Robert Sullivan / Reuters
David Hess, president of Pratt & Whitney, speaks to his employees at a rally to call to attention upcoming defense budget cuts in West Palm Beach, Florida August 8, 2012.
Rather than hold out for Congress to reverse a scheduled $500 billion in spending cuts, defense firms are opting to go against Labor Department guidelines and move forward in issuing layoff warnings to employees.
Defense contractors say they are prepared to send layoff notices to thousands of employees in preparation for the looming spending cuts, which would kick in Jan. 2 if Congress can't agree to a deficit reduction deal.
Last month, Lockheed Martin CEO Bob Stevens escalated the threats by saying he planned to send layoff notices to the company’s full 123,000-employee workforce. And on Wednesday, David Hess, the president of the aircraft engine manufacturer Pratt & Whitney, warned of the looming cuts and the potential impacts on U.S. jobs.
"Make no mistake: sequestration budget cuts are a threat to American jobs, the economy and U.S. national security," Hess said at a rally to stop the cuts. "Sequestration is the wrong way to address the country's fiscal challenges, and instead risks damaging a vital industrial sector as a consequence of a historic political gamble."
The Labor Department and some administration supporters say it's inappropriate for the firms to send employees speculative warnings, since Congress could yet come to a deal. And even if it doesn't, says the department, it's unclear just where the cuts will come from.
“There is no reason to needlessly alarm hundreds of thousands of workers when there is no way to know what will happen with sequestration,” Rep. Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said earlier this month.
But the contractors say they're only trying to comply with the federal Worker Adjustment and Retaining Notification Act, which requires a 60-day notice. That would mean the notifications would occur right before the November election, in which economic concerns will be pivotal.
A report funded by the Aerospace Industries Association estimates that the across-the-board spending cuts could ultimately cost the nation two million jobs.
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These kinds of things happen when a party is not interested in governing. Maybe it's just the corporations and the conservatives, getting together, to have things their way, or the highway.
with no congress what can he do except what the GOP want... death to Obama
r u some kind of @!$%#ing idiot? u must b a racist, middle state bufoon!!! hope the secret service snatches ur ass up for wishing "death to obama." if u're a real gangsta homie, y don't u post ur pic, ur address, telephone# , so folks could discover who u r and what u look like , so those in extreme opposition to ur stance can express their feelings towards u for ur unneccessary, blatantly racist statements, u @!$%#ing hillbilly coward!!! wish i would've ran into u in clinton corr. fac. so i could've expressed the anger of a black man who's soul is on ice.
Your Pic. is not up their like everyone else. It sounds like your the racist. Let me guess your black or you voted for Obama because you didn't want to be called a racist or your on walfare and you don't want too work just collect free money the rest of your life. Obama is the worst President we have ever had. We were acted on 911 so we had to defend our self and the budget sky rocketed. Obama said he would cut the deficit his first term or he would be a one term President another lie. He spent more in 4 years than all the other Presidents combined. And when he bows to king and Queens that is a decreases to the United States of America. The most powerful man in the world bowing to other. What U.S. citizen does that? None Don't forget in his book he say's he was born in Kenya and he used a scholarship for people that are not US citizens. Or did his rich white grandparents pay for it. Yes his family had lots of money. Not mom and dad but they didn't raise him but for a few years.
Sorry but stop repeating that robmehood lie, you have to work to get welfare and have since welfare reform, no one sits at home and collects welfare, sorry but that old Reagan lie no longer exists since the 1990's. So if you lie about welfare then more then likely every word of your post is either a lie or based on a lie.
hey chip, where is you freaking photo? You are so freaking ignorant and backward. whether you like it or not, jim crow days are over and they will never return. don't you realize or are you so stupid the economy almost went into a depression, forget recession. you really think you can recover from that in 3 years. wakeup and smell the coffee. if you have no freaking clue about what you are talking about, then just stay off the site and keep your stupid comments to yourself. just read. you might learn something.
Where is the yes we can congress??????
you mean the "do-nothing" congress? they are on vacation.
The yes we can Congress is being obstructed by the teapublicans in the House bringing the inner workings to a halt ... in other words, the teabillies caused Congress to become constipated, which most teapublicans are most of the time explaining why they're so full of hate ... so, they hit the road, Jack ...
Well we can thank our do nothing Congress for whatever happens. I'm so sick of this. I hope people are smart enough to vote these Republicans out of office this Nov.
Why because they will not bow down to Obama idiot ideas, lies, and all the other BULL CRAP that comes out of his mouth. First 2 years he still couldn't get everything he wanted and it was all in the Democrats hand. How about kicking out the WORST president in U.S.A history. He pasted Jimmy Carter and that is bad
Except that is a lie chip, you are crediting Obama for 34 years of GOP stupidity that have failed the country with trickle down nonsense. Don't blame the guy trying to end 34 years of GOP stupidity by showing your ignorance on how the economy got so bad. It started before Carter and Reagan made it worse as did both Bush's.
Go for it! All this talk, is just that, talk to put fear in people you have working for you, as well as propose a problem the GOP agreed to. I am sure, by the time January 2, 2013 is here, you will be laughing at those you made suffer through your empty threats! Shut it down, and the next time they you hear some state "Less government, get government out of our lives, remember it was you that wanted this, less government!"
Seems to me that this is the Modern Day Wild Bill Hick cock,Buffalo Bill and Billy Bobs who previously had unhampered rights from the Government to clear out the Indigenous by any means available,who are no longer going to get as much immunity and subsidies as the Government previously gave them to do the nasty work.
Not all employees for Pratt & Whitney are liberals. I believe this is a strategy applied by the GOP DO NOTHING CONGRESS and the tea party movement to make President Obama look bad. But Pratt & Whitney's employees ( liberals or conservative ) are not stupid. They know what is going on only to see that it will backfire on the DO NOTHING GOP and the tea party movement. BUT THERE IS A SOLUTION TO ALL THIS. VOTE JOHN BOEHNER AND HIS CREW OUT OF OFFICE. LET THEM HAVE SOMETHING TO CRY ABOUT. LET IT TRICKLE DOWN TO TEXAS AND MAKE IT BLUE IN THE MAP.
Not all employees for Pratt & Whitney are liberals. I think this is a strategy by the GOP DO NOTHING CONGRESS and the tea party movement to make the President of the United States look bad. But the employees of Pratt & Whitney ( liberals or conservatives ) are not stupid. They know what is going on and will only see this backfire on the DO NOTHING CONGRESS and the tea party movement. BUT THERE IS A SOLUTION. VOTE JOHN BOEHNER AND HIS CREW OUT OF OFFICE. LET THE GOP DO NOTHING CONGRESS AND THE TEA PARTY MOVEMENT HAVE SOMETHING TO CRY ABOUT. LET IT TRICKLE DOWN TO TEXAS AND MAKE IT A BLUE STATE IN THE MAP.
good night chip.
So David Hess, president of Pratt & Whitney and Bob Stevens, Lockheed Martin CEO have threated the President of The United States.
We await your reply, Mr. President, it is either your job or ours, don't cross the line, and don't sign another contract.
So now that we have waited, for all these long and many years, for the Military Industrial Complex to join forces with the political party.
This joining has from the outset in very first days of the administration has had, as its objective, to spew hatred for a black president. The political party has sought to solicit secret monies from foreign accounts, from foreign earnings, from foreign businesses, and has entered into a campaign of the most desperate type of distortion. By purchasing media messaging, both blatantly partisan, keyed to the uninformed, and of general corporate advertisement dominating revenues. When the messaging is so dominated by corporate expenditures that it becomes plausible to have captured the entire market place, the voice of the public is strangled in disbelief.
So we have all the worlds' wealthy, powerful and influential in lock step, determined for some unknown reason to derail our ever fragile democracy. We have not a clue of the intention that we can believe to be true. Trying as hard as we dare only strains the mind to find a believable hypothesis. We have not a clue as how the sub-rosa and blatantly announced goal of defaming a president and unseating him, and we cannot imagine a single reason.
We have no means to stop this attack on all that is America, and the ideals we have learned and trusted and found useful are nearly coopted.
The reason of race hatred is not enough to justify the Civil War's failing to indicate that this prejudice was to pass into history. It may be long in going, but it will end because it cannot be sustained. Something has changed, but what has changed within in the past 100 years, that has not always been there, unseen, but there. The list is short enough, was it wealth, power, greed, was it machines, industry, energy, electric power, etc.? Or was it what those changes made possible the primal savage beast within human kind to stand on new legs, to expand ambition with jaws dripping from the blood of 20th century carnage.
Did this monster wait some period of three generation, long enough for the strength to wane in those who experienced those great wars? Those that they would fall silent with advancing age, or that youth cannot benefit from the experiences of parents, or from books unread, or from the captive knowledge of school teachers passing unknown into empty heads. It must be, because this is true, that we are no longer bonded together in our lowly struggles to live to accept what is normal or of a passing age of growth into maturity.
We feel it, this monster, it follows us, it guides us, it possesses us, it directs us, and it is in the fiber and the core of our being. This tells us what it is, it is so very hard to believe, it is so hard to accept, it is contrary to all that we believe to be true, and worthy, and correct. But this monster has been seen before in civilizations and in wars and in empires and unhalted conquests, it dies in war, but only for three generations.
It died in Europe in WWII, but what was born at the same moment the atom ended that war? If was not the monster called winning, named as victory, robed in triumph, disguised as peace, and one more unnamed thing. The unnamed thing was the unspoken ambition to profit from war. To assume war would go away, if and only if we spend as much on the efforts of war as the world had to spare, all if it. It not this monster the same one as we see after every war in history, if not it looks the same. It is the same delusion. Did you think we had won any war since WWII, if you had not noticed the direction of losing was to just improve the war tools? You do understand what the Military Industrial Complex produces, better war tools, yes, but what else? It is the ambition, the idea that we as the last world power have to take over the entire world, so to this we add Finance, and Power.
Military Industrial Complex of Finance and Power, and this means genocide because not one individual can resist, no one can stop it.
The upcoming election, if we succeed in having it fairly, will be the last one, if the monster is defeated it will be the first time, but as no one can stop it, it obvious that we all have to.
We have to throttle back our military forces & contracts. Our nation spends more on defense than all other nations. The Soviet Union collapse was due to defense spending that bankrupted their nation. I want see it in my lifetime, but soon, the USA will also suffer a collapse based on our arrogance, that we are the world police. The contractors are playing the capitalistic political game that the republicans are supscribing. Most americans are smart enough to know the republican congress has been the obstructionist and unamerican representation. We have real problrms to solve in this country and political games have no place.
What really amazes me is the name calling that always surfaces from the left. So I guess that makes it O.K. for me to refer to Obama followers as Zombiecrats or maybe Democraps or how about Pathological Liers. There can never seem to be a civil discourse from either party any more. Or how about intelligent discussions. Here's one fpr you guys to refute;
President Obama saved the collapse of the American automotive industry. By making GM restructure before bailing them out, and putting incentive money to help the industry, he saved the industry. People want to make jokes about “cash for clunkers” but the automakers aren’t laughing. They’re thanking him.
-----The narrative that President Barack Obama offers up about his “rescue” of the U.S. automobile industry is tidy, upbeat and built on an utter lie.
His campaign has repeatedly claimed that the odd, modified bankruptcy that his administration arranged with General Motors and Chrysler saved 1.5 million jobs. This is based on the bizarre argument that without it all automobile manufacturing in the U.S. would have gone away. How and why exactly would Ford’s, Toyota’s and Honda’s U.S. plants have disappeared if GM and Chrysler had undergone a regular bankruptcy?
Democrats have also repeatedly claimed GM will end up repaying the federal government for all the help it got in recent years. Really? The taxpayers who provided $26.4 billion in direct, as-yet-unrepaid funds to GM have as collateral 500 million shares of GM stock. To break even, GM’s stock price needs to be about $53. At Thursday’s close of trading, it was $23.53, meaning the value of taxpayers’ GM stock is $11.8 billion, $14.6 billion short of what taxpayers are owed. Over the past two years, the Dow Jones is up 20 percent and GM is down 31 percent. Be scared, taxpayers. Very scared.
If such wildly deceptive claims were made in the private sector, regulators would launch a fraud investigation. But in politics, anything goes – and the president knows he can’t tell the truth about GM.