News-Record.com

Joe! How dare you!

According to the righties who post here incessantly, one should just "pull themselves up by the bootstraps" and not complain! You know, just like "W" did!

btw Joe, one of these workers would be a fool to sign any 'Non-compete' clause.
But I would not doubt it, if TIMCO decided to begin making them.

I believe no-compete contracts should be illegal.

Non compete clauses are used quite frequently with top executives and scientists who are privy to proprietary information. It would be a stretch to think that a mechanic should sign one, thus tying them to their firm--much like slavery or indentured servitude.

It IS imaginable under the current fascist doctrine of the Bush administration though. Heck, they even let the oil companies write the energy legislation! What's a couple dozen wrench jockeys to Cheney and company now?

I agree.. non compete agreements should be unenforceable in NC and in the universe.

It is not right that a corporation can actually prevent a person from using the only trade/skill that they know in order to feed their family. This is what, in my opinion, a non compete agreement does.

I also believe that if you treat people right, (it costs NOTHING to be nice to someone) then you will get the loyalty that you are seeking from your employees. Pay them a living wage while you are at it.

Remember, you dont OWN these people, you are FORTUNATE that they use their skils to make you richer. Having them sign non compete agreements is like legalized slavery in my opinion.

To the the lawyers who enforce these agreements in the state of NC:
You should be ashamed of themselves. Most working class people are not in a position like you are Mr. Lawyer to just open an office and hang up a shingle and start making money. The rely on their skills and the trades that they know in order to feed their families. When these big corporations more or less force them to sign zee paper.. well.. your defending the scumbags n corporate america makes me sick.

Its pretty hard to not sign zee paper when u are accepting a job offer.... thats what u call being under duress for sure.
NO NON COMPETE AGREEMENTS!!!!

Twila and the rest who think 'No Competes' are wrong...if you sign one you can believe your pay will reflect the same!
I personally think that Mr. Cawthron got tied of seeing good ones leave and had to complain to someone.
I have found that if you have the right programs in place that folks don't want to leave...even for lots more money...you wouldn't even have to worry about it!

"It would be a stretch to think that a mechanic should sign one,..."

Do some homework first before affixing fingers to the keyboard. These people in question aren't mechanics, they are FAA certified engineers who can design and certify the airworthiness of an airplane's components through the FAA. That requires special training/certification and people with these credentials are in short supply.

Airframe and powerplant mechanics and avionics technicians also require special training and FAA certifications, it's not like 'ol Billy Bob turning wrenches on your '68 Camaro down at Juniors Auto Fix It Shop.

This post is not for/against non-compete agreements, just to once again correct incorrect information from someone who apparently has no clue about aviation maintenance.

*********************************************
"It IS imaginable under the current fascist doctrine of the Bush administration though."

The letter is about TIMCO's employment practices and morphs into Bush being a fascist.

BDS is a remarkable illness.

I know of a company that has been in business for many many years on High Point Road, in Greensboro that does NOT pay its employees top dollar for signing non compete agreements.

When I had direct knowledge of this company, (years ago) they expected their employees to lie, cheat and steal from the customers they served. I do not have any direct knowledge of this practice continuing today, however if i were a betting woman....

ANYWAY.....

At the time they hire people, theyhave them sign a non compete agreement The HR person (or duly designated representative) actually hands the "employee to be" the first dollar the company alledgedly ever made across the table, then takes it back.. (this is the consideration)...

Now you tell me. Legally, Is handing someone a dollar bill to hold for less than 5 seconds, then taking it back enough consideration? Hell no. Its no class business tacticts.

JUST SAY NO TO NON COMPETE AGREEMENTS.

In my company no compete contracts go for $25,000 for 3 years and $50,000 for 5 years.

Paid out in yearly bonuses.

Dan:
Do you even KNOW what fascism is??

Obviously not.

Hint: Corporations control the government.

Here's a "dumbed down" version so that even you can understand it:
http://oldamericancentury.org/14pts.htm

Danny, whenever you open your mouth about something you know little or nothing about, you make people fall to the floor laughing! This is, again, such an instance.

`

If Mussolini defines fascism as "the merger of corporate and government power" what does that make the K Street project?

`

Gosh, I am STILL laughing at Danny's lack of knowledge on business practices and fascism!!

Dan says,
"The letter is about TIMCO's employment practices and morphs into Bush being a fascist."

NO KIDDING!!

Earth to little Danny, Earth to little Danny!
HERE'S YOUR SIGN!

Whew! I have belly laughed so hard and released so many endorphins that I just might live forever--as long as little Danny keeps posting.!!
Thanks, little fella!

Dan:
Do you even KNOW what fascism is??

Do you?

From Dictionary.com
fas·cism
–noun

a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism.

#1 we don't have a governmental system led a dictator having complete power, Bush is a lame duck who will leave in 1/09, quite far from a dictator.

#2 our govt isn't forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism.

#3 Govt. does regiment industry and commerce to a degree, especially in industries like aviation. However it in no way makes a decision whether little TIMCO here in Greensboro can or cannot use non-compete agreements.

From Merriam Webster:

fas·cism

a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition

Same thing as the first definition. Tell me again what this definition has to do with employers making decisions about non-compete clauses eh?

You lose again. BDS, causes extreme delusions.

"Gosh, I am STILL laughing at Demon Deacon's lack of knowledge on business practices and fascism!!"

In support of his argument Demon Deacon supplies a left wing kook site. You and your buds at oldamericancentury omitted a key part of fascism as defined twice in my previous post, a govt. ruled by a dictator. As much as you and your fellow BDS sufferers like to think it, we don't have a dictatorship. Hint, hint, there is a presidential election going on and none of the candidates is GWB.

Thanks for the link however, I'll save it and attribute it to you whenever the subject of TIMCO or BDS comes up since you liked the two.

One more and back to work, tell me again about those "wrench jockeys" at TIMCO eh?

FAA certified engineers who can design and certify the airworthiness of an airplane's components through the FAA = "wrench jockeys" for Demon Deacon.

I didn't notice a retort on that one as once again you got your arse handed to you on a platter.

Gosh Danny. I forgot you did not read--my bad! While I realize this will be way over your head--I'm gonna try to work with you....if I can stop laughing at you.

Reclaiming The Issues: Islamic Or Republican Fascism?
by Thom Hartmann

In the years since George W. Bush first used 9/11 as his own "Reichstag fire" to gut the Constitution and enhance the power and wealth of his corporate cronies, many across the political spectrum have accused him and his Republican support group of being fascists.

On the right,The John Birch Society's website editor recently opined of the Bush Administration's warrantless wiretap program: "This is to say that from the administration's perspective, the president is, in effect, our living constitution. This is, in a specific and unmistakable sense, fascist."

On the left, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. specifically indicts the Bush administration for fascistic behavior in his book "Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and his Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy."

Genuine American fascists are on the run, and part of their survival strategy is to redefine the term "fascism" so it can't be applied to them any more. Most recently, George W. Bush said: "This nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation."

In fact, the Islamic fundamentalists who apparently perpetrated 9/11 and other crimes in Spain and the United Kingdom are advocating a fundamentalist theocracy, not fascism.

But theocracy - the merging of religion and government - is also on the plate for the new American fascists (just as it was for Hitler, who based the Nazi death cult on a "new Christianity" that would bring "a thousand years of peace"), so they don't want to use that term, either.

While the Republicans promote the term "Islamo-fascism," the rest of the world is pushing back, as the BBC noted in an article by Richard Allen Greene ("Bush's Language Angers US Muslims" - 12 August 2006):

"Security expert Daniel Benjamin of the Center for Strategic and International Studies agreed that the term [Islamic fascists] was meaningless.
"'There is no sense in which jihadists embrace fascist ideology as it was developed by Mussolini or anyone else who was associated with the term,' he said. 'This is an epithet, a way of arousing strong emotion and tarnishing one's opponent, but it doesn't tell us anything about the content of their beliefs.'"

Their beliefs are, quite simply, that governments of the world should be subservient to religion, a view shared by a small but significant part of today's Republican party. But that is not fascism - the fascists in the US want to exploit the fundamentalist theocrats to achieve their own fascistic goals.

Vice President of the United States Henry Wallace was the first to clearly and accurately point out who the real American fascists are, and what they're up to.

In early 1944 the New York Times asked Vice President Wallace to, as Wallace noted, "write a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?"

Vice President Wallace's answers to those questions were published in The New York Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the Axis powers of Germany and Japan:

"The really dangerous American fascists," Wallace wrote, "are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power."
In this, Vice President Wallace was using the classic definition of the word "fascist" - the definition Mussolini had in mind when he claimed to have invented the word. (It was actually Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile who wrote the entry in the Encyclopedia Italiana that said: "Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power." Mussolini, however, affixed his name to the entry, and claimed credit for it.)

As the 1983 American Heritage Dictionary noted, fascism is: "A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism." (The US dictionary definition has gotten somewhat squishier since then, as all the larger dictionary companies have been bought up by multinational corporations.)

Mussolini was quite straightforward about all this. In a 1923 pamphlet titled "The Doctrine of Fascism" he wrote, "If classical liberalism spells individualism, Fascism spells government." But not a government of, by, and for We The People - instead, it would be a government of, by, and for the most powerful corporate interests in the nation.

In 1938, Mussolini brought his vision of fascism into full reality when he dissolved Parliament and replaced it with the "Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni" - the Chamber of the Fascist Corporations. Corporations were still privately owned, but now instead of having to sneak their money to folks like John Boehner and covertly write legislation, they were openly in charge of the government.

Vice President Wallace bluntly laid out his concern about the same happening here in America in his 1944 Times article:

" If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. ... They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead."
Nonetheless, at that time there were few corporate heads who had run for political office, and, in Wallace's view, most politicians still felt it was their obligation to represent We The People instead of corporate cartels. The real problem would come, he believed, when the media was concentrated in only a few hands:

"American fascism will not be really dangerous," he added in the next paragraph, "until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information..."
Noting that, "Fascism is a worldwide disease," Wallace further suggested that fascism's "greatest threat to the United States will come after the war" and will manifest "within the United States itself."

In Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel "It Can't Happen Here," a conservative southern politician is helped to the presidency by a nationally syndicated "conservative" radio talk show host. The politician - Buzz Windrip - runs his campaign on family values, the flag, and patriotism. Windrip and the talk show host portray advocates of traditional American democracy as anti-American. When Windrip becomes President, he opens a Guantanamo-style detention center, and the viewpoint character of the book, Vermont newspaper editor Doremus Jessup, flees to Canada to avoid prosecution under new "patriotic" laws that make it illegal to criticize the President. As Lewis noted in his novel:

"The President, with something of his former good-humor [said]: 'There are two [political] parties, the Corporate and those who don't belong to any party at all, and so, to use a common phrase, are just out of luck!' The idea of the Corporate or Corporative State, Secretary [of State] Sarason had more or less taken from Italy." And, President "Windrip's partisans called themselves the Corporatists, or, familiarly, the 'Corpos,' which nickname was generally used."
Lewis, the first American writer to win a Nobel Prize, was world famous by 1944, as was his book "It Can't Happen Here." And several well-known and powerful Americans, including Prescott Bush, had lost businesses in the early 1940s because of charges by Roosevelt that they were doing business with Hitler. These events all, no doubt, colored Vice President Wallace's thinking when he wrote in The New York Times:

"Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion. American fascists of this stamp were clandestinely aligned with their German counterparts before the war, and are even now preparing to resume where they left off, after 'the present unpleasantness' ceases."
Thus, the rich get richer (and more powerful) on the backs of the poor and the middle class, giant corporate behemoths wipe out small and middle sized businesses, and a corporate iron fist is seizing control of our government itself. As I detail in my new book "Screwed: The Undeclared War Against The Middle Class," the primary beneficiaries of this new fascism are the corporatists, while the once-outspoken middle class of the 1950s-1980s is systematically being replaced by a silent serf-class of the working poor.

As Wallace wrote, some in big business "are willing to jeopardize the structure of American liberty to gain some temporary advantage." He added, "Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise [companies]. In an effort to eliminate the possibility of any rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself."
But American fascists who would want former CEOs as President, Vice President, House Majority Whip, and Senate Majority Leader, and write legislation with corporate interests in mind, don't generally talk to We The People about their real agenda, or the harm it does to small businesses and working people. Instead, as Hitler did with the trade union leaders and the Jews, they point to a "them" to pin with blame and distract people from the harms of their economic policies.

In a comment prescient of George W. Bush's recent suggestion that civilization itself is at risk because of gays or Muslims, Wallace continued:

" The symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment and adapted to immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power. It is no coincidence that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case been heralded by the growth of prejudice. It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination..."
But even at this, Wallace noted, American fascists would have to lie to the people in order to gain power. And, because they were in bed with the nation's largest corporations - who could gain control of newspapers and broadcast media - they could promote their lies with ease.

"The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact," Wallace wrote. "Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy."
In his strongest indictment of the tide of fascism the Vice President of the United States saw rising in America, he added:

"They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection."
Finally, Wallace said, "The myth of fascist efficiency has deluded many people. ... Democracy, to crush fascism internally, must...develop the ability to keep people fully employed and at the same time balance the budget. It must put human beings first and dollars second. It must appeal to reason and decency and not to violence and deceit. We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in the form of monopolies and cartels."

This liberal vision of an egalitarian America in which very large businesses and media monopolies are broken up under the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act (which Reagan stopped enforcing, leading to the mergers & acquisitions frenzy that continues to this day) was the driving vision of the New Deal (and of "Trust Buster" Teddy Roosevelt a generation earlier).

As Wallace's President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, said when he accepted his party's renomination in 1936 in Philadelphia:

"...Out of this modern civilization, economic royalists [have] carved new dynasties.... It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction.... And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man...."
Speaking indirectly of the fascists that Wallace would directly name almost a decade later, Roosevelt brought the issue to its core:

"These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power."
But, he thundered in that speech:

"Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power!"
In 2006, we again stand at the same crossroad Roosevelt and Wallace confronted during the Great Depression and World War II. Fascism is again rising in America, this time calling itself "compassionate conservatism," and "the free market" in a "flat" world. The RNC's behavior today eerily parallels the day in 1936 when Roosevelt said:

"In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for."
President Roosevelt and Vice President Wallace's warnings have come full circle. Thus it's now critical that we reclaim the word "fascist" to describe current-day Republican policies, support progressive websites that spread the good word, and join together this November at the ballot box to stop fascist election fraud and this most recent incarnation of Republican-fascism from seizing complete and irretrievable control of our nation.

_____________________________

It would be a lot easier if you just READ every now and then, Dan.
As to your contention that TIMCO employees are the type employee who should, although you don't condone, have to sign non-compete clauses. You are delusional. They have no skillset that is proprietary. They are NOT working on the stealth bomber out there. You may understand why a plane flies, but you have no clue as to corporate law.

"As to your contention that TIMCO employees are the type employee who should, although you don't condone, have to sign non-compete clauses."

Never said that.

Try some reading yourself, my 3:23 pm post yesterday:

"This post is not for/against non-compete agreements,..."

My point was that these people have special training and skills and or not simply mechanics, or "wrench jockeys" as you incorrectly noted.

*********************************************
From American Heritage:

Fascism a. A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism. b. A political philosophy or movement based on or advocating such a system of government. 2. Oppressive, dictatorial control.

Link all the kook sites you want, cut and paste all the essays you want, we do not have central authority under a dictator.

All three definitions I provided mention the word DICTATOR, why is that concept so difficult to understand eh? If we had a dictatorship we would not be enjoying the fun of watching Hillary and Obama going after each other. Bush would simply say he will continue being president until he decides otherwise.

Enjoy sweet dreams from all the left wing sources you wish, we are not living under fascism. Your insistence that we do is a slap in the face to those who actually live under these conditions.