Last week I commented that scholars of intolerance tell us that feeling threatened often leads to hate. That’s one reason the economic threat to some American workers matters to all of us.
Trump is clearly working with the free marketeers. The free market is not about your, or workers’ rights; it’s about your boss’s or your company’s right to close your plant, move, lower your wages, reject your union, or just skip protecting your safety.
Trump makes different noises when talking about your jobs and when writing rules and hiring his cabinet. But his Republican Senate will insist on a free market, and Trump is counting on it.
Trump told us he wants to eliminate 75% of regulations. Those regulations protect employees and consumers; in other words, you and me. They protect our wages, require safer working conditions, ban poisons from our food and water and require companies to give us what we paid for. That’s how Trump shows us his true colors.
Obama saved thousands of jobs by saving American auto makers and growing the economy by hundreds of thousands of jobs per month – but gets no credit. Trump may have saved a few hundred but people think he takes action. With victories like that we can all starve.
Trump’s focus on the optics of small victories keeps us looking the wrong way. U.S. factory output is growing. But the jobs have changed. Missing are factory jobs for poorly educated people. I don’t say that out of disrespect. My Uncle Hershel, a truly lovely man, was a factory worker. I remember him sitting by my bed when I was ill. What I’m talking about is how to get good jobs for people like him. If we expect jobs to show up the same way they did a century ago, we’re whistling in the wind. If we think Trump can trump marketplace change by jawboning a few companies, we’re spitting in the wind. He doesn’t have the time or tax cuts to do it that way.
Central New York was once a manufacturing powerhouse. What’s left are mostly small towns far from traditional jobs. Yet one can now work thousands of miles from where things have to be made or done. We could be linked in to the world IF we invested in and rebuilt the economy, instead of jawboning the owners of obsolete factories.
And education must be available and affordable for everyone who wants a good job. Education sounds like elitism to many workers. But what made America an economic powerhouse was our system of mass education. And that’s part of why those who think we can go back to a prior era of American greatness are spitting in the wind – the rest of the world has caught up. To provide jobs, we need to provide retraining for mid-career workers on top of excellent schools, pre-school and after-school programs – all of which provide jobs.
Yes education will have to change. I’m a dinosaur, standing up in front of a class of students, even though the alternatives, so far, are not working very well. But when people figure out better methods, education will take off again – here or elsewhere. That’s where we need evidence –based experimentation – science. We rely on science from morning till night for the things we touch and use. Denying science is the height of idiocy, not a mark of greatness.
Trump yells about foreigners and markets. It’s our job to address reality.
Steve Gottlieb is Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor of Law at Albany Law School and author of Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and the Breakdown of American Politics. He has served on the Board of the New York Civil Liberties Union, and in the US Peace Corps in Iran. Steve maintains a blog: constitutionalismanddemocracy.wordpress.com
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