I am surprised President Obama showed his face at Boeing Corporation last Friday in Washington state to cheering union crowds to praise Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner, declaring eloquently: “I am here to sell stuff.”
As the Times account reported:
“the White House also carefully calibrated the optics of the trip, choosing to visit a unionized Boeing plant in Washington State just a few months after the NLRB dropped a lawsuit against Boeing over complaints it built a nonunion plant in South Carolina to retaliate against the union in Washington State for strikes.”
Indeed, the Obama administration’s NLRB held Boeing’s multi-billion Boeing 787 hostage by ruling it could not build an extra production facility for the Dreamliner in right-to-work South Carolina (after Boeing had already completed construction of its new plant there). The Obama administration blackmailed Boeing just as it was to begin mass production of its 787 aircraft – a project already four years behind schedule and facing stiff competition from Europe’s Airbus 380.
The Obama administration was telling the nation’s premier manufacturing exporter where it must do business or else.
Had Boeing not caved to its Washington State unions on a new contract, the Dreamliner would have still be in limbo today.
And Obama, the President who threatened to ruin the project on which Boeing’s fate depends, stood before cheering crowds in Washington state to praise Boeing and its new 787, as "the perfect example of American ingenuity."
What nerve! What chutzpah! I imagine the Republicans will wish to revisit this mugging on behalf of organized labor during the election campaign.
I'm surprised
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