In a bizarre, nonsensical Washington Post op-ed, Bernie Sanders has managed to convince anyone with a modicum of common sense and even a rudimentary awareness of economic reality, that American blue-collar workers may have dodged an even bigger bullet in avoiding a Crazy Bernie administration than a Crooked Hillary administration.
In a nutshell, Sanders seems to argue the point that the livelihoods of 1000 workers are completely and utterly insignificant when compared to the pure unadulterated joy of economically punishing their employer into oblivion, or aggressively forcing their hand to completely pull up stumps and relocate to a country where they can pay 750 brown people to do the same work as 1000 Americans for half the pay.
Sanders believes that Trump is somehow capitulating to United Technologies to get them to stay. And he’s partly right. But what the funny little man who avoided gainful employment until he was 40 and avoided anything remotely resembling the free market in perpetuity doesn’t realise, is that that’s just business. A household is a business. Likewise, a nation is a business. I’m sure that Crazy Bernie would prefer that America ran like a commune, but generally people in communes don’t get the use of a private jet or a lake house in Vermont.
Business is about negotiation. There’s always a third world s—hole that will offer more business-friendly incentives than a first world nation. Tariffs sound good on paper, but if you slug a Detroit car company a 35% import tariff as punishment for defying completely hostile operating conditions stateside when they’re saving 45% on their running costs in Juarez, the only loser is the unemployed auto worker in Detroit, or the consumer who now has to add 35% to the ticket price of the new car they’re looking at. Much like the carbon tax racket, it’s always the sucker at the end who foots the bill.
Sanders’ definition of capitulation is actually stock standard negotiation. I do it in my line of work. If I don’t, they go to someone who will. My competitors are my own equivalent of Mexico or Asia. It’s up to me to find a perfect balance of a good product/service, exciting discounts/incentives, and my own conditions to maintain a degree of control. Quite a similar process, I’d imagine, to Trump’s negotiation to save a thousand jobs.
Bernie’s bugbear seems to be that Trump has failed somehow because he only secured 1000 jobs out of 2200. It’s a little like saying that saving 1000 children from a burning orphanage is pointless if you couldn’t save the other 1200. His argument makes absolutely no sense.
Sanders’ seems to be of the opinion that saving a thousand jobs and keeping them in America is nowhere near as satisfying as relentlessly punishing a ‘big evil’ corporation until it fully bleeds out and dies. I saw his kind in my first job toiling on a factory floor. Trade Unionists had no qualms whatsoever about using workers as cannon fodder in prolonged crippling (more to the workers than the bosses who were on salary) strike action, that was usually based around a hollow symbolic victory over an issue that seldom hurt workers as much as the strike itself.
The remaining Carrier employees should be livid at Crazy Bernie playing with their livelihood like ants beneath a magnifying glass, merely to nurture and placate his socialist ideals. The rest of America’s working class should breathe a sigh of relief that this enemy of industry was shown the door early on in the electoral race.
It’s your XYZ.