Carrier on Carrier

Because my last name is Carrier I’ve long-noticed the air conditioning company by the same name, secretly hoping there’s a pile of money there waiting to find me as its inheritor.  Shy of that, I can gripe about the hype The Donald tried to foist on us.

He brought it up at least four times during the campaign, saying the 2100 Carrier jobs would not go – or there would be a 35% tariff on the returning products.  Turns out about 1250 Carrier jobs will be lost to Mexico and only 730 saved.

That’s better than none, but it’s far shy of the 1,500,000 auto jobs president Obama saved in the auto bail-out bill.  Conservatives called that socialistic, that governments shouldn’t sway the market.

Conservative objections are missing from this deal.  This deal is far bigger and more hidden than apparent.  Carrier’s parent company, United Technologies, is the seventh largest client of our Pentagon, to the tune of $6,700,000,000, 957 times more than the $7 million Indiana’s Pence kicked in!

What back-room promises were made to shunt a little money for a few jobs in order to, what, perhaps assure them bigger war-making profits are on the way?  Will all exiting jobs get the same buy-outs?

True to form that lies get more sway than corrections, Trump played this loudly as if he is the hero.  Truth is, automation “takes” more jobs than globalization.  As robots do everything we used to have to do, who will harvest the benefits: the international capitalists, or the people and planet that generated these abilities and need a fair share of the wealth?

This snafu is lost amidst larger outrages, such as putting a climate change denier as head of our EPA and a CEO in charge of our State Department from our largest oil company (who was blessed by the same Russians who swayed our election with their hacking and planting of influential stories).

The Carrier deal was mostly smoke and mirrors, obscuring far worse plans.  My only hope is that whoever is in charge of that large pile of money at Carrier will spot my name and send it to me.  Fat chance, about as much as Trump’s making America great again.