Sarah Palin And Boeing CEO Tell Government Who The Boss Is

What can a democracy like ours do when giant companies say, “Rules? We don’t need no stinkin’ rules! We don’t got to pay you no taxes!” and “We will just move out of your puny country if you try to tell us what to do.”

Government is beginning to enforce labor laws again, with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) filing a complaint against Boeing for retaliating against employees for legitimate union activities. In response Boeing’s CEO questions government’s “authority” to tell big businesses like Boeing what to do, saying companies like his can just move “overseas.” Sarah Palin echoes the complaint, saying businesses can just move to “more business-friendly countries.” These are direct challenges to the democracy we fought to build.

Boeing Threatens “Overseas Flight”

Boeing chairman, president and CEO Jim McNerney has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in which he challenges the “authority” of our democracy to regulate giant multinational corporations.

“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.”

McNerney essentialy confirms that it was union activity that led Boeing to decide to open a plant in anti-union South Carolina,

“Among the considerations we sought were a long-term “no-strike clause” that would ensure production stability for our customers, and a wage and benefit growth trajectory that would help in our cost battle against Airbus and other state-sponsored competitors. … Union leaders couldn’t meet expectations on our key issues, and we couldn’t accept their demands that we remain neutral in all union-organizing campaigns…”

Like the movie stereotype, poking his finger in your chest, “You got a problem with that?”

McNerney goes on to call the NLRB enforcement “brazen regulatory activism” that “could accelerate the overseas flight of good, middle-class American jobs.”

There it is, the threat, basically, “We will just move out of your puny country if you try to tell us what to do, and we will take your jobs with us.”

Boots On Necks

Sarah Palin, in her Facebook post, Removing the Boot from the Throat of American Businesses, blasts President Obama’s “appointees at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) who have their boots on The Boeing Company’s neck.”

Palin explains that business is the boss now, not We-the-People democracy, writing,

Does the President realize the real concern here is not that businesses will choose to locate in one state over another? It’s that businesses will choose to locate in other countries because thanks to the Obama administration’s job killing policies and over-reaching regulatory boards the business climate in the United States is growing toxic.

Basically, she says government ought to just get out of the way of the plutocrats, because big, multinational businesses have so much power over democracy that,

… eventually every state will suffer when businesses declare “enough is enough” with these tactics and decide to relocate in more business-friendly countries.

Once again, the threat: Mess with us and we will leave and take your jobs with us.

Whose Boot Is On Whose Neck?

To be clear, Palin does not mean this as a call to strengthen democracy and get these companies and their threats under control. She is not complaining that these companies do not want to follow our rules and pay decent wages, offer benefits, protect worker safety and protect the environment. She is saying the United States should change and become more “business-friendly” — like the non-democracies that suppress labor rights, pay low wages, and lock you up if you complain.

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