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Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes

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Re: Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes

#111

Post by BartjeD »

keiferski wrote: post #99

The people saying “send the CEO to jail” or “make the board liable” are vastly oversimplifying the complexity of the issue here, which is about how to enforce regulations and standards without torpedoing your economy. One of the single most important reasons why the US has such a successful business culture is because of its approach to liability - virtually all business debt can be erased in a bankruptcy, and the en…

`without torpedoing your economy`

It's OK to kill people, just let the company go bankrupt afterward... Better luck next time!

What an immensely unsatisfying bunch of intellectually corrupt market-speak regurgitation.

There are laws. Those laws should apply the same to service workers as they do to service operators and CEO's. That is: If you believe in the integrity of your own society.

Flouting the law to do influential people a favor, under the guise of not-torpedoing-your-economy, is just another way to have favoritism appear justified.

A societies' law already decided on - and struck a balance on the question of -'not-torpedoing'. Ignoring that later on is inherently political and smacks of corruption and sweetheart-dealing.

---

For spilling a hot coffee cup you get $ 2.7 million worth of punitive damages. But for killing more than 200 people and trying to hide the evidence, we'll charge you 200 million and call it a day.

That's less per person than the price of a hot-coffee spill.

Re: Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes

#112

Post by keiferski »

BartjeD wrote: post #111
keiferski wrote: post #99

The people saying “send the CEO to jail” or “make the board liable” are vastly oversimplifying the complexity of the issue here, which is about how to enforce regulations and standards without torpedoing your economy. One of the single most important reasons why the US has such a successful business culture is because of its approach to liability - virtually all business debt can be erased in a bankruptcy, and the en…

`without torpedoing your economy` It's OK to kill people, just let the company go bankrupt afterward... Better luck next time! What an immensely unsatisfying bunch of intellectually corrupt market-speak regurgitation. There are laws. Those laws should apply the same to service workers as they do to service operators and CEO's. That is: If you believe in the integrity of your own society. Flouting the law to do influe…

Nowhere did I write that Boeing shouldn’t be punished or that killing people is absolved by bankruptcy. I said that making company operators by default liable would have bad economic consequences.

In fact, I suggested that Boeing ought to be treated like Occupied Japan, which to me seems like it ought to be treated pretty harshly.

Re: Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes

#113

Post by kristjank »

keiferski wrote: post #99

The people saying “send the CEO to jail” or “make the board liable” are vastly oversimplifying the complexity of the issue here, which is about how to enforce regulations and standards without torpedoing your economy. One of the single most important reasons why the US has such a successful business culture is because of its approach to liability - virtually all business debt can be erased in a bankruptcy, and the en…

I do not care about the economy bottom line. I want deaths of people caused by the arguably same motivation of penny-pinching and ever-growing profits translate into at the very least jail times of people that represented and concurred with these horrendously dangerous decisions.

When economists are left alone too long, their results do not differ very much from those of serial killers.

Re: Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes

#114

Post by rlpb »

keiferski wrote: post #99

The people saying “send the CEO to jail” or “make the board liable” are vastly oversimplifying the complexity of the issue here, which is about how to enforce regulations and standards without torpedoing your economy. One of the single most important reasons why the US has such a successful business culture is because of its approach to liability - virtually all business debt can be erased in a bankruptcy, and the en…

> And so you really don’t want to set up a situation where the operators of a company are by-default responsible for anything that their company does.

I think you're conflating criminality with civil liability here (covering legal risk taking and mere incompetence). The former is what's under discussion here. The latter is what allows entrepreneurs to take risk for economic benefit.

Re: Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes

#115

Post by onli »

constantcrying wrote: post #93
onli wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm. Yeah, hard to prove.

Stonecipher was CEO nearly 20 years ago. Are you proposing to put someone in jail for crimes which happened over a decade after he left the company. Someone which has certainly ZERO knowledge of anything related to the MAX? It is not illegal to be a bad CEO.

Absolutely. If he made systemic changes to the company (and those are proveable) that focused on profit over security he belongs in jail, no matter how long it took for the murder to take effect.

He lead an airplane maker, not a coffee shop. Focusing on profit the way Boeing did was planning a murder and trying to reap the profit in the meantime. All the participating management belongs in a court room.

Re: Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes

#116

Post by krisoft »

lupusreal wrote: post #66
cycomanic wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well what are the ridiculously high salaries for if they don't even take responsibility. I mean parents are liable for their children, so why should a CEO not be made responsible for the culture of the corporation underneath them?

Parents are generally not criminally liable for the crimes their kids commit. They might catch some related negligence charges or something, but if little Jimmy decides to rob a 7-11 his mom doesn't get sent to prison for armed robbery.

The way i see it (and here I describe how I think the law should work, not how it works):

If a Boeing engineer has a breakdown and robs a 7-11, the C suite of Boeing is not responsible for that.

If the Boeing engineer murders people in their course of duty because of the incentive structure set up by the C suite then they are responsible for that. How do you prove that? The same way how you prove anything. Lots of discovery which reveals concrete evidence of the C suite setting up and maintaining said incentive structure and then the prosecutorial team describing the connection to a jurry of their peers.

It is the difference between little Jimmy deciding to rob a 7-11 because they are dumb as a rock, vs doing the same because they grown up in an organised crime family.

Re: Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes

#117

Post by energy123 »

supernova87a wrote: post #25

Our governmental methods of punishment for corporations strike me as lacking. This seems similar to Wells Fargo, where ok, the company was fined, sued, made to pay restitution (somewhat) to victims. But underlying it all, the culture and incentives at the company that produced the situation didn't get fundamentally changed. Which often perpetuates across specific leaders, boards, and is a part of what a company is --…

Just design the incentives so they want to fix themselves. Jail time etc.

Re: Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes

#118

Post by BartjeD »

supernova87a wrote: post #25

Our governmental methods of punishment for corporations strike me as lacking. This seems similar to Wells Fargo, where ok, the company was fined, sued, made to pay restitution (somewhat) to victims. But underlying it all, the culture and incentives at the company that produced the situation didn't get fundamentally changed. Which often perpetuates across specific leaders, boards, and is a part of what a company is --…

For spilling a hot coffee cup you get $ 2.7 million worth of punitive damages. But for killing more than 200 people and trying to hide the evidence, we'll charge you 200 million and call it a day.

That's less per person than the price of a hot-coffee spill.

Re: Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes

#119

Post by asimpletune »

constantcrying wrote: post #97
squigz wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me the real perversion of justice is executives constantly avoiding consequences for their actions

It is not illegal to be a bad CEO. CEOs, surprisingly are protected by the law as well.

Maybe in some cases it should be?

Re: Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes

#120

Post by BiteCode_dev »

quonn wrote: post #82
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies are persons, except they are not. They cannot die. They cannot go to prison. This concept of a moral person is a totally unfair advantage that they exploit again and again.

I hear this claim a lot but is it really true? Corporations in most countries are „legal persons“ in the sense that they can act like a person. This is what limited liability is all about. In fact the very name „incorporation“ comes from giving a sort of „body“ to an entity that otherwise doesn‘t have one in order to shield the owners from liability as it should be. I do not think that a corporation is considered to…

They can make investments, sue, go bankrupt, have bank accounts, like a person, in their own name instead of the owner.
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