- Why manufacturing jobs are never coming back to America;
- Heather Cox Richardson records Steven Inskeep’s quip;
- And How JD Vance is fine with abandoning due process;
- About Linus, our fourth cat.
I keep thinking: we’re living in history, that is, we’re living in a period of rapid change that historians will record, yet that most people living right now are not noticing. (I think this is the way history has always happened.) Basic institutions are being undermined. The ideals of the American form of government are being undermined. This seems to be an era in which the ideals of American gave way to fascist or tribal thinking. Without most people noticing.
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This has been common knowledge for years, for decades. For many reasons. I’ll resist spelling out my own understanding of this, and let the article speak for itself.
Vox, Dylan Matthews, 16 Apr 2025: Manufacturing jobs are never coming back, subtitled “Putting Americans back to work in factories isn’t just hard. It’s impossible.”
This has long been the key argument behind protectionist policies like Trump’s: They will bring manufacturing jobs back to America. It’s a claim popular not just on the right, but with pro-tariff Democrats and labor unions, too. Chris Deluzio, a House Democrat from western Pennsylvania (a traditional hotbed of protectionism), has urged his party to “embrace tariffs as one component of a broader industrial strategy to revitalize American manufacturing and make whole communities that have been hollowed out by decades of bad trade policy.”
Once again, conservatives what to retreat to a past that is gone. The world has become globalized…. and, but I refrain.
It’s a false promise. Tariffs cannot “make whole” any communities that have seen manufacturing jobs depart. That’s partly because tariffs are wildly ineffective at that purpose, as we saw in Trump’s first term, when his tariffs failed to lead to any increase in manufacturing employment, while costing jobs elsewhere.
But the bigger reason is that the fall of manufacturing employment in the US was not caused primarily by changes in policy, and changes in policy cannot reverse it. What’s happening is a transition from manufacturing to services that occurs in all countries as they get richer.
This transition happened in countries whose policies were strongly biased toward manufacturing, like Germany, just as it did in the US.
It’s because manufacturing more stuff is not how the world economy works anymore. Manufacturing stuff is more and more given over to robots. The world is moving to service-based economy. Trump dreams of rebuilding car factories.
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Choice bit from Heather Cox Richardson’s column yesterday. This is about that guy living in Maryland, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was “accidentally” abducted and departed to El Salvador. Now the Trump administration is saying there’s no way to force El Salvador to return the man to he US. The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, one of those strong-man dictator types that Trump so admires, was there.
Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, April 14, 2025
At the meeting, it was clear that Trump’s team has cooked up a plan to leave Abrego Garcia without legal recourse to his freedom, a plan that looks much like Trump’s past abuses of the legal system. The White House says the U.S. has no jurisdiction over El Salvador, while Bukele says he has no authority to release a “terrorist” into the U.S.
Remember, Trump and Rubio and others keep insisting Abrego Garcia is member of a terrorist gang, without providing any evidence. But this is the choice bit:
As NPR’s Steven Inskeep put it: “If I understand this correctly, the US president has launched a trade war against the world, believes he can force the EU and China to meet his terms, is determined to annex Canada and Greenland, but is powerless before the sovereign might of El Salvador. Is that it?”
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Meanwhile, this administration demonstrates once again its indifference to law and order (including due process), never mind basic values of humanity and justice.
Salon, Charles R. David, 16 Apr 2025: Why not tyranny? JD Vance says he’s fine with the “inevitable errors” of abandoning due process, subtitled “The vice president argues it would too difficult to provide due process to those he wants to imprison or deport”
The opening summarizes the situation.
It can be hard, living in a free society. In places where the rule of law prevails, and where all people — citizens, criminals, immigrants — are believed to be endowed with certain inalienable rights, guilt or innocence is determined by an independent judiciary and a jury of one’s peers. Even when the facts of the matter are hardly contested, liberty and justice require that the accused be judged not by the mob, or any one person, but through an oft-lengthy process wherein they are entitled to challenge the evidence against them.
Have you ever been certain of something, only to be later proven wrong? That happens to governments, even when they are composed of people doing their best to ascertain the truth; due process serves to protect everyone from an earnest mistake, but it also has safeguards against the possibility that the state may one day be run by those who are not acting in good faith at all.
That process isn’t perfect, and actually existing criminal justice systems tend to fall short of the ideal: sometimes the guilty get off, and sometimes the innocent are condemned. But it beats the alternative: tyranny.
In a tyrannical system, the accused’s guilt is determined by their being accused in the first place. If the government says someone is a terrorist, then they are dealt with accordingly. There is no appeal and indeed there is no formal process at all beyond the pronouncement: terrorist; guilty.
That is the system that the Trump administration would like everyone in America to live under — one where the word of a 78-year-old man and his underlings is enough to justify sending anyone to a foreign prison for the rest of their life.
And are even most of Trump’s voters just fine with this? If so they haven’t thought this through. Or perhaps, much more likely, they simply don’t care.
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About Linus. Long story. Mother and kitten showed up on our back patio on Aug 25th. Mother was frail, the kitten so tiny he could barely climb into the kitty bed we put outside. We kept feeding them, mother got healthy and kitten got bigger. They stayed outside except when the weather was bad and we’d let them inside, despite hissing from a couple of our indoor cats. Months went by. The Montclair Village vet wanted $1500 to spay Mother. I put it off. Six weeks ago, Mother had four kittens. This past week, I contacted the East Bay SPCA, and took Mother and her four kittens to “surrender” them, to put them up for adoption. We still have Mother’s original kitten, all grown up now, whom we’ve named Linus. He’ll become part of our family, maybe as an indoor/outdoor cat. We’ll see how he settles in. He’ll be our fourth permanent cat.
