the call where Trump threatened to withhold aid to Ukraine unless the government there helped him dig up dirt on Joe Biden? is DeSantis’s position that extorting a foreign government is fine if it happens on the phone? https://t.co/uIqghdNLAi
the call where Trump threatened to withhold aid to Ukraine unless the government there helped him dig up dirt on Joe Biden? is DeSantis’s position that extorting a foreign government is fine if it happens on the phone? https://t.co/uIqghdNLAi
If not for Tucker Carlson and ball tanning, I’d think this was a joke (Washington Post):
It’s been almost 2,000 years since the Roman Empire reached the historic peak of its power. But many men still contemplate it — quite a lot.
A new social media trend prompting women to ask the men in their lives how often they think about ancient Rome reveals that it crosses the minds of many men on a weekly basis. Even daily. Or more — to the surprise and confusion of their loved ones.
“Three times a day,” answered one woman’s fiancé in a TikTok video. “There’s so much to think about,” he explained, eliciting a stunned look into the camera from his soon-to-be wife.
“They built an entire world-dominating society,” another man exclaimed when asked by a bewildered-looking woman to justify why he contemplates ancient Rome.
Captain Oveur: Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?
According to historians, one explanation could be that Western societies have historically overemphasized the aspects of Roman history that are associated with masculinity in the popular imagination.
The first thing that comes to the mind is “an image of the Roman legion, the imperial eagle and that sort of military aspect — along with gladiators, which has a long association with masculinity and power,” Hannah Cornwell, a historian of the ancient world at Britain’s Birmingham University, said in a telephone interview Thursday.
[…]
“Ancient Rome was of course patriarchal and violent,” Lewis Webb, a historian of ancient Rome at Oxford University, wrote in an email. “But it was also a diverse place: there were numerous forms of masculinity, women could have agency and power, and there were multiple gender expressions and identities, as well as various sexualities.”
Somehow, I don’t think diversity and gender-bending is atop these men’s minds when they think about ancient Rome multiple times a day.
At the end of August, a Roman reenactor based in Sweden, Gaius Flavius, took to his Instagram to post a reel asking his followers to ask their partners how often they think about the Roman Empire, saying: “Ladies, many of you do not realize how often men think about the Roman Empire. Ask your husband/boyfriend/father/brother – you will be surprised by their answers.”
His post was in reference to the post made by Swedish influencer Saskia Cort, who originally began asking her Instagram followers in September 2022 to ask their partners how often they think about the Roman Empire. It went viral in Sweden, but now a year later has gone global.
“I think it’s being murdered, or assaulted,” Melissa Urban said in a TikTok. She captioned the clip: “With a splash of did I leave the curling iron on.”
“Definitely being kidnapped, or just in general somebody’s gonna get me,” says TikToker Danyelle Leyden.
“It speaks volumes for society that women are so cautious and have to feel on guard most of their lives,” Leyden said. “I think unfortunately most women have had past experiences that led them to be this cautious.”
“For me it also put into further perspective that as women we feel like prey subconsciously,” she added.
And the men? How many daydream of being predators? With nicely tanned balls.
It’s the GOP’s trusty “Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi” tactic. They’re gonna “But her emails” Joe Biden from here to next November. With help from a compliant, both-sides press again.
The GOP’s goal of course is to repeat unsubstantiated allegations often enough that they are the first impression that comes to mind when people think about the opposing candidate. Take for instance this word cloud Gallup assembled this time seven years ago:
It’s a variant of poisoning the well. Newt Ginrich taught them well. In the Trump era, the GOP has abandoned “Optimistic Positive Governing Words.” (Governing is no longer their aspiration.) But Republicans are still hell at “Contrasting Words.”
Republicans desperate to distract attention from their front-runner’s two impeachments, four indictments and an insurrection will flood the zone with “old,” “senile,” “corrupt,” “Hunter,” and “impeachment.” A little baseless impeachment here, a ton of innuendo there, and voila! Biden is damaged goods. Meanwhile, Donald Trump throws rallies the press will cover. They’ll humor him with uncritical interviews to get the exclusive.
As with Donald Trump’s campaign to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, the GOP will get as much face time in the (water-carrying) press as it needs. Their leaders will look into the cameras and make claims of evidence, massive amounts of it, against Biden and his “crime family.” Evidence we’ll never see because, as with “Stop the Steal,” thereisn’t any. Just plenty of wars and rumors of wars. Massive amount of unseen evidence was enough to provoke a violent insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021.
The point is that repetition works. On the left and on the right. So many on the left who hold degrees in political science should have spent more time studying political psychology.
Here’s the New York Times hyping Democratic handwringing over Biden. Democrats do it by reflex, of course, but the GOP knows too well how to trigger the reflex, and the press, having learned nothing, is willing to play along. “Democratic politicians and party officials … have been unable to dispel Democratic concerns about [Biden] that center largely on his age and vitality,” the Times reports:
Mr. Biden’s campaign and his allies argue that much of the intraparty dissent will fade away next year, once the election becomes a clear choice between the president and former President Donald J. Trump, the dominant leader in the Republican primary field.
But their assurances have not tamped down worries about Mr. Biden from some top Democratic strategists and many of the party’s voters, who approve of his performance but worry that Mr. Biden, who will be 82 on Inauguration Day, may simply not be up for another four years — or even the exhausting slog of another election.
“The voters don’t want this, and that’s in poll after poll after poll,” said James Carville, a longtime party strategist, who worries that a lack of enthusiasm for Mr. Biden could lead to lower Democratic turnout in 2024. “You can’t look at what you look at and not feel some apprehension here.”
See? They’re still calling Carville for quotes, for God’s sake.
The massively corrupt Texas GOP AG Ken Paxton was acquitted in his impeachment trial today. They just can’t quit him. But the Texas GOP is at each others’ throats and it’s going to be a bloodbath.
Even among those Party leaders who cast their lot with Trump in the lead-up to the 2020 election, very few are still with him: NBC News surveyed forty-four of Trump’s former Cabinet members and found that just four supported his reëlection. Trump’s own Attorney General Bill Barr has been making the rounds this summer calling his former boss’s arguments about January 6th “nauseating” and “despicable,” and insisting that “someone who engaged in that kind of bullying about a process that is fundamental to our system shouldn’t be anywhere near the Oval Office.” Mick Mulvaney, a former Trump chief of staff, has said, “I’m working hard to make sure someone else is the nominee.”
This dissent belongs to the same pattern as the Koch and Club for Growth efforts, and to the motivated reasoning that powered the early support for DeSantis. For a decade, the central drama of Trumpism has concerned the Republican élites who continued to support him—the story has been about their malignity, or opportunism, or willful moral blindness. Now it may be about their ineffectiveness. The elected officials who long stuck with Trump—Mike Pence, Chris Christie—have found that their loyalty earned them no sway with his base when they finally turned on him. They might as well have been John Kasich.
It has been striking, this summer, to notice how important January 6th has been to the Stop Trump faction—especially to figures like Barr and Mulvaney. And yet that insurrection never features in the ads designed to persuade voters to break with Trump. On policy, too, it is hard to detect an establishment imprint: much of the conversation among Trump’s opponents on the trail has concerned various crazy-sounding plans to use the military to attack Mexico, theoretically to target drug cartels, a plan cooked up by a new maga think tank. Every party, at every time, has some tension between its élites and its base. But it’s hard to think of a more spectacular divide than the one defining the G.O.P. right now.
Why do I believe that they’ll come around when it comes right down to it? Could it be because that’s what they always do?
It was only a matter of time before this clash manifested somewhere:
This city of 28,000 was once so Polish it was dubbed “Little Warsaw.” But in recent decades, an influx of immigrants gave Hamtramck new character. Bengali and Arabic joined English on signs at City Hall. Yemeni and Bangladeshi mosques, restaurants and shops proliferated.
And last year, a Muslim who emigrated from Yemen as a teenager became mayor — the city’s first leader in nearly a century with no Polish roots — alongside what is believed to be the nation’s only all-Muslim city council.
Many residents in this tiny enclave just north of downtown Detroit saw these changes as a sign of the Hamtramck’s progressiveness. The Muslim community that had previously experienced discrimination, including voter intimidation and resistance to mosques’ public call to prayer, had finally taken its seats at the table.
Yet the ethnic, cultural and religious diversity that made Hamtramck something of a model is being put severely to the test. In June, after divisive debate, the six-member council blocked the display of Pride flags on city property — action that has angered allies and members of the LGBQT community, who feel that the support they provided the immigrant groups has been reciprocated with betrayal.
“We welcomed you,” former council member Catrina Stockpoole, a retired social worker who identifies as gay, recalls telling the council this summer. “We created nonprofits to help feed, clothe, find housing. We did everything we could to make your transition here easier, and this is how you repay us, by stabbing us in the back?”
The council’s unanimous vote in the middle of Pride Month seemed intentional to Stockpoole and others, though the resolution banned not only the rainbow flag but all flags except for the U.S., state, city and POW/MIA banners. Mayor Amer Ghalib, 43, defends the action as one of neutrality, saying no group should be able to promote a political agenda on city property.
“We’re not targeting anybody,” he said recently. “We are trying to close the door for other groups that could be extremist or racist.”
Not everyone buys that.
Of course they don’t. It’s ridiculous. Are they saying that LGBTQ people are extremist and racist? Come on. We know what this is about.
“The sole purpose was absolutely to go after the gay pride flag,” maintains Josh Hansknecht, a local middle school teacher and president of the Hamtramck Queer Alliance. The issue has laid bare tension between the LGBTQ community and socially conservative Muslims like the mayor.
“The ban did not create the conflict, but it emboldened people,” said Hansknecht, 28. “It expanded on that tension.”
It alsotriggered a spike in thefts and vandalism of Pride flags on private property. One YouTube video shows teenagers egging homes that were flying the flag. Some people, like 23-year-old Selena Briggs, are talking about moving out of the city, saying they no longer feel welcome.
“I don’t feel comfortable to even hold hands with my girlfriend,” said Briggs, a lesbian who works at a cellphone shop on Joseph Campau Street, a main commercial thoroughfare lined with mostly aging store fronts where furniture, clothing, jewelry and cannabis can be bought.
Because of Hamtramck’s historic diversity — a reflection of immigrants from Poland, Albania, Ukraine, Yemen and Bangladesh, among other countries — the city likes to describe itself as “the world in two square miles.” Its neighborhoods are filled with small, tightly packed single-family homes and duplexes. Many were built well before World War II.
Flags have long held an important symbolism here.
A 2013 council resolution directed the Human Relations Commission to manage the display of those representing various groups and nationalities on the city’s 18 poles on Joseph Campau. The Pride flag went up across from City Hall in 2021, but only after then-mayor Karen Majewski broke a 3-3 council tie. The next year, despite some officials’ opposition, it flew along with flags representing various countries, the African Union, Cherokee Nation and others. Today, the stars and stripes top every pole.
[…]
Many Muslims and other residents support the council’s decision, the mayor insists.
“I don’t like the fact that [the LGBQT community is] publicly having these flags everywhere, and it’s being forced on me,” said Amin Haque, 26, an Uber driver who is of Bangladeshi descent. “There’s no problem being gay or lesbian, but keep it to yourself. Just don’t push it on us.”
Stockpoole, who served on the council from 2008 to 2012, thinks the real rift is between the LGBTQ community and the city’s male leadership, backed by Hamtramck’s conservative mosques.
Neighbors are not pitted against neighbors, she said. “Everybody I know gets along with their neighbors on a one-to-one basis. We mow each other’s grass, we look out for each other’s kids. Our children play together.”
Anthropologist Rumana Rahman, who chairs the local beautification committee, echoes those sentiments. In a city where low-income immigrants are a significant part of the population, she sees most getting along with the LGBQT community. And their real concerns are not a Pride flag but worries about the challenges of daily life.
“There’s lead in the water, there’s lead in the soil, there’s trash overflowing in the alleys, potholes in the road,” said Rahman, 41, who is from Bangladesh. “A lot of the factory workers don’t have cars. These are their problems.
Right. The trash is overflowing so they don’t want pride flags flying. I get awfully sick of academics and other political experts constantly offering excuses for people’s bigotry. It is what it is and it isn’t going to be solved with a chicken in every pot. Not everything is about money.
The liberals in that town stuck to their principles when they defended people who don’t share their belief in tolerance and diversity. That’s the essence of liberalism. But no one should be surprised when the recipients of that generosity of spirit fail to return it. They don’t believe they have to tolerate people who believe differently.
Jenna Ellis – the Donald Trump lawyer who like the former president faces criminal charges regarding attempted election subversion in his defeat by Joe Biden in 2020 – says she will not vote for him in the future because he is a “malignant narcissist” who cannot admit mistakes.
“I simply can’t support him for elected office again,” Ellis said. “Why I have chosen to distance is because of that frankly malignant narcissistic tendency to simply say that he’s never done anything wrong.”
Ellis, 38, was speaking on her show on American Family Radio, a rightwing evangelical network run by the American Family Association, a non-profit that by its own description has been “on the frontlines of America’s culture war” since 1977.
Ellis was one of 18 Trump associates charged with him in Georgia over attempts to overturn Biden’s victory there. Charged with violating state anti-racketeering laws and solicitation of violation of an oath by a public officer, she was granted $100,000 bail and pleaded not guilty.
Trump pleaded not guilty to 13 racketeering and conspiracy charges.
Denying all wrongdoing and claiming political persecution, he also faces four federal counts related to election subversion; 40 federal counts related to retention of classified information; 34 state counts in New York over hush-money payments; and civil cases including a $250m lawsuit lodged by the New York attorney general over his business affairs and a defamation claim arising from a rape allegation a judge said was “substantially true”.
Nonetheless, Trump leads polling regarding the 2024 Republican presidential primary by vast margins, in national and key state surveys.
Ellis is a former counsel for the Thomas More Society, a conservative Catholic group, whose claims to be a constitutional lawyer have been widely doubted.
Described by the New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman as “a lawyer whom Trump sought out after seeing her television commentary”, in 2020 Ellis rose from relative obscurity to become part of what she called an “elite strike force team” working to overturn Trump’s defeat by Biden.
That effort failed. American Family Radio signed up Ellis in December last year. On her show on Thursday, she spoke to Steve Deace, another rightwing host.
Deace said: “Before that man [Trump] needs to be president again … [to] escape the quote-unquote, ‘witch-hunts’, that man needs Jesus again because … his ambitions would be fueled by showing some self-awareness. And he won’t do it because he can’t admit, ‘I’m not God.’”
Ellis said Deace had “perfectly articulated exactly how I as a voter feel”. She knew Trump well “as a friend, as a former boss”, she said, adding: “I have great love and respect for him personally.
“But everything that you just said resonates with me as exactly why I simply can’t support him for elected office again. Why I have chosen to distance is because of that, frankly, malignant narcissistic tendency to simply say that he’s never done anything wrong.
“And the total idolatry that I’m seeing from some of the supporters that are unwilling to put the constitution and the country and the conservative principles above their love for a star is really troubling.
“And I think that we do need to, as Americans and as conservatives and particularly as Christians, take this very seriously and understand where are we putting our vote.”
She loves and respects him personally but she can’t vote for him because he’s a malignant narcissist. Lol….
I suspect her real issue is that the Trumpers turned on her when she decided to back DeSantis (another career move) and now Trump won’t help her with her legal bills which are going to be massive. Perhaps she now thinks she’ll be compensated by the Christian right? Good luck with that.
But she’s not wrong. Trump is a malignant narcissist who refuses to admit he did anything wrong — or that he lost. And she signed on to help him steal the election from the American people. Let’s just say that her current opinions don’t mean very much.
With the ongoing hysteria over Biden’s age, it’s long past time to look more closely at Trump’s mental gyrations which are much more indicative of a disordered mind which, along with his massive psychological defects, is getting worse every day. Here are some examples from this weekend alone.
Watch this whole thing to see him try in vain to pretend he didn’t stumble and becomes even more incoherent. It’s pathetic.
Trump: As you know, crooked Joe Biden and the radical left thugs who have weaponized law enforcement to arrest their leading political opponent that leading by a lot, including Obama pic.twitter.com/T5mx6LhH5D
You know people have told him that isn’t true and the press has certainly covered this as a gaffe. It’s not the only way to express this concept. He could say that you have to show ID to get on an airplane, for instance. But he persists in saying that you have to show ID to buy food which is simply ridiculous. Why? It’s not normal to keep repeating a lie but to keep repeating lies that are totally unnecessary is a little bit crazy. I think he just doesn’t remember that it isn’t true.
How about this?
Trump says Joe Biden is “cognitively impaired” and then accuses him of getting us into World War TWO.
— Jim Stewartson, Anti-disinfo activist 🇺🇸🇺🇦💙 (@jimstewartson) September 16, 2023
It was a slip, of course. Anyone can make one. But if it were Joe Biden they’d say he didn’t know what year it was.
My point is that Trump should be much more careful about going after Biden for his verbal stumbles. People think Trump is just a liar, which of course he is, the greatest the world has ever known. But he’s also full of delusions and strange verbal tics that are not normal cognitive functions. He has had them for a long time but we’ve excused it because some of it is just because he’s very ignorant and some of it is because he’s a sloppy thinker. But going after Joe Biden for cognitive impairment opens him up to much more scrutiny and the press should be much more aggressive in pressing him on it.
Someone needs to ask him if he really thinks that you need ID to buy a loaf of bread. And I’d love to hear someone confront him on the WWII comment. He’ll have to either deny it, when it on tape for everyone to see or he’ll have to admit he misspoke which he seem incapable of doing. Yes, it’s a gotcha question but that’s what they’re doing with Biden and it’s only fair that this 77 year old man falls under exactly the same scrutiny. You can be sure that if he didn’t trowel on the bronze make-up and dye his hair people would be much less impressed with his alleged “vitality.” Close your eyes and he sounds like an old man at the end of the bar ranting with his buddies about kids these days.
This Kristen Welker interview tomorrow on Meet the Press looks to be the exact opposite of that as far as we can tell so far. More on that tomorrow.
Labor unions continue to enjoy high support in the U.S., with 67% of Americans approving of them, similar to the elevated level seen in recent years after more than a decade of rising support. Mirroring this trend, Americans have gradually become more likely than a decade ago to want unions’ influence to strengthen and to believe unions benefit various aspects of business and the economy.
In contrast to the incremental changes seen in U.S. adults’ support of unions over time, the new poll documents an unprecedented uptick since the prior measure, in 2018, in perceptions that unions in the country will become stronger in the future than they are today. A third of Americans (34%) believe this today, compared with 19% five years ago and no more than 25% at any time in the trend since 1999.
Union Approval Steady Near Recent High Point
The 67% of Americans who approve of labor unions today is down slightly from 71% a year ago but marks the fifth straight year this reading has exceeded its long-term average of 62%.
Here’s Trump, ignorant as always:
EXCLUSIVE: Ahead of the UAW strike, Kristen Welker asked fmr. Pres. Trump whose side he's on in negotiations.
Trump: “I’m on the side of making our country great. … The auto workers are being sold down the river by their leadership, and their leadership should endorse Trump.” pic.twitter.com/a8UDVvwFm5
Trying to stop the manufacture of EVs is ridiculous which seems to be what he wants. It’s happening. But then this is someone who says windmills cause cancer so when it comes to anything more complicated than rank racism and payoffs it’s best to ignore him.
There are many issues involved in the strike that have nothing to do with the emerging electric car market. But it is one of the issues. I can ‘t vouch for this analysis by Axios and I’m pretty sure that they lean toward management but as a simple overview I think it manages to lay out the complexities reasonably well:
A big sticking point in contract talks between Detroit automakers and the United Auto Workers union is the popular assertion that it takes fewer workers to manufacture electric vehicles (EVs) than conventional cars.
In fact, the opposite may be true: Researchers at Carnegie-Mellon University recently found that EVs require more labor hours, primarily to produce battery cells.
Today, those cells are manufactured mostly in Asia. Yet a slew of companies are shifting production to the U.S. to take advantage of new tax incentives — though the resulting jobs will likely be non-unionized and lower-paying.
Why it matters: The EV transition is fraught with risks for both auto workers and Detroit’s big three manufacturers: General Motors, Ford and Stellantis.
For UAW members, it’s the risk that good-paying union jobs building engines, transmissions and exhaust systems will disappear.
For auto companies, it’s the risk that they’ll fall further behind Tesla and other non-unionized rivals that already have a significant labor cost advantage.
The big picture: EVs have fewer moving parts than gas-powered vehicles, with no engines, transmissions or exhaust systems.
That makes them easier to maintain and — according to some industry experts — simpler to build.
Even Ford CEO James Farley says so: Last November, he bluntly asserted that EVs will require 40% less labor to produce than traditional cars.
To preserve jobs, Farley said, Ford will need to build more EV components in-house — similar to the way founder Henry Ford operated nearly 100 years ago.
For example, Ford workers at a former transmission plant near Detroit are now making EV motors and transaxles, while workers at another parts facility are assembling battery packs.
The intrigue: Manufacturing battery pack cells is the most labor-intensive part of EV production, according to Turner Cotterman, a McKinsey consultant who worked on the Carnegie-Mellon study.
Yes, but: Even as cell production shifts to the U.S., that labor will likely be done by non-union workers at factories co-owned by foreign battery partners, and they’ll make less money than workers at traditional powertrain factories.
For example, battery cell factories under construction in Kentucky and Tennessee and co-owned by Ford and Korea’s SK On just started hiring workers for $21-$29 per hour, compared to the $28-$35 union workers earn making engines and transmissions at Ford’s existing plants.
A GM battery plant co-owned with another Korean company, LG Energy Solution, opened in Ohio in 2022 with a starting wage of $16.50 an hour, and a promised rise to $20 after seven years.
What’s happening: The UAW successfully organized employees at the Ohio plant, called Ultium Cells, last December, making it the country’s first unionized battery cell factory.
But the two sides still have to negotiate a contract.
GM and Ford insist these new battery plants aren’t covered by the national bargaining agreements for existing autoworkers because they are technically owned by separate companies.
I think we can agree that this is about more than China stealing jobs and the unions know it. There’s a reason the UAW president said another Trump presidency would be a disaster.
Meanwhile:
“Auto companies have seen record profits, including in the last few years, because of the extraordinary skill and sacrifice of the UAW workers. But those record profits have not been shared fairly.” —President Joe Biden on the United Auto Workers strike pic.twitter.com/IL1CrEpEBp
My friend DocDawg (@AnalyticsEqv) runs a small biotech lab in the Research Triangle and keeps track of things like local wastewater assays for SARS-CoV-2 (above). Have a gander. “This isn’t an ‘uptick,’ it’s a tsunami,” he believes.
But you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the COVID-19 blows. Several friends have been down with repeat bouts of COVID in the last few weeks. Mild cases, fortunately, but DocDawg believes, “Each reinfection (even mild) increases your risk of Long COVID disability.” Long Covid, he writes caustically, is “the disability whose name must not be spoken b/c fighting it requires infection control, which Dems fear would lose them elections.”
I’m back to wearing a mask in stores, although few others do.
FWIW: My neighborhood CVS pharmacy closed early the other day due to a “staffing shortage.” A friend reported finding her dry cleaners closed one day this week because of a “staffing shortage.”
We’re four hours west of Durham. And where you are?
The United Auto Workers are on strike against the Big Three (Washington Post):
UAW Ford workers say they are striking because they are not making enough money to support their families or their futures.
“We have our limits too,” said Kevin Ewald, a Ford employee who has worked at the company for nearly three decades. He wants his newer colleagues to be paid more for doing “bone-breaking” work.
UAW workers began striking just after midnight Friday morning after failing to reach a deal with the Big Three autoworkers, Ford, General Motors and Stellantis.
The union demanded 36 percent wage increases for workers over four years, saying that wages have not kept up with inflation. Full-time workers make about $18 to $32 an hour while CEOs at the Big Three companies each made more than $20 million in overallcompensation last year, figures the union used to justify its demands for higher worker wages. The UAW also wants an end to tiered employment system, which means that newer workers get lower pay and have worse benefits. The companies countered that they are offering bigger wage increases than they have in years but can’t meet all of the union’s demands and stay viable.
Auto manufacturers “still making most of their money from gasoline-driven cars” are trying to retool for making electric vehicles while trying to compete against Tesla and foreign EV makers, reports The New York Times:
Under pressure from government officials and changing consumer demand, Ford, G.M. and Stellantis are investing billions to retool their sprawling operations to build electric vehicles, which are critical to addressing climate change. But they are making little if any profit on those vehicles while Tesla, which dominates electric car sales, is profitable and growing fast.
Ford said in July that its electric vehicle business would lose $4.5 billion this year. If the union got all the increases in pay, pensions and other benefits it is seeking, the company said, its workers’ total compensation would be twice as much as Tesla’s employees.
Union demands would force Ford to scrap its investments in electric vehicles, Jim Farley, the company’s chief executive, said in an interview on Friday. “We want to actually have a conversation about a sustainable future,” he said, “not one that forces us to choose between going out of business and rewarding our workers.”
For workers, the biggest concern is that electric vehicles have far fewer parts than gasoline models and will render many jobs obsolete. Plants that make mufflers, catalytic converters, fuel injectors and other components that electric cars don’t need will have to be overhauled or shut down.
I don’t trust modern corporations as far as I can throw them, having worked inside and for a slew of them as clients. The financialization of the economy has dehumanized it even more than it once was. That employees who were once “personnel” are now “human resources” is a subtle hint of the shift not just in investments but in attitudes. Financialization turned millions of homes into bundled assets for investors and turned millions of families out into the streets when rapacious investors’ house of cards collapsed. We, you, they are inputs in the annual profit calculation. Cogs in the machine.
This is nothing new. Watch Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), nearly a century old. Watch CEO Tim Gurner insist in the last week that workers need to feel some pain to remind them who’s in charge. (He has since apologized for making comments that were “deeply insensitive to employees, tradies and families.” He did not apologized for how he thinks about them.)
Even so, technological change is a bumpy road for both employers and workers. Internal combustion engines are on their way out like CDs, cassettes, and 8-track tapes before them. And CRT TVs, DVDs, VHS tapes, and Blockbuster. Gasoline-powered engines will in time be a niche product like vinyl records for audiophiles.
I entered engineering at the transition from board drafting to rudimentary 2D AutoCAD and got out when the field was full 3D. Designers and employees had to retool and adapt. (I lucked into a specialty involving finite element analysis and never learned CAD.) There was a yearly “Homecoming Job Fair” I attended here for years out of curiosity. Men who made their livings for decades as tool and die makers in the textile and furniture industries found themselves having to retool their skills. They had to learn to program CNC machines (if they could get into a program at the local community college) for making aerospace parts or else settle for call center work.
Which is to say I have no idea how the UAW and automakers will navigate this transition and this contract negotiation. There will be pain enough to go around, and hopefully less on the beleaguered working class.
