Who’s Out of Touch?

By William L. Garvin

A most curious moment occurred when Democrats were grilling oil company executives with their petulant faux outrage. Virginia Democrat Jay Rockefeller was browbeating Chevron Corporation CEO John Watson during a hearing of the Senate Finance Committee. Rockefeller interrupted Watson with the sarcastic comment: "Lovely statement, but do you understand how out of touch that is?" What is out of touch is Rockefeller spending his time chastising an industry that pays millions of dollars in taxes each day while ignoring administration sycophants (such as General Electric) which pay NOTHING in taxes!

Naturally Senator Rockefeller skipped over some other rather interesting items relevant to the discussion. While oil companies make around seven to nine cents per gallon of gasoline sold, government taxes are around forty-eight cents per gallon. Who is really raking in the windfall profits? Keep in mind that government assumes none of the risk, invests no capital, labor or time. It simply sits back and confiscates money off the top. By the way, Jay, how did you get your multimillions? That’s right, you did it the old fashioned way—you inherited it. Granddaddy John D. Rockefeller was one of the richest men in America. How did he make his millions? He was an oil magnate and the first president of the Standard Oil Company, that’s how, you phony.

Headlines today trumpet the President’s move to “speed up oil production” and backing “new Alaska drilling.” That is just comical. After two plus years of assaulting and demonizing the oil industry, his tiny, timid baby steps are being touted as some bold initiative. So why don’t you just admit that the Republicans were right when they said “drill, baby, drill!”? It will be months before we will even get back to the status quo that existed BEFORE you began your systematic destruction of fossil fuel production. If you had spent one-tenth the money on recapturing emissions that you spent subsidizing the solar and wind industries, we would all be ahead of the game.

Rockefeller’s hypocritical histrionics may be hilarious but there are sinister machinations in Washington. The President made two recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board. One was Lafe Solomon, the NLRB acting general counsel, and the other was Craig Becker. Curiously, Becker was previously rejected by the Democrat Senate in 2010. They have currently set their sights on Boeing and are attempting to infiltrate/subjugate the airplane industry just as they did the automotive industry.

Boeing wanted to open a new plant to meet the growing demand for the 787 Dreamliner. After months of negotiations with the machinists union, Boeing was unable to get an agreement that there would be no strikes for ten years. There have been five stoppages in the Puget Sound plant and the last one cost the company $1.8 billion dollars. So Boeing decided to open its two-billion dollar, 3,800 employee plant in South Carolina, one of 34 states in which Boeing has a presence. It is scheduled to come on line this summer. It is now seventeen months since Boeing made its decision but the NLRB is just now investigating union concerns. Apparently, the machinists who live (and are still working in Washington) had their feelings hurt and lodged a complaint with the NLRB. They think that Boeing moved their new plant to South Carolina in retaliation for their strikes. It would seem apparent that it was because of their strikes! With orders for eight hundred 787’s and production way behind schedule, a stable work force would be paramount to any sound business decision. Washington’s hardly been left out in the cold. Nobody has lost a job. In fact, Boeing has added 2,000 jobs to the Washington line since 2009.

If the NLRB expects Boeing to abandon its South Carolina investment and disenfranchise the newly employed South Carolina workforce, that bodes ill for American companies. It also means that the 22 “right to work” states will never get a new company plant if that company has a union workforce in another state. Since unions appear to own this administration, that could certainly happen. If it does, the next company move will be to another country…not another state!