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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

#331

Post by treflop »

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…

What Boeing needs is competition. There is Airbus, which apparently doesn’t scare them enough, but there used to be a lot more in Boeing’s earlier years.

Unfortunately an airplane building company has high upstart costs and is also not a cool industry to get into.

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

#332

Post by robertlagrant »

actionfromafar wrote: post #300
robertlagrant wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it matters. What does it meant to punish something that isn't sentient? It's like bemoaning the fact that you can't punish the car that was driven into someone.

Depends on if you care about outcome or morality. Already now we use terms like punishment, reward and adverserial competition between neural networks.

We do have those terms. The way they are used is not relevant here.

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

#333

Post by tzs »

heymijo wrote: post #207

Regarding the "Can/should a CEO or officer be held liable?" dialogue, there is already at least one precedent. The 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act: > The law states that if top corporate executives knowingly sign off on a false financial report, they’re subject to a prison term of up to 10 years and a fine of up to $1 million, with penalties escalating to 20 years and $5 million if their misconduct is willful. [0] Now,…

"Knowing" and "willful" can be a bit confusing. Generally in statutes you do something "knowingly" if you have knowledge of it. If you know the report is false when you sign it you have "knowingly" signed off on a false report.

"Willful" means that you knew that you were doing something that the law forbids. If you knew the reports was false but did not know that the law forbids doing that then it would not be willful.

Here's a more detailed explanation from the DoJ [1]. That's in general rather than specifically about Sarbanes-Oxley but a quick grep in SOX didn't turn up any SOX-specific definitions for those terms.

[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...

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

#334

Post by ActionHank »

deeth_starr_v wrote: post #298

From the article: Paul Cassell, a lawyer for victims’ family members, said he plans to ask the federal judge on the case to reject the deal and “simply set the matter for a public trial, so that all the facts surrounding the case will be aired in a fair and open forum before a jury.” Hard to disagree

If it does go to trial it would be great for people behind this to be directly tried for their criminal actions as well.

The reality is that a company is on trial for the actions of individuals and if there is no follow through on that it will not change anything.

I doubt it goes to trial as I am 99% sure that the judge will rubber stamp the whole thing because the US is a corporate driven hellscape where peasants are accountable, but wealthy individuals and corporations are not.

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

#335

Post by robertlagrant »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #262
robertlagrant wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's such a strange angle. Should we stop companies having bank accounts in order to do that? Who cares if they have a bank account?

Quite the opposite, since they have bank accounts, let's: - Make them more liable. - Make the people behind them more liable. - Give companies limitations. What would be the equivalent of jail for a company ? Unable to sale for x years ? How long a company should be able to exist ? Right now there is way too much power and shielding at the same time.

> What would be the equivalent of jail for a company ? Unable to sale for x years ? How long a company should be able to exist ?

If they can't sell then they don't have money, and everyone is fired. Is that what you mean? Why are you trying to make companies into physical people who can be punished separately to their employees/shareholders, instead of thinking of the actual outcome you want and coming up with something to achieve that?

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

#336

Post by spacecadet »

ActionHank wrote: post #334
deeth_starr_v wrote: post #298

From the article: Paul Cassell, a lawyer for victims’ family members, said he plans to ask the federal judge on the case to reject the deal and “simply set the matter for a public trial, so that all the facts surrounding the case will be aired in a fair and open forum before a jury.” Hard to disagree

If it does go to trial it would be great for people behind this to be directly tried for their criminal actions as well. The reality is that a company is on trial for the actions of individuals and if there is no follow through on that it will not change anything. I doubt it goes to trial as I am 99% sure that the judge will rubber stamp the whole thing because the US is a corporate driven hellscape where peasants ar…

1000%

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

#337

Post by oersted »

robertlagrant wrote: post #231
oersted wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point of OP was that in many ways companies have many of the same rights and privileges as individuals, but cannot be punished in the same ways.

I don't really understand that as a point, though. What would punishing a company look like? Why wouldn't we want to figure out how to punish (or hold accountable) individuals, instead of focusing on the fact that we can't punish legal entities? We can't punish countries either, even though they can also do these things. We can only punish people. So what?

You can definitely punish countries as an independent entity: with trading sanctions, refusal to give in on certain diplomatic compromises, or different degrees of military retaliation.

Same with companies: mostly fines, but also limits on how they can operate, additional oversight...

Of course, the consequences trickle down to people, but these punishments are not meant to target any given individual, and if the individuals in charge change, the ones that leave don't necessarily carry the punishment with them.

This makes sense, legal entities like companies are guided by incentives. And it sometimes makes more sense to punish the legal entity to change its behaviour, by imposing disincentives, rather than punishing whichever people are running it at the time.

For example, people within a company might pressure an individual to commit a crime, because even if that individual might get punished, the company may benefit as a whole. But if the company's (financial) survival is at stake, everyone is more likely to collaborate to prevent that situation, including the shareholders, if the punishments are big enough.

The point here is, that for issues like negligence and fraud, the current punishments are not significant enough to act as a real deterrent. The punishment on the companies is too lenient (they can absorb the fines, they are rarely an existential threat), and the punishment on the individuals responsible is too lenient (difficult to attribute culpability, limited liability...).

We do want to figure out how to hold individuals more accountable, as you said, we are just having a conversation about why it works like that right now and what could be changed to improve it.

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

#338

Post by sandworm101 »

anikom15 wrote: post #328
sandworm101 wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are nuances between jurisdictions, but while a US judge can reject a plea deal they generally cannot reject a guilty plea. A judge cannot force a trial between parties that don't want one. And a trial isn't really possible where the parties agree the facts. The judge can certainly impose a sentence different than that which was agreed between the parties, but any such punishment would have to be based on the ag…

Hunter Biden’s guilty plea got rejected.

No. His plea deal was rejected. That is not the same thing.

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

#339

Post by psunavy03 »

heymijo wrote: post #207

Regarding the "Can/should a CEO or officer be held liable?" dialogue, there is already at least one precedent. The 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act: > The law states that if top corporate executives knowingly sign off on a false financial report, they’re subject to a prison term of up to 10 years and a fine of up to $1 million, with penalties escalating to 20 years and $5 million if their misconduct is willful. [0] Now,…

So the TL;DR is a) SOX forced companies to improve internal controls, which we can all agree is a good thing, and b) when things still go wrong, the execs are usually committing other crimes that make it more feasible to prosecute those instead.

Seems to me to me more legal inside baseball than an indication execs are getting away with more fraud than before. Seems prosecutors are just choosing to charge other crimes when they know they have a good case.

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

#340

Post by mynameisvlad »

kortilla wrote: post #57
jajko wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely 0 doubt about that. Just look how at the beginning they tried to blame it all on incompetent african pilots. Human lives have wildly different values to us based on race, ethnicity, religion, remoteness etc., I don't like it but this is still very much part of human nature. How much do you care if plane with 150 civilians falls down in remote russia or china and everybody burns to charcoal? Now compare it…

It had nothing to do with racism against the victims. It’s quite literally that the level of rigor to be a pilot in Africa is not the same as what the FAA requires. Airlines very frequently get banned from US airspace because their procedures do not meet the strict safety bar set by the FAA. So it’s very reasonable to assume that what was identified as a training gap on the MCAS operations was due to sloppy regional…

The NTSB and FAA were both sent to help with the investigation (as they would for any US airplane manufacturer), so I’m not sure how them “[setting] the bar for aviation safety and crash investigation” comes into play here.
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