Confidence Fairytale Theater

Obama pal David Cote, the multimillionaire union-busting CEO of the criminally convicted polluter Honeywell International, went on "Meet the Press" yesterday to talk about his lack of confidence.  He's hoarding his record obscene profits, he says, because he is just too uncertain about the future.  In order to Win the Future like his president wants, he has to have reassurances from government  that it'll find a way to not tax his company's offshore billions and also do something about all that annoying regulation.  The multimillions in fines from his record number of SuperFund toxic waste sites and the radioactive sludge episode have left him feeling mighty unconfident.

 Since the topic of the Sunday talk fest was Jobs and the Economy, the alleged moderator (David Gregory) didn't bother asking Cote (which Gregory pronounced "Cootie") about his lockout of whistleblowing unions and his company's recent criminal conviction.  Nobody in the mainstream media has ever challenged him about this.  Gregory eagerly asked, "Are politics unable to meet the challenges we (meaning corporations) face?"


From the transcript, Cote's reply:  

It's the sort of thing that scares me is -- we're -- I'm -- Honeywell 's a global company , 37 billion in sales, got 130,000 people, half our sales and people outside the USA. Traveled the world a lot and the world has changed, we went from a billion participants in the global economy to four billion over the last 20 years, yet we still act like we did 20 years ago. And we need an American competitiveness agenda that gets our finances right, gets energy policy , math and science education , infrastructure, and we can't even do something like this. It's very scary as a businessman.

And later.....

I always find it interesting when I hear government say "We need to create jobs."  And I say, "No, actually, government doesn't create jobs.  Government can create an environment where jobs can be created.  And I think it's important to distinguish between the two."

Cote, who is a Republican, was supposed to have gotten his chance to ask not what he can do for his country, but what his country can do for him, at a special lunch with Democratic senators a few weeks ago.  But then Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Illinois Sen.Dick Durbin got a letter from the President of the United Steelworkers Union:

Honeywell - one of the nation’s largest multinationals - would seem a poor choice for such a discussion since the Company has engaged in a lockout of 228 USW members at Local 7-669 in Metropolis, Illinois since June 2010, seeking drastic concessions from our members. For years this Honeywell facility has put USW members and the community at risk innumerable times because of multiple health and safety standard violations cited by OSHA, the NRC and the EPA. If CEO Cote really desires to create jobs in the U.S. he could immediately create 228 good paying jobs by simply ending this disastrous lockout of our members in Metropolis, Illinois.

The meeting was subsequently cancelled. But Durbin, whose constituents include those locked-out workers, also appeared on "Meet the Press" Sunday.  Although he was in a different segment than Cote (with whom he also served on the Simpson-Bowles Deficit Reduction "Catfood" Commission) I like to imagine that the two of them met in the Green Room and exchanged pleasantries.  Both of them wholeheartedly agree, by the way, that Social Security needs to be "fixed." 


From the Durbin interview transcript, words evidently failed him as he choked up recounting the consensual awesomeness of Obama: 

SEN. DURBIN:

David, let me tell you, if you could've been in the White House Cabinet Room , as I was, for six separate meetings and watched this president of the United States patiently listen to each member of the leadership in Congress lay out their ideas of where to go and how we can do this together, if you know that he started the meeting saying, "I'm putting everything on the table so that we can have a reasonable, comprehensive approach to it," you saw real leadership in action. I can't think of another president in my memory...

MR. GREGORY:
Mm-hmm.




"It's Very Scary as a Businessman".... Now Eat Your Peas, Pod People!