Productive Jobs Vanish: The Case Of Wichita

A case study of the collapse of productive jobs in the U.S. economy—a reality assiduously being covered up by the news media and the Obama Administration—appeared in Aviation Week of Oct. 16. The case in point was Wichita, Kansas, which, as of June 2008, was turning out business jets, turboprops, and Boeing 737 fuselages at a record pace.

"Could Wichita become the next Detroit?" ask the authors of the short article. They then provide the following picture:

"In less than a year, Wichita's three business jet producers—Cessna, Hawker Beechcraft and Bombardier's Learjet—have shed about 12,000 jobs, or nearly 30% of the local aerospace workforce...

"'It is as bad as I've ever seen it for that industry, and I've been doing this for 34 years,' says Tom Buffenbarger, president of the International Assn. of Machinists. 'In September 2008 we had 9000 openings in Wichita for machinists, aircraft-certified welders, avionics electricians and aircraft sheet metal people. And today we have 11,000 [union member] layoffs. That's a shift of 20,000 jobs right there.'"

This picture, of course, leaves out all the thousands of jobs that are dependent on the airline industry—from retail, to machine shops, and the like. So far, Wichita does not look like Detroit, and its jobless rate is officially 9.7%. But the rate of collapse (as in the bottom function of LaRouche's Triple Curve) tells the story—and shows how, without the radical shift of the LaRouche Plan, we're headed straight for hell.