Chuck Spinney: Why Is Boeing Imploding? Lack of Integrity….

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2011 Why Is Boeing Imploding? Part I

2013 Why is Boeing Imploding? Part II

2019 Why is Boeing Imploding? Part III

The problems with Boeing are deeply connected to the larger story of American deindustrialization enhanced in Boeing’s case by the pathological political-economic practices of the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex (MICC) and how those practices spill over into the larger manufacturing sector of our economy. The late professor Seymour Melman began warning about deindustrialization and the nexus of its causal factors (i.e., managerialism, financialization, and the spillover of the MICC’s cost-plus political-economic practices) in the 1970s (see Profits Without Production (1983) for his synthesis of these ideas).

Boeing’s ongoing implosion derives from a dangerous combination of effects from

(1) the neo-liberal de-industrializing political-economic practices championed by Democrats and Republicans alike since the mid 1970s (particularly deregulation, conglomeratization via mega mergers, financialization, union busting, outsourcing, managerialism and its obsession with short-term profit maximization at the expense of long term investment, and government-industry crony capitalism, particularly “regulatory capture”), and

(2) the disintegration of Boeing’s traditional iron wall between its quasi-market-based airliner production and its typical cost-plus, corner-cutting crony business practices of its defense sector (as is hinted at by the virtual take over of Boeing’s senior management by people with backgrounds in the defense business), and

(3) by the natural sclerotic effects of giantism created by Boeing’s Pentagon-subsidized megamerger with McDonnell-Douglas promoted and paid for by the Clinton Administration (which resulted in a far greater defense concentration as well as the movement of its Boeing’s Headquarters from its commercial production hub in Seattle to a non-production hub in Chicago in 2001 together with the establishment of one of the largest crony-capitalist lobbying operations in Washington DC.)

ROBERT STEELE: The Department of Defense is 50% waste and 95% stupid. When I created the flagship study, Planning and Programming Factors for Expeditiionary Operations in the Third World (MCCDC, 1990) I learned everything that the DoD leadership refuses to consider: strategic generalizations about reality (hot humid aviation days and 30 ton bridge loading limits for example), and true cost economics. We build based on an unlimited budget with no accountability — what Chuck Spinney calls “government specifications cost plus. This has destroyed not only our military-industrial complex, but the entire US economic — the model, with lobbying of corrupt Members of Congress owned by Zionist Israel — has been extended to every policy area from agriculture to water.

Robert Steele: Grand Strategy, Global Reality, & Re-Inventing US National Security Centered on Re-Inventing the US Army