WeAreAllLivingInPottervilleNow
RobberbarronVille
So.
Why is Caterpillar moving talking our money and running and opening up shop in the fine state that hosted the ‘A-Fiat-Is-Still-A-Fiat’ Bowl last week.
I mean, to my naive ears it didn’t make sense that the Robberbarrons were going to the northern, sensible state of Indiana when they could go south to a ‘Right-To-Kill-Unions-Dead’ state like, say, Tennessee.
Boy, was I wrong about that.
Thomas Walkom has the story:
“The timing of Caterpillar Inc.’s decision to close its locked-out London locomotive plant was no accident.
Last Wednesday, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels signed into law a so-called bill making his state the first in the U.S. industrial north to directly take on private-sector unions.
Two days later, Caterpillar — which is based in next-door Illinois — closed its unionized London plant.
Since it locked out 460 Canadian workers in January, the giant U.S. firm had made little secret of its intent to move their jobs to Muncie, Ind.
All it was waiting for, apparently, was a signal that the state government there was serious about crippling trade unions….”
And still, there are people, some of them prominent ‘business people’ who should know better, who have been screaming that its the fault of the workers in Waterloo for not ‘compromising’ to save their jobs.
Again.
We are going in reverse at a million miles-an-hour, with the accelerator jammed to the floor.
That’s us I tell you.
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And if you read a few of the comments to the Walkom piece you will see that there are many regular folks who make like the sheeple in Thomas Frank’s ‘What’s the matter with Kansas’ and cheer Caterpillar for screwing them and their community over on their way out the door…
.
