The investigation is tied to an incident on an Alaska Airlines flight in early January. Boeing also told a Senate panel that it cannot find a record of the work done on the Alaska plane.
If it’s anything like other criminal inquiries in this country, they will find the lowest paid chump on the totem pole to pin all the blame on while the C-Suite once again walks away with Golden god damned Parachutes.
It’s optimistic to assume they’ll even bother finding someone in the company guilty even if it’s some low level chump. I don’t actually expect anyone to be found guilty in this whole thing. The only time corporations in this country actually suffer repercussions for their actions is when they cost shareholders significant money Enron style.
I think even this isn’t as hurtful to major shareholders - the ones that have decisionmaking power - as you’d hope. They typically have more information and pay more attention than the small fish. They’d offload their shares earlier, for longer, as to not disturb the price too much, leaving the remainder to hold the bag once shit hits the fan. The stock market enables that. They’ve extracted a shit ton of money by steering the company over the last couple of decades. The ones that would really bear the brunt are the shareholders that never had any decisionmaking power, and the company’s workers.
Oliver Schmidt was a senior executive at VW who was prosecuted for that. Yes, upper management did take a hit.
Was he an executive, or just a manager, or just an engineer? Articles (including those on the justice department website) aren’t clear about exactly what his role was. None of the actual executives holed up on DE have appeared to pay the price.
I assume Boeing’s response to this criminal inquiry will be a stock buyback.
How else will their stock price go up amidst all this controversy lol.
Accountability should be held at the top. If they can benefit from cost cutting that can potentially kill people through negligence, they need to face criminal consequences for doing so.
Not potentially.
MCAS did kill several hundred people just a few years ago.
A system Boeing put in place and snuck past regulators specifically to deploy a cheaply developed product that could compete with airbus.
The executives at Boeing already have blood on their hands. They should have faced manslaughter charges for the 2 flights that went down due to MCAS.
Sadly nothing Boeing has done is criminal in the US even though it absolutely should be. It’s just the bog standard corporate pursuit of profit at the expense of all else. Cutting corners, ignoring safety, rushing everything, and all with fewer people to do the work than are necessary. If Boeing is found criminally guilty for that half the corporations in the US are in trouble.
No, this is just political theater, much like the TSA is. Boeing has fucked up enough that people are starting to take notice, so this is just a little reminder to them that they need to stop fucking up quite so publicly. The executives will sweat a little, temporarily improve things, and then go right back to their usual bullshit in a year or two when things calm down. Worst case scenario they’ll put out a series of BP style “We’re sorry” videos where they emphasize how much quality and safety supposedly mean to them.
much like the TSA is
While mostly true, the TSA was also a stealth jobs program for flunkies who couldn’t get jobs anywhere else (and to help Bush pump his jobs numbers, which were abysmal). You kind of have to be a motivated fucking idiot to spend every day undermining the fourth amendment and acting like you’re doing a service to society. Especially with all the evidence of TSA agents using their authority to just outright steal shit. They’re not hiring the best, and everyone knows that they hire the worst of the worst for these jobs, so it’s hard to even call it “theater” anymore when everyone sees right through it. Hypernormalization.
While you’re correct in your assessment, I’d like to remind people to not be assholes to TSA when they’re going through security. They’re people just trying to do their jobs like the rest of us. It’s a shit job with no recognition and a ton of public contact. The agents aren’t there because they want to stomp on your rights; they have bills to pay and people to take care of.
Being assholes to them is irrational, they can be more of a nuisance to you than you can be to them. However I disagree people doing those jobs deserve any respect, doing evil because it’s a job and it pays and they can’t think of anything better… that doesn’t mean it suddenly becomes acceptable. The pawns don’t feel like they’re responsible for abuses.
Sadly nothing Boeing has done is criminal in the US even though it absolutely should be.
I doubt that you know whether Boeing has or has not broken any laws.
OK, well nothing there’s anything public about anyway. It’s always possible they’ve been embezzling or I don’t know, running a drug smuggling ring out of their warehouses, but nothing they’ve probably done is illegal. Remember this is all just a response to the multiple accidents related to manufacturing defects in their planes. At this moment the worst charge they’re looking at is maybe criminal negligence.
They’re being investigated under “Conspiracy to Defraud the United States”, which does have criminal penalties.
Now, that’s a prison sentence of up to 5 years. People died because of the decisions by Boeing executives, and countless others were put at risk. There should be a whole lot more here that they should be charged with, but probably won’t.
Slap on the wrist incoming
Somehow I doubt American Ju$tice will jail the executive who went laughing all the way to bank with the bonuses they made from cutting corners in design, manufacturing and QA, cutting costs down to the bone and using Boeing employees acting as in-house FAA “representatives” to self-certify the pieces of junk Boeing now makes.
(As somebody else pointed out, the deaths attributable to such practices, namelly in the MCAS debacle, should’ve been treated as manslaughter).
Its a functional state-financed monopoly that isn’t owned or operated by the state and gets to charge taxpayers an absurd markup per unit by passing every expenditure through half a dozen shell companies that each get to squeeze out profit on the margins.
But hey, we get the latest in aviation technology, right? Not like they’re just churning out lemons that fall apart in midair.
