Isn’t there a form of mental illness in which one cannot distinguish fantasy from reality? Shortly after his election, then President Donald Trump convened a manufacturing advisory council of top CEOs under the MAGA banner of bringing back jobs to American shores. Amid Trump’s xenophobic bluster, you could make out the disbelief and embarrassment in the CEO’s faces. Most left early-on to Trump’s cries of “you grandstanders!”
No lucid person in the 21st century would suggest this country bring back home and invest in the construction of tens of thousands of new factories to make back scratchers, microwave ovens and coat hangers.
But the Oval Office has not led with clarity for quite some time. And apparently, President Biden has been taking hits off of the same bong as his predecessor. He appeared outside Columbus, Ohio, recently, at the site of what is to be a new Intel semiconductor plant to perpetuate the fantasy that “the industrial Midwest is back.” Is that so? Whaddya say we fire up another bowl, Joe?
The more sobering reality is that the largest employer in Ohio is Walmart — where the average wage is $14 an hour. About 70%-80% of their store merchandise (minus the bongs) is made in more than 30,000 sweatshops located in China where tens of thousand of wage slaves toil for up to 16 hours a day spraying formaldehyde on particle board and packing polyester bedsheets into plastic — for the tidy sum of $2 an hour. And what’s even better — for Walmart and its low-cost obsessed fan base — the Chinese Communist Party prohibits unions.
Humbled by this reality, Walmart offers its customers moral pressure relief in the form of their “Made in America” initiative. Ain’t that just dandy; honey, pass me a Keystone.
If you were to travel 65 miles north from the grandiose Intel circus tent in New Albany, Ohio, you could visit the hollowed-out shell of the former G.E. Lighting factory in Bucyrus, Ohio. After 80 years, they shuttered their doors in 2022 to move production to where? You guessed it, China. And they had been a “shining light” in Walmart’s Made in America program! Four hundred of their employees scraping by on unemployment checks trying to keep themselves and their children away from depression’s trendy antidote: fentanyl. Likewise, Ohio’s Akron-based Goodyear Tire has thrown in the towel at most of their U.S. factories — thousands more laid off in the last few years.
Amid the burdensome exodus of U.S. manufacturing, can you really blame the politicians for selling hope, for trying to keep their plates spinning long enough to be reelected? When fantasies evaporate, most voters will settle for a pleasant distraction, scapegoating aside.
As in every lie, there is a kernel of truth: the reshoring of production facilities is an earnest response from many companies to the crippling supply chain disruptions that peaked during the pandemic.
I remember it all too well, forking out $60 for a sheet of plywood — if you could get it. These new investments on home shores are decidedly high-tech. Follow the R2D2 beeping robots and they will lead you to the new uber-engineered clean production fab floors. And to be sure, most of those former low-tech employees who cranked out light bulbs and tires won’t be working there. Robots don’t take coffee breaks or waste time with pesky unions.
Because life as we know it wouldn’t be the same without semiconductors (could actually improve), a colossal $280 billion in CHIPS and Science Act funding will be quickly soaked-up by Intel, Micron, TSMC, Samsung, and the like.
We can’t expect these taxpayer-funded subsidies to do more than they were intended to do. They will do little to help us distinguish reality from fantasy. They will contribute to the illusion that the American carbon-drenched suburban dream can continue without end.
Even on its last legs, hallucinating, bruised, the fantasy crawls along the engineered hardwood flooring to the backyard to admire the freshly mowed lawn and to heave a slab of BBQ ribs onto the grill — if only to savor that final sizzle.
After years of globetrotting, Broadman finds himself writing from his perch on the Palouse and loving the view. His policy briefs can be found at US Renew News: usrenewnews.org.
