The poorly designed and built Boeing 737 Max had crashed twice, killing hundreds of people. The FAA grounded it. Thanks to Nimarata Randhawa, aka Nikki Haley, the plane would fly again with near disastrous results.
Boeing 737 Max missing panel
If you haven’t done so, read David Cay Johnston’s “Huge Boeing Scandal Behind Alaska Airlines Catastrophe,” and The Lever’s series of investigative reports about why the Boeing 737 is crashing and exploding. You’ll probably be shocked, as I was. Corruption and greed run rampant in our corporations, corporatized government, including South Carolina, Nikki Haley, and Boeing Aircraft.
Not embracing her beautiful name given at birth, Nimarata Randhawa, Nikki Haley takes on an Anglo name to not fight racial discrimination that plagued her as a child in South Carolina. Instead she embraces an Anglo name and joins the side that created and maintains White Nationalism, corporate greed and self aggrandization at the expense of poor people, often minority groups. I don’t see Kamala Harris acting this way, for example, nor Rashida Tlaib or Ro Khanna.
In a race to the bottom with other Southern States, Nimarata Haley fiercely opposed unionization drives at a Boeing factory in South Carolina. Cheap labor using low quality and poorly trained workers was what Haley offered to Boeing. With dollar signs flashing in their heads, Boeing management gladly accepted. The deal included taxpayers giving the Boeing corporation money. It’s another example of socialism for the rich, crapitalism for the middle class. Nikki gives the rich what they want, and in return, Nikki receives money from the same people to bolster her lifestyle and campaigns. This is the woman who never learned the cause of the Civil War, but did learn how to take a bribe and give a bribe.
Cheap labor and poorly trained workers is just what one wants when they’re flying in a high tech aircraft at 30,000 ft. Haley, then serving on the board of Boeing in 2020, helped kill an initiative designed to force Boeing to more comprehensively disclose its spending to influence politicians and safety regulators, government filings show. Great, no wonder she has so many corporations funding her presidential campaign.
The Boeing board’s opposition to the shareholder measure came the same year that the company was lobbying the Federal Aviation Administration on “certification,” or approving planes to fly — and the agency lifted its grounding order of the company’s 737 fleet, which had been in effect since two of the airliners had crashed in 2018 and 2019, killing 346 people.
As David Cay Johnson writes, “Digging below the surface, The Lever found a frightening tale of political influence involving former Trump administration official Nikki Haley, dark money campaign contributions, cowed aviation regulators, safety waivers and more.” Troubling evidence in their report is that executives at a major Boeing contractor, Spirit Aerosystems, ignored safety warnings.
Although the recent scandal about Boeing surrounds its 737 Max, for years airlines have been refusing to purchase the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, Boeing’s flagship aircraft, if it is manufactured in South Carolina instead of Everett, Washington. Nimarata Haley arranged a $900 million taxpayer subsidy for Boeing to build its 787 Dreamliners in her state. It’s all about corporate greed with reduced costs and playing one redneck state against the other to receive taxpayers dollars to make the rich even richer. South Carolina taxpayers have given Boeing hundreds of millions. Nimarata likes that, and benefits from the giveaways greatly.
One of the greedy corporate maneuvers was to spend $69 billion buying back their companies’ stock. Big deal, you say. Well, here’s how it works. Stock buybacks reduce the number of stock shares outstanding. That makes each remaining stock share more valuable. That, in turn, enriches corporate executives, because most of their excessive pay is in stock options. Those options grow in value when the stock price rises, as typically happens when there are fewer shares in the market. So, basically what they’re doing is using Boeing income to make themselves richer instead of investing the income in workers or other measures to improve quality.
As the greed continued and people were dying, five years ago during the Trump administration, Chinese aviation authorities, not US, were the first to ground all 737 Max airliners.
Here’s one greedy aspect of what Boeing has been doing. Faulty cockpit software was one cause of the crashes. And Boeing executives and directors were so cheap that instead of hiring even adequate programmers, forget the best, Boeing hired part-timers for as little as $9 an hour. Think about what The Lever found. Commercial jets full of crash dummies (the middle class) flying for executive and director enrichment, paying a paltry $9 an hour for programmers.
There’s more to the story, and if you want to learn about it, read David Cay Johnson at DC Reports and Katya Schwenk at The Lever.
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