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Comment by notquitehuman | Hacker News Reader

Boeing has offices in nearly every congressional district, and has been openly bribing congress for decades. They will never fail, experience hardship, or suffer consequences for anything so long as the current republic stands.

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All of the big defense contractors do this, it’s kind of astounding. Lockheed, Raytheon, etc. their offices are spread out over the country to give enough coverage in congressional districts where no one will be willing to kill funding for a project at the risk of their local plant closing.

Also the contracts the big companies have with vendors across the country. They still purchase a large portion of their parts and talking to congress members about the jobs a program creates in their district is a strong data point.

The military-ness has now outweighed the engineering culture in those companies...making them effectively government agencies that are publicly traded. I don't have a positive outlook for any stakeholder.

IMO the only reason those companies are not literal divisions of the government is plausible deniability so they can sell things to other countries. I would guess 95% of their revenue is from the government, and they have very strict government regulations. If we just nationalized Lockheed and friends, I would be we could get improved efficiency.

You don't need to tear down the Republic, but you do need to elect representatives that can somehow stand against the relentless current of lobbyists jockeying for appropriations.

That means campaign funding from a different source.

Which means overruling Citizens United and campaign funding reform.

What you say is true but now they do have some competition from SpaceX. If we make other companies that can compete with Boeing we can at least have price competition which is really the only thing that is needed.

Boeing though has so many government contracts that are used so often for other projects you can’t shut down so you are correct.

I worked with a guy that had previously worked in the Boeing plant making the ospreys. He called it a job factory, not an airplane factory.

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