July 4 -6, 2017: Ford, GM and "Bloated Payrolls," and a North Korean Missile that Can Strike Alaska

 

7/4/17: Carmakers announce that June sales dropped for the sixth month in a row. Last year, American auto plants employed 211,000 workers, up 55% from a 2009 low, during the Great Recession. Ford announced in June it would move production of its Focus model to China. As The New York Times notes, “The company had previously planned to move the car to a new plant in Mexico, but canceled the project after meeting stiff opposition from Mr. Trump.” 

“Ford’s China move will not cost any American jobs,” reporters add, “because Focus production in Michigan will be replaced by trucks and S.U.V.’s.” But it won’t add any, either. Scaling back jobs is supposedly part of automakers’ efforts to “avoid bloated payrolls.” Detroit has also hired large numbers of low-wage entry-level workers to reduce expenses. 

Also: to reduce the American middle class. 

“These decisions are always tough, says Alan Batey, GM’s president of North American operations. “But at the end of the day we have to be disciplined about our production plans.” 

Making tough decisions is hard work and for that reason Batey earns $6,282,013 for the year.

Batey and others get paid to make the "tough decisions."

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7/5/17: President Trump insisted (in a January tweet) that a North Korean test of an ICBM capable of hitting the USA “won’t happen!” Note the exclamation point! That meant the man was serious!!!! 

On July 4, however, the North Koreans launch a missile that crosses that line, if just barely. They now have the capability to hit Alaska. 

Secretary of State Tillerson calls for global action, including stronger measures to be enacted by the U.N. Security Council. (The Trump administration hates the U.N. except when it needs U.N. assistance.) The missile fired on July 4 traveled 580 miles before splashing down in the Pacific but followed a 1,700-mile arc into space and back to earth. Trump’s advisers say the administration has laid down no red lines because “they would rather keep the North guessing.” 

Secretary of Defense Mattis says on Face the Nation that war with North Korea “would be probably the worst kind of fighting in people’s lifetimes.”

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7/6/17: Volvo, the Swedish carmaker, bows to the realities of climate change and announces all new models, starting in 2019, will be battery-powered electrics or hybrids. 

The American company, Tesla, which promises to build nothing but electric cars, surpasses Ford and General Motors in stock valuation. Change is coming even if Trump is too dense to see it.

June 19, 2019: Sen. Leader Mitch McConnell Nixes Statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico

 

6/19/19: As noted two days ago (see: 6/17/19), Milksop Mitch McConnell loves the voice of the people, so long as the people support Mitch and the GOP. In an interview with Laura Ingraham, which gains wide attention Tuesday, Sen. Milksop says there’s no way he’s going to let Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives push forward a bill to grant statehood to Washington D.C. 

No statehood for D.C.!

 

Mitch McConnell thinks voting leads to socialism. 

That would give the 705,749 people of the District of Columbia, a voting representative in the House and two votes in the Senate. This would be horrible and unfair and anti-American and a total rip-off where Wyoming, with 578,759 people, and Vermont, with 623,989, are concerned. 

McConnell also tells Ingraham that there’s no way he’ll allow Puerto Rico to become a state, not so long as he has breath in his body. He says that would be socialism…which…

WTF! 

That doesn’t even make sense.

 

In case you’ve forgotten, or never knew, Puerto Ricans gained U.S. citizenship in 1917, but till recently, tended not to wish to become a state. 

Now, imagine that the estimated 3,655,121 people of that island did vote by referendum for statehood. 

Would the master of the U.S. Senate allow them in, or would Ol’ Milksop ignore the voice of several million U.S. citizens? 

He would. McConnell would not listen to the Puerto Rican voice of the people, but would listen to the voice of Alaskans, North and South Dakotans, and Montanans, and their eight representatives in the Senate, representing roughly 3.4 million citizens, combined. 

Apparently, some U.S. citizens count more than others when McConnell is making up his mind.

Puerto Ricans in New York City march in favor of statehood.

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE: We missed this detail until October 2021, when looking up all the Republicans Trump has called RINO’s. It turns out that the 2016 Republican Party platform (page 30) had this to say: 

We support the right of the United States citizens of Puerto Rico to be admitted to the Union as a fully sovereign state. We further recognize the historic significance of the 2012 local referendum in which a 54 percent majority voted to end Puerto Rico’s current status as a U.S. territory, and 61 percent chose statehood over options for sovereign nationhood. We support the federally sponsored political status referendum authorized and funded by an Act of Congress in 2014 to ascertain the aspirations of the people of Puerto Rico. Once the 2012 local vote for statehood is ratified, Congress should approve an enabling act with terms for Puerto Rico’s future admission as the 51st state of the Union.

April 7, 2021: Are Democratic Cities Really Unsafe?

 

4/7/21: Did you know that as of today, 37 percent of the population of New York City is foreign-born? 

Plus, the city has a Democratic mayor.

 

____________________ 

Maybe Democrats and immigrants aren’t the problem.

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We all remember how then-President Trump enjoyed talking about killers and rapists sneaking across the border, and Democratic mayors who failed to keep their cities safe. Never doubting a single syllable that escaped from our former president’s mouth, I had to assume people in New York City must be getting murdered at a phenomenal rate. The city had to be a veritable ghost town by now. 

I was surprised. The city suffered 289 murders in 2018. (I use that figure, because in a story about the most dangerous states, USA Today uses crime statistics from that year.)

 

Are Republican controlled places safer? I checked. Alaska had only 47 murders – proving that people who think Democrats fail the “law and order” test may not be able to perform simple division. 

New York City has 8.7 million people. That would mean your chances of being murdered by dangerous immigrant gang members, or anyone else, would be 1 in 30,104. Alaskans would have to take their chances at…1 in 15,557. Tennessee – about as red a state as you can find – had 498 murders, for a rate of 1 in 13,829. Alabama, even redder, had 607 murders, or 1 per 8,108. In other words, immigrants might not be the problem, nor the fact most cities are run by Democratic mayors.

 

Case in point: This weekend a customer at a Burger King in Memphis got mad when her order at the drive-thru window took too long. As Fox News explained, the irate woman stepped out of her car. 

Burger King surveillance video showed the woman pull out a black handgun from her car, lean into the drive-thru window and open fire.

 

Luckily, none of the employees were hit and the workers took off running through a backdoor, police said.

 

This is not to be confused with the shooting in Orlando last August, also at a Burger King, also due to a customer’s anger over a delayed order, in which one employee was killed. Nor do we mean the murder of another young drive-thru worker at a McDonalds in Elko, Nevada last November. Nor do we mean the incident in Milwaukee that month, where an irate customer broke the drive-thru window on purpose – only to have an employee at the Golden Arches come outside, pull a gun, and pistol whip the customer. Or the incident in October where an employee at a McDonalds in Kansas City, Mo., ended a dispute with a drive-thru customer by shooting and nearly killing him. 

For “variety,” you have the Oklahoma City customer who became upset when informed the McDonalds dine-in room was closed. She, too, “fired multiple shots,” according to police. That assault last May left three workers bleeding from various wounds, although none were life-threatening.

 

* 

A contract worth $628 million – and zero doses delivered. 

SINCE THE TOPIC is danger, it turns out Emergent, the company tasked with making America’s coronavirus vaccines, has botched the job. So far, their factory in Baltimore has produced 150 million doses of vaccine which is good. Emergent has also been accused of violating safety and sanitation protocols and 15 million doses had to be destroyed. Which is not good. So far, not a single dose produced has been deemed safe enough to ship. 

Definitely not good.

 

Emergent’s auditors reported last July that errors made at the factory “are not investigated to determine root cause, or are not investigated adequately.” Even worse, “Investigations are terminated without sufficient cause.” Mold was discovered repeatedly in one laboratory. The company conducted “essentially no investigation” and all workers did was wipe down the wheels of one cart. 

Since Team Trump awarded the company a contract worth $628 million you might have thought officials would have been more diligent. 

And, of course, President Trump might have asked for regular updates to ensure Emergent was doing its job. 

But he was too busy tweeting to care.