Steven Rattner | Biden’s Big, and Risky, Semiconductor Push – The New York Times

By Steven Rattner

Mr. Rattner was a counselor to the Treasury secretary in the Obama administration.

“Intent on reversing America’s decline in the world’s production of cutting-edge semiconductors, the federal government has begun what is arguably the government’s largest foray into the private sector since World War II.

That’s just one piece of a larger, more muscular approach to industrial policy. It’s a road filled with hope but also pockmarked with risks. On balance, the record of government trying to improve the functioning of the private sector is poor, and particularly in complex sectors like semiconductors, the challenges are great.”

Opinion | How Elon Musk Won the Fight to Reopen His Tesla Factory – By Kara Swisher – The New York Times

By Kara Swisher

Contributing Opinion Writer

• May 13, 2020
• • 413

Elon Musk reopened a Tesla factory in Fremont, Calif., over objections from local officials.Credit…Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

“How do you solve a problem like a tweet-storming Elon Musk?

Memo to the officials of Alameda County in Northern California: You don’t.

Of course, hindsight is 20-20, as the county officials have found in a high-profile tussle this week with Mr. Musk, the famous, and occasionally infamous, entrepreneur known for electric cars, space rockets, tunnel digging and creative baby-naming.

And, most of all, for tweet-baiting, which Mr. Musk used to great effect while clashing with local officials over the timing and terms of reopening of his Tesla factory in the San Francisco Bay Area suburb of Fremont. Mr. Musk closed the plant after shelter-in-place rules were put in place in March (after initially defying orders).

But now Mr. Musk has apparently had enough. He filed a lawsuit and threatened to move operations and 10,000 jobs out of state, even as several reports indicated that he had restarted production at the plant over the weekend, flouting the rules and attracting the ire of the local government.”

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Trump’s Chaos Theory: A Single Tweet Causes Jobs To Return – by Steven Rattner- The New York Times

“Donald J. Trump spent much of his campaign peddling hope to beleaguered working-class Americans that, on his watch, those old-fashioned, good-paying manufacturing jobs would come back to America.

On Thursday, the president-elect was in Indiana to celebrate the news that the Carrier Corporation will move only 1,300 jobs to Mexico, not 2,100 as planned. That’s not bringing jobs back to the United States; they are just leaving more slowly.

Source: Trump’s Chaos Theory: A Single Tweet Causes Jobs To Return – The New York Times

Here is a good comment:
Jennifer Stewart NY 8 hours ago

“I see news anchors punting the “art of the deal” as underpinning this latest stunt. But as Tony Schwartz, the author of that book tweeted, “I wrote the Art of the Deal. Trump read it.” And he has exposed Trump for a complete fraud.

Conspicuously absent from all the news are the terms of this deal for the workers. How long are they protected, what will their wages be, and what about the guys who have lost their jobs? How can a president-elect decide who will keep their jobs and who won’t?

I’m outraged, as I always am, at every con this despicable man pulls. And frustrated beyond description at how he can feed poison to his followers and tell them it’s nectar and they’ll believe him. This isn’t a deal for the workers, it’s one for Carrier. Essentially all Trump has done here is tell all corporations that they can blackmail him.”

473 Recommended

Carrier Jobs – Saved by Government – The New York Times

‘The holidays came early this year for workers at a Carrier furnace plant in Indiana, who learned on Tuesday that 800 of their jobs would not be moving to Mexico after all. Their good fortune is also an early triumph for the incoming Trump administration. President-elect Donald Trump had promised during the campaign to stop the offshoring of American manufacturing jobs, and true to that pledge, he and Vice President-elect Mike Pence, who is governor of Indiana, cut a deal with Carrier, a division of United Technologies, to keep the jobs in the state.’

Source: Carrier Jobs, Saved by Government – The New York Times

Top comments to date at NYT:

Marc

New York City 12 hours ago

“I keep thinking of all the Detroit auto jobs President Obama saved and how the U.S. eventually made a profit off of the deals, and how much opposition he faced with Republicans who were against it. I think of all the other jobs Obama saved while being vilified for government “interference”. I think of all the lives he saved with his flawed but still crucial expansion of health care, which included Medicaid (limited only by cruel Republican governors who were certain that denying poor sick people any coverage was far better). I think of his efforts to raise the wages of millions by authorizing overtime pay that would only bring it back to the level it was decades ago in terms of inflation, but which has now been said by a judge to be illegal in our twisted world. I think of how much money Obama and the Fed gave Wall Street, reluctantly because of moral hazard, to ensure that the financial crisis would not get worse and cause greater destruction of jobs nationwide — which was his real goal –and how the country ended up making a profit on that money, too.

Then I think of how the media (except for the Times, thankfully) has fawned over Trump’s tiny little deal with Carrier, in which many jobs are still leaving while Carrier executives will most certainly not suffer at all (what an understatement).

Obama saved the country and the world. Trump has only enabled another one of his false tweets.

• 566 Recommended

Clyde Wynant

is a trusted commenter Pittsburgh 13 hours ago

The beauty of this, from the Trump administration’s standpoint, is that the details you layout will be entirely lost on “the base.” They will sip beers and applaud their leader for “giving it to the man.” They can’t be bothered with details like tax breaks and loopholes and tariffs and such. And Trump and his people know this. They realize, perhaps more than any group of leaders before them, that you CAN fool “most of the people, most of the time.” “

• 448 Recommended

Trump Cheered for Carrier Deal Even as Other Jobs Are Trimmed – The New York Times

“INDIANAPOLIS — The long-promised call from Donald J. Trump to the heating and cooling giant Carrier came early one morning about a week after the election, when he unexpectedly won the industrial heartland
The president-elect warned Gregory Hayes, the chief executive of Carrier’s parent, United Technologies, that he had to find a way to save a substantial share of the jobs it had vowed to move to Mexico, or he would face the wrath of the incoming administration.”

Source: Trump Cheered for Carrier Deal Even as Other Jobs Are Trimmed – The New York Times