Sex workers as an economic development model.

The Boeing deal is fading from the headlines. The politicos all issued press releases congratulating themselves for being part of the deal-making. Now's the time when bloggers- and the old media- need to start really watching how the deal plays out in reality.


Palmetto Scoop is a good example of how the SC ruling class, like the Bourbons of France, remember everything, but learn nothing.


Boy Fogle's take on the Boeing deal is typical. He treats it like a football game. We won! Yeah! Us! The underdogs!:

Boeing Wednesday sternly rebuked its home state of Washington when the company chose to locate its new Dreamliner 787 facility 3000 miles away in South Carolina.

That monumental move cost the state up to 12,000 jobs, millions of dollars, and whole lot of pride.

And like a scorned lover, the good folks of Washington let their bitterness with Boeing be known.

On Thursday, U.S. Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash., above) gave Boeing, the world’s largest aircraft manufacturer to task, a piece of her mind.

Murray says Boeing is overlooking its well-trained workers in its decision to built its next airplane assembly line in South Carolina. [...]

Murray calls that decision shortsighted and says it overlooks generations of experience building airplanes in the region around Seattle. [AP]

Shortsighted? How about “practical”?

Boeing ditched Washington because they refused to be held hostage by the machinists union, with which the company tried for months to work out a no-strike deal. The new Boeing plant in North Charleston doesn’t have a union. Who is the shortsighted one there?

But Seattle Times columnist Jon Talton put Murray’s whining to shame.

“This is a place of huge income, class and racial disparity,” Talton wrote in a 738 word rant against South Carolina. “More to the point, Boeing is not going to the wealthy, storied city on the harbor. It’s going to cheap land in the homely exurbs.”

Talton also noted that South Carolina has hurricanes and a poor standard of living. Bitter much?

Well… guess what Washingtonians? Boeing ditched your state for a place that wasn’t run by unions. Sorry, but that’s the way it is. And now it’s time to accept that fact and move on.

Sigh...where to begin....?

As Waldo's noted before, Boy Fogle is a very bright young man who settles for intellectual laziness and pandering for the interests of his paymasters' clients. If he worked harder and showed some independence of thought, he could legitimately reclaim his abandoned claim to be transforming SC politics.

So let's start the fisk.

Senator Patty Murray's comments Fogle dismisses as whining. But they are literally true. Boeing has been building airplanes around Seattle since 1916. They are as Seattle as salmon and Eddie Bauer. Seattle has stuck with Boeing through some pretty tough times, like the 1970s crash that led to this billboard:

You dance with the one that brung ya, and while Boeing has always been insistent that Washington give it carte blanche for decades- and Washington's pretty much done so, Boeing has shown a decreasing gratitude for the endless tax concessions and generous unemployment comp that allows them to dump tens of thousands of workers in a year when their bean counters screw up- like the corporate HQ shift to Chicago, and like giving a big chunk of the Dreamliner fabrication to the North Charleston Vought plant that screwed it up so badly the project is now two years behind. The only way Boeing could whip it into shape was to buy out Vought and take over the plant directly.

You haven't seen that sort of slackness at the Everett Dreamliner plant.

So Senator Murray is right. Boeing has a huge labor pool developed over decades in Everett, Seattle, and Renton. They already know how to do this stuff. North Charleston has a plant that wasn't up to the task but was so desperate to stay at it they decertified themselves as union members.Now they'll get to do the same job at $14 an hour that fellow Boeing employees on the Everett Dreamliner line get paid $26 an hour for.

Will they be telling themselves over their coffee breaks how glad they are they aren't those union hacks who get paid twice the coin for the same tasks because it's a sign of SC's ideological soundness?

Fogle's other pinata is Seattle Times columnist Jon Talton, who could give Fogle some needed schooling on how to be a good journalist. Talton's not the parochial Northwest whiner Fogle makes him out. He's a former SC bureau head for The Charlotte Observer who married a South Carolina native.  Most of Talton's column is about what Washington needs to learn from losing the second production line, and, in the process, he underlines what SC politicos overlook in their smugness:

--The more I think about it and hear from sources, the more I think there was nothing Washington could have done to prevent it. Boeing is joining a race to the bottom for wages and docile workers. This has profound implications for a state such as Washington, which built a quality economy that included a strong, well-paid middle class. It doesn't mean we'll turn into Michigan. It does mean we're in a battle royal with a world that has an oversupply of workers. The world is not flat. It's spiky, as Richard Florida says, with a wide dispersal of winners and losers.

--In such a world, South Carolina has many worries. It's used the "Southern strategy" to throw massive incentives to lure Boeing, and before that, BMW. But overall, the strategy hasn't lifted most living standards there; the state continues to underperform most others. World competition has decimated its textile and apparel backbone. The Southern strategy can be used against us again, nevertheless. But in the race to the bottom, South Carolina should worry about places like El Salvador. Boeing has no loyalty.

--I covered the auto industry in the 1980s and 1990s, and there are parallels. The biggest one is continued mismanagement by top executives with no accountability to shareholders. Detroit was taken over by bean counters and marketers. Likewise, Boeing has altered the traditional paramountcy of engineering and technical innovation. The prime culprit in both cases was management, not the unions.

Indeed. In the Upstate, it's well known that BMW employs relatively few locals permanently. They hire a lot on a contract basis with promises that after a certain-always receding dates- you'll be permanent. Their contractors are subject to endless demands to exceed their contract terms until there is no profit left to be made.  But so much face would be lost if BMW suddenly said, "Mumbai looks good", everyone looks the other way.

Or, for another example, once Roger Milliken's dead, how long will corporate headquarters stay in Sparatanburg, underwriting the SC GOP?

Waldo cited Talton at length over a year ago when the heads of the legislature unveiled their nitwit SC Knowledge Sector Council that disappeared without a trace in no time flat. Talton understands we're in a worldwide competititon not just to get jobs, but to keep them, and that being willing to whore yourself out cheaper than another state only works as long as you put out and someone younger and cheaper doesn't start working your corner. As Talton notes, SC bet the farm on textiles. Textiles went overseas and didn't so much as say "Thanks for all the cheap labor, suckers."

Talton's right. South Carolina has a crappy standard of living. And he is right to argue that "South Carolina will never be a magnet for talent, software, gaming, biotech, etc."

All South Carolina has done in recent years us lure back office operations of marquis  names in new technologies. Starbucks is hot, but it's not rocket science to set up a plant in SC to grind beans. Google is hot, but it's not rocket science to pay a handful to people to keep a huge room full of servers running.

Boeing's hot but it's not rocket science to bolt together airplanes. It's just a bigger version of a Detroit production line.

The piece that's missing is that none of these companies are moving their knowledge workers here. The kind of incredibly smart, roving minds that create industries just have no interest at all in coming to a state that revels in its nigraphobic constitution, its appalling education system, its one party political system, its corrupt judiciary, and a political culture that elevates hacks who couldn't find their ass with two extra hands and a GPS system.

Until we stop making being stupid a political virtue, we're just gonna be a way station for Boeing till India makes them a better deal. And nobody in Columbia seems to realize this as they party hearty over snagging a single production line from a state that has some of the most innovative corporations in the history of the world with the pitch that "we'll do whatever you want, and way cheaper."