Why does Boeing hate America? That’s not the idiotic title, but it might as well be.
[Via Katie Wickswat]
25 thoughts on “A Piece Breathtaking In Its Illogic”
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Why does Boeing hate America? That’s not the idiotic title, but it might as well be.
[Via Katie Wickswat]
Comments are closed.
That’s bull, anyway. Saturn (in Tennessee) was, for a time, a major improvement over GM’s normal quality. Naturally, that had to be stopped, as it painted a different picture of what unions did for manufacturing.
Holy cow, the subtitle is completely offensive.
Leland,
Yes, and it’s not true, either. Not to mention that treating the entire South as exactly the same strikes me as blind prejudice.
I’m fine with unions, but when they get special treatment by the state, then it becomes something very sinister indeed.
Isn’t the Delta IV built in the south by Boeing already?
Apparently this fellow is the Gloria Allred of labor lawyers: so offensive and intellectually bankrupt as to go all the way through contemptible and emerge on the other side, where his extremity of corruption becomes fascinating. It’s hard to see why else the WSJ would publish his ravings.
I mean, you got to love the size and scope of his delusions, and the number of people he’s willing to offend: there’s Boeing of course. I’m so much smarter than you fools, I know how to run an airplane business WAY better than you do. That kind of clueless arrogance is just par for the course among lawyers. But then he manages to insult every Southern worker:
“There are reasons workers in the North get $28 an hour while down in the South they get $14 or even $10. Adam Smith could explain it: “productivity,” “skill level,” “quality.”
Here that, Texans, Tenneseans, Georgians, Carolinians? Your wages aren’t lower because the cost of living is lower, or the cost of transport, or the price of land. Your wages are lower because you’re all morons, every one of you. Worthless ham-handed buffoons who can never be taught how to put an airplane together.
Then there’s all the engineers and managers who’ve ever worked at Boeing, and every commercial customer who ever bought a plane from them:
“Boeing is not a product of the free market—it’s an extension of the U.S. government. Over the years, our taxpayers have paid to create a Boeing work force with exceptionally high skills.”
Got that, idiots? Your engineering work on the 747 — means nuthin’. You there, salesman? Sold 10 planes to UAL or American in one week? Pfft, peanuts. Listen, it was the government — and us labor laywers! — who created this mighty engine of innovation and construction. Don’t ask me exactly how, but we surely did, because the idea that somebody other than our most excellent selves, myself and my fellow lawyers and regulators, could have the slighest bit to offer the world is outside my comprehension.
This fellow is an illustration of the fact that not all antisocials are in prison, and not all those who are fully out of touch with reality are in asylums. He’s a living counterexample of the philosophical proposition that a solipsist can’t earn a living. He’s one of the 21st Century Grand Challenges to psychiatric pharmaceutical research: come up with a drug to treat this if you can, fellows.
The comments at the WSJ are hilarious, and all the readers are having a field day shredding this steaming pile of red meat.
To sum up Carl, the better part of Thomas Geoghegan ran down his Mother’s leg.
Let’s not sugar coat it. This bastard is a contemptable, arrogant prick.
One can only hope that was a beautiful troll.
The piece is nonsensical even taking its premises without debate.
“Boeing is not a product of the free market—it’s an extension of the U.S. government. Over the years, our taxpayers have paid to create a Boeing work force with exceptionally high skills.”
In other words, if you take the King’s Shilling, the King owns you. Indentured involuntary servitude, just updated for a post-modern Progressive Amerikkka.
This dudes’ rant can be debunked in three words: Subaru of America. A perfect example of a company that shows how it benefits the workers more to not get the unions involved. Subura of America has endured 3 major recessions with: zero layoffs, zero pay cuts, and zero strikes. They offer premium free healthcare and even a free degree program through Purdue University. Plus they tout all the green stuff with their zero landfill production processes and recycling/salvaging technics. And lest we not forget that their lineage as a company is owed to their success in building aviation airframes and powerplants.
“Section 7 of the Wagner Act, passed in 1935, states that all workers can engage in concerted activities without reprisal.”
Now, I’ll admit that I am no legal scholar, I don’t even play one on TV.
But this section meant the strikers / union members could not be harassed, nor fired, nor could the companies close schools or company stores during a strike.
It did NOT mean the company couldn’t move!!
This guy is doing us a favor by putting such stupidity on display for all to see.
Der, he probably thinks Section 7 of the Wagner Act forbids the company from going out of business, too. He’d read the first half of “Atlas Shrugged” and say “So? What’s the problem?”
I can’t believe the WSJ would publish a POS opinion piece like this.
Carl P,
I started to just about the same thing about Atlas Shrugged / Going out of business. I even started to ask if he had read it, but sided against Dagny, Galt, et al.
It seems very likely that would be his take.
Bill M,
I think it was an offering to those who know better. Like the majority of the commenters over there.
‘..here you are daily readers, have some FUN…”
hmm.. ya know it’s no fun making subtle Atlas Shrugged references if you’re just gunna go name the freakin’ book.
As much as I dislike all sentences that begin with “you can’t fire someone for..” I really do think there’s a gradient where one end is seeking predictable fair dealing and the other end is seeking entitlements.
Someone who complains about being fired for the color of their hair or worse has a case. Someone who expects to keep getting paid while they refuse to work does not.
In this case, I strongly doubt Boeing wants to move an entire factory because there’s too many red haired people in the surrounding suburbs.
“Someone who expects to keep getting paid while they refuse to work does not.”
Or, you could just say it this way,
“Someone who expects to keep getting paid while they refuse to work, is a (enter one of the following, per situation)”
(government employee)
(SEIU member)
(liberal)
(Obama Supporter)
(idiot)
.
.
(personally, the last one is all encompassing of the other groups)
Someone who complains about being fired for the color of their hair or worse has a case
Obviously you’ve never heard of right to work states.
Because right-to-work states have absolutely no laws protecting employees. Bosses in those states can kill and eat their employees and the state is perfectly okay with that.
Because right-to-work states have absolutely no laws protecting employees. Bosses in those states can kill and eat their employees and the state is perfectly okay with that.
Indeed, here in Texas, if we don’t like you (e.g. you’re from Washington state and try to out do us in quality), we just take you out back, plink you with our six shooters, have the horses drag the body to the spit, and then roast your remains to be fed to the cattle later. Recycling the meat that way keeps the costs down, but it makes the cattle a bit more stringy, less marbled than the pure corn fed.
It’s probably some emanation of a penumbra that allows “reprisal” to take on these new, broader meanings as we march towards the glorious future of socialism in which politicians make all decision in their, oops, society’s interests.
I lived in Washington for a while. Wasn’t able to get work in my chosen and trained for field because of compulsory party, er, union membership.
“This dudes’ rant can be debunked in three words: Subaru of America.”
“Indeed, here in Texas, if we don’t like you (e.g. you’re from Washington state and try to out do us in quality), we just take you out back, plink you with our six shooters, have the horses drag the body to the spit, and then roast your remains to be fed to the cattle later. ”
“I lived in Washington for a while. Wasn’t able to get work in my chosen and trained for field because of compulsory party, er, union membership.”
Yes, there are even (or perhaps especially) advantages to the workers of going non-union — not having to pay high rates of union dues, not being represented by a politically active organization that does not represent your personal political view, not being layed off because your union is dragging down your workplace, being able to get a job if you are perhaps young, inexperienced, and not politically connected, having your individual merit and work ethic be better recognized, and so on.
Yes, free labor markets can offer advantages to the workers and not only the people benefiting from the labor of those workers (management, stockholders, customers, tax payers).
On the other hand, the current enthusiasm for the roll-back of unions seems to be purely expressed in terms of them-vs-us these days, the whining-entitled-overpaid-overbenefited public sector worker, whether they happen to be in a union or not vs the taxpayer and the rest of everybody. It is all about what we are going to “do to” these spoiled brats, be it wage or benefit reductions, elimination of collective bargaining in order to save the rest of us from runious public debt.
And yes, there are those in the union leadership who are those spoiled brats — the union guys laying in to Andrew Cuomo in New York for wanting to freeze pay. Heck, we have been dealing with frozen pay for years now and are getting a pay cut, and someone is complaining about a pay freeze? Some union guy thinks that Governor Cuomo is giving his people the same hard deal as a Walker/Kasich/Daniels/Christie?
But getting back to the topic at hand, the enthusiasm and cheering in the Right Blogosphere has almost exclusively focused on some set of workers being a privileged class and how social justice will be achieved by rolling back those advantages. Of course it is often expressed more directly than that. After years of workers wondering why they are bothering with unions (the Subaru Plant example), we in the Right Blogosphere are practically writing the talking points as to why maybe why workers would want to hang on to their unions after all.
I guess people have their opinions and strong feelings about unions or dislike of unions, and I am not having any influence on people. What I am criticizing is not the aim, defeating WW-II Germany in an example I used on another thread, bringing about free labor markets, but in the means, Operation Market-Garden on the one hand, the Scott Walker Agenda on the other hand.
People ask me, Paul, if we don’t roll back unions now, when are we going to do it? If we don’t go for a quick end to WW-II by a bold paratrooper assault on the Holland bridges giving the heavy forces an express route to the German border, when are we ever going to win WW-II? The Direct Approach of Market-Garden was an epic fail; the outcome of the 2012 elections aren’t foreordained to success.
Quoting from British military strategist B. H. Liddell Hart from the Wikipedia page:
“In strategy the longest way round is often the shortest way there; a direct approach to the object exhausts the attacker and hardens the resistance by compression, whereas an indirect approach loosens the defender’s hold by upsetting his balance.”
That is what I am trying to tell people. A direct approach hardens the resistance by compression. Don’t you see that in football on “1st-down and goal” plays? The touchdown is no guarantee because the offense lacks depth of maneuver.
However existential and necessary it is to prevail over the public sector unions, I am trying to tell you that the Walker/Daniels/Kasich/Christie approach is a Direct Approach. Historically, such fails more often than it succeeds.
+5 Funny, McG & L. Keyboard was genuinely at risk from coffee.
Paul Milenkovic,
That’s why I believe in a real right to collective bargaining analogous to our other rights. Everyone has the right to join the union of their choice or none at all. If unions were competing for workers instead of running a monopoly I think we would all be better off. Neither my employer nor my government can tell me which doctor I should see or which lawyer I should hire. The same should be true for my labor representation.
This is an indirect approach. Libertarians, businesses and union officials should be able to succeed under than rubric I have just proposed. My employer is not allowed to fire me because I join a union and the union is not allowed to fire me if I don’t.
Yours,
Tom