refer to those Krugman labeled “losers.”

“It’s the Deplorables, who said ‘I don’t understand all this high finance, and I don’t understand all this mumbo jumbo, but here’s what I do understand,’” Bannon said in a speech at a meeting of the Committee on Clear and Present Danger. “The factories left, the jobs left with them, and the opioids came.”

“But the Deplorables found an instrument—Donald Trump. And that instrument,” Bannon argued, “in all its imperfections—is an armor-piecing shell.”

Stephen K. Bannon, former White House strategist, at a conference hosted by the Committee of Present: Danger about the Chinese Communist Party’s unrestricted economic warfare against America in Manhattan, New York, on April 25, 2019. (Cathy He/The Epoch Times)

“We are one nation—and their pain is our pain,” Trump said at his inauguration. “Their dreams are our dreams, and their success will be our success. We share one heart, one home, and one glorious destiny.”

Steven Moore, a former White House pick for the Federal Reserve Board and author of “Trumponomics: Inside the America First Plan to Revive Our Economy,” told the Epoch Times of specific policy propositions that are meant to reforge the pain of those most hurt by hyper globalization into success.

‘Trumponomics’ Takes the Stage

“I believe we’re in a very abusive relationship with China right now,” Moore told The Epoch Times, adding that while the United States opened its market to China decades ago, China keeps its market closed.

He said Trump sought to correct that relationship by enacting a trade deal that would bring more balance. Still, China reneged on commitments made during the negotiations, and the process degenerated into tit-for-tat tariffs and, in effect, a trade war.

“I’m a free-trade guy,” Moore said, “I hate tariffs, I love free trade. But it’s hard to have free trade, frankly, with a country that is stealing, cheating, lying, involved in cyber-espionage against the United States, hacking into our computer systems.”

Moore called China “an increasingly menacing power,” and he hopes Trump’s policies will force them into a good and fair trading relationship with the United States.

“I do think China’s playing a dangerous game here. It’s going to hurt both of our countries,” Moore said, adding that consumers would be affected.

“China will be hit three or four times harder than we will, but it’s a mutually assured destruction strategy,” he said. “I do think Trump is using leverage. And I think at the end of the day, I’m actually fairly confident that Trump is going to get a victory here.”

Besides negotiating and renegotiating international trade deals, the domestic dimension of Trump’s policies has been to stimulate growth through tax cuts and deregulation.

Lawrence Kudlow, former financial analyst and current head of the National Economic Council under Trump, wrote in the foreword to Trumponomics that while he and the President don’t always see eye to eye, “Trump says we can get to 3, 4, or even 5 percent growth through tax reduction, deregulation, American energy production, and fairer trade deals, and he is exactly right.”

“He wanted tax cuts. He wanted to deregulate, he wanted to get the government out of the way,” is how Kudlow described Trump’s aims.

“What a contrast with the left—which was full of negativity,” Kudlow continued. “We can’t grow faster than 2 percent. We can’t get wages up. We have to live with secular stagnation. We can’t rebuild our coal industry. Climate change is going to bring the end of civilization. The inner cities cannot be hopeful and prosperous places again.”

‘The Case for Trump’

Historian Victor Davis Hanson wrote the book “The Case for Trump.” He echoes Kudlow’s perspective that, at the core of Trumponomics, are policies that seek to unlock the stifled potential of an under-performing U.S. economy.

Hanson told The Epoch Times that the results of Trump’s economic policies had defied the assumptions of naysayers.

“They said ‘the economy is stagnant: No 3 percent annualized GDP in ten years. No gain in real wages. They’ve written off the middle of the country. They’re losers. They’re not part of the globalized elite on the coast. They need to learn coding,” Hanson said of Obama-era policymakers and mainstream economists.

Trumponomics, Hanson said, accomplished “3 percent GDP, record-low unemployment, record-low minority unemployment, record energy production, the Iran deal is gone, those crazy Paris Accords finalized, Keystone, ANWAR.”

“Some of the best economic numbers our country has ever experienced are happening right now,” Trump tweeted earlier this month.

Wage growth is one of the standouts.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, from Sept. 2018 to Sept. 2019, real average hourly earnings increased 1.9 percent, seasonally
adjusted.

Wage growth statistics. (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics)

‘Economic Populist’

“Donald Trump is not an ideological conservative,” Moore explains in the book Trumponomics.

“Reagan was far more schooled in conservative thought and was more dedicated to the principles of limited government. Trump is for common sense. He is an economic populist in many ways—he believes in addressing the plight of ordinary people.”

“He’s authentic,” Hansen says of Trump. “He doesn’t play the game. If he goes to the Indiana State Fair, or he goes to Tulare, California, or the South, it’s the same Queens accent, same suit.”

“Hilary doesn’t do that,” Hansen says. “She’s got a Southern accent here and an inner-city accent here. John Kerry, when he ran, he had flannel at the State Fair. Trump is authentic; he is who he is. Unapologetic.”

“Hilary goes to West Virginia, and she says, ‘I’m sorry, you guys have to basically learn solar skills or something, I’m going to put you out of business.’

“Trump goes and says ‘I love big, beautiful coal.'”

Josh Hawley: Bush’s Globalist ‘New World Order’ Has Made the Elites Rich, Eroded ‘Middle Class Way of Life’

MOHD RASFAN/AFP via Getty Images

JOHN BINDER

 1 Nov 2019500

3:22

President George H.W. Bush’s plan for a “New World Order” with global integration of the United States’ economy has made the ruling class richer while eroding “the middle class way of life” in America, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) says.

In an interview on The Realignment podcast, Hawley described how the long-held push by both political establishments to massively globalize the American economy has been at the expense of U.S. workers while the ruling class and their allies in the donor class have profited.

Hawley said:

If I have to give you a sense of the kind of vision that I think voters rejected, President Bush … gave a speech to Congress in 1990 where he talked about a ‘New World Order,’ and he was saying this of the situation in the context with Iraq, but he talked broadly about a ‘New global liberal order’ that of course America would lead, that it would involve America making the world much more like America and the rest of the world kind of blending in with America … and there wouldn’t be the need for hard borders any longer, and we’d have free trade, and we’d have great multinational cooperation, and we’d have these multinational corporations that can do business in any country, and it would be a whole new era. [Emphasis added]

Well, as it turns out — first of all, China and Russia didn’t get the memo on that — secondly, as it turns out, that ‘New World Order’ wasn’t good for American workers. And as it turned out, it didn’t protect American middle class values. As it turned out, it undermined the middle class way of life. [Emphasis added]

 

Hawley said the ruling class is primarily a “small group of people” from a “fairly narrow band of colleges and graduate schools” who largely agree on the most challenging issues facing the nation and oppose the traditionalism of middle American communities.

“They also tend to be the winners of this global integration. George Bush’s ‘New World Order,’ the people who have been in charge of the parties who run the media, who hold commanding heights in our culture; they win from that agreement,” Hawley said of the ruling class. “They’re doing great; they are the wealthy in our society. They are the ones who are globally integrated and global facing.”

Hawley continued:

They also tend to be skeptical of places like Missouri and of things like home and community. So they say that they value those things, but you listen to somebody … and somebody says, “I’m not going to move from this small town even though I’m having trouble finding a job because my family is here and because this is where we’ve lived for generations and this is where my friends are and I want to make a life here.” A lot of D.C. elites in both parties listen to that and they’re like, “That’s crazy.”

As Breitbart News has chronicled, free trade has helped gut working and middle class American jobs and stripped whole middle American towns of their industries and livelihoods.

Since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed and China was allowed to enter the World Trade Organization (WTO), five million American manufacturing jobs and more than 50,000 manufacturing facilities have been eliminated from the U.S. economy. This mass elimination of jobs due to free trade has coincided with an almost 600 percent increase in trade deficits.

In recent years, the economic recovery from the Great Recession disproportionately benefitted elite zip codes. For example, by 2016, elite zip codes had a surplus of 3.6 million jobs, which is more than the combined bottom 80 percent of American zip codes. While populations have grown in major cities where the wealthiest of Americans live, rural communities have continued to shrink.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder

 


Who's Putting Who in Chains?

By Daren Williams

It was in August, 2012, during the final months of the Obama reelection campaign, when then-Vice President Joe Biden made the ham-fisted statement to a Danville, Virginia crowd which included many black Americans, that Mitt Romney would, "put y’all back in chains,” by cutting regulations on Wall Street. 

His gaffe was a clumsy attempt to slander Romney and all Republicans by intimating their desire to put Americans ‘back’ in chains, interpreted by the hypersensitive liberal Left as a twisted reference to slavery. But unfortunately many Americans, (especially blacks), believe this to be a truism -- that Republicans are oppressors and slavemasters to be eradicated from the American landscape. 

The notion is ludicrous, both literally and figuratively. Given that Republicans freed American blacks from the slavery imposed by Democrats, the idea of the GOP somehow putting them back in chains is stupefyingly ignorant. This ignorance is exceeded only by the preposterousness of thinking that cutting the size and power of the federal government equals slavery when in fact, it is precisely the opposite that is true. 

President Donald Trump has been gradually unchaining Americans, especially blacks, from the slavery of big government, excessive regulation, high taxes, bad economic policy and a prejudicial criminal justice system. Black unemployment is the lowest in recorded American history. More people are working than ever in the history of the republic. More than a million children have been lifted from the chains of poverty and never have so many black men been given a chance for release from an unfair criminal justice system.

It is for these reasons that President Donald Trump is, and will continue to be, portrayed by a dishonest Left as racist and wanting to shackle/chain/enslave blacks -- the polar opposite of reality. Biden won’t admit it publicly but he knows, as do other powerful Democrats, that Trump is the biggest single threat to their plans to bring socialism to America. Trump has blown up their timetable, so he must be driven from office, not by being defeated at the ballot box but through impeachment. 

For a moment, let’s imagine that President Donald Trump is impeached, driven from office and hauled off to jail, and that Democrats win the White House in 2020, keep the House of Representatives and secure the Senate. What about those “chains” Uncle Joe talked about? 

Democrats are promising to repeal the Trump tax cuts, shackling the household wealth of all Americans to a ravenous federal Treasury. This would be followed by the chains of onerous governmental regulations on businesses and higher corporate taxes, destroying jobs and cutting wages. Particularly hard hit would be coal and other fossil-fuel industries, which Democrats promise to eradicate through the Green New Deal or variations thereof.

Our national sovereignty would be in bondage to the United Nations, making the United States the world’s piggy bank for countries like Iran, China, and other belligerents. American citizens would be clapped into the irons of censorship with the erosion or outright loss of First Amendment rights, like New York City’s ban on free speech, which fines those who speak the truth about illegal aliens.

Our health care would be enslaved to a government system of socialized medicine that would invariably result in rationing medical treatment and levying confiscatory taxes on those able to pay so free health care can be provided to non-citizens and others who are in the United States illegally. 

Democrats went to war in 1861 so they could continue to own other human beings. Today, Democrats are going to war again, this time using an illegitimate impeachment of President Trump, in their effort to enslave an entire nation to their vision of a socialist America, the casus belli being their vendetta against him for daring to make America truly great again. This is not idle speculation. Rep. Al Green - a black man, no less - was unequivocal when he said, “If we don't impeach the president, he will get reelected.” 

President Trump has done more in three years to free blacks and all Americans from the shackles of big and increasingly oppressive government than any other president. If we do not come to his aid while Democrats lay siege to his administration, Joe Biden’s 2012 admonition will indeed become reality and y’all will be back in chains. 

Daren Williams is a director of the New Journey PAC.

 

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