Ron Johnson to President Donald Trump: "it makes no sense to try and bring back high labor manufacturing jobs"

Yesterday Sundance put up an hour-long video of Trump hosting a round table discussion on trade. President Trump invited the media to keep their cameras rolling while he put Republican senators at ease to argue their points of view. The Republicans exposed their anti-American corporate business agenda.

Today, Sundance lifts the part that bugs him the most.

Ron Johnson, Republican senator from Wisconsin was the most explicit. Wisconsin, the state where FoxConn, one of the world's largest electronic manufacturer, unveiled plans to build a new factory.

Ron Johnson:

In seven years I have not visited one manufacturer [in Wisconsin] that could hire enough people. That was certainly my experience in the last 20, 25 years. For a host of reasons, we tell our kids, you have to get a four-year degree. We pay people not to work. So we do need to be concerned about, in such a tight labor market, do we have enough workers in manufacturing. 

So my final point is, it makes no sense for me to try and bring back high labor-content manufacturing to America. We need to do the value added things. And so I would just say, proceed with real caution there.

There is a lot more at the treehouse.  Including a video cued to Ron Johnson speaking.

Ron Johnson is saying what my professors said w-a-a-a-a-y back in 1983 at Regis. One professor in particular is insufferably memorable through the decades. The professor was a successful businessman and ostentatiously wealthy. I cannot forget his imposing height and girth that suggested a diet of rich dense hors d'oeuvres and his ridiculously expensive perfectly tailored Italian suits, but most of all his exceedingly annoying all-knowing shit-eating grin while delivering sweeping unassailable macro-economic socio-economic statements that disrupted conventional thinking and challenged by ridicule students to challenge him where his one-sentence responses take the place for thoughtful explanation. It was a worthless class.

"Why not just ship the entire factories to third world countries? Pack up the whole factory and ship them off to Central and South America. What do Americans need with those low paying jobs when cheap labor is abundantly available elsewhere? They can do something more advanced than manufacturing. That's what the first world is about."

Well, Mr. Professor, Sir, the flaw of your analysis is those manufacturing plants are not locked in their time. Your conceptualization in anachronistic and backward thinking, not forward thinking as it presumes. It denies regular capital investment that results in fewer manufacturing workers matched to increased production through advancements in technologies by shipping entire plants out of the country instead of upgrading and keeping them here. Your plan shuts out American workers and shunts them to imagined service industries left for invention. And does not protect those imaginary jobs from the same fate. Your plan does not account for what happens to American workers when their service jobs are likewise outsourced, unemployment, increased welfare, the moribundity and death of entire towns and cities, drug addiction. Your analysis is in spreadsheet columns and not in people. Your thinking is in the flow of products and rivers of currencies, and not in the stable family lives of American citizens.

I was distressed with my first Toshiba laptop computer (and second and third) when I called for tech support and got a guy in India on the other side of the line. I was truly confused about this development. Why weren't they hiring people like me?  I felt sympathy for graduates younger than myself just beginning to look for work. Why were those very first technical service jobs outsourced? Why aren't they going to young American students or graduates or apprentices? They would be perfect careers for young college graduates such as myself. But no. Due to cheap communications, it is less expensive to outsource all that work overseas (and that's rather impressive right there) instead of engaging the task of training young Americans for this new class of jobs. With the advantage of English being their first language and spoken fluently without wildly distorted impenetrable accents. American consumers pay the additional price of penetrating those impenetrably wild accents. It's not fair to the Asian foreigners frustrated with impatient Americans, and it's not fair to American consumers who deserve an American voice and American employed person at the other end of the line. Just because the foreign IT guy claims English a second language doesn't mean he can be understood. And their training in preternatural patience with frustrated American consumers does not compensate for the unfairness put on both. Silicon Valley broke their social agreement. That imaginary liberal construct that the left keeps pontificating about, the tacit understanding that successful companies pay back to country that gave them so much infrastructure, so much opportunity, so much freedom to succeed so impressively. Instead the companies take the short-sighted narrow globalist view imagining an immediate robust American market for their electronics produced elsewhere by cheap labor and lower cost and higher profit until nearly all U.S. production is outsourced along with its service portion and with long-term results of the reliable American middle class market shrunken to near extinction.

Ron Johnson's concerns make sense at tip of his nose and his own wallet. The problems he addresses are the results of outsourcing and can be reversed just as they were initiated. He left out the problem of entire American towns ravaged by opioid addiction. They're addicted because they are jobless, now jobless because they're addicted. Trump impelled these Republican men to state their  Chamber of Commerce positions, so disastrous to American employment. Trump achieves quite a lot by this exposure to sunlight. In the least Trump compelled media to produce his next campaign clips for him.