DOW Breaks 17,000!

It has only been about seven months since the last time the DOW (our unofficial, single-point, cheerleading indication of our economy) crested 16k, but it feels a lot longer. The stock market has risen, stalled, fell back a little, took up a long occupancy in the middle 16000s, flirted with the next milepost, then finally leveled up, gaining three skill points and a new Feat from the Paragon list.

It almost feels like the market is a little reluctant to admit that it is doing pretty well. With a rising level of awareness of the difference in income between the very rich and the rest of us mugs, the wealthy seem to want to downplay the idea that, through sheer financial inertia, they will continue to get richer. One of the items that has been passed around the 'net was a bit from one of these very wealthy guys you probably have never heard of, Nick Hanauer, an Amazon founder, who points out that unless we start addressing the evergrowing canyon of wealth inequity, the lower ranks will be putting their money into the noted hedgefund of Pitchforks and Torches LLC. This guy has been talking about it for some time, but finally got a podium for his thoughts at Politico, a mostly conservative operation that the Haves tend to read. Needless to say, these readers have not taken the news well.

Not an analogy for Boeing. Nope, not at all.

Meanwhile, one of the favorite local targets for corporate greed has been Boeing, which shook down received from the state government a huge chunk of benefits in exchange for setting up the triple-7x production here in this state. So yay! Then they turned around neatly and shipped 1100 engineering jobs out of the Puget Sound region and to other, more comfortable, less unionish locations. So, um, yay. (Anyone in state government negotiating with Boeing should really play D&D, in particular those sessions where the DM is trying to pimp them over with the wording of a wish spell).

And speaking of Boeing, there was a recent accident involving them shipping fuselages from Wichita to Renton (because, of course, it is more profitable to build things far away and then bring them here rather than actually pay people here to do the work). In any event, the train derailed, pitching the unfinished green fuselages into the Clark Fork River, where a group of white water rafters took pictures of them. They are pretty impressive in color. So of course the Seattle Times ran the picture in black and white. On one of the interior pages, where you might miss it.

Of course, looking at this, am I the only one to ask: Aren't these the same rail lines that they want to ship those perfectly-safe, nothing-to-worry-about, hey-trust-us oil and coal trains that will soon be coming through Seattle?

More later,