IBM is again crying crocodile tears and threatening to hold its breath until it turns blue. Well it isn’t IBM precisely but a surrogate croc. Leave it to millionaire businessman Jack McMullen’s fine tuned political instincts to pen an op-ed regurgitating the time worn “ IBM- may- leave- Vermont- if…” line at the very moment the Occupy Wall Street movement seems to be peaking.
59 percent of adults either completely or mostly agree with the OWS protesters according to an October National Journal survey reported by Atlantic Magazine. Also sympathy toward corporations is low as shown by a Sept. 2011 Gallup poll indicating 70 percent of respondents favor hiking taxes on corporations by eliminating tax deductions
But with bullet point efficiency McMullen sobs out the alleged historic wrongs inflicted on poor IBM by mean old Vermont.
• you never gave us the circ highway you promised,
• you never got us the low power rate we wanted,
• you never gave us relief from act 250,
• you never gave us assistance in training insufficiently prepared new workers
Ah, but it’s his justification for an emotional tender spot that long ago bruised the fragile corporate heart that dredges up the grandest crocodile tears. Millionaire and twice failed US Senate candidate McMullen recalls the time Bernie Sanders actually gasp publicly criticized IBM.
Says McMullen:
Its eventual extinction will have been caused in large part by the failure of political leaders to respond to clear signals from the largest private, taxpaying employer our state is ever likely to have.In the 1990s, then-Congressman Sanders launched a very public campaign [supporting IBM workers who were] criticizing IBM for [unilaterally] changing its 1960s-era pension plan to remain competitive with nimbler, newer entrants into the semiconductor business. I am told by the same source [an unnamed most senior IBM corporate executive] that IBM’s then-CEO, Louis Gerstner, reacted to Sanders demagoguery with a statement something like: “Don’t the politicians in Vermont realize there are more than a dozen other states vying for our business?”
So take it from businessman Jack McMullen, the man who lost a shoo-in Republican primary to Vermont farmer Fred Tuttle, that IBM feels pain at not getting what they want.
Who doesn’t, eh Jack? On the other hand, many go forward to other goals or find ways to compromise for the mutual good of the community, while others clutch old grudges, keep crying and holding their breath to get attention.
If Waterbury is devastated by lost government jobs because the State moves its offices from Waterbury to another location within Vermont, we are told on this site that is very BAD. If Chittenden County is devastated by lost private sector jobs because IBM moves jobs out of Vermont, we are told GOOD RIDDANCE. Do you truly believe this a sustainable economic model?
Jack, who??
is like very other “corporate person”, a self-absorbed sociopath.
IBM is just larger than most.
The “corporate person” that is IBM is run by senior management and a board of directors that know they must mollify the “corporate person” by always asking for more – more – more, by acting like sociopaths themselves, and the only ones that survive into senior management positions at a large corporation share the self-absorption and single-minded purposefulness of the “corporate person”.
The road, if built, won’t be wide enough anyway. There will never be a large enough training subsidy, the power will never be cheap enough even if it’s free, and, of course, IBM’s taxes will never ever be low enough.