This is a Pocket Note. Pocket Notes are where I practice paying attention. Today, I am paying attention to billionaires who want your children and your children's children to be ground to dust on factory floors.
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Yesterday, billionaire Howard Lutnick when on CNBC to defend Trump's Tariffs. He claimed factories would spring up all over America. And then said it is "time to train people not to do the jobs of the past, but to do the great jobs of the future. This is the new model where you work in these kinds of plants for the rest of your life and your kids work here and your grandkids work here."
Before we go on, I think it's important to note that Lutnick is talking about making your kids and your grandkids work in a factory. But he throws his own kids parties that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. He probably helped finance this godforsaken wannabe hip hop single by one of his kids. (????)
And - shocker - Lutnick does not seem eager to usher his own children onto the factory floor. He just gave his oldest sons, Brandon and Kyle, the keys to the empire. (According to Fortune, Kyle is the one with the hip hop single. Which is very funny in a very Arrested Development kind of way.)
- Fortune
Now that we have that out of the way. What does Lutnick mean by jobs of the past and future? Whose past? Whose future?
When I think of jobs of the past, I think of entire family lines being ground to dust on factory floors. I think of the Second Industrial Revolution and its crowning horror, The Gilded Age. I think of Lewis Hine's photojournalism. His images of children holding baby siblings on their laps while they worked beside their mothers in factories. I think of the way Jim Crow laws were designed to bind Black families and Black communities to the most dangerous forms of industrial labor. I think about my ancestors who breathed in coal dust until they lost their breath.
When I think of "great jobs of the future," I think of many things! Some of which involve ethical manufacturing! But mostly, I think of accessible education and worker protections. I think of people empowered to choose the kind of work they do, no matter what kind of work their parents did.
Lutnick has it flipped. He thinks the right to choose where you work and the right to survive where you work are relics of the past. And he wants to use a crashed economy and factory floors to impose a reboot of Gilded Age. Trump has been adamant he wants this too.
Today, Trump defended his tariffs by making a bunch of false claims. He then talked about our kids. Like these idiots cannot stop doing evil monologues about our children! It's wild! Anyways, Trump talking about China said,
"They made a trillion dollars with Biden selling us stuff. Much of it we don't need. Somebody said, 'oh, the shelves are gonna be open.' Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more."
Now, we can talk about the "right" number of dolls some other time. Wondering how the America's supercharged consumer economy got going? I recommend Amanda Mull's article, Cheap American Goods are the American Dream, Actually.
For now, I want to emphasize that these men are not saying Americans can do with less because they want to reduce the kind of consumption that hurts workers and the environment. We know they are not concerned about because, among many other things, this regime is gutting the EPA and stripping workers of protections. These men are saying Americans can do with less because they want to permanently restrict all choices available to some Americans. This is just how they're getting started.
First of all, the rich kids will still have lots of dolls. The poor kids will have no dolls. Well, no dolls other than the ones they carve from the bits of anthracite they sneak into their pockets after ten hour shifts at the coal breaker. Remember that the GOP wants to make child labor great again!
Meg Conley
Meg Conley
And of course Trump uses "dolls" as the example. The subtext is pretty obvious: Shelves without dolls don't matter because dolls are girl-coded. Girls are ridiculous. My manly policy will not be moved by ridiculous girl stuff.
Like no matter what these guys are talking about, they gotta make sure we all know that they really, really hate girls. Why is that? They claim being men gives them authority. But in their heart of hearts, they must know how dumb that is. So they're constantly trying to reinforce their bad claims by being like, Girls! Ick!
Meg Conley
But of course, it's not just dolls that we get from other countries. We get food, medicine, electronics, clothing and lots of other things. And so it isn't just hard to fill shelves with dolls. It's hard to fill shelves with everything.
Empty shelves mean products become more expensive. People will buy less. Businesses will cut employee hours and jobs. People will buy even less. The economic downturn orchestrated by Trump and the Republicans will start to spiral into something much worse. (Just as I was about to send this letter out, the Republicans voted to protect Trump's tariffs!)
A lot of unemployed people will be forced to make choices they wouldn't have made otherwise. Unemployed women have a more difficult time getting a job than unemployed men. This is exacerbated by economic turmoil. Middle class White women might decide to leave the labor force - an echo of what happened during the Industrial Revolution. Everyone else will have to take the work that they can find.
Like, I don't know, a job in a VC-funded AI-enabled factory that requires employees to live in blockchain-based company towns and pays everyone in company crypto. Just one random example. Ahem.
Meg Conley
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