Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

The lede graph in a Hartford Courant story detailing a meeting held with Wall Street Journal analysts and leaders of United Technologies was not encouraging: "’Anyplace outside of Connecticut is low-cost,’ United Technologies Corp.'s chief financial officer, Gregory Hayes, told Wall Street analysts -- paraphrasing previous remarks by another UTC executive, Jeff Pino, the president of Sikorsky Aircraft. ‘Even if work has to stay in the U.S., there are opportunities to reduce cost by moving out of those high-cost locations,’ Hayes said.” UTC executives hosted the analysts at a meeting at the St. Regis Hotel in Manhattan devoted to the company’s business prospects in 2010. Both the conversation with Wall Street analysts and UTC’s previous contacts with administration officials in Connecticut indicate the company may plan to shift jobs from Connecticut to lower cost facilities in both foreign ouptposts – India, Poland, China, Turkey, Istanbul, Singapore, Japan – and out o...

Pratt&Whitney is moving some of its operations out of Connecticut because it is more cost effective for the parent company, United Technologies, to have the work done elsewhere, in this case in Georgia, Singapore and Japan. A far flung enterprise, UTC also has a research facility in China. The bad news is that China is now selling to Iran products that may, over the course of time, enable it to blow up Israel . Iran -- whose undemocratically installed president, Mahmoud Amadinijad, is busy making new and improved explosive devises that blow up American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan -- used to be considered part of the axis of evil; now it is simply yet another member in good standing at the ineptly named United Nations. The good news is that Georgia is in the United States . There is another Georgia , formerly a satellite of the Soviet Union , that has been attempting, without much aid and succor from president of the United States Barack Obama, to fend off the grasping Pri...