I’m getting really sick of writing these kinds of articles. But of course that’s less than nothing compared to the suffering of people directly harmed by corporate criminality—and yes, the behavior I’m talking about is criminal in moral terms, even if it wasn’t against the law at the time. The list of corporate crimes from just the current decade is voluminous: Wells Fargo, Takata, General Motors, Volkswagen, Massey Energy, Toyota—and those are just the ones I’ve written about.
This week we learned even more about what went on behind closed doors at Boeing, the company that has lost two passenger airliners in the past 13 months, resulting in the deaths of 346 people:
One Boeing employee worried the 737 Max might be “vulnerable.” A company document said if pilots didn’t respond to a new automated system within seconds it would be “catastrophic.” A plan to include an alert for the system, known as MCAS, was considered but scrapped.
The new revelations about how Boeing wrestled with the safety questions surrounding the new system on its best-selling plane came at a congressional hearing on Wednesday in Washington, adding to evidence that the company was aware of concerns about the plane’s safety before two crashes that left 346 people dead.
Taken together with emails released this month showing that a top Boeing pilot was having trouble with the new system in the simulator before the plane was complete, the documents paint a fuller picture of Boeing employees’ developing and at times raising concerns about MCAS.
Despite these concerns, Boeing put the 737 Max, with the MCAS system in place, in the air and kept it there—even after the first crash. Worse, they tried to keep those planes flying after the second crash, with CEO Dennis Muilenburg calling Trump and saying that everything was still hunky dory.
Muilenberg testified this week at House and Senate hearings. It didn’t go very well for him.
From CNN:
[Members of the House Transportation Committee] pointed to another internal document, dated prior to the crashes, noting that "a slow reaction time" to a MCAS malfunction "found the failure to be catastrophic." In this document, "slow" was defined as longer than 10 seconds.
[snip] "My first concern is that our workforce is exhausted. Employees are fatigued from having to work at a very high pace for an extended period of time," [one] employee wrote, according to [Rep. Albio Sires (D-NJ)]. "Fatigued employees make mistakes."
"Frankly right now all my internal warning bells are going off," the message continued. "And for the first time in my life, I'm sorry to say that I'm hesitant about putting my family on a Boeing airplane."
There’s a lot more to the Boeing story, although one more detail I want to share involves Nadia Milleron, whose daughter died in one of the two recent crashes. After hearing Muilenberg talk over and over about his upbringing on an Iowa farm, this grieving mother had heard enough, and told him: “Go back to Iowa. Do that. I don't feel like you understand. It's come to the point where you're not the person anymore to solve the situation."
As of this writing, Muilenberg remains chief executive officer of Boeing, although sadly for him he’s no longer chairman of the board. The head of the commercial airlines division lost his job as well—although some at Boeing are calling him a scapegoat for a far broader corporate failing. That’s all the accountability that’s necessary here, apparently.
But this isn’t about one company: It’s about the need to rein in corporate malfeasance in general. And that’s where it connects to politics. Are Democrats perfect on this? Absolutely not, although some are far better than others (I’ve got a video below of one of the very best on these matters). But the contrast between them and Republicans overall is about as clear as it gets.
Republicans trust corporations. It’s that simple. They don’t trust regular people to be honest when seeking, for example, food stamps or Medicaid benefits. But corporations? They don’t need tough rules, oversight, and regulations to make sure they do the right thing. Republicans think such things just add unnecessary cost and reduce profits to shareholders (i.e., rich people whom the Republicans serve).
Look what happened last year on the matter of air safety:
With a few short paragraphs tucked into 463 pages of legislation last year, Boeing scored one of its biggest lobbying wins: a law that undercuts the government’s role in approving the design of new airplanes.
For years, the government had been handing over more responsibility to manufacturers as a way to reduce bureaucracy. But those paragraphs cemented the industry’s power, allowing manufacturers to challenge regulators over safety disputes and making it difficult for the government to usurp companies’ authority.
Although the law applies broadly to the industry, Boeing, the nation’s dominant aerospace manufacturer, is the biggest beneficiary. An examination by The New York Times, based on interviews with more than 50 regulators, industry executives, congressional staff members and lobbyists, as well as drafts of the bill and federal documents, found that Boeing and its allies helped craft the legislation to their liking, shaping the language of the law and overcoming criticism from regulators.
Even as the bill was moving through Congress—it ultimately passed on October 3, 2018, while the House and Senate remained under Republican control—the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) stated directly that its provisions would “not be in the best interest of safety.” Even more blunt was the assessment made by an agency inspectors’ group, who warned that the new law would transform the FAA into a “rubber stamp” that could do nothing until after “people are killed” in a crash. Twenty-six days after the bill became law, the first of the two Boeing crashes took place.
You want more evidence of Republicans bending over backward to show how much they trust corporations? We don’t even have to go back more than a few days to see these guys selling out our drinking water to pump up corporate profits:
The Trump administration is expected to roll back an Obama-era regulation meant to limit the leaching of heavy metals like arsenic, lead and mercury into water supplies from the ash of coal-fired power plants, according to two people familiar with the plans.
With a series of new rules expected in the coming days, the Environmental Protection Agency will move to weaken the 2015 regulation that would have strengthened inspection and monitoring at coal plants, lowered acceptable levels of toxic effluent and required plants to install new technology to protect water supplies from contaminated coal ash.
The E.P.A. will relax some of those requirements and exempt a significant number of power plants from any of the requirements, according to the two people familiar with the Trump administration plan, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the new rules.
As our own Meteor Blades wrote: “This is a step backward designed to keep dumping the economic externalities of health perils and financial costs onto the people and communities being polluted instead of the polluters.”
Also, we saw The Man Who Lost The Popular Vote and his cronies act this week to help corporations dodge taxes:
The Treasury Department on Thursday took steps to ease regulations issued during former President Barack Obama’s administration that were aimed at curbing offshore tax deals.
Treasury issued final regulations eliminating documentation requirements that were part of the Obama-era rules. The department also announced its intention to propose regulations in the future that alter other portions of the offshore tax rules.
[snip] The rules were a part of a series of regulations issued by the Obama administration that slowed the pace of inversions. But business groups had long disliked the rules, arguing that they ensnared transactions that had nothing to do with inversions and that the documentation requirements were too burdensome.
The rules were too burdensome? The business groups didn’t like ‘em? Oh, well, Big Daddy Trump will take care of all that. Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon called out what’s really going on here:
The corporations that got a massive taxpayer handout are getting another gift from Donald Trump. The Obama administration had essentially shut down inversions—transactions whose only purpose is to help big multinational corporations move overseas to avoid paying taxes. Weakening these rules only provides an opening for corporations to again dodge their taxes.
Finally, since good things always come in threes, we learned this week of some interesting doings over at the Internal Revenue Service—which, don’t forget, has been badly underfunded thanks to Republicans, even though every dollar put into the IRS budget produces between four and five dollars in tax revenue. What’s been going on there?:
For a decade and a half, the IRS program to allow most Americans to file their taxes for free has been floundering.
Now, IRS emails obtained by ProPublica help show why: The agency has allowed the tax preparation industry to write the rules.
The IRS tried to hide the documents from public view, initially withholding more than 100 pages of emails between agency officials and industry representatives in response to ProPublica’s Freedom of Information Act request filed in April. The agency released the emails this month only after ProPublica sued.
Not all of these examples of Republicans giving corporations what they want resulted in deaths, at least not directly. But even the ones that only involve money (i.e., corporations having more of it and our government having less) directly harm large numbers of Americans. Furthermore, these actions by Republicans only add to the skewed distribution of power in our society. Those with great wealth, in particular institutions like large corporations, have far too much of it. One of our two major parties thinks that’s exactly how it should be. Virtually all Democrats have a much better take on the matter. As I mentioned earlier, some are even better than others.
Here’s Sen. Elizabeth Warren in 2013, talking at the time about financial institutions. This argument applies across the board to the matter of corporate malfeasance and our ability to scare potential bad actors before they, well, act badly:
(starting at 0:52) If they can break the law and drag in billions in profits, and then turn around and settle, paying out of those profits, they don’t have much incentive to follow the law….There are District Attorneys and U.S Attorneys who are out there every day squeezing ordinary citizens, on sometimes very thin grounds and taking them to trial in order to make an example, as they put it.
Isn’t it about time we start making an example out of corporate executives who roll the dice with human life? I’m talking about the people who make decisions figuring that the odds of loss of life actually happening are in their favor, so why not take what amounts to, in mathematical terms, a pretty small risk in order to guarantee lots more cash for their company—not to mention for their own bank accounts?
Of course, if the dice come up snake eyes and people die, well, those executives will be very sad and will “take responsibility” and all that. That’s just not good enough. The problem is that the risk-and-reward equation is, in our current system, not properly calibrated. Today, the risk to the executives is simply about whether they’ll lose some money or maybe their job (and even that’s not a certainty, as the case of Dennis Muilenburg at Boeing demonstrates) and how that potential compares to the potential financial reward. It’s a simple matter of money. We must change that equation.
The American people need to make sure that these guys, as they sit behind their desks contemplating whether to endanger human beings—their fellow Americans, in most cases—are thinking about whether their decision will harm someone a little closer to home if things go wrong. We need to make clear that certain actions will result in them being taken from behind their desks and placed behind bars.
Until these guys truly fear being put in prison—until people at high-level meetings stand up to the ones proposing taking these crazy risks (with other people’s lives and health) and say “we are not doing that because I’m not going to jail”—we know this kind of behavior is going to continue. That’s one thing you can put your trust in.
Ian Reifowitz is the author of The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh's Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump (Foreword by Markos Moulitsas)