Chinese social media users have mocked Donald Trump with an AI-generated video showing overweight Americans working in factories.
A viral 30-second clip shows a series of miserable-looking rotund Americans slowly sewing garments and building smartphones on crowded shop floors.
The video, which is set to Chinese music, is called “make America great again” and has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times.
edit: added youtube link
give them maga hats, made in china.
This is hilarious except that the factories aren’t here, and to every MAGAts’ surprise, they can’t appear overnight.
But it’s more than just that. The factories will never be built if industry leaders aren’t sure the situation is stable.
No one will invest a billion dollars building factories and setting up supply lines if the tariffs could go away tomorrow. They would lose their investment. The only way they would commit all that money is if they know the tariffs are here to stay.
And if there’s one thing we know about Donny it’s that he’s a fucking idiot. And it’s there’s two things we know about him it’s that he’s inconsistent and will bow to flattery. Only his most stubborn followers believe he’ll actually stick to things as they are right now, meaning the desire to invest locally will never materialize.
Trump’s stated reason for the tariffs (bringing industry back to the US) will never happen under his leadership. The only thing this will cause is pain and poverty for the American people.
Edit: And to prove this, mere hours after typing it the tariffs have been ‘paused’ for another 90 days. There’s no stability. No one would invest that kind of money into building factories in the US only for this to happen… again.
Even if he would keep things stable for the remainder of his term that is still not even close to enough time for the majority of factories to be built, start production and reach profitability and it is extremely unlikely that his successor would keep the tariffs around unchanged too.
I don’t really understand the need to bring industry in your own country, if another country does it cheaper.
The only reason I can think of is independence. Limiting others their power over you.
But purely economically? It’s a waste of resources.
Who will do these jobs anyways? For what income? What can they learn at these jobs? Why would they waste their own opportunity of living in a wealthy economy just to do a job that someone without education and far lower costs can do?
These jobs are temporarily, the next generation won’t do those. Then the factories move again to another poor country.
Which is a good thing. This is how we develop the whole world.
When the whole world is developed, there will be no need for such braindead jobs.
If you need tariffs to get those jobs at your location, you’re just being inefficient.
But that’s economically. Can’t trust other countries until we’re all more united. And the current era is not making that look promising.
It’s not just because he’s an idiot. He also said explicitly that the tariffs are part of a negotiation that he will use to get concessions. So he intends to bargain them away which would render any industrial tariff-based investments useless.
Which is why, generally, taxing wealth and having the state invest it in supportive infrastructure and subsidising is the preferred option for developed economies that want manufacturing (back).
Sweeping, protectionist tariffs are usually a painful measure of necessity, if you have an economy without any developed industrial or service sectors, where initial investments are basically impossible due there being no taxable wealth and no market incentives, because of global players always being more profitable and cheaper, than any beginning industry that has to go through growth processes and learning experiences. (More selective tariffs or outright import/export bans of course also have their place for a multitude of political reasons, e.g. the EU not wanting a lot of artificially cheap and lower-health-standards US meat)
Playing the long game bro. Things gonna be so dope in the US in 50 years. We will be an isolated Arian labor economy breathing in pure sulfur and working in factories to produce goods for oligarchs on their yachts.
FYI “Aryan” is the word you’re looking for. “Arian” is an early Christian sect decried as heretical in the later Roman Empire
As long as they are both white, its probably fine man.
The historical Arians were a pretty diverse group, much like the early Christian church in general. Arius, the person whose teachings the Arians were named after, was North African, and there were Arians throughout North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe.
Haha, believable except for the part about oligarchs being on yachts.
In 50 years they will be in habitats in orbit or on other planets, free from pesky laws or crumbling climate. The ocean is going to be a stagnant, warm swamp of stinking algae and dead fish.
I mean, if you’ve ever been in an american factory, this is pretty much what 90% of them look like. No need for lame AI.
I work in a factory in the US, and the vast majority of my coworkers at least don’t appear overweight. Granted, a pretty big percentage of them are immigrants, so maybe that skews the numbers compared to the general population.
It’s not quite to this level, but yeah. Being a sedentary worker like this makes it easier to become overweight or obese. It’s not just America, though, I’ve seen it in Mexico too, and I have no reason to believe Canada would be any different.
Yes, capitalism is a miserable slave system. Nobody should be forced to waste their lives in some sweatshop regardless of nationality, weight, etc.
The current version sucks
But that’s because everyone needs to just get all their coworkers and make a new company that is a Union used to share all the profits
Another reason moving factory jobs here wouldn’t make any sense is that we don’t have universal healthcare so the employer has to pay the workers insurance costs.
You do realize that employers do pay a share of the healthcare cost in other countries too? They are just not given as many choices about it as in the US.
Lol yeah the choice here is be broke or die
Healthcare IIRC is free in China. I am not sure whether something changed or not but it was free of cost.
I’m sorry, do you genuinely think that free means we don’t pay for it? Taxes
In US you have to pay tax as well as pay extra for insurance. The insurance is not a full insurance as well. There is copay and a certain value below which insurance does not even start. Its a scam.
And the insurance can boot you off, or refuse to cover you if you’re too expensive.
So if you got cancer, and had to spend a million dollars to treat it, your insurance could just go “okay, your treatment is too expensive, we’re not covering that, you’ll have to pay for this yourself”.
It used to be worse. Many years ago, they could outright decide not to cover some medical conditions of yours, deeming them to be “pre-existing”. So if you had diabetes, sorry, that’s a pre-existing condition. We don’t cover those.
Nail in the coffin is that Americans spend more money on healthcare, per capita, than most other countries, without marked improvement in care/outcomes.
Yup. Majority of US lives in 3rd world conditions so the oligarchy can live like literal Pharaohs.
And do you not realize that the private insurance you pay for also pays for others insurance, if others don’t pay their insurance money your premiums go up to compensate for it
“‘Right-to-work’ means freedom and choice,” a Boston Globe op-ed explains. “As housing costs rise, some people are choosing to live on the road instead,” a Fox Business headline states. “If your insurance company isn’t doing right by you, you should have another, better choice,” reads Joe Biden’s campaign platform. We’re told repeatedly that “freedom of choice” is essential to a robust economy and human happiness. Economists, executives, politicians, and pundits insist that, the same way consumers shop for TVs, workers can choose their healthcare plan, parents can choose their kids’ school, and gig-economy workers can choose their own schedules and benefits.
While this language is superficially appealing, it’s also profoundly deceitful. The notion of “choice” as a gateway to freedom and a sign of societal success isn’t a neutral call for people to exercise some abstract civic power; it’s free-market capitalist ideology manufactured by libertarian and neoliberal think tanks and their mercenary economists and media messaging nodes. Its purpose: to convince people that they have a choice while obscuring the economic factors that ensure they really don’t: People can’t “choose” to keep their employer-provided insurance if they’re fired from their jobs or “choose” to enroll their kids in private school if they can’t afford the tuition.
In this episode, we examine the rise of “choice” rhetoric, how it cravenly appeals to our vanity, and how US media has uncritically adopted the framing–helping the right erode social services while atomizing us all into independent, self-interested collections of “choices.”
We are joined by Jessica Stites, executive editor of In These Times.
Yay! We get to choose how to pay a ridiculous price something that’s free in other countries! Yay, choice!
Found the video on nitter:
https://nitter.net/_MariaZakharova/status/1909980522471633058#m
YT video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qn5RamAEt3E
Your video is from a russian propagandist (I am assuming you didn’t mean to link her).
No, I really didn’t lol. It’s the first real one that came up on nitter and I never go there usually, so I wouldn’t know. Not surprised that’s who would come up first on X though. I appreciate you calling it out and informing me.
Hey! The workers in the cell phone factory aren’t that fat!
Are they trying to say it’s inherently miserable to work in a factory? So let Chinese workers do it instead of Americans?
It shouldn’t be miserable to work in a factory. The overhead pneumatic drill shown towards the end is just like a drill I used when I worked in a factory one summer in Chicago. It was perfectly safe, and the people I worked with were well compensated. (I was not, because I was only 16.)
I think people in China might have this attitude because to them, it usually is unsafe, miserable, and underpaid. There is no proper unionization in China, and no OSHA, so it’s always bad.
In 2019, when I visited a Chinese factory for work, the assembly line was tight enough that all the workers bumped elbows constantly. One person had a very loud compressed air tube to clean off components, and wore hearing protection and safety glasses. The person next to them had no hearing protection. Another person was testing blindingly bright LED shop lights, and wore sunglasses, but the people next to them had no protection. This would have been considered totally unsafe in the US.
I doubt much manufacturing will return to the US, but if it does, then even by 2025 standards it wouldn’t be as bad as in China. With OSHA gutted by the current Republican administration, it’s getting worse, but we still have more worker’s rights than workers in China.
The way capitalism works, the manufacturing won’t return until the conditions are so monstrously cost-saving as to be as bad as China’s.
The conditions will worsen until manufacturing returns.
I think people in China might have this attitude because to them, it usually is unsafe, miserable, and underpaid. There is no proper unionization in China, and no OSHA, so it’s always bad.
Do you really think Trump won’t be shipping union organizers off to CECOT? “Next they came for the trade unionists,” after all.
Yes, I think he will (except the ones that fall over to threats, and give in to 47’s demands).
But that’s not the point. It’s possible to have a safe factory staffed by happy, well-paid workers. If it were actually true that manufacturing would return to the US as a result of the tariffs, that manufacturing shouldn’t be considered an inherently bad thing.
And the thing is, when magats talk about manufacturing, that’s what they’re envisioning.
That said, sewing is generally understood to be shit work in manufacturing
Wait until Drumpf throws a fit over this, after he himself releasing his own version of the AI Gaza bearded ladies.
The black guy in the video just does not give a fuck.
I mean, what sort of a psychopath do you have to be to give a single fuck about working in manufacturing?
Yeah, he definitely has the right idea.
84 per cent
How much is that per dime?
Mocking MAGA is fine with me, but fucking China was once the leader in obesity and cancer growth. I am uncertain if they still lead.
Growth is doing a lot of work in that sentence. I’m not debating the actual numbers of each of these countries, but if 50% of your population is obese it’s practically impossible to double while if it’s 10% doubling isn’t that crazy.
The goal is to use AI and robotics to bring manufacturing back, they never promise jobs so much as building it here. The wealthy classes don’t need you anymore like a horse after the car was invented.
