Brady Bunch wrote:

I'm no fan of Trump, but where does it say the plant workers were not impressed by Trump?

The article is written by Leo Gerard, who was President of the USW previously and is currently VP of the AFL-CIO,  Both the USW and AFL-CIO have endorsed Clinton, so I would expect the VP of the AFL-CIO to fully support her and not be impressed by Trump.  I don't think because someone who endorses Clinton isn't impressed by Trump that we can assume everyone he is supposed to represent also isn't impressed by him.

This article is no different than a Trump loyalist and supporter calling Hillary a liar and crook.

 
Aaahhhh, yes . . . Except for the fact that my relative was in attendance as an employee of the facility where Drumpf gave his speech in Monessen. He and 99% of his colleagues had the same impression of Drumpf's speech on trade, bringing jobs back to the U.S., and his insincerity about the words coming out of his mouth.

Actions speak louder than words and Drumpf's words are the polar opposite of his actions. Those are the words of a family member of mine, not the president of the USW or the AFL-CIO . . . Just a regular guy that was present at and listened to his speech.

I didn't say they were all union workers that had a negative reaction to Drump's speech. Most are not members of any Union, but they still see through his nonsensical rhetoric. I'll take the word of Tim and his co-workers, who actually attended this particular affair, over a third party telephone poll when it come to gauging their actual reaction to Drumpf and his BS rhetoric when it comes to global trade initiatives political positioning versus his actual business actions in this realm.

Also, your wonderings about the facility being a statistical outlier is an out of the blue inference. The facility was hand picked by the GOP as a place that would be a place that would receive Drumpf's message positively due to some of the upper management being financial supporters of the GOP. A nice photo op in a manufacturing facility in the middle of 'rust belt', steel manufacturing, union dominated, western Pennsylvania. Unfortunately for the GOP, they didn't count on the employees of the facility to have a brain, an ability to separate fact from fiction, and the ability to express their own reactions to what they considered to be a big fat lie from Drumpf regarding global manufacturing and trade.

Again . . . His actions speak louder than his words.

Last edited by Rongone (7/04/2016 5:26 pm)

This article captures the essence of what Tim and his colleagues saw in Drump's speech in Monessen last week.


Sorry, Donald Trump. American workers won’t fall for your scam.


In a report that will alarm some Democrats, the Post today quotes union leaders and representatives saying that they are worried that the rank and file may be getting sucked in by Donald Trump’s bluster about trade and China, and his attacks on Hillary Clinton for supposedly supporting trade deals that have hammered American workers. Trump’s rhetoric has the Democratic candidate for Senate in Pennsylvania, among others, claiming that the Donald has “recognized a couple of truths.”

So perhaps it’s worth noting another tangentially relevant truth: Hillary Clinton is offering actual policies that would benefit workers facing the very problems that Trump identifies, and Trump isn’t offering them squat. Indeed, Trump’s agenda would hurt workers, not help them.

The Post story quotes one union rep this way: “When he talks about trade, it resonates with a lot of workers.” But other union leaders, while recognizing the potency of this message, believe that in the end, the contrast in policy agendas between Trump and Clinton will ultimately carry the day. As one puts it: “Who’s going to be for collective bargaining? It’s pretty clearly Hillary is. Who’s better for paid family leave? Hillary is.”

GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump outlined seven steps he would pursue as president "to bring back our jobs." Trump was speaking at a campaign rally in Monessen, Pa. (Reuters)

But it goes a lot farther than this. Jonathan Cohn has a must-read look at Trump’s overall policy agenda, concluding that it would hurt American workers in multiple far-reaching ways. As Cohn notes, Trump has identified something important — trade deals may have indeed harmed a lot of people — but his threatened tariffs would likely start trade wars that would not reverse the damage in hard-hit communities, and instead would drive up prices and slow growth. What’s more, Cohn points out, Trump’s tax plan, which would deliver a windfall to top earners and cut corporate taxes, would cost up to $10 trillion in revenues over the next decade, which would likely hurt working people further:

The quick addition of so much new debt, combined with the contractionary effect of Trump’s new tariffs, could lead to a sudden and serious recession, as a recent report from Moody’s Analytics suggested. And for working-class people, the real cost of the tax cut might come over the longer term, since the loss of so much revenue would almost certainly require massive spending cuts — first to discretionary programs like education, infrastructure maintenance or biomedical research; and later to entitlements, including Medicare and Social Security, even though Trump has pledged to protect those programs….

Throw in Trump’s vow to repeal the Affordable Care Act and musings that he might lower the federal minimum wage standard, and the likely end result of Trump’s economic agenda would be an economy providing even fewer well-paying jobs — and a government in an even weaker position to help those struggling to find work.

This gets at a crucial point: Unlike Trump, Clinton supports spending federal money and regulating the economy in ways designed to help workers who are dislocated by trade, facing joblessness or suffering from flat wages. Clinton would push for more spending on worker retraining, infrastructure, child care, and boosting domestic manufacturing. She supports raising the minimum wage and higher mandated overtime pay. And she is pushing proposals for family and medical leave and plans to boost the countervailing power of labor and incentivize corporate profit sharing. There is simply no meaningful indication that Trump would do anything like this.

Yes, Trump has vowed to spend on infrastructure and defend social insurance for the elderly. But his enormous tax cuts reveal his actual priorities. Trump likes to claim his tax plan would produce runaway growth. But if anything, this is additionally revealing of the shortcomings in his approach. All Trump really means is that, by manhandling other countries in trade deals and unshackling the private sector, he will magically make us all so rich again that we won’t have to bother figuring out how to pay for sustaining entitlements (since revenues will be rolling in) or what to do about workers’ wages (since business will be booming). When Trump says he wants wages to be higher, this is what he is really saying, not that he would support government action to raise them, as Clinton would in a variety of ways.

In fact, Trump gave away the whole game when, in his big speech on trade, he claimed a core problem we face is that businesses are over-regulated and overtaxed. As liberal economist Lawrence Mishel explains, this shows that Trump is sending key signals in support of the corporate agenda, not a pro-worker one. What workers really need, Cohn notes, is “stronger unions, spending on public works, more financial assistance with child care and other necessities — as well as better support for people who lose their jobs.”

Trump’s con game is simple. He is trying to win over working class whites with anti-China, anti-free-trade bluster and a vow to crush the dark hordes who make them feel threatened culturally and economically, while simultaneously retaining just enough good will (via his other proposals) from GOP-aligned elites to remain the nominee and be competitive. This is not ideological heterodoxy. It’s a smorgasbord of policy ignorance and indifference, opportunism, making-it-up-on-the-fly, and of course, good old fashioned flim-flammery.