Obama's War on Boeing

Tuesday's New York Times carried a front page story on the astonishing assault of President Obama and his appointees on Boeing's new manufacturing plant in South Carolina.

The reporter slants the coverage to help cover the egregious and unprecedented nature of the Obama effort to assist his union supporters in Washington State, and it underplays how many new jobs would be created by the opening of the plant in South Carolina, and not just in the Boeing production facility but down through the supply-and-support chain. As Senator Lamar Alexander said on yesterday's program, it looks like the president's policy is to export jobs abroad, not airplanes.

The mask slips a bit towards the end of the article and we glimpse the real agenda of Team Obama's war on Boeing:

The machinists’ union has hinted that it might drop the case if Boeing pledged to locate some future production in Washington State — perhaps the Air Force replacement tanker or the next-generation jet after the 787 Dreamliner or both.

So even though the NLRB's action is unprecedented and likely to be reversed as soon as it gets past the political appointees to a federal court, the president's appointees and their union clients are hoping that the costs of the delay and the litigation will force Boeing into a payoff of future jobs located in a union state, not where they are most productively placed and done. This is exactly the sort of technique that landed the American car business in the ditch, and while Boeing will do what is in its best economic interests, voters have to take note of the thuggish nature of the attempted use of government power to compel favors for favored interest groups.