It can be hard to take this website seriously sometimes. Here’s the picture they dug up for Eric Idle:
I like to think Mr Idle himself would appreciate the quality of the hit job. The article itself isn’t worth going into. A lot of these narratives are not new I guess, the steady stream of articles such as these are about creating an us-against-them sentiment that is then used to rally up support for the agenda.
So what’s the current agenda? How is breitbart peddling the proposed budget, for example? Education is taking a cut, so remind everyone that the education system is crap and it’s not worth paying for. All dissent should be ascribed to unionists and Hollywood.
New York State Kills Literacy Test for Teachers: Minority Kids Hardest Hit
Teachers Union: Budget Guts Public Education
Joy Behar: Trump’s Cutting Education ‘So We Can All Be as Dumb as He Is’
Same essential treatment of the EPA.
GOP Sen Inhofe: EPA ‘Brainwashing Our Kids’ With Propaganda
The comments are all about killing the DoE and letting communities work it out for themselves.
For selling the increased military spending, I found this article. I have nothing funny to say about this article.
Virgil: Donald Trump, Rosie the Riveter, and the Revival of American Economic Nationalism
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/03/17/virgil-donald-trump-rosie-riveter-revival-american-economic-nationalism/
You can copy and paste that if you want to see for yourself the pictures of Rosie the Riveter building B-52s, bombers flying sorties over Europe, a burning oil refinery in Romania, and Donald Trump standing in front of a sign “Buy American - Hire American”.
Sometimes big ideas get small coverage. Unfortunately, that was the case with President Trump’s March 15 trip to Michigan, in which he raised an important idea—arguably the most important economic-policy idea in U.S. history—and yet his words received almost no attention.
“Virgil”, who refers to itself in third person throughout the piece, does not spend a lot of time quoting Trump directly. Trump is a leaping off point for Virgil’s own lofty dreams.
Trump started out by taking his listeners back to a time when America was at the zenith of its power. That was World War II. Back then, Americans were more confident and more united; they were all in this together, aiming to defeat Hitler abroad and, at the same time, defeat the Depression at home.
And no state better epitomized that “Can Do” ethos than Michigan. The Wolverine State was the manufacturing hub of the country, which meant that it was the manufacturing hub of the world. And it was that manufacturing strength, of course, that enabled us to defeat the Axis powers in less than four years. Trump recalled those years of American strength, and even included a wistful note about the manufacturing mojo that’s been lost in recent decades:
Great Americans of all backgrounds built the Arsenal of Democracy — including the legendary Rosie the Riveter, who worked here at Willow Run. . . . Seventy-five years ago, during the Second World War, thousands of American workers filled this very building to build the great new airplane: the B-24 Liberator. At peak production–listen to this, it’s not the country that we’ve been watching over the last 20 years—they were building one B-24 every single hour.
Without a doubt, Willow Run was an immense achievement. In June 1941, it was just a field, 30 miles outside of Detroit. And yet by September of the the following year, it was producing B-24 Liberator bombers, each with 488,193 parts, capable of delivering four tons of ordnance on a target nearly three thousand miles. By 1945, Willow Run had produced nearly 9,000 of these fearsome birds of war. And oh, by the way, it employed 42,000 men, and women, at its peak—including Rosie the Riveter
Yes, Willow Run is a stirring tale of get-up-and-go war production, and yet it is just one of many. In WWII, the overall American industrial war effort also produced, for example, more than 100,000 armored vehicles, 300,000 airplanes, and 41 billion rounds of ammunition. It takes nothing away from the courage of our fighting men in WWII to say that their job of victory was made infinitely easier by the typhoon of steel that they could unleash on the enemy.
So how did Uncle Sam achieve that miracle of production? The most obvious answer is that we had the industrial resources in place before the war, and so it was simply a case of ramping them up during the war. [emphasis Virgil’s] In 1939, for example, we produced twice as much steel as Hitler’s Germany, and our advantage grew during the war years, in no small part because B-24s, and other bombers, were smashing Nazi factories.
Creating jobs by ramping up industrial production before the war. 1939 is the chosen example.
There’s a lot of waxing lyrical about B-52s that I’ll cut but I found this part of the vision particularly interesting.
As an aside, we can note that the title of Sorenson’s tome, My Forty Years with Ford, takes us back to another facet of that bygone era, when a well-paid employee was loyal to a company and the company, in turn, was loyal to the employee. It’s in such a context—that is, a rich “corporate culture” that nurtures talent—that employees tend to do their best for their company, and for their country.
Of course, for every motivated white-collar executive, there were thousands of skilled blue-collar workers, and they were key, too. We can say: This is how quality manufacturing gets done—that is when employers and employees are so invested that they both work extra hard to improve the product.
One white collar for every few thousand blues makes for an oligarchy of about 0.1 to 0.01%. I think there’s crowd huddled round Trump right now who understand what they’re doing and are gambling that they can land on the right side of the divide.
It’s been estimated that the U.S. government spent a trillion dollars, adjusted for inflation, to build all those defense plants during the war, and yet after VE Day and VJ Day, those now-surplus facilities were sold off to private manufacturers for just pennies on the dollar. Critics complained that it was a giant giveaway to corporate America, but consumers were just happy to have new cars, toasters, and TV sets.
Then some subtle jabs at unions, Obama gets blamed for stealing America’s “manufacturing mojo”, manufacturing is great, patriotism, the stakes are high, economics, manufacturing, the damn liberals etc. etc. and we’re out.
Strip education and social services, destroy social mobility, put the masses to work tooling up for an as yet undeclared war. Even having read the article I can’t find a way to summarise it so that it sounds good. Must be why the article is so long.
