Boeing just won a hard fought $35 billion dollar Department of Defense contract.
In a surprise twist in a long-running saga, the Air Force on Thursday awarded a $35 billion contract for aerial fueling tankers to Boeing rather than to a European company that builds Airbus planes.
This was a huge deal in 2008, when the Pentagon choose EADS, for Airbus is not an American company, and most of the work, and thus jobs would be offshore. That's your taxpayer dollars going offshore, not hiring American workers, not circulating back through the U.S. economy.
Pentagon officials said decision was based solely on price. Boeing’s bid was more than 1 percent below that of its rival, the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company, the officials said. If the bids had been within one percent, the Air Force would have weighed 92 additional requirements for the plane as a tiebreaker, and some of those were widely thought to favor the larger EADS plane.
This contract eventually will be worth $100 billion dollars and a huge number of good paying jobs, 50,000 directly and over 100,000, eventually, will be in the state of Washington.
That said, now is the time to put pressure on Boeing to hire Americans. They just got a multi-billion dollar, multi-year slip lesson that labor arbitraging your labor force and offshore outsourcing will actually cost you more. Boeing wipe that egg off your face, think global, act local, bring your supply chain back state-side and place yer bets on he #1 aircraft manufacturer in the world.
These are much needed jobs and keeping those funds inside the United States helps the U.S. economy and will help Boeing compete against Airbus in other areas in the aviation manufacturing industry.
The contract could be the largest awarded for many years as military budgets tighten, and it could eventually reach $100 billion. The tankers are likely flying gas stations, and they transfer fuel in mid-flight to fighters, bombers and cargo planes.
Richard L. Aboulafia, an aviation analyst at the Teal Group in Fairfax, Va., said the victory could help Boeing in its battle with Airbus in the much larger market for passenger jets and freighters.
Sad You Have to Say This
Everything you point out is true of course.
Why hasn't Boeing volunteered to do this? Are they hoping that if they stay silent for a few months and they can quietly send many of these jobs overseas?
Considering what we let companies do with barely a protest or whimper, they might be able to do that. And that's even sadder. The seemingly endless passivity of the American worker continues to astonish me.
The American worker
The American worker (although probably not the ILWU, at least not the union staffers) supports protectionism. But do we hear anything about that in Congress or in corporate media? No, we only hear that any such thing would be a disaster!
NAFTA and the rest were not enacted by Congress with the support of the people.
Conclusion? Working people of America are not so much passive in nature as silenced and unrepresented, by circumstance.
Spot on...deaf ears
I'm writing from the PNW where all the politicos were lining up to take credit for the Boeing contract and honk about American Jobs and so on. Meanwhile those of us who know how the world works were sitting there going, "We'll just see how many of those jobs stay in the US."
The union jobs stand of chance of staying locally rooted, though of course those workers will be shoved at gunpoint into concessions that erode their positions and standard of living as well. And they will be vilified, hated, and run down, just as is happening to unionized public workers in Wisconsin, the supposed hotbed of La Follette (Republican!) progressivism (which is in fact more like a hotbed of Hate Your Neighbor First).
I too have to wonder why there is so little push back. I grew up in the Rust Belt, where I watched relatively progressive Republicans like my father take until the '70s to see the writing on the wall where their jobs and families and communities were on the line, because their employers were managing everything for profit skimming for a global plutocracy. My father and his cohort organized and finally got a union in. Then he died a couple years later of asbestos. If it hadn't been for the union, my mother would have starved in that first two difficult years. The people who owned his industry destroyed it, rather than share the profits with the workers. So now Korea and China own global shipbuilding, and the US is sitting here hoping for greeter jobs at Wal-Mart.
It seems that people just simply worship the rich, as Reagan taught them to. And hate themselves, as advertising schooled them.
Asbestos and Seattle
Unionists finally came to understand that the Green Critique had to be a part of their political stand and that 'the environmentalists' were not their enemy, when they all marched together in Seattle in late 1999 (protest at WTO Ministerial Conference). The protesters, including some members of Congress, were dispersed by pepper spray and other police crowd-control and protest-control methods.
But how was this covered by corporate media? And how is it remembered, if at all?
Asbestos profiteering and the global neo-mercantilist system ... any connection?
That was then, and this is now.
Then and now ... any connection?
Damned If You Do Damned If You Don't
(Damned If You Do Damned If You Don't), is all I have to say when it comes to people complaining about this and about that in life. There is no Utopia on Earth and there will never be an Utopia so shut the Hell up and stop your compaining. If you was given a golden spoon, you would most likely complain that someone else got a Platinum Spoon. You unthankful humans will never be happy no matter what you are given because you're too damn greedy for your ownselves.
LOL
LOL, Robert (unverified)!