Tuesday, December 6, 2016

BOEING

► In the P.S. Business Journal — Boeing’s ad campaign boasting UK job gains upsets Washington workers after year of cuts — A new Boeing advertising campaign on UK taxi cabs boasts of doubling its UK workforce and boosting supply chain spending since 2011. “We understand Boeing is a global employer with operations around the world,” said SPEEA spokesman Bill Dugovich. “Our concern is Boeing maintains jobs here in Washington state, particularly after our state’s taxpayers granted $8.7 billion in tax breaks to Boeing in 2013. Ever since we did that, we’re losing jobs.”

► In today’s Washington Post — As Trump vows to retain jobs, U.S. firms plan to build fighter jets in India — Backed by the Obama administration, Lockheed Martin and Boeing have proposed manufacturing combat aircraft in India, in part to increase sales to other countries. For Lockheed Martin, that would mean moving its entire Texas assembly line for F-16s, which are being phased out by the U.S. military. But the election of Donald Trump has brought a measure of uncertainty to the talks.

► From The Hill — Trump: Cancel Boeing’s contract for Air Force One — President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday ripped Boeing for the cost of a new Air Force One plane, calling for the contract to be cancelled.

► From The Hill — Trump speaks and Boeing stock falls — “I think Boeing is doing a little bit of a number (on Air Force One). We want Boeing to make a lot of money but not that much money,” Trump said. The impact of Trump’s comments were immediately apparent Tuesday morning, as Boeing’s stock took an immediate sharp turn downward when the market opened.

EDITOR’S NOTE — Couldn’t not post this…

ELECTION REDUX

► From KBAI — The Joe Show (12-5-16) — The election of Trump and other Republicans have put workers and organized labor in a difficult position. We discuss how best to move forward with Mark Lowry of the Amalgamated Transit Union and Washington State Labor Council.

ALSO at The Stand — WSLC is ready to push back, move forward (by Jeff Johnson)

THIS WASHINGTON

► MUST-READ from CrossCut — Eyman initiative is starving rural Washington (by David Kroman) — Citizens of rural Washington may still favor the Tim Eyman property tax cap. but many of even the staunchest conservative local officials are coming out and saying: the cap is killing us. “It’s really affecting our county,” says Lincoln County Commissioner Rob Coffman. “We pride ourselves on being efficient and lean,” but, he adds, as total expenditures creep up by three to five percent a year, they simply can’t afford to fill vacated positions. Just this last year, 13 positions were not replaced, a 10% reduction in county staffing. “We’re way below minimum staffing levels,” he says.

EDITOR’S NOTE — The 2017 Legislature should scrap this cap!

► In today’s Seattle Times — Dino Rossi chosen to fill vacant 45th District state Senate seat — Dino Rossi, the former state senator and three-time candidate for statewide office, was chosen Monday to fill the 45th District Senate seat that was left vacant when Sen. Andy Hill died in October. Rossi said he will not campaign for re-election. He will serve in the Senate through the end of next year. A special election to fill the seat will be held in 2017.

► In today’s Spokesman-Review — Sen. Baumgartner files amendment to state constitution calling for Legislature to have sole authority to set school funding — Republican Mike Baumgartner submitted a proposed constitutional amendment that would rewrite the sections of the Washington Constitution that form the basis for the state Supreme Court ruling that lawmakers have struggled with for four years.

EDITOR’S NOTE — Or, Senator, you could just do your job under the current Constitution, and fulfill your “paramount duty” by full funding public education.

THAT WASHINGTON

► In today’s NY Times — Carson is new sign Trump plans to govern from right — AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, reflecting on Trump’s nominations with dismay: “Donald Trump the candidate claimed he would rein in the power of Wall Street traders, protect Social Security and Medicare, and ensure all kids have great schools. But his cabinet choices send a dangerous signal about how President-elect Trump will conduct his presidency.”

► From the Hill — Top Dem signals likely opposition to Sessions nomination — Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) is signaling she’ll likely oppose Sen. Jeff Sessions‘s attorney general nomination next year. The Washington senator — who will be the No. 3 Senate Democrat in 2017 — said the Senate rejected Sessions three decades ago because of civil rights and racism allegations and “those same concerns linger.” Murray writes:

“We need to do everything we can to fight for an Attorney General who is truly committed to standing up for and protecting the rights of everyone in this country. Given Senator Sessions’s record, it is difficult to see how he could pass this most basic, most essential, test.”

► From the Stranger — Murray: Carson is ‘wrong choice’ to lead Housing agency

► From The Hill — Fight over ‘Buy America’ provision erupts in Congress — At issue is language included in the Senate-passed version of the Water Resources Development Act that would require American iron and steel products be used in projects assisted by the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund. Sources say Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is actively pushing to strip the provision from the bill.

► From The Hill — Transition official: Trump will not rip up NAFTA — “I don’t think we’re looking to rip up NAFTA as much as we are looking to right-size it and make it fairer,” said Anthony Scaramucci, a senior adviser on the Trump transition team.

THAT WAS THEN… — Candidate Trump vowed to “rip up” all free-trade deals.

► In today’s Washington Post — Trump’s misleading numbers about the Carrier deal — Just 800 jobs (not 1,100) saved with $7 million tax break and 1,300 still going to Mexico.

► From Business Insider — ‘We do feel forgotten’: About 1,300 Carrier company employees will still lose their jobs, despite Trump’s deal — Carrier’s parent company is still going forward with its plan to close its Huntington, Indiana, plant and outsource 700 jobs to Mexico. “His whole campaign was focused on Indy,” Huntington plant employee Mike Harmon told ABC2. “I never heard one thing about the Huntington plant. So yeah, we do feel forgotten.”

► From The Hill — Trump allies warn: No compromise on immigration — The hard-liners’ message to Trump is blunt. In the words of a source close to Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the powerful immigration hawk whom Trump has selected for attorney general: “You could choose an establishment person for any position but that one [DHS].” Above anybody, they want Trump to pick Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state who has achieved national fame, and notoriety on the left, for his uncompromising stances on immigration.

EDITOR’S NOTE — When he showed up for his interview (at right), Kobach was carrying legible notes describing his ideas on how to build a 1,989-mile wall along the Mexican border, to step up deportation of immigrants, to reintroduce a failed post-9/11 people tracking system, to block all refugees who are fleeing ISIS in Syria from entering the U.S., and to change the National Voter Registration Act, a Clinton-era law that allowed easy voter registration at DMVs.

► In today’s NY Times — Why does Donald Trump lie about voter fraud? (editorial) — Millions of people did not vote illegally, but top Republicans are happy to let the country believe they did. This is how voter suppression efforts start. First come the unverified tales of fraud; then come the urgent calls to tighten voter registration rules and increase “ballot security,” which translate into laws that disenfranchise tens or hundreds of thousands of qualified voters. That’s already happened in Wisconsin and North Carolina, in Ohio and Texas, where Republican lawmakers pushed through bills requiring voter IDs or proof of citizenship; eliminating early-voting days and same-day registration; and imposing other measures. Virtually all these laws aimed at making voting harder for citizens who happen to be members of groups that tend to support Democrats.

► In today’s NY Times — Justices wrestle with role of race in redistricting — In a pair of spirited arguments on Monday, the Supreme Court returned to the question of what role race may play in drawing legislative maps. The two cases, from Virginia and North Carolina, were the court’s latest attempts to solve a constitutional puzzle: how to disentangle the roles of race and partisanship when black voters overwhelmingly favor Democrats. The difference matters because the Supreme Court has said that only racial gerrymandering is constitutionally suspect.

► Plus this blockbuster exclusive from the Washington Post — Pentagon buries evidence of $125 billion in bureaucratic waste — The Pentagon has buried an internal study that exposed $125 billion in administrative waste in its business operations amid fears Congress would use the findings as an excuse to slash the defense budget.

NATIONAL

► In today’s NY Times — Amazon moves to cut checkout line, promoting a grab-and-go experience — At an experimental store on the ground floor of a new Amazon office building in Seattle, shoppers will be able to pluck what they want off the shelves and leave without waiting to pay.

► Meanwhile from NACS — Grocers ditching self-checkout for customer interaction — The convenience of self-checkout is going away at Albertsons, Vons and Pavilions stores in Southern California, noting that the grocery chain is eliminating self-checkout lanes at 96 of its 352 stores (27%) in an effort to provide better one-on-one service to shoppers.

TODAY’S MUST-READ

► From Vox — The outrageous legal decision that took overtime pay from millions of workers (by Jared Bernstein) — Just days before new overtime rules were to go into effect on December 1, a federal judge in Texas blocked the Obama administration’s update to overtime pay from taking effect. That means that millions of workers who should receive time-and-a-half pay when they work more than 40 hours a week are now at risk of losing that extra income. The CBO estimates that canceling the rule will lead to the loss of $570 million in earnings for affected workers in 2017… Judge Amos Mazzant blocked the rule based on legal reasoning that, given historical precedent, makes no sense. The implication of the judge’s logic is that the federal government has been breaking the law for a very long time. If his reasoning is correct, the government violated the law when it set the first salary threshold in 1938, and it violated it every time it subsequently adjusted the threshold.

The Stand posts links to Washington state and national news of interest every weekday morning by 10 a.m.