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New Data Shows Manufacturing Growth Slowest Since 2009

New Data Shows Manufacturing Growth Slowest Since 2009

Trump continues to brag about an American manufacturing renaissance, but data released Thursday shows growth slowed to the lowest level in a decade, according to CNBC.

The U.S. manufacturing PMI (purchasing managers’ index), a key indicator in the industry, dropped to a level indicating a contraction in the industry. It is the first time the PMI dropped to such a level since September 2009.

Further, new orders received by American manufacturers dropped to a 10-year low and export sales “tanked to the lowest level since August 2009,” CNBC reported.

“The most concerning aspect of the latest data is a slowdown in new business growth to its weakest in a decade, driven by a sharp loss of momentum across the service sector,” Tim Moore, economics associate director at IHS Markit, told CNBC.

The sobering news comes barely a week after Trump bragged about the strength of the manufacturing sector.

At a Pennsylvania speech on Aug. 13, Trump claimed, “we’re restoring the glory of American manufacturing, and we are reclaiming our noble heritage as a nation of builders again.”

Yet in places like Eaton County, Michigan, there has been a 9 percent drop in manufacturing jobs between January 2017 and December 2018, according to the New York Times. Seventeen other counties in Michigan saw a similar drop in manufacturing in a state known for manufacturing, especially the auto industry.

In Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, many counties Trump carried in 2016 have also experienced significant losses in the manufacturing industry.

“This is a classic example of Trump’s broken promises,” David Bergstein, the DNC’s battleground state communications director, told Shareblue Media. “On issue after issue, he’s broken his promises to the American people. Under his leadership, Americans are seeing increased health care costs, job losses, and [Trump] is only looking out for his wealthy and well-connected friends.”

“I think we are definitely seeing a slowdown,” Carla Bailo, president and chief executive of the Center for Automotive Research, told the Times. “Sales have slowed. Production rates have slowed.”

During the 2016 campaign, Trump made campaign promises to states like Michigan, vowing, “If I’m elected, you won’t lose one plant … The long nightmare of jobs leaving Michigan will be coming to a very rapid end.”

Three years later, factories are closing and manufacturing growth is slowing, despite Trump’s promises of restoring glory to the manufacturing sector.

Published with permission of The American Independent.

Remember When Obama Saved 1.5 Million Auto Industry Jobs?

Remember When Obama Saved 1.5 Million Auto Industry Jobs?

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters. 

Fox News and much of the conservative media slipped into messiah mode coverage this week when news broke that Carrier, the air conditioner giant, has decided to not move approximately 1,000 manufacturing jobs from Indiana to Mexico as the company had previously planned. President-elect Donald Trump took credit for having negotiated the respite.

Cheering Trump’s hands-on approach and his commitment to the working class, Fox talkers portrayed the Republican’s maneuver in relentlessly glowing terms. “A Big Win For Donald Trump,” announced Bill O’Reilly’s show last night.

Fox’s Stuart Varney claimed Trump had played hardball with Carrier and won: “He strong-armed them. What’s wrong with that?” (According to reports, it was likely the lure of additional tax incentives that convinced Carrier to keep the jobs in Indiana, not being “strong-armed” by Trump.)

Trump’s cheerleader-in-chief Sean Hannity was just gobsmacked by the whole thing, saying on his radio program that he “can’t think of a time in my lifetime where a president-elect or a president ever” did this.

Hannity loved the fact that Trump reached out to corporate America, which is fascinating because you know what Hannity didn’t love in 2009? He didn’t love when newly elected President Obama reached out to Detroit’s auto industry in the form of an $80 billion-dollar bailout. Back then, an unhinged Hannity called Obama every name in the book as conservative pundits accused the president of trying to destroy democracy and capitalism.

Fox News and the entire right-wing noise machine relentlessly denounced Obama as he tried to rescue American manufacturing jobs, which the federal bailout eventually did. One independent study estimated the aggressive government move saved 1.5 million jobs. “This peacetime intervention in the private sector by the U.S. government will be viewed as one of the most successful interventions in U.S. economic history,” the study’s author wrote.

Lots of people might forget, especially in light of the bailout’s stunning success, but Obama’s push to help the Detroit industry once served as a defining line of GOP attack. The bailout symbolized the dangers of Obama’s alleged socialist/gangster leanings. This, despite the fact it was actually President George W. Bush who unveiled the first phase of the bailout plan during the final weeks of his presidency, in order to “avoid a collapse of the U.S. auto industry.”

Nonetheless, the topic soon became a cornerstone of the Tea Party and its overheated attacks on Obama, amplified by Fox News.

Remember how Varney this week toasted Trump for having “strong-armed” Carrier? Back in 2009, the host was furious that Obama was allegedly trying strong arm the public into buying American cars: “[N]ow you’re in the position where the government somehow has to coerce or force us all into buying the small cars that it insists Detroit puts out.” (Varney routinely whined that Obama was a “bully” to business.)

Meanwhile, Glenn Beck, then with Fox News, claimed the bailout reminded him of “the early days of Adolf Hitler.” Fox favorite Michelle Malkin compared the auto deal to a “crap sandwich,” and a “lemon” the U.S. taxpayers would be stuck with “for life.”

Hannity himself berated Obama for engaging in what he called a “mission to hijack capitalism.” And in the infamous words of Rush Limbaugh, it was as if General Motors and Chrysler “bent over and grabbed the ankles.” (Limbaugh loves Trump’s Carrier deal, by the way.)

Question: Why would conservatives be so upset about saving American manufacturing jobs? Seems bizarre, right? But they were furious. So wrapped up in hatred for the new Democratic president, conservative pundits despised the government’s attempt to save GM and Chrysler from bankruptcies. They also seemed to despise the companies’ union workers, suggesting they were wildly overpaid. (Pundits even lied about how much the Detroit autoworkers made.)

Republican politicians were also angry. Mitt Romney, who’s reportedly being considered for a cabinet position in Trump’s administration, derided the auto bailout as a “sweetheart deal disguised as a rescue plan,” and guaranteed that if Detroit companies accepted the aid, you could “kiss the American automotive industry goodbye.”

In the end, the bailout that Obama championed saved more than one million jobs, and Fox News still hated it.

If only Obama had saved 1,000 Carrier jobs instead.

IMAGE: President Obama delivers remarks on the U.S. auto industry at the UAW-GM Center for Human Resources in Detroit, January 20, 2016. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

Do Trump’s White Men Really Want Problems Fixed?

Do Trump’s White Men Really Want Problems Fixed?

Some harsh truths: Years ago, blue-collar America suffered mightily in the loss of manufacturing jobs. Everyone knows that. Many new, high-paying factory jobs are today going unfilled because workers aren’t being trained for them. Some know that. Donald Trump has done about zero to offer these Americans a better tomorrow. Not nearly enough working white men seem to know that.

Or perhaps they’d rather see their anger applauded than their hard times ended. How else could anyone following Hillary Clinton’s proposals for improving ordinary Americans’ economic security prefer Trump? (We’re making the dangerous assumption that much of the general electorate has even bothered looking at the real-world fixes she’s prescribing.)

Let’s start with the struggling white folk of the Appalachian coal country. Polls indicate that the white men there especially prefer Trump. Because? Because? You tell me why. Politicos explain that they are an ornery population — proud, courageous and patriotic — but also susceptible to the sort of racist appeals that Trump uses to get them on the cheap.

Trump’s vow to “bring back coal” would be one of his easiest promises to break. The problem for coal isn’t just that it’s dirty energy. It’s that natural gas is cheaper. Trashing every environmental law on the books would not change the fact of free market life that consumers are going to buy the less expensive product.

Clinton, by contrast, has a plan to create a new economy for Appalachia. She would spend $30 billion upgrading the region’s roads and sewer lines, installing broadband and improving other communications. That’s good employment for local workers. Money would go toward education to prepare people for the high-paying jobs that don’t require a college degree. And she’d offer tax incentives for the companies that need such skills to move there. Her running mate, Tim Kaine of Virginia, has close family ties to Appalachia. He would, in all likelihood, be heading the project.

Trump’s plan is to favor himself and other 1 percenters with steep tax cuts that would drain the Treasury of money needed to make a Clinton-type plan a reality. (That might not matter much because he doesn’t have such a plan, or any plan.) The tax cuts would also put pressure on social programs — food stamps, Medicaid — that keep struggling workers above water.

Contrary to Trump’s hollering that American manufacturing is dead, U.S. factories are making more stuff than ever. They’re just doing it with robots and computers and fewer people than before.

The so-called Rust Belt state of Indiana is doing rather well in this new manufacturing economy. This is the state with the highest proportion of factory jobs, yet its unemployment is now only 4.4 percent. Meanwhile, personal income rose nearly 4 percent last year.

Most of the people who work in these modern plants don’t need a college education. They just need extra training to fix and operate the machines.

Some years back, European companies building ultramodern factories in South Carolina, Tennessee and elsewhere in the South complained that they couldn’t find people with the proper skills. Some set up their own apprenticeship programs to provide employees the education they need — the kind of vocational training that has nurtured Germany’s famously prosperous blue-collar workforce.

It’s good that some companies take it upon themselves to offer even low levels of training. But it’s our educational system’s duty to impart these basic skills before the workers submit their job applications. Neither Trump’s heart nor his brain is into setting up such a nuts-and-bolts program.

Blue-collar Americans have every right to vote their emotions over their economic self-interest. But let’s just not pretend they’re doing otherwise.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached atfharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

Photo: Virginia State Parks

In Manufacturing, Americans Are Back in Action

In Manufacturing, Americans Are Back in Action

Reports of NASA’s Juno spacecraft’s entering the orbit around Jupiter lit a sparkler in this American heart — on the Fourth of July, no less. It showed that Americans still have what it takes.

To keep spirits orbiting, let’s note another recent American feat that few could have imagined a couple of years ago. The United States is now gaining, not losing, factory jobs. This glad trend has some sobering asterisks attached, but there’s no denying this:

There are now nearly a million more factory jobs in this country than there were in 2010. Many of them are coming — surprise, surprise — from China. China, meanwhile, has lost about 6 percent of its factory positions from four years ago.

Why do Americans seem to know more about Jupiter’s 67 moons than about the turnaround in factory employment?

Reason No. 1 is politics. From Donald Trump on the populist right to Bernie Sanders on the left, trade agreements have become the obsession, the all-purpose villain behind U.S. factory closings and “movings” to low-wage countries.

In documenting the brutal departure of U.S. factory jobs, the candidates’ rearview mirrors have been quite accurate. We’re still down over 7 million manufacturing jobs from a peak of about 19.5 million in 1979.

But any serious plan to address the future of blue-collar America must focus on what’s actually happening now. What’s happening is automation. Robots enable manufacturers to make lots of stuff with relatively few workers. The ability to do the job with far fewer humans goes far in canceling the advantage of low-wage countries. (Lower U.S. energy costs have helped, too.)

This is how General Electric could move 4,000 jobs from China and Mexico to a new appliance plant in Louisville, Kentucky.

“We have (only) two hours of labor in a refrigerator,” GE CEO Jeff Immelt explained, “so it really doesn’t matter if you make it in Mexico, the U.S. or China.”

Another reason many don’t know about the improved outlook for factory work is that most of the new manufacturing jobs are in the South — especially North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. The rattling job losses occurred in the industrial Midwest. Conditions are better there, too, but many of the region’s laid-off workers still suffer.

The asterisks:

—The technology that lets U.S. companies slash the labor content of their products is something anyone can use. Foxconn, a supplier for Apple and Samsung, recently replaced 60,000 Chinese workers with robots.

—The new factory jobs require more training. The workers must be able to program and oversee fancy machinery. They need to be flexible, to move to another task as orders change. Happily, the pay is much higher.

—Advances in automation seem destined to reduce human workforces even more, here and everywhere.

—Brexit chaos has made the dollar stronger. That makes U.S. products more expensive on the global market.

We should probably abandon hope that a Trump stump talk on U.S. manufacturing will delve in reality. That U.S. factory output and employment have been trending upward is something Trump may not even know. In any case, it’s not useful information for his purposes.

But Trump’s thundering vows to bring factory work back to this country by the container shipload do everyone a disservice. Robotics are upon us. Peddling a dated vision of U.S. factories humming along with thousands and thousands of workers is just another con. China won’t be able to have that soon.

To restore prosperity to blue-collar America, we will need a moonshot program to retrain and rebuild. A country that can send spacecraft spinning around Jupiter should be able to pull that off.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com.

Photo: An Airbus A321 is being assembled in the final assembly line hangar at the Airbus U.S. Manufacturing Facility in Mobile, Alabama September 13, 2015.  REUTERS/Michael Spooneybarger