Obama Regime Moves to Kill Boeing Plant in South Carolina

Anyone who doubts that Atlas Shrugged is not so much fiction as an alarmingly accurate prediction of where left-wing authoritarianism would take America needs to read the plea for sanity from Boeing President and CEO Jim McNerney in today’s Wall Street Journal:

Deep into the recent recession, Boeing decided to invest more than $1 billion in a new factory in South Carolina. Surging global demand for our innovative, new 787 Dreamliner exceeded what we could build on one production line and we needed to open another.

This was good news for Boeing and for the economy. The new jetliner assembly plant would be the first one built in the U.S. in 40 years. It would create new American jobs at a time when most employers are hunkered down. It would expand the domestic footprint of the nation’s leading exporter and make it more competitive against emerging plane makers from China, Russia and elsewhere. And it would bring hope to a state burdened by double-digit unemployment — with the construction phase alone estimated to create more than 9,000 total jobs.

Eighteen months later, a North Charleston swamp has been transformed into a state-of-the-art, green-energy powered, 1.2 million square-foot airplane assembly plant. One thousand new workers are hired and being trained to start building planes in July.

Naturally this sort of outrage against The People will not be permitted under Obamunism.

[T]he National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) believes it was a mistake and that our actions were unlawful. It claims we improperly transferred existing work, and that our decision reflected “animus” and constituted “retaliation” against union-represented employees in Washington state. Its remedy: Reverse course, Boeing, and build the assembly line where we tell you to build it.

The NLRB is wrong and has far overreached its authority. Its action is a fundamental assault on the capitalist principles that have sustained America’s competitiveness since it became the world’s largest economy nearly 140 years ago. We’ve made a rational, legal business decision about the allocation of our capital and the placement of new work within the U.S. We’re confident the federal courts will reject the claim, but only after a significant and unnecessary expense to taxpayers.

I wouldn’t be so confident. True, Boeing’s union contracts expressly permit the company to locate new work at its discretion. True, no existing work is being transferred to South Carolina. True, in a free country it would be absolutely no business of federal bureauweenies where Boeing builds its factories.

But it’s also true the courts are falling increasingly under the control of the same authoritarian leftists who issue demented dictates from the White House on behalf of the Democrat Party’s union financiers. South Carolina is loathed by the left as a right to work state populated by racist redneck yahoos, as our liberal overlords characterize conservatives.

The implications go far beyond Obama killing thousands more jobs in South Carolina:

The world the NLRB wants to create with its complaint would effectively prevent all companies from placing new plants in right-to-work states if they have existing plants in unionized states.

The embers of liberty have not yet been completely extinguished in right to work states, so naturally Comrade Obama wants to punish them. But as with all government interventions, there will be unintended consequences:

[F]orward-thinking CEOs also would be reluctant to place new plants in unionized states — lest they be forever restricted from placing future plants elsewhere across the country.

The solution: build the plants overseas, where you don’t have unions and the malevolent obscenity calling itself the federal government to deal with.

There’s a reason people are dirt poor in crappy South American dictatorships. It isn’t possible to do business in a country run by a Marxist thug like Evo Morales or Hugo Chavez — or Barack Hussein Obama.

This isn’t a problem to the government, which learned from FDR that the higher it keeps unemployment, the more of our freedom it can get away with snuffing out.

obama-unemployment.jpg
High unemployment is part of the plan. Via Common Cents.

On a tip from Varla. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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