General Motors To Lay Off 2,000 Workers at Two US Plants (reuters.com) 320
General Motors plans to lay off 2,000 employees at two U.S. auto plants in early 2017, the automaker said on Wednesday. From a Reuters report:GM said it will furlough the employees when it cuts the third shift at its Lordstown, Ohio and Lansing, Michigan plants in mid-January. The Lordstown plant builds the compact Chevrolet Cruze, whose U.S. sales through October were down 20 percent. The Lansing Grand River plant builds the Cadillac ATS and CTS, whose sales were down 17 percent through October.An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a Washington Examiner report, "Trump has already criticized General Motors for reports that it would shift some production to Mexico, a plan that the company hasn't confirmed and didn't allude to Wednesday. The incoming Republican president also has said that he would impose a 35 percent tariff on the products of former U.S. subsidiaries that moved out of the country. When Ford announced the opening of a new factory in Mexico earlier this year, Trump called it an "absolute disgrace" and pledged to tax its imports to the U.S."
Short Lived (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Short Lived (Score:5, Insightful)
Frankly, I have no problem with the US giving breaks and incentives to stay in the US, employ US citizens...and penalize those that leave and ship jobs overseas.
Think About It... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you believe that companies should be able to move their production overseas, you are tacitly approving of working conditions( wages, safety, environmental, etc.) that, were they in effect here in the US, would have SJWs lighting themselves on fire in the public square in protest.
If Mexico or any other nation imposes the same regulations as the US, then moving to another nation would be no different than moving to another state. Absent that, it provides an unfair advantage to outsourcing companies at the expense of the employees of the overseas plant.
This is 100% against what most Democrats believe.
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Funny thing, he doesn't believe in global warming but bringing manufacturing to the US with stricter environmental requirements would do more to help than the carbon tax sham.
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Enlighten me as to what working conditions in Canada would you be referring to, exactly?
Or did you somehow think that countries like Canada would be immune to this?
Re:Think About It... (Score:4, Informative)
WTO troubles (Score:2)
That something is likely to get him into trouble with the WTO. It may save some auto jobs in the short term, but US expert will be hit in the medium term as the WTO will authorize retaliatory tariffs to compensate foreign businesses.
You can put anti-dumping tariffs in place, not protectionist ones.
Of course, the US could quite the WTO, but that would have massive impact on US exporters.
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That something is likely to get him into trouble with the WTO
Chief of Staff: "Mr. President, we're seeing some pushback from the WTO in Geneva with regard to our recent establishment of protectionist trade tariffs. Do you have a response for the Secretary of State to convey?"
President: "Sergeant, bring me that briefcase they were telling me about. The one with all the buttons and lights and handcuffs and whatnot."
Marine guard: "I beg your pardon, sir?"
President: "And where's Geneva, again? That's in Wisc
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I don't think he particularly cares what anyone else thinks.
And besides, what can they do to him, exactly?
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You do realize all his fncking swag like Make America Great Again caps were made in china, right?
App Proposal (Score:2)
"Wake Me Up When...", Freeze yourself until preset conditions are met!
Also... kinda funny how Slashdot turns super liberal the minute Trump wins. Where did all those supporters go? Did their last check arrive or something?
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In case you didn't know, that's how journalism is supposed to work. You know, "Comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable."
Re:Short Lived (Score:5, Interesting)
He's wanting to put tariffs on imported goods. Car manufacturers rely on imported goods. Detroit is about to get a whole lot poorer. Even if more parts were made domestically, retaliatory tariffs will make American made cars unattractive overseas. America could potentially lose most or all of its car industry. I suspect the design of cars will still be done by well trained engineers in the US, but the whole product will be assembled elsewhere to avoid extra retaliatory tariffs in the rest of the world.
(we did this whole tariff thing in the 1800's and early 1900's; abolishing it is what led to people getting wealthier)
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At least for cars that are sold outside the United States. The most likely effect of protectionist policies is a bifurcation of manufacturing, where products for sale in the U.S. are made here and products for sale outside the U.S. are made elsewhere. The net effect on American jobs is likely to be a wash, but the
I cannot imagine (Score:2)
He's wanting to put tariffs on imported goods. Car manufacturers rely on imported goods. Detroit is about to get a whole lot poorer. Even if more parts were made domestically, retaliatory tariffs will make American made cars unattractive overseas.
You mean car manufacturers will have incentive to make things locally?
Heavens!
What will the car manufactures do without overseas workers?
I simply cannot imagine how this will be good for the country! Our GDP will drop at the expense of creating all those jobs!
No longer being paid (Score:2)
You're the one who wanted to collect my bitter tears of regret, right?
The campaign is no more, you're no longer getting paid for her opinions.
Go ahead and get it out of your system, but I cannot imagine how spending time like this is of any benefit.
Not that I care.
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And wiping out one of the US's major manufacturing industries would help your wages how?
You understand that what tariffs actually do is raise prices for consumers. Now there may be times when tariffs are useful, particularly in response to a foreign country dumping, or where they started throwing tariffs on first, but tariffs as a general trade practice don't help the average family one little bit, and usually harm average citizens.
And as the other poster pointed out, what happens when some of these countri
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I'm sorry, did anyone think that the system exists to help the average citizen? vs. the corporations who bought the legislatures fair and square?
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You don't think liberal access to foreign markets helps the average person in the exporting nation? For chrissakes, the US has been a merchant power since its inception, and yet you still have people that believe it is best served by starting trade wars with trading partners?
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"Wiping out" an industry would be destructive, in the sense that suddenly destroying hundreds of thousands of jobs would be a shock that created lots of unemployment. Bleeding it out over decades isn't, if it reduces product costs, because jobs move, population changes, and the amount of consumer purchasing power increases as a result.
Now there may be times when tariffs are useful, particularly in response to a foreign country dumping, or where they started throwing tariffs on first,
Actually, if a foreign country is throwing up tariffs, they're hurting their own wealth. If we have an export, we can just keep selling it off to everyone else. It'd be
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Thanks for this! This is a really neat writeup. I'm going to go through it later with a bit of a fine tooth comb, but I think you're making a damned good point about the state of modern manufacturing, and one I've tried to make. What Trump has promised idled Rust Belt workers (and by extension other idled groups like coal miners) is that somehow he's going to magically turn back the clock half a century.
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Without significant alterations to various trade agreements, including the WTO agreements, how would Trump start nailing such companies with a 35% tariff. This would almost certainly need Senate approval, and it isn't terribly clear that the Senate would be all that interested in basically tearing up the US's international trade agreements just so he can punish Ford and GM.
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I have a feeling that in some ways the Trump presidency will resemble the GWB and Reagan presidencies, in that it will be the VP, advisers and chief allies in Congress that do much of the actual leg work. I don't think Trump really has the intellectual or emotional capacity to be a president in anything but a nominal way. He'll come into the office much like Woodrow Wilson left it.
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He promised. If he doesn't, he is a liar and a charlatan.
This is microcosm of the disconnect in American politics.
Trump's detractors take him literally, but not seriously.
Trump's supporters take him seriously, but not literally.
His supporters don't actually expect him to build a wall, or slap tariffs on Chinese imports.
That is not why they voted for him.
But they do expect him to address immigration and outsourcing as serious issues.
THAT is why they voted for him.
Disclaimer: I didn't vote for Trump, but I understand why other people did.
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That's the very definition of "feels before reals".
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That's the very definition of "feels before reals".
Sure. But is it better to have a president that is a bald-faced liar, or one that tells more subtle lies that people believe?
"Neither" isn't an option.
Detroit has been 98% Democrat since shortly before (Score:2)
> the lost jobs in the first place this process has been going on since the 70's.
Since right about the time Democrats seized total control of Detroit. When you're arguing that Democrat policies work, the normal strategy is to pretend Detroit doesn't exist. Detroit is NOT an example you want anyone looking at if you're going to blindly support whatever foolishness the Democrats come up with.
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Just so you know, GM is moving it's plants from Lansing, Michigan and Lordstown, Ohio.
Detroit has nothing to do with it.
In fact, Ford, Chrysler and GM started moving production out of Detroit in the period from 1945 to 1957.
Re:Another of the same, then (Score:5, Informative)
I notice you failed to mention that Lordstown, Ohio has a Trump-supporting, Republican city council, a Republican congressman, a Republican senator and a Republican governor. Oh yeah, and Ohio is a "Right to Work" state.
And their plant is moving to Mexico, too. I notice you failed to mention that.
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Thank you! Detroit is a symptom of the same deindustrialization pressures that hit parts of Canada and the UK. There are other rust belts over the last three or four decades who have been hit by severe declines. The notion that you can blame what is an issue suffered by a number of industrial areas in a number of different countries on an American political party is stunningly absurd. I'm sure there are many Thatcherites that would be thrilled to blame the industrial decline in Northern England on the Democ
Re: Short Lived (Score:3)
Yes of course. And the bad weather.
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All the real manufacturing jobs got replaced with robots. There's nothing Trump can do to fix that. The dream of 9-5 in a factory tightening bolts all day for $20/hour is dead and gone and won't come back. But hey, blame it on Democrats. Simple answers are best, after all.
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The US is a CAPITALISTIC democratically elected (Theoretically) Republic.. so if you argument is CAPITALISTS are the issue, then I suggest you toss your hat in the ring for Communism or Monarchy or whatever else you want to use. In a capitalist society, their notion of every man for himself has always been at the crux of it.. heck, half the people voting for Trump like him because they feel he is the very embodiment of capitalism and as such, any actions are first and foremost for him.. (and if it happens
Re:Short Lived - MAGA, despite the liberal shits. (Score:5, Insightful)
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there's no such thing.
Jobs vs. Stuff (Score:5, Interesting)
Protectionism has mostly "worked" in Japan, at least in terms of jobs. They have a low unemployment rate compared to other countries. But many products are indeed more expensive because of it. Whether jobs or "stuff" is more important is a subjective choice.
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Ideally you do free trade and with the comparative advantages that entails, you tax the people who win due to fair trade and give that money to the people who lose.
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That's assuming the so-called losers want money instead of jobs.
For males it's especially difficult: our career is our #1 defining quality to society for good or bad. For women the equivalent is looks. That may not be fair either, but it's less career pressure. If a lady has looks, she doesn't have to work so hard.
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There's no way to balance letting jobs leave the country and keeping the country employed unless there are new types of jobs being built that the country is progressing towards and thus not needing the jobs that are leaving the country.
Which brings us to the next farce; a college education
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The US unemployment rate is hovering somewhere around 5%. Now we can quibble over what that means exactly, but in general, the US has not seen a drop in unemployment due to liberalized trade agreements.
If you look at the auto industry in particular, it has been in trouble since the 1970s. The idea that NAFTA or any other trade agreement somehow created this crisis is absurd. Detroit has been in a decline for about 40 years. The Rust Belt is hardly the first industrial area in an industrialized country to go
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The reason Japan's unemployment rate is so low is because it is a demographically shrinking nation. It is at a tipping point where even its drive towards automation cannot make up for the overall losses of workers due to an aging population.
Describing Japan's policies as some sort of economic success is like describing the Black Death as a great boon for Medieval workers rights. While true on a superficial level, neither claim bears much scrutiny.
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Cheaper products are little solace to those with no jobs and no money to buy any of them.
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Protectionism works up to a point.. unemployment is low there, but the costs of living are quite high.. and salaries do not match.. + you have things that the US doesn't want to implement.. such as national healthcare.. And lets also remember, a lot of ideas don't scale very well when you just have more people (with more ideas, many of them wrong) and more land (so people on the fringe can either remain such or just become invisible because they are not in the nexus anymore) Japan is really one country.. (O
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At the end of the day, you only need some water (free), food (you can hunt right?) and a place to sleep that won't kill you while you are doing it.. (I know some good caves in NY).. outside of that, everything else is pure "want"
these jobs aren't going to Mexico (Score:2)
GM would be moving low-profit cars to Mexico, not Cadillacs.
And Trump won't be saving these jobs. Car companies will not be keeping production in Michigan and Ohio, they'll move to Southern states where there is no UAW. Even if Trump keeps them from crossing the Southern border he isn't going to force them to stick with unions.
Got it! (Score:2)
GM would be moving low-profit cars to Mexico, not Cadillacs.
And Trump won't be saving these jobs. Car companies will not be keeping production in Michigan and Ohio, they'll move to Southern states where there is no UAW. Even if Trump keeps them from crossing the Southern border he isn't going to force them to stick with unions.
No other course of action will succeed, and in this particular case it won't matter anyway.
We understand. Your rationalization is pretty clear. We got it.
interesting conclusion (Score:2)
It's your own. It's not what I said at all.
He won't be saving these jobs. He might save American jobs, he won't be saving these. I understand those in Michigan and Ohio who are upset about losing jobs, but voting for Trump isn't going to save them. Unless they want to move to South Carolina, they might be able to follow their jobs as they move there.
No surprise... (Score:2)
we will see shortly (Score:2)
Original Article was pretty short (Score:5, Insightful)
Other than it being announced after the Election, there doesn't seem to be anything political in the announcement.
Sales are down on vehicles made at those two plant and they are cutting the Third Shift at both plants.
Nothing about moving production elsewhere or even discontinuing the two other shifts at both plants.
The added on Anonymously section to the /. article is where the politics are injected with a reference to Trump and his proposed tariffs on products made outside of the US by US mgs.. which this story is not about.
This will be a very interesting experiment (Score:5, Insightful)
Growing up in a Rust Belt city, I watched as most factory workers got thrown out of work when factories moved to the South, then offshore. The next 4 years may or may not be a very interesting economics experiment depending on how many policies Trump implements from his campaign promises. The loss of stable high-paying manufacturing jobs has a devastating effect on the locations they hollow out when those workers aren't paying taxes, buying things locally, etc.
If he does succeed in building the wall, deporting immigrants and taxing foreign imports, how much of a tariff will be necessary to convince manufacturers to make goods for the US market in the US? I know India has a similar setup -- it's very expensive to import foreign goods to India, and manufacturers are responding by setting up plants in India. Unless there's absolutely no way around it, and the tariff is set at a punitive level, manufacturers are just going to say "tough" and raise the price of their goods to cover the cost.
I know all the arguments are against me on this one, but I would definitely like to see all the manufacturing come back. People say we're one of the top countries in manufacturing output, but the reality is that this is due to high dollar items like airplanes and weapons systems. I'm an educated person, working in a non-factory job for a non-manufacturer, and I see the need for this. The country needs to be able to dump low-skilled people directly out of high school into a job that will pay enough to sustain them and their families over a lifetime. Don't concentrate so hard on educating everyone -- some people can't handle it and don't want to be...look at how many students are just barely graduating college and not actually absorbing anything. I graduated high school in 1993, and even by that time the only route to a stable life without a college degree was to get a union apprenticeship in a skilled trade. This is still viable, but only in union states and it certainly doesn't pay the same as it used to.
College should be available to those who want it at a reasonable cost, but having it be the new minimum standard to be considered for any type of employment is crazy. Bring back old school factory work, and allow those who can't handle education to work in a steel mill, shipyard or car plant.
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The country needs to be able to dump low-skilled people directly out of high school into a job that will pay enough to sustain them and their families over a lifetime. Don't concentrate so hard on educating everyone -- some people can't handle it and don't want to be...look at how many students are just barely graduating college and not actually absorbing anything.
While you're absolutely right that there needs to be low-skill jobs that pay a good wage - manufacturing just isn't going to be it. We already have robots to make a lot of things. As long as the cost of building things with robots is less than the cost of building them with manual labor - and thanks to the relatively high labor costs in the US, they will be - those jobs are never coming back.
Ever watch the show "How It's Made?" [sciencechannel.com] The answer is (almost) always robots. I remember one where they showed how moder
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Exactly. What's happening now is a sort of Industrial Revolution Mark II, and in this iteration, it is automation that is playing the starring role. And if anyone feels grumpy about a dozen robots with one guy sitting at a console making sure the gears turn, jump ahead ten or fifteen years, when that level of automation means even cheap labor in China, India, Mexico and probably by that point Africa can't undercut the robots.
The fact is that the world is going through a manufacturing revolution, and has bee
we need more trades schools and less college. ITT (Score:3)
we need more trades schools and less college. ITT and others like it where good but they got stuck in the college traps as well high costs.
Also Devry was better but they moved to more online and less hands on classes.
Community college is hit or miss and some times the 4 year colleges make you repeat classes that you took already.
4-6 Years of pure class room is way to much for most jobs and they have big skill gaps.
It's not just low-skilled people there are also lines of work that college is a poor fit for.
W
Re:This will be a very interesting experiment (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing is, manufacturing jobs won't come back, because they're gone. In the 70's and 80's, it took 200 people to do what 3 machines running 24/7 with almost no error do now. Even if you were to set up a new factory, you'd have like 40 jobs where you used to have 1000 - enough to actually support a reasonable town. So point 1,
1. You aren't bringing the jobs back.
Here's another amusing point: even if we do get jobs, the value of them will be based against the value of that job globally - so long as businesses and currency is still traded globally, so until we have really brought the quality of life and cost of living to some sort of equilibrium world wide, these jobs will never provide the value they used to. Back when we didn't have to compete with other countries for this work, it was viable. That's no longer the case and it won't ever be. We avoid manufacturing now because it's simply not the best return on investment for a business OR an employee. So point 2,
2. Manufacturing work doesn't make enough money for the business or employee to incentivize companies or workers to do it in the US in past large numbers.
Last, you mentioned vocational skills. Surprising many who haven't looked into it, we do have some vocational training and even government programs to make it cheap and relatively available. The problem? If you churn out 70-200, let's say, air conditioner repairman from the same school, in the same location, every 6 months, you're not going to have enough jobs available for them. The only way that would work is if you got trained and then were required to move at least 20 miles from any other graduate at any point in time. So point 3,
3. Vocational training doesn't work at scale because it saturates the local markets past the point of available jobs
The end tally is this: Neither manufacturing nor vocational jobs have the ability or potential to support a nationwide middle class, nor provide economic mobility to enter the middle class in numbers greater than what we have today, with all likelihood of them actually decreasing in the future.
In layman's terms, manufacturing can't support a large middle class population.
Even China, the manufacturing king of the world, is dealing with this issue right now. It's prompting their hurried transition to a more service-based economy.
Advocating to bring back factory work, you may as well advocate to bring back rat catchers, switchboard operators and video rental stores for all the good it'll do the middle class. The reality is that we're moving towards a more maintainable, fully service-based economy and that necessitates higher levels of education to meet the ever rising bar for good paying skilled jobs if we want to maintain a large middle class. For good or for ill, the college degree is fast becoming the old highschool diploma as far as job hunting goes.
He Has the Same Problem As Obama (Score:2)
So, y'all realize the same people that that have controlled the house of representatives are still there right? The people elected the same bunch of Do-Nothings that have been in place for the last 12 years or so. They are anti-tax and free-trade. So unless they all of sudden have decided to become socialists these ideas of having massive taxed on companies that move production overseas is a no go. What Trump can do is Exit NAFTA. But doing that would all of a sudden make millions of materials produced in t
Can't wait to see the H1B caps (Score:2)
Let's not forget the house has been trying to move on removing all H1B caps for a while now. Trump has no love loss for college educated voters, but he does like white males. So that's going to be a toss up.
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His current wife worked illegally so not sure that's even necessary.
Trump will trade his current wife for younger model when it comes time to run for re-election.
Why blame Trump? (Score:2)
Why not blame, oh, I dunno, G.M.? Maybe their management had something to do with it. This quote from the summary might have something to do with it "Chevrolet Cruze, whose U.S. sales through October were down 20 percent". Why were their sales down? According to Hillary and Obama, the economies great so it could be that. And to say otherwise would be sexists.
Check out the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariff consequence (Score:5, Interesting)
In this particular situation, if GM decides it can't make the Cruze economically in the US and the tariff would make it price uncompetitive then it could just stop making the car. Not only would no US workers make the car and dealers not have it to sell and make a profit, but there would be no Mexican workers making it either. This would be good news for foreign car makers producing similar sized cars made overseas. Another option is to build the car completely using robots. GM knows a lot about industrial robotic car assembly.
Economics is complicated and dramatic, swift changes in policies can have many unintended consequences.
Re:This is totally Trump's fault! (Score:4, Insightful)
Why not? Trump blamed everything of the last 30 years on Hillary.
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And the GOP blamed Obama exclusively for the bail out when it started under Bush!
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Well, unlike Trump she has been in power in one form or another since the '90s.
Additionally, I'm pretty sure that Obama's cereal got soggy sometime this week... Bush's fault.
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> Why not? Trump blamed everything of the last 30 years on Hillary.
You mean she wasn't First Lady, a Senator, or Secretary of State for that time?
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What he said is that a lot of the things she was promising to do as President were things she ALREADY COULD HAVE DONE during her 30 years of public service, but hadn't bothered because she is one of the least effective politicians to ever hold an office.
Funny you should mentioned that. NY Times article ran an article that started off with that scenario from Trump and ended with Senator Hillary Clinton voting to close the loophole that he used to avoid paying taxes for 20 years.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/01/us/politics/donald-trump-tax.html [nytimes.com]
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As secretary of state, her role/and duty is very specific, IE: outward.. and as a senator, she can try to effect change in her state.. but the reality is the nature of the US governent is you can't wave a hand and make ANYTHING happen. Heck, you can't even get 3 people in the same room that LIKE each other to agree on where to eat lunch.. try it with several hundred people that have their own agendas and some of which are just plain.. I won't work with you because I'm running later and I'm on the other tea
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Actually for my companies (I own several) this was planned as contingency (in case he won).. and we are now just executing it (we will take our 30K jobs and put them in other countries).. and I know at least 100 other multinationals that are reevaluating their relationship with the US and deciding if its worth the hassle.. most I can assure you are on the "no its not" camp.
Remember, the ENTIRE US economy (both internally and externally) is based on the BELIEF of stability and growth.. When you remove those.
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Actually, while job outsourcing was happening either way, fewer jobs isn't a thing that's caused by that, in general. Our standard-of-living and our employment rate have increased in a large part due to trade; the other part is due to straight technical progress.
Technology and trade are essentially the same thing: we found a way to do something cheaper. "Cheaper" generally means "with less labor", although in the real world it's labor cost (people tell me cows aren't spherical; this is why they're not
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A the end of the day, EVERY company has to make plans based on worst case scenarios and what is likely.. we all saw for the past YEAR who he is.. and what he says and would like to do.. Only a fool waits until the water is at his waist to say "maybe I should abandon ship".
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But the fact is Russia is not your enemy though. Think hard about why Russia did what they did. Crimea annexation and Russian support for Eastern Ukraine rebels only happened after the US/EU sponsored Ukraiine coup d'etat. Syria, kind of like the same deals. Russia has had military bases on those countries for a long time. You cannot rattle a cage like that and expect nothing will happen. Democrats have been so cynical about it that they are saying it was all Russia's fault.
Putin is not precisely a democrat
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Of Michigan's 14 House seats, 9 went to Republicans and 5 went to Democrats. Michigan did not have a Senate seat up for election this year. Their seated Senators are both Democrats.
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Best thing Trump and the GPO can do is announce an infrastructure investment plan that begins with replacing all the bad pipes in Flint. After that, come up with an agreement with Carrier to reverse the moving of 1,400 jobs to Mexico. Wouldn't take very many victories like that to secure blue collar Dems for another 8 or 12 years. Let's see the Democrats try to win anything better than town dog catcher without that group.
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And then, once the cheap loans and subsidies have been eaten up, the companies that were bought off still move to Mexico...
Handing subsidies to companies to keep their facilities in your area is just another iteration of the race to the bottom. If the only way a job can be tenable is by handing company money (directly or indirectly), then the job isn't really tenable at all, and all that happens is that other sectors of the economy have to underwrite untenable and unsustainable jobs.
Look at Venezuela. That'
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What exactly have the globalist, immigrant-friendly Democrats been doing to help people whose jobs have been offshored? Why don't I remember actual action by Obama to reduce or eliminate H1-B visas or crack down on sham job replacement "outsourcing"?
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He can gang up all he wants, for the next two years at least he'll have damned little leverage. And even in two years, what's he going to do, campaign for third parties and Democrats?
The system has been set up so that while a President is very powerful, he is also very vulnerable, and if he decides to make enemies of the majority of those folks on the Hill, they can make his life an absolute misery. While someone like Obama has the wit to navigate an unfriendly Congress to at least get something done, if Tr
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Point is that Democrat party is leaderless, aside from Schumer, Pelosi and probably Kaine. From what I understand, Trump does have a past relationship w/ Schumer, which got overshadowed by his rivalry w/ both Obama and Hilary. But w/ both of the latter gone, he can use Schumer as a backup in case Republicans like McCain go rogue. From the leadership of the GOP, he may not have problems in the senate, since McConnell is somewhat genuinely conservative, but too gun shy in the last senate to confront Obama
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Expect trump to re-usher the age of McCarthyism. Remember his mentor was Roy Cohn and how can we forget his transition team guy is Christie, you know the guy who took out a bridge for payback. I expect it is going to be ugly, very very very ugly. It is who trump is. The old proverb about the frog carrying the scorpion across the river comes to mind. Neither did well, but it was in the scorpion's nature to kill. I'm not sure the frog will survive as a democracy. Would not surprise me if trump tries to pull a
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The powers of Congress were designed explicitly by the Founding Fathers to deal with a president like Trump. You may call it dysfunctional, I call it it the ultimate check on power. If Trump tries to push through the more absurd aspects of his agenda, Congress will do what the Constitution intended it to do, prevent him from doing significant harm to the interests of the people of the United States.
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President Pussy Grabber
Thanks, I needed to laugh out loud, and that did it. :-) Maybe I'll get a T-shirt made with the most unflattering pic of Trump on it, captioned with 'All Hail President Pussy Grabber!'. xD
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So let's get this straight. The man the American people just elected President has no actual intention of being a functional President? So this really is going to be like all Trump's other endeavors, he'll be the face of the endeavor, the guy that comes in, shakes hands, inks the deal others have negotiated, and then is ushered out the door while the actual people running his companies go about doing the actual work.
So if this is the case, what the Americans actually have done has elected a 21st century ver
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The man the American people just elected President has no actual intention of being a functional President?
Worked for Bush and Cheney :-)
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It might have worked better if the VP wasn't the proverbial Whore of Babylon.
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He can cancel NAFTA, but he can't do the 35% tariff without an act of congress. These are the same anti-tax, free trade republicans that have been there for years. Trumps experience in getting a good deal is based on not living up to his side of the bargain.
Re:No doubt... (Score:5, Insightful)
Speak for yourself. As a latino I take no offense in Trump winning. Why would you support people that pay no taxes only and accept whatever wage is thrown at them since they have no options, which in the process reduces the job pool for a lot of people, simply because they could not find a legal path to immigrate to the US?
It seems you are too blinded by the kool-aid that the media gave you about Trump to actually see that he was the one talking about bringing jobs back and making the economy work again.
But just chill, it is politics after all. I am not expecting miracles coming from either candidate so just focus on getting better opportunities or starting your own thing.
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Judging by the sound bites we got here in Europe, Trump's plan for bringing jobs back went something like
1) Promise more jobs.
2) ???
3) Profit!
It is entirely possible that he actually HAS a working plan, I won't rule that out. But until I hear something more believable than "Because magic" or that one sound-bite going on all day of "We didn't do it. God did it!" I have very little faith in the next four years for you guys.
If I thought Trump would do what he said (Score:4, Interesting)
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LAIR. Not that you would ever care about the market or money (real vs fiat) - but the MARKET is up 1.39% as of now.
The MARKET tanked last night as investors were expecting a Hillary win.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurengensler/2016/11/09/trump-wins-election-markets-live-blog/#7bffd8149397 [forbes.com]
LIAR. YOU are the god damned wreckers - why wouldnt you want jobs in the USA? why wouldnt you want to try something besides obamanomics which has the labor force collapsed and part time and multijob and gig jobs for everyone?
You shouldn't believe everything you read on Facebook.
It IS news for nerds (Score:2)
And Oh Boy this is stuff that MATTERS.
Since when did 'News for nerds' imply Slashdot should cover technical stories only, as you seem to think it does?
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Who you calling relatively intelligent? You wanna fight or something?