Boeing's deliberately defective fleet of flying sky-wreckage - Cory Doctorow

[justaprogressive]

Boeing's 787 "Dreamliner" is manufactured far from the company's Seattle facility, in a non-union shop in Charleston, South Carolina. At that shop, there is a cage full of defective parts that have been pulled from production because they are not airworthy.

Hundreds of parts from that Material Review Segregation Area (MRSA) were secretly pulled from that cage and installed on aircraft that are currently plying the world's skies. Among them, sections 47/48 of a 787 – the last four rows of the plane, along with its galley and rear toilets. As Moe Tkacik writes in her excellent piece on Boeing's lethally corrupt culture of financialization and whistleblower intimidation, this is a big ass chunk of an airplane, and there's no way it could go missing from the MRSA cage without a lot of people knowing about it:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-04-30-whistleblower-laws-protect-lawbreakers/

More: MRSA parts are prominently emblazoned with red marks denoting them as defective and unsafe. For a plane to escape Boeing's production line and find its way to a civilian airport near you with these defective parts installed, many people will have to see and ignore this literal red flag.

The MRSA cage was a special concern of John "Swampy" Barnett, the Boeing whistleblower who is alleged to have killed himself in March. Tkacik's earlier profile of Swampy paints a picture of a fearless, stubborn engineer who refused to go along to get along, refused to allow himself to become inured to Boeing's growing culture of profits over safety:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-03-28-suicide-mission-boeing/

Boeing is America's last aviation company and its single largest exporter. After the company was allowed to merge with its rival McDonnell-Douglas in 1997, the combined company came under MDD's notoriously financially oriented management culture. MDD CEO Harry Stonecipher became Boeing's CEO in the early 2000s. Stonecipher was a protege of Jack Welch, the man who destroyed General Electric with cuts to quality and workforce and aggressive union-busting, a classic Mafia-style "bust-out" that devoured the company's seed corn and left it a barren wasteland:

[link:https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/01/boeing-boeing/#mrsa|

[CrispyQ]

1. Make corporations accountable to their stakeholders, not just their shareholders,

& give employees a share of the company & a percentage of seats on the board. As is, corporations are just psychopathic paper entities created by rich people to protect their personal assets from their irresponsible and/or incompetent behavior.

Slavery is the fiction that people are property;
corporate personhood is the fiction that corporations are people.

https://reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate-personhood/

snip...

Our Bill of Rights was the result of tremendous efforts to institutionalize and protect the rights of human beings. It strengthened the premise of our Constitution: that the people are the root of all power and authority for government. This vision has made our Constitution and government a model emulated in many nations.

But corporate lawyers (acting as both attorneys and judges) subverted our Bill of Rights in the late 1800’s by establishing the doctrine of “corporate personhood” — the claim that corporations were intended to fully enjoy the legal status and protections created for human beings.

We believe that corporations are not persons and possess only the privileges we willfully grant them. Granting corporations the status of legal “persons” effectively rewrites the Constitution to serve corporate interests as though they were human interests. Ultimately, the doctrine of granting constitutional rights to corporations gives a thing illegitimate privilege and power that undermines our freedom and authority as citizens. While corporations are setting the agenda on issues in our Congress and courts, We the People are not; for we can never speak as loudly with our own voices as corporations can with the unlimited amplification of money.

Read our draft constitutional amendment to revoke corporate constitutional “rights,” (published nearly a decade before the Citizens United v FEC ruling). See also Move to Amend’s proposed language.

~end snip

A timeline of the people's personhood rights vs corporate personhood rights:
https://reclaimdemocracy.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/personhood_timeline.pdf

The documentaries, The Corporation I & II are both worth viewing.

https://thenewcorporation.movie

[msongs]

2. in its entire hisotry there have been zero crashes and deaths attributed to the 787. cant say that about fords n chevys

[bello]

3. I'd hate to find out the hard way

There were zero crashes and deaths attributed to the 737 MAX until there were two and lots.

Those crashes and deaths were directly attributed to the same management culture that is building the 787.