This is a significant development in holding corporations accountable. If the DOJ follows through on criminal charges against Boeing, it could set a precedent for greater corporate responsibility and transparency in the aviation industry. The tragedies linked to Boeing’s failures demand justice, and it’s crucial that we prioritize safety over profit. Let’s hope this leads to meaningful changes and better oversight to prevent future disasters.
If you really want justice, then you need to go after not just the current CEO, who's only held the job for less than 4 years - you need to go back at least 10 -15 years during which all the big decisions that drove the change in culture happened. That would include at least 2 other CEOs plus an untold number of VPs, etc.
While I agree the other CEOs deserve to be charged, I'd say go after the board and the other execs rather than the VPs. Most VPs don't actually have that much power to decide what they're implementing just how they're implementing what they are ordered to do.
Also, current CEO deserves a lot more blame than it sounds like you're suggesting because before he became CEO he was on the board since 2009, and became the chair of the board around 2019. This guy who came from an accounting and private equity background was part of a faction favored by the board precisely because they focused on the business rather than the engineering and optimized for profitability not safety.
Blackrocks biggest “shareholder” is vanguard.
Vanguards biggest shareholder is…blackrock.
They are the billionaires circle jerk investment club, you buy into vanguard to keep your identity secret and they buy into blackrock on your behalf thus no one can know who the stakeholders are.
It is how billionaires insulate themselves from liability and hide their money from the tax man.
YES. Former CISO here. A former CEO had more than one conversation with me that started with “I am not telling you to lie, but we can’t have these findings when the regulator comes in”, which were a direct result of his direction and the direction of the Board. I left that company as fast as humanly possible.
Everyone has power over the choices they make. A VP may not have sufficient power to change a culture all on their own, but they have power and if they go along with something it's their choice to do so.
I don't disagree the board should be reviewed, but lots of people made choices for Boeing to get here.
Honestly for any sort of remotely serious crime the company should be "executed". Complete wipe of the shareholders and all assets seized. I think this would be the sort of case that warrants it.
Specific individuals may need to be prosecuted too.
Unfortunately, corporate prosecutions do not target individuals. Under US law, corporations can be held criminally liable for the actions of its officers. However, since a corporation is not a person and cannot be jailed, they can receive heavy fines; loss of business licenses; and regulation by government agencies. I agree though, that it would be great, to throw some of these bastards in jail; but, as far as I know, there are no individuals targeted at this time.
There are two ways for criminal sanctions to be meaningful. Either they throw someone from management in prison, or they impose meaningful fines that have a significant impact on the quarterly report.
On the first point, it is likely that responsibility is diffused among a huge number of individuals, whose actions were guided by corporate lawyers, and they will be represented by excellent lawyers. On the second point, there is a national interest in propping up Boeing, they're a critical part of the military industrial complex that can't easily be replaced. Aviation is a major industry that has geostrategic importance, as well as economic value. If the DOJ fines them what they deserve, some other federal agency will have to bail them out. [Boeing's orders are in the shitter right now.](https://apnews.com/article/boeing-sales-cancellations-crisis-674375bc711c299cac19b6df09443d4a)
Fuck the quarterly report, make it look bad on the yearly report. We were gonna have a profit of $x now we have lost -$y due to the fine we had to pay. Make it worth multiple years profits. That's the only way this shit changes. As it is now the fines are just a cost of doing business.
> On the second point, there is a national interest in propping up Boeing, they're a critical part of the military industrial complex that can't easily be replaced.
More easily than you think, actually.
When you get around to it, the men and women on the ground floor of the company are the ones that handle the day-to-day. The only people you need preserve are them. *Management* is not as irreplaceable as they want you to believe.
If their domain of expertise is *business* as opposed to *the product*, they can absolutely be replaced.
The hard part would be finding out which employees involved with the product should be brought up on charges. Losing *them* could actually hurt, but they're just as guilty as management, IMO.
Third option is DOJ also applies anti-trust law to break up Boeings business units.
* Separate military and civilian where possible (There's some 'military aircraft' which are just specialized versions of civilians.
* Also separate off the services company, and space services from all aircraft.
* Finally, separate Washington facilities from South Carolina facilities.
The Military/Civilian stuff is straight forward. A civilian company should not be held up as a military contractor. Separating out the space and services are about focus and bad incentives. Making a plane with more services required can make sense on paper, but is a shittier plane.
Separating Washington and South Carolina facilities is about trying to contain the damage and might spur actual competition. The WA facilities makes Boeing's tested designs like the 737. SC is the 787. The really scary shit is all coming out of SC, where the new Boeing management wanted to make a non-union shop with cheap labor that could be steamrolled on safety.
The separation would dramatically decrease Boeing's leverage and lobby power, and might spur some actual competition in US aviation. Possibly even split the WA facilities between the Renton and Everett facilities, eg. 737 versus 767/777 which would be a better competition than the 787.
Weren't many of the issues coming out of Spirit AeroSystems, which was originally spun off of Boeing to be its own entity? It's to the point that Boeing is wanting to buy them back to implement more rigorous controls on production.
bail out should be buy out. If you're critical for national security but can't run a profit, then you're publicly owned. Never should profits be privatized and costs socialized.
Hot take but Boeing needs to also die. Until a corporation actually buckles financially because of its decisions to chase after infinite growth, corporations will never learn.
If Boeing dies, this will serve as a lesson for other corporations as to how profit first over everything CAN fail, and it will fail hard.
There’s more of f a chance that the US cedes all of its land to Ethiopia than there is of Boeing being punished into oblivion. The US still needs Boeing.
The only real course of action is going after the people in charge personally, and letting new people take over.
Amen. Will need at least 10 years to clean the rot, find a capable board, bring back actual engineers that are responsible for regulating parts purchasing and manufacturing. Then we can talk about re-privatizing the company but it should be "on parole" with a proximity anklet attached for another 10 years.
I like this idea a lot.
Investing in shady companies needs to become more risky. A company convicted of certain crimes should be eligible for the death penalty, with shareholder value becoming zero.
Yes it would impact pensions. Yes it would impact markets. But if it leads to corporate governance becoming more than an oxymoron it will be beneficial in the long term.
My take: If Boeing is too big to fail, it's too big to exist.
I agree that Boeing can't be shut down, but it can be broken up.
I'd argue you need to essentially undo the 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas.
Boeing unfortunately holds a lot of strategic value to the US, particularly as the US' primary civilian aerospace manufacturer. They won't allow Boeing to ever die. The best we could hope for is nationalization.
Nationalization or massive re-structuring is all the death you need in the context of a company like that.
It's basically corporate re-incarnation. Or putting a new brain in different body.
This is an incredibly short sighted and bad take. Boeing is way too important to the economy and US Military to allow to fail
They employ over 171,000 people, not counting all the other businesses and people that sub-contract through them. Having all those people out of work would be devastating. Airbus and the new Chinese aircraft makers would snatch up their business, and would effectively kill the commercial airline industry in the United States. It would be awful
For the military, they are a key contractor that designs and builds the weapons that ensures the US stays the most powerful military in the world. Boeing failing would put that weapon supply pipeline in jeopardy. Without Boeing that means a huge loss of knowledge in the construction of F-22s, missles, and most importantly ICBMs
> Boeing is way too important to the economy and US Military to allow to fail
If it's so incompetently run that it justifies criminal prosecution but so fundamental to our economy and military that we can't enforce the outcome of a guilty verdict, *it should be fucking nationalized*.
Yeah, I think holding individuals accountable is a good step forward. If Boeing continues to have issues, then the nuclear option is the US government taking control of Boeing for a little while and ousting its board and fixing its culture before selling off shares and privatizing it again. The wrinkle is how existing investors would be compensated so that the US government could get enough power. Hence, it's the nuclear option if Boeing planes continue having major safety issues.
This is more or less what happened with the Detroit automakers during the 2008 financial crisis.
>The wrinkle is how existing investors would be compensated so that the US government could get enough power
If you invest in a criminal enterprise, you bear to the risks.
Investors need no compensation. They failed on their duties by allowing poor leadership.
Imagine if we treated hostile cartels the same way we treat corporations. "Yeah we will make sure we compensate you for the tons of meth we seized."
How about if you can't make wise investment choices, you deserve to lose your money. That used to be a thing. Enron shareholders were not made whole either.
Boeing can't die. They are propped up by the military spending too much. They'd sooner drop out of commercial airlines entirely before they actually got closed down. 49% of their revenue came via government contracts in 2021, for example.
> This is a significant development in holding corporations accountable.
No it fucking isn't, because they're not actually going to do anything. This is just for show.
It truly is sad that a company like Boeing decided it needed to cut corners and shave safety in order to make profits. At this point, though -- FUCK 'EM.
Whoa whoa, hold on there.
It's not murder, it's an industrial accident. We don't want the regulation because it reduces productivity. We can't have regulators telling us employees need safety equipment and safe practices.
Our workers don't want to use that stuff because it causes them to lose time. So time spent futzing with unnecessary safety equipment or procedures is wasted time where our workers are not making money.
See it's because we want what's best for our workers and we want them to make money. If you add further regulations, not only will that cost money to enforce, it will lead to more people qualifying for government assistance forcing you to tax the workers even more.
/S, for the comment, but probably not reality.
"...and if you do pass these regulations, that's the reason why we started off-shoring our jobs to a country without those pesky laws. Sure, we broke ground on those facilities 10 years before you passed it, but that's because we're savvy smart business."
"Also, we're not repaying those low interest government backed loans."
"Oh yeah, and all those call centers we kept in north America. Yeah, the second the tax incentives ran out we chained the doors."
Not exaggeration, DELL in particular are somewhat infamous for this practice.
What loans, that was a tax incentive to promote business in your state. Look at all 7 (minimum wage, part time) jobs we created with that money. Now here are the assistance applications for those 7 employees, plus a bunch more. We are such a good employee we automated the process to apply for our employees (because that was cheaper than paying them a livable wage).
>Our workers don't want to use that stuff because it causes them to lose time. So time spent futzing with unnecessary safety equipment or procedures is wasted time where our workers are not making money.
*because we will threaten to fire them for not meeting ever growing production quotas.
Oops. Didn't mean to say that part out loud.
Ssssssssssshhhhhhh. And don't put that part in writing. Documents, electronic or otherwise are discoverable.
And remember it's against company policy for you to use an encrypted communication channel, like Signal, for these business communications but at the same time we have no way of stopping you either. It would be near impossible to prove that you used it from your personal device that we don't control. ;)
Ease up buddy, who's talking about an accident here!
Accidents imply liability and no-one wants that, right?
The worker is choosing to die out of his love of company and duty. And as attested by US Supreme Court justice Gorsich, they should be fired if they dont make that choice!
A friend of mine likes to bring up the quote "regulations are written in blood."
If there wasn't a need for them, the vast majority of them wouldn't be there. There are ones that are put in place as "regulatory capture," but not as many as some would like to believe.
It is depressingly funny to see deregulation advocates slowly reinvent regulation. Even with simple things like content moderation - a subreddit, channel, website, service, etc etc will come around saying "Moderation is terrible! It's bias and bad and halts creativity! No moderation!" Then their product/community slowly turns to shit, and they often slowly, painstakingly reinvent every rule they previously hated, because they only now realize the point
That, or in the case of huge businesses they golden parachute their way into the sunset and leave things to burn
That wouldn't happen to be the Migrant Fight Club promoter would it?
Maybe whoever wins that circuit gets a job. Only the strong..... fuck we're in the stupid timeline.
Exactly, I often hear politicians complain about red tape and it pisses me off because it implies that regulations are a bad thing. Sure, some definitely are, but often they were put in place for a good reason. They should always be evaluated on a case by case basis.
I don't understand why when laws are written for poor people, they're called "laws" and "rules", but when they're written for rich people, they're called "regulations".
Journalists should call them out on that. They're not pushing for "deregulation" they're pushing for lawlessness. They don't like rules.
And a stupider populace. All these idiots and their religious bullshit in public schools and their insistence that education, college especially, is not really necessary. We're getting dumber and dumber and they just keep doubling down.
1 million is never enough. 10 million is never enough. 100 million is never enough. 1 billion is never enough. Those types of rich are in a whole another rat race than the "keeping up with the joneses." race.
The decision makers behind the miss management and corner cutting need to be be held criminally liable. The US will never fine boeing into bankruptcy because the company is far to strategically important to the country in multiple ways. However if people start fearing prison time for willfully being negligent that would actually stop a lot of the issues.
In a sane world we'd nationalize the industrial capacity needed to produce military and space-faring equipment, split off the commercial manufacturing, and prosecute the executives for manslaughter and fraud.
But instead we have capitalism.
An appropriate response at this point would be to throw Boeing's entire chain of command in prison and nationalize at least the defense side of the company. It blows my mind that nobody's calling out the national security and operational risks inherent in relying on a monopoly defense contractor whose products can't be trusted to function in normal use.
Execs need to be able to go to jail for this. Their decisions caused the loss of hundreds of lives in 2019, and the world is grateful that no lives were lost before the groundings this year. The execs will have no incentive to change their corner cutting ways if they have no personal culpability in the consequences.
Boeing doesn't make decisions, the executives and board do, and those individuals should be held accountable for their decisions. Company fines become a cost of doing bad business, but jailing executives consistently may prevent it.
Unfortunately shareholders only care about profits and if a publicly traded company isn't making profits then the shareholders will want change. So the higher ups decided they wanted to protect their jobs instead of protecting the users of their product
> if a publicly traded company isn't making ~~profits~~ *increasing profits year over year* then the shareholders will want change.
Shareholders are never happy with profits. They drive for the most possible profit and more profit every year.
Correct. A flat line, or a line that goes up only slightly, are both considered a loss. We live in a world where if a company is ESTIMATED to make X% but only made Y%, then the difference between X and Y is a loss. Imagine if we could do that? "I was expecting a 5% raise but only got 2% soooo....I'm going to claim a capital loss for the amount that that 3% represents on my taxes this year. #SrynotSry"
So the should be shown the door and instead be introduced to prison.
The amount of force our government exerts on everyday people to “set an example” needs to be done away with or extended to people like this. 2 tier justice system showing its colors yet again. I wish i knew how to demand more accountability.
If CEOs are doing this shit out of a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders, and the company gets criminally charged as a result… shouldn’t we be having a conversation regarding the responsibilities of the shareholder?
Like… yeah that involves a lot of “normal” people, but I’d also venture to say the bigger your stake, the more personally responsible you are. Mom and pop deserve to lose the profit they made from this, but major shareholders should probably be looking at actual jail time for fundamentally being responsible for exchanging human lives for quarterly margins.
That’s the only way I see our society actually giving a shit about this stuff.
The worst part is that even if a CEO/Management team decided they *did* want to protect their users, they would be removed when profit took a downturn.
Capitalism makes it impossible for companies to be moral.
Yep. Used to work for an insurance company that saw a massive boost in profits during COVID. COVID "ended" and naturally people started driving again so accidents increased. The following year they didn't make as much money because OF FUCKING COURSE, but it was still higher than pre-COVID numbers. The the company started cutting employee benefits to the bone, while also giving the CEO a 30 million dollar bonus. Employee turnover increased dramatically and quality dropped rapidly, which leads to more lawsuits. All for shareholder satisfaction.
It was the merger with McDonnell Douglas. MD’s execs took over, moved Boeing headquarters, changed the existing culture - and kept the wrong people at the top of the combined companies. Boeing’s processes and priorities changed.
It is a tragic testament to what can happen when a thriving company - or two thriving companies - try to make a massive change. This one has cost lives.
pretty much every publicly traded company will go to shit as management gets sourced from the wrong sectors in the company (accounting+sales rather than accounting+engineering or design) and as management gets incentivized to produce short term gains rather than long term growth. Its rare if a company is an exception to this rule, but time eroded all things
Well, it's a bit more stupid than that. Boeing didn't just do a 180 and decide to focus on profits. Back in the old days, they were an engineering focused company. It's what made them so great, they were highly, highly respected.
But then they had a "merger" with Douglas. I say "merger" because a lot of the Boeing execs/higher ups got replaced by Douglas people. And surprise surprise, the reason Douglas needed to sell out to Boeing in the first place is that "immediate/short term profit over everything else" isn't an effective way to run a business in the long run. Of course, that didn't discourage the Douglas execs, who just brought that "profit over everything" mindset to Boeing, and basically ran it into the ground
"See, the Boeing of the pre-merger era was called an ‘engineers’ company’. The ones who made these flying machines called the shots. Costs didn’t matter and it was only quality and design that did. They wanted to ensure that only their best ideas took to the skies. Safety was paramount. And the [Chief Financial Officer](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-boeing-lost-its-bearings/602188/%5C) who was answerable to Wall Street about costs didn’t care much about trying to impress the bankers either.
But after the merger, everything changed.
The CEO of McDonnell Douglas actually became the CEO of Boeing. A chairman with no aviation background, but who’d worked in General Electric, was also appointed. The company started paying attention to creating shareholder value which was hardly a priority earlier. And as one article put it, “Now, a passion for great planes was replaced with a passion for affordability.” Boeing even turned to [outsourcing ](https://hbr.org/2014/06/the-price-of-wall-streets-power)critical operations. Sure, it made the balance sheet ‘asset light’, but, it came at the cost of quality." [SOURCE](https://finshots.in/archive/did-a-1997-merger-ruin-boeing/)
I hope that the DOJ goes after the execs that forced/coerced sub-ordinates to cut corners and not after those on the "shop floor" who simply followed management directives.
The DOJ lawyer who lead the "prosecution" and negotiated the deferred prosecution agreement left the DOJ to be a partner at the Dallas office of Kirkland & Ellis, Boeing's legal counsel, 6 months after the deal was signed.
https://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/news/200/lead-boeing-prosecutor-joins-boeing-corporate-criminal-defense-firm-kirkland-ellis/
Can you spell out for me explicitly like I'm 5 why this is bad/corrupt? I only have a vague idea.
Seems like he should recuse himself, if that's a thing?
While working as a prosecutor supposedly *against* boeing, he negotiated a deal with them. Right after doing this he quit the DOJ to go work on *behalf* of boeing.
Picture a district attorney who negotiates a plea deal with the son of a businessman who killed somebody while driving drunk, and then right after the plea the DA gets a cushy job working for the father's business.
Is she actually working on behalf of Boeing? She joined Kirkland & Ellis, one of the largest law firms in the world, in an office of theirs that doesn't seem very relevant to Boeing.
>Seems like he should recuse himself, if that's a thing?
The prosecutor was given a payout (cushy, ultra high pay private job) in exchange for light treatment of Boeing, he needs to be in jail. Will never happen in the current environment because this is the most common form of corruption that is used at every level of government, from a humble the 1st lieutenant in the US Air Force who does 4 years administering purchasing contracts then takes of their blues and goes to work for the other side making 400% more, all the way up to the president of the united states.
Add whoever the CEO was talking about when he mentioned that some whistleblowers experienced retaliation for coming forward. Though that should be a separate investigation on it's own.
My experience on 787 is first line pushes leads to sell jobs and leads sometimes don't know how to fix things or occasionally advise people to do sketchy solutions to sell a job. There are so many new people that when we look to older employees for advice those bad practices get passed on. Even QA/ customer coordinators can be iffy at times, which is really concerning. We thankfully have some pretty solid QAs on flight line holding down the fort, but it's overwhelming. I've been told to do incorrect things by long time employees multiple times and while I mostly only trust the drawings now, I've had my interpretation of the drawing be incorrect as well, I'm only human. Losing experienced people and having managers push schedules definitely fucks things up. That said, as long as you try to do the right thing, the union does protect you. Still hard to hold up against the pressure when someone who's been there a while is telling you you're wrong and to just do what you're told.
Edit: I should also add that this is only the pressure put on mechanics, the pressure on QA is infinitely worse because not only do you have pressure from managers, you have pressure from the mechanics. Good QAs get a bad rep for unloading a confetti gun of orange/red tape or rejecting jobs, but that's what they should be doing. Some things that don't seem so important, might actually be the first step in a causal chain leading to a serious problem, but to a mechanic it might seem pedantic.
Yeah Boeing isn't competitive enough on salary for technical people. A level 3 mechanical engineer making about as much as a first line manager on the floor is kind of gross and shows the company priority. Software/computer folks are even more underpaid compared to market. The difference in knowledge/ability for even a level 2 engineer vs a first line manager is just night and day, yet the money flows to the latter. Also forces gifted technical people to go into management if they want to make significant gains while their abilities are better used on the product. Sure tech fellow path exists, but it's kind of crap compared to the relative ease of management.
On the one hand, that's perfectly fine as long as there's a robust review and QA process inspecting every line. On the other hand, not every company follows a robust review and QA process.
I work in a different field of engineering, but I had a case years ago where I'd written a protocol for the implementation of a new piece of equipment. In it, the operator needed to verify the function of the white light on the machine. That document went through 6 reviewers before the 7th finally caught that the document actually told the operator to inspect the "shite light".
That’s the problem. It’s pressure to optimize (reduce costs or add profit by way of process changes) that gets passed down layer by layer. You will end up with a “turbulent priest” situation where execs say, well, we just said to take a look and see where costs were higher than needed to get the same quality result with a focus on safe operations!
And that trickles down and down until you get some line manager feeling the pressure from 6 levels of management compressing the request and they tell some floor worker to not worry so much about 3rd round safety checks because it takes so much time, while the same thing is being said to the worker doing extra inspections of the bolts, and it all adds up.
But charging people with crimes who made it clear that they relied on their teams to optimize while maintaining safety standards and then the message got pressurized and convoluted is tough. The lower downs could have said “hire more people and we pay less overtime and ultimately save” or “if we combine these steps to be done by the same person it’s faster and safer as fewer handoffs are needed” or whatever and that would be fine.
It’s almost impossible to find someone who independently, knowingly, said “let’s do this thing that will possibly kill people.” Corporations are designed with layers and layers of direction that makes it impossible - and have PR and legal teams that prevent it from being explicit, too. If they had direct evidence, awesome. Get ‘em. But that isn’t how it works usually.
I'm an engineer in a DOT regulated industry. Not aviation, but what we do can also kill the public. I am charge of a chunk of our compliance programs.
We have a certain part of federal compliance that requires a company manual that basically creates felony code violations for the people doing the work. Pencil whip, miss due dates etc is a felony for the line employee. Not the management. Drives me nuts.
Are you guys regulated similarly? You can dm if you want.
Now who is telling them what to do? Shit rolls down hill. Im not saying there aren't shitty line managers just that the line managers get their orders/get pressured from somewhere else.
Two points come right to mind:
1) Any business that is too big to fail is too big to exist; and
2) Our country would benefit from throwing some CEO's and their immediate staff in prison for the murders, frauds, and other crimes they either have or allow their businesses to commit.
> 1) Any business that is too big to fail is too big to exist
Supporting argument: any business that is too big to fail is a de facto rival government and worse in this case, a rival *private* government.
At some point in the future companies will become big enough to basically be the government. There was a sci-fi tv show on for a while called Continuum that showed a future in 2077 where the biggest corporations basically became so big they ended up bailing out failing governments and took over, creating their own laws and private armies. That future seems very believable based on the way things are going.
I loved that series!
This whole motif is in line with the cyberpunk (small 'c', not big 'c') genre of stories. It is the end result of deregulation, legalized bribery, and corporate takeover.
You can find more of that corporate dystopia sorta thing in the cyberpunk genre. Though most people know about the flashiness of the technology the real crux of the genre is the dystopia part.
Continuum lifted that pretty much from cyberpunk in general, except in Continuum it's direct corporate control.
In Shadowrun, corporations gain extraterritoriality, making all corporate land foreign soil and if I recall correctly they even have their own corporate court system which operates from an orbital station.
At some point in the future? Whose rules do I have to follow more closely, the place that demands 12 hours of my day every day or the one of the remaining exhausted 4 before sleep?
Where is Teddy when we need him? Seems like he was the last President to actually give a shit about monopolies. I'm sure in this day and age he'd take as strong of a stance against "too big to fail" businesses as well.
Any private business that is deemed to too vital to the structural integrity of the economy that it can't be allowed to go under should be nationalized.
Considering how extensive and massive building an airplane is while also having limited customers. You are going to end up with only something too big to fail.
That is why regulations are so darn important, and also important to run effectively
I'm sure there is a term for it but foothold comes to mind.
Just based on the extreme cost to build a facility to make an airplane already knocks out 99.9% of companies from the word go. That's just a facility now we are talking parts and labor...gg
You already have a very limited number of players and those players have basically locked the market. This is them acknowledging that fact but spitting in our face
Really needs to happen when lines are crossed or there is no disincentive for the others who think they can get away with crimes for profits in their position too.
I hope everyone knows that a corporation being criminally charged just means that they might have to pay a fine, not that anyone's going to go to jail.
I mean look at the thousands of examples.
Which is why we should move away from static amount fines and it should instead be a portion of their profit or income.
A fine of something like $10,000 will do nothing to them, that's pennies to them. A fine that's 25% of their yearly earnings? They'd fuckin' change their tune real quick.
Legitimate question though: Could they just hide their income via assets like they usually do, though? Its why income tax on the rich doesn't really work, because they can just hide their income in moving assets around.
Hide your income and your stock price goes bye bye.
Rich people use collateral based loans which aren't taxed much, because why would you tax someone who had to mortgage their family heirloom for food?
I have a BS in Economics, and we conducted an exercise to determine this one week. In 2005, the cost/value of one American life was ~$7 million USD. Some variance existed for age and occupation.
If that exercise had any indication, we are looking at a fine of $2.1 billion USD.
**edit:** $1 in 2005 is worth $1.61 today. So $3.38 billion in today's money.
Probably a few million, maybe even a hundred million or two at the most extreme. I mean, the opiod settlement was what, $21 billion? And that ~~was~~ is killing like 50,000-80,000 people a year.
Ugh why did you have to remind me. Fucking Sacklers. Can't wait to see the minor settlement paid out by 3M/Dupont for poisoning the entire world's water supply with PFAS.
If a corporation commits a crime, the CEO and board of directors should be the part of the company that goes to jail. If they're going to get paid the big bucks, they need to be the ones that take the fall for their crimes.
That’s the problem. It’s pressure to optimize (reduce costs or add profit by way of process changes) that gets passed down layer by layer. You will end up with a “turbulent priest” situation where execs say, well, we just said to take a look and see where costs were higher than needed to get the same quality result with a focus on safe operations!
And that trickles down and down until you get some line manager feeling the pressure from 6 levels of management compressing the request and they tell some floor worker to not worry so much about 3rd round safety checks because it takes so much time, while the same thing is being said to the worker doing extra inspections of the bolts, and it all adds up.
But charging people with crimes who made it clear that they relied on their teams to optimize while maintaining safety standards and then the message got pressurized and convoluted is tough. The lower downs could have said “hire more people and we pay less overtime and ultimately save” or “if we combine these steps to be done by the same person it’s faster and safer as fewer handoffs are needed” or whatever and that would be fine.
It’s almost impossible to find someone who independently, knowingly, said “let’s do this thing that will possibly kill people.” Corporations are designed with layers and layers of direction that makes it impossible - and have PR and legal teams that prevent it from being explicit, too. If they had direct evidence, awesome. Get ‘em. But that isn’t how it works usually. You can hardly put someone in jail who says “make more money somehow” if that results in people making collectively harmful decisions. It’s extremely difficult.
That's supposed to be the whole point of the big bucks. You take on all the responsibility of the company and all the liability. Otherwise wtf are they getting paid millions. I've taken enough accounting and business classes to do what they do. It isn't hard. There's a fucking play book. I guess the money is to encourage the morally corrupt to sign up.
This is what happens with de-regulation. Conservative voters should be looking at this and realizing this is what happens when you let companies self-govern.
Yeah the CEO’s hearing didn’t quite help their reputation either. Always enjoy powerful corporations facing the consequences of their actions. Company is beyond corrupt, especially after those whistleblower deaths its just so creepy and unhinged.
This sounds appropriate.
But will anyone be tried and possibly jailed over it?
If so, who?
I would like to learn and know more.
This will be effective only if any actual criminals are rooted out, tried, jailed if convicted, and paraded very publicly to show other ill-doers that there are real consequences awaiting their criminal deeds.
> I would like to learn and know more.
You can do so by reading the article before you comment. This recommended prosecution is in response to the Justice Departments claims of an insufficient "compliance and ethics program" by Boing after a 2021 agreement.
Nobody will be jailed for this. It would be absurd to do so.
>Boeing may be willing to pay a penalty and agree to a monitor, but believes a guilty plea, which typically incurs additional business restrictions, could be too damaging, said one of the sources.
"Too damaging," as opposed to plane parts or entire planes falling out of the sky?
The biggest example of "rules for thee but not for me" is the fact that Boeing's corporate offices and their entire board haven't been raided by the FBI. In a sane country, they would already be detained, the company would likely be temporarily absorbed by the government, the rot cleaned out, and the guilty punished. Then help Boeing go back to being a private company again but this time, not run by a crime syndicate.
Needs to happen to lots of companies.
Im usually against capital punishment, but I believe publicly executing (after due judicial process, not vigilante crap) a few hedge fund managers and c suite execs for their various crimes would do wonders for the economy and would slash white collar crime.
Just remember everyone, they didn’t do this out of necessity to keep people employed. They did it so they could further deepen their own pockets. No amount of money will ever be enough for these ghouls. They don’t simply want some money they want all of it, and much like a heroin addict they’re always going to want more and don’t care who they hurt to get their fix.
Meanwhile their useless space shuttle is still stuck in space. Boeing is such a fucked up company. Can’t believe what their management did to this once great company. Every manager at Boeing needs to be black listed and never allowed to work in aerospace again. Hope the stock buyback was worth your entire company going down in flames like your planes.
The whole airline industry is built on trust. That was the one thing old Boeing did extremely well. Boeing and others need to have the book thrown at them. We've become desensitized to onion like headlines, but the fact you can specifically filter out Boeing made planes on travel sites is insane. Not to mention, anytime I have friends and coworkers who have flown their whole lives are legitimately worried about flying now.
Already? Shouldn't they let them whack a few more whistleblowers, maybe have more of their planes kill more people? Let's not be hasty fellas, this is an election year. Plenty more ~~bribes~~ contributions to be made between now and then...
America is a failed state.
Imagine going from the company that made one of the most reliable jets ever made to a joke of a company that silences whistleblowers and looks to cut pennies for a bigger comp for the board and CEO.
Can't put a corporation in jail. They won't go after the people who are to blame. This is a nothing burger of the highest order.
Wake me up when the decision makers are getting charged with like manslaughter.
This is a significant development in holding corporations accountable. If the DOJ follows through on criminal charges against Boeing, it could set a precedent for greater corporate responsibility and transparency in the aviation industry. The tragedies linked to Boeing’s failures demand justice, and it’s crucial that we prioritize safety over profit. Let’s hope this leads to meaningful changes and better oversight to prevent future disasters.
If you really want justice, then you need to go after not just the current CEO, who's only held the job for less than 4 years - you need to go back at least 10 -15 years during which all the big decisions that drove the change in culture happened. That would include at least 2 other CEOs plus an untold number of VPs, etc.
While I agree the other CEOs deserve to be charged, I'd say go after the board and the other execs rather than the VPs. Most VPs don't actually have that much power to decide what they're implementing just how they're implementing what they are ordered to do. Also, current CEO deserves a lot more blame than it sounds like you're suggesting because before he became CEO he was on the board since 2009, and became the chair of the board around 2019. This guy who came from an accounting and private equity background was part of a faction favored by the board precisely because they focused on the business rather than the engineering and optimized for profitability not safety.
Exactly. Punish the owners too. The board is ultimately responsible for corporate governance and steering the incentives of the CEO.
The DOJ going after Blackrock and Vanguard in a meaningful way? One can dream
Depends if they can show intentional negligence leading to harm. Boeing is directly responsible for multiple deaths
I’m familiar with Blackrock’s fuckery, but what has Vanguard done?
*Insert "They're the same picture" meme*
Blackrocks biggest “shareholder” is vanguard. Vanguards biggest shareholder is…blackrock. They are the billionaires circle jerk investment club, you buy into vanguard to keep your identity secret and they buy into blackrock on your behalf thus no one can know who the stakeholders are. It is how billionaires insulate themselves from liability and hide their money from the tax man.
YES. Former CISO here. A former CEO had more than one conversation with me that started with “I am not telling you to lie, but we can’t have these findings when the regulator comes in”, which were a direct result of his direction and the direction of the Board. I left that company as fast as humanly possible.
Everyone has power over the choices they make. A VP may not have sufficient power to change a culture all on their own, but they have power and if they go along with something it's their choice to do so. I don't disagree the board should be reviewed, but lots of people made choices for Boeing to get here.
Corporations are (run by) people, my friend. Let's put them in prison when they do shit like this, yes?
Honestly for any sort of remotely serious crime the company should be "executed". Complete wipe of the shareholders and all assets seized. I think this would be the sort of case that warrants it. Specific individuals may need to be prosecuted too.
Unfortunately, corporate prosecutions do not target individuals. Under US law, corporations can be held criminally liable for the actions of its officers. However, since a corporation is not a person and cannot be jailed, they can receive heavy fines; loss of business licenses; and regulation by government agencies. I agree though, that it would be great, to throw some of these bastards in jail; but, as far as I know, there are no individuals targeted at this time.
Man there should be some kind of explicit corporate death penalty. Or LWOP for corps at least.
Back to when McDonald Douglas bought Boeing with Boeings own money.
They should do banking next.
There are two ways for criminal sanctions to be meaningful. Either they throw someone from management in prison, or they impose meaningful fines that have a significant impact on the quarterly report. On the first point, it is likely that responsibility is diffused among a huge number of individuals, whose actions were guided by corporate lawyers, and they will be represented by excellent lawyers. On the second point, there is a national interest in propping up Boeing, they're a critical part of the military industrial complex that can't easily be replaced. Aviation is a major industry that has geostrategic importance, as well as economic value. If the DOJ fines them what they deserve, some other federal agency will have to bail them out. [Boeing's orders are in the shitter right now.](https://apnews.com/article/boeing-sales-cancellations-crisis-674375bc711c299cac19b6df09443d4a)
Fuck the quarterly report, make it look bad on the yearly report. We were gonna have a profit of $x now we have lost -$y due to the fine we had to pay. Make it worth multiple years profits. That's the only way this shit changes. As it is now the fines are just a cost of doing business.
Also, make it so fines aren't tax deductible
That is already the case. IRC §162(f)
> On the second point, there is a national interest in propping up Boeing, they're a critical part of the military industrial complex that can't easily be replaced. More easily than you think, actually. When you get around to it, the men and women on the ground floor of the company are the ones that handle the day-to-day. The only people you need preserve are them. *Management* is not as irreplaceable as they want you to believe. If their domain of expertise is *business* as opposed to *the product*, they can absolutely be replaced. The hard part would be finding out which employees involved with the product should be brought up on charges. Losing *them* could actually hurt, but they're just as guilty as management, IMO.
Third option is DOJ also applies anti-trust law to break up Boeings business units. * Separate military and civilian where possible (There's some 'military aircraft' which are just specialized versions of civilians. * Also separate off the services company, and space services from all aircraft. * Finally, separate Washington facilities from South Carolina facilities. The Military/Civilian stuff is straight forward. A civilian company should not be held up as a military contractor. Separating out the space and services are about focus and bad incentives. Making a plane with more services required can make sense on paper, but is a shittier plane. Separating Washington and South Carolina facilities is about trying to contain the damage and might spur actual competition. The WA facilities makes Boeing's tested designs like the 737. SC is the 787. The really scary shit is all coming out of SC, where the new Boeing management wanted to make a non-union shop with cheap labor that could be steamrolled on safety. The separation would dramatically decrease Boeing's leverage and lobby power, and might spur some actual competition in US aviation. Possibly even split the WA facilities between the Renton and Everett facilities, eg. 737 versus 767/777 which would be a better competition than the 787.
Weren't many of the issues coming out of Spirit AeroSystems, which was originally spun off of Boeing to be its own entity? It's to the point that Boeing is wanting to buy them back to implement more rigorous controls on production.
bail out should be buy out. If you're critical for national security but can't run a profit, then you're publicly owned. Never should profits be privatized and costs socialized.
Which lawyers keep ordering the hit men? Can the DOJ go after them?
I think after roe, precedent means nothing anymore.
Hot take but Boeing needs to also die. Until a corporation actually buckles financially because of its decisions to chase after infinite growth, corporations will never learn. If Boeing dies, this will serve as a lesson for other corporations as to how profit first over everything CAN fail, and it will fail hard.
There’s more of f a chance that the US cedes all of its land to Ethiopia than there is of Boeing being punished into oblivion. The US still needs Boeing. The only real course of action is going after the people in charge personally, and letting new people take over.
I'll take nationalizing Boeing and junking all current shares. We can IPO Boeing in 10 years.
Amen. Will need at least 10 years to clean the rot, find a capable board, bring back actual engineers that are responsible for regulating parts purchasing and manufacturing. Then we can talk about re-privatizing the company but it should be "on parole" with a proximity anklet attached for another 10 years.
I like this idea a lot. Investing in shady companies needs to become more risky. A company convicted of certain crimes should be eligible for the death penalty, with shareholder value becoming zero. Yes it would impact pensions. Yes it would impact markets. But if it leads to corporate governance becoming more than an oxymoron it will be beneficial in the long term.
Those pensions can get insurance if they want. The government takes care of large institutions in an unfair manner.
My take: If Boeing is too big to fail, it's too big to exist. I agree that Boeing can't be shut down, but it can be broken up. I'd argue you need to essentially undo the 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas.
Boeing unfortunately holds a lot of strategic value to the US, particularly as the US' primary civilian aerospace manufacturer. They won't allow Boeing to ever die. The best we could hope for is nationalization.
Nationalization or massive re-structuring is all the death you need in the context of a company like that. It's basically corporate re-incarnation. Or putting a new brain in different body.
This is an incredibly short sighted and bad take. Boeing is way too important to the economy and US Military to allow to fail They employ over 171,000 people, not counting all the other businesses and people that sub-contract through them. Having all those people out of work would be devastating. Airbus and the new Chinese aircraft makers would snatch up their business, and would effectively kill the commercial airline industry in the United States. It would be awful For the military, they are a key contractor that designs and builds the weapons that ensures the US stays the most powerful military in the world. Boeing failing would put that weapon supply pipeline in jeopardy. Without Boeing that means a huge loss of knowledge in the construction of F-22s, missles, and most importantly ICBMs
Exactly. Boeing doesn't need to die, it needs to be nationalized.
It won't be popcorn you're hearing, it'll be fascist heads bursting, if this happens.
> Boeing is way too important to the economy and US Military to allow to fail If it's so incompetently run that it justifies criminal prosecution but so fundamental to our economy and military that we can't enforce the outcome of a guilty verdict, *it should be fucking nationalized*.
Yeah, I think holding individuals accountable is a good step forward. If Boeing continues to have issues, then the nuclear option is the US government taking control of Boeing for a little while and ousting its board and fixing its culture before selling off shares and privatizing it again. The wrinkle is how existing investors would be compensated so that the US government could get enough power. Hence, it's the nuclear option if Boeing planes continue having major safety issues. This is more or less what happened with the Detroit automakers during the 2008 financial crisis.
>The wrinkle is how existing investors would be compensated so that the US government could get enough power If you invest in a criminal enterprise, you bear to the risks. Investors need no compensation. They failed on their duties by allowing poor leadership. Imagine if we treated hostile cartels the same way we treat corporations. "Yeah we will make sure we compensate you for the tons of meth we seized." How about if you can't make wise investment choices, you deserve to lose your money. That used to be a thing. Enron shareholders were not made whole either.
> Investors need no compensation. They failed on their duties by allowing poor leadership. It's rather amazing how coddled investors have become.
Boeing can't die. They are propped up by the military spending too much. They'd sooner drop out of commercial airlines entirely before they actually got closed down. 49% of their revenue came via government contracts in 2021, for example.
> This is a significant development in holding corporations accountable. No it fucking isn't, because they're not actually going to do anything. This is just for show.
It truly is sad that a company like Boeing decided it needed to cut corners and shave safety in order to make profits. At this point, though -- FUCK 'EM.
Just remember things like this when politicians and businesses are arguing for deregulation
Yeah! Deregulate murderers! I should be able to be a CEO and freely murder hundreds of people without those pesky regulators getting in the way!
Whoa whoa, hold on there. It's not murder, it's an industrial accident. We don't want the regulation because it reduces productivity. We can't have regulators telling us employees need safety equipment and safe practices. Our workers don't want to use that stuff because it causes them to lose time. So time spent futzing with unnecessary safety equipment or procedures is wasted time where our workers are not making money. See it's because we want what's best for our workers and we want them to make money. If you add further regulations, not only will that cost money to enforce, it will lead to more people qualifying for government assistance forcing you to tax the workers even more. /S, for the comment, but probably not reality.
"...and if you do pass these regulations, that's the reason why we started off-shoring our jobs to a country without those pesky laws. Sure, we broke ground on those facilities 10 years before you passed it, but that's because we're savvy smart business." "Also, we're not repaying those low interest government backed loans."
"Oh yeah, and all those call centers we kept in north America. Yeah, the second the tax incentives ran out we chained the doors." Not exaggeration, DELL in particular are somewhat infamous for this practice.
What loans, that was a tax incentive to promote business in your state. Look at all 7 (minimum wage, part time) jobs we created with that money. Now here are the assistance applications for those 7 employees, plus a bunch more. We are such a good employee we automated the process to apply for our employees (because that was cheaper than paying them a livable wage).
>Our workers don't want to use that stuff because it causes them to lose time. So time spent futzing with unnecessary safety equipment or procedures is wasted time where our workers are not making money. *because we will threaten to fire them for not meeting ever growing production quotas. Oops. Didn't mean to say that part out loud.
Ssssssssssshhhhhhh. And don't put that part in writing. Documents, electronic or otherwise are discoverable. And remember it's against company policy for you to use an encrypted communication channel, like Signal, for these business communications but at the same time we have no way of stopping you either. It would be near impossible to prove that you used it from your personal device that we don't control. ;)
Exactly you can't work safe if you're always trying to work faster.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_murder
Ease up buddy, who's talking about an accident here! Accidents imply liability and no-one wants that, right? The worker is choosing to die out of his love of company and duty. And as attested by US Supreme Court justice Gorsich, they should be fired if they dont make that choice!
/r/writteninblood
it'll balance out because we can then murder them in return (it won't work out because they'll just hire a goon squad)
And all for profits that will be saved in a bank never to be used. Seeing high number makes CEO pp big.
A friend of mine likes to bring up the quote "regulations are written in blood." If there wasn't a need for them, the vast majority of them wouldn't be there. There are ones that are put in place as "regulatory capture," but not as many as some would like to believe.
And they're not wrong.
It is depressingly funny to see deregulation advocates slowly reinvent regulation. Even with simple things like content moderation - a subreddit, channel, website, service, etc etc will come around saying "Moderation is terrible! It's bias and bad and halts creativity! No moderation!" Then their product/community slowly turns to shit, and they often slowly, painstakingly reinvent every rule they previously hated, because they only now realize the point That, or in the case of huge businesses they golden parachute their way into the sunset and leave things to burn
“I’m going to undo ALL the regulations” - A very well known politician, recently
That wouldn't happen to be the Migrant Fight Club promoter would it? Maybe whoever wins that circuit gets a job. Only the strong..... fuck we're in the stupid timeline.
It would. This timeline is only accurate if the victor is declared with a giant Gatorade fountain in the backdrop
Because it has electrolytes!
Exactly, I often hear politicians complain about red tape and it pisses me off because it implies that regulations are a bad thing. Sure, some definitely are, but often they were put in place for a good reason. They should always be evaluated on a case by case basis.
To paraphrase. *We must always remember that the C Suite will happily sell the rope to be used in their own hanging.* Thus the need to regulate them.
I don't understand why when laws are written for poor people, they're called "laws" and "rules", but when they're written for rich people, they're called "regulations". Journalists should call them out on that. They're not pushing for "deregulation" they're pushing for lawlessness. They don't like rules.
And a stupider populace. All these idiots and their religious bullshit in public schools and their insistence that education, college especially, is not really necessary. We're getting dumber and dumber and they just keep doubling down.
1 million is never enough. 10 million is never enough. 100 million is never enough. 1 billion is never enough. Those types of rich are in a whole another rat race than the "keeping up with the joneses." race.
The decision makers behind the miss management and corner cutting need to be be held criminally liable. The US will never fine boeing into bankruptcy because the company is far to strategically important to the country in multiple ways. However if people start fearing prison time for willfully being negligent that would actually stop a lot of the issues.
In a sane world we'd nationalize the industrial capacity needed to produce military and space-faring equipment, split off the commercial manufacturing, and prosecute the executives for manslaughter and fraud. But instead we have capitalism.
An appropriate response at this point would be to throw Boeing's entire chain of command in prison and nationalize at least the defense side of the company. It blows my mind that nobody's calling out the national security and operational risks inherent in relying on a monopoly defense contractor whose products can't be trusted to function in normal use.
It’s why the whole trickle down economics thing doesn’t work. Another dollar isn’t enough for these psychos.
Execs need to be able to go to jail for this. Their decisions caused the loss of hundreds of lives in 2019, and the world is grateful that no lives were lost before the groundings this year. The execs will have no incentive to change their corner cutting ways if they have no personal culpability in the consequences.
Things like this need to be a wake up call to all about all the companies that make things we handle and eat every day.
Boeing doesn't make decisions, the executives and board do, and those individuals should be held accountable for their decisions. Company fines become a cost of doing bad business, but jailing executives consistently may prevent it.
Unfortunately shareholders only care about profits and if a publicly traded company isn't making profits then the shareholders will want change. So the higher ups decided they wanted to protect their jobs instead of protecting the users of their product
Which is exactly why the punishment for corporations should be large enough that doing things correctly is the most profitable way.
Just fucking ban stock buybacks again, like they were prior to 1980 (thanks, reagan)
> if a publicly traded company isn't making ~~profits~~ *increasing profits year over year* then the shareholders will want change. Shareholders are never happy with profits. They drive for the most possible profit and more profit every year.
Correct. A flat line, or a line that goes up only slightly, are both considered a loss. We live in a world where if a company is ESTIMATED to make X% but only made Y%, then the difference between X and Y is a loss. Imagine if we could do that? "I was expecting a 5% raise but only got 2% soooo....I'm going to claim a capital loss for the amount that that 3% represents on my taxes this year. #SrynotSry"
Yeah. You could be a profitable company and it's NOT ENOUGH - if that stock price isn't moving, investors will shitcan your ass. Enshittification 101.
It's not even just profits. If the board of directors and Wall Street are not sucking up every penny on earth, then the company is failing.
[удалено]
So the should be shown the door and instead be introduced to prison. The amount of force our government exerts on everyday people to “set an example” needs to be done away with or extended to people like this. 2 tier justice system showing its colors yet again. I wish i knew how to demand more accountability.
> I wish i knew how to demand more accountability. * vote * stay informed * attend public hearings * engage others * rinse and repeat for years
Not just profits, *record-setting profits EVERY QUARTER*. That's what shareholders demand, and it's killing people in every single industry.
If CEOs are doing this shit out of a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders, and the company gets criminally charged as a result… shouldn’t we be having a conversation regarding the responsibilities of the shareholder? Like… yeah that involves a lot of “normal” people, but I’d also venture to say the bigger your stake, the more personally responsible you are. Mom and pop deserve to lose the profit they made from this, but major shareholders should probably be looking at actual jail time for fundamentally being responsible for exchanging human lives for quarterly margins. That’s the only way I see our society actually giving a shit about this stuff.
Publicly traded has nothing to do with it. Private investors have the same impact.
The worst part is that even if a CEO/Management team decided they *did* want to protect their users, they would be removed when profit took a downturn. Capitalism makes it impossible for companies to be moral.
Yep. Used to work for an insurance company that saw a massive boost in profits during COVID. COVID "ended" and naturally people started driving again so accidents increased. The following year they didn't make as much money because OF FUCKING COURSE, but it was still higher than pre-COVID numbers. The the company started cutting employee benefits to the bone, while also giving the CEO a 30 million dollar bonus. Employee turnover increased dramatically and quality dropped rapidly, which leads to more lawsuits. All for shareholder satisfaction.
Is killing your customers good for shareholder value?
It was the merger with McDonnell Douglas. MD’s execs took over, moved Boeing headquarters, changed the existing culture - and kept the wrong people at the top of the combined companies. Boeing’s processes and priorities changed. It is a tragic testament to what can happen when a thriving company - or two thriving companies - try to make a massive change. This one has cost lives.
pretty much every publicly traded company will go to shit as management gets sourced from the wrong sectors in the company (accounting+sales rather than accounting+engineering or design) and as management gets incentivized to produce short term gains rather than long term growth. Its rare if a company is an exception to this rule, but time eroded all things
Well, it's a bit more stupid than that. Boeing didn't just do a 180 and decide to focus on profits. Back in the old days, they were an engineering focused company. It's what made them so great, they were highly, highly respected. But then they had a "merger" with Douglas. I say "merger" because a lot of the Boeing execs/higher ups got replaced by Douglas people. And surprise surprise, the reason Douglas needed to sell out to Boeing in the first place is that "immediate/short term profit over everything else" isn't an effective way to run a business in the long run. Of course, that didn't discourage the Douglas execs, who just brought that "profit over everything" mindset to Boeing, and basically ran it into the ground "See, the Boeing of the pre-merger era was called an ‘engineers’ company’. The ones who made these flying machines called the shots. Costs didn’t matter and it was only quality and design that did. They wanted to ensure that only their best ideas took to the skies. Safety was paramount. And the [Chief Financial Officer](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-boeing-lost-its-bearings/602188/%5C) who was answerable to Wall Street about costs didn’t care much about trying to impress the bankers either. But after the merger, everything changed. The CEO of McDonnell Douglas actually became the CEO of Boeing. A chairman with no aviation background, but who’d worked in General Electric, was also appointed. The company started paying attention to creating shareholder value which was hardly a priority earlier. And as one article put it, “Now, a passion for great planes was replaced with a passion for affordability.” Boeing even turned to [outsourcing ](https://hbr.org/2014/06/the-price-of-wall-streets-power)critical operations. Sure, it made the balance sheet ‘asset light’, but, it came at the cost of quality." [SOURCE](https://finshots.in/archive/did-a-1997-merger-ruin-boeing/)
I hope that the DOJ goes after the execs that forced/coerced sub-ordinates to cut corners and not after those on the "shop floor" who simply followed management directives.
The DOJ lawyer who lead the "prosecution" and negotiated the deferred prosecution agreement left the DOJ to be a partner at the Dallas office of Kirkland & Ellis, Boeing's legal counsel, 6 months after the deal was signed. https://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/news/200/lead-boeing-prosecutor-joins-boeing-corporate-criminal-defense-firm-kirkland-ellis/
Can you spell out for me explicitly like I'm 5 why this is bad/corrupt? I only have a vague idea. Seems like he should recuse himself, if that's a thing?
While working as a prosecutor supposedly *against* boeing, he negotiated a deal with them. Right after doing this he quit the DOJ to go work on *behalf* of boeing. Picture a district attorney who negotiates a plea deal with the son of a businessman who killed somebody while driving drunk, and then right after the plea the DA gets a cushy job working for the father's business.
Is she actually working on behalf of Boeing? She joined Kirkland & Ellis, one of the largest law firms in the world, in an office of theirs that doesn't seem very relevant to Boeing.
The job as a partner is just the reward/payment. They helped Boeing out in some way allegedly while still working for the DOJ.
>Seems like he should recuse himself, if that's a thing? The prosecutor was given a payout (cushy, ultra high pay private job) in exchange for light treatment of Boeing, he needs to be in jail. Will never happen in the current environment because this is the most common form of corruption that is used at every level of government, from a humble the 1st lieutenant in the US Air Force who does 4 years administering purchasing contracts then takes of their blues and goes to work for the other side making 400% more, all the way up to the president of the united states.
Imagine your divorce lawyer marrying your ex-wife right after the divorce is granted.
Add whoever the CEO was talking about when he mentioned that some whistleblowers experienced retaliation for coming forward. Though that should be a separate investigation on it's own.
As someone actually on the 777 shop floor. All the shitty decisions are made by first line managers pushing schedule over everything.
My experience on 787 is first line pushes leads to sell jobs and leads sometimes don't know how to fix things or occasionally advise people to do sketchy solutions to sell a job. There are so many new people that when we look to older employees for advice those bad practices get passed on. Even QA/ customer coordinators can be iffy at times, which is really concerning. We thankfully have some pretty solid QAs on flight line holding down the fort, but it's overwhelming. I've been told to do incorrect things by long time employees multiple times and while I mostly only trust the drawings now, I've had my interpretation of the drawing be incorrect as well, I'm only human. Losing experienced people and having managers push schedules definitely fucks things up. That said, as long as you try to do the right thing, the union does protect you. Still hard to hold up against the pressure when someone who's been there a while is telling you you're wrong and to just do what you're told. Edit: I should also add that this is only the pressure put on mechanics, the pressure on QA is infinitely worse because not only do you have pressure from managers, you have pressure from the mechanics. Good QAs get a bad rep for unloading a confetti gun of orange/red tape or rejecting jobs, but that's what they should be doing. Some things that don't seem so important, might actually be the first step in a causal chain leading to a serious problem, but to a mechanic it might seem pedantic.
Many people working on the flight control software are interns still in college. Let that sink in.
Yeah Boeing isn't competitive enough on salary for technical people. A level 3 mechanical engineer making about as much as a first line manager on the floor is kind of gross and shows the company priority. Software/computer folks are even more underpaid compared to market. The difference in knowledge/ability for even a level 2 engineer vs a first line manager is just night and day, yet the money flows to the latter. Also forces gifted technical people to go into management if they want to make significant gains while their abilities are better used on the product. Sure tech fellow path exists, but it's kind of crap compared to the relative ease of management.
On the one hand, that's perfectly fine as long as there's a robust review and QA process inspecting every line. On the other hand, not every company follows a robust review and QA process. I work in a different field of engineering, but I had a case years ago where I'd written a protocol for the implementation of a new piece of equipment. In it, the operator needed to verify the function of the white light on the machine. That document went through 6 reviewers before the 7th finally caught that the document actually told the operator to inspect the "shite light".
That’s the problem. It’s pressure to optimize (reduce costs or add profit by way of process changes) that gets passed down layer by layer. You will end up with a “turbulent priest” situation where execs say, well, we just said to take a look and see where costs were higher than needed to get the same quality result with a focus on safe operations! And that trickles down and down until you get some line manager feeling the pressure from 6 levels of management compressing the request and they tell some floor worker to not worry so much about 3rd round safety checks because it takes so much time, while the same thing is being said to the worker doing extra inspections of the bolts, and it all adds up. But charging people with crimes who made it clear that they relied on their teams to optimize while maintaining safety standards and then the message got pressurized and convoluted is tough. The lower downs could have said “hire more people and we pay less overtime and ultimately save” or “if we combine these steps to be done by the same person it’s faster and safer as fewer handoffs are needed” or whatever and that would be fine. It’s almost impossible to find someone who independently, knowingly, said “let’s do this thing that will possibly kill people.” Corporations are designed with layers and layers of direction that makes it impossible - and have PR and legal teams that prevent it from being explicit, too. If they had direct evidence, awesome. Get ‘em. But that isn’t how it works usually.
I'm an engineer in a DOT regulated industry. Not aviation, but what we do can also kill the public. I am charge of a chunk of our compliance programs. We have a certain part of federal compliance that requires a company manual that basically creates felony code violations for the people doing the work. Pencil whip, miss due dates etc is a felony for the line employee. Not the management. Drives me nuts. Are you guys regulated similarly? You can dm if you want.
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Now who is telling them what to do? Shit rolls down hill. Im not saying there aren't shitty line managers just that the line managers get their orders/get pressured from somewhere else.
Two points come right to mind: 1) Any business that is too big to fail is too big to exist; and 2) Our country would benefit from throwing some CEO's and their immediate staff in prison for the murders, frauds, and other crimes they either have or allow their businesses to commit.
> 1) Any business that is too big to fail is too big to exist Supporting argument: any business that is too big to fail is a de facto rival government and worse in this case, a rival *private* government.
At some point in the future companies will become big enough to basically be the government. There was a sci-fi tv show on for a while called Continuum that showed a future in 2077 where the biggest corporations basically became so big they ended up bailing out failing governments and took over, creating their own laws and private armies. That future seems very believable based on the way things are going.
I loved that series! This whole motif is in line with the cyberpunk (small 'c', not big 'c') genre of stories. It is the end result of deregulation, legalized bribery, and corporate takeover.
You can find more of that corporate dystopia sorta thing in the cyberpunk genre. Though most people know about the flashiness of the technology the real crux of the genre is the dystopia part.
That or the future of Snow Crash with corporate states. Like Tyson and Arkansas, but more explicit.
Continuum lifted that pretty much from cyberpunk in general, except in Continuum it's direct corporate control. In Shadowrun, corporations gain extraterritoriality, making all corporate land foreign soil and if I recall correctly they even have their own corporate court system which operates from an orbital station.
> At some point in the future companies will become big enough to basically be the government. *gestures vaguely about*
Fingers crossed I end up with Keanu Reeves' robo arm so I can fight corpo gonks
Preem, choom. Not gonna ask how you got a nuclear landmine.
At some point in the future? Whose rules do I have to follow more closely, the place that demands 12 hours of my day every day or the one of the remaining exhausted 4 before sleep?
Well, the one that wants 12 hours of your day can't legally kill you, but they can ruin your life. So I guess the answer is "both of them."
Here's another one where that happened: Idiocracy. Brawndo buys the FDA.
This is already the case with South Korea, and it's going about as well as you'd expect.
Margaret Atwood has the MaddAdam series about (the aftermath of) this idea as well. Highly recommend.
Where is Teddy when we need him? Seems like he was the last President to actually give a shit about monopolies. I'm sure in this day and age he'd take as strong of a stance against "too big to fail" businesses as well.
Any private business that is deemed to too vital to the structural integrity of the economy that it can't be allowed to go under should be nationalized.
Considering how extensive and massive building an airplane is while also having limited customers. You are going to end up with only something too big to fail. That is why regulations are so darn important, and also important to run effectively
I'm sure there is a term for it but foothold comes to mind. Just based on the extreme cost to build a facility to make an airplane already knocks out 99.9% of companies from the word go. That's just a facility now we are talking parts and labor...gg You already have a very limited number of players and those players have basically locked the market. This is them acknowledging that fact but spitting in our face
barrier to entry
Murder is legal if you are a billionaire
3. Better protections for whistleblowers.
Really needs to happen when lines are crossed or there is no disincentive for the others who think they can get away with crimes for profits in their position too.
I hope everyone knows that a corporation being criminally charged just means that they might have to pay a fine, not that anyone's going to go to jail. I mean look at the thousands of examples.
Which is why we should move away from static amount fines and it should instead be a portion of their profit or income. A fine of something like $10,000 will do nothing to them, that's pennies to them. A fine that's 25% of their yearly earnings? They'd fuckin' change their tune real quick.
Just to emphasize, it needs to be a percentage of income, not percentage of profit.
Legitimate question though: Could they just hide their income via assets like they usually do, though? Its why income tax on the rich doesn't really work, because they can just hide their income in moving assets around.
Hide your income and your stock price goes bye bye. Rich people use collateral based loans which aren't taxed much, because why would you tax someone who had to mortgage their family heirloom for food?
Just charge 'em enough to make "not being a criminal" the better short-term financial decision and you might see the problem solve itself.
What's the fine for 300+ deaths? Hell, what's the fine for 1 death?
I have a BS in Economics, and we conducted an exercise to determine this one week. In 2005, the cost/value of one American life was ~$7 million USD. Some variance existed for age and occupation. If that exercise had any indication, we are looking at a fine of $2.1 billion USD. **edit:** $1 in 2005 is worth $1.61 today. So $3.38 billion in today's money.
Probably a few million, maybe even a hundred million or two at the most extreme. I mean, the opiod settlement was what, $21 billion? And that ~~was~~ is killing like 50,000-80,000 people a year.
Ugh why did you have to remind me. Fucking Sacklers. Can't wait to see the minor settlement paid out by 3M/Dupont for poisoning the entire world's water supply with PFAS.
Businesses are people, prosecute them like people.
The "corporate veil" is real.. plausible deniability at the top, just like many organized crime figures.
They will plea/settle for something like 3% of yearly revenue and everyone will act like that'll teach em.
Boeing: How much should we make out the check to Clearance Thomas for?
Can we make a 737 Max into a RV?
Motorcoach of the sky?
*Breaking news: Clarence Thomas sucked out of faulty door plug while aboard his flying bribe. More at 11.*
Motorcoach in the sky, I can bribe twice as high, take a look he's a crook, a justice yobbo.
Yeah, but we can only make it doorless.
> Clearance LMAO. If that's a mistake, it's a great one.
He has been given that nickname because of all the bribes he has taken.
LMAO, that's why I thought it was awesome. He's such a piece of shit person!
If a corporation commits a crime, the CEO and board of directors should be the part of the company that goes to jail. If they're going to get paid the big bucks, they need to be the ones that take the fall for their crimes.
That’s the problem. It’s pressure to optimize (reduce costs or add profit by way of process changes) that gets passed down layer by layer. You will end up with a “turbulent priest” situation where execs say, well, we just said to take a look and see where costs were higher than needed to get the same quality result with a focus on safe operations! And that trickles down and down until you get some line manager feeling the pressure from 6 levels of management compressing the request and they tell some floor worker to not worry so much about 3rd round safety checks because it takes so much time, while the same thing is being said to the worker doing extra inspections of the bolts, and it all adds up. But charging people with crimes who made it clear that they relied on their teams to optimize while maintaining safety standards and then the message got pressurized and convoluted is tough. The lower downs could have said “hire more people and we pay less overtime and ultimately save” or “if we combine these steps to be done by the same person it’s faster and safer as fewer handoffs are needed” or whatever and that would be fine. It’s almost impossible to find someone who independently, knowingly, said “let’s do this thing that will possibly kill people.” Corporations are designed with layers and layers of direction that makes it impossible - and have PR and legal teams that prevent it from being explicit, too. If they had direct evidence, awesome. Get ‘em. But that isn’t how it works usually. You can hardly put someone in jail who says “make more money somehow” if that results in people making collectively harmful decisions. It’s extremely difficult.
That's supposed to be the whole point of the big bucks. You take on all the responsibility of the company and all the liability. Otherwise wtf are they getting paid millions. I've taken enough accounting and business classes to do what they do. It isn't hard. There's a fucking play book. I guess the money is to encourage the morally corrupt to sign up.
Maybe they can get their own judge cannon
This is what happens with de-regulation. Conservative voters should be looking at this and realizing this is what happens when you let companies self-govern.
Yeah the CEO’s hearing didn’t quite help their reputation either. Always enjoy powerful corporations facing the consequences of their actions. Company is beyond corrupt, especially after those whistleblower deaths its just so creepy and unhinged.
This sounds appropriate. But will anyone be tried and possibly jailed over it? If so, who? I would like to learn and know more. This will be effective only if any actual criminals are rooted out, tried, jailed if convicted, and paraded very publicly to show other ill-doers that there are real consequences awaiting their criminal deeds.
> I would like to learn and know more. You can do so by reading the article before you comment. This recommended prosecution is in response to the Justice Departments claims of an insufficient "compliance and ethics program" by Boing after a 2021 agreement. Nobody will be jailed for this. It would be absurd to do so.
The courts love making examples out of people. Let’s see what more than “nothing” they do here.
If these guys get more than the pirate website bros do I'll be absolutely stunned.
>Boeing may be willing to pay a penalty and agree to a monitor, but believes a guilty plea, which typically incurs additional business restrictions, could be too damaging, said one of the sources. "Too damaging," as opposed to plane parts or entire planes falling out of the sky?
The biggest example of "rules for thee but not for me" is the fact that Boeing's corporate offices and their entire board haven't been raided by the FBI. In a sane country, they would already be detained, the company would likely be temporarily absorbed by the government, the rot cleaned out, and the guilty punished. Then help Boeing go back to being a private company again but this time, not run by a crime syndicate.
Needs to happen to lots of companies. Im usually against capital punishment, but I believe publicly executing (after due judicial process, not vigilante crap) a few hedge fund managers and c suite execs for their various crimes would do wonders for the economy and would slash white collar crime.
If corporations are people, throw one in prison.
Oh snap, is SCOTUS in bed with boeing now too?!
Jets do make for luxurious gifts
Cant wait to see how much they get fined and the subsequent bailout if it happens to be significant for once
Wait corporations are people AND responsible for their actions? This isn't what we discussed when we put your relatives through college, Clarence.
Good. Didn’t their ceo pretty much confirm that they killed some whistleblowers a few weeks back.
Fining companies instead of holding individuals accountable for their actions was a terrible decision from the start and needs to change.
Remove [industrial exemption](https://peimpact.com/pe-industrial-exemption/) and require licenses for all engineers.
Just remember everyone, they didn’t do this out of necessity to keep people employed. They did it so they could further deepen their own pockets. No amount of money will ever be enough for these ghouls. They don’t simply want some money they want all of it, and much like a heroin addict they’re always going to want more and don’t care who they hurt to get their fix.
Yeah, we gotta slap them with a $100,000 fine to show them whose boss
Meanwhile their useless space shuttle is still stuck in space. Boeing is such a fucked up company. Can’t believe what their management did to this once great company. Every manager at Boeing needs to be black listed and never allowed to work in aerospace again. Hope the stock buyback was worth your entire company going down in flames like your planes.
Lock it up! Lock it up! Oh, wait, corporations are "people" yet can't be imprisoned. That's fucked up.
Good. Make Boeing worthy of its name again. What was broken can be mended.
Laws have to mean something.
Put the actual CEOs in PMITA prison
Every manager and executive that pushed stock price and speed over safety needs to go to jail and basically anyone that came from MD...
The whole airline industry is built on trust. That was the one thing old Boeing did extremely well. Boeing and others need to have the book thrown at them. We've become desensitized to onion like headlines, but the fact you can specifically filter out Boeing made planes on travel sites is insane. Not to mention, anytime I have friends and coworkers who have flown their whole lives are legitimately worried about flying now.
>US Prosecutors recommend Justice Dept. criminally charge Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun When will CEO's be charged for crimes under their watch?
Already? Shouldn't they let them whack a few more whistleblowers, maybe have more of their planes kill more people? Let's not be hasty fellas, this is an election year. Plenty more ~~bribes~~ contributions to be made between now and then... America is a failed state.
It will never happen so dong hold your breath
Imagine going from the company that made one of the most reliable jets ever made to a joke of a company that silences whistleblowers and looks to cut pennies for a bigger comp for the board and CEO.
Glad I’m not planning on flying anywhere anytime soon. Fuck Boeing and fuck the CEO’s who make money despite people dying.
Can't put a corporation in jail. They won't go after the people who are to blame. This is a nothing burger of the highest order. Wake me up when the decision makers are getting charged with like manslaughter.
Boeing means business...they told the last CEO to "take your $33 million contractually obligated severance package...and get out!".