When reading about the other states having special sessions to try to lure Boeing production, it’s really disheartening. Not that Boeing is dumb enough to take those offers. They may well, and have to start from scratch or near from scratch again with a workforce who their goal is to have be shittier (if you get what you pay for).
No, what I’m concerned about is that there are a lot of states (including Washington, obvs) that will have a sunk cost of putting on a special session, and only one of them will have a gain. I know they won’t, but Boeing might consider compensating the states that it doesn’t pick as an irenic gesture: Sorry you wasted millions of dollars trying to give us billions of dollars.
There is a much larger issue here than Boeing. All over the country, state and local governments fall over themselves trying to lure industries and businesses with what amount to taxpayer-funded bribes; and business execs, of course, make the most of it and have gotten adept at playing various communities off each other to up their “take.” It’s a shady business that’s been going on for decades and ought to stop, but no one knows how to stop it, any more than we can stop the selling out of our democracy to K Street lobbyists and big corporations. I guess at some point voters have to rise up and revolt against the system by throwing its legislative practitioners out of office.
Boeing is engaging in crony capitalism.
Here are a couple of especially odious examples of how this bribery competition works.
1. In Wisconsin, GOP Gov. Scott Walker extracted approximately $130 million of givebacks from public workers in the name of balancing the state budget, then turned right around and handed out approximately $130 million of new tax breaks to already-wealthy business orders in the hope of poaching already-existing businesses and jobs from the neighboring state of Illinois.
2. Cabela’s, the outdoor retailer whose principal owners are the billionaire Cabela brothers, builds stores costing $25 to $50 million in mid-sized communities willing to give them the land, improvements, and buildings for free. In return, the community gets several hundred minimum-wage retail jobs, many of which are part-time. See, e.g., this example of a $59 million Cabela’s store in Pennsylvania that cost taxpayers an average of $45,000 per full-time or part-time minimum-wage job.
http://www.thehighroad.org/arc.....p&
Cabela’s is merely one of the most adroit corporate practitioners of this scam. Taxpayers are the usual victims; in Wisconsin, public workers became direct victims, partly due to the extremely anti-worker attitude of that state’s Republican governor. But it goes on everywhere in the U.S., because communities feel they have no choice but to compete in this tawdry, exploitive game.
@2 I don’t think you know what the term means. Crony capitalism is an equally perfidious, but altogether different, animal.
Meanwhile, elswhere in the realm of “corporate socialism”, it was revealed today that the Mariners are going to pay some guy nearly a quarter of a billion dollars to play baseball.
@5 Hey, what’s the beef? Some hedge fund managers make that in 3 months — and pay the same tax rate as a school janitor. You should be used to this kind of shit by now — living in a country where a few people make zillions and everyone else is expected to live on $15,000 a year.
Boeing moves the 777X to another state. DUMMOCRETINS in the WA Legisture will worry where they will have the financial base to make all their $$$ handouts work!
Boeing moves the 777X to another state…
And who builds the the planes? Wallmart greeters?