Boeing put Wall Street first, safety second ahead of Alaska Air blowout
seattletimes.com
seattletimes.com
Corporate personhood is a centuries-old legal concept [1], finding first mention at the Supreme Court in the 19th century.
> then Boeing should be held criminally liable
They were charged in 2021, and entered into a deferred-prosecution agreement after paying a $2.5bn fine [2]. It appears the DoJ is already looking into the Alaska Airlines blow-out [3].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood
[2] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/boeing-charged-737-max-fraud-...
[3] https://www.wsj.com/business/airlines/justice-department-ope...
This is the invisible boundaries that map the most resilient economies. Even Canada does this to a large degree but stood no chance against American Greed.
The question is if, with new tech, we might be able to undo that?
Boeing makes military hardware that plenty of people would (literally) kill to get their hands on even just the plans for.
American business operates like a feudal system with lords and peasants. Management are the lords and everyone else are the expendable peasants.
Occasionally, the lords are forced to acknowledge that the peasants are just as essential as they are. Without them there is nothing and no one to "lord" over.
This is the abherrent phase that Boeing has just entered. The system will be forced to either return to normal or simply cease to exist a la GE.
Boards are the lords. Management without a board seat are the bourgeoisie; Boeing engineers, too. To the degree we have peasants in modern America, it’s in agriculture and retail, not at Boeing.
I still vividly remember when I was in my 20s, an American executive from a fortune 500 company forgetting to unmute himself and accidentally unmasking himself and the attitude of those around him.
They were at the forefront of "woke" and "diversity". This is when I learned it was just another slogan like "human rights" to make the citizens feel good about themselves.
Just look what was the result after 1989 - companies who could compete with western ones, because government did not required innovation last 40 years and 5 year plans were solved by throwing more people at the problem or outright lying. Result was that products were often obsolete long before manufacturing even started, what was made were poor quality (i.e. we called it finish it at home) and much more expensive than in the rotten West.
There’s also more options than Soviet Union’s state capitalism and US’ “market” capitalism.
The other system has never been implemented. You know this.
E.g.,
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroflot_accidents_and_incid...
and so are our passengers
It’s pricing in the risk of fines, the cost of groundings and the potential penalties thereafter. Put another way, the market is reacting to regulation, actual and potential.
> Back to Marx here. “The two characteristics immanent in the credit system are, on the one hand, to develop the incentive of capitalist production, from enrichment through exploitation of the labour of others, to the purest and most colossal form of gambling and swindling.” So the finance sector carries on just as before, engaging in speculation and regulators cannot and do not stop them.
> The answer is not regulation (before or after the event), but the banning of fictitious capital investment. Close down hedge funds, bitcoin exchanges and exchange trade funding. Instead, banking should be a public service for households and small companies in order to take deposits and make loans – not funding for a massive financial casino where criminals and swindlers gamble away our livelihoods.
Greed, hatred, delusion has poisoned the American psyche and its manifesting across all walks of life. Boeing is just one of the many examples.
This is the end of the American era.
The next chapter has not been written, and the current state of worsening points directly at the reality that things can indeed be better.
Good luck.
1. devaluation of its currency and rise of ponzi finance (Ex. dutch gild decline and tulip mania).
2. declaring perpetual war on an invisible enemy like opposing ideology, terrorists, drugs, poverty, etc
There's a third signal but its too controversial to talk about here.
But why isn't the headline "Wall Street put profits ahead of safety".
Or "The electorate chooses capitalism over safety."
During the oil crisis, highway speed limits were reduced to 55 mph, to ease the gas shortage. But an unexpected side effect was that about 4,000 less people died in car crashes each year. Would you be willing to drive slower to save lives?
Put it another way: how many people would you be willing to kill to be able to drive at 65mph?
Its so easy to sit there and put the blame on some amorphous, anonymous, abstraction like "Wall Street" because it exonerates you and you can feel all self-righteous. But if you were in the same position, are you so sure you'd give up your annual bonus? Or put your stock options underwater? When you knew full well that if you didn't they would just fire you and hire somebody who would?
This argument entirely ignores that lobbying and political donations skew government policy to benefit a small minority on Wall Street.
If this is proven to be a criminal act, even of criminal negligence, charge not only the people making decisions, the board members, but also shareholders, relative to their holdings. Including grouped stocks such as funds.
All it will take is once for this to happen and shareholders to actually think about the repercussions of “investing” in corporations that do this kind of thing.
Right, you wouldn’t invest in American business, period. (Also, how do you criminally charge someone on a pro rata basis? Do you send every American with a pension to jail for 1/31,000,000th the jail time?)
Yes. Yes you do. You set a minimum then fine below that minimum.
Would be pretty convenient for America if China or Russia adopted your proposal…
So who committed the crime?
The exec who wanted to save money? Saving money is the prime directive. Why is it his fault that he was given bad advice by his engineers about it?
Did the engineers commit the crime? Does your computer software have no bugs in it? Arn't the testers and inspectors supposed to give the proper feedback?
Did the testers and inspectors commit the crime? Well, some of those testers and inspectors worked for Boeing, some worked for the FAA--and some worked for the people who bought the airplanes. If there was a serious problem, surely some of them would have spoken up...
Exactly who was the criminal? Who is guilty of "criminal neglect?"
This is what makes all of capitalism deplorable - and sometimes criminal.
When people are hurt - even knowingly - the owners need to be held to task.
Boeing is part of the S&P 500. Almost every American who has stocks is going to have a fund that includes Boeing. That includes people with 401Ks, so basically everyone in the middle class. You’re talking about charging a 100 million people.
Okay, so maybe that’s what you intended. Now what? Does everybody now have a criminal record? What exactly are they charged with? Negligent homicide? A fraction of a percent of the deaths from the 737 Max? Who charges them? How does it get through the courts? What are the exact consequences, and why does Joe Random Schmoe deserve those consequences? Let’s see you actually think this through.
Below a certain holding quantity, fine the shareholders.
I didn’t say it was simple.
Capitalism has destroyed more lives than it’s really worth. If it wants to keep existing its capital owners should be held responsible.
No. Because people still died when the speed limit was 55. Why then didn't we lower the speed limit to 45? Heck, we could stop people from dying altogether by simply banning driving!
So why didn't we do that?
Great question. Why didn't we? How many people are you willing to kill to be able to drive at 65mph instead of 45 mph??
Could it be that the electorate’s power to effect change has become usurped by lobbyists?
No, it is the voters who are wrong.
To the degree voters get apathetic or distracted by culture war issues, sure. When the electorate gives a shit about something, electeds listen. Most issues simply don’t rise to that level. Case in point: Boeing; nobody is going to beat their competitor by promising to be tougher on Boeing.
It's this irrational and unapologetic greed that Americans like to accuse other cultures of but guilty of themselves.
The problem is that keeping investors happy, it is keeping investors with a short term outlook happy.
If anything more than two years is too long term to care about, then the best strategy is to take risks and hope it does not catch up with you before then.
The market is ultimately made up of people. Some of them are short-term oriented. Some of them are not. Which cohort a company chases very much defines the relationship, and Boeing—unfortunately—chose wrong.
Unless they didn't plan at all (an answer I would not accept, or would advocate for prison terms if true), then they absolutely did plan for this outcome. Putting safety importance somewhere except the most important factor in manufacturing commercial passenger planes puts this exact outcome in the "planned" category.
Deciding to shift the needle from "safety" toward "economic feasibility" is very often the correct thing to do, and vice versa.
That might help resolve this kind of conflict of interest.
So any money that _would_ have been paid out to shareholders (bonuses, dividends, buybacks) is what goes to pay the fine, until it is paid. This would dis-incentivize decisions that benefit shareholders at the risk of breaking rules. We all hear about fines being "one day of operating expenses" and so on.. So who cares about getting fined then.
In retrospect I'm sure this isn't that realistic as companies would just do accounting gymnastics to get around this, as many do for other accounting rules.
And it would probably impose an undue burden on auditing to make sure money is put in the right buckets etc...