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« In short: he's trolling you | Main | Since We're Talking About Dems Refusing to Acknowledge the Real Problem with the Party »

Is Obama Out of Touch or Just an Asshole?

Cereally. WTF? Link

Donald Trump is in negotiations with Carrier to keep two Indiana air conditioning and furnace plants from moving to Mexico, eliminating 2,100 U.S. jobs. A video of executives informing workers of the plant closures went viral in February, leading Trump to vow to stop the outsourcing. Now president-elect, he is exerting his new leverage to make that a reality.

But someone else already holds that power. His name is Barack Obama. He just doesn't seem to care.

The most Obama has said about Carrier, at a June town hall in Indiana, is that some jobs "are just not going to come back."

This is all part of his new laissez faire attitude to everything, i guess. Just forget about those jobs. Let the DAPL situation play itself out. What's everyone so upset about?

Obama could have used those lucrative contracts as a condition of maintaining the Carrier plant, just as Trump is now being urged to do by Sen. Bernie Sanders. "I call on Mr. Trump to make it clear to the CEO of United Technologies that if his firm wants to receive another defense contract from the taxpayers of this country, it must not move these plants to Mexico," Sanders said in a statement last week.

It's precisely the kind of hardball Obama has consistently played with federal contractors in other contexts. He has signed executive orders to raise the minimum wage for federal contract workers to $10.10 an hour, ensure paid sick leave, and promote from within the company. He also signed an order to make companies ineligible for federal contracts if they violated employment and labor law over the past three years. He has no compunction against using the government's leverage as a large purchaser of goods and services to get better outcomes for workers. But this power has been set aside with respect to Carrier -- and outsourcing in general.

If we could only get Trump to listen to everything Sanders suggests...

Sanders, who routinely criticizes the excess profits and corporate welfare earned by companies that ship jobs overseas, recently vowed to introduce the Outsourcing Prevention Act, which would prevent companies that outsource from receiving federal contracts, tax breaks, grants, or loans, and would claw back a decade's worth of those federal benefits from any company that outsources more than 50 jobs in a given year. Sanders would also tax companies that move jobs offshore, and tax the bonuses, stock options, and golden parachutes of executives of outsourcing companies.

At that Indiana town hall, Obama did not show this kind of fight. "You cannot look backwards," he said then. "And that doesn't make folks feel good sometimes, especially if it was a town that's reliant on a couple of big manufacturers. But they're going to have to retrain for the jobs of the future, not the jobs of the past."

Retraining?? RETRAINING!!! WTF are people supposed to retrain for, you asshat? Who's going to pay for it since you took away their jobs, and they haven't got any income? And exactly which mythical company is going to hire a 40-50 yr old with zero prior experience?

He's got plenty of energy for things like TPP, but for anything else, he's basically put up the "Gone Fishing" sign. If you're not going to be useful, at least get the fuck out of the way. And stop creating situations where i have to blog a "look what Trump's doing that Obama couldn't be bothered to try" post.

By min | November 30, 2016, 8:37 AM | Liberal Outrage


Reference from SuperMegaMonkey

Yglesias makes a fair point (warning: Twitter): "When Obama used leverage over contractors to get paid leave for *over a million people* it was a minor story." He means this in contrast to Trump's Carrier actions. But two counterpoints: 1)...    Read More: Own it and be ready