Once you start thinking of Boeing as a government agency with less oversight that poses as a for-profit corporation, a lot of things start to make more sense. Including what you wrote about.
So, yes. All have deep ties with government through their regulatory apparatus (some would characterize this as "capture"). Also of note: people might be confused by tobacco's inclusion here if they don't realize that North America was essentially settled as a tobacco agribusiness (Spanish gold-hunting and death-trap religious colonies notwithstanding). Tobacco's role in shaping America's socioeconomic nature is massively underrated.
Take a nice drive through the Midwest/south, you'll see all kinds of branded barns used for drying tobacco... assuming they're still standing
I say this more to reminisce than anything. It used the big industry, not anymore. People either adapted or they didn't. Kentucky and Ohio for example used the be Big Tobacco. Now, in large parts - nothing.
There must be a billion corporations out there. What % can kill customers on the scale of Boeing and get away with it?
A tiny number.
And for the ones that can, it’s likely that there are strong ties to the same government that’s supposed to prosecute them. For Boeing, there are significant financial and contractual ties to the US government.
Having a steady stream of ultra-reliable government cash surely reminds you of a state department?
> What % can kill customers on the scale of Boeing and get away with it?
100% of the ones that are at, or near, the top of their domain. As the US and other developed nations move more towards Oligarchy, this describes a vast majority of the economy.
If you pick a domain, any domain, there's typically < 5 companies that represent almost 100% of the value in that domain. There're some exceptions, like tech, but not many.
Losing even just one of those companies therefore has catastrophic economic effects. So you can't lose them, or even really hurt their profit much, because what's good for them is good for you (you being the US economy).
Bayer Pharmaceutical famously gave thousands of people HIV, knowingly, instead of clearing their inventory. Who knows how many of those people went on to unknowingly spread HIV to their future children or partners. We literally can't measure how many people died of AIDS because of them.
But they're one of the most important pharmaceuticals out there. And we need drugs.
The root problem is that the rich and powerful[1] face no consequences for wrongdoing. It's endemic to every part of life, and nothing gets done about it because the rich and powerful make the rules. It really doesn't matter if they happen to be aligned with "Team Corporation" or "Team Government". They are equally unaccountable to justice.
1: Rich and Powerful are both the exact same thing since money is frictionlessly convertible to power and vice versa.
> the rich and powerful[1] face no consequences for wrongdoing.
Bernie Madoff. Jeff Epstein & Ghislane Maxwell. Sam Bankman-Fried. Elizabeth Holmes. Harvey Weinstein.
I get that sometimes you'll see things like Hunter Biden's tax issues being allowed to pass the statute of limitations, but a universal "the rich never face consequences" is just plain false.
can you list how many financiers were jailed after 2008 GFC ?
can you find any?
can you list how many people were jailed for engineering SARS-CoV?
heck, government hasn't even acknowledge that it was engineered and still pushes fairy tale about bat infecting pangolin who infected a chain of few other animals and then ended up in wet market - but no signs of viruses in 1000 miles between caves and wet market were ever found
Well, disregarding the bankers - generally we require evidence to be presented in a court of law and then those findings to be found true for people to go to jail - repeating stuff you read on the internet doesn't really rise to that level.
BP and Exxon have killed entire ecosystems including people. They lied for decades about the environmental effects of fossil fuels. Air pollution alone has conservatively killed hundreds of thousands of people. While you can't blame them for air pollution existing, you can blame them for intentionally suppressing the ability of people to mitigate it and improve air quality.
Are you joking? Once a corporation gets large enough, the worst they can get is a fine, which is usually a fraction of their income. This is how the system works.
For example, depending on how you calculate it, Merck killed between 3,000 and 500,000 people with Vioxx, and they knew the risks prior to releasing it. They got a fine. And now, the company is now doing just fine. No one was individually prosecuted.
If you have a corporate charter and billions of dollars, you have a license to kill.
I am European (left FWIW, which I guess in the US is "far-left" or something alike), been influenced by Reagan for sure (against most of his stated policies and views) and I do believe the government should exists to help people among other things. The government should not aim to generate profits but instead spend that overflow money on improving more lives.
Lat time I went to an American DMV it was in a small town in Colorado to get a license renewal. I was in and out within 10 minutes.
My next license was in Canada. Made an appointment and it was about the same, maybe a bit more to get all the paperwork scanned to convert my US license.
The DMV doesn't have to suck. Government services don't have to suck, and a lot of them actually don't. Frequently they suck because they are tasked with doing far more than any similarly resourced private company could accomplish.
In my experience living in California, government services such as the DMV and the post office tend to be more pleasant in small towns compared to in large metro areas. When I lived in San Luis Obispo and in Santa Cruz County, it was generally a smooth experience running errands at government facilities. In fact, I remember people smiling and being friendly in San Luis Obispo. In larger metros such as Sacramento and the Bay Area, though, I often have to contend with long lines and surly service.
I know this is just anecdata, but this is something I’ve noticed over the years.
It depends on the country, though. I love Japan, where I lived for eight months and where I frequently travel to, but dealing with government services there can be stressful. Granted, the clerks are professional and cordial, but be prepared to deal with long waits and perplexing bureaucracy. The United States is not unique when it comes to the stereotypical “DMV experience.”
I actually lived in Japan for some years and was thinking specifically of them.
People that care at the post office, even if they have a litany of questions, and deliver your package in pristine condition is the preferred result over crap service where nobody in the entire chain cares at all if it even shows up or if it's beat up and stuff fell out.
The only government service that felt purposefully bad, like many American government services, were the immigration services in Shinagawa, conveniently located next to the garbage processing facilities.
Back in November I spent half a day at the Shinagawa immigration office to obtain a trusted travelers program pass since doing it at the airport would’ve been inconvenient for me due to my super-early arrival at Haneda and my super-late departure. It wasn’t too bad, but I spent half a day there and there were unclear instructions regarding which area I needed to wait in. Thankfully it’s all taken care of, and the reward for spending half a day at Shinagawa is using the automated kiosks whenever I enter and depart Japan, which saved me tons of time in July when I arrived at Narita, bypassing a very long visitors’ line. I go to Japan frequently and so I’ll make up for the hours I spent in Shinagawa by the time my pass expires.
The Reagan-era conservative propaganda is so unbelievably strong that even when a private corporation kills hundreds of people, people will STILL use the opportunity to point at the public sector.
No, they don't operate like the public sector because they're actually in the private sector. But the propaganda is so strong that it's literally unthinkable for a private actor to do something bad on a large scale - only the public sector can do something bad on a large scale.
Therefore, in this reasoning, Boeing must be like a public actor. It's really remarkable the mental effort people will go through to avoid any type of narrative that MIGHT imply the private sector needs more accountability.
> Therefore, in this reasoning, Boeing must be like a public actor. It's really remarkable the mental effort people will go through to avoid any type of narrative that MIGHT imply the private sector needs more accountability.
Maybe it wasn't very clear but I'm making (trying to make) the opposite point. Boeing pays out bonuses to executives like they're a for-profit company, but considering Boeing is too big to fail and NASA using them as a partner to push their other partners and won't drop them no matter what happens (one of the press conferences about Starliner made this very clear) makes it seem like Boeing is a government agency.
Seems weird to immediately jump to "Reagan-era conservative propaganda" when I'm probably as far away from anything like that as humanly possibly.
I didn't read the OP as saying, "Private sector good; public sector bad." I read him as saying, "Unregulated monopoly bad."
I think a more charitable read of the OP is that the FAA hasn't done a good job regulating Boeing because the FAA is in Boeing's pockets. Boeing is so critical to national defense that the regulators don't want to rock the boat and risk getting fired. Both Boeing and the FAA need to be cleaned up.
This is just malicious. Boing is the exemplar capitalist enterprise, traded, where the sole objective is profit above everything else, including safety and following regulations obligations, something that they can do because they bought politicians (lobby aka legal corruption).
> How is that an exemplar of profit making capitalism?
They still exist and are regularly pumping out millionaires from their executive suites.
It's helpful to think about corporate America as a gigantic factory, but instead of a factory that makes gadgets or appliances, it's a factory that makes millionaires. On one end of the factory, the raw materials come in: Able-bodied workers, money from customers, and capital from investors. On the other end of the factory, the finished product--millionaire executives--fly out on golden parachutes into retirement. In the back, the waste from the manufacturing process gets discarded: The broken lives and bodies of all the rank-and-file workers, and all the negative societal and environmental externalities that were also destroyed in the process.
Profit for shareholders and [temporary, conditional] employment for workers are mere side effects of the process, and they'd do away with the second one if they had the technology to.
