Corporate personhood is a centuries-old legal concept [1], finding first mention at the Supreme Court in the 19th century.
> then Boeing should be held criminally liable
They were charged in 2021, and entered into a deferred-prosecution agreement after paying a $2.5bn fine [2]. It appears the DoJ is already looking into the Alaska Airlines blow-out [3].
Because Boeing is so important to national security, everyone involved in leading this from the CEO to the board of directors should be treated as traitors and have all their assets seized and spend the rest of their life in a maximum security federal prison.
If it's really that important it should be government-owned, like Airbus. You can't give random people free reign and then punish them if you retroactively didn't like it.
but unlike the kamikaze-americana free market attitude on display by characters competing for attention on social media, this state ownership ensures that ultimately it benefits the state's interest not the executives.
This is the invisible boundaries that map the most resilient economies. Even Canada does this to a large degree but stood no chance against American Greed.
This is what happens when monopolies are allowed to exist. In a competitive market if the CEO gives away market share to rivals due to reckless indifference to safety and becomes a liability, they will be fired or the company gets spun off to fend for themselves. When we as a society allow a monopoly to exist, then government assumes responsibility for whatever that monopoly does with its power. Government intervention ought to be a last resort, not the first. The only reason anyone's calling for government action here is because we allowed Boeing to become a monopoly to begin with, so now we have no other choice but to accept what Boeing has become or else break it up. All monopolies will eventually do something to harm the public in exchange for personal wealth. It is an inevitability.
But it isn't a monopoly? It is just an extremely capital intensive business. At least if you are building large passenger jets, everything else has quite a bit of competition.
I'm sorry but you're exactly wrong. Natural monopoly means monopoly which is a direct consequence of nature, rather than through collusion and anticompetitive practice. Ie a "natural" monopoly. My analogy holds just fine.
You believe it's so traitorous to try to cut costs that it should result in life in prison for all members of the board and CEO? And why maximum security, do you believe they are going to be tunneling out with spoons?
Traitorous does seem strong. But gross negligence that can result in hundreds of deaths per mistake? Mistakes that may not happen if share prices weren't the number one priority? Yah something heavy should happen.
American business operates like a feudal system with lords and peasants. Management are the lords and everyone else are the expendable peasants.
Occasionally, the lords are forced to acknowledge that the peasants are just as essential as they are. Without them there is nothing and no one to "lord" over.
This is the abherrent phase that Boeing has just entered. The system will be forced to either return to normal or simply cease to exist a la GE.
> Management are the lords and everyone else are the expendable peasants
Boards are the lords. Management without a board seat are the bourgeoisie; Boeing engineers, too. To the degree we have peasants in modern America, it’s in agriculture and retail, not at Boeing.
I was quite surprised how authoritarian American/Canadian business environments were and subconsciously/covertly racist without saying it outright.
I still vividly remember when I was in my 20s, an American executive from a fortune 500 company forgetting to unmute himself and accidentally unmasking himself and the attitude of those around him.
They were at the forefront of "woke" and "diversity". This is when I learned it was just another slogan like "human rights" to make the citizens feel good about themselves.
As somebody from Eastern Block, it is not much worse. Government will forcibly create monopoly businesses, they have no reason to improve their products and to top it off, you can't create competing business, because government does not allow that.
Just look what was the result after 1989 - companies who could compete with western ones, because government did not required innovation last 40 years and 5 year plans were solved by throwing more people at the problem or outright lying. Result was that products were often obsolete long before manufacturing even started, what was made were poor quality (i.e. we called it finish it at home) and much more expensive than in the rotten West.
Capitalism killing people, nothing new or out of the ordinary here. Companies are innovative when growing and competing, but if they win they’ll reach the final form for a successful firm: monopoly. From then on, the only innovation will be in new ways to rebrand corruption and avoid regulation.
> the free market has taken care of them to some degree
It’s pricing in the risk of fines, the cost of groundings and the potential penalties thereafter. Put another way, the market is reacting to regulation, actual and potential.
Investment has become increasingly decoupled from its reputed purpose; it’s not a means to an end, getting short term gains at all costs has become the end goal.
> Back to Marx here. “The two characteristics immanent in the credit system are, on the one hand, to develop the incentive of capitalist production, from enrichment through exploitation of the labour of others, to the purest and most colossal form of gambling and swindling.” So the finance sector carries on just as before, engaging in speculation and regulators cannot and do not stop them.
> The answer is not regulation (before or after the event), but the banning of fictitious capital investment. Close down hedge funds, bitcoin exchanges and exchange trade funding. Instead, banking should be a public service for households and small companies in order to take deposits and make loans – not funding for a massive financial casino where criminals and swindlers gamble away our livelihoods.
What comes next is a choice we will all collectively make. We can use these growing scandals as warnings and take corrective steps. We can take seriously the worsening trends and reorient our life’s work toward finding solutions for the next generation.
The next chapter has not been written, and the current state of worsening points directly at the reality that things can indeed be better.
Curious how we assign moral blame. Sure, Boeing put Wall Street first ahead of safety.
But why isn't the headline "Wall Street put profits ahead of safety".
Or "The electorate chooses capitalism over safety."
During the oil crisis, highway speed limits were reduced to 55 mph, to ease the gas shortage. But an unexpected side effect was that about 4,000 less people died in car crashes each year. Would you be willing to drive slower to save lives?
Put it another way: how many people would you be willing to kill to be able to drive at 65mph?
Its so easy to sit there and put the blame on some amorphous, anonymous, abstraction like "Wall Street" because it exonerates you and you can feel all self-righteous. But if you were in the same position, are you so sure you'd give up your annual bonus? Or put your stock options underwater? When you knew full well that if you didn't they would just fire you and hire somebody who would?
> Its so easy to put the blame on some amorphous, anonymous abstraction like "Wall Street" because we can feel self-righteous. But things are the way they are because--by and large--we like them that way.
This argument entirely ignores that lobbying and political donations skew government policy to benefit a small minority on Wall Street.
If this is proven to be a criminal act, even of criminal negligence, charge not only the people making decisions, the board members, but also shareholders, relative to their holdings. Including grouped stocks such as funds.
All it will take is once for this to happen and shareholders to actually think about the repercussions of “investing” in corporations that do this kind of thing.
> All it will take is once for this to happen and shareholders to actually think about the repercussions of “investing” in corporations that do this kind of thing
Right, you wouldn’t invest in American business, period. (Also, how do you criminally charge someone on a pro rata basis? Do you send every American with a pension to jail for 1/31,000,000th the jail time?)
At that point you’ll need to go full Soviet. Seize resources and have the state deploy them. Because in no rational world would someone accept criminal liability on behalf of someone they do not control. So to stop a capital exodus, you’d need to seize the means of production (and incur the stasis that comes from centralising economic decision making among the political class).
Would be pretty convenient for America if China or Russia adopted your proposal…
The exec who wanted to save money? Saving money is the prime directive. Why is it his fault that he was given bad advice by his engineers about it?
Did the engineers commit the crime? Does your computer software have no bugs in it? Arn't the testers and inspectors supposed to give the proper feedback?
Did the testers and inspectors commit the crime? Well, some of those testers and inspectors worked for Boeing, some worked for the FAA--and some worked for the people who bought the airplanes. If there was a serious problem, surely some of them would have spoken up...
Exactly who was the criminal? Who is guilty of "criminal neglect?"
Easy? You’re letting your outrage short-circuit your brain. There’s no way you’ve thought this ridiculous proposal through.
Boeing is part of the S&P 500. Almost every American who has stocks is going to have a fund that includes Boeing. That includes people with 401Ks, so basically everyone in the middle class. You’re talking about charging a 100 million people.
Okay, so maybe that’s what you intended. Now what? Does everybody now have a criminal record? What exactly are they charged with? Negligent homicide? A fraction of a percent of the deaths from the 737 Max? Who charges them? How does it get through the courts? What are the exact consequences, and why does Joe Random Schmoe deserve those consequences? Let’s see you actually think this through.
> Would you be willing to drive slower to save lives?
No. Because people still died when the speed limit was 55. Why then didn't we lower the speed limit to 45? Heck, we could stop people from dying altogether by simply banning driving!
> Its so easy to put the blame on some amorphous, anonymous abstraction like "Wall Street" because we can feel self-righteous. But things are the way they are because--by and large--we like them that way.
Could it be that the electorate’s power to effect change has become usurped by lobbyists?
> Could it be that the electorate’s power to effect change has become usurped by lobbyists?
To the degree voters get apathetic or distracted by culture war issues, sure. When the electorate gives a shit about something, electeds listen. Most issues simply don’t rise to that level. Case in point: Boeing; nobody is going to beat their competitor by promising to be tougher on Boeing.
Earning estimates are manipulated to dangle a carrot for the executives to act on short term signals for short term outcomes with zero regard for long term consequences. Short term investors love it, moving from stock to stock, like locusts, using up the resources like mobsters that takeover a business to create financial leverage to take over more businesses.
It's this irrational and unapologetic greed that Americans like to accuse other cultures of but guilty of themselves.
The problem is that keeping investors happy, it is keeping investors with a short term outlook happy.
If anything more than two years is too long term to care about, then the best strategy is to take risks and hope it does not catch up with you before then.
Amazon succeeded in large part because they ignored the complaints of short term investors for years. So while I think that the widespread short term outlook is definitely an issue, it is a choice of boards and CEOs. Ultimately if the company tanks on being blind to long term risks - short term investors will be the fastest to leave the stock.
> Amazon succeeded in large part because they ignored the complaints of short term investors for years
The market is ultimately made up of people. Some of them are short-term oriented. Some of them are not. Which cohort a company chases very much defines the relationship, and Boeing—unfortunately—chose wrong.
Yes to be clear I very much agree that Boeing leadership chose wrong. I was aiming to speak to the impression that companies somehow had to respond to short term investors - they very much don’t and can justify financial outcomes on consistent long term objectives & decisions
I ain’t mean this about you personally; this is the dumbest logic imaginable. Anytime someone cries crocodile tears about the rationality of the market please refer back here to B0eing’s self destruction
Agency conflict of interest. It's like Enron executives. They put society third, Wall Street second, and themselves first. That's the default alignment of incentives in our capitalist system by the way. Good governance and good regulations can try to align all those things but often falls short.
Unless they didn't plan at all (an answer I would not accept, or would advocate for prison terms if true), then they absolutely did plan for this outcome. Putting safety importance somewhere except the most important factor in manufacturing commercial passenger planes puts this exact outcome in the "planned" category.
Well, no, that's clearly not the case. It's always possible to improve the safety of a plane by spending more money. Airlines could do a 72-hour safety review of every plane after every flight. Planes could have 7 copies of every system/sensor instead of 3. We could stick 6 pilots up in the cockpit in case the first 5 have simultaneous mid-air heart attacks.
Deciding to shift the needle from "safety" toward "economic feasibility" is very often the correct thing to do, and vice versa.
What? Fines are expenses, they do "come out of profits" to whatever extent that has meaning. They also aren't deductible expenses for taxable income if that's what you're talking about.
Sure my comment was probably over-simplified, but I was imagining fines as coming out exclusively of whatever slice of money goes to the beneficiaries of public companies, vs. something that comes out of a bank account or operating expenses.
So any money that _would_ have been paid out to shareholders (bonuses, dividends, buybacks) is what goes to pay the fine, until it is paid. This would dis-incentivize decisions that benefit shareholders at the risk of breaking rules. We all hear about fines being "one day of operating expenses" and so on.. So who cares about getting fined then.
In retrospect I'm sure this isn't that realistic as companies would just do accounting gymnastics to get around this, as many do for other accounting rules.
And it would probably impose an undue burden on auditing to make sure money is put in the right buckets etc...
