Boeing wants to finalize the divorce
Boeing wants to finalize the divorce
Seattle Post-Intelligencer 10/30/03
author: Chi-Dooh Li
(Copyright 2003)
Repugnant. Distasteful. Unseemly. Humiliating.
Those are a few of the words that describe the farcical "Joe Millionaire" script that The Boeing Co. has written for the states of Washington, Texas, Alabama, California, Kansas, Indiana and who knows how many other suitor states competing to provide the home for assembling the new 7E7 airliner.
Dutifully playing by that script, Gov. Gary Locke and his counterparts gussy up and parade themselves before Boeing, each cooing sweet and tender words of tax relief, expedited permits, low-cost power and undying devotion.
Washington state has as much chance to win this sham of a contest as an elderly widow laying on thick makeup and bright red lipstick to win the love of a young gigolo who has not the slightest intention of a committed relationship.
By moving its corporate headquarters to Chicago, Boeing has already told us loud and clear that its long-time love affair with Seattle and the Puget Sound region has come to an end.
In matrimonial terms, Boeing has already divorced us.
Sure, they still have assembly plants in Everett and Renton. But expect more and more of the work to be done elsewhere, including overseas.
Watch closely, and you'll see Boeing acting like the husband who has found a new love, who can hardly wait to extricate himself completely from the wife he is abandoning.
Last month our overeager governor jumped the gun and announced that our state had made the final cut for the 7E7. Boeing promptly denied even the existence of a short list.
A few days later, just to remind us the love really has gone cold, Boeing's commercial airplane chief Alan Mullaly uttered four unforgettable monosyllabic words to the cream of the Seattle business establishment gathered at a Rotary Club luncheon: "I think we suck."
If you're not into current lingo and don't know what that charming little expression means, let me translate: "You're really ugly. You've got a face no one could love."
The grim probability is that years before the public announcement of its corporate move, Boeing had come to a strategic conclusion that it could no longer thrive and compete in this state.
All the desperate attempts by the governor and Legislature to put together a sweetheart deal for the 7E7 will be for naught. The recently rejected transportation tax package, even had it passed, would still have been far short of what Boeing and others regard as vital to the economic health of our state.
The recommended actions by the governor's Competitiveness Council, considered by many as the essential checklist for restoring a healthy business environment, only address symptoms of our state's malaise.
The root problem is that we have become a selfish and capricious people.
We righteously decry special interests, but by our ballots on such issues as the transportation tax package and rolling back auto license taxes, too many of us vote only for our self-interest.
We've lost our sense of a greater common good.
In the process, we have become unwilling or unable, as a people, to make the hard and sometimes sacrificial decisions required so that Boeing would never have moved in the first place, and so that our state would be a place where other businesses would want to locate.
Things will get a lot worse in transportation, higher education and K-12 funding and other essentials before they get any better.
We might blame it on the lack of strong, visionary, statesmanlike leadership. But through the initiative process, we have effectively stripped from our elected officials the ability to lead in any meaningful sense of the word.
Any significant legislative solution carefully knit together by the governor and Legislature to address the serious problems we face is only one Tim Eyman initiative away from being completely unraveled.
What business looking to make multibillion-dollar capital investments can live with that kind of uncertainty?
The challenge for this and the next generation of political leadership in our state is to find a way to inspire and rekindle the public spirit now buried deep in the recesses of our civic souls.
We need to be challenged to look far beyond ourselves if we are to face up to the tough and costly choices involved in rebuilding our transportation infrastructure, funding our educational system at all levels, revamping our patchwork taxation schemes and streamlining our regulatory systems.
Which one of us in this state does not wish that some day, the Joe Millionaire script can remain the domain of that tawdry genre known as reality television instead of the real-life burlesque that it now is with the 7E7 competition and with other projects in the future?
Chi-Dooh Li is a Seattle attorney.