About that Trump economy…
by Tom Sullivan
A homeless camp in Oakland, California. Photo by NeoBatfreak via CC BY-SA 4.0
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Nearly 50,000 United Auto Workers members are on strike this morning after management and labor could not agree on terms for a new four-year contract, CNN reports:
The union’s 46,000 hourly workers walked out at 31 GM factories and 21 other facilities, spread across nine states, mostly in the center of the country.
The strike started at 11:59 pm on Sunday. It’s the largest strike by any union against any business in the United States since the last strike at GM in 2007.
The acting president will be so pleased it is happening on his watch, in his economy.
GM’s decision to close down its Lordstown, Ohio and Hamtramck, Michigan facilities is also an issue, with the union pushing GM to convert the sites to manufacturing electric vehicles. The hiring of temporary workers as part of a two-tiered wage system is also up for negotiation.
The International Brotherhood of Teamsters pledged to support the strike by refusing to deliver completed vehicles to dealerships.
“We clearly understand the hardship that it may cause,” said UAW Vice President Terry Dittes. “We are standing up for fair wages, we are standing up for affordable quality health care, we are standing up for our share of the profits.”
Decent pay and affordable quality health care remain elusive for a lot of Americans.
So does housing. The acting president has a plan for that. He has his people looking into relocating homeless Americans from the streets of major cities to government-run facilities “to get that whole thing cleaned up.” By what legal authority he could act is unclear. But don’t worry. “Senior administration officials” are not considering forced relocation at the moment.
“We’re not rounding people up or anything yet,” one official told the Washington Post.
Paul Waldman ponders just who would do the rounding-up, “The FBI? Federal marshals? The military?” He writes:
Let’s back up for a moment. Homelessness is a long-standing and extremely challenging problem, and although the overall number of homeless people is slightly lower than it was a few years ago, there are cities that have seen significant increases in recent years. The main culprit is housing costs, which in many places make it unaffordable to live unless you’re earning a high salary. For example, the median rent on a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco is a ludicrous $3,600 a month, or more than $43,000 a year just for rent. A job making the California minimum wage of $12 an hour would make you about $24,000 a year before taxes or any other expenses.
What has the Trump administration done about this problem? If the answer was “nothing,” that would be a blessing, because the truth is that the administration’s policies amount to a concerted effort to push more people toward homelessness.
They have tried to sabotage the Affordable Care Act and throw poor people off Medicaid. They have proposed huge cuts to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which would have included cutting funds for repair of public housing along with raising rents for those living there. They have waged a multi-pronged effort to slash safety net programs that keep people from falling into desperate poverty, of which homelessness can often be a consequence. They have attempted to kick immigrant families out of public housing.
With 6 in 10 Americans expecting a recession and his approval rating slipping, the acting president is showing signs of panic. He needs another wedge issue to stimulate his base.
Enter Fox News.
Media Matters observed in June that Fox had begun portraying cities run by Democrats as crumbling pictures of Third-World decay about the time the acting president declared Baltimore “a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.”
Given recent health department citations of Donald Trump’s restaurants, infestation is something he might actually know something about. Also, writes Waldman, studies link conservative leanings with heightened sensitivity to “stimuli meant to invoke disgust, like bodily fluids or insects,” something also “associated with foreigners and other out-groups.” It is both a natural response from the germophobe-in-chief and a natural hook for keeping the Trump base jacked up should the economy falter and his numbers trend down.
But rounding up the homeless is a particularly authoritarian as well as anti-capitalist solution to homelessness in an economy Trump brags is booming. Instead of government action, weren’t churches prescribed to take up that slack? Aren’t there mega-ones in red states that could hold thousands? Or simply give the homeless Trump Jobs if the Trump Economy is what he says it is and the Trump Tax Cut is working as advertised.