He paraded the CEO's of Walmart, CVS, Walgreens and Target out like prized mules and everyone talked heavily of the new Public/Private partnership that was needed to solve this issue.... I wish I was kidding.
Nit, but he only shook a couple. Certainly, the majority did not receive handshakes
Of course, he'll never say it was socialism - just "strong action".
Isn't that the ultimate stimulus?
Is the potential of returned manufacturing jobs not a hugely good thing?
Or are we not allowed to give credit for anything because Trump?
I do not know where you got the idea that this is happening.
If Trump isn't a total idiot (though I know many of you believe he is) this is his opportunity to return manufacturing jobs to the US, possibly under subsidy, at the very least as a national security concern.
This rampant tribalism is insane. Literally nothing the administration does now will see any credit from it's opponents. Take off the partisan blinders. Even shitty leaders can make good decisions, and deserve credit for doing so.
So far he's been moving in the opposite direction though with an emphasis on overall company welfare at the expense of employees - there have been no proposals around preventing people from losing their jobs due to needing to self-isolate and no effort to make treatment federally subsidized (testing is probably free if you're not one of the millions of people without insurance, but even here the details are hazy).
Do you think these companies will continue to exist if they fire all the employees who get sick from the virus? Do you think these employees will survive without their paychecks?
Do you believe that anything benefiting "corporations" goes directly into the pocket of evil 1% CEOs and confers no benefit to employees? You probably work for a corporation. Corporate well-being is employee wellbeing because corporations are staffed by people.
Also, the US manufactures more stuff than any other time in its history, it just does it with less labor than it needed in the 80's. Even if manufacturing came back, it would not be some job boon. Products would become more expensive for the same quality that we get from China. The people employed would be higher skilled and likely need to come in on visa's because we already have a skilled labor shortage in America. Hell, our U3 unemployment rate is like 3.8% the last time I checked*.
America's problem is our intransigence to help one another move to where jobs are, and to get educated in the skills needed to fill those jobs. And I'm not talking about programming jobs here.
Please remove your Orange Man Bad blinders for a minute and listen to what I'm saying. I'm not saying he's done anything for manufacturing to date. I'm saying that this coronavirus now has exposed the weakness of offshoring a substantial proportion of critical manufacturing and it's an excellent opportunity to bring back much of the capacity that is still disrupted in China.
That's also why I said under subsidy. Because manufacturing here is more expensive but it looks like a national security problem if during calamity or war we have to depend on a nation on the other side of the world for things like semiconductors, medical equipment, and medicine. Based on the way the word is being thrown around recently, think of it as "socialism."
>China is already returning to work
Don't be so sure. This is an authoritarian regime which went to great lengths to cover up the outbreak for the first month. And they claimed return to capacity weeks ago when pollution maps still showed little to no productivity. The world isn't all rainbows and sunshine - nation states are still competitive and do not always work in each other's best interest.
None of this even begins to go into all of the IP fuckery and socialization of US companies going on in China.
I agree that has been the case in economically disadvantaged countries but do you think America is closer to Cuba, Venezuela or Tzarist Russia... or closer to Britain.
This is legitimately the kind of stimulus that the economy has needed for decades. A true cause for the American powerhouse to rally behind, if there's anything left of it. Yeah the administration has been less than ideal in handling this but you people need to give credit where it is due.
This will be a true test of the viability of the declining American Empire.
If you think Bernie Sanders is a socialist then this is socialism, if you think this is good then you like Sanders' level of socialism.
We are literally turning toward capitalist corporations to manufacture and sell products to solve a crisis. This is not socialism. Workers are not taking control of factories. The government is not commandeering private resources.
>Look, either socialism includes Bernie Sander's Democratic Socialism or it doesn't
You also don't seem to understand how many different flavors of socialism exist - feel free to point out how what's going on now fits under any definition. Also what does any of this have to do with Sanders?
The fact that you agree with what you read does not mean that it isn't propaganda. The man had his homeymoon in the USSR and is on video talking fondly of bread lines. I'm not saying he's Stalin 2.0 but right wing media isn't entirely stretching when they point out how far removed his policies are from American politics.
Note, that's not a value judgement. I'm just saying you're wrong to blame the shift in meaning on the particular media that you don't agree with.
I'm only being slightly sarcastic.
That's not what Socialism is.