Gonna try and avoid Boeings of all types going forward
It's the American way.
It looks like the firm bought the prosecutor, resulting in a win for its client. How could this be prevented, though? Politicians can't be trusted with oversight like this--they would use it to punish prosecutors and would inevitably further politicize the Justice Dept.
https://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/news/200/lead-boeing-...
It's like trying to separate church and state in England back in 1600-1700s.
It is the same problem - bribery/corruption but hard to proof and not much interest to investigate.
A tiny number.
And for the ones that can, it’s likely that there are strong ties to the same government that’s supposed to prosecute them. For Boeing, there are significant financial and contractual ties to the US government.
Having a steady stream of ultra-reliable government cash surely reminds you of a state department?
Some are even immortalized in Oscar-winning movies. See e.g. the disasters section here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Gas_and_Electric_Compa...
100% of the ones that are at, or near, the top of their domain. As the US and other developed nations move more towards Oligarchy, this describes a vast majority of the economy.
If you pick a domain, any domain, there's typically < 5 companies that represent almost 100% of the value in that domain. There're some exceptions, like tech, but not many.
Losing even just one of those companies therefore has catastrophic economic effects. So you can't lose them, or even really hurt their profit much, because what's good for them is good for you (you being the US economy).
Bayer Pharmaceutical famously gave thousands of people HIV, knowingly, instead of clearing their inventory. Who knows how many of those people went on to unknowingly spread HIV to their future children or partners. We literally can't measure how many people died of AIDS because of them.
But they're one of the most important pharmaceuticals out there. And we need drugs.
The regulators are under-resourced, if anything.
As opposed to what, people dying because government workers were negligent or on a power trip and nobody getting even that much accountability?
The root problem is that the rich and powerful[1] face no consequences for wrongdoing. It's endemic to every part of life, and nothing gets done about it because the rich and powerful make the rules. It really doesn't matter if they happen to be aligned with "Team Corporation" or "Team Government". They are equally unaccountable to justice.
1: Rich and Powerful are both the exact same thing since money is frictionlessly convertible to power and vice versa.
Bernie Madoff. Jeff Epstein & Ghislane Maxwell. Sam Bankman-Fried. Elizabeth Holmes. Harvey Weinstein.
I get that sometimes you'll see things like Hunter Biden's tax issues being allowed to pass the statute of limitations, but a universal "the rich never face consequences" is just plain false.
can you find any?
can you list how many people were jailed for engineering SARS-CoV?
heck, government hasn't even acknowledge that it was engineered and still pushes fairy tale about bat infecting pangolin who infected a chain of few other animals and then ended up in wet market - but no signs of viruses in 1000 miles between caves and wet market were ever found
But what about "95% of the time 95% of the rich do not face consequences"? It's still a huge problem, and probably what the commenter meant.
I say this more to reminisce than anything. It used the big industry, not anymore. People either adapted or they didn't. Kentucky and Ohio for example used the be Big Tobacco. Now, in large parts - nothing.
EDIT: accidentally a word.
For example, depending on how you calculate it, Merck killed between 3,000 and 500,000 people with Vioxx, and they knew the risks prior to releasing it. They got a fine. And now, the company is now doing just fine. No one was individually prosecuted.
If you have a corporate charter and billions of dollars, you have a license to kill.
They still exist and are regularly pumping out millionaires from their executive suites.
It's helpful to think about corporate America as a gigantic factory, but instead of a factory that makes gadgets or appliances, it's a factory that makes millionaires. On one end of the factory, the raw materials come in: Able-bodied workers, money from customers, and capital from investors. On the other end of the factory, the finished product--millionaire executives--fly out on golden parachutes into retirement. In the back, the waste from the manufacturing process gets discarded: The broken lives and bodies of all the rank-and-file workers, and all the negative societal and environmental externalities that were also destroyed in the process.
Profit for shareholders and [temporary, conditional] employment for workers are mere side effects of the process, and they'd do away with the second one if they had the technology to.
But there's also a recency bias here, as in fatal defects aren't new. Example: there were several fatal accidents with the 737 rudder in the 1990s [1].
One valid area of criticism is how the FAA has essentially allowed Boeing to self-certify to safety since ~2009 [2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_rudder_issues
[2]: https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/letters-to-the-editor/b...
Unless you're not in the US, you want Boeing to get better, not fail (or root for a competitor, but I see no such thing)
Only the absolute worst of the worst of the worst will get jail time for doing something illegal in the course of doing their job at the company, if it's something that nominally benefits that company (as opposed to, say, stealing from the company themselves). And even then, probably only some.
This creates a perverse incentive to commit crimes as an executive, because the upsides are huge -- big bonuses/promotions/pay raises as a part of cutting costs, even if you had to compromise on safety or otherwise do something illegal -- but the biggest downside is usually only having to resign or get fired.
Imagine if the worst result of repeatedly putting someone in the hospital or robbing a bunch of banks with a gun was just losing your job. That's how executive crime works in the US.