To Paraphrase Harry Truman...

     ...the only thing that's new under the sun is the corruption we've forgotten or that which hasn't been exposed.
     Again, from faithful reader CC comes this trenchant series of nonetheless accurate observations and a link to a Yahoo news article delineating the truth behind the Trump "miracle" of "saving" 850 jobs from going to Mexico:

     And retraining doesn't guarantee anything. What if the job you're retrained for doesn't materialize?

     Or, if it does, who's to say it won't also be automated or you won't find yourself training an H1B visa holder who would soon be able to perform it at a fraction of the cost?

     Or what if Carrier and the like decide to extort the government for more handouts in order to keep the jobs at home?
     What if the government were to grow a pair and hit Carrier's parent  company, a defense [sic] contractor where it hurts: threaten to  withhold all government contracts until it employs more Americans?
     Then again, these contractors could take their business elsewhere - perhaps to a rival nation.
     That's the danger of a military-industrial complex.

     To which I'd responded:
     "About two and a half years after I started the current Pottersville, I wrote an article about something like this and the culprit at the time was Evergreen Solar, which had a manufacturing plant in Marlborough, MA, the next city south of us. They also had a plant in Deven.
     Evergreen had gotten a whopping $58,000,000 in tax breaks from our then Governor Deval Patrick in exchange for keeping about 800 jobs in MA. The problem with this deal was that it ended after a year. So, once Evergreen got their $58,000,000, they axed those jobs, anyway, and used that $58,000,000 to build a new manufacturing plant in Wuhan, China. Which was their plan all along. Patrick, someone who came from the corporate world, shouldn't've been so bamboozled by these corporate scum yet he was.
     I was just telling Mr. JP yesterday Carrier will do the same thing, as do all companies. They use the threat and the siren call of keeping US jobs where they are but only if they get massive tax breaks and incentives. But they also use this job carrot on the stick to also leverage into the bargain a certain time limit. And the minute those tax breaks and subsidies expire is the very nanosecond those US jobs are history.
     Back when I was still living with my last girlfriend and her kids, we used to go to a place called Clark's Trading Post in Lincoln, New Hampshire. The main attraction was a couple of trainers who got into this concrete pit with New Jersey black bears to get them to do stupid tricks. Clark's daughter always had in one hand a cone of soft serve ice cream and a spoon in the other.
     Over their microphones they admitted that the very second they stopped feeding the bear his ice cream would be the very second they'd die because the bear would turn on them. So literally every one or two seconds, she'd have to shovel ice cream into this bear's mouth to maintain his very conditional and short term compliance (and to stay alive).
     This is your typical American corporation in a nutshell- The very nanosecond the tax breaks stop getting shoved into their maws is the very nanosecond those US jobs disappear. Then they audaciously take those tens of millions of tax breaks, courtesy of that state's taxpayers, and use it to build a brand new factory in fucking China.
     Which is probably the biggest reason why I loathe executives as much as I do. They're just bears with silk suits and styling gel."