Arkansas Blog

My bet goes to Arkansas, the corporate prostitute. We give away the health of our residents to provide electricity to Texas. The good liberal Beebe gives away our natural gas and environment to drillers for pennies. We steal money from schools to give to corporations to kill local businesses. The Department of Environmental Quality is owned by polluters. The Department of Labor is still owned by the plantation owners.

Arkansas is a corporate red-light district.

We will probably be the state that loses the plant. For years we have tried to woo Toyota to build an automobile manufaturing plant in the Delta. Everytime we got beat out by another state because they had the best incentive package even though we had an accessible rail system, two nearby interstate highways, and the Mississipi River near the proposed site. There is only so much incentive a state with roughly 2.6million people can offer.

"Arkansas is a corporate red-light district."

We Arkies should cease being corporate whores. Oh, yes! We should. We certainly don't want to do anything to help ourselves by acquiring or keeping jobs here, do we? Just look at what those California whores did recently. Why, they up and helped Tesla Motors locate the first high-volume maker of electric cars in San Jose.

The $250 million plant will initially employ 1,000 people in clean tech, green collar manufacturing jobs; and it will eventually produce 30,000 cars a year. As part of the deal, the state of California will buy and lease assembly machinery to Tesla. Imagine that! The sluts.

And, as if the state's whores didn't do enough, the sluts of San Jose will lease 89 acres for the new facility, letting Tesla use it rent-free for 10 years. Imagine THAT! Oh, and don't forget the federal whores. Tesla can access at least $150 million in federal loan guarantees for building a factory that makes advanced technology vehicles. Congress approved $25 billion in such loan guarantees last year as part of energy legislation.

But, hey, let's not try any of that nonsense here in Arkansas. I mean, why do anything that might help us lure jobs? After all, Arkansas WAS "The Land of Opportunity." But, progressive, futuristic people that we are, we changed all that, remember? We Arkies much prefer to keep our heads buried in the sands of "The Natural State." Right? Right.

UPDATE: Shame on Rep. Steve Harrelson, D-Texarkana, for doing the best he could to protect the Cooper Tire jobs in his district. And shame on him for not being clairvoyant. Throw the whore out!

ARK. BLOG: No knock on Harrelson. The knock is on the system that allows the corporate outlaws to hold decent working people hostage and provides no recourse when they are dishonest bloodsuckers who barely wait for ink to dry on their giveaway before they put people out of work.

The people of this state will continue to be held hostage by the totally incompetent and outmoded "thinking" [reacting actually] of people with mid-20th century economic development concepts. Beebe should clean the whole damn lot of them out. As the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation begins its new initiative against poverty - they should fund a study which would create a state of the art economic development unit for the state and its regions. No one currently engaged in these activities should be allowed anywhere near a totally revamped effort growing out of such a study.

Jim-"We give away the health of our residents to provide electricity to Texas"

durango-
$250 million plant will initially employ 1,000 people in clean tech, green collar manufacturing jobs;

Jim-"good liberal Beebe gives away our natural gas and environment to drillers for pennies.

yes, and visit the Hartford area of Ark if you want to see what the new "Natural" looks like.

Apples to oranges durango. I think Jim would celebrate if not help out were there a possibility of securing a "clean tech, green collar manufacturing" facility. Eventually
the cars and technology of the future which California is promoting will pay off. When the
gas is gone and major streams are dead zones, rural people are drinking imported water, the cancer wards are overflowing, then what? Move to Mexico?

Calif may be whoring but she's a high class one who is selective. Better than our street walker status.

Loves us some corporate socialism!
.

Maybe it's too early in the morning, but I can not figure out whether the sarcasm-prone durangokid and eLwood are agreeing with me or they are saying that we should jump into bed without protection and no guarantee of compensation, as usual - taken for a ride and dumped in a ditch with an incurable disease.

Obtuse doesn't work in blogs.

Jim,
As a politician that's your job to sort out the differences. But since I'm sure you're VERY busy campaigning for Abel or Rebekah this one is for you

Should Ark attract clean, green, future oriented manufacturing jobs my hunch is that you would help support it with corporate give-aways (incentives just doesn't work anymore, call a spade a spade).

Would you?
.

eLwood,
Term-limited out, I am no longer in a position to give away our money, experience is lost. However, I did support energy conservation incentives. In all honesty, I also supported some financial incentives "for job creation" with the hope that the incentives would be used to improve the living standards of people in this state. I was betrayed. The administration used that money to bargain foolishly. The rich got richer and we all paid for it in taxes the rich should have paid, while they profited.

As to your question, if I, in a post-term-limited situation, faced any "clean, green, future oriented manufacturing" job possibility, it would have to accept stringent claw-back requirements, environmental regulations, and employee benefits. This, however, is not and never has been an Arkansas policy. We continue to be a prostitute state and a plantation economy. Until you elect a majority of people who are not corporate lackeys, that is not going to change.

That is why I am campaigning for the slate of Green candidates, because the corporate parties, despite what they say, are not going to allow change.

"Calif may be whoring but she's a high class one who is selective."

You'll get no argument from me on that one, eLwood. But, I can guarantee you, that if the state of Arkansas provided incentives to lure an electric auto plant like the one in San Jose, the usual suspects on this blog would moan and groan until the cock crowed a thousand times. It is a deep-rooted mentality in our beloved state. We're AGIN it, by God! No matter what potential it might have, we're AGIN it! Easier to think poor and be poor. Poor but Proud, we Arkies! Hail yeah! The think-poor, "agin it" mentality goes along so nicely with our congenital statewide inferiority complex.

And, Max, you declare unequivocally that the Cooper people are corporate outlaws and "are dishonest bloodsuckers who barely wait for ink to dry on their giveaway before they put people out of work." Is it a known, provable fact that they are dishonest bloodsuckers or does it just seem that way? Is it possible that the 150 layoffs were due to circumstances unforeseen when the company got its tax breaks? Might the layoffs actually have been justifiable? Did any of the workers affected by the layoff regain their jobs later? Is it possible that they eventually will? Is Texarkana, Arkansas better off (and has it been better off) with Cooper present than if Cooper had never been lured to town in the first place?

I'll hang up, fix a drink, and listen.