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Narrow Focus


This past election has shown how narrowly focused many people are about Government and the people they elect. Any government and the elected representatives should ( and many times do) have to look at the whole picture involved in regulations on anything that affects us. Each area of the country have at once different and the same issues. These issues cannot be considered in a microcosm. While the coal miners have issues with health issues related to coal miners (with fierce fights on that issue), there has been no real information regarding the effect of Fracking on the coal industry. Fracking with its side effects has driven the price of gas and oil down relegating coal to a side line thus reducing the working mines to a fraction of the output they once had. This reduction has caused the decline in mine work and workers with no assistance from the representatives of these areas save a mouth full of blame on someone else. It would appear to me that these representatives should have been investigating or advocating for the Affordable Care act aka “Obamacare” which has a provision for the care and treatment of the mine workers who contract Black Lung Disease. It appears that some of these legislators have failed their own constituents in not recognizing the unhealthy conditions that they have to work under. When several mines closed  the workers were left without jobs yet none of the elected dim wits sought to get or institute any retraining and  maintain health services. They did have time to block anything the President was doing while fostering the notion that He was “killing coal”, it seems now that coal is killing the miners but the Legislators are still standing on the sidelines now hoping a Trump Presidency will allow them to continue their nefarious ways. It is unfortunate that big Coal has bought and paid for the lives of the miners through “gifts” to the Lawmakers. It would be interesting to see what the lives of the Mine owners are like compared to the mine workers. The elections have shown that politicians and candidates focused narrowly in each area  to maximize their vote count even though that focus was inadequately represented in rallies and meetings. Essentially “ALL politicians and candidates LIE! to get what they need to gain office! These lies no matter what small truth is used as a lead in to get your attention are still just lies and do not nor will not benefit the people of the United States.

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The internet is broken. Starting from scratch, here’s how I’d fix it.


Informative article on the beginnings of the internet and its subsequent misuse/ abuse. It is a slightly dry read but worth going through and if you think you know it all then you definitely need to read this. MA

Published on December 14, 2016

Walter Isaacson
CEO at Aspen Institute
My big idea is that we have to fix the internet. After forty years, it has begun to corrode, both itself and us. It is still a marvelous and miraculous invention, but now there are bugs in the foundation, bats in the belfry, and trolls in the basement.
I do not mean this to be one of those technophobic rants dissing the Internet for rewiring our brains to give us the twitchy attention span of Donald Trump on Twitter or pontificating about how we have to log off and smell the flowers. Those qualms about new technologies have existed ever since Plato fretted that the technology of writing would threaten memorization and oratory. I love the internet and all of its digital offshoots. What I bemoan is its decline.
There is a bug in its original design that at first seemed like a feature but has gradually, and now rapidly, been exploited by hackers and trolls and malevolent actors: its packets are encoded with the address of their destination but not of their authentic origin. With a circuit-switched network, you can track or trace back the origins of the information, but that’s not true with the packet-switched design of the internet.
Compounding this was the architecture that Tim Berners-Lee and the inventors of the early browsers created for the World Wide Web. It brilliantly allowed the whole of the earth’s computers to be webbed together and navigated through hyperlinks. But the links were one-way. You knew where the links took you. But if you had a webpage or piece of content, you didn’t exactly know who was linking to you or coming to use your content.
All of that enshrined the potential for anonymity. You could make comments anonymously. Go to a webpage anonymously. Consume content anonymously. With a little effort, send email anonymously. And if you figured out a way to get into someone’s servers or databases, you could do it anonymously.
For years, the benefits of anonymity on the Net outweighed its drawbacks. People felt more free to express themselves, which was especially valuable if they were dissidents or hiding a personal secret. This was celebrated in the famous 1993 New Yorker cartoon, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”
Now the problem is nobody can tell if you’re a troll. Or a hacker. Or a bot. Or a Macedonian teenager publishing a story that the Pope has endorsed Trump.
This has poisoned civil discourse, enabled hacking, permitted cyberbullying, and made email a risk. Its inherent lack of security has allowed Russian actors to screw with our democratic process.
The lack of secure identification and authentication inherent in the internet’s genetic code has also prevented easy transactions, thwarted financial inclusion, destroyed the business models of content creators, unleashed deluges of spam, and forced us to use passwords and two-factor authentication schemes that would have baffled Houdini.
The trillions being spent and the IQ points of computer science talent being allocated to tackle security issues makes it a drag, rather than a spur, to productivity in some sectors.
In Plato’s Republic, we learn the tale of the Ring of Gyges. Put it on, and you’re invisible and anonymous. The question that Plato asks is whether those who put on the ring will be civil and moral. He thinks not. The Internet has proven him correct.
The Web is no longer a place of community, no longer an agora. Every day more sites are eliminating comments sections.
If we could start from scratch, here’s what I think we would do:
Create a system that enables content producers to negotiate with aggregators and search engines to get a royalty whenever their content is used, like ASCAP has negotiated for public performances and radio airings of its members’ works.
Embed a simple digital wallet and currency for quick and easy small payments for songs, blogs, articles, and whatever other digital content is for sale.
Encode emails with an authenticated return or originating address.
Enforce critical properties and security at the lowest levels of the system possible, such as in the hardware or in the programming language, instead of leaving it to programmers to incorporate security into every line of code they write.
Build chips and machines that update the notion of an internet packet. For those who want, their packets could be encoded or tagged with metadata that describe what they contain and give the rules for how it can be used.
Most internet engineers think that these reforms are possible, from Vint Cerf, the original TCP/IP coauthor, to Milo Medin of Google, to Howard Shrobe, the director of cybersecurity at MIT. “We don’t need to live in cyber hell,” Shrobe has argued.
Implementing them is less a matter of technology than of cost and social will. Some people, understandably, will resist any diminution of anonymity, which they sometimes label privacy.
So the best approach, I think, would be to try to create a voluntary system, for those who want to use it, to have verified identification and authentication.
People would not be forced to use such a system. If they wanted to communicate and surf anonymously, they could. But those of us who choose, at times, not to be anonymous and not to deal with people who are anonymous should have that right as well. That’s the way it works in the real world.
The benefits would be many: Easy and secure ways to deal with your finances and medical records. Small payment systems that could reward valued content rather than the current incentive to concentrate on clickbait for advertising. Less hacking, spamming, cyberbullying, trolling, and the spewing of anonymous hate. And the possibility of a more civil discourse.
Walter Isaacson, the CEO of the Aspen Institute, is the author of The Innovators and biographies of Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, and Steve Jobs. This essay is partly drawn from a talk delivered to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Why do Republicans want to repeal Obamacare so much? Because it would be a big tax cut for the rich.


There are graphs associated with this post unfortunately they did not transfer  but you can search out Matt O’Brien @Wonkblog for the details. MA
Wonkblog analysis

By Matt O’Brien
December 16 at 7:50 AM

(AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
There are going to be so many tax cuts for the rich, you’re going to get tired of tax cuts for the rich. You’re going to say, “Mr. President, please don’t cut taxes for the rich so much, this is getting terrible.”
And it will start when Republicans repeal Obamacare.
This is the Rosetta Stone for understanding why conservatives have acted like subsidized health care was the end of the republic itself. It wasn’t just that it had the word “Obama” in its name, which, in our polarized age, was enough to ensure that 45 percent of the country would despise it. No, it was that Obamacare was one of the biggest redistributive policies of the last 50 years. The Republican Party, after all, exists for what seems like the sole purpose of reversing redistribution.
A quick recap: Obamacare is a kind of three-legged stool. First, it tells insurance companies that they can’t discriminate against sick people anymore; second, it tells people that they have to buy insurance or pay a penalty, so that everyone doesn’t just wait until they’re sick to get covered; and third, it helps people who can’t afford the plans they have to buy be able to. Which is to say that you need to come up with a whole lot of money to make this work — money that Obamacare gets by taxing the rich. Indeed, at its most basic level, it raises taxes on the top 1 percent to pay for health insurance for the bottom 40 percent.
So undoing Obamacare would undo a lot of taxes at the top, and a lot of subsidies at the bottom. You can see that in the chart below from the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. They crunched the numbers to figure out how much getting rid of Obamacare’s taxes and tax credits would help or hurt people at different rungs of the income ladder, and the results were about what you’d expect. The bottom 40 percent are a good deal worse off, the middle 55 percent are mostly unaffected, and the top 1 percent would do pretty, pretty well. In fact, they’d get an average tax cut of around $32,820.  It’s a reverse Robin Hood. It’s taking tax subsidies from the poor to give as tax cuts to the rich. The starkest way to think about that is that the bottom 60 percent would get negative 61.1 percent of the total benefits of getting rid of Obamacare, while the top 1 percent would get 117.5 percent. That’s right: the wealthiest would gain more than the country as a whole would, because the working class wouldn’t be gaining anything at all. They’d be losing tax credits, and the health insurance those bought them.
It’s even more lopsided than it sounds. The 44.8 percent of the total benefits that the 99 to 99.9 percent would get makes them seem like plebes compared to the 72.7 percent that the top 0.1 percent would.
What we can’t say, though, is how much the “repeal” part of “repeal and replace” would make up for the “repeal” part. That’s because Republicans still haven’t figured that out almost seven years later. The problem is that it’s hard to come up with a conservative alternative to Obamacare when Obamacare is the conservative alternative. It’s the market-based way to try to insure the uninsured. Think about it like this: if you want to make insurance companies cover people with preexisting conditions, then you need a mandate, and if you have a mandate, then you need subsidies to make it affordable. Obamacare, in other words, is the If-You-Give-A-Mouse-With-Preexisting-Conditions-An-Insurance-Plan system of health care reform.
Now, maybe Republicans really will put together their own plan . . . but maybe they won’t. It’s hard to see where they’d get the money for one when they’re so committed to getting rid of all the taxes that pay for Obamacare now.
Getting tired of tax cuts for the rich yet?

The Moment That Made Trump Possible


This is not to negate Trump supporters or the people who voted for him because of the poor showing by the Government overall. Many of Trump supporters are ordinary people who are not satisfied with their situations and the government’s role in those situations. The fringe elements are just that (like ISIS), people who see an opening to foment their own brand of hate and dissension. If Mr. trump does anything correctly, it may be in his cabinets selections for better or worse. MA

Matt Bai 3 hours ago
Donald Trump said a lot of things about a lot of people on his journey to the White House. He mocked a war hero for getting captured. He accused a rival’s dad of consorting with President Kennedy’s killer. He likened another opponent — soon to be a member of his Cabinet — to a child molester.
But nothing Trump unleashed during the campaign reverberated through Washington’s vast governing apparatus like the 14-word sentence released by his transition team this week, after intelligence agencies issued their finding that the Russians had tried to intervene in our election — a charge that Trump, betraying more than a little insecurity, dismissed as “ridiculous” and politically motivated.
“These are the same people,” the statement read, “that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.”
Oh. That again.
Capital insiders were horrified that Trump would brutalize the nation’s top spies in the same way he went after Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz — and this after refusing to sit for intelligence briefings. They shouldn’t have been.
Because all Trump did, really, was to acknowledge the subtext of his own political ascent. If there’s one thing that enabled his assault on the country’s governing and media establishments, it’s the calamitous series of events that began in September 2001. Trump could never sail on with such impunity were it not for the invasion of Iraq and everything that followed.
By now it should be clear: He is the vehicle of our reckoning.
There was a time, not long ago, when it was possible to believe that no one would pay a very steep price for that cascade of failure during the Bush years, when just about every trusted institution in American life seemed to collapse of its own dereliction.
Disgraced pundits kept on pontificating. The CIA kept right on stonewalling — successfully — to keep its history of torture sealed off from public view. The parties in Washington kept on fighting like spoiled brats. The bankers kept on making money and loaning it out.
A decade passed, and American voters seemed to have settled into their cynicism, in the same way baseball fans still filled the stadiums after the steroid debacle and Catholic parishioners still lined the pews after coming to terms with chronic abuse.
But politics is like that. The larger the shock to the system, the longer it takes for the effects to surface. Pain and resentment ricochet through the years, rattle around in the culture, until all at once the ground beneath us opens

Destiny


The Dupublican party now in control of both houses of Government has stated that they can now proceed with the changes to make government better for America (not necessarily for the people as they want you to believe). As voters we need to be extremely vigilant in listening to what the Administration says it is and will do for us. You have remember we are in a time where politicians lie with regularity to further their own ends. The access to many types of media has led many to believe what is put out electronically as fact. You must remember that no matter what is done to us in or names, the elected  official will not suffer like many of us will. They are protected by us in that we fail to understand what they have enacted to protect themselves and feather their own nests. We all want change but we must be careful what we ask for. I would really like to believe things will get better with the Trump administration but unfortunately the selections and statements (tweets) he has made so far are not encouraging. It is now up to the statesmen in the Congress to control this chaos wrought by the self servers in the Dupublican party. This will clearly be a case of “lying down with dogs and waking up with fleas”. It is unfortunate that too many people are so desperate to blame the president (no matter who it is) that they lose sight of the real power in Government. Now on the promise of “draining the swamp” Mr. trump will be taking the helm of the country with the theme of making America great again. The greatness has never left America, what has gone is our apparent inability or desire to pay attention to our Congress. The partisan politics has allowed the rise of Donald Trump whose sole objective in life is materialistic and self serving. Along with this Presidency come the rise (possible insurgency) of radical groups in America. Compare the potential uprisings to what is occurring and has occurred in the Middle East (third world?) . With a leader who ignores anything that DOES NOT BENEFIT HIM where are we going?  It is unfortunate that we have fallen to a low that allows for the rise of Donald trump, the Greatness (?) of America was determined when Trump won the Presidency with the backing of avowed racist organizations not the Americans who are in desperate need.  Destiny, the future will show us where it lies.

KKK, Other Racist Groups Disavow The White Supremacist Label


Aside from the obvious, these individuals, groups, klaven, or whatever they are called  apparently have never listened to themselves. First the idea that American was made for Whites doesn’t take into account that the Native Americans were here before Columbus (who was slave trader aside from being an explorer). There were the Pilgrims as far as we know who were essential persecuted  religious folk who attempted to “whiten” the Native Americans with their own version of how things should be. From that time on it would always be that the native Americans were savages (hard to believe that a person would protect themselves from  invaders who were trying to change their way of life rather than understand it). To move along: since the first “whites” arrived on the North American continent, the Native Americans have suffered diseases, rape, murder and displacement almost to extinction. These are the same events that occurred in Africa ( the Dark Continent) precipitated by the various wars in ancient Europe and Egypt when Black and brown  ( so called Yellow skinned folk in the east) residents   were stolen, sold, raped and displaced. The nature of those events brought millions to North American shores ( the ones who survived the trip). Given this information who would you consider to be the  bad actors in this? There is a line where the interviewee mentions “mongrelizing your seed” – what would you consider the uncounted rapes of the captives?- I think the last line of the post below shows how out of touch these folks are and will not hesitate to create whatever dissension they can to further their agenda to the detriment of us all!-MA

JAY REEVES,
Associated Press 20 hours ago

PELHAM, N.C. (AP) — In today’s racially charged environment, there’s a label that even the KKK disavows: white supremacy.
Standing on a muddy dirt road in the dead of night near the North Carolina-Virginia border, masked Ku Klux Klan members claimed Donald Trump’s election as president proves whites are taking back America from blacks, immigrants, Jews and other groups they describe as criminals and freeloaders. America was founded by and for whites, they say, and only whites can run a peaceful, productive society.
But still, the KKK members insisted in an interview with The Associated Press, they’re not white supremacists, a label that is gaining traction in the country since Trump won with the public backing of the Klan, neo-Nazis and other white racists.
“We’re not white supremacists. We believe in our race,” said a man with a Midwestern accent and glasses just hours before a pro-Trump Klan parade in a nearby town. He, like three Klan compatriots, wore a robe and pointed hood and wouldn’t give his full name, in accordance with Klan rules.
Claiming the Klan isn’t white supremacist flies in the face of its very nature. The Klan’s official rulebook, the Kloran — published in 1915 and still followed by many groups — says the organization “shall ever be true in the faithful maintenance of White Supremacy,” even capitalizing the term for emphasis. Watchdog groups also consider the Klan a white supremacist organization, and experts say the groups’ denials are probably linked to efforts to make their racism more palatable.
Still, KKK groups today typically renounce the term. The same goes for extremists including members of the self-proclaimed “alt-right,” an extreme branch of conservatism mixing racism, white nationalism and populism.
“We are white separatists, just as Yahweh in the Bible told us to be. Separate yourself from other nations. Do not intermix and mongrelize your seed,” said one of the Klansmen who spoke along the muddy lane.
The Associated Press interviewed the men, who claimed membership in the Loyal White Knights of the KKK, in a nighttime session set up with help of Chris Barker, a KKK leader who confirmed details of the group’s “Trump victory celebration” in advance of the event. As many as 30 cars paraded through the town of Roxboro, North Carolina, some bearing Confederate and KKK flags.
Barker didn’t participate, though: He and a Klan leader from California were arrested hours earlier on charges linked to the stabbing of a third KKK member during a fight, sheriff’s officials said. Both men were jailed; the injured man was recovering.
Like the KKK members, Don Black said he doesn’t care to be called a white supremacist, either. Black — who operates stormfront.org, a white extremist favorite website, from his Florida home — he prefers “white nationalist.”
“White supremacy is a legitimate term, though not usually applicable as used by the media. I think it’s popular as a term of derision because of the implied unfairness, and, like ‘racism,’ it’s got that ‘hiss’ (and, like ‘hate’ and ‘racism,’ frequently ‘spewed’ in headlines),” Black said in an email interview.
The Klan formed 150 years ago, just months after the end of the Civil War, and quickly began terrorizing freed blacks. Hundreds of people were assaulted or killed as whites tried to regain control of the defeated Confederacy. During the civil rights movement, Klan members were convicted of using murder as a weapon against equality. Leaders from several different Klan groups have told AP they have rules against violence aside from self-defense, and opponents agree the KKK has toned itself down after a string of members went to prison years after the fact for deadly arson attacks, beatings, bombings and shootings.
The Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League, which monitor white extremist organizations and are tracking an increase in reports of racist incidents since the election, often use the “white supremacist” label when describing groups like the Klan; white nationalism and white separatism are parts of the ideology. But what exactly is involved?
The ADL issued a report last year describing white supremacists as “ideologically motivated by a series of racist beliefs, including the notion that whites should be dominant over people of other backgrounds, that whites should live by themselves in a whites-only society, and that white people have their own culture and are genetically superior to other cultures.”
That sounds a lot like some of the ideas espoused by today’s white radicals, yet they reject the label. That’s likely because they learned the lessons of one-time Klan leader David Duke, who unsuccessfully ran for the U.S. Senate in Louisiana this year, said Penn State University associate professor Josh Inwood.
“(There was) this peddling of kinder, softer white supremacy. He tried to pioneer a more respectable vision of the Klan,” Inwood said.
Extremist expert Sophie Bjork-James, a scholar at Vanderbilt University, prefers the term “racist right” to describe today’s white supremacists.
“They are not simply conservative or alt-right, but actually espousing racist ideas and racist goals,” she said. “They won’t agree with this label, but I think it is important to be clear about what they represent and what their goals are.”
Whatever you call them, the muddy-road Klansmen said their beliefs have gained a foothold. The popularity of Trump’s proposal to build a wall on the Mexican border — an idea long espoused by the Klan — is part of the proof, they said.
“White Americans are finally, most of them, opening their eyes and coming around and seeing what is happening,” said a man in a satiny green Klan robe.

Timeline


Sears holdings slide to the end is imminent . The takeover by non retail CEO has created a vortex that will end with Sears/K-mart in memory only, much like  Woolworth’s (for those who can remember that company). I expect that the year 2017 will be the last year that the SH (Sears holdings) will exist as a company but will possibly remain a licensing agency for the name brands associated with the defunct company much like well known names like: RCA, Magnavox, etc. It is a tragedy that the Board of directors failed to see the future under their CEO and benefaker .

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Regrets?-There are A Few


Aside from what we know, how many more regrets will there be coming from voting for Donald? Maybe there will not be the forgiveness as expressed in the song? Looking at short and long term: There have been several cabinet appointments made  and yet to be confirmed. Looking at these nominees they are business folk who have supported many of Trump’s ideas and on its face may not be too bad. We unfortunately have to look to the do nothing Congress to step up and do what is required to keep us safe from Trumpedations. As voters who are disappointed with Government continue to celebrate, the views of the Dupublicans is not as friendly for the nation as a whole. The idea of altering the current social security system to match the ideals of  the Dupublican party narrowly skirts Racism and poverty bias. Remember that the US Congress along with other government workers are under a health and retirement system that does not mirror the Social security system most Americans are covered by. This is another “walking in my shoes” moment. So with the rise of Trump we could progress or regress but the 535 Congressional members will still be in place and planning our demise “for our own good” and  try to make many of us like it. This coercion is accomplished by innuendo and sound bites that sound better than they are. Take note of  what is being said by Congress and the government on your behalf. This is not to say that the Government is bad but merely manipulated by less than stellar people (our elected officials).

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Donald Trump just insulted a union leader on Twitter. Then the phone started to ring.


Trump and Indiana-Still!! MA

The Washington Post
Danielle Paquette

4 hrs ago

Chuck Jones uses a flip phone, so he didn’t see the tweet. His friend of 36 years called him Wednesday night and said: The president-elect is smearing you on Twitter.
Jones, a union leader in Indianapolis, represents the Carrier workers whose jobs Donald Trump has pledged to save. He said the sudden attention from the country’s next leader didn’t feel real.
“My first thought was, ‘Well, that’s not very nice,’ ” he told The Washington Post on Wednesday night. “Then, ‘Well, I might not sleep much tonight.’ ”
Jones, president of the United Steelworkers Local 1999, told The Post on Tuesday that he believed Trump had lied to the Carrier workers last week when he visited the Indianapolis plant. On a makeshift stage in a conference room, Trump had applauded United Technologies, Carrier’s parent company, for cutting a deal with him and agreeing to keep 1,100 jobs that were slated to move to Mexico in America’s heartland.
Jones said Trump got that figure wrong.
Carrier, he said, had agreed to preserve 800 production jobs in Indiana. (Carrier confirmed that number.) The union leader said Trump appeared to be taking credit for rescuing 350 engineering positions that were never scheduled to leave. Five hundred and fifty of his members, he said, were still losing their jobs. And the company was still collecting millions of dollars in tax breaks.
In return for downsizing its move south of the border, United Technologies would receive $7 million in tax credits from Indiana, to be paid in $700,000 installments each year for 10. Carrier, on top of that, has agreed to invest $16 million in its Indiana operation. United Technologies, meanwhile, still plans to shuttle 700 factory jobs from Huntington, Ind., to Monterrey, Mexico.
Jones, who said the union wasn’t involved in the negotiations, said he’s working to lift his members’ spirits. He said he didn’t have time to worry about Trump.
“He needs to worry about getting his Cabinet filled,” he said, “and leave me the hell alone.”
Representatives for Trump did not respond to The Post’s requests for comment.
Over the past two decades, the United States has lost about 4.5 million manufacturing jobs, a consequence economists ascribe to trade and automation. Jones said he has fought to keep work on U.S. soil, bargaining repeatedly with Carrier and Rexnord, another Indianapolis plant that plans to relocate jobs to Mexico.
Vice President-elect Mike Pence tweeted his support for Jones earlier this year:
Half an hour after Trump tweeted about Jones on Wednesday, the union leader’s phone began to ring and kept ringing, he said. One voice asked: What kind of car do you drive? Another said: We’re coming for you.
He wasn’t sure how these people found his number.
“Nothing that says they’re gonna kill me, but, you know, you better keep your eye on your kids,” Jones said later on MSNBC. “We know what car you drive. Things along those lines.”
“I’ve been doing this job for 30 years, and I’ve heard everything from people who want to burn my house down or shoot me,” he added. “So I take it with a grain of salt and I don’t put a lot of faith in that, and I’m not concerned about it and I’m not getting anybody involved. I can deal with people that make stupid statements and move on.”
Brett Voorhies, president of the Indiana State AFL-CIO, called Jones after Trump’s tweet caught his eye. Jones, he said, had just left his office in Indianapolis, where he manages the needs of about 3,000 union members.
“This guy makes pennies for what he does,” Voorhies said. “What he has to put up with is just crazy. Now he’s just got the president-elect smearing him on Twitter.”

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‘He got up there and lied his a– off’: Carrier union leader on Trump’s big deal


Another Face of The Carrier deal. MA

The Secret Service agents told the Carrier workers to stay put, so Chuck Jones sat in the factory conference room for nearly three hours, waiting for president-elect Donald Trump. He’d grown used to this suspense.
Seven months earlier, at a campaign rally in Indianapolis, Trump had pledged to save the plant’s jobs, most of which were slated to move to Mexico. Then the businessman won the election, and the 1,350 workers whose paychecks were on the line wondered if he’d keep his promise.
Jones, president of the United Steelworkers 1999, which represents Carrier employees, felt optimistic when Trump announced last week that he’d reached a deal with the factory’s parent company, United Technologies, to preserve 1,100 of the Indianapolis jobs —  until the union leader heard from Carrier that only 730 of the production jobs would stay and 550 of his members would lose their livelihoods, after all.
At the Dec. 1 meeting, where Trump was supposed to lay out the details, Jones hoped he would explain himself.
“But he got up there,” Jones said Tuesday, “and, for whatever reason, lied his a– off.”
In front of a crowd of about 150 supervisors, production workers and reporters, Trump praised Carrier and its parent company, United Technologies. “Now they’re keeping — actually the number’s over 1,100 people,” he said, “which is so great.”
Jones wondered why the president-elect appeared to be inflating the victory. Trump and Pence, he said, could take credit for rescuing 800 of the Carrier jobs, including non-union positions.
Of the nearly 1,400 workers at the Indianapolis plant, however, 350 in research and development were never scheduled to leave, Jones said. Another 80 jobs, which Trump seemed to include in his figure, were non-union clerical and supervisory positions. (A Carrier spokesperson confirmed the numbers.) And now the president-elect was applauding the company and giving it millions of dollars in tax breaks, even as hundreds of Indianapolis workers prepared to be laid off.
“Trump and Pence, they pulled a dog and pony show on the numbers,” said Jones, who voted for Hillary Clinton but called her “the better of two evils.” “I almost threw up in my mouth.”
Spokespeople for Trump did not respond to the Post’s request for comment.
In exchange for downsizing its move south of the border, United Technologies would receive $7 million in tax credits from Indiana, to be paid in $700,000 installments each year for a decade. Carrier, meanwhile, agreed to invest $16 million in its Indiana operation. United Technologies still plans to send 700 factory jobs from Huntington, In, to Monterrey, Mexico.
T.J. Bray, 32, one of the workers who will keep his job, sat in the front row during the Dec. 1 meeting as Trump spoke. A corporate employee had guided him specifically to that seat, he said, so he suspected he might be part of Trump’s remarks.
On Carrier’s makeshift stage, Trump paraphrased the words of an unnamed Carrier employee who talked to an NBC reporter after the election. Bray was the only Carrier employee who had appeared on television that day. Apparently, he realized, Trump was saying he inspired the deal.
“He said something to the effect, ‘No, we’re not leaving, because Donald Trump promised us that we’re not leaving,’ and I never thought I made that promise,” Trump said. “Not with Carrier. I made it for everybody else. I didn’t make it really for Carrier.”
In fact, Trump did make that commitment, and it’s on video.  “They’re going to call me and they are going to say ‘Mr. President, Carrier has decided to stay in Indiana,’” Trump had said at the April rally. “One hundred percent — that’s what is going to happen.”
Last week, though, the president-elect told the Carrier crowd he hadn’t meant that literally.
“I was talking about Carrier like all other companies from here on in,” Trump said. “Because they made the decision a year and a half ago. But he believed that was — and I could understand it. I actually said — I didn’t make it — when they played that, I said, ‘I did make it, but I didn’t mean it quite that way.’”
Trump asked if the employee he’d been referencing was in the audience. A woman yelled that her son was, and Trump began to compliment that son, though he hadn’t spoken in the television news segment. (Bray said that a United Technologies spokesperson later told him Trump meant to single him out.)
“I was confused when he was like, ‘I wasn’t talking about Carrier,’” Bray said. “You made this whole campaign about Carrier, and we’re still losing a lot of jobs.”
Bray clapped that day, anyway, for the 800 that would remain on American soil

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