This is a mistake for the history books:
Nov 20 (Reuters) – An advertisement placed in The Seattle Times on Wednesday by a group hoping to encourage Washington state to keep up its fight to secure the coveted work on the new Boeing 777 includes a notable miscue.
At the top of the full-page ad, under the all-caps text “The Future of Washington,” is pictured not a Boeing jet, but rather an A320 from archrival Airbus.
The ad, which prominently displays the logo of the Washington Aerospace Partnership, a coalition of business, labor and government groups championing the industry, urges state lawmakers to pass a large-scale roads-and-transit tax package that Boeing executives have said would make the state a more desirable venue for future projects.
The Washington Aerospace Partnership includes the cities of Auburn, Everett, Kent, Marysville, Redmond, and so on, as well as the ports of Seattle, Everett, and Port Angeles, and the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, which placed the ad.
The screwed up ad is a sideshow, but it’s a sharp reminder of our screwed up real-life situation: Washington state has agreed to give Boeing $8.7 billion in tax breaks—the biggest state tax break to a business in US history—to keep it here, but the machinists have voted down another part of the Boeing plan.
As Tim Egan summed up the pathetic (on the political level) and greedy (at the corporate level) state of affairs a few days ago in the NYT:
The events of the last few days show the utter bankruptcy of economic policy prescriptions offered by both political parties. You want tax breaks and deregulation — the Republican mantra? The $8.7 billion granted Boeing this week is the largest single state-tax giveaway in the nation’s history. It wasn’t enough. You want government training for schools and highly skilled workers — the Democratic alternative? There was plenty of that, to Boeing’s liking, in the package.
What Boeing wants is very simple: to pay the people who make its airplanes as little money as it can get away with. It needs to do this, we’re told, to stay competitive. It has all the leverage, because enough states — and countries — are willing to give it everything it asks for. Who wouldn’t want a gleaming factory stuffed with jet assemblers, a payroll guaranteed for a generation?
Boeing is on a roll, its stock at a record high despite the troubled rollout of its 787 Dreamliner, and the pay of its C.E.O. boosted 20 percent to a package totaling $27.5 million last year. It is not impelled, as the auto industry was five years ago, in the midst of bailouts and cutbacks. Boeing could afford to be generous, or at least not onerous. But it’s easier to play state against state, the race to the bottom.
Meanwhile, councilperson-elect Kshama Sawant is suggesting that Boeing workers “re-tool the machines to produce mass transit like buses” instead of “war machines.” Which does not seem like an auspicious start for the newly elected socialist’s uphill battle to make socialism seem sensible to the rest of the city—and the country.
