The union vote is a big prize in presidential politics.
Well, it was. Our corporations and businesses regularly crush unionization efforts in every industry. The American worker is in a desperate situation-they often cannot risk organizing, nor can they afford to strike. You all know you’re working harder for less year after year. We are purported to have a revolutionary character in this country-our Declaration Of Independence reflects that-but when we are up against the wall, we fold and instead of standing in solidarity with our neighbor, and don’t rock the boat, hoping the wave of bad news hits him and not us.
Knowing this, it’s hardly surprising that one of the nation’s largest unions, the United Auto Workers, has seen its membership drop 75% in the last fifty years. But there’s hope. Down here in yahoo land where I live, several plants are currently angling to join the UAW. Predictably, many fuckball governors here are calumniating about it saying that it will lead to job cuts. Whatever. They’d much rather slob on the knobs of the corporate bastards eating workers alive instead of standing in solidarity with the little guy. I personally don’t know how they keep getting elected when their contempt for workers is so incredibly obvious.
2024’s battle lines have been drawn on the issue of unions. It is quite clear President Biden believes in organization, joining a picket line during a UAW strike in 2023. Trump, however, has a long history of standing against unionization. In Agenda 47, Trump is making no bones about the fact that he wants to cleave workers from unions, particularly in the automaking industry:
What’s happening to our auto workers is an absolute disgrace and an outrage beyond belief. Auto workers are getting totally ripped off by Crooked Joe Biden and also their horrendous leadership. Because these people are allowing our country to do these electric vehicles that very few people want. And it’s a mandate so you’ll ultimately be forced to drive in a car that goes for an hour and then you have to have it recharged. I hope you don’t want to go very far away.
Biden has imposed the outlandish requirement that 67% of all new vehicles must be electric in less than ten years. That means Michigan and places that make cars you can forget about it, you better get your union working because you can forget about. Those cars are all going to be made in China.
Ignoring Trump’s typical limited vocabulary and grammar destruction, let’s look at this claim about EVs. We can dispense with his notion outright that they only drive for an hour. Most of them are hitting 400 miles to a full charge-simple math dictates that they would go much longer. We’ll return to this in a minute. So, how much truth is there to Biden’s 67% target?
Since this was published in October, the Biden White House has negotiated a slower timeline and a less stringent requirement. The auto industry finds that fifty percent by 2030 is a more reasonable goal. But it’s quite obvious that the Biden administration (and the automakers) do not want America to be left behind in revolutionizing how the world gets around. As of now, countries like China have the jump on us because of our bizarre dedication to the combustion engine. Certainly, legitimate questions abound in consumers’ minds. Many do worry that a sparse infrastructure of charging stations will leave them by the side of the road. Apparently, the goal is 500,000 stations nationwide. I’d love to see that finished before we make such a radical transition. Many probably are concerned about maintenance costs. Also, the vehicles take about between a half hour to an hour to charge. That’s entirely too long. But our ability to compete in this sector could be overshadowed by the fact that we are in a race against time to slow down the heating of the planet through emissions. Furthermore, only 30% of our emissions come from vehicles. Chances are our home and business energy needs make up a great deal of the other 70%. We need more windmills, turbines and solar panels to power our way of life. I would like to see the coal and natural gas plants shuttered, perhaps moreso than I would like to change the car industry. A guy can dream.
Anyway, back to Trump’s dumb ass.
According to the UAW president himself, one auto company CEO used the word brutality over 40 times in a single conversation to describe Joe Biden.
This needs a bit more exposition. Shawn Fain, the new president of the UAW, is no Trump fan at all. So there’s that. And the complaining about brutality came from a discussion Fain had with the Stellantis CEO concerning new emissions standards on gas powered cars. Fain was derisive towards the auto exec’s carping:
According to Fain’s telling, Tavares complained about what he called the “brutality” of emissions regulations that leave the company with no choice but to slash costs to afford the EV transition.
“He used the word brutality probably 40 times in our conversation,” Fain later said in an interview with Bloomberg. “Our workers have had a brutality imposed upon them for the last 40 years — closed plants and having to uproot their lives.”
Anyway, Fain doesn’t want to hear much from executives whose compensation is seriously out of whack with the workers on the factory floor.
More Trump…
But Joe Biden’s cruel and foolish electric vehicle mandate. That’s how bad this policy is. Your union heads know it. But the union bosses don’t want to do anything about it because they’re not leaders. But you know who is voting for me? The people in the union.
The union heads and Crooked Joe keep using the phrase fair transition. There’s no fair transition. First of all, people don’t want the electric car. And the ones that want it should get it. But we want to have all forms of transportation and all forms of motorization, to describe this unnecessary forced transition to electric vehicles.
But there’s no such thing as a fair transition that destroys over 100,000 auto manufacturing jobs (it will be much more than that), wastes tens of billions of dollars that should be going to the workers, and makes new cars entirely unaffordable.
For the middle class, that’s a transition to hell. You’re going to hell and your bosses are leading you right down the tubes. You shouldn’t pay your fees. They get these big fees from all of their workers.
And I’m telling you, you shouldn’t pay those dues. You should not pay your dues because they’re selling you to hell. You’re going to be going to hell. You’re not going to have any jobs. All those cars are going to be made in China. Every one of them. You can forget it, Michigan. You can forget it, South Carolina. You can forget it, everybody. All of those cars are going to be made in China.
And there you have it, Trump the union-buster.
I looked hither and yonder for this “fair transition” that Trump keeps alluding to and found nothing. And I can only assume that this number of 100,000 is made up to scare voters. Oh, not that you would know because you probably don’t drive anywhere except in your little golf cart, but new cars are already close to unaffordable and as Shawn Fain rightly points out, it’s corporate greed, not the needs of workers, that is elevating prices, and that’s happening in every sector of the economy.
Now what Trump doesn’t seem to get is that the EV mandate is supposed to make us competitive with places like China. If we do not get in on this industry, indeed, our automakers will be left in the dust. The rest of the world seems to understand the climate crisis much better than the United States.
We sit on liquid gold, and we’re getting rid of combustion engines. And they sit on all of the other materials that you need for the batteries. They’re going to make all those cars. We’re not going to make any of them.
Again, Trump seems not to give one whit for our keeping pace with the rest of the world as it evolves from fossil fuels. It’s bad business and it’s bad policy in terms of environmental degradation. You wanna talk about hell? Wait until the planet heats up another couple of degrees if we keep fucking around. Now, Trump is not far off the mark when he suggests that China will be the epicenter for a great deal of EV minerals. I’ll grant the dumbfuck that. All the more reason to forge smart relationships with it, not to declare it an enemy as we are doing right now. It’s still very possible to influence it with trade and put an end to its poor human rights record. We don’t have much moral authority left, so it might be a bridge too far, but who knows what tomorrow may bring.
And on day one, you’re going to be back in business with me. And those factories are going to start opening up again. Remember when I got elected, I told you all about this in the campaign. And when I got elected, hardly a car company built outside of this country. I stopped it.
This is such a hilarious assertion that it barely warrants a comment. But he continues to brag…
They didn’t go to Mexico anymore. I said if you go to Mexico, I’m putting a big tariff. You’ll make a car you’re going to have a 25% tariff if you send that car back into the United States. I stopped it. Well, right now they’re doing it again, worse than ever before. We lost 32% of our industry to Mexico prior to my getting there. And we lost almost nothing. Nothing. In fact, we were taking back our industry. But now it’s going again. I’ll straighten it out.
Trump’s so full of crap here, and dangerously so. His own USMCA, a trilateral free trade pact with Mexico and Canada still on the books, may up the requirement for US made parts, but his tariff threats were idle. In order to make cars affordable, some labor and manufacturing went to Mexico, because of lower wages there. Forbes has noted that Trump is all over the map with his protectionist threats, and suggests that we’re looking at multiple catastrophes if we start trade wars in the auto industry that could radiate into other sectors of the economy. Higher prices, retaliation, less units, plant closings, and layoffs, the exact opposite of what he is trying to achieve. For a vaunted businessman, he’s awful at this. It would appear that it takes a big ass global village to make a car.
How typical it is of a proto-fascist like Trump to lash out at other countries for our problems. But all it is going to do is snap back at us domestically. Who will Trump blame then? He certainly won’t take responsibility, if history is any judge. I fear that his rage will most likely turn inward to his domestic “enemies”, the imaginary radical leftists and communists who oppose him. Simply disagreeing with the man or his constituents labels you as such. Trump loves to play the victim to “witch hunts”, but we may see some actual ones if he clears opposition away in the manner that Agenda 47 strongly suggests. We’ll be wishing that getting around is our biggest problem.
The Illogical Seminary 