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

Post by keiferski » Mon, Jul 08, 2024, 9:12 AM UTC

kristjank wrote: post #113

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.

Post by rlpb » Mon, Jul 08, 2024, 9:15 AM UTC

keiferski wrote: post #122

rlpb wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Sure they are different things, but culturally I do think they are treated interchangeably. The average person on the street probably couldn’t tell you if X celebrity was embroiled in a civil or criminal trial, merely that they’re in a trial. I still think it would be very anti-entrepreneurial culture to make company operators liable by default for everything their company does. Again the key word phrase here is “by…

Post by robertlagrant » Mon, Jul 08, 2024, 9:17 AM UTC

monero-xmr wrote: post #26

buildbot wrote: post #2

"The guilty plea would brand the planemaker a felon and could complicate its ability to sell products to the U.S. government. About 32% of Boeing’s nearly $78 billion in revenue last year came from its defense, space and security unit." Well that's a fun little fact

Banks are declared “too big to fail”. Banks! How can a bank be so important, and ostensibly private, that it can’t fail and let its shareholders take their licks? There is no world - none - literally no possible universe - that Boeing cannot sell to the government, or that it fails, or that its planes get grounded indefinitely, or anything even remotely close to this outcome. There are 2 plane makers of appreciable s…

Post by chakintosh » Mon, Jul 08, 2024, 9:19 AM UTC

BartjeD wrote: post #124

justinclift wrote: post #31

Seems an extremely soft ball approach: • Under the deal, Boeing agreed to pay a $243.6 million fine and for an third-party monitor to be installed to monitor the company’s compliance. ~$240M seems pretty low for an industry where billions are commonly thrown about. • The deal spares Boeing from a trial just as the planemaker is trying to turn a corner in its safety and manufacturing crises. Sparing them from a trial…

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.

Post by pmontra » Mon, Jul 08, 2024, 9:22 AM UTC

constantcrying wrote: post #36

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 --…

The problem is that finding the people responsible can be extremely hard, so you have to go against the corporation itself. Punishing a corporation is easy, but the government hates doing it for obvious reasons. It means ruining something which is useful to you and punishing tens of thousands of completely innocent people, with inevitable layoffs. What Boeing really needs is a complete change in management culture, a…