This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Faramarz Farbod.

Janine Jackson interviewed independent journalist Katya Schwenk about Boeing’s non-prosecution deal for the June 6, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

AP (5/23/25)

Janine Jackson: There’s no need for me to rewrite the AP story on how Boeing and the Justice Department got together and decided no crime was committed when Boeing’s 737 Max planes crashed in 2018 and 2019, killing 346 people. So I’ll just cite it:

Boeing did not tell airlines and pilots about a new software system, called MCAS, that could turn the plane’s nose down without input from pilots if a sensor detected that the plane might go into an aerodynamic stall.

The Max planes crashed after a faulty reading from the sensor pushed the nose down and pilots were unable to regain control. After the second crash, Max jets were grounded worldwide until the company redesigned MCAS to make it less powerful and to use signals from two sensors, not just one.

The Justice Department charged Boeing in 2021 with deceiving FAA regulators about the software, which did not exist in older 737s, and about how much training pilots would need to fly the plane safely. The department agreed not to prosecute Boeing at the time, however, if the company paid a $2.5 billion settlement, including the $243.6 million fine, and took steps to comply with anti-fraud laws for three years.

Federal prosecutors, however, last year said Boeing violated the terms of the 2021 agreement by failing to make promised changes to detect and prevent violations of federal anti-fraud laws. Boeing agreed last July to plead guilty to the felony fraud charge instead of enduring a potentially lengthy public trial.

But now that we’re up to speed, here’s a reporter whose work, unlike that of AP, is not headlined with a little ticker telling you how Boeing stock is doing. Katya Schwenk is a journalist whose work appears at the Lever, the Intercept and the Baffler, among other outlets. Welcome to CounterSpin, Katya Schwenk.

Lever (1/10/24)

Katya Schwenk: Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

JJ: I used that long quote for information, but I do hope that listeners know that those Indonesia and Ethiopia 737 crashes weren’t the start of all of this. And I know that listeners will have clocked the bit about Boeing agreeing to plead guilty if it would spare them a “lengthy public trial.” So if I kill a few hundred people, I don’t think I can say, “Well, yeah, I did it, and I knew I was doing it, but here’s some change from my bottomless bucket of money, because otherwise I might have to lose my whole summer in court.”

I can’t help but be startled at the reception to this agreement, as though it actually, as a DoJ spokesperson said, “provides finality and compensation for the families and makes an impact for the safety of future air travelers.” Is there any indication of that happening?

KS: Yeah, I think the answer to that is a pretty resounding “no.” I mean, the families do not support this agreement. They had wanted to see Boeing face a trial, face some kind of criminal penalty, face real accountability after the crashes. The families of these people who died in the planes, they had been fighting for years and years to get some small measure of accountability in court.

Jacobin (5/18/24)

And it looked like they might actually see that, when the Justice Department had given Boeing a sweetheart deal under the first Trump administration. It was walked back last year; it seemed like Boeing might actually plead guilty. And then this has basically completely undone all of that.

The fine, in terms of, if you think about how much money Boeing has, it’s somewhat negligible. It includes credit for what they’ve already paid in this case. So I think it’s pretty disappointing for everyone who wanted to see Boeing face real public accountability.

JJ: What is a “non-prosecution agreement,” which is coming up a lot in this? What does it do? What does it not do?

KS: Basically, the Justice Department has agreed to drop all criminal charges against Boeing, and has said that so long as Boeing pays this fine, invests more in its “compliance programs,” it will not be moving forward with any criminal charges. It’s dropping the case, basically.

And this is different from what had been the previous sweetheart deal; it’s even better than the first sweetheart deal, which was a deferred prosecution agreement, which basically meant, we’ll wait and see if we’re going to prosecute you. We’ll see if you comply–if you invest more in your anti-fraud programs, in this case. And the deal that was just released today, this is like, they’re not even going to continue monitoring Boeing. It’s just like, total blank slate, charges are gone.

JJ: The idea that if you just throw enough money at it, it’s not a crime, I just know how weird that lands with everybody who is understanding that that just means if you’re rich, you can do what you want. Or if you’re a corporation and you have enough money, you can commit a crime, and we won’t call it a crime because you can pay. It just sounds wrong.

KS: Yeah. This is like the Trump administration approach to white-collar crime and holding corporations accountable, which is part of a longer-term trend in the US government for decades. But corporations, even when, in this case, many, many people died, right, often are given deals that allow them to just pay a big fine, say they’ve implemented reforms, and get away scot free.

And there was a moment where it felt like Boeing might not. There was so much public scrutiny, there was so much pressure on the DoJ to actually hold them accountable, and instead we’re seeing that.

JJ: I just talked with Jeff Hauser, from the aptly named Revolving Door Project, and it seems like cronyism, and “it’s a big club and you ain’t in it,” has been a part of your focus as you’ve reported this story out for some time now.

Katya Schwenk: “You can really see how close the relationship is between Boeing and people at the highest positions of power in our country.”

KS: Yeah, absolutely. Boeing spends quite a lot of money lobbying Washington. There are people that go into roles at the DoJ or the FAA that have previously worked for Boeing. It’s very much the revolving door at work, and they do quite a lot of business with the federal government.

And so we’ve seen, under the Trump administration, they have granted various giveaways to Boeing. They facilitated a massive deal; the government of Qatar gave Boeing a huge contract to work on fighter jets. You can really see how close the relationship is between Boeing and people at the highest positions of power in our country.

And I think that, definitely, that’s explaining a lot of what’s going on. And I think the more people that we can have paying attention, not only to Boeing, but again to these sort of mechanisms, levers of power, challenging either–I mean, you mentioned the stock price of Boeing is often the focus of a lot of media attention. I think there are many people who would say it’s not good that you have a company responsible for all this air travel that’s totally ruled by Wall Street. And so I think that really needs to be the focus of reporting moving forward, how it’s going, buying influence, who are they answering to? Is it their engineers, is it the flying public? Is it travelers, or is it their shareholders?

JJ: And just finally, if folks do pick up a paper today and look for a story on Boeing, they will likely see a story about how China is scrambling to make something as good as a Boeing plane. That seems to be the way Boeing is showing up in the media right now.

It’s almost as if the story, it’s done. That was yesterday, and now we’re moving on to this corporation that has these deep contracts, military contracts, government contracts. If an individual killed hundreds of people, the story wouldn’t just die because we thought, “Oh, they’re going to go on and do something good, maybe.” It’s a malfeasance on journalism’s part, I feel.

KS: Absolutely. It sends a message, right? It sends a message that you can do something like that, and we’ll move on and we won’t pay attention. So, yeah, I totally agree.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with journalist Katya Schwenk. Her work on Boeing can be found at the Lever and at Jacobin, and no doubt elsewhere. Thank you, Katya Schwenk, very much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

KS: I appreciate it. Thanks.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

White House photo (5/30/25) of Elon Musk’s farewell press conference with President Donald Trump.

This week on CounterSpin: An email we got this week tells us: “The radical left is up in arms about DOGE. Just think about it—DOGE has exposed BILLIONS in wasteful spending, and is rooting out fraud and corruption at every turn. They’re making the government work for the people of this great nation once again, as the founders intended, and that is why the left simply can’t stand DOGE.” The ask is that we fill out a survey that represents “our once-in-a-lifetime chance to slash the bloated, woke and wasteful policies in the federal government. Thank you, and God Bless, Speaker Mike Johnson. (Paid for by the NRCC and not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.)”

Reports are that Elon Musk is leaving government, going back to make Tesla great again or something. But if that’s true, why did we get this weird, sad email? We’ll talk about how to miss Musk when he won’t go away with Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project.

Lever (5/17/24)

Also on the show: The New York Times has its stories on the Boeing “non-prosecution agreement” in the “Business” section, suggesting that whether planes drop out of the sky is mostly a concern for investors. A huge corporation paying money to dodge criminal charges is evidently not a general interest story. And the families and friends of the hundreds of people dead because of Boeing’s admittedly knowing malfeasance? They’re just another county heard from. If you want reporting that calls crimes “crimes,” even if they’re committed by corporations, you need to look outside of corporate media. We’ll hear about Boeing from independent journalist Katya Schwenk.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of trans youth in sports and gender-affirming care.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

This speculation is unfounded. The American Airlines passenger plane involved in the collision was not manufactured by Boeing.

On January 29, an American Airlines passenger plane collided with a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter (UH-60) as it was approaching its landing at Ronald Reagan Airport near Washington. The two planes exploded midair before crashing into the Potomac River below. All 60 passengers and 4 crew members on the commercial flight and three soldiers on the helicopter are believed to have died in the crash.

Suspicions about Boeing’s supposed role appears to have originated on Weibo. “Guyan Muchan,” a widely-followed Weibo user, attributed the collision to a Boeing plane accident. Another Weibo user wrote a post claiming that “Boeing, the giant of the US aviation industry, is really not good. The loopholes in the aircraft system have claimed countless lives. Now even regional airliners have become full of fatal risks?”

(Weibo, annotation by AFCL)

However, AFCL has found that the plane involved in the crash was from a fleet flown by PSA Airlines, a subsidiary of American Airlines, with flight number 5342.

According to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), this was a CRJ700 regional airliner produced by Canada’s Bombardier, not a Boeing passenger plane.

A budget question

In the same post the Weibo user claimed that “just last week, Congress rejected a proposal to upgrade the air traffic control system.” The reason, the person claimed, was that the money would be instead used to build bomb shelters at holiday villas for elected officials.

(Weibo, annotation by AFCL)

This is also false. Neither the House of Representatives nor the Senate held hearings or meetings related to budget review last week, according to publicly available schedules for the relevant committees in each chamber.

Moreover, budgets of various U.S. administrative departments are calculated based on the fiscal year, which runs from October 1 of each year to September 30 of the following year.

Generally, the President and the executive departments submit budget plans to Congress in early February each year. The committees of the Senate and the House of Representatives then hold public hearings and review the budgets. Usually this is completed by the end of June each year.

According to the Congressional Research Service, the Department of Transportation’s fiscal year 2025 budget was signed and implemented by then-President Biden on September 26, 2024, involving a budget of approximately $21.8 billion for the Federal Aviation Administration. Congress also separately passed the Federal Aviation Administration Reauthorization Act 2024, giving the FAA at least $105 billion in budget to expand the recruitment of air traffic controllers and upgrade the reform of the new generation of air traffic control systems to maintain operations until fiscal year 2028.

Therefore, the statement that “the U.S. Congress has just rejected a proposal to upgrade the air traffic control system” is wrong.

Edited by Boer Deng.

Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) was established to counter disinformation in today’s complex media environment. We publish fact-checks, media-watches and in-depth reports that aim to sharpen and deepen our readers’ understanding of current affairs and public issues. If you like our content, you can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and X.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Rita Cheng for Asia Fact Check Lab.

Photo by Thomas Bormans

In a potentially game-changing move, 33,000 Boeing machinists in the Pacific Northwest, unionized with IAM District 751, are on strike after rejecting the company’s initial insulting contract offer. A stunning 96 percent of the rank and file voted to go on strike, marking a sea change for the fight of working people at Boeing. For decades, Boeing’s executives and wealthy shareholders have, with the active help from Democrats and Republicans in Washington state and Washington D.C., enforced a decades-long brutal regime that has thrown both workers and safety standards under the bus in favor of short-term profit maximization for themselves. The strike offers an opening for the company’s workers to win historic gains and begin rebuilding a fighting union with a militant, active rank-and-file membership.

Like workers everywhere, Boeing machinists are fighting for decent wages and benefits in the face of the sky-high cost of living. The workers are demanding a 40 percent wage increase, which is the bare minimum they need given the ground they have lost in past sell-out contracts from the bosses, combined with historic inflation levels and high living costs in the region. They are angry at Boeing’s shell games, including the attempt to take away their annual employee bonuses (called “AMPP”), which they were promised in return for being forced to accept higher healthcare costs in a past contract. They are also demanding an end to the intolerable regime of mandatory overtime, which is running rampant at Boeing, denying workers the right to a life outside of work. The machinists are also fighting for a restoration of defined benefit pension, and full and retroactive reinstatement of pension for all workers.

The initial contract offer from the Boeing bosses came nowhere close to meeting these demands. What Boeing touted as a 25 percent raise over four years in the contract offer is, in reality, much less. When coupled with the cost of living and the removal of the annual AMPP bonus, the proposed raises don’t even make up for recent and future inflation, much less the severe blows from past contracts. The offer also fails to restore workers’ pensions.

Since the strike began, Boeing has been forced to release a second contract offer, which includes a 30 percent pay increase over the next 4 years, up from 25 percent in the last offer. The strike has also forced Boeing to back down from their attempt to take away workers’ annual bonuses. But this new offer is still far less than what workers have been demanding and what they need, and workers immediately responded both on the picket line and in social media with their strong opposition to this totally inadequate offer, saying they must continue the strike.

The union leadership has now come out with a statement that says as much also, and which condemns the disgraceful way in which Boeing has attempted to undemocratically circumvent the union with this offer. Because of this, they are rejecting this new offer outright.

A Decade of Extorting Workers and Taxpayers

In the Seattle area, a job at Boeing used to be highly sought after — it was a path to decent wages and benefits and relative stability. A common phrase among workers was “If it ain’t Boeing, I ain’t going.” With the attacks over the last 15 years, many new Boeing workers are instead being paid less than the Seattle minimum wage, and the company has had higher and higher turnover. These attacks on the workforce have gone hand-in-hand with the corporation’s major struggles in recent years with safety and quality control.

The strike comes in the wake of the machinists being sold out in a spectacularly shameful deal made over a decade ago in November 2013 by Boeing executives and shareholders with the Democratic Party-dominated Washington State Legislature, and Democratic Governor, Jay Inslee. The defined benefit pension plan, won by the unionized machinists in previous decades, was eliminated in one fell swoop. A defined benefit plan, which is currently accessible only to a small proportion of the workforce in the private sector and which was won through labor struggle, is a plan that guarantees retired workers a decent income for life. This was replaced by Boeing with a far weaker 401(K) retirement system that leaves workers at the mercy of the ups and downs of the stock market. This dramatically undermines annual retirement income, as well as shifting the risk away from the executives and major shareholders of big corporations like Boeing onto the backs of working people.

The Democratic Party justified this historic attack on both the Boeing machinists and working people statewide by claiming that it was necessary to save jobs. Boeing executives had carried out public extortion, threatening to take away the final assembly of the 777X aircraft out of Washington state, which would eliminate an estimated 10,000 union jobs. State and local Democrats from across the region insisted that the machinists accept the contract, and scandalously told them that if they didn’t, they would be responsible for not only the loss of their own jobs, but also the broader economic repercussions if Boeing were to move future production out of state.

Rather than mobilize the union members and the wider labor movement into a serious strike and fightback, the IAM international leadership echoed the arguments from the Democrats. Disgracefully, even though the rank-and-file members had rejected the contract, the leadership brought the same sell-out contract back for a second vote in order to push it through. This was a highly undemocratic vote, which the union’s leadership held on January 3rd of 2014, while many of the workers were still out of town for the holidays. The contract squeaked by with a 51-49 vote and a much lower turnout than the first vote.

In addition to publicly shaming workers to accept the elimination of their pensions, Washington State Democrats voted to give Boeing an $8.7 billion tax handout in 2013 — the largest tax handout by any state in U.S. history — as an added “incentive” to keep jobs in state.

I rallied in solidarity with Boeing workers after they initially rejected the contract in November 2013. I had just been elected to the Seattle City Council as an independent socialist and working-class representative, using my campaign to launch the fight for a $15/hour minimum wage. In the following year, my office, the 15 NOW movement, and Seattle’s working people made Seattle the first major city to win the $15/hour minimum wage, despite opposition from big business and the Democratic Party. That wage is now at nearly $20/hour, and is the nation’s highest major-city minimum wage.

At the rally, I urged Boeing workers to shut down the company’s profit-making machine until their demands were met. I called Boeing’s threat to cut jobs “economic terrorism,” and warned that there was nothing preventing Boeing executives from pocketing the billions from tax handouts and pension cuts and then moving jobs out of state anyway. I said that if Boeing attempted to carry out their threat to cut jobs, that workers should take the Boeing facilities into democratic public ownership. I said that workers’ control of production was the only solution that could actually protect jobs and working-class taxpayers: “The machines are here, the workers are here, we will do the job, we don’t need the executives. The executives don’t do the work, the machinists do.”

The Democrats approved Boeing’s massive tax handout and the company succeeded in robbing workers of their pensions, but predictably, Boeing executives did cut jobs in Washington state: by 2017, they had cut nearly 13,000 jobs, or more than 15 percent of the company’s Washington workforce. And those job losses don’t even account for the tens of thousands of additional layoffs during the Covid-19 pandemic, which Boeing used as a further excuse to attack workers, including early retirements for higher paid and more experienced older workers. This culture of placing little value on the workers who build the planes is a key reason for Boeing’s ongoing safety failures, and is evident throughout company policy. This includes Boeing paying the full cost for children of non-unionized employees like managers and executives to attend a childcare facility across the street from their site in Everett, but union machinists have to pay the full $1,700/month cost out of pocket!

Since that betrayal in 2013, the machinists have faced stagnating wages and untenable increases in the cost of living. In contrast, Boeing made record profits, and engaged in billions in stock buybacks to further enrich wealthy shareholders. Meanwhile, over the same decade, Washington State Democrats and Republicans have systematically underfunded public education, affordable housing, healthcare, and social services.

A Strong Strike: Escalation, Double Strike Pay, Mass Rallies

Last year, UAW auto workers won historic victories through coordinated strike action, including increases of up to 150 percent in starting wages. This lesson — that workers’ demands can be won with a strong strike — appears not to have been absorbed by IAM’s leadership, who so far have not taken a bold, combative approach, including not organizing strong picket lines, rallies, or otherwise building on the strike’s momentum. They instead attempted to avoid striking altogether by insisting that Boeing’s initial offer was the best the workers could get, that it was even “historic,” and warning that there’s no guarantee a strike will win anything. In a statement published the morning after the strike vote, the IAM International leadership refused to even use the word “strike,” referring to it instead as “this challenging time,” hardly a characterization meant to inspire confidence or a fighting spirit.

While pledging to “make every resource available,” there was no mention of how the leadership will mobilize the 600,000-member organization to concretely support the striking members. The machinists know just how inadequate the strike fund currently is. Some have noted that the $250/week, which isn’t available until the third week of the strike, would not even cover rent. Many have reported having to scramble to line up temporary jobs to make sure their bills can be paid during the strike.

A weak strike fund leads to weak picket lines if workers are forced to take on other jobs rather than stay on the picket line. And Boeing workers need the strongest possible picket lines not only to prevent the possibility of strikebreakers from reopening the facilities, but crucially to build momentum, cohesion, and the overall strength of the strike, showing the bosses the strength of the workers in hard numbers.

The UAW’s victory last year shows that Boeing machinists have the potential to win many of their demands, but it will require a strong, united strike. The 96 percent strike approval vote proves that workers are united in their desire to win a good contract, but there is an urgent need to build on that initial vote and escalate the strike. There’s also a crucial need to actively build for strong community support and solidarity from the wider labor movement and community to let the company know that it cannot simply starve them back to work. You can hear the potential to mobilize broad community solidarity every day on the picket lines, from the constant honks of other workers driving by.

Working people from around the region should go to the picket lines to show support, and to send a message to Boeing that they have to contend with not just their own employees, but the wider community as well. Union members should pass solidarity resolutions that include strike fund donations, from tens of thousands of dollars for small unions to millions, or even hundreds of millions, from the biggest unions like UAW, the UFCW, and the Teamsters. This is what strike funds are for — to help win big victories for the working class that can empower the labor movement as a whole. Members of my organization, Workers Strike Back, are bringing such solidarity resolutions in their own unions.

The primary responsibility for a well-resourced strike lies with IAM international leadership, who need to dramatically increase the strike fund immediately so workers can go to the picket lines rather than being forced to work other jobs.

Prioritizing Profits Over Safety

At the time in 2013, Democratic Party politicians and the corporate media sneered at my points at the Boeing rally where I talked about the need for democratic public ownership of Boeing. But the dire necessity of actual democratic oversight has since become clear as day, with short-sighted and selfish Boeing executives having plunged the company into a complete crisis, with one safety disaster after another.

Both Democratic and Republican politicians have been working in lockstep with Boeing executives to aggressively roll back safety regulations and government oversight over the course of the last decade. Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell from Washington state chairs the U.S. Senate panel tasked with overseeing the airline industry. The recipient of nearly $200,000 in contributions from Boeing’s executives and political action committee, Cantwell championed legislation rolling back safety requirements for Boeing after the 2018 and 2019 crashes that killed 346 people!

Testimony in lawsuits and investigations by Congress and Federal regulators has revealed the degree to which the bosses have willfully ignored safety concerns and even punished workers for raising them. One Boeing team captain at the 737 factory told investigators of problems of low employee morale and high turnover: “We have a lot of turnover specifically because, you know, this can be a stressful job…What the company wants and what we have the skills and capabilities to perform at the time sometimes that doesn’t coincide.” Other workers backed this up. One explained: “As far as the workload, I feel like we were definitely trying to put out too much product, right?” said [an] unidentified Boeing worker. “That’s how mistakes are made. People try to work too fast. I mean, I can’t speak for anybody else, but we were busy. We were working a lot.” Another said he told the National Transportation Safety Board that his team was “put in uncharted waters to where… we were replacing doors like we were replacing our underwear.” “The planes come in jacked up every day. Every day,” the second worker added.”

At a recent banking conference, Boeing CFO Brian West claimed that a strike by the machinists would “jeopardize our recovery” from the ongoing safety scandal. This statement is belied by the fact that Boeing’s credit rating was hovering “one notch above junk status” long before the strike, as a fallout from the spate of safety incidents, including the shocking midair blowout of a cabin door plug on an Alaska Airlines plane, forcing an emergency landing.

Instead of deploying resources into addressing urgent safety issues, Boeing executives have prioritized returning maximum profits for shareholders in the near term, exorbitant CEO pay, and shoring up their status as one of the most powerful political lobbying groups in the U.S. They’ve also been actively undermining worker efforts at fighting for quality control and safety measures at Boeing, including targeting workers trying to raise the alarms.

CEO Dave Calhoun was paid $22.6 million in 2022, $33 million in 2023, and another $45 million in stock bonuses upon “stepping down” in August, amid mounting criticism over “mishandled” (i.e., illegally suppressed) safety issues.

Boeing’s major shareholders have, in turn, pocketed a staggering $68 billion in dividends and stock buybacks over the last decade. As economist Marie Christine Duggan found:

In 2017, the year before the first deadly plane crash, Boeing’s spending on dividends and stock buybacks was 66% of total spending, while only 9% of Boeing’s cash went into new equipment to manufacture planes. In other words, payouts to shareholders were seven times larger than spending on new equipment for manufacturing.

These same major shareholders are also the ones who hire executives and decide their extravagant pay. As comedian George Carlin once said, “It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.”

In fact, what we’re seeing right now is the logical outcome of a major industry like air travel being run on the basis of private profit rather than in the public interest, with the limited public oversight that used to exist being increasingly unraveled.

Boeing executives’ disregard for safety isn’t just deadly to passengers on their planes but also to workers. Just last month, two Delta airlines workers were killed and a third was gravely injured when the tire on a Boeing plane exploded on the runway. Overall, 15 of the 32 whistleblower complaints filed against the company in the past three years have raised workplace safety concerns as the primary issue. Just this past May, Boeing locked out its own chronically understaffed and underpaid firefighters for three weeks in an effort to avoid raising their pay to be more in line with the industry standard. These workers are responsible for the critical task of responding to fires and medical emergencies at the company’s facilities.

Since the fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019, Boeing has been forced to pay over $3 billion in criminal penalties and related fees for illegally hiding safety concerns from government regulators and attempting to silence worker whistleblowers. Until this strike, dozens of worker whistleblowers have been at the leading edge of the fightback against Boeing’s deadly corporate greed. Though undoubtedly heroic, their vulnerability as individuals could not be more evident. But as an organized force, 33,000 machinists are impossible for Boeing to silence. Their demands correctly include more say over safety and quality control procedures.

Unfortunately, the “seat at the table” of Boeing’s Board of Directors being requested by union leadership is not going to give the workers any say over safety procedures. Workers need actual democratic control and decision-making authority — like democratically elected worker-led quality-assurance committees with real power over policy and budget so  they can aggressively defend Quality Assurance (QA) and other workers from corporate pressure to overlook safety issues in the interests of corporate profits.

Opportunity is Ripe for a Big Win — Labor Must Seize it

The situation is ripe for Boeing workers to win major concessions with a strong strike. Boeing’s public image has been deeply tarnished by the ongoing safety scandals. Because of the close Presidential race, Democrats are sensitive to pressure from the labor movement. This isn’t just wishful thinking. Bank of America analyst Ronald Epstein wrote in a note to clients, “We see it likely Boeing would have to make further concessions and move closer to the IAM’s initial proposal.”

When even Wall Street bankers are talking openly about a company’s weak position relative to workers in a strike, there is no excuse for union leaders not to take advantage of this leverage to win the biggest possible victory for workers.

IAM’s international leadership, with a membership of over 600,000, must immediately concretely prioritize the machinists’ strike by massively strengthening their strike fund. At a minimum, strike pay should be doubled to $500/week and begin immediately, not after 3 weeks. Striking workers need to be out in force at the picket lines to prevent scab labor from restarting production, to build momentum, ensure high morale and a strong public profile, to facilitate ongoing discussion among workers about strike strategy, and to put maximum pressure on Boeing. Unions should organize mass rallies in support of Boeing workers, which could bring out tens of thousands of working people, and maximize pressure on both Boeing and the Democratic Party, which is overseeing mediation and has huge leverage over the company, including billions in government contracts.

A victory in this strike would be a huge boost for the labor movement after a decade of gross profiteering by Boeing on the backs of workers, taxpayers, and public safety. The labor movement as a whole needs to take responsibility for ensuring an adequate strike fund so no worker has to worry about how their bills will be paid during a strike. The elected leaders of major unions nationally have a special responsibility to actively and materially support a historic strike.

Rank-and-file union members everywhere can introduce resolutions in solidarity with IAM 751, calling for their demands to be met in full, pledging large donations to their strike fund. If you’re in the Puget Sound region, mobilize your union’s members to the machinists’ 24/7 picket lines at Boeing Field in South Seattle, Boeing’s Everett Site, and the Boeing Renton Factory.

Workers everywhere, both union and non-union, should do whatever is possible to support this strike, including making trips to the picket line, donating to the strike fund, and helping organize community support rallies. Workers should also publicly demand that Democratic politicians in the state stand with striking Boeing workers and call for Boeing to immediately meet their demands in full.

Boeing Machinists have the opportunity to reset the playing field and reverse the devastating losses from their last contract. Such a shift in the balance of power against Boeing’s ruthless corporate leadership would be a huge victory for working people everywhere. Solidarity with Boeing machinists on strike!

The post Boeing Machinists on Strike Have a Historic Opportunity appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kshama Sawant.

Boeing CEO David Calhoun appeared before a Senate committee on Tuesday to face questions about the aerospace giant’s safety record, just hours after the release of a damning report on Boeing’s business practices. Released by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, the report found that the company lost track of hundreds of substandard aircraft parts, eliminated quality inspectors and put manufacturing workers in charge of signing off on their own work. We speak with Nadia Milleron, an aviation safety advocate, whose daughter Samya Stumo was killed on Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 in 2019 when a Boeing 737 MAX 8 jet crashed due to the plane’s malfunctioning software that put the plane into a nosedive. She attended Tuesday’s hearing and is also running for Congress in Massachusetts. “Why is Dave Calhoun paid $32 million? He’s paid that money to cut costs. That’s what he’s good at. He’s not good at production. He’s not an engineer. He’s paid to strip-mine the company,” says Milleron, who signed a letter along with other families of Boeing crash victims calling on the Justice Department to consider criminal prosecutions against company leadership. “They need to clean house.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

• Boeing victims relatives call on federal government to fine the company $25 billion over two crashes.
• New Mexico firefighters continue to battle large wildfire in mountainous area.
• Tropical storm Alberto heads toward Mexico and Texas Gulf Coast.
• Recall campaign for Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao gets enough signatures for ballot approval.
• Richmond City Council approves Chevron refinery tax.

The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – June 19, 2024. Boeing victims relatives call on federal government to fine the company $25 billion over two crashes. appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

• Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun testifies at Senate Committee hearing on company safety issues.
• Record setting heatwave bakes parts of Midwest and Northeast.
• Labor and Environmental groups petition FEMA for extreme heat and wildfire some disaster status.
• California wildfires continue to burn, firefighters manage to gain some ground.
• Consumer spending up only slightly from April to May.

The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – June 18, 2024. Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun testifies at Senate Committee hearing on company safety issues. appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

• Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun testifies at Senate Committee hearing on company safety issues.
• Record setting heatwave bakes parts of Midwest and Northeast.
• Labor and Environmental groups petition FEMA for extreme heat and wildfire some disaster status.
• California wildfires continue to burn, firefighters manage to gain some ground.
• Consumer spending up only slightly from April to May.

The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – June 18, 2024. Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun testifies at Senate Committee hearing on company safety issues. appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

OVER 1,000 CSULB STUDENTS, FACULTY, AND STAFF RALLIED FOR PALESTINE ON MAY 2, 2024. (PHOTO: BEN HUFF)

“Over the years, Boeing and its employees have played a vital role in the advancement of Cal State Long Beach.”

Jane Close Conoley, President, California State University, Long Beach

Pro-Palestinian student protests and encampments have bloomed this spring across U.S. universities. Unsurprisingly, campus administrators have responded with calls for civility and peace — that is, when not inviting militarized police forces onto campus to attack and arrest peaceful student demonstrators. At California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), while chiding students for a planned demonstration against Israel’s genocidal offensive in Gaza, the university President stressed that “we must hold to a vision of peace and reject violence. We must embrace the immeasurable value of human life.” However, this “vision of peace” apparently does not extend to our university’s deep and numerous links to the U.S. military-industrial complex, the largest purveyor of weapons of mass destruction and death in the world, or to Palestinian people.

The “golden triangle” of military, industry, and university cooperation is nothing new, but in today’s neoliberal university — shaped by the politics of austerity and privatization policies and deliberately starved of public funding for over four decades — military and defense industry funding and collaborations have become foundational to the public university’s normal fiscal and research operations. These lucrative partnerships raise serious questions about the ways in which university priorities are inexorably bent and shaped to the will of corporate interests, imperial militarism, and war-profiteering.

As the second biggest campus in the nation’s largest four-year public university system, CSULB, as a site of analysis, is a prime example of this ongoing and growing complicity of higher education with the corporate machinery of war and imperialism. CSULB reveals the troubling ways that public universities have become entangled in the global geographies of racial capitalism and anti-Palestinian violence. In particular, the university’s longstanding partnership with Boeing showcases public higher education’s connections to US-Israeli militarism and genocide.
Boeing’s connection to Israel’s military violence

Since the founding of Israel in 1948, Boeing has played a key role in supporting Israel’s military and commercial interests. The Boeing Company is the world’s largest aerospace corporation and fourth-largest defense contractor, valued at over $100 billion. Boeing’s weapons and technology have provided material support for Israel’s military campaigns of displacement, occupation, and brutal violence against Palestinians. While producing profit for the corporation, Boeing’s 75-year relationship with Israel is linked to tens of thousands of Palestinians killed by Boeing’s weaponry, the complete destruction of Gaza’s civil society and infrastructure, and the displacement of over 2 million Palestinian people.

Boeing’s financial partnership with Israel has provided key military assets, including (via its merger with McDonnell Douglas) F-15 fighter jets, “Apache” helicopters, hellfire missiles (produced in collaboration with Lockheed Martin), and the “tail kit” navigation system used on massive 2,000 pound MK84 bombs that have devastated Gaza in the latest round of genocidal attacks. Israel’s indiscriminate use of Boeing’s heavy bombs directly contributed to numerous “mass casualty events” and the soaring death toll in Gaza. Since October of 2023, Boeing and Israel have expanded their financial partnership with Israel’s recent purchase of 25 new sophisticated F-15 IA (Israel Advanced) fighter jets, in addition to Israel’s high-tech Arrow-3 missile defense system, marketed for its “hit-to-kill” technology.
Boeing at ‘The Beach’: profit, privatization, and the erosion of the public university

Despite its complicity in occupation and genocide, Boeing has had a long and financially reciprocal relationship with CSULB, one going back decades with its latest iteration being touted as CSULB’s “Boeing Partnership.” CSULB is one of just 16 universities nationwide – and the sole university in California – to be selected by the Boeing Company for an exclusive university partnership. The Boeing Partnership is a university-corporate alliance that has further transformed CSULB into a public relations mouthpiece for the defense contractor. The CSULB-Boeing partnership illustrates not only how defense contractors such as Boeing, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman profit from Israel’s violence against Palestinians, but also how these massive corporations simultaneously undermine the mission of public universities by harming students domestically and facilitating genocide, militarism, and mass death abroad.

In alignment with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) Movement, the global student solidarity movement with Palestine has bravely demanded that their universities “disclose and divest” from stock holdings in corporations that profit off of Palestinian death and support Israel’s settler-colonial war machine. This work has been crucial. Yet it is also critical to expose how the complicity of US universities in Israeli militarism and Palestinian genocide extends far beyond investments in stocks. Under constant threats of austerity measures and the steady erosion of state funding in the neoliberal context, large public university systems like the California State University (CSU) system have quietly become embedded with defense contractors saturating every facet of campus life. The university-corporate nexus has become all-encompassing, producing deleterious consequences for students, faculty, and staff while undermining the university’s mission of promoting the “public good.”

At CSULB, the administration has invited the Boeing Company to become the university’s omnipresent corporate partner. Boeing and CSULB’s insidious alliance can be found in classrooms and research labs, job fairs, Boeing internships, the Aerospace Corporation Leadership Academy, Boeing guest speakers at the Student Leadership Institute, Boeing-sponsored student orientation events, Boeing research competitions, and Boeing-sponsored scholarships for students in Business and Psychology. Students are inundated with Boeing’s footprint on campus. The College of Engineering and College of Business has quite literally transformed into Boeing’s labor-supply mill. CSULB was the second institution to receive Boeing’s “Supplier of the Year” award. It’s no surprise, then, that Boeing employs the largest number of CSULB graduates. In recent years, the College of Engineering introduced the Boeing Endowed Chair in Manufacturing. Meanwhile, the College of Business has also aligned closely with Boeing as one of its key “corporate partners” providing “internships for students, support the different centers, programs, and student organizations at the College.”

The revolving door of defense contractor executives serving as advisors to university administrators at CSULB has become a taken-for-granted reality. Previously, the Vice President of Boeing’s Defense unit served on the Board of Directors for CSULB’s 49er Foundation – the primary body in charge of the university’s endowment and investment holdings. CSULB’s Alumni Association also honored two former Boeing Vice Presidents of Boeing’s Defense, Space, and Security unit with the Distinguished Alumni Award, CSULB’s highest alumni honor.

Beyond Boeing, the university has also formed strategic corporate partnerships with other weapons and defense contractors complicit in Israeli violence, such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman. The Dean’s Advisory Council for the College of Engineering currently has three members from Boeing, two members from Raytheon, and two members from Northrop Grumman. Like Boeing, Northrop Grumman is similarly embedded in CSULB faculty and student research, student organizations, along with so-called labor “talent” pipelines. The Dean for Research and Graduate Programs has also sought to build a closer relationship between the university and the US Army. While the university’s purported mission is to promote “global understanding” through “respect and appreciation for different cultures,” collaborations such as these do nothing of the sort. Instead, they facilitate capital accumulation for defense contractors at the expense and destruction of racialized peoples across the globe.
Reclaiming the people’s university from the U.S.-Israeli war machine

As Palestinian life continues to be annihilated by a settler-colonial state aided by its primary ally, the United States, hope has also emerged from university campuses where student movements are demanding transparency about university investments and divestment from corporations that thrive from war profiteering. These organizing efforts stand in stark contrast to the neoliberal university’s collaboration with corporations that profit from war and violence.

Across the CSU, student activists are rising up and demanding transparency and accountability at numerous CSU campuses and they are winning. Cal State Sacramento became the first public university in California to promise divestment from companies doing business with Israel. At San Francisco State, students are redefining democracy at their university by engaging in open bargaining with their campus president over its investments. These movements remind us of the collective responsibility to defend, at all costs, the right to life and human dignity. Students are also mobilizing against public university partnerships with defense contractors such as Boeing. Students at Portland State University demanded the university cut all financial ties with Boeing. The pressure from Portland State’s student activists led to an announcement from the university President: “PSU will pause seeking or accepting any further gifts or grants from the Boeing Company until we have had a chance to engage in this debate and come to conclusions about a reasonable course of action.”

Meanwhile, the CSU Office of the Chancellor has countered that they do “not intend to alter existing investment policies related to Israel or the Israel-Hamas conflict,” choosing to prioritize corporate profit-making and the neoliberal machinery of mass death rather than the purported values and responsibilities of public institutions. Drawing on the politics of scarcity without calling into question the violent logic of austerity, the CSU sanctimoniously continues to justify its support of the US war machine that actively aids genocide in Gaza. CSU leaders claim that “CSU investments provide a stable revenue stream that benefits our students and faculty, and supports our critical campus facilities, scholarships, and other key elements of our educational mission.” The fact that this “stable revenue stream” comes soaked in the innocent blood of Palestinians doesn’t give them pause, since clearly to them the right to life of Palestinians is less important than the CSU system hoarding its $8 billion reserve fund.

Boeing’s takeover of CSULB illustrates the immense ethical challenge facing public higher education. As educators and students, we must actively resist the normalization of university partnerships with corporations that facilitate dehumanization and indignity while imagining new ways to ensure public universities can thrive without becoming complicit in the mounting crimes against humanity perpetrated by the US-Israeli military-industrial complex. The uncritical acceptance of military defense corporations’ enmeshment in all levels of the university demonstrates how a public university’s mission is being eroded before our eyes. We must ask, what role can and should public higher education play in articulating different life worlds where a generative vision of peace, justice, and transformative possibilities can flourish? The answers to these pressing ethical dilemmas are already being generated by student activists, not university administrators; this means, we need to listen to our students.

The authors are all members of CSULB Faculty for Justice in Palestine, an academic worker collective of over 50 tenure-track and lecturer faculty at California State University, Long Beach.

This piece first appeared at Modoweiss.

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Janine Jackson interviewed Public Citizen’s Robert Weissman about the Boeing scandal for the March 29, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CNN (3/25/24)

Janine Jackson: Boeing CEO David Calhoun is going to “step down in wake of ongoing safety problems,” as headlines have it, or amid “737 MAX struggles,” or elsewhere “mishaps.”

Had you or I at our job made choices, repeatedly, that took the lives of 346 people and endangered others, I doubt media would describe us as “stepping down amid troubles.” But crimes of capitalism are “accidents” for the corporate press, while the person stealing baby formula from the 7/11 is a bad person, as well as a societal danger.

There are many reasons that corporate news media treat corporate crime differently than so-called “street crime,” but none of them are excuses we need to accept.

Public Citizen looks at the same events and information that the press does, but from a bottom-up, people-first perspective. We’re joined now by the president of Public Citizen; welcome back to CounterSpin, Robert Weissman.

Robert Weissman: Hey, it’s great to be with you.

American Prospect (10/31/19)

JJ: Boeing is a megacorporation. It has contractors across the country and federal subsidies out the wazoo, but when it does something catastrophic, somehow this one guy stepping down is problem solved? What happened here versus what, from a consumer-protection perspective, you think should have happened, or should happen?

RW: Well, I think the story is still being written. Folks will remember that Boeing was responsible for two large airliner crashes in 2018 and 2019 that killed around 350 people. The result of that, as a law enforcement matter, was that Boeing agreed to a leniency deal on a single count of fraud. It didn’t actually plead guilty; it just stipulated that the facts might be true, and promised that they would follow the law in the future. That agreement was concluded in the waning days of the Trump administration.

Fast forward, people will remember the recent disaster with another Boeing flight for Alaska Airlines earlier this year, when a door plug came untethered and people were jeopardized. Luckily, no one was fatally injured in that disaster.

But the disaster itself was exactly a consequence of Boeing’s culture of not attending to safety, a departure from the historic orientation of the corporation, and, from our point of view, directly a result of the slap-on-the-wrist leniency agreement that they had entered after the gigantic crashes of just a few years prior.

So now the Department of Justice is looking at this problem again. They are criminally investigating Boeing for the most recent problem with Alaska Airlines Flight 1282. And we are encouraging, and we think they are, looking back at the prior agreement, because the prior agreement said, if Boeing engages in other kinds of wrongdoing in the future, the Department of Justice can reopen the original case and prosecute them more fully–which it should have done, of course, in the initial instance.

Public Citizen (3/25/24)

JJ: Let’s talk about the DoJ. I’m seeing this new report from Public Citizen about federal corporate crime prosecutions, which we think would be entertained in this case, and particularly a careful look back at choices, conscious choices, made by the company that resulted in these harms. And this report says the DoJ is doing slightly more in terms of going after corporate offenders, but maybe nothing to write home about.

RW: Right. There was a very notable shift in rhetoric from the top of the DoJ at the start of the Biden administration, and not the normal thing you would hear. Much more aggressive language about corporate crime, and holding corporations accountable, and holding CEOs and executives accountable.

However, that rhetoric hasn’t been matched in good policymaking, and we had the lowest levels of corporate criminal enforcement in decades in the first year of the administration. We gave them a pass on that, because that was mostly carrying forward with cases that were started, or not started, under the Trump administration. But we’ve only seen a slow uptick in the last couple years. So it has increased from its previous low, but by historic standards, it’s still at a very low level, in terms of aggregate number of corporate criminal prosecutions.

By the way, if people are wondering, what numbers are we talking about, we’re talking about 113. So very, very few corporate criminal prosecutions, as compared to the zillions of prosecutions of individuals, as you rightly juxtaposed at the start.

JJ: And then even, historically, there were more corporate crime prosecutions 20 years ago, and it’s not like the world ended. It didn’t drive the economy into the ground. This is a thing that can happen.

Robert Weissman: “There’s no sense in which holding corporations accountable for following the law is going to interfere with the functioning of the economy.”

RW: Correct. The corporate criminal prosecutions don’t end the world, and moreover, corporate crime didn’t end. So we ought to have more prosecutions than we have now. I mean, we’re just talking about companies following the law. This is not about aggressive measures to hold them accountable for things that are legal but are wrong, which is, of course, pervasive. This is just a matter of following the law. There’s no sense in which holding corporations accountable for following the law is going to interfere with the functioning of the economy. It doesn’t diminish the ability of capitalism to carry out what it does. In fact, following the rule of law, for anyone who actually cares about a well-functioning capitalist society, should be a pretty core principle, and enforcement of law should be a core requirement.

JJ: And one thing that I thought notable, also, in this recent report is that small businesses are more likely to face prosecution. And that reminds me of the IRS saying, “Well, yeah, we go after low-income people who get the math wrong on their taxes, because rich people’s taxes are really complicated, you guys.” So there’s a way that even when the law is enforced, it’s not necessarily against the biggest offenders.

RW: Yeah, that’s right. Although the numbers are so small, that disparity isn’t quite that stark. I think the big thing that illustrates your point, though, is the entirely different way that corporate crime is treated than crime by individual offenders, street offenders.

First of all, the norm for many years has been reliance on leniency agreements. So not even plea deals, where a corporation pleads down, or a person might plea down the crime to which they are admitting guilt. But a no-plea deal, in which they just say, “Hey, we promise to follow the law going forward in the future, and if we do, you won’t prosecute us for the thing that we did wrong in the past.”

Human beings do not get those kinds of deals, except rarely, in the most low-level offenses. But that’s been the norm for corporations, for pervasive offenses with mass impacts on society, sometimes injured persons, and instances where the corporations, of course, are very intentional about what they’re doing, because it’s all designed based on risk/benefit decisions about how to make the most profit. The sentences and the punishments for corporations in the criminal space and for CEOs in the criminal space are just paltry.

JJ: So if deterrence, really genuinely preventing these kinds of things from happening again, if that were really the goal, then the process would look different.

RW: It would look radically different. I think that there’s a lot of data when it comes to so-called street crime. You need enforcement, obviously, against real wrongdoing, but tough penalties don’t actually work for deterrence. It’s just not what the system is, in terms of the social system and the cultural system, people deciding to follow or not follow the law and so on.

But for corporations, deterrence is everything. They are precisely profit-maximizing. They’re the ultimate rational actors. If the odds are good that they will be caught breaking the law and suffer serious penalties, then they will follow the law, almost to a T. So this is the space where deterrence actually would work, and we see criminal deterrence with aggressive enforcement and tough penalties really missing from the scene.

And this Boeing case is the perfect example. The company was responsible, through its lax safety processes, for two crashes that killed 350-plus people; they got off with a slap on the wrist. As a result, they didn’t really feel pressure to change what they were doing, and they put people at risk again. If they had been penalized in that first instance, I think you would’ve seen a radical shift in the company, much more adoption of a safety culture. We would have avoided this most recent mishap.

Seattle Times (2/26/24)

JJ: Let me, finally, just bring media back in. There was this damning report from the Federal Aviation Administration last month, and the reporting language across press accounts kind of incensed me.

This is just the Seattle Times: “A highly critical report,” they said, “said Boeing’s push to improve its safety culture has not taken hold at all levels of the company.” “The report,” the paper said, “cites ‘a disconnect’ between the rhetoric of Boeing’s senior management about prioritizing safety and how frontline employees perceive the reality.”

Well, this is Corporate Crime 101. I mean, there are books written on this. It’s not a disconnect: “Oh, the company’s at war with itself; leadership really wants safety really badly, but the workers just aren’t getting it.”

This is pushing accountability down and maintaining deniability at the top. So the CEO doesn’t have to say, “Oh, don’t follow best practices here.” They just need to say, “Well, we just need to cut costs this quarter,” and everybody understands what that means. Anybody who’s worked in a corporation understands what “corporate climate” means.

And so I guess my hopes for appropriate media coverage dim a little bit when there is so much pretending that we don’t know how decision-making works in corporations, that we don’t know how corporations work, when I know that reporters do.

RW: Yeah, well, I’ll just say that is so 100% correct in characterizing what happened at Boeing, because not only is that fake, and obviously culture is set from the top, this is a place where the culture of the workers and the engineers wants to, and long did, prioritize safety. They’re the ones who’ve been calling attention to all the problems. So it’s management that’s preventing them from doing their jobs, which is what they want to do.

Public Citizen (3/18/19)

I think in terms of how media talks about this, I agree with your point, and I think the reporting on Boeing has been pretty good in terms of documenting what happened. But what is often missing from even really good reports in mainstream news media is the criminal justice frame.

Now, admittedly, that partially follows from the failure of the Department of Justice to treat it as a criminal matter seriously, but I think it does change the way people think about this stuff. If you call it a crime, it’s exactly as you said, it’s not errors, it’s not just lapses. It’s certainly not mistakes. These are crimes, and they’re crimes with really serious consequences, in this case, hundreds of people dying.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Rob Weissman, president of Public Citizen. You can find their work on Boeing and many, many other issues online at citizen.org. Robert Weissman, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

RW: Great to be with you. Thanks so much.

The post ‘Punishments for Corporations and CEOs Are Just Paltry’: <br></em><span class='not-on-index' style='color:#000000; font-size: 23px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 25px; font-family: 'Open Sans','sans-serif'; padding-bottom: -10px;'>CounterSpin interview with Robert Weissman on Boeing scandal appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

BBC (3/28/24)

This week on CounterSpin: A senior UN human rights official told the BBC that there is a “plausible” case that Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza, a war crime. Meanwhile, US citizens struggle to make sense of White House policy that seems to call for getting aid to Palestinians while pursuing a course of action that makes that aid necessary, if insufficient.

Phyllis Bennis is senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, an international advisor with Jewish Voice for Peace and a longtime UN-watcher. She joins us with thoughts on the evolving situation.

American Prospect (10/31/19)

Also on the show: As reporter Alex Sammon outlined five years ago in the American Prospect, the Boeing scandal is an exemplar of the corporate crisis of our age. Putting resources that should’ve been put into safety into shareholder dividends and stock buybacks, selling warning indicators that alert pilots to problems with flight-control software as optional extras, and outsourcing engineering to coders in India making $9 an hour—these weren’t accidents; they were choices, made consciously, over time. So why are media so excited about Boeing’s CEO stepping down, as though his “taking one for the team” means changing the playbook? We hear from Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen.

The post Phyllis Bennis on Gaza Ceasefire Resolution, Robert Weissman on Boeing Scandal appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

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A closed-circuit video camera zoomed in on the tarmac of Seattle's Boeing Field one recent afternoon, buffeted by 30-mile-an-hour gusts as it captured the arrival of a charter jet. The jet rolled to a stop alongside two buses. Behind their tinted windows, still invisible to the camera, were people waiting to be deported from the United States.

"Windy," muttered a woman watching the video feed on a projector screen. Struggling to make out the plane’s tail number from the shaky image, she stood up for a closer look.

On the screen, a stairway was wheeled over, and a cluster of men in bright yellow jackets descended from the plane. Another man stepped out of an SUV that partly blocked the foot of the stairs from view. Soon the group lugged over black bags, opened them, and laid out something that looked like chains.

When detainees began emerging from the camera’s blind spot, their ankles, waists and wrists appeared to be shackled together, and they seemed unable to hold the handrails as they shuffled up the wet stairs in the wind.

"So dangerous," said another woman watching the video feed. People kept coming, and she and her partner kept count: "Seven ... eight ... nine ... ten ... eleven ... twelve." One by one, the hunched figures disappeared into the plane. After an hour, it was gone.

Watch video ➜

The observation room at Boeing Field offers what is arguably America’s best real-time window into our vast network of privately run deportation flights, a system that has generated troubling reports of passenger mistreatment and in-flight emergencies.

In 2017, passengers on a deportation flight to Somalia said they were left bound and shackled in their seats for 23 hours during a stopover, some forced to soil themselves because they were denied bathroom visits. A year later, the right landing gear collapsed as a plane carrying detainees touched down at an airport in Louisiana, sparking a fire on its wing, filling the cabin with the smell of burning rubber and sending shackled passengers racing toward the three functioning evacuation slides after another slide failed to deploy. The next year, a detainee at the same Louisiana airport tumbled from the top of the boarding stairs and was rushed to the hospital.

While news organizations have reported on some of these incidents aboard what the government calls ICE Air, key details about how the system works would still be hidden were it not for a group of researchers who are now part of the work inside the observation room.

The University of Washington Center for Human Rights has spent the past six years trying to shed light on deportation operations, even as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its contractors and subcontractors have taken steps that shield their activities from view. (ICE declined ProPublica’s requests for comment.) Now the human rights center is in close contact with the observers at Boeing Field, hoping their weekly vigil will yield new clues and drive further research.

Every scrap of information is hard won.

As the recent dramatic influx of immigrants has prompted a push among political leaders to accelerate expulsions, what Seattle's single shaky tarmac camera really shows is how little the public is allowed to know about the nation’s hidden deportation infrastructure.

The Washington human rights center’s investigation of ICE Air began in 2018 with a modest goal: to prove that deportation operations took place at King County International Airport, as Boeing Field is officially known. Liberal local officials had enacted various “sanctuary” policies to insulate their residents from then-President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigrants, but they were unaware (or could at least claim to be unaware) of ICE flights at the county-owned airport. “They all played dumb,” said Maru Mora Villalpando of the immigrant rights group La Resistencia. “All of them were like, ‘Wait, what, there are deportations happening here?’”

The center began gathering documents that proved it, and also hinted at the worldwide breadth of ICE Air's network. Their investigation grew. Through records requests to ICE, and after interventions by Washington's congressional delegation, researchers obtained an ICE Air database spanning eight years of global operations: 1.73 million passenger records from nearly 15,000 flights to and from 88 U.S. airports — Boeing Field indeed among them — and to 134 international airports in 119 countries around the world.

In April 2019, the center published this trove of raw data and a pair of reports cataloging a history of in-flight abuses and potential due process violations.

The Washington human rights center reports also mapped the layers of contractors and subcontractors that provide ICE with planes, security guards, in-flight nurses and access to local airports. “Over the past decade, the institutional infrastructure behind these flights has shifted from a government operation run by the US Marshals Service on government planes,” the researchers wrote, “to a sprawling, semi-secret network of flights on privately-owned aircraft.” Their reports identified the charter companies by name.

A great majority of the deportation flights leaving Boeing Field were bound not for destinations overseas but for domestic ICE Air hubs closer to America’s southern border, over 1,000 miles away, where detainees could be placed on connecting flights to countries of origin. The Washington researchers showed that Boeing Field was a busy part of the network, having hosted close to 500 ICE Air flights since 2010, collecting landing fees as the government shipped off at least 34,400 people for deportation.

Confronted with these findings, King County Executive Dow Constantine issued an order designed to eventually make it impossible for ICE Air to get any ground support, such as refueling, at Boeing Field. The company providing these ground services to ICE, which had also been named in the center’s reports, decided to stop rather than wait until its contract came up for renewal. The flights suddenly ended. (The company, Clay Lacy Aviation, and its successor in Seattle, Modern Aviation, did not respond to requests for comment.)

A game of cat and mouse had begun, pitting the Trump administration — and later the Biden administration — against local sanctuary advocates.

First, ICE switched locations. It began charter operations out of a municipal airport in the small city of Yakima, located in the farming region about three hours east of Seattle.

But activists began showing up at the Yakima airfield, recording tail numbers and keeping count of people being deported.

Second, ICE changed its flight numbering system. The human rights center had disclosed in its 2019 report that it used the federally assigned prefix “RPN-” for “repatriate” to plug information into free flight-tracking websites and obtain a plane’s tail number and ownership. So ICE dropped the “RPN-” and adopted the call signs of its various charter companies.

Activists became more sophisticated. Thomas Cartwright, a retired financial executive in Ohio turned refugee advocate, figured out how to identify ICE Air missions by analyzing flight patterns, operators and airport pairs. He began to track charter planes by the dozens, enabling the human rights center to issue a 2022 report linking specific deportation flights to the sports teams and musical acts that chartered the same planes.

“I'm retired, and I really do need to retire," Cartwright said. "I don't know who's going to do it after me.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Justice proceeded with a lawsuit against Constantine, the King County executive, to restart ICE flights at Boeing Field. Announcing the suit in February 2020, then-Attorney General William Barr had called it “a significant escalation in the federal government’s efforts to confront the resistance of 'sanctuary cities.'"

A judge ruled against the county in March 2023, and ICE made preparations to return.

Signature Aviation, a ground-support company at Boeing Field with an $11.5 million new terminal building for its executive clients, agreed to service ICE Air out on a hard-to-see part of the tarmac. Two charter companies, iAero Airways and GlobalX, would do the flying. (None of the companies responded to ProPublica’s requests for comment.)

La Resistencia, the local immigrant rights group, responded by pressuring King County officials to set up a viewing area. The county hastily opened a conference room and closed-circuit video feed for observers.

On May 2, according to a spreadsheet kept by the observers, a white Boeing 737 with the tail number N802TJ arrived from Phoenix. The plane was known as the Straight Talk Express when used on Sen. John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign, photos and news reports from the time show. On this day iAero was using it for a deportation flight. ICE Air was back.

Volunteers now observe deportation flights every week at Boeing Field, usually on Tuesday mornings.

Coordinating their efforts along with La Resistencia’s Maru Mora Villalpando is Stan Shikuma, a 70-year-old retired nurse and the co-president of the civil liberties group Tsuru for Solidarity.

“Tsuru” means “crane” in Japanese. The group consists of Japanese American survivors of U.S. incarceration camps during World War II and their descendents. They first organized to protest what they saw as similar mass camps for immigrant families during the Trump administration. One, in Dilley, Texas, was just 45 minutes down the road from Crystal City, Texas, the site of an infamous camp that housed Japanese American families. In 2019, the group that would become Tsuru led a large rally outside the Dilley detention center, giving speeches and playing taiko drums and stringing tens of thousands of origami paper cranes along the fence. The cranes became their symbol. They rallied under the cry “Stop Repeating History!”

At Boeing Field, the volunteers record tail numbers and keep a count of how many people get on and off each plane. The observations can serve as “a check on ICE in case they do put out numbers,” Shikuma says. “If they say, ‘We’ve only deported 25 people in the last two months,’ we can say, ‘Well, we counted 85 in the last two weeks.’”

The second goal, Shikuma says, is to "let the people on the plane know that we're out here and that someone cares." In this effort, the groups, hidden away as they are in the observation room, have been less successful.

When Shikuma is on duty, he sits with one or two other observers in the conference room and stares intently at the closed-circuit video screen on the wall. He sips coffee and checks FlightAware, a popular plane tracking app, on his phone. He watches the buses roll in from the 1,575-bed Northwest ICE Processing Center in nearby Tacoma, run by private-prison contractor The Geo Group.

After the ICE Air flight arrives, usually from Phoenix but sometimes Las Vegas, San Antonio or El Paso, Shikuma marks in his notebook the time, the plane’s tail number, how many detainees exit and how many board.

Planes meet buses behind a large hangar, almost entirely out of view from a perimeter road. There are often three buses, but only two of them, Shikuma said, ever unload passengers. The third parks along a fence line, blocking any remaining view from the road. While the county's closed-circuit camera can still capture the boarding process, the positioning of the SUV and two passenger buses means that detainees are generally visible on the camera only for the seconds it takes them to ascend the stairs.

Twice in recent months volunteers witnessed what they considered unusual activity during boardings on the tarmac, prompting the human rights center to request records of internal ICE documentation on those two flights under the Freedom of Information Act.

Activists say that King County, despite its left-leaning reputation, has been a more reluctant partner in keeping tabs on deportation flights than was Yakima, which had regularly shared passenger tallies.

But Cameron Satterfield, a county spokesperson, said officials are doing what they can within a limited set of options. “We have a federal judge saying, ‘No, this is a public airport,’” he told ProPublica.

The county logs ICE Air’s arrivals and departures on its website, though the page was missing for weeks this winter after an update. Local officials have been unable to obtain passenger data from ICE, not even a head count. “They have told us: You can send a FOIA request,” Satterfield said.

This means that the only practical way to get numbers is the volunteers’ flight-by-flight paper tally. In 2022, ICE's average processing time for what it deems "complex" requests hit a record high: 186 days. At the end of that year, it had a backlog of 16,902 unresolved cases, a fourfold jump from 2021.

ProPublica’s review of deportation videos posted online by ICE shows what a difference the unvarnished view from Boeing Field can make. The agency began routinely posting the productions in May.

The 97 videos ProPublica examined, ranging in length from 22 seconds to almost 3 minutes, show signs of careful framing and editing. While detainees are commonly shown climbing the steps in handcuffs and the waist chains that secure them, the videos often cut to a new shot before leg shackles can make an appearance. When leg shackles are visible, they are typically out of focus, discernible only if you know to look for them.

It is common on ICE Air to place passengers in five-point restraints — wrists, ankles, and waists in chains — even as the agency’s own statistics show that less than half of the people deported in 2023 had any kind of criminal conviction, let alone for serious felonies that could suggest a possible risk to others on board.

Carrier names and tail numbers are blurred or absent in the videos, consistent with tail-number redactions in documents the Washington human rights center has gradually received from ICE in the years after its 2019 reports. The agency cites an exemption to the Freedom of Information Act protecting records that would reveal "techniques and procedures for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions" or "could reasonably be expected to risk circumvention of the law."

Watch video ➜

The agency did not respond when asked by ProPublica how disclosing tail numbers could pose such risks, nor when asked to explain the use of five-point restraints. When the California news organization Capital & Main wrote in 2021 about ICE flights that went badly, it quoted a spokesperson saying the agency required safety reports from flight brokers and that “ICE retains the ability to hold the vendor accountable if there are performance issues.”

The spokesperson also told Capital & Main that the agency “utilizes restraints only when necessary for the safety and security of the detainee passengers, flight crew, and the aircraft.”

What ICE’s online videos don't show is revealing in its own right. In spring 2023, the center obtained a series of ICE Air incident reports detailing various accidents during charter operations, including the one in which a detainee in Alexandria, Louisiana, tumbled down the boarding stairs. Agency investigators recommended that contractors and subcontractors avoid such accidents in the future by placing a guard midway up the stairs to help detainees board and to catch any who lose their balance.

Yet in most of the ICE Air videos, including 32 of the 33 shot over the last year at the Louisiana airport where the man fell, ICE's contractors did not heed the investigators’ suggestion.

At Boeing Field, observers have documented the same practices. Week after week, rain or shine, including the recent gusty day when the tarmac camera shook in 30-mile-an-hour winds, chained detainees continue to climb aboard the planes alone.

On a calmer day this winter, Shikuma shared the observation room with Mora Villalpando and with fellow Tsuru volunteer Margaret Sekijima. FlightAware showed an inbound Airbus A320 operated by the ICE Air subcontractor GlobalX. Buses from the detention center, which normally arrive well in advance, had yet to appear on the screen. “Very unusual,” Shikuma said. “I wonder if they've changed up the protocol."

A few weeks prior, Mora Villalpando had led a group of protestors who intercepted the buses outside the gates of the airport, waving at the detainees inside and unfurling a banner that read "You are not alone" in three languages spoken by recent groups of Northwest detainees: English, Spanish and Punjabi.

Minutes later, two buses traversed the video frame from left to right. A young woman burst into the room. “They changed the entrance and came from the north!” she said. She was a student from the University of Washington, there to lead a demonstration in front of Signature Aviation’s gleaming terminal building. “I’m going to go round up the troops.”

The Airbus landed. The observers took down its tail number. They counted 29 detainees getting on, zero getting off.

Shikuma and Mora Villalpando went outside to join the protesters. Sekijima stayed in the conference room, her expression tight, her eyes on the screen until the plane left for El Paso, its next destination in ICE Air’s endless loop of deportation flights.

Help ProPublica Reporters Investigate the Immigration System

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by McKenzie Funk.

Photograph Source: Aka The Beav from Seattle, Washington – CC BY 2.0

The documentary Downfall: the Case Against Boeing confines its scope to the crashes of Lion Air Flight 610 (which occurred on October 29, 2018, in Indonesia) and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 (March 10, 2019, in Addis Ababa). Both planes crashed shortly after their takeoffs (13 minutes for 602, six minutes for 210), killing everyone on board.

In both cases, the plane was a brand-spanking-new Boeing 737 MAX 8. In both cases, Boeing blamed pilot error by the stinky pagan wogs, who were too stupid to fly anything more complex than a paper airplane.

In both cases, the crash was traced directly to problems with the sensors and flight control systems on the plane–specifically, something called MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System). The Lion Air crash led a number of countries to issue advisories about the MAX 8. After the Ethiopian Air crash, countries began grounding the model.

The first–and credit to the documentary for pointing this out–was China. The US, unsurprisingly, was the last country to take that step (March 13, 2019, three days after the crash).

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Here’s something you won’t get from the documentary. It’s not surprising that the US was last. Remember, these events happened in 2018-2019– meaning Donald Trump was president and Mitch McConnell’s wife (Elaine Chao) was Transportation secretary.

More importantly, during the period when both crashes occurred, there was nobody running the show at the Federal Aviation Administration.

The 17th Administrator (who served from December 6, 2011 – January 6, 2018) was Michael Huerta. He was a technocrat with zero experience managing an aviation system (other than being a commissioner of New York City’s Department of Ports, International Trade and Commerce). Barack Obama appointed him as Deputy Administrator in 2010; he was promoted to the top job when his predecessor quit.

Huerta’s term expired on January 6, 2018; his interim replacement was a Trump-appointed Deputy Administrator. Dan Elwell was a former pilot for American Airlines who became the company’s chief lobbyist and later head of the Aerospace Industries Association (the industry’s lobbying organization). You can probably guess how much he cared about safety and regulation.

Elwell didn’t leave the post until Stephen Dickson (a former pilot with 27 years running flight operations for Delta) was confirmed on August 12, 2019.

During the interim between Huerta and Dickson, 346 people died.

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The documentary accurately explains what happened, but it offers the technical stuff in bits and pieces, spread out over the film’s 90 minutes. It doesn’t do a great job of explaining, in a structured way, exactly how Boeing got into the mess.

The design of the Boeing 737 began in 1964; the first model was tested in April 1967 and began flying commercially in February 1968. It was designed and built from scratch, using lessons learned from the 727, but everything else was new. The 737 has been in service ever since.

That a piece of technology could continue to offer competitive performance is remarkable (would you want a TV first built in 1968?) and partly terrifying–more than six decades, you should have made it obsolete. Boeing has updated its design and changed the configurations–the 737 MAX is the fourth major version of the plane. But it’s still a 737, albeit with tweaks.

Boeing was resting on its laurels, raking in profits and boosting dividends. The third ‘generation” (the “737 Next Generation”) began production in 1996 and hit the runways in 1997. Which is why Airbus was able to clean Boeing’s clock with the 320neo in 2014.

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Since I’m trying to supplement the film, not rehash it, I’ll introduce the competition. Airbus Industrie GIE was formed in 1970, through a merger of a French company (Aérospatiale-Matra), an English firm (Hawker Siddeley), a German one (DASA) and a Dutch one (Fokker-VFW ). The goal was to produce an “Airbus”–a wide-body aircraft that could transport over 100 passengers over short to medium distances (all you need to get from point to point in Europe) whose workmanship approached the three US companies (Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, and Lockheed) who dominated the commercial airline industry, due to their high-quality models.

You could make jokes–and the “Big Three” did. What do you get when you combine the quality of German food, French customer service and British flexibility and willingness to change?

Another way you could have framed it: what happens if you blend French design with German craftsmanship and English quality control and cost management?

(One thing the US overlooked. The “D” in the German airline company DASA stood for “Daimler”. As in Daimler-Benz. As in “Mercedes.”)

It took a while for Airbus to figure things out. The merged companies battled for control. They couldn’t agree on what they should do. Was the path to success through military or civilian planes? Passenger or cargo? Short-range or long-distance?

The biggest steps forward were probably (1) the Spanish aviation company CASA joining up in 1977 and (2) British Aerospace buying Hawker in 1979. That pretty much eliminated any competing firms in the Common Market, and made it “Us against America.”

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Meanwhile, American aviation decided to focus on profits, with encouragement from Wall Street and the administration of President Horndog the First. In 1995, Lockheed merged with Martin-Marietta (a huge defense contractor). That effectively took it out of the commercial aircraft industry.

(By 2010, Lockheed-Martin was getting 85% of its revenues from US government contracts and 13% from foreign governments. Commercial revenue fell to 2%.)

Boeing and McDonnell-Douglas (also a defense contractor) merged in 1997. The documentary correctly makes the latter company the villain of the piece, blaming it for destroying the quality control processes at Boeing. Here, the film is substantially correct.

M-D had been formed by a merger in 1967. McDonnell Aircraft was a government contractor that found sucking at the public teat much more profitable– and much less difficult– than competing for business. If something doesn’t work, the Pentagon will give you unlimited extensions (while still paying your bills). If you simply can’t make something work, they’ll let you rewrite the specs to accept worse performance.

When Douglas Aircraft ran into a cash crunch trying to balance the demands of commercial aviation and military work, McDonnell scooped them up in 1967. 30 years later, they spun the same siren song for Boeing: “Merge with us and you’ll make a fortune.”

Then McDonnell-Douglas did the same bullshit that Jack Welch did to GE: Slash the research budget, eliminate the people in charge of quality and project management and sell the current models until people stop buying.

“Why are you wasting all this money trying to make your product better?,” the mindset went. “With Lockheed gone, we’re the only game in town. You don’t think airlines are gonna buy planes from a joint project between Nazis and Cheese-eating Surrender Monkeys, do you?”

Which, in the 1990s, was true, Just as it had been true– in the 1960s– that no red-blooded, God-Fearing American would drive a rice-burning sardine can with a lawnmower engine that was built by a bunch of Japanese.

Both perceptions ultimately changed–and for the very same reason.

+++

Airbus’s first model was the A300 (a twin-engine widebody with up to 247 seats and a range of 4,000 miles). It began production in 1972 went into commercial use in 1974 and was sold until 2007.

It sold only 561 units, because the plane was designed for large capacity, long-distance flights and suffered on fuel efficiency. But what made it unsuited for flights from Italy to Spain made it ideal for carrying cargo. The three customers who bought the most A300s were FedEx, UPS and European Air Transport.

The A320 was designed for people. It was announced in 1984, had the first test flights in 1987, and entered service in 1988. It had a smaller capacity (135-190 people) and shorter range, but better fuel efficiency. It’s still in service and Airbus has sold over 11,000–primarily to American Airlines for regional flights.

The A330 (designed in 1990, released in 1992, in service in 1994) was another step forward, It was the first model to offer a choice of engines and configurations. You could cram up to 400 people in it to shuttle around Europe or accommodate fewer people and use it to cross oceans. However you set it up, it would meet published specs.

It’s still in service, has sold almost 1,600 units and its big fans are Delta, Turkish Air, Aer Lingus (Ireland) and China Eastern.

Airbus funneled all that experience (and lessons from iterations and less unique models) to create the A320neo. That plane was announced in 2010, made its first flight in 2014 and went into service in 2016. The 320neo has a fully redesigned body, a new generation of high-powered, fuel-efficient engines, and scads of design improvements. The most noticeable, if you’re a passenger, are “winglets” (which look like shark fins at the end of wings, but reduce drag and offer greater stability).

The most noticeable–if you’re an airline–is fuel efficiency. The 320neo gets 15-20% better mileage than anything Boeing has. Airbus literally can’t build 320neos fast enough to match the demand. At last count, 130 different airlines have ordered a combined 10,350… and Airbus has only been able to build 3,200.

+++

Boeing was caught flatfooted. They had nothing in development–why build a new plane if the ones you have now are still selling?

They needed to do what Airbus had done–completely re-engineer the design, so they could take advantage of the latest technology. But they didn’t have time to do it.

More to the point, Boeing wasn’t any fucking good at building planes by this point. Consider the 787 “Dreamliner”. Boeing initially announced the 787 in January of 2003. They didn’t get a prototype built until July 8, 2007. And it had so many issues that the first flight didn’t occur until December of 2009. The 787 didn’t go into service until October or 2011–and when airlines began flying it, they reported an astonishing number of different issues.

Eight years from design to “in service, “and the 787 was pulled out of service in 2013 for four months because its batteries kept imitating Samsung phones (catching on fire). Cost overruns mean that Boeing is still in the red on the 787. They’ve sold 1,100, but they won’t break even until they deliver 1,500 to 2,000.

+++

What Boeing did with the 737 MAX 8 was slap a new engine on a 737 body with a few tweaks. Because the new engine was so much larger than the older ones, they had to mount it higher to avoid drag. That change mucked up its handling. If you pulled back too hard on the stick, the 737 MAX 8 would stall.

Boeing’s solution was the MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System). It put a sensor at the front of the plane. ONE.

If that sensor decided that the plane was climbing too rapidly–meaning in danger of stalling–MCAS would engage. It would flash a shitload of lights, set off all sorts of warnings in the cockpit… and then automatically push the nose of the plane sharply downward.

Towards the ground.

MCAS would do that no matter how hard the pilots tried to pull back on the controls. It would apply as much force as it believed it needed to, until that sensor was satisfied that the plane was leveling out.

What would happen if that one sensor malfunctioned? Boeing figured that probably wouldn’t happen. If it did, the pilots would have to shut off MCAS. And they had to shut off MCAS, Boeing’s internal studies showed, within ten seconds. Any longer, and the weight and speed of the plane–with some help from gravity–would produce enough momentum to send the plane into the ground. You wouldn’t be able to pull out.

+++

If you know anything about flying, you’ll realize how insane that is. If the lights on the instrument panels go off, it’ll take you a second or two to identify the problem. Then your first step will be to check other instruments to confirm the problem. That’s 1-2 seconds more. Deciding what to do burns a second or two. By the time you realize it’s an instrument failure–and you need to shut off the system (in the words of pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, who served as an expert) “maniacally pushing you into the ground”–you’re probably out of time.

Assuming you even know that MCAS exists. And Boeing guaranteed that no pilot would.

As the Downfall explains carefully, Boeing didn’t document what MCAS was or what it did. And Boeing actually refused to offer training on its use–even when Lion Air specifically asked for it.

FAA rules are very strict about training. If a plane’s systems contain new technology that changes the operational procedure, the manufacturer has to offer full training to every pilot in the fleet on its use. You can’t just watch a PowerPoint or a YouTube video–it means taking classes and spending time in the simulators and then passing tests. The time required to train a few hundred pilots would have kept the 737 MAX 8s from being approved to fly for several months.

So Boeing didn’t tell Lion Air. And when Flight 610 crashed, the company blamed the pilots, saying that any American pilot would have had the training to handle the plane.

Internal documents showed that Boeing knew what had happened, and realized they needed to fix MCAS. They thought it might take six weeks and they figured the odds of a second crash were infinitesimally low.

CEO Dennis Muilenberg’s instructions (caught on tape) were explicit: “I don’t give a shit what happens. I want you all to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment, cover-up or anything else, if it’ll save it, save this plan. That’s the whole point. We’re going to protect our people if we can.”

Actually, that was what the taping system caught Richard Nixon saying to his White House staff during Watergate. But the instructions coming from Boeing’s senior leadership were equally direct and more appalling.

And they delayed making fixes for five months. When Ethiopian Air 302 crashed, aviation regulators around the world took matters into their own hands.

The FAA wouldn’t allow the 737 MAX 8 to fly again until November 18, 2020. That’s a year and eight months (619 days).

Amazingly, when the scope of the disaster became fully known, Boeing’s Board of Directors voted (on December 23, 2020) to give CEO Dennis Muilenburg a $55 billion bonus.

No, wait, that’s what Tesla did with Grifter Elon Musk. Boeing asked Muilenberg to resign. He agreed and forfeited $14 million in performance bonuses. But he kept the full $62.8 million from his severance package.

And, no, that is not a joke.

+++

The documentary decides to go in a number of directions that I don’t entirely endorse. It makes the widow of the pilot of Lion Air 610 a main character, as well as the American father of one of the passengers on Ethiopian Air 302. (Of course, she’s a pretty white woman).

It tells the story of how McDonnell-Douglas gutted Boeing through the eyes of three staff members–only one of whom I really felt added a lot.

It makes the very solid decision to feature some of the pilots who spoke out against the 737 MAX 8. It does not– and I think this is chickenshit– mention that Dan Carey (and some of the others) are union officials. The film was made by Imagine (run by Brian Grazer and “Little Opie Cunningham”) so they’re not gonna get into politics or class warfare. Opie (who made THE DA VINCI CODE without mentioning the Catholic Church and HILLBILLY ELEGY without talking about Republicans or Sackler Pharmaceuticals) is as far from hard-hitting as it gets.

The film makes the guy in government most responsible for taking action to be retired Oregon Congressman Peter De Fazio (who was chair of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, as well as a longtime member of the Progressive Caucus). I think this is substantially correct. But Trump was in power and the Senate was Republican.

It would have been nice to discuss the FAA’s non-feasance, and to point out that the FAA chair who let the 737 MAX 8 get approved was an Obama appointee. But this is a movie that paints in broad strokes and doesn’t drill down.

It’s still well worth seeing. Using a simulator to show what was going on in the cabin was a nice decision. And it gets the facts right.

I will offer kind words for filmmaker Rory Kennedy,  the child of Robert Kennedy who ought to be running for president.

If you know that campaign, you might recall that Ethel Kennedy (Bobby’s wife) was pregnant at the time her husband was assassinated. That child– born on December 12, 1968; the youngest of 11– was Rory.

RFK, Jr. is as bad a seed as one can get, and I wasn’t enamored with Kathleen or Congressional Critter Joe (not the one who ran against Ed Markey, a different moderate). Rory is the real deal. She was arrested at a protest outside the South African Embassy in her teens and organized a protest supporting migrant farmworkers at a Providence supermarket in college.

I say this even though Kennedy is a challenge for me to like, because so much of her life is fueled by privilege. She founded a documentary company with Vanessa Vadim (daughter of filmmaker Roger and actress “Hanoi Jane” Fonda). She did an HBO series about AIDS that was funded by Jeffrey Epstein’s wingman (through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation).

She made a film about the uplifting challenge by The Rock (back when he was Cory Booker) running for Mayor of Newark. She did a film about the soldiers who tortured people at Abu Ghraib… but found that many of them weren’t totally evil people. (The Neo-Times could have told me that.) She made a 1999 film about how hard it is to grow up in Appalachia and a 2010 film about how fences at the Mexican border don’t really work. She’s about to release a film on Synanon

The subjects are all worthwhile and the viewpoints are never horrible. But they always make things a little too pat, never go quite far enough– and a lot of them are on her name. (Many of us think our moms were nifty, but HBO wouldn’t fund my film…)

On the other, she has had more than her share of tragedy– her dad was killed before she was born, one brother died before her eyes (in a ski accident; she tried to keep him alive) another brother died of a drug overdose and her wedding (to a college classmate) had to be postponed because her cousin and his wife crashed their plane into an ocean (entirely without Boeing’s assistance).

I don’t have to deal with stuff like that. Nor do I have to live my life knowing Faux News and TMZ are always ready to pounce on me.

But when Kennedy’s wedding was rescheduled, it was held in Greece, at the home of a billionaire shipping magnate (not Onassis). Details like that make unsnarked appreciation come hard.

The post The Downfall of Boeing: Its Planes and Company appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Geoff Beckman.

Less than a month before a door plug on a Boeing aircraft blew off midflight, employees at Spirit AeroSystems, a subcontractor for Boeing, had tried to warn corporate officials about serious safety problems with parts for 737 MAX jets. But those warnings went unheeded, and the employees were told to falsify records, according to a new investigation by The Lever on a federal complaint filed by workers at Spirit. “In some cases, workers were retaliated against for trying to raise those alarms,” says journalist David Sirota. “These workers in this federal complaint are alleging essentially a culture of defects, a culture of fraud, a culture of retaliation.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The Federal Aviation Administration has temporarily grounded scores of Boeing 737 MAX 9 jetliners after a fuselage door plug blew off an Alaska Airlines plane midflight near Portland, Oregon, on Friday. The incident forced the plane to make an emergency landing. The National Transportation Safety Board has revealed Alaska Airlines had concerns about the plane prior to the incident but kept flying it. It’s just the latest safety issue plaguing Boeing’s MAX planes, which had two catastrophic crashes in 2018 and 2019 that killed 346 people when faulty flight control systems put the planes into nosedives. “This is a tip of the iceberg type situation,” says aviation expert Ed Pierson, a former senior manager at Boeing who says he left the company over its “unacceptable” business practices that prioritize production over safety. We also speak with Nadia Milleron, whose daughter Samya Rose Stumo was among those killed in the 2019 crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302. “There are serious, serious problems with these MAX planes,” says Milleron. “A lot of them are manufacturing problems, and Boeing is trying to evade safety regulations.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Seattle Times. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

In its early days as a major aircraft manufacturer, Boeing was remarkably open about toxic chemicals flowing from its factory into the neighboring Duwamish, Seattle’s only river and a longtime source of food, tradition and culture for Indigenous people.

In fact, the company described the Duwamish River as “a natural collector for Boeing’s fluid wastes” in a 1950 magazine article Boeing produced for its employees. Boeing said at the time that it had a handle on the situation — asserting, for example, that some of its most volatile waste would be neutralized by chemicals released by other polluters.

Today the waterway is among the nation’s most contaminated, a full-scale cleanup is scheduled to begin next year, and Boeing is deep in negotiations over how to split the cost with other leading landowners on the river: the city, adjoining King County and the Port of Seattle.

As with most negotiations conducted under the nation’s Superfund cleanup law, the parties agreed long ago to keep details of their talks secret. But a short-lived lawsuit, filed by the port last year and withdrawn in June, offered a glimpse of a staggering dollar figure that’s never been part of the public discussion.

In court papers accusing Boeing of trying to slough off its share of the cleanup bill, the port said the total cost could top $1 billion. The sum is more than double any estimate previously made public, and it would make the Duwamish one of the nation’s costliest cleanups on record. Government websites still put the cost at about $340 million.

The dollar amounts alluded to in the 2022 lawsuit point to a high-stakes and largely hidden deliberation between the region’s biggest government players and a major company born in Seattle more than a century ago.

Whatever the parties agree to, taxpayers may never know whether the cost split was fair because how the decision was reached is intended to remain secret.

This month, in response to questions from The Seattle Times and ProPublica, Boeing said it was the port that is refusing to do its part.

A full-scale cleanup is scheduled to begin next year. The Port of Seattle says it could cost $1 billion, which would make it one of the nation’s costliest Superfund cleanups.

“We were extremely disappointed in the Port’s refusal to pay its equitable share of the cleanup and in their decision to subsequently file and then dismiss a lawsuit,” the company said in a written statement.

Boeing declined to comment on the private negotiations or disclose the exact amount it agreed to pay, but it said that the company expects to spend “hundreds of millions of additional dollars.”

This summer, Boeing joined with the city and county in issuing a separate statement saying the lawsuit’s allegations do not affect their “ongoing and lasting commitment to restoring the water quality of the Lower Duwamish for people, salmon, and orcas.”

“The City of Seattle, King County, and Boeing will continue to work to advance the cleanup to benefit this generation and those that will follow,” the joint statement reads.

The port continues to claim, as it did in its lawsuit against Boeing, that negotiations could saddle taxpayers with “tens of millions of dollars” in costs for which the company is liable.

Meanwhile, people who have waited for the Duwamish to be restored say they worry about the lack of information available to the public.

“The reality is there isn’t a lot of transparency,” said Paulina López, executive director of the Duwamish River Community Coalition, a federally recognized task force dedicated to representing community interests in the cleanup.

What advocates say worries them even more is the possibility that an impasse over who pays, two decades into the river’s Superfund listing, will mean yet further delays in restoring the river.

Two centuries ago, as white settlers began to develop the land, Native tribes successfully negotiated for their fishing rights on the Duwamish River to preserve a cultural touchpoint and vital food source. The city of Seattle eventually recognized the river’s value as a pathway for transporting cargo. It scraped away the winding river’s marshy banks, straightened its natural bends and dredged its floor.

What was once a complex ecosystem of mudflats, native plants and spawning fish became a sprawling industrial corridor.

Boeing found a home along the Duwamish in 1916, launching an operation from an abandoned shipyard where it built seaplanes. In the 1930s, the company developed the nation’s first four-engine bomber, and the federal government eventually ordered about 7,000 B-17s over the course of World War II. By the end of the war, Boeing’s plant along the Duwamish expanded to nearly 1.7 million square feet.

It ultimately became one of the largest landowners in the industrial district, but publicly owned facilities also contributed toxins: water runoff tainted with chemicals from the city’s steam plant, pollution from the port’s cargo terminals and unfettered sewage dumped from King County’s wastewater system.

The river is now contaminated with heavy metals and cancer-causing chemicals, including polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).

Along the river now are large health advisory signs warning the public not to eat bottom-feeding fish and to limit consumption of certain salmon, a warning system King County calls “Fun to Fish, Toxic to Eat.” Even direct contact with river mud is a risk, the state health department warns. Tribal fishing, protected by an 1855 federal treaty, continues along the river despite declining fish populations and public health warnings.

Some of these contaminants can be traced to Boeing’s plants along the river, which is why the federal government has named it as one of the major responsible parties.

Boeing’s 1950 magazine article, brought to light in the port’s lawsuit, described its efforts to curb pollution, but the company openly acknowledged that “any unrestrained liquid emptied on the Boeing premises is bound sooner or later to get into the Duwamish.”

Tracy Collier, a toxicologist who worked at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center for three decades and who read the magazine article at The Times’ request, said that it makes legitimate scientific arguments about how pollutants can be diluted and neutralized, but that it’s impossible to tell from the description alone whether Boeing successfully reduced the amount of contamination.

It’s also important to note, Collier said, that some contaminants now found in high concentrations in the river weren’t on the radar 70 years ago. Boeing is one of the parties known to have contributed PCBs, for example, according to the state Department of Ecology.

“We didn’t know in 1950 that PCBs were going to be persistent and as toxic as they are,” Collier said. The chemical wasn’t banned by the EPA until the 1970s.

Boeing said in a statement that its article described disposal practices that were the industry standard at the time. The company added that it proactively took the steps described in the article before federal and state environmental laws took effect.

In early 2000, a survey by the EPA revealed that the river was eligible for Superfund designation, meaning it was one of the most polluted sites in the country.

The Superfund, created by Congress in 1980, was meant to address the nation’s legacy of toxic industrial waste by establishing a process to pay for cleanups. It was also known to result in costly legal battles. The port, city, county and Boeing hoped to divvy up the tab and clean the river without triggering the Superfund process.

“They were worried about the stigma it would cast on the city, and some believed that they could clean the river up faster and better without EPA dogging their efforts,” BJ Cummings, community engagement manager for University of Washington’s Superfund Research Program, wrote in her book “The River That Made Seattle,” which details the Duwamish’s history.

But federal environmental regulators needed to sign off. They wanted an agreement that would allow them to go after polluters for damage up to three years after completion of the cleanup, just as they could under the Superfund.

Boeing would not agree. The company told a Times reporter in 2000 that it caused only a small part of the pollution and was worried that it would be stuck with a big share of the cleanup.

“We couldn’t sign the agreement without assurances that there would be an equitable outcome,” a Boeing spokesperson said at the time.

The Duwamish River landed on the national Superfund list the following year.

With EPA oversight, the three government agencies and Boeing agreed to equally front the bill for testing the river water, surveying the contamination and planning the cleanup. They planned to eventually redistribute the costs based on responsibility for pollution, a canon of Superfund law known as the “polluters pay” principle.

What happened next is hidden by an agreement signed by the parties to keep the process private.

This type of process was first created under the Superfund to make it easier for private companies to discuss business practices and liabilities frankly with the EPA. The goal was to have polluters agree among themselves on how to cover cleanup costs.

But in this case, the polluters in question include three local governments. Every dollar that Boeing doesn’t pay could end up the responsibility of Seattle-area taxpayers.

Even where the negotiators meet, who is in the room and what evidence is considered are secret. But court documents and interviews offer a few intriguing details about the process so far.

In 2014, the group hired John Barkett, an experienced environmental lawyer from Florida, to act as an outside allocator and deliver a report suggesting how the parties should divide the costs.

Court documents Boeing filed seeking to put the port’s lawsuit on hold describe parties exchanging historical records, responding to detailed questionnaires, providing expert reports, taking depositions and attending meetings to discuss costs.

Barkett provided his final report to the parties last year and hasn’t been involved in the process since, he told The Times and ProPublica, declining to speak in detail about the Duwamish River or the allocation. The news organizations asked the port, the city and the county for a copy of the report, but all declined, citing the nondisclosure agreement among the parties.

Both King County and the city said in separate statements that they believe the ongoing allocation process has been “thorough and fair.” Both said they plan to make their individual shares public once the process wraps up, but neither one plans to release the full report. The reason, the city wrote in an email, is that it “contains each party’s sensitive operational and financial information.”

The allocation report is nonbinding, meaning the parties can adjust or reject Barkett’s suggested breakdown of costs. Court documents show that on July 11, 2022, Boeing agreed to an undisclosed share of the cost. The Port of Seattle filed its lawsuit eight days later.

“Boeing has gleaned billions of dollars in profits over the past several decades partly through externalizing its waste disposal costs by dumping wastes into the Lower Duwamish River,” the port said in its claim.

The port said it had negotiated diligently for eight years, but that the cost split on the table would force the port to “redirect taxpayers’ funds from projects and programs that benefit the public,” threatening environmental justice initiatives, “employment funds” and projects aimed at expanding public access to the river.

The port’s allegations opened old wounds for tribal leaders who have fought for decades to hold the river’s polluters accountable, said Leonard Forsman, chairman of the Suquamish Tribe, which has fishing rights on the river.

“I know that industries along the river made a lot of money at the expense of our waterway,” Forsman said.

“They were well aware of what they were doing,” Forsman said of corporate polluters, adding that Boeing and other companies “have to acknowledge that and take responsibility.”

Port officials withdrew the lawsuit in June, saying that “litigation is not the most efficient path to resolution at this time.” Any further discussions would once again take place behind closed doors.

The Duwamish River Community Coalition, which represents the public’s interests in the cleanup, feels shut out, said Jamie Hearn, a lawyer for the coalition. “We don’t have access to a lot of information, and responsible parties are very careful to only release certain details,” Hearn said.

Still, as frustrated as Duwamish activists may be about the lack of transparency in the Superfund process, they want to avoid delaying the cleanup any further.

The community is less concerned with who pays the bill than with making sure the cleanup happens on schedule, said López, the executive director of the community coalition.

“We’ve already waited so long,” she said.

What is known about the Duwamish cleanup publicly is that it has already cost a lot — and U.S. taxpayers have picked up a big chunk of the bill so far.

The Lower Duwamish Waterway Group, a private-public partnership between Boeing and the three government agencies, says it has already invested more than $200 million in early cleanup projects and habitat restorations along the river, targeting its most polluted parts. These actions have reduced the amount of PCBs in the river’s sediment by half, according to the group.

Boeing said in a statement that it alone invested $115 million on an early cleanup project. In 2015, the company completed a two-year cleanup that turned five acres of industrial waterfront into a wetland habitat with native plants and woody debris. The company touts on its website an award from NOAA for the project.

Boeing recovered $51 million from the federal government in 2018, through a lawsuit that said the Duwamish pollution was the result of the company’s role as a defense contractor during World War II.

Originally, the Superfund was fed by a tax on a variety of polluting industries to ensure cleanups could proceed even if polluting companies went out of business or couldn’t afford to pay.

But since that tax expired, in 1995, taxpayers of all kinds have spent billions of dollars cleaning up hazardous waste released by private companies, according to a 2017 analysis by News21, an investigative journalism project connected to Arizona State University.

The Lower Duwamish River parties are scheduled to embark on the full-scale cleanup as soon as next year.

The schedule will be complex and intricate. In-water work, which will involve dredging and barging away contaminated sediment, can only happen during a short window, typically October to February, to avoid interfering with fish migration or fishing treaties. It will likely take years to complete the cleanup.

Removal of contaminants from the river’s most polluted stretch, where Boeing Field airport is located, is supposed to come first, after a final bout of planning and contracting, according to the EPA.

But it isn’t clear how the lengthy cost negotiation will play a role in the timeline. The dozens of parties responsible for the cleanup have to agree to a payment plan and present it to the EPA for approval.

Agreeing is key to avoiding years of litigation and bickering.

The city of Seattle warned as much on its website, where it notes that cleanup parties can disagree, “but everyone knows that those who reject their assigned shares are likely to be sued by the others.”

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Lulu Ramadan, The Seattle Times.

The post Boeing Criminal Case Epitomizes Biden Double Standard of Justice appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Russell Mokhiber.

Autocrats only understand one word: no, no, no. No you will not take my country, no you will not take my freedom, no you will not take my future… A dictator bent on rebuilding an empire will never be able to ease the people’s love of liberty. Brutality will never grind down the will of the free.

— President Biden

Oh, the hypocrisy.

To hear President Biden talk about Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, you might imagine that Putin is the only dictator bent on expanding his military empire through the use of occupation, aggression and oppression.

Yet the United States is no better, having spent much of the past half-century policing the globe, occupying other countries, and waging endless wars.

What most Americans fail to recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with propping up a military industrial complex that has its sights set on world domination.

War has become a huge money-making venture, and the U.S. government, with its vast military empire, is one of its best buyers and sellers.

America’s part in the showdown between Russia and the Ukraine has already cost taxpayers more than $112 billion and shows no signs of abating.

Clearly, it’s time for the U.S. government to stop policing the globe.

The U.S. military reportedly has more than 1.3 million men and women on active duty, with more than 200,000 of them stationed overseas in nearly every country in the world.

American troops are stationed in Somalia, Iraq and Syria. In Germany, South Korea and Japan. In Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Oman. In Niger, Chad and Mali. In Turkey, the Philippines, and northern Australia.

Those numbers are likely significantly higher in keeping with the Pentagon’s policy of not fully disclosing where and how many troops are deployed for the sake of “operational security and denying the enemy any advantage.” As investigative journalist David Vine explains, “Although few Americans realize it, the United States likely has more bases in foreign lands than any other people, nation, or empire in history.”

Incredibly, America’s military forces aren’t being deployed abroad to protect our freedoms here at home. Rather, they’re being used to guard oil fields, build foreign infrastructure and protect the financial interests of the corporate elite. In fact, the United States military spends about $81 billion a year just to protect oil supplies around the world.

The reach of America’s military empire includes close to 800 bases in as many as 160 countries, operated at a cost of more than $156 billion annually. As Vine reports, “Even US military resorts and recreation areas in places like the Bavarian Alps and Seoul, South Korea, are bases of a kind. Worldwide, the military runs more than 170 golf courses.”

This is how a military empire occupies the globe.

After 20 years of propping up Afghanistan to the tune of trillions of dollars and thousands of lives lost, the U.S. military may have finally been forced out, but those troops represent just a fraction of our military presence worldwide.

In an ongoing effort to police the globe, American military servicepeople continue to be deployed to far-flung places in the Middle East and elsewhere.

This is how the military industrial complex, aided and abetted by the likes of Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and others, continues to get rich at taxpayer expense.

Yet while the rationale may keep changing for why American military forces are policing the globe, these wars abroad aren’t making America—or the rest of the world—any safer, are certainly not making America great again, and are undeniably digging the U.S. deeper into debt.

War spending is bankrupting America.

Although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world’s population, America boasts almost 50% of the world’s total military expenditure, spending more on the military than the next 19 biggest spending nations combined.

In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety.

The American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth.

Since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $4.7 trillion waging its endless wars.

Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt politicians and incompetent government officials, America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $32 million per hour.

In fact, the U.S. government has spent more money every five seconds in Iraq than the average American earns in a year.

Future wars and military exercises waged around the globe are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053.

Talk about fiscally irresponsible: the U.S. government is spending money it doesn’t have on a military empire it can’t afford.

Unfortunately, even if we were to put an end to all of the government’s military meddling and bring all of the troops home today, it would take decades to pay down the price of these wars and get the government’s creditors off our backs.

As investigative journalist Uri Friedman puts it, for more than 15 years now, the United States has been fighting terrorism with a credit card, “essentially bankrolling the wars with debt, in the form of purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds by U.S.-based entities like pension funds and state and local governments, and by countries like China and Japan.”

War is not cheap, but it becomes outrageously costly when you factor in government incompetence, fraud, and greedy contractors. Indeed, a leading accounting firm concluded that one of the Pentagon’s largest agencies “can’t account for hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of spending.”

Unfortunately, the outlook isn’t much better for the spending that can be tracked.

A government audit found that defense contractor Boeing has been massively overcharging taxpayers for mundane parts, resulting in tens of millions of dollars in overspending. As the report noted, the American taxpayer paid:

$71 for a metal pin that should cost just 4 cents; $644.75 for a small gear smaller than a dime that sells for $12.51: more than a 5,100 percent increase in price. $1,678.61 for another tiny part, also smaller than a dime, that could have been bought within DoD for $7.71: a 21,000 percent increase. $71.01 for a straight, thin metal pin that DoD had on hand, unused by the tens of thousands, for 4 cents: an increase of over 177,000 percent.

That price gouging has become an accepted form of corruption within the American military empire is a sad statement on how little control “we the people” have over our runaway government.

Mind you, this isn’t just corrupt behavior. It’s deadly, downright immoral behavior.

Americans have thus far allowed themselves to be spoon-fed a steady diet of pro-war propaganda that keeps them content to wave flags with patriotic fervor and less inclined to look too closely at the mounting body counts, the ruined lives, the ravaged countries, the blowback arising from ill-advised targeted-drone killings and bombing campaigns in foreign lands, or the transformation of our own homeland into a warzone.

That needs to change.

The U.S. government is not making the world any safer. It’s making the world more dangerous. It is estimated that the U.S. military drops a bomb somewhere in the world every 12 minutes. Since 9/11, the United States government has directly contributed to the deaths of around 500,000 human beings. Every one of those deaths was paid for with taxpayer funds.

The U.S. government is not making America any safer. It’s exposing American citizens to alarming levels of blowback, a CIA term referring to the unintended consequences of the U.S. government’s international activities. Chalmers Johnson, a former CIA consultant, repeatedly warned that America’s use of its military to gain power over the global economy would result in devastating blowback.

The 9/11 attacks were blowback. The Boston Marathon Bombing was blowback. The attempted Times Square bomber was blowback. The Fort Hood shooter, a major in the U.S. Army, was blowback.

The U.S. military’s ongoing drone strikes will, I fear, spur yet more blowback against the American people.

The war hawks’ militarization of America—bringing home the spoils of war (the military tanks, grenade launchers, Kevlar helmets, assault rifles, gas masks, ammunition, battering rams, night vision binoculars, etc.) and handing them over to local police, thereby turning America into a battlefield—is also blowback.

James Madison was right: “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” As Madison explained, “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes… known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.”

We are seeing this play out before our eyes.

The government is destabilizing the economy, destroying the national infrastructure through neglect and a lack of resources, and turning taxpayer dollars into blood money with its endless wars, drone strikes and mounting death tolls.

Clearly, our national priorities are in desperate need of an overhauling.

At the height of its power, even the mighty Roman Empire could not stare down a collapsing economy and a burgeoning military. Prolonged periods of war and false economic prosperity largely led to its demise. As historian Chalmers Johnson predicts:

The fate of previous democratic empires suggests that such a conflict is unsustainable and will be resolved in one of two ways. Rome attempted to keep its empire and lost its democracy. Britain chose to remain democratic and in the process let go its empire. Intentionally or not, the people of the United States already are well embarked upon the course of non-democratic empire.

This is the “unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex” that President Dwight Eisenhower warned us more than 50 years ago not to let endanger our liberties or democratic processes.

Eisenhower, who served as Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, was alarmed by the rise of the profit-driven war machine that emerged following the war—one that, in order to perpetuate itself, would have to keep waging war.

We failed to heed his warning.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, war is the enemy of freedom.

As long as America’s politicians continue to involve us in wars that bankrupt the nation, jeopardize our servicemen and women, increase the chances of terrorism and blowback domestically, and push the nation that much closer to eventual collapse, “we the people” will find ourselves in a perpetual state of tyranny.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

On the other hand, Ukraine’s economy has shrunk by 35% or more, despite $46 billion in economic aid from generous U.S. taxpayers, on top of $67 billion in military aid.

European economies are also taking a hit. After growing by 3.5% in 2022, the Euro area economy is expected to stagnate and grow only 0.7% in 2023, while the British economy is projected to actually contract by 0.6%. Germany was more dependent on imported Russian energy than other large European countries so, after growing a meager 1.9% in 2022, it is predicted to have negligible 0.1% growth in 2023. German industry is set to pay about 40% more for energy in 2023 than it did in 2021.

The United States is less directly impacted than Europe, but its growth shrank from 5.9% in 2021 to 2% in 2022, and is projected to keep shrinking, to 1.4% in 2023 and 1% in 2024. Meanwhile India, which has remained neutral while buying oil from Russia at a discounted price, is projected to maintain its 2022 growth rate of over 6% per year all through 2023 and 2024. China has also benefited from buying discounted Russian oil and from an overall trade increase with Russia of 30% in 2022. China’s economy is expected to grow at 5% this year.

Other oil and gas producers reaped windfall profits from the effects of the sanctions. Saudi Arabia’s GDP grew by 8.7%, the fastest of all large economies, while Western oil companies laughed all the way to the bank to deposit $200 billion in profits: ExxonMobil made $56 billion, an all-time record for an oil company, while Shell made $40 billion and Chevron and Total gained $36 billion each. BP made “only” $28 billion, as it closed down its operations in Russia, but it still doubled its 2021 profits.

As for natural gas, U.S. LNG (liquefied natural gas) suppliers like Cheniere and companies like Total that distribute the gas in Europe are replacing Europe’s supply of Russian natural gas with fracked gas from the United States, at about four times the prices U.S. customers pay, and with the dreadful climate impacts of fracking. A mild winter in Europe and a whopping $850 billion in European government subsidies to households and companies brought retail energy prices back down to 2021 levels, but only after they spiked five times higher over the summer of 2022.

While the war restored Europe’s subservience to U.S. hegemony in the short term, these real-world impacts of the war could have quite different results in the long term. French President Emmanuel Macron remarked, “In today’s geopolitical context, among countries that support Ukraine, there are two categories being created in the gas market: those who are paying dearly and those who are selling at very high prices… The United States is a producer of cheap gas that they are selling at a high price… I don’t think that’s friendly.”

An even more unfriendly act was the sabotage of the Nord Stream undersea gas pipelines that brought Russian gas to Germany. Seymour Hersh reported that the pipelines were blown up by the United States, with the help of Norway—the two countries that have displaced Russia as Europe’s two largest natural gas suppliers. Coupled with the high price of U.S. fracked gas, this has fueled anger among the European public. In the long term, European leaders may well conclude that the region’s future lies in political and economic independence from countries that launch military attacks on it, and that would include the United States as well as Russia.

The other big winners of the war in Ukraine will of course be the weapons makers, dominated globally by the U.S. “big five”: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and General Dynamics. Most of the weapons so far sent to Ukraine have come from existing stockpiles in the United States and NATO countries. Authorization to build even bigger new stockpiles flew through Congress in December, but the resulting contracts have not yet shown up in the arms firms’ sales figures or profit statements.

The Reed-Inhofe substitute amendment to the FY2023 National Defense Authorization Act authorized “wartime” multi-year, no-bid contracts to “replenish” stocks of weapons sent to Ukraine, but the quantities of weapons to be procured outstrip the amounts shipped to Ukraine by up to 500 to one. Former senior OMB official Marc Cancian commented, “This isn’t replacing what we’ve given [Ukraine]. It’s building stockpiles for a major ground war [with Russia] in the future.”

Since weapons have only just started rolling off production lines to build these stockpiles, the scale of war profits anticipated by the arms industry is best reflected, for now, in the 2022 increases in their stock prices: Lockheed Martin, up 37%; Northrop Grumman, up 41%; Raytheon, up 17%; and General Dynamics, up 19%.

While a few countries and companies have profited from the war, countries far from the scene of the conflict have been reeling from the economic fallout. Russia and Ukraine have been critical suppliers of wheat, corn, cooking oil and fertilizers to much of the world. The war and sanctions have caused shortages in all these commodities, as well as fuel to transport them, pushing global food prices to all-time highs.

So the other big losers in this war are people in the Global South who depend on imports of food and fertilizers from Russia and Ukraine simply to feed their families. Egypt and Turkey are the largest importers of Russian and Ukrainian wheat, while a dozen other highly vulnerable countries depend almost entirely on Russia and Ukraine for their wheat supply, from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Laos to Benin, Rwanda and Somalia. Fifteen African countries imported more than half their supply of wheat from Russia and Ukraine in 2020.

The Black Sea Grain Initiative brokered by the UN and Turkey has eased the food crisis for some countries, but the agreement remains precarious. It must be renewed by the UN Security Council before it expires on March 18, 2023, but Western sanctions are still blocking Russian fertilizer exports, which are supposed to be exempt from sanctions under the grain initiative. UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths told Agence France-Presse on February 15 that freeing up Russian fertilizer exports is “of the highest priority.”

After a year of slaughter and destruction in Ukraine, we can declare that the economic winners of this war are: Saudi Arabia; ExxonMobil and its fellow oil giants; Lockheed Martin; and Northrop Grumman.

The losers are, first and foremost, the sacrificed people of Ukraine, on both sides of the front lines, all the soldiers who have lost their lives and families who have lost their loved ones. But also in the losing column are working and poor people everywhere, especially in the countries in the Global South that are most dependent on imported food and energy. Last but not least is the Earth, its atmosphere and its climate—all sacrificed to the God of War.

That is why, as the war enters its second year, there is a mounting global outcry for the parties to the conflict to find solutions. The words of Brazil’s President Lula reflect that growing sentiment. When pressured by President Biden to send weapons to Ukraine, he said, “I don’t want to join this war, I want to end it.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies.

Smoke billowing over the U.S. Capitol. Rioters marching through the halls, carrying the Confederate battle flag. A gallows, with a noose hanging from it, erected just steps from the Capitol. Police officers beaten and tased.

Unfortunately, this is the game that corporations play— they write big checks to politicians who control how much of our tax dollars they receive and how big their tax breaks are.

These images from the Capitol riot on January 6th, 2021 will be forever seared into American history. But we must not forget that the events of this infamous day were only warning signs of a deep-rooted illness in our political system. Since then, the same members of Congress who incited armed right-wing militants to attack our Capitol have repeatedly tried to block any investigations into the events of January 6th—and their role in it.

Meanwhile, extremist politicians have kept up a drumbeat of daily lies and disinformation about the validity of the 2020 election to keep their supporters engaged and enraged, which has led to continued death threats and violence against election officials.

And they're doing it with the support of one of Washington state's biggest companies—Boeing, which employs more than 50,000 workers here.

One week after Jan. 6, following the suit of other companies and massive national pressure, Boeing released a statement announcing they were halting all political contributions to the "Sedition Caucus", the group of politicians who voted against the certification of a free and fair election.

Most companies kept their post-January 6 pledges (including big names like Allstate, American Express, Nike, Walgreens, and 79 other major corporations). Boeing didn't.

Boeing resumed political contributions to the Caucus just a few months after January 6—not coincidentally, right as Congress was considering the defense budget. According to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), Boeing's political action committee has donated almost $250,000  to lawmakers who voted to overturn the election and the party committees that boost their campaigns.

It must be embarrassing for the tens of thousands of Boeing workers in Washington state to see their corporate PAC dollars go to legislators who turned their backs on our country and continue to lie about the election, fanning the flames of hatred and stirring up violence.

Unfortunately, this is the game that corporations play—they write big checks to politicians who control how much of our tax dollars they receive and how big their tax breaks are. We have a system that is out of balance, where the voices of everyday Washingtonians are drowned out by billionaires and big corporations like Boeing. We have a system that rewards extremist rhetoric, rather than level-headed policymaking for the common good.

Boeing states that its company values include "integrity," "transparency," and "being held accountable." Their actions in this instance violate all of those principles.

Boeing should honor its promise and demonstrate commitment to their stated values by immediately and permanently withdrawing any funding to members of Congress who voted to overturn the 2020 election.

By doing so, Boeing will be aligned with the values of its American workers, its customers, and the democratic system that governs these United States.

Let's hold Boeing accountable. Please sign the petition.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News &amp; Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Cindy Black.

They should all be charged in varying degrees with manslaughter. Note how the definition fits the facts on the ground:

Reckless homicide is a crime in which the perpetrators were aware that their act (or failure to act when there is a legal duty to act) creates significant risk of death or grievous bodily harm in the victim, but ignores the risk and continues to act (or fail to act), and a human death results.

Trump violated willfully and repeatedly so many laws, including obstruction of justice, that it would take a large well-staffed special prosecutor’s office to handle his offenses. (Biden’s Attorney General, Merrick Garland, has decided to immunize Trump by doing nothing). (See, Letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, June 17, 2021).

War criminal George W. Bush violated the Constitution by invading Iraq without a Congressional declaration of war, lying about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction, killing over one million Iraqis, in addition to causing injuries, sicknesses, and devastation of critical public infrastructure. During this process of torture and mayhem, Bush violated federal statutes, international treaties, and returned to Texas immunized in fact, though not in law. He and former Vice President Dick Cheney could still be prosecuted.

New York lawyer and former homicide prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, Robert C. Gottlieb, called for the prosecution of Trump over willful, disastrous actions and inactions concerning the Covid-19 pandemic, under the presidential duties to act, which led to many tens of thousands of preventable losses of life. Trump began dismissing the dangers of the fast multiplying virus as soon as it entered the U.S. from China.

Gottlieb gives examples of when the average citizen could not be able to escape criminal prosecution, citing the conviction of the owner (and two others) of a New York City residential and commercial building of homicide. Reckless drivers resulting in the deaths of innocents are often convicted of manslaughter and jailed.

Governor Ron DeSantis, confronting overwhelmed hospitals, and 25,000 new Covid-19 cases just in one day, still is brazenly advocating the maskless, crowd-together-if-you-choose-behavior of ‘live free and die.’ Somehow, he got through Harvard Law School uneducated to become a perilous promoter of opposing mask mandates in schools and hospitals, opposing required vaccinations for hospital workers (though he favors vaccinations generally), and is described politely by contagious disease specialists as being “in a state of denial.” Gritting his teeth, DeSantis, a fervent Trump supplicant, says again and again, “People are going to be free to choose to make their own decisions.” What? Free to infect others with a lethal disease? Does he not know of past public health campaigns against tuberculosis, smallpox, and the 1919 influenza epidemic?

Some Florida school districts, mandating masks to protect their children, have disregarded his ideological orders. Had DeSantis lost the last election, many more Floridians would be living today.

The same situation exists under Texas Governor Greg Abbott. The Dallas, Houston, and Austin school districts are defying his homicidal executive order prohibiting mandates for masks by complying with CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) standards. The Dallas County officials sued Abbott, declaring that the governor’s ban violates Texas law.

The headline in Wednesday’s New York Times tells the story: “Texas Hospitals Are Already Overloaded. Doctors Are ‘Frightened by What is Coming.’” The more contagious Delta variant has spread everywhere, to which Abbott replied, “We must rely on personal responsibility, not government mandates.” Has he spoken to the deadlier Delta variant lately about his delusions?

When it comes to the crimes of large corporations and their bosses, immunity or impunity is what they expect. When, once in a while, they’re caught in the act, the company pays the dollar penalties and the company’s rulers and backers get off with no “personal responsibility.”

In one of the biggest corporate marketing/promotional crimes – over 500,000 opioid deaths so far and accelerating, the Sackler’s company, Purdue Pharma, escaped into bankruptcy while the Sacklers escaped any criminal prosecution. As a part of the Purdue Pharma bankruptcy the Sacklers negotiated for personal immunity from further civil suits, and the wrongdoers only had to fork over $4.5 billion, (spread out over years no less!) of their immense fortune. Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty to three felony charges in 2020, but under the settlement with the Justice Department, the Sacklers agreed to pay $225 million but made no admissions of wrongdoing. I once recall a person stealing a donkey in Colorado going to jail for 15 years.

Then there are the criminal Boeing bosses who committed the manslaughter of 346 passengers and crew members in Indonesia and Ethiopia. Boeing’s stealth cockpit software, not provided to the pilots, the airlines, and deceptively conveyed to the FAA, took away control of the two ascending 737 MAX planes from the pilots and drove the aircraft into the sea and ground in 2018 and 2019.

The Trump Justice Department sweetheart-settled a criminal case against Boeing, with the prosecutor subsequently quitting and joining Kirkland & Ellis, the law firm for Boeing. There was no trial or jail for any Boeing bosses, just a modest $2.5 billion exaction, mostly going to the airlines and the government with the rest to the grieving families. The civil tort suits will come under Boeing’s insurance with the rest being mostly deductible against the few federal income taxes Boeing pays.

Next time you hear any prominent person announce that “Nobody is above the law,” you can ask: “Really, with all the corporate and government lawbreaking we read about, tell us just how many of these big-time crooks are in orange suits serving time?”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ralph Nader.

Gelles reports that Boeing, after its criminal negligence brought down two 737 MAX planes and killed 346 people, went into a corporate tailspin. The company laid off 30,000 workers and its sales and stocks plummeted as it reported a $12 billion loss. No matter, the new Boeing boss, David Calhoun, managed to pay himself about $10,500 an hour, forty hours a week, plus benefits and perks.

“Executives are minting fortunes, while laid-off workers line up at food banks,” writes Gelles. Carefully chosen Boards of Directors rubberstamp lavish compensation packages, as they haul in big money themselves for attending a few Board meetings.

It gets worse. Hilton Hotel had many rooms empty due to the Covid-19 pandemic. But CEO Chris Nassetta made sure his pockets weren’t empty. He was paid $55.9 million in compensation in 2020 or more than a million dollars a week!

Gelles goes on to report that with “the cruise industry at a standstill…,” the Norwegian Cruise Line, “doubled the pay of Frank Del Rio, its chief executive, to $36.4 million.” That is more than $700,000 per week. He must have worked overtime counting empty ships and red ink.

T-Mobile’s merger with Sprint got government antitrust approval with the assurance that more jobs would be created with cost savings. Instead, they’re starting layoffs while awarding CEO Mike Sievert over a million dollars a week. Sometimes, CEOs make more dollars from their company than the entire company itself makes in profits. Companies that lay off workers pay their top executives huge amounts, and still have the avarice to demand and get federal stimulus grants.

On March 22, the New York Times reported a new analysis by IRS researchers and academics about tax evasion by the richest 1% of U.S. households. Taken as a whole, these super-rich don’t even report a fifth of their income, according to this study. The ultra-wealthy get away with this heist by offshoring to tax havens and pass-through businesses. Adding to this unlawful evasion is their upper-class power over Congress to rig the tax laws so they can avoid even more taxes.

The Republicans, by starving the IRS budget and audit staff over the past decade, have aided and abetted enormous tax evasions. Curiously, the cowardly Democrats have not made this an issue in their campaigns against the GOP. Hundreds of billions of dollars a year are at stake.

Trump, of course, made matters worse. ProPublica found the IRS audited the poor at around the same rate as the richest Americans.

Big Corporations make out like no mere individuals. Earlier this month, the New York Times told its readers that The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) study revealed: “55 of the nation’s largest corporations paid no federal income tax on more than $40 billion in profits last year.” These companies even received $3.5 billion in rebates from the Treasury Department, so zany are the fine-print tax bonanzas.

Twenty-six corporations paid no federal income taxes since 2017, according to the ITEP study. These included Nike and FedEx.

Corporations get lots of these tax breaks by arguing before Congress that they need them to invest and create jobs. Repeatedly, these promises turn out to be false. Some have called them lies, citing profits totaling over 7 trillion dollars in the past decade being shredded in buybacks of the companies’ own stock.

Apple, whose quasi-monopoly reaps huge quarterly profits, just announced another $90 billion in stock buybacks. Apple doesn’t know what to do with its cash from vastly overpriced computers and iPhones. Apple, not surprisingly, pays very little in federal income taxes to Uncle Sam – despite the U.S. being the land of its birth and source of ample R & D corporate welfare paid for by U.S. taxpayers.

CEO Tim Cook, arguably the most miserly CEO plutocrat in America, turns a deaf ear to health, labor, and environmental specialists pleading with him to address the solid waste of its junked electronic products and pay its serf-labor in China a living wage. These two expenditures would not consume 10 percent of Apple’s enormous profits. To which, Emperor Cook says no dice.

Testifying before the Senate Finance Committee, Kimberly A. Clausing, a U.S. Treasury official, said according to the Washington Post, that while other wealthy nations typically raise roughly 3 percent of GDP through corporate taxes, in the United States that share fell to just 1 percent following the 2017 Trump tax cut−all while corporate profits, as a share of U.S. GDP, were setting records.

The usual progressive members of Congress issue denunciations of this whole corporate, ultra-rich tax escape racket. Nearly 7 in 10 Americans believe corporations pay too little in taxes, according to Gallup polling. Unfortunately, nothing happens in Congress to address this injustice.

When are the American people going to move on to Congress and their Big Boy paymasters? When the plutocratic class evades taxes, either there are fewer public services, more public deficits, or higher taxes on the middle class. As Joe Biden says – they must pay “their fair share.” People, use your civic muscle to make your members of Congress act and do it, now!

This article was posted on Friday, April 30th, 2021 at 8:11pm and is filed under Capitalism, Classism, Corporate Globalization, Elitism, Opinion, Tax.

Stating an intention is not fulfilling it and considering Biden’s further pledge, “to continue to support and help Saudi Arabia defend its sovereignty and its territorial integrity and its people,” his use of the word “relevant” to modify “arms sales” could indicate a convenient loophole. Still, it is refreshing to hear a U.S. president at least recognize that the Yemeni people are suffering an “unendurable devastation” and this is due to the hard work of grassroots peace activists around the world.

Whether Biden’s proclamation will mean much in the real world beyond a temporary hold on the weapons deals Trump made just before leaving office is yet to be seen. The Saudi kingdom welcomes Biden’s announcement and the U.S. arms sellers who have profited from the war seem unruffled by the news. “Look,” Raytheon Technologies CEO Greg Hayes reassured investors anticipating this move, “peace is not going to break out in the Middle East anytime soon. I think it remains an area where we’ll continue to see solid growth.” The prospects for peace in Yemen probably depend more on sustained international pressure than on a kinder and gentler administration in the White House.

The Congressional Research Service in a report updated on December 8, 2020, “Yemen: Civil War and Regional Intervention,” references a major factor in U.S. policy planning regarding Yemen that the president did not mention. Roughly five million barrels of oil passes through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait off Yemen’s western coast on a daily basis, eventually making their way to Asia, Europe, and the United States.

In case the president gave the false impression that the U.S. was getting out of the business of killing Yemenis completely, the next day the State Department issued a clarifying statement: “Importantly, this does not apply to offensive operations against either ISIS or AQAP.” In other words, whatever happens in regard to weapons sales to the Saudis, the war that has been waged for 21 years under the guise of the Authorization for Use of Military Force passed by congress authorizing the use of the US Armed Forces against those responsible for the September 11 attacks, will continue indefinitely, despite the fact that neither ISIS nor Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula existed in 2001.

The “offensive operations” in Yemen that will continue under Biden include drone (UAV) strikes, cruise missile attacks and U.S. Special Forces raids and are a part of the larger “war on terror” that began in the administration of George W. Bush and was expanded under Obama. Despite his campaign promises to end the “forever wars,” a report from Airwars suggests that Trump has bombed Yemen more times than his two predecessors combined.

In January 2017, just days after taking office, Trump ordered Navy Seal commandos supported by Reaper drone air cover to raid a compound suspected of harboring officials of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. While the raid’s targets escaped, one Navy Seal died in the raid, and eventually it came out that 30 Yemenis were also killed, including 10 women and children. The Navy Seal was not the only US citizen killed in that raid: the other was an 8-year-old girl, Nawar Awlaki. In September, 2011, Nawar’s father, Yemeni-American imam Anwar Awlaki, was assassinated in a drone strike in Yemen that was ordered by President Obama, on secret intelligence that he was an al Qaeda operative. A few days after her father was killed, Nawar’s 16 year old Denver born brother Abdulrahman was killed in another drone strike.

Many other Yemeni families have suffered in these attacks. On January 26, 2021, relatives of at least 34 Yemenis alleged to have been killed in American military actions asked the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, to determine whether the deaths were unlawful. The petition asserts that six drone strikes and one Special Operations raid during the Obama and Trump administrations inflicted catastrophic damage on two families.

The statistics around the U.S. war in Yemen are difficult to come by, in part because many of the attacks are carried out secretly by the CIA and not by the military, but the Airwars and other studies count the number of drone strikes and their victims conservatively in the hundreds. The casualties of Saudi led war, in contrast, are more than 100,000 dead with almost as many killed by hunger and disease caused by the Saudi blockade and millions of Yemenis being deprived of food and other needs.

While its death toll is much smaller, the U.S. drone attacks have a disproportional effect on Yemeni society. A 2014 screening study of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder symptoms among civilians by the Alkarama Foundation found that “for a large swath of population in Yemen, living under a sky that has become a constant source of trauma is an everyday reality” and that under drone attack and surveillance, Yemen is “a precarious time and a peculiar place, where the skies are becoming traumatic and a generation is being lost to constant fear and suffering.”

If the Special Forces and air strikes are intended to defeat terrorism in Yemen as in the other countries under attack, they are having the opposite effect. As the young, late, Yemeni writer Ibrahim Mothana told Congress in 2013: “Drone strikes are causing more and more Yemenis to hate America and join radical militants. … Unfortunately, liberal voices in the United States are largely ignoring, if not condoning, civilian deaths and extrajudicial killings in Yemen.”

Mothana’s observation about liberal voices in the US “largely ignoring, if not condoning, civilian deaths and extrajudicial killings in Yemen” was affirmed in Senator Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign for president. While Sanders has become outspoken in his opposition to the Saudi led war, as a presidential candidate he repeatedly voiced his support of Obama’s drone wars. “All of that and more,” he replied when asked if, as president, drones and Special Forces would play a role in his counter-terror plans. Again, in the 2019 resolution “To direct the removal of United States Armed Forces from hostilities in the Republic of Yemen” offered by Sanders, passed in both houses of Congress and vetoed by Trump, U.S. participation in this other war was given a pass: “Congress hereby directs the President to remove United States Armed Forces from hostilities in or affecting the Republic of Yemen, except United States Armed Forces engaged in operations directed at al Qaeda or associated forces.”

In Biden’s foreign policy address, he left open the possibility of arms sales as he pledged his commitment “to continue to support and help Saudi Arabia defend its sovereignty and its territorial integrity and its people.” The threats Saudi Arabia faces include, he said, missile attacks and UAV (drone) strikes from weapons he says are supplied by Iran. In fact, Yemeni Houthi Ansar Allah rebels have launched drone attacks on Saudi Arabia, most notably a September 14, 2019 attack on Saudi Aramco refineries that disrupted world crude oil supplies. It is a strange irony, that after the U.S. assaults Yemen with thousands of Hellfire missiles launched from Predator drones for over 20 years, the U.S. now must arm Saudi Arabia to defend itself (and our oil supply) from Yemeni drones and missiles.

The global proliferation of weaponized drones is no surprise and Biden’s plea for peace in Yemen that allows for their continued use is a hollow one. Giving a pass, continuing  to ignore, if not condone, civilian deaths and extrajudicial killings in Yemen and elsewhere will not bring peace but will ensure that for generations to come, profiteers like Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and General Atomics, will “continue to see solid growth.” Peace in Yemen, peace in the world, demands no less than an end to the production, trade and use of weaponized drones.

This article was posted on Wednesday, February 10th, 2021 at 9:09pm and is filed under Donald Trump, Drones, Joe Biden, Militarism, Saudi Arabia, Yemen.

Pacific Media Watch newsdesk

Body parts and debris were hauled from waters near Indonesia’s capital Jakarta today from a Boeing passenger plane that crashed shortly after take off with 62 people on board, reports The Jakarta Post.

The Sriwijaya Air Boeing 737-500 plunged into a steep dive about four minutes after it left Soekarno-Hatta international airport in Jakarta on Saturday afternoon.

No reasons have yet been given for the crash, with authorities focusing on a frantic search and rescue effort that appeared to offer no hope of finding any survivors.

• READ MORE: Indonesia’s deadliest air crashes in recent years

“As of this morning, we’ve received two (body) bags, one with passenger belongings and the other with body parts,” Jakarta police spokesman Yusri Yunus told Metro TV.

The discovery came as a flotilla of warships, helicopters and divers were deployed off the coast of the sprawling city.

Sixty-two passengers and crew were on board, including 10 children, all of them Indonesians, according to authorities.

Sriwijaya Air flight SJ182 was bound for Pontianak city on Indonesia’s section of Borneo island, about 90 minutes flying time over the Java Sea.

Crashed in Java Sea
It crashed in the Java Sea near popular day-trip tourist islands just off the coast.

Distraught relatives waited nervously for news at Pontianak airport on Saturday night.

“I have four family members on the flight — my wife and three children,” Yaman Zai said as he sobbed.

“(My wife) sent me a picture of the baby today…How could my heart not be torn into pieces?”

Officials said today they would continue their search by sea and air while also using sonar radar to pick up more signs of the downed jet.

Divers marked at least three sites at the suspected crash site with orange ballons, according to an Agence France-Presse reporter on the scene.

“From our observation, it is strongly believed the coordinates match the ones from the plane’s last signal contact,” said Hadi Tjahjanto, head of Indonesia’s military.

Hundreds of personnel from search and rescue, the navy, the police, with 10 warships also taking part in the search effort.

Sudden dive
Data from FlightRadar24 said the plane reached an altitude of nearly 3,350m before dropping suddenly to 100m. It then lost contact with air traffic control.

Indonesian Transport Minister Budi Karya Sumadi said Saturday that the jet appeared to deviate from its intended course just before it disappeared from radar.

Sriwijaya Air, which has about 19 Boeing jets that fly to destinations in Indonesia and Southeast Asia, has said only that it was investigating the loss of contact.

It did not immediately comment when contacted by AFP again on Sunday.

In October 2018, 189 people were killed when a Lion Air Boeing 737 MAX jet slammed into the Java Sea about 12 minutes after take-off from Jakarta on a routine one-hour flight.

That crash – and a subsequent fatal flight in Ethiopia – saw Boeing hit with $2.5 billion in fines over claims it defrauded regulators overseeing the 737 MAX model, which was grounded worldwide following the two deadly crashes.

The jet that went down Saturday is not a MAX model and was 26 years old, according to authorities.

No immediate insights
In its initial statements on Saturday’s crash, Boeing offered no immediate insights into the cause.

“We are aware of media reports from Jakarta regarding Sriwijaya Air flight SJ-182. Our thoughts are with the crew, passengers, and their families,” the US-based planemaker said in a statement.

“We are in contact with our airline customer and stand ready to support them during this difficult time.”

Indonesia’s aviation sector has long suffered from a reputation for poor safety, and its airlines were once banned from entering US and European airspace.

In 2014, an AirAsia plane crashed with the loss of 162 lives.

Domestic investigators’ final report on the AirAsia crash showed a chronically faulty component in a rudder control system, poor maintenance and the pilots’ inadequate response were major factors in what was supposed to be a routine flight from the Indonesian city of Surabaya to Singapore.

A year later, in 2015, more than 140 people, including people on the ground, were killed when a military plane crashed shortly after takeoff in Medan on Sumatra island.

The Labor Department also said Friday that a half-million people streamed into the job market in January, though not all of them found jobs. That influx meant that more people were counted as unemployed, and it boosted the jobless rate to 3.6% from a half-century low of 3.5% in December.

The government’s monthly jobs report signaled that businesses remain confident enough to keep hiring, with the pace of job growth accelerating from a year ago. Solid consumer spending is offsetting drags from the trade war and declining business investment.

The job gains also give President Donald Trump more evidence for his argument that the economy is flourishing under his watch. The Democratic contenders vying to oppose him, who will debate Friday night in New Hampshire, have embraced a counter-argument: That the economy’s benefits are disproportionately benefiting wealthier Americans.

Economists cautioned that a large chunk of January’s job growth reflected temporary increases from unseasonably warm weather. Construction firms, hotels, and restaurants, which benefit from better outdoor conditions, accounted for about one-third of last month’s gains.

Still, taken as a whole, Friday’s job growth reflects an economy that shows continued strength 11-plus years into a record-long expansion.

“While favorable weather conditions likely flattered the headline figures in today’s employment report, the key takeaway is that jobs growth continues to run at a solid pace,” said Neil Dutta, head of economics at Renaissance Macro Research.

January’s jobs report doesn’t appear to reflect any economic damage from the coronavirus, which has sickened thousands in China, closed stores and factories there and led many international businesses to suspend operations involving China. The virus’ impact likely came too late in the month to affect Friday’s jobs data.

Nor did Boeing’s decision to halt production of its troubled 737 MAX appear to have much impact on last month’s hiring gain. But the repercussions could begin to restrain job growth in the coming months.

Despite the brisk pace of hiring in January, hourly pay is up just 3.1% from a year earlier, below a peak of 3.5% last summer, though still above the inflation rate.

The public’s confidence that jobs are plentiful is helping persuade more people outside the workforce to begin looking for one. The proportion of Americans either with jobs or actively looking for one rose to 63.4%, the highest since June 2013.

Friday’s report also included, for the first time, data on same-sex couples who were included in broader figures on married people. The overall unemployment rate for married men was 1.7% in January and for married women 2.1%.

With fewer unemployed people to choose from, many companies are having to work harder to fill jobs. Tracy Graziani, co-owner of Graziani Multimedia with her husband, Lou, says she has struggled to find workers with web developer skills in her town of Mansfield, Ohio, population 47,000, an hour from Cleveland and Columbus.

So the couple have decided to develop their own web specialist, hiring a college student part time and training him. With their business growing, they have little choice. A strong economy typically enables more companies to train their workers.

“We hope when he graduates, he’ll stay on with us,” Tracy Graziani said, though many college grads move away.

Friday’s employment report included the government’s annual revisions of estimated job growth. The revisions showed that hiring was slower in 2018 and early last year than previously estimated. Employers added 2.3 million jobs in 2018, down from a previous estimate of 2.7 million.

That total gives Trump slightly less to boast about. Job growth in 2018 had previously topped 2016’s total. But the revised figures indicate that hiring in each of the first three years of Trump’s tenure trails the pace in the final three years of the Obama presidency.

The revisions also lowered February 2019’s job gain from 56,000 to just 1,000. That revision barely maintained the record-long streak of hiring that began after the Great Recession and has now reached 112 months.

The report may help keep the Federal Reserve on the sidelines in the coming months. With wage growth moderate, companies will face less pressure to raise wages in the coming months. That should keep inflation in check.

Factory hiring, however, will likely be slowed in coming months by Boeing’s decision to suspend production of its troubled aircraft, the 737 MAX. One Boeing supplier, Spirit Aerosystems, has said it will cut 2,800 jobs. Those layoffs occurred after the government’s survey for the January jobs report and will likely affect the hiring figures released next month.

Still, manufacturers shed jobs in January for the third time in four months, cutting 12,000 positions, mostly because of layoffs in auto plants. Companies as a whole have cut back sharply on their spending on plants and equipment, in part because of Trump’s trade conflicts. That pullback in spending may continue to hamper manufacturers.

In the meantime, consumers remain confident about the economy and are spending steadily, benefiting such industries as restaurants, hotels, and health care. A category that mostly includes hotels and restaurants added a robust 36,000 jobs. Health care providers added more than 47,000.

All told, economists have forecast that the economy will expand at a roughly 2% annual rate in the first three months of this year, roughly the same as its 2.1% annual growth in the final three months of last year.

The bare truth of the matter is that various forms of fraud and cons are the rule for the vast majority of large corporations.  WeWork is basically a tiny fish in the ocean when we step back and consider the scale of cons from various transnational corporations. For more recent and humorous examples, check out Current Affairs 2019 “Griftie” Awards.

All the signs of brazen criminality are in front of us. We have to do no more than look at the public figurehead of the con economy, our own president. His personality is the distillation of the elite grifter, a hollow shell of a human, heir to a fortune which has created a uniquely toxic mix of entitlement, hubris, ignorance, and malignant narcissism; a truly pathetic man molded by late capitalism, celebrity and TV culture. His wealth bequeathed by inheritance, profits acquired through real estate scandals and “university” scams; his brain is addled by a diet of fast food; and his worldview warped by utterly deluded conservative media.

For instance, the spurious idea that 1.5 trillion in tax cuts will help grow our economy through job creation, or new business ventures, is a fraud on its face, but represents an exquisite example of capitalist propaganda. This is a lie that millions of US citizens either sincerely believe or acquiesce to due to generations of mainstream media indoctrination. As for the corporate scams cited below, there are similar factors involving coercion and propaganda, and they are similarly undemocratic: the ownership class and upper management dictate narratives in the media, how the labor is done, how the con will play out, and workers carry out immoral orders against their better judgment.

For instance, take Boeing and the two tragic crashes involving its 737 Max 8 jet. The market valuation of the company fluctuates today at around 200 billion dollars, even as it knowingly and deliberately sold its newest model without the needed software updates (MCAS), as well as without the needed sensor reading and indicator light to multiple foreign airlines, and in many cases without training pilots on the new system. Now, you might think that the software needed to keep a plane from nose-diving might come standard with the purchase of a multimillion dollar passenger jet, but you’d be wrong. In its infinite wisdom, Boeing decided to not to include the computer programmed safety features, selling them for extra and deeming them “optional.” Internal Boeing emails make clear there was systemic negligence and incompetence with the implementation of the MCAS program.

Let’s take another somewhat dated example, the behemoth Volkswagen, which had a huge emissions scandal in regard to its diesel vehicles produced from 2009-2015. Volkswagen installed “cheat software” to fool emissions tests in 11 million of its diesel cars, which, when driven for real world road tests, pumped out up to 40 times the permissible amount of nitrogen oxides. Further studies with other car manufacturers showed that many other brands were also well above the allowable limit for diesel emissions. One air pollution expert confided that the added pollution in European cities would result in “thousands of deaths.”  Volkswagen was forced to fork out 2.8 billion dollars to the US for their troubles. That might seem like a lot, but with 11 million cars sold in the process, and taking a guess and using a round number of $20,000 for each new car sold, it adds up to 220 billion in car sales just for these diesel automobiles.

Let’s shift to finance, a sector just filled with the most outlandish, craven, and fraudulent criminal activity. We could go on and on down the line from Bank of America to Wells Fargo to Deutsche Bank. By the way, media devoted to following the practices of these hallowed institutions have “scandal timelines” and lists of the “biggest scandals” just to help us make sense of the dizzying and insane levels of depravity these corporations have reached. One might think that encyclopedic chronologies and compendiums documenting these bank scams would shame and humble these corporations into adopting a semblance of corporate responsibility, but no.

Recently, Goldman Sachs has been in the news for their involvement in the 1MBD scandal. Haven’t heard of it? This was a massive scheme involving the Malaysian government and Goldman Sachs executives to sell billions of dollars worth of bonds to a giant Malaysian shell company functioning effectively as a Ponzi scheme, a “massive, international conspiracy to embezzle billions of dollars,” in the words of a wealth fund which was bilked in the process. Seventeen Goldman Sachs employees face charges in Malaysia, and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein met with the disgraced Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak and the mastermind of the scam, one Jho Low, who is now believed to be on the run in China (check the Chinese wine caves?).

In all likelihood, these scandals are just the tip of the iceberg. Even if someone like Blankfein did time for his involvement in 1MBD, it might be analogous to Al Capone doing time for tax evasion. The amount of immoral criminality is staggering when one attempts to tally how many countries have been ripped off and commons privatized, how much land and assets seized, how many poor and vulnerable people have had benefits cut and prices of necessities jacked up to benefit a tiny elite, how many desperate people have died to serve neoliberal business models. These untold atrocities are barely hidden, and all one has to do is scratch the surface of our system to reveal the sordid deeds which must stay hidden for the economy to stay afloat and for public morale not to wane and stir folks to revolution. No one is ever held responsible for financial crimes under capitalism, just like our war criminals, even though the culprits roam free in broad daylight, and even though these crimes have devastating real world consequences.

No corporate media will ever acknowledge that these are just the cases we know about. What else lies under the surface? Who among us has the means and the guts to find out if the mainstream media won’t? If these companies are willing to go to these lengths to defraud their customers, there is really nothing they won’t do. If we knew the full scope of the Mafioso-like corruption and barbaric behavior of these multinationals, people might actually revolt and overthrow our inhumane capitalist system. Mainstream media thus has a distinct role, and performs excellently for the transnational corporations (TNCs), by not investigating and not pushing for prosecution of guilty parties. This “balanced” approach to news is justified in the name of being “objective,” and trying to show “both sides of the issues.”

It’s not just corporate leaders, politicians, and the media who are shirking their duties. The judicial system is just as complicit. On January 17th, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals threw out a case (Juliana vs. United States) brought by twenty one young plaintiffs who argued that “the US government acts as a barrier to climate action” and quite rightly pointed out that “the US government [is] violating their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness by enacting policies that contribute to the climate crisis.” The majority 2-1 ruling “reluctantly concluded that the plaintiff’s case must be made to the political branches or the electorate at large.” Isn’t it revealing that these judges view the judicial system as somehow above politics?

The dissenting judge called her fellow colleagues out for their cowardice:

It is as if an asteroid were barreling toward Earth and the government decided to shut down our only defenses. Seeking to quash this suit, the government bluntly insists that it has the absolute and unreviewable power to destroy the Nation…my colleagues throw up their hands, concluding that this case presents nothing fit for the Judiciary.

Here we can clearly see the Kafkaesque institutional evasion of responsibility. Everyone in these elite institutions is to blame, so no one can be blamed, for it risks exposing the system as the root cause. In the West, we are stuck in a time where no one accepts a public duty to do anything regarding climate change, corporate criminality, etc. As Mark Fisher succinctly explained in Capitalist Realism:

The supreme genius of Kafka was to have explored the negative atheology proper to Capital: the center is missing, but we cannot stop searching for it or positing it. It is not that there is nothing there – it is that what is there is not capable of exercising responsibility.

As Fisher and others have shown, the lack of responsibility taken and lack of corporate and governmental transparency, and lack of differentiation between the corporate, judicial, legislative, and media bodies is a defining feature of late capitalism. We can view the contours and delineate between the modern and postmodern periods, in terms of the sea change from a Foucauldian disciplinary society to a Deleuzian society of control. In the modern period, there were bounded, separate domains of work, home life, recreation, public and private, etc. In our late-stage dystopia, it becomes exceedingly obvious that “all that is holy is profaned,” for instance, judges (supposed impartial arbiters of fairness and democratic values) who are supposedly duty-bound to uphold basic issues of social, environmental, and economic justice, yet do not have the temerity to overturn the death-grip fossil fuel multinationals have over our country.

Whereas before disciplinary action – punishment and jail time – could act as a bit of leverage to limit outright corporate crimes, now we have interconnected, networked, embedded elite coteries who can no longer be distinguished as serving private or public functions: the “revolving door” phenomenon. Today, our elites also cannot distinguish or internalize their own actions and take responsibility for them. Internal checks could at least possibly prevent catastrophes, or lead to feelings of shame and regret for past actions in the old-fashioned, modern way. For this reason, we can view someone like Robert McNamara as perhaps the last modernist public servant in the old-school disciplinary age. His actions were unconscionable, but it is well known he at least regretted his part in the Vietnam War afterwards. The bizarre but true story of McNamara almost getting thrown off a ferry to Martha’s Vineyard in deep ocean in 1972 by an enraged anti-war citizen with family who had served in Vietnam confirms this. Afterwards, McNamara refused to press charges, making clear he knew on some level he deserved punishment.

On the contrary, take the figures of Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld today. They are insulated by layers of ideology (and bodyguards), inebriated by luxurious lifestyles and sycophantic think tanks who parrot their every word, and interwoven within the framework and institutions of imperialist and conservative power who no longer have the capacity for self-reflection. Their perceptions and self-image, in other words, are managed by a network of power, control, and domination, in this example the interests of the national security state. Figures such as Bush, Obama, and Trump operate under the aegis of the capitalist/imperial postmodern society of control, which has continually formulated, modulated, subdued and attenuated any tension, any tendency to self-doubt, or any capacity to think critically and examine the atrocities committed by their orders.

It is a world where instantaneous feedback can assuage and soothe the troubled nerves of the elites, by providing media and/or classified reports that justify their grotesque barbarism in real time. We can observe this on a smaller scale when examining how social media algorithms create echo chambers and polarize those with opposing belief systems. The type of worldview our war-criminal presidents are subject to is a “higher immorality” as C. Wright Mills put it. It was best summed up by an unnamed senior Bush regime official, supposedly Karl Rove, speaking to journalist Ron Suskind:

People like you are still living in what we call the reality-based community. You believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you are studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

The commonality between all these absolutely absurd scams is that, unlike the relatively small size and bumbling ineptitude of a WeWork, the fetishization of and overvaluation of hare-brained tech with a company like Theranos, the pyramid scheme of a Bernie Madoff, or the cooking-the-books accounting of an Enron, companies such as Boeing, Volkswagen, and Goldman Sachs form the commanding heights of the world economy. These are supposedly the bona fide, respectable “blue-chip companies” which many middle class investors look to for stable, steady growth of their wealth. These companies and their corporate owners cannot clearly view “reality,” (who can? but still) and the public is simply “left to just study what they do.”

Another aspect is the proliferation of marketing and advertising, which hypnotizes the middle classes, which in the West are approaching comatose status in regards to the scale of these interlocking crises of corporate greed and climate disruption. Abject submission and conformity are the key features of the professional-managerial class, who hype new trends and fads, and even business models (such as WeWork). Pharmaceutical companies spend more on advertising than research and development, which lead the most sycophantic employees to top positions with deadly repercussions (for example, in the Vioxx scandal) and leads to modern pharmacological advances being in many cases guided by snake-oil peddling quack researchers and their corporate overlords.

Individuals, as well as our artistic preferences, and urban spaces, increasingly are modulated by these corporate structures, leading to a flattened consumerist aesthetic. In a brilliant essay, Andru Okun explains using quotes from author Oli Mould:

As Mould argues, ‘Neoliberalism is about the marketization of everything, the imprinting of economic rationalities into the deepest recesses of everyday life’ … [Mould] posits that 21st-century capitalism, ‘turbocharged by neoliberalism,’ has co-opted the conceptual framework of creativity in the interest of endless growth. Even movements interested in destabilizing capitalism can be ‘viewed as a potential market to exploit,’ subsumed by the very world they seek to transform. ‘Creativity under capitalism is not creative at all… it merely replicates existing capitalist registers into ever-deeper recesses of socioeconomic life,’ writes Mould.

This form of “imprinting” becomes clear when examining the professional-managerial classes and the petit-bourgeois class. Class locations, as Erik Olin Wright pointed out, invariably determine the psychological states of the middle classes, who exert exploitative pressure upon their subordinates as well as pressure from above. When advances and promotions are made within the confines of the professional class structure, one can view the accommodation to capital with near-empirical precision: “Individual consciousness is related to position within the class structure.  That is, the attitudes and behaviour of individuals has a connection to the location they occupy within the division of labour and the contradictory locations that exist in capitalism.” Thus, Mark Fisher explains how the individual actions of managers to change corporate culture are futile:

The delusion that many who enter into management with high hopes is precisely that they, the individual, can change things, that they will not repeat what their managers had done, that things will be different this time; but watch someone step up to management and it’s usually not long before the grey petrification of power starts to subsume them. It is here that the structure is palpable – you can practically see it taking people over, hear its deadened/deadening judgments speaking through them.

Again, the activities of these huge conglomerates which dictate the global economy, public discourse, and private and individual aesthetic preferences are not exceptions; they represent the rule when it comes to the behavior of TNCs and international finance. Scamming is what they do best, whether by illegal software or the TV commercial, and the scam-ees quite often turn out to be other elite venture capital and banking firms hoodwinked by the allure of profit no matter the unseemly source or the ridiculousness of the business model. Climate denialism is also a very profitable scam for its elite adherents in the fossil fuel industries and the media, one that plays a key role by influencing public opinion just enough to convince judges, politicians, and CEOs that nothing can be done within their hallowed institutions.

The assertion I’ll lay out here, and it’s admittedly not a particularly original or insightful one, is simply that the falling rate of profit as we approach what we might call terminal-stage capitalism has convinced these TNCs to slightly adjust their calculus. The adjustment is to supplement the neoliberal grip on power with the brazenness of the scam.

The neoliberal era, stretching from approximately the mid-1970s until now, can be defined quite rightly by David Harvey as being driven by a process of “accumulation by dispossession.” In his brilliant 2004 essay “The New Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession”, Harvey explains the four main policies which drive this process as privatization (selling out the commons to private interests), financialization (the penetration of all parts of the economy by banks, loans, institutions such as the IMF, World Bank, the WTO, excessive debt, etc), management and manipulation of crises (for instance, see Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine), and state redistributions (huge subsidies and contracts for the fossil fuel and military-industrial corporations, “socialism for the rich”, as it were).

Perhaps today we can add a fifth category: accumulation by the scam. If a Volkswagen or Boeing or Goldman Sachs stands to make hundreds of billions of dollars by swindling their customers, and can somewhat accurately guess that the level of future fines will be small or negligible; that lobbyists can protect future interests; that their teams of corporate lawyers can derail federal investigations; that federal regulators will be hamstrung due to lack of expertise, power, and/or resources; and that their customer base and supply chains will remain relatively stable, there is more of an incentive to cheat than ever before.

If the gravediggers of capital ultimately end up being a united working class, and/or the ecological crises combined with global warming-induced climactic Armageddon, perhaps it’d be helpful to think of these corporate grifters as the grave robbers, exhuming and reanimating whatever scam du jour they deem necessary to circulate capital. Not only does this reliance on fraud betray the moral failings of the people and institutions implicated, but it reinforces that Marx was right: the falling rate of profit over time and over-accumulation continues to force new methods of creative destruction to enter our midst to necessitate continuous expansion. Neoliberal economics officially saw its death-knell during the 2008 recession, but twelve years later this undead ideology maintains hegemony in a world teetering on the brink of disaster. Zombie Economics, if you will.

Profit and GDP growth at all costs to line elites’ pockets and increase national tax bases is killing the planet and working classes. Put another way, from a humorous statement by @Anarchopac on twitter: “The problem with capitalism is eventually you run out of planet to destroy to maximize short-term profit.” Put yet another way, John Maynard Keynes pointed out: “Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all.”

In our late capitalist reality, there are barely any new frontiers to shift capital and production to, and the possibility of opening new markets in underdeveloped nations is also limited. The colonialist frontiers have been tapped and the system begins to cannibalize itself. A rentier economy coalesces and the contours of a neo-feudal regime based on debt and precarity are readily apparent now. Speculation and passive income from the FIRE sectors (Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate) are near all-time highs, but their assets are so overvalued that sooner or later it will spur on an economic downturn that at this point is unavoidable. Consider, for instance, that the Dow Jones at its low point in March 2009 stood at around 6,600. Here in 2020, we find the average hovering over 29,000. No one can legitimately say that our markets or average families are four times as well off or any more resilient and economically secure than ten years ago. The next crash could very well make terms like “housing bubble” and “tech bubble” seem quaint. The entire US economy is a bubble, a rigged casino designed to implode.

Since financial, real estate, and stock speculation has in some sense reached a tipping point of limited returns on investment, our hypothesized 5th category, accumulation via fraud, is implemented. It fits into our upside-down world nicely: since what is productive for one class is often unproductive for another, one-percenters elide reality to maintain their own class interests at all costs, and block any real public discussion in the media of what constitutes productive versus unproductive labor. The masters know what is good for us. Capitalist elites see no moral qualms in the most debased forms of wealth acquisition. It’s all relative to them, and where previous Taylorist models focused on planned obsolescence of products, now we construct products that do not even work initially; i.e., jets that literally fall out of the sky without the necessary software updates.

In all likelihood these examples are just harbingers of things to come, as the structural instability of capital demands new avenues for expansion even as it teeters before the inevitable collapse. The brazen criminality and fraudulence of the system bubbles to the surface and can no longer be rationalized away as an “aberration.” As real material conditions deteriorate for the multitudes, resistance to capitalism must intensify as it enters its final death throes.

            <p class="postmeta">This article was posted on Tuesday, January 21st, 2020 at 12:05pm and is filed under <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/capitalism/" rel="category tag">Capitalism</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/corporate-globalization/corporate-finance-criminality/" rel="category tag">Corporate/Finance Criminality</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/justice/courts-and-judges/" rel="category tag">Courts and Judges</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/donald-trump/" rel="category tag">Donald Trump</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/economics/economic-inequality/" rel="category tag">Economic Inequality</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/asia/malaysia/" rel="category tag">Malaysia</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/neoliberalism/" rel="category tag">Neoliberalism</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/opinion/" rel="category tag">Opinion</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/ruling-elite/" rel="category tag">Ruling Elite</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/environment/the-commons/" rel="category tag">The Commons</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/united-states/" rel="category tag">United States</a>. 

The documents, made public Thursday by Boeing at the urging of Congress, are likely to fuel allegations the vaunted aircraft manufacturer put speed and cost savings ahead of safety in rolling out the Max. Boeing has been wracked by turmoil since the twin disasters and is still struggling to get the plane back in the air. Last month, it fired its CEO, Dennis Muilenburg.

In the internal messages, Boeing employees talked about misleading regulators about problems with the company’s flight simulators. which are used to develop aircraft and then train pilots on the new equipment. In one exchange, an employee told a colleague he or she wouldn’t let family members ride on a 737 Max. The colleague agreed.

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In a message chain from May 2018, an employee wrote: “I still haven’t been forgiven by God for covering up (what) I did last year.” It was not clear exactly what the cover-up involved. The documents contain redactions and are full of Boeing jargon. The employees’ names were removed.

Employees also groused about Boeing’s senior management, the company’s selection of low-cost suppliers, wasting money, and the Max.

“This airplane is designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by monkeys,” one employee wrote.

In response, Boeing said that the conversations “raise questions about Boeing’s interactions with the FAA” in getting the simulators qualified. But it said the company is confident the machines work properly.

It said it is considering disciplinary action against some employees: “These communications do not reflect the company we are and need to be, and they are completely unacceptable.”

The Max has been grounded worldwide since March, after two crashes five months apart — one involving Indonesia’s Lion Air, the other an Ethiopian Airlines flight — killed 346 people. Investigators believe the crashes were caused when the jetliners’ brand-new automated flight-control software mistakenly pushed the planes’ noses down.

Boeing is still working to fix the flight-control software and other systems on the Max and persuade regulators to let it fly again. The work has taken much longer than Boeing expected, and it is unclear when the plane will return to the skies.

A lawmaker leading one of the congressional investigations into Boeing called the messages “incredibly damning.”

“They paint a deeply disturbing picture of the lengths Boeing was apparently willing to go to in order to evade scrutiny from regulators, flight crews and the flying public, even as its own employees were sounding alarms internally,” said Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., chairman of the House Transportation Committee.

DeFazio said the documents detail “some of the earliest and most fundamental errors in the decisions that went into the fatally flawed aircraft.”

In one email message, an employee who apparently is a test pilot wrote that he crashed the first few times he flew the Max in simulator testing. The email was written in May 2015, before the Max was certified by the Federal Aviation Administration to fly.

“You get decent at it after 3-4 tries, but the first few are ugly,” the employee wrote.

In a series of messages dated May 2018, after an airline requested Boeing set up simulator training for its pilots on the Max, an unidentified test pilot wrote that he would struggle to defend the simulators to the FAA the following week.

The emails add to the evidence that Boeing misled the FAA through the process to get the Max into the air and possibly during subsequent pilot training. Back in October, Boeing turned over messages in which a former senior test pilot, Mark Forkner, told a co-worker in 2016 that the MCAS flight-control system that would later be implicated in two deadly crashes was “egregious” and “running rampant” when he tested it in a flight simulator.

“So I basically lied to the regulators (unknowingly),” wrote Forkner, then Boeing’s chief technical pilot for the 737.

The latest batch of internal Boeing documents was provided to the FAA and Congress last month.

An FAA spokesman said the agency found no new safety risks that have not already been identified as part of the FAA’s review of changes that Boeing is making to the plane. The spokesman, Lynn Lunsford, said the simulator mentioned in the documents has been checked three times in the last six months.

”Any potential safety deficiencies identified in the documents have been addressed,” he said in a statement.

The grounding of the Max will cost the company billions in compensation to families of passengers killed in the crashes and to airlines that canceled thousands of flights. Last month, the company decided to suspend production of the plane in mid-January, a decision that is rippling out through its vast network of suppliers.

The CEO was ousted after alienating regulators, Boeing’s airline customers and the crash victims’ families with his handling of the disaster and his overly optimistic predictions for when the plane might fly again.

Krisher reported from Detroit.

The battles against extremist violence and Ebola will also continue to be major campaigns in Africa in the coming year.

The crash of an Ethiopian Airlines jet shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa in March killed all 157 passengers and crew. The disaster, which claimed the lives of a large number of U.N. officials, involved a Boeing 737 Max jet and came just five months after a similar crash in Indonesia of the same aircraft.

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Boeing was inundated with questions about the safety of its plane. After initially claiming that it was safe, the company was forced to ground the plane after many countries refused to let it fly in their airspace. In December Boeing announced that it would suspend production of the jet.

The air crash was a trial for Ethiopia’s reformist Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who later in the year won the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize for achieving peace with neighboring Eritrea. But Abiy is challenged by often violent ethnic rivalries in his country and elections set for May 2020 will be crucial, analysts say.

Cyclone Idai ripped into Mozambique in March, killing more than 1,300 people, making it “one of the worst weather-related disasters ever to hit the southern hemisphere,” according to the U.N. A month later Cyclone Kenneth roared into northern Mozambique, killing more than 50 people.

This was the first time in recorded history that Mozambique had two major cyclones, prompting some to worry that the country, with a 1,000-mile Indian Ocean coastline, may be prone to more storms as a result of climate change.

Across Mozambique more than 2.5 million people remain in urgent need of assistance, according to the U.N. Mozambique also starts 2020 troubled by ongoing attacks on vehicles in the country’s central area and by Islamic extremist attacks in the country’s north.

Extremist violence continues to vex Africa from the east to the west.

2019 began with extremist violence. In Kenya in January, insurgents launched an assault on a luxury hotel and shopping complex in Nairobi that killed at least 14 people.

The year came to an end with extremist attacks across the continent.

A bomb in Somalia killed 78 people, including many university students, in the capital, Mogadishu, on Dec. 28, the deadliest attack in years. Somalia’s al-Shabab, allied to al-Qaida, claimed responsibility for the bombing.

In Nigeria extremists linked to the Islamic State group circulated a video showing 11 hostages, most of them Christians, being executed. They were thought to be killed on Christmas Day. The extremist group, which calls itself the Islamic State West Africa Province, said the captives were executed as revenge for the killing of Islamic State group leaders in Iraq and Syria in October.

In northern Burkina Faso, jihadists killed 35 civilians, most of them women, and ensuing clashes with security forces left 80 jihadists dead, the West African nation’s president announced Dec. 24. That attack came weeks after an attack on a convoy carrying employees of a Canadian mining company in which at least 37 civilians were killed in the country’s east. Both attacks were by groups numbering close to 100, indicating the presence of relatively large, well-organized extremist groups.

“The startling deterioration of the security situation in Burkina Faso has been a major development in 2019,” said Alex Vines, director of the Africa program at Chatham House, the British think tank. ”There’s been a dramatic spike in extremist attacks.”

Frequent attacks in Burkina Faso’s north and east already have displaced more than a half million people, according to the United Nations. While Burkina Faso’s military has received training from both former colonizer France and the United States, it starts 2020 with little progress in halting the surge in extremist violence.

Congo starts the year waging a different kind of war — a campaign against Ebola, which has killed more than 2,200 people since August 2018. The medical effort to control the second deadliest Ebola outbreak in history has been severely hampered since the start by the presence of several armed groups in eastern Congo, the epicenter of the epidemic. It was hoped that new vaccines would help control the outbreak more quickly, but the violence has hampered those efforts.

Congo’s President Felix Tshisekedi, elected in 2019, said in November that he was optimistic that the Ebola outbreak would be ended before 2020, but the epidemic continues throughout eastern Congo.

South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa, re-elected in 2019, said in a New Year’s statement that the need to boost his country’s ailing economy and create jobs is his biggest challenge for 2020. Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, also re-elected, has said that his government has controlled the rebellion by Boko Haram extremists, but violence continues to plague the country’s northeast.

Zimbabwe’s longtime ruler, Robert Mugabe, died at age 95 in September. Mugabe, the guerrilla leader who fought to end white-minority rule in Rhodesia and then ruled independent Zimbabwe from 1980 until 2017, left a mixed legacy of liberation, repression and economic ruin.

Zimbabwe begins the new year with severe economic problems including inflation estimated at more than 300% and widespread hunger. In an emergency appeal at the end of December, the U.N.’s World Food Program said that even though the southern African country had suffered a drought, Zimbabwe’s food shortages are a “man-made” disaster, laying the blame squarely with President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s government.

The once-prosperous country staggered to 2020 with power shortages lasting up to 19 hours per day and large parts of the capital, Harare, a city of some 2 million people, going without running water.

As the company scrambled to understand what happened, NASA canceled the Starliner’s docking with the International Space Station, instead focusing on a hastier than planned return to Earth. The Starliner could parachute into its landing site in the New Mexico desert as early as Sunday.

Officials stressed the capsule was stable and safe, and that had astronauts been aboard, they would have been in no danger. A crew may have been able to take over control and salvage the mission. The problem was with the Starliner’s mission clock: It was off-kilter, which delayed timed-commands to put the capsule in the right orbit. Engineers worried the problem could resurface during descent.

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It was a major setback for Boeing, which had been hoping to catch up with SpaceX, NASA’s other commercial crew provider that successfully completed a similar demonstration last March. SpaceX has one last hurdle — a launch abort test — before carrying two NASA astronauts in its Dragon capsule, possibly by spring.

NASA officials did not think Friday’s problem would hold up SpaceX, but said they would need to make sure nothing was in common between the two companies’ on-board mission timers. Ground controllers were puzzled over why the Starliner’s timer was not working properly when the capsule separated from the rocket and began flying freely.

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said it was too soon to know whether Boeing would need to conduct another orbital test flight without a crew, before flying astronauts. The company had been shooting for its first crew launch by the middle of next year. An additional test flight would almost certainly push the first astronaut flight back.

Boeing’s Jim Chilton, a senior vice president, stopped by the Starliner’s manufacturing plant at Kennedy Space Center to address employees on his way to a somber news conference.

“These are passionate people who are committing a big chunk of their lives to put Americans back in space from our soil, so it’s disappointing for us,” Chilton told reporters.

It’s been nearly nine years since NASA astronauts have launched from the U.S. The last time was July 8, 2011, when Atlantis — now on display at Kennedy Space Center — made the final space shuttle flight.

Since then, NASA astronauts have traveled to and from the space station via Kazakhstan, courtesy of the Russian Space Agency. The Soyuz rides have cost NASA up to $86 million apiece.

The space agency handed over station deliveries to private businesses, first cargo and then crews, in order to focus on getting astronauts back to the moon and on to Mars.

Commercial cargo ships took flight in 2012. Crew capsules were more complicated to design and build, and parachute and other technical problems caused repeated delays. Target launch dates starting with 2017 came and went. Last April, a SpaceX crew capsule — the same one that flew to the space station a month earlier — exploded during a ground test.

The U.S. needs companies competing like this, Bridenstine said Thursday, to drive down launch costs, boost innovation and open space up to more people. He stressed the need for more than one company in case of problems that kept one grounded.

Friday’s blastoff from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station started flawlessly as the Atlas V rocket lifted off with the Starliner just before sunrise. But a half-hour into the flight, the trouble became apparent.

Ground controllers tried to send up commands to get the spacecraft in its proper orbit, but the signals did not get there and by then it was too late. The capsule tried to fix its position, burning too much fuel for the spacecraft to safely make it to the space station for a Saturday rendezvous.

All three astronauts assigned to the first Starliner crew were at control centers for the launch: Mike Fincke and Nicole Mann, both with NASA, and Boeing’s Chris Ferguson, who commanded the last shuttle mission. He’s now a test pilot astronaut for Boeing and one of the Starliner’s key developers.

“This is why we flight test, right? We’re trying to get all of the bugs, if you will, out of the system,” said Fincke at the briefing. “There’s always something.”

Built to accommodate seven, the white capsule with black and blue trim will typically carry four or five people. It’s 16.5 feet (5 meters) tall with its attached service module and 15 feet (4.5 meters) in diameter.

For the test flight, the Starliner carried Christmas treats and presents for the six space station residents, the original air travel ID card belonging to Boeing’s founder and a mannequin, named Rosie after the bicep-flexing riveter of World War II.

The flight was designed to test all systems, from the vibrations and stresses of liftoff to the touchdown at the Army’s White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, with parachutes and air bags to soften the landing.

On the eve of the launch, Bridenstine said he’s “very comfortable” with Boeing, despite the prolonged grounding of the company’s 737 Max jets. The spacecraft and aircraft sides of the company are different, he noted. Boeing has long been involved in NASA’s human spacecraft program, from Project Mercury to the shuttle and station programs.

Boeing began preliminary work on the Starliner in 2010. Four years later, Boeing and SpaceX made the final cut. Boeing got more than $4 billion to develop and fly the Starliner, while SpaceX got $2.6 billion for a crew-version of its Dragon cargo ship.

On Thursday, Bridenstine said NASA wants to make sure every reasonable precaution is taken with the capsules, designed to be safer than NASA’s old shuttles.

“We’re talking about human spaceflight,” he cautioned. “It’s not for the faint of heart. It never has been, and it’s never going to be.”

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