The "shareholder value" movement and our tax system reward not innovation, entrepreneurship, and excellence, but rather the money-changer fund managers (especially the hedge-fund types).
It isn’t just this fanatical desire for some kind of gung-ho leadership - it’s also that the finance guys have taken over. With shareholder value driving everything, corners are getting cut and experienced (read: expensive) workers pushed out. It’s sad, immoral, and just plain stupid.
If you ever worked for a large corporation, cutting corners has replaced competence and the drive for excellence. Quality and customer service is too expensive
I saw the identical thing evolve in tech. The engineers and entrepreneurs of the '80's were slowly replaced by the HR clerks and accountants. The CEOs are now mainly for show and for on-command performances for "The Board." It appeared to me that many a leading semi company ends up making products solely to support their stock price.
The cause of this is many fold, when we disincentivized salary in favor of stock options, when stocks became a "fad" and when large investment funds arose who forced the focus away from strategy and onto quarterly results.
What Boeing did to itself is one of the saddest and most instructive stories in American business history. Regression to the mean (remarkably, without any competition) when it could very easily have remained alone at the top. Boeing lost a one-horse race.
It’s why I’m reluctant to fly anymore. Wish they didn’t have so many gov’t contracts. Sort of makes them to big to fail, when oversight could make failure not an option.
Same here...I'm wondering if I really want to fly to Reykjavik on one of Icelandair's Boeing jets. (757-200 series). I haven't read anything bad about any of them...but you gotta wonder and after reading this article...yikes!
Thank you TC. This is an example of the incompetence of the financiers in charge of the whole economy—-the entire game. This is where having as your SUCCESS marker money not quality leads—these people are crazy (really) in fundamental ways. But they are buying the government and they’ll soon dismantle regulation. It sends shivers up my spine to read the story of gutting expertise from a company that should run on expertise. Thank you an uncomfortable and infuriating read. This death was murder. The mob has taken over the corner offices
Orwellian to the max. Good is bad, bad is good. Hard work and experience must be squashed. Those quotes from performance reviews are startling. Being targeted by morons with $signs for eyes must have been so demoralizing. Yet he never wavered. He was murdered. Is there anyone with the power to investigate? Or are the mobsters already the powers that be?
I have 3 commercial pilots in my family. My sister-in-law flies 777’s, my niece and her fiancé fly Embraer 175, although my niece is going from Horizon to United next month. The crap at Boeing was a spirited topic of conversation. I hope she ends up on the Airbus.
I have been horrified by the entire Boeing fiasco. Surprised by TC’s post? Not really. I had the privilege of being on a grand jury about a huge company’s ‘compliance’ w an asbestos case. The upper corner office tried to blame the heroic
employees. We all saw right through their attempts. It went to trial, and changed that company’s relationship with the city. However, some of those employees died of cancer before the case was settled.
Thank you for laying out this sad tale of greed and arrogance, Tom. When Boeing merged with McDonald Douglas in 1997, the writing was on the wall. McDonald took over management and effectively began gutting a legendary company.
James McDonnell would have killed those guys, thrown them out of the plane.
As an "airplane guy" I know what kind of people James McDonnell and Bill Boeing and Donald Douglas were. I was too late to meet them, but I met those who had known them - and others in the aviation pantheon - and these MBAscum pinstriped pimps aren't worthy to shine the shoes of any of the greats.
The Boeing story is rightly described as the poster child for everything that has gone wrong with American capitalism. It has lots of threads. The MD merger is certainly one of them and deserves to be fleshed out. A Michael Lewis type book would probably start there.
And thats just ONE industry! Of course their product has the ability to kill lots & lots of people. The 1% & the shareholders are making great strides, arent they?
Maybe more than a few buyers will rethink buying from a known crooked company. Of course, gov’t contracts will keep them afloat. Who has the guts to stop that. They had better hurry.
This is what terrifies me about chump, and republicans in general. This exemplifies their approach to everything, not just Boeing. It goes way back and has infected us worse than Covid. Profits rule and anyone who gets in the way of that, is targeted. Swampy was murdered. Worse than that is the verbiage they use to justify their actions. When propaganda is equated with free speech, the deal is sealed and we are screwed.
I read that story in the _American Prospect_ a couple of days ago. Every time I think I can't get more angry at these capitalism über alles people, I turn out to be wrong. When will we USians get it through our collective head that economic policy matters? Too many people blame it all on greed. Greed, along with numerous other human failings, we will always have with us -- but we also have the tools to keep greed (and many of those other failings) under control. Since the advent of Reaganomics, supply-side BS, corporate tax cuts, etc., there have been few fetters on greed. Since the SCOTUS Citizens United decision, it's been easier than ever for corporations and the ultra-rich to devote their ill-gotten gains to buying lawmakers and regulatory agencies.
If only "we the people" could stop falling for the right-wing line that taxes and regulations inhibit innovation, creativity, etc. What they inhibit is the kind of shoddy workmanship that at Boeing has caused so many deaths -- and remember that Ohio train derailment just over a year ago?
Phil Condit had my vote as worst Boeing CEO ever until Jim McNearny came along. Condit had the mystical vision that Boeing could be like Nike and outsource everything but brand name so they would shunt liabilities to suppliers and just collect rents on the name. Kind of like the Trump business model. That was part of the rationale for moving corporate headquarters to Chicago (among others). But it turned out building planes is a complex business, and outsourcing not just parts but assembly as well was not practicable. Who could have imagined that? So even though the original vision didn’t materialize, Boeing did increase their outsourcing, which created enormous delays while they got suppliers sufficiently schooled in measurements and tolerances, and moved 787 production to Charleston, where there was no union and no community with a history of building planes. But McNearny was worse. He was total scorched earth with the employees. Nothing but ego. Before he did everyone the favor of retiring, he forced the mechanics union to accept a much less favorable contract, even though the existing contract still had some years before it would expire. It was a move that was unnecessary from a business standpoint. It appeared to be done to boost McNearny’s compensation package, but I also thought it was a deliberate humiliation of the union. He also got unbelievable tax breaks from the state because Washington officials were too chicken to call his bluff about moving the whole company to SC. I regard him as the Sauron of the story. He’d probably have a smug chuckle over that.
Oh, yikes. Horrifying. I just flew in an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 from Dulles to LAX on Friday. Thanks for not posting this earlier. I wouldn’t have been able to sleep on the plane.
I would add here that the destruction of Boeing's safety-first culture is a prime example of the sociopathic nature of neoliberal economics, in which the highest profits possible are the only consideration, and the safety, health or well-being of the customers is not a consideration if it interferes with those high profits..... What the MBA idiots/criminals never realized was that they had a moral obligation to their customers and a fiduciary obligation to the company to provide a safe and useful product - this seems not to have been a primary objective of any of the past 30 years of senior management at Boeing. Their mindless quest for profits has killed hundreds of people, tanked the company's stock AND its reputation, and threatened the very future of the company itself. The only thing that might keep Boeing in the aircraft-building game is that Airbus cannot increase production enough to meet the demand for new airliners. But Boeing must be brought to heel so that airlines and customers (us, the flying public) can trust that the planes they build will stay in the air and not try to kill us. That seems to be a reasonable request.....
This article is excellent, and extremely disturbing. In the little newsletter I send to a group of folks, I provided the following summary of this awesome TAP article, in case it's length is too daunting for you:
This article about Boeing is not for the faint of heart.
Maureen Tkacik, investigations editor at The American Prospect, provides a long and detailed look at the disgusting (definition: “arousing revulsion or indignation”) business practices of Boeing, focusing on their stock price, not their engineering, or their safety and quality inspections.
I am currently reading Dante’s The Divine Comedy, and one cannot help but think of these Boeing executives when encountering the descending circles of Hell. As one descends, one meets the avaricious, later the thieves, and, in the Seventh Circle, the falsifiers.
Among other things, this article describes:
--->Appalling mistreatment of employees trying to follow the rules that ensure safe airplane operation (one of whom either committed suicide or was the victim of foul play when scheduled to continue in testimony in a whistleblower lawsuit; the details of his treatment by Boeing are infuriating to read)
--->Targeting of Good machinists and inspectors who wore wristbands in support of a union drive were framed with dubious infractions.
--->Purposeful purging of knowledgeable veteran workers into early retirement or transfers
---Prioritization of intellectual property, trade secrets and data, rather than shop floor expertise and the complex reasoning of a skilled and experience workforce
--->Outsourcing of development and engineering design of the 787 Dreamliner to suppliers, “many of which lacked engineering departments.” [Italics in the original] Why? To save money and bust unions (but instead went $50 million over budget and was 3½ years behind schedule).
--->Institution of a process in which quality inspectors were directed to outsource 90% of their duties to the mechanics they were supposed to be supervising (with intention to axe the then-surplus inspectors). [The Federal Aviation Administration charter explicitly requires that quality inspectors document all defects detected, work performed, and parts installed on a commercial airplane in one centralized database.]
--->Multiple examples of problems with Boeing aircraft over and above the ones that hit the big headlines; one inspection team compiled a list of 300 defects on a fuselage scheduled for delivery
--->Boeing had quietly assumed many of the roles traditionally played by its primary regulator, an arrangement that was ethically absurd.
--->Qatar Airways had become so disgusted with the state of the planes it received from Charleston that it refused to accept them
--->Al Jazeera produced a withering documentary called Broken Dreams, in which an employee outfitted with a hidden camera chitchatted with mechanics and inspectors about the planes they were producing. “They hire these people off the street, dude … fucking flipping burgers for a living, making sandwiches at Subway,” one mechanic marveled of his colleagues; another regaled the narrator with tales of co-workers who came to work high on “coke and painkillers and weed” because no one had ever had a urine test. Asked if they would fly the 787 Dreamliner; just five of 15 answered yes, and even the positive responses did Boeing no favors: “I probably would, but I have kind of a death wish, too.”
--->Boeing had quietly assumed many of the roles traditionally played by the FAA, an arrangement Ms. Tkacik calls “ethically absurd”
--->The FAA forced Boeing to halt deliveries of the 787 Dreamliner pending further investigation after so many problems were found, and nonconformances and noncompliances piled up, one headline was “Boeing Looked for Flaws in Its Dreamliner and Couldn’t Stop Finding Them.” (Here the article contained a visual of a diagram showing numerous locations where problems existed.)
Ms. Tkacik calls the plea bargain that settled the criminal probe of Boeing’s practices in the aftermath of two downed 737 Max jets “one of the most pathetic plea bargains in the history of American justice.”
Stan Sorscher, a longtime Boeing physicist and former officer of the Society of Professional Engineering, called Boeing’s business practice a war on “brilliance.”
AS ALWAYS, READING THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE IS WAY, WAY BETTER.
I sincerely hope that, if in fact Swampy's death was not suicide, that case gets cracked. The circumstances were Jeffrey-Epstein level suspicious - creepy.
Your cross-posting is very helpful, as it gets messaging out to so many who would not otherwise see it. I just know many of my contacts are not about to dig into an article that long.
I want to believe that Swampy didn't commit suicide, but is it all that easy to kill a man in this fashion and make it look like suicide? According to Maureen Tkacik's March 14 _American Prospect_ story (URL below): "Swampy was inside the Ram, bleeding from his right temple with a silver pistol in his hand and something 'resembling a note' in the passenger seat." He'd been under massive stress at Boeing for well over a decade. A doctor had expressed concern about the state of his heart, and he'd been "diagnosed with anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder, incurred in his daily struggles with Boeing management." His wife, Diane, had died a little over a year earlier.
Tkacik herself writes in the March 14 story: "I personally have trouble believing Boeing would plot a whistleblower murder, mostly because there are dozens of internal whistleblowers where Swampy came from, and it would be impractical to kill all of them, especially given that Boeing has thus far enjoyed exceptional impunity without bringing about the mysterious death of any crucial witnesses."
Even if Mr. Barnett actually did commit suicide--it was still murder. Boeing's relentless pressure to "conform" and the management's lies that framed him for sub-par work performance and their refusal to let him transfer to another part of the company...all that stress killed "Swampy" even he was the one that pulled the trigger. No question that Boeing is ultimately responsible for Mr. Barnett's death and that is murder in my eyes.
From what I've read, Boeing was responsible for Swampy's death, but that doesn't make it murder. I'm an editor and writer by trade, and since words are the tools of my trade, I take them seriously.
Maybe they will when other companies stop buying their shitty planes. Of course they will blame anybody else. Like chump said in Sun, in 2005 " You never blame yourself. You have to blame something else. You never, ever blame yourself." No wonder a Boeing CEO was hanging with chump in the WH. Sure wish I could remember where I read that, and when.
If I had had Fred as Dad, and Roy as mentor, I may have been a serial killer. One has to have had a "core" which was sorely missing in chump. Empty through and through
This article makes me want to scream in fury and frustration. I've worked for a corporation which regressed from celebrating it's employees, considering them to be "stakeholders in the company" to their employees becoming expensive (and expendable) overhead, and it is one of the most demoralizing experiences I've ever undergone. When management gets taken over by the bean counters--watch out: quality of the product and quality of the workforce gets flung right out the window.
Infuriating to read, and that is only a start..... This is the basic rot inherent in the neoliberal supply-side emphasis on financial results at the expense of sound business practices. I do not see a way forward for Boeing, because the festering decay in the company management culture cannot be expunged to save the company until ALL the people who believe the neoliberal theory are removed from the company. And that will not happen. So any changes under duress from the FAA will be made reluctantly, taking more time and working with the depleted work force left at Boeing, which will not bring abut the needed and enthusiastic changes needed to change the corporate culture. Until that culture is changed and changed thoroughly, no lasting changes in operations or quality of the products are possible.....
It isn’t just this fanatical desire for some kind of gung-ho leadership - it’s also that the finance guys have taken over. With shareholder value driving everything, corners are getting cut and experienced (read: expensive) workers pushed out. It’s sad, immoral, and just plain stupid.
If you ever worked for a large corporation, cutting corners has replaced competence and the drive for excellence. Quality and customer service is too expensive
Yep. Been there.
I saw the identical thing evolve in tech. The engineers and entrepreneurs of the '80's were slowly replaced by the HR clerks and accountants. The CEOs are now mainly for show and for on-command performances for "The Board." It appeared to me that many a leading semi company ends up making products solely to support their stock price.
The cause of this is many fold, when we disincentivized salary in favor of stock options, when stocks became a "fad" and when large investment funds arose who forced the focus away from strategy and onto quarterly results.
Entirely right.
Thank you. Blind squirrel, right? 😅
What Boeing did to itself is one of the saddest and most instructive stories in American business history. Regression to the mean (remarkably, without any competition) when it could very easily have remained alone at the top. Boeing lost a one-horse race.
Exactly. It was literally managed into the ground.
And that's not what one wants in an aircraft.
It’s why I’m reluctant to fly anymore. Wish they didn’t have so many gov’t contracts. Sort of makes them to big to fail, when oversight could make failure not an option.
Same here...I'm wondering if I really want to fly to Reykjavik on one of Icelandair's Boeing jets. (757-200 series). I haven't read anything bad about any of them...but you gotta wonder and after reading this article...yikes!
757-200 was designed and built during the 'good times."
Thanks Tom....somehow I knew you would know more about that model than I could find out!
Desperately needed news.
Thanks for this. I’ve worked in machine shops, making close tolerance aircraft parts, but that was
in the eighties and nineties. Such men and women as Swampy are priceless and represent the best of ‘Made in USA’.
The management quality control mentality you’ve described boggles the mind.
“ . . . discarding “thought” and “understanding” and “complex reasoning” . . . “!!!
I wonder if Boeing execs routinely travel on their own planes. One can only hope.
Thank you TC. This is an example of the incompetence of the financiers in charge of the whole economy—-the entire game. This is where having as your SUCCESS marker money not quality leads—these people are crazy (really) in fundamental ways. But they are buying the government and they’ll soon dismantle regulation. It sends shivers up my spine to read the story of gutting expertise from a company that should run on expertise. Thank you an uncomfortable and infuriating read. This death was murder. The mob has taken over the corner offices
Accountants - they know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Orwellian to the max. Good is bad, bad is good. Hard work and experience must be squashed. Those quotes from performance reviews are startling. Being targeted by morons with $signs for eyes must have been so demoralizing. Yet he never wavered. He was murdered. Is there anyone with the power to investigate? Or are the mobsters already the powers that be?
HR Dept = Human Repression
Mob Dept may be more like it
I have 3 commercial pilots in my family. My sister-in-law flies 777’s, my niece and her fiancé fly Embraer 175, although my niece is going from Horizon to United next month. The crap at Boeing was a spirited topic of conversation. I hope she ends up on the Airbus.
Oh, and Swampy did not kill himself…
He is reason for us to fight in his stead.
Ally, impressive family!
I have been horrified by the entire Boeing fiasco. Surprised by TC’s post? Not really. I had the privilege of being on a grand jury about a huge company’s ‘compliance’ w an asbestos case. The upper corner office tried to blame the heroic
employees. We all saw right through their attempts. It went to trial, and changed that company’s relationship with the city. However, some of those employees died of cancer before the case was settled.
Thank you for laying out this sad tale of greed and arrogance, Tom. When Boeing merged with McDonald Douglas in 1997, the writing was on the wall. McDonald took over management and effectively began gutting a legendary company.
James McDonnell would have killed those guys, thrown them out of the plane.
As an "airplane guy" I know what kind of people James McDonnell and Bill Boeing and Donald Douglas were. I was too late to meet them, but I met those who had known them - and others in the aviation pantheon - and these MBAscum pinstriped pimps aren't worthy to shine the shoes of any of the greats.
Thank you for correcting my egregious spelling of McDonnell without actually correcting me. You are a gentleman.
At your service, ma'am. :-)
And Diane, you are obviously a true lady.
As my late dad said, ‘There are lots did women, but unfortunately very few ladies.’
The Boeing story is rightly described as the poster child for everything that has gone wrong with American capitalism. It has lots of threads. The MD merger is certainly one of them and deserves to be fleshed out. A Michael Lewis type book would probably start there.
Michael Lewis could do it.
And thats just ONE industry! Of course their product has the ability to kill lots & lots of people. The 1% & the shareholders are making great strides, arent they?
Maybe more than a few buyers will rethink buying from a known crooked company. Of course, gov’t contracts will keep them afloat. Who has the guts to stop that. They had better hurry.
This is what terrifies me about chump, and republicans in general. This exemplifies their approach to everything, not just Boeing. It goes way back and has infected us worse than Covid. Profits rule and anyone who gets in the way of that, is targeted. Swampy was murdered. Worse than that is the verbiage they use to justify their actions. When propaganda is equated with free speech, the deal is sealed and we are screwed.
I read that story in the _American Prospect_ a couple of days ago. Every time I think I can't get more angry at these capitalism über alles people, I turn out to be wrong. When will we USians get it through our collective head that economic policy matters? Too many people blame it all on greed. Greed, along with numerous other human failings, we will always have with us -- but we also have the tools to keep greed (and many of those other failings) under control. Since the advent of Reaganomics, supply-side BS, corporate tax cuts, etc., there have been few fetters on greed. Since the SCOTUS Citizens United decision, it's been easier than ever for corporations and the ultra-rich to devote their ill-gotten gains to buying lawmakers and regulatory agencies.
If only "we the people" could stop falling for the right-wing line that taxes and regulations inhibit innovation, creativity, etc. What they inhibit is the kind of shoddy workmanship that at Boeing has caused so many deaths -- and remember that Ohio train derailment just over a year ago?
Phil Condit had my vote as worst Boeing CEO ever until Jim McNearny came along. Condit had the mystical vision that Boeing could be like Nike and outsource everything but brand name so they would shunt liabilities to suppliers and just collect rents on the name. Kind of like the Trump business model. That was part of the rationale for moving corporate headquarters to Chicago (among others). But it turned out building planes is a complex business, and outsourcing not just parts but assembly as well was not practicable. Who could have imagined that? So even though the original vision didn’t materialize, Boeing did increase their outsourcing, which created enormous delays while they got suppliers sufficiently schooled in measurements and tolerances, and moved 787 production to Charleston, where there was no union and no community with a history of building planes. But McNearny was worse. He was total scorched earth with the employees. Nothing but ego. Before he did everyone the favor of retiring, he forced the mechanics union to accept a much less favorable contract, even though the existing contract still had some years before it would expire. It was a move that was unnecessary from a business standpoint. It appeared to be done to boost McNearny’s compensation package, but I also thought it was a deliberate humiliation of the union. He also got unbelievable tax breaks from the state because Washington officials were too chicken to call his bluff about moving the whole company to SC. I regard him as the Sauron of the story. He’d probably have a smug chuckle over that.
All of that outsourcing not only created delays, but it also weakens quality control and sets a stage for sabotage.
Oh, yikes. Horrifying. I just flew in an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 from Dulles to LAX on Friday. Thanks for not posting this earlier. I wouldn’t have been able to sleep on the plane.
I would add here that the destruction of Boeing's safety-first culture is a prime example of the sociopathic nature of neoliberal economics, in which the highest profits possible are the only consideration, and the safety, health or well-being of the customers is not a consideration if it interferes with those high profits..... What the MBA idiots/criminals never realized was that they had a moral obligation to their customers and a fiduciary obligation to the company to provide a safe and useful product - this seems not to have been a primary objective of any of the past 30 years of senior management at Boeing. Their mindless quest for profits has killed hundreds of people, tanked the company's stock AND its reputation, and threatened the very future of the company itself. The only thing that might keep Boeing in the aircraft-building game is that Airbus cannot increase production enough to meet the demand for new airliners. But Boeing must be brought to heel so that airlines and customers (us, the flying public) can trust that the planes they build will stay in the air and not try to kill us. That seems to be a reasonable request.....
This article is excellent, and extremely disturbing. In the little newsletter I send to a group of folks, I provided the following summary of this awesome TAP article, in case it's length is too daunting for you:
This article about Boeing is not for the faint of heart.
Maureen Tkacik, investigations editor at The American Prospect, provides a long and detailed look at the disgusting (definition: “arousing revulsion or indignation”) business practices of Boeing, focusing on their stock price, not their engineering, or their safety and quality inspections.
I am currently reading Dante’s The Divine Comedy, and one cannot help but think of these Boeing executives when encountering the descending circles of Hell. As one descends, one meets the avaricious, later the thieves, and, in the Seventh Circle, the falsifiers.
Among other things, this article describes:
--->Appalling mistreatment of employees trying to follow the rules that ensure safe airplane operation (one of whom either committed suicide or was the victim of foul play when scheduled to continue in testimony in a whistleblower lawsuit; the details of his treatment by Boeing are infuriating to read)
--->Targeting of Good machinists and inspectors who wore wristbands in support of a union drive were framed with dubious infractions.
--->Purposeful purging of knowledgeable veteran workers into early retirement or transfers
---Prioritization of intellectual property, trade secrets and data, rather than shop floor expertise and the complex reasoning of a skilled and experience workforce
--->Outsourcing of development and engineering design of the 787 Dreamliner to suppliers, “many of which lacked engineering departments.” [Italics in the original] Why? To save money and bust unions (but instead went $50 million over budget and was 3½ years behind schedule).
--->Institution of a process in which quality inspectors were directed to outsource 90% of their duties to the mechanics they were supposed to be supervising (with intention to axe the then-surplus inspectors). [The Federal Aviation Administration charter explicitly requires that quality inspectors document all defects detected, work performed, and parts installed on a commercial airplane in one centralized database.]
--->Multiple examples of problems with Boeing aircraft over and above the ones that hit the big headlines; one inspection team compiled a list of 300 defects on a fuselage scheduled for delivery
--->Boeing had quietly assumed many of the roles traditionally played by its primary regulator, an arrangement that was ethically absurd.
--->Qatar Airways had become so disgusted with the state of the planes it received from Charleston that it refused to accept them
--->Al Jazeera produced a withering documentary called Broken Dreams, in which an employee outfitted with a hidden camera chitchatted with mechanics and inspectors about the planes they were producing. “They hire these people off the street, dude … fucking flipping burgers for a living, making sandwiches at Subway,” one mechanic marveled of his colleagues; another regaled the narrator with tales of co-workers who came to work high on “coke and painkillers and weed” because no one had ever had a urine test. Asked if they would fly the 787 Dreamliner; just five of 15 answered yes, and even the positive responses did Boeing no favors: “I probably would, but I have kind of a death wish, too.”
--->Boeing had quietly assumed many of the roles traditionally played by the FAA, an arrangement Ms. Tkacik calls “ethically absurd”
--->The FAA forced Boeing to halt deliveries of the 787 Dreamliner pending further investigation after so many problems were found, and nonconformances and noncompliances piled up, one headline was “Boeing Looked for Flaws in Its Dreamliner and Couldn’t Stop Finding Them.” (Here the article contained a visual of a diagram showing numerous locations where problems existed.)
Ms. Tkacik calls the plea bargain that settled the criminal probe of Boeing’s practices in the aftermath of two downed 737 Max jets “one of the most pathetic plea bargains in the history of American justice.”
Stan Sorscher, a longtime Boeing physicist and former officer of the Society of Professional Engineering, called Boeing’s business practice a war on “brilliance.”
AS ALWAYS, READING THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE IS WAY, WAY BETTER.
Swampy didn't commit suicide.
When an article is important, I cross-post for those who can't subscribe.
I sincerely hope that, if in fact Swampy's death was not suicide, that case gets cracked. The circumstances were Jeffrey-Epstein level suspicious - creepy.
Your cross-posting is very helpful, as it gets messaging out to so many who would not otherwise see it. I just know many of my contacts are not about to dig into an article that long.
Thanks for bringing it to my attention.
I want to believe that Swampy didn't commit suicide, but is it all that easy to kill a man in this fashion and make it look like suicide? According to Maureen Tkacik's March 14 _American Prospect_ story (URL below): "Swampy was inside the Ram, bleeding from his right temple with a silver pistol in his hand and something 'resembling a note' in the passenger seat." He'd been under massive stress at Boeing for well over a decade. A doctor had expressed concern about the state of his heart, and he'd been "diagnosed with anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder, incurred in his daily struggles with Boeing management." His wife, Diane, had died a little over a year earlier.
Tkacik herself writes in the March 14 story: "I personally have trouble believing Boeing would plot a whistleblower murder, mostly because there are dozens of internal whistleblowers where Swampy came from, and it would be impractical to kill all of them, especially given that Boeing has thus far enjoyed exceptional impunity without bringing about the mysterious death of any crucial witnesses."
https://prospect.org/justice/2024-03-14-strange-death-boeing-whistleblower/
Yes, that scene can be staged.
Even if Mr. Barnett actually did commit suicide--it was still murder. Boeing's relentless pressure to "conform" and the management's lies that framed him for sub-par work performance and their refusal to let him transfer to another part of the company...all that stress killed "Swampy" even he was the one that pulled the trigger. No question that Boeing is ultimately responsible for Mr. Barnett's death and that is murder in my eyes.
From what I've read, Boeing was responsible for Swampy's death, but that doesn't make it murder. I'm an editor and writer by trade, and since words are the tools of my trade, I take them seriously.
If chump cheats his way back into the WH, Boeings shenanigans will be business as usual
Yup. Regulations? We don't need no stinkin' regulations.
Maybe they will when other companies stop buying their shitty planes. Of course they will blame anybody else. Like chump said in Sun, in 2005 " You never blame yourself. You have to blame something else. You never, ever blame yourself." No wonder a Boeing CEO was hanging with chump in the WH. Sure wish I could remember where I read that, and when.
He learned that from Roy Cohn, Snakehandler LLC.
If I had had Fred as Dad, and Roy as mentor, I may have been a serial killer. One has to have had a "core" which was sorely missing in chump. Empty through and through
This article makes me want to scream in fury and frustration. I've worked for a corporation which regressed from celebrating it's employees, considering them to be "stakeholders in the company" to their employees becoming expensive (and expendable) overhead, and it is one of the most demoralizing experiences I've ever undergone. When management gets taken over by the bean counters--watch out: quality of the product and quality of the workforce gets flung right out the window.
Infuriating to read, and that is only a start..... This is the basic rot inherent in the neoliberal supply-side emphasis on financial results at the expense of sound business practices. I do not see a way forward for Boeing, because the festering decay in the company management culture cannot be expunged to save the company until ALL the people who believe the neoliberal theory are removed from the company. And that will not happen. So any changes under duress from the FAA will be made reluctantly, taking more time and working with the depleted work force left at Boeing, which will not bring abut the needed and enthusiastic changes needed to change the corporate culture. Until that culture is changed and changed thoroughly, no lasting changes in operations or quality of the products are possible.....
I’m reading I’m reading…