Boeing pleads not guilty to fraud in criminal case over deadly 737 Max crashes
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> The families of those killed in the crashes petitioned the court to reverse the deal, arguing that under the Crime Victims' Rights Act, they should have been consulted and had input into the agreement. The Justice Department initially objected, arguing that it was the FAA, a regulatory agency overseeing airplane certification, that had been defrauded by Boeing, not those killed in the crashes and their survivors.
> Judge O'Connor sided with the families this fall, ruling that they legally are crime victims and that their rights were violated under the Crime Victims' Rights Act, and they should have been consulted. But he has not yet agreed to reopen the deferred prosecution agreement.
So the DOJ cut a deal with Boeing to skip the court system entirely - which I assume was a bit of a win-win for everyone: Boeing didn't have to admit fault, the DOJ didn't have to build a painstaking fraud case without a smoking gun, and victims got restitution without having to wait for a verdict.
It seems here the real case is against the DOJ for not pursuing a criminal case in the first place. I also wonder what sort of risk this has to backfire - if Boeing ends up beating the fraud case, or worse, they find executives singularly responsible, does that mean Boeing can claw back their $2 billion payouts to this point?
Also, why would anyone ever want to cut a deal with the DOJ again if they have no authority? For the next accident, why not just wait until the court verdict to pay out to victims next time?
Except it isn't a win-win for all the people who want to continue not randomly dying because a bunch of business executives wanted to crank out some extra earnings. Like why is it ever a benefit to anyone that a multi billion dollar company doesn't have to admit fault, it was quite literally their fault. They made the high level decisions which deprioritized safety, and now people are dead. It's only a few levels abstracted from pulling the trigger, and if we had a real functioning society those reasonable would be put in jail like other murderers.
Presumably Boeing extracted waivers from the victims and airlines in exchange for the payouts, so those payments are basically civil tort and breach of contract settlements and independently enforceable.
All that money should go to the families or at least the majority. I don't care some share holders lost some money but I guess this is the disgusting side of overreaching capitalism.
Why? The 500m you mentioned means that each family which lost a family member in the crashes received 1.45m USD.
Seems like most families were okay with that number? Why should the compensation to airlines now also be paid to the families? What would the fair amount be?
There's a case to be made that in buying the Boeing 737MAX, airlines were deliberately choosing an aircraft they knew was cutting safety corners, and thus bear some moral culpability. But I have no idea how one would accordingly derive a compensation figure to families, especially from airlines not involved in the crashes. Presumably the indignation is merely because $500m is less than $1.7b. But all that disparity really reflects is the enormity of the airline industry (economically, physically, etc), and that the two crashes, however horrendous, are economically inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.
When it comes to moral outrage regarding deaths, I find it worth remembering that for most of human history, and in most (if not all) societies, economic restitution to families sufficed in the case of negligent death, regardless of any remaining benefits to someone else. Moreover, this was also often the case for many kinds of murder and other violent, intentional crime, partly because punishment beyond restitution risked clan and tribal feuding. The relative safety and stability (including legal predictability) of modern life has heightened our sense of injustice when these events do occur.
Except this wasn't just negligence. It was willful negligence.
This wasn't "oopsie, we didn't do everything we should have", this was "Don't sweat the plane, the earnings take priority." The logic espoused in your post above is basically an acceptance of the principle that as an executive of a multibillion dollar company, that you bear no responsibility to the society in which you operate. By doing nothing, we announce loud and clear, that this is acceptable behavior to generate a mass produced, industrial scale flying coffin, and make the rest of society pay for it.
I refuse to accept that principle as valid. The only thing that need be done for evil to thrive is that good men sit back and do nothing. This is worthy of strife. The pursuance of this criminal case to it's ultimate comclusion creates the predictability that this country really needs: that noatter who you are, no matter what your position, you will be held ultimately responsible for blatantly unethical behavior.
The airlines had no right to accept a plane where such corners as were cut with the MAX were cut. Boeing had no right to pressure their employees into just pushing the thing through. Boeing had no right to deceive regulators. Boeing had no right to interfere with the fundamentally adversarial relationship between their. Employees, and their employees operating as FAA proxies.
You claim the unpredictability introduced by prosecution by the government is undesirable; I claim the unpredictability created by a cabal of executives playing fast and loose in the pursuit of earnings, and getting away scot free has injected far more real harm into our day to day than the Government doing what it was designed to do ever will. The executive of infinite risk tolerance must be moved against, as it is inevitably these people who are most likely to cause serious harm to our society in the long run. Far more so than even the common thief or ne'er-do-well unaddressed ever will.
Due process demands we uncover the ultimate truth. To do anything less, is to abrogate the DoJ's primary mission, and to abrogate any shred of accountability of these corporate legal fictions we the Public suffer to exist so that the most unethical among us can scrabble to the top to pull the slotmachine lever to see if they can cashout. That risk taking compounds over and over again against people who can do naught but put faith in those who had one bloody job: make safe airplanes, but who decided making money was more important.
I'll suffer the unpredictability of a duopoly collapsing to a monopoly gladly to get a win where the monopoly realizes that if it so much as sneezes, the international community will come down on them like a brick shithouse thrown by a tornado if they make ultimately profit-seeking driven risks resulting in negligent homicide on the scale of 100s of people. And if it turns out there's lacking paper trail, then it's about time we realize these corporations require far more onerous documents to disincent their financialization at the ultimate risk of the General Public.
Give me subpoena power. I guarantee I'll find no shortage of muck to rake out of this entire affair. I'm done with this regulatory capture BS.