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**JANUARY 11, 2024**

On the Prospect website

Unmasking the Local TV Station Monopolies

Deregulation has rendered station ownership caps meaningless. But a
federal antitrust case and a new FCC majority offer one last chance to
unwind broadcast consolidation. BY AUSTIN AHLMAN

The Fight for $15 Can Take a Bow

Workers are celebrating minimum-wage increases around the country, but
the new frontier is already creeping toward $20. BY GABRIELLE GURLEY

Fast-Growing 'Carbon-Neutral' Energy Company Ramps Up Oil and Gas
Production

Environmentalists question the sustainability commitments made by
Denver-based Civitas Resources. BY JENNIFER OLDHAM

Meyerson on TAP

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**** How About Those Factories?!

Americans, it turns out, want to revive domestic manufacturing.
Advantage, Biden.

Like a number of other commentators, I've argued that President Biden
needs to do a lot more than tout his economic achievements, considerable
though they've been, if he's going to defeat Donald Trump and
preserve American democracy come November.

That said, polling

released today by American Compass, an organization that's become the
pro-union unicorn in the Republicans' union-hating herd, makes the
case, however unintentionally, that there's at least one Biden
economic achievement that he should shout from the housetops: the
revival of American manufacturing.

The poll, conducted by YouGov, found that the support that Wall Street
and every president, both Republican and Democratic, from Reagan through
Obama, gave to actually existing globalization has virtually no support
among actually existing people. Only 3 percent of poll respondents
agreed that "the goal should be producing things where it can be done at
the lowest cost," which has long been a tenet of economic orthodoxy, and
which was indeed the goal of such trade accords as NAFTA and permanent
normal trade relations with China. Only 2 percent agreed that government
should be guided by the belief that "manufacturing was the old economy;
we need new economy jobs," which was a refrain of post-New Deal
Democrats dating back at least to Gary Hart.

The public's rejection of offshoring our industrial base was doubtless
intensified by the supply chain vulnerabilities exposed by the COVID
pandemic. But the poll also showed widespread awareness that whole
regions of our country have been left behind in the shift to a
postindustrial economy, and that the government should prioritize their
economic revival. Asked whether the government should help Americans in
those regions move to areas with greater economic opportunity (as Trump
once suggested for the residents of upstate New York) or help those
regions recover, 70 percent support the latter. Overwhelmingly,
respondents said that creating a stronger domestic manufacturing sector
was necessary, for reasons of national security, the viability of the
nation's economy, for the good jobs it would (presumably) create, or
some or all of the above.

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Which brings us back to Biden and Trump. Both talk the talk about
reshoring industry and revitalizing the sector, but only Biden has
walked the walk. By virtue of the tax credits for factories that will
build electric vehicles and other components of a green economy, credits
created by the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden has resurrected the
long-moribund factory-construction industry, spending on which increased
by 73 percent in 2023 over the previous year. Those factories are going
up, moreover, in the very regions that private capital had long
abandoned, the very regions that Americans, by the evidence of this and
other polls, want the government to revive.

Trump, of course, has consistently opposed the Inflation Reduction Act
and vowed to hasten its repeal if elected. To be sure, factories take
time to come online, but it takes no creative genius to envision Biden
campaign ads showing factories under construction, featuring the workers
building them, and contrasting those images with the vacant lots that
are Trump's industrial legacy and his vows to curtail the only upsurge
in American industrial capacity in many decades.

Biden will need to campaign on a lot more than that, of course, but
while there are very real limits on his ability to run on Bidenomics,
this contrast is so visible, so tangible, that it surely merits some
audible horn-tooting.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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