Ralph Nader's Blog, page 44

Trump: Importing Dangerous Medicines and Keeping Consumers in the Dark

By Ralph Nader

May 15, 2019

Conservatives favor consumer choice. Consumer information is vital to make that choice meaningful. Corporatists, masquerading as conservatives, do not care about informed consumer choice. Donald Trump is a corporatist, as are the vast majority of Republicans in his Cabinet and in Congress. Corporatists do not even want you to know where products are made. Today, producers and retail sellers do not have to tell you the “country of origin” for meat and pork products. Before 2015, when Congress bowed to the dictates of the World Trade Organization (WTO), Congress had enacted a law that required country of origin labels on meat products.

People wanted to know whether the beef and pork sold in their local stores was from the U.S., or Canada, Brazil, China, Mexico, or South Africa, among other importers. But after the WTO judges in Geneva, Switzerland decided, bizarrely, that “country of origin” labeling was an impermissible non-tariff trade barrier, Congress meekly repealed the labeling law and President Obama signed it into law.

While Donald Trump claims to reject “free trade” treaties, he has been silent on country of origin regulations. State Cattlemen’s Associations want laws mandating country of origin labels, believing that consumers are more trusting of the U.S. meat industry than the meat industries in most other countries. These associations know that the U.S.D.A. Food Safety and Inspection Service has a much less rigorous inspection process for imported meats. Unfortunately, the rest of the meat industry likes to import meat, without labeling, and mix it up with the U.S. products. Trump – a prodigious meat eater has yet to tweet in favor of the American cattle industry, even though many people in this part of the U.S. meat industry voted for him in 2016.

Even worse, we cannot tell where our drugs are being manufactured. Rosemary Gibson, author of China Rx: Exposing the Risks of America’s Dependence on China for Medicine thinks American patients are endangered by imported medicines. Gibson is about to testify before Congress on her very disturbing findings regarding importation of medicines from China. I’ve been trying to get the attention of Donald Trump, his Secretary of Health and Human Services, Alex Azar, and the Secretary of Agriculture, Sunny Perdue, regarding risks with importation of food and drugs. Letters, emails, and calls have been met with silence. By not responding, they’re telling us who they primarily support—corporate profiteering interests. That is one reason why Trump has broken his promise to the American people to bring down staggeringly high drug prices.

It will be harder for the Trump administration to ignore journalist Katherine Eban . Eban provides us with a terrifying glimpse of her new book, Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom, in a New York Times article published on Sunday May 11, 2019. The article, “Americans Need Generic Drugs, But Can They Trust Them?” exposes the widespread unsafe conditions in many Indian and Chinese labs and plants that manufacture generic drugs for the U.S. market (generics amount to 90 percent of the U.S. supply of drugs). One of her sources was an intrepid Food and Drug Administration (FDA) inspector, Peter Baker (he has since left the agency).

Baker was a bold and honest auditor. He refused to announce lab inspections in advance, as is FDA’s lackadaisical practice. From 2012 to 2018, Baker discovered “fraud or deceptive practices in almost four-fifths of the drug plants he inspected” in India and China. Indian and Chinese manufacturers engaged in data manipulation that could prove deadly.

At one firm, the Wockhardt plant in India, Baker caught the company knowingly releasing insulin vials containing metallic fragments from a defective sterilizing machine into Indian and foreign markets. Eban reports that “[Baker] learned that the company had been using the same defective equipment to make a sterile injectable cardiac drug for the American market.” Two months later, the FDA banned imports from that plant.

Eban continues, shockingly: “In some instances, deceptions and other practices have contributed to generic drugs with toxic impurities, unapproved ingredients and dangerous particulates reaching American patients.” This is nothing new. In 2008, at least 81 American patients died in hospitals after being given heparin, a blood thinner that contained a contaminated ingredient from China.

You’d think that the FDA would demand from Trump more inspectors abroad and the U.S. Department of Agriculture would ask the House for more U.S.D.A. Food and Safety inspectors, along with tougher laws and penalties on unsafe imports to transmit to Congress. After all, the sheer scope of U.S. drug companies going to China and India to produce drugs cheaply, so as to swell their already swollen profits, is simply stunning.

Another chilling statistic from Eban is that “Nearly forty percent of all our generic drugs are made in India. Eighty percent of active ingredients for both our brand and generic drugs come from abroad, the majority from India and China… America makes almost none of its own antibiotics anymore” (My emphasis). The outsourcing of the production of drugs to foreign countries presents vast challenges for health and safety regulators.

One would think this surrender to imports, whose sole purpose is to fatten U.S. drug companies’ profits, would be considered both a consumer safety threat and a national security matter. Why isn’t Trump doing anything to keep Americans safe from dangerous foreign products, as he crows about tariffs?

Of course the FDA responds with their usual phony assurances about its reliable inspections, putting out a statement that reads: “The F.D.A. inspects all brand-name and generic manufacturing facilities around the world which manufacture product for the U.S. market.”

Is that why the FDA, which has largely conducted unannounced inspections of U.S. plants, still allows pre-announcement of the vast majority of its foreign inspections? Eban reports, the FDA investigators are treated as “the company’s guests and agree on an inspection date in advance…Plant officials have served as hosts and helped to arrange local travel.”

Messrs. Trump, Azar, and Perdue better wake up before innocent Americans lose their lives due to corporate indentured government officials failing to properly do their jobs. Before a major disaster lands on their derelict desks.

They are on full public notice.

The Contented Classes – When Will They Rebel?

By Ralph Nader

May 9, 2019

For all the rhetoric and all the charities regarding America’s children, the U.S. stands at the very bottom of western nations and some other countries as well, in terms of youth well-being. The U.S.’s exceptionalism is clearest in its cruelty to children. The U.S. has the highest infant mortality rate of comparable OECD countries. Not only that, but 2.5 million American children are homeless and 16.2 million children “lack the means to get enough nutritious food on a regular basis.”

The shamelessness continues as the youngsters increase in age. The Trump regime is cutting the SNAP food program for poor kids. In 2018, fewer children were enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP than in 2017. To see just how bad Trump’s war on poor American children is getting, go to the web sites of the Children’s Defense Fund (https://www.childrensdefense.org/) and the Children’s Advocacy Center (http://www.caichildlaw.org/).

Trump brags about a robust economy—still, however, rooted in exploitation of the poor and reckless Wall Street speculation with people’s savings.

Trump’s pompous promises during his presidential campaign have proved to be a cowardly distraction. He claimed he would take on the drug companies and their price gouging. The hyper-profiteering pharmaceutical goliaths are quietly laughing at him. Worse, Trump continues their tax credits  and allows them to use new drugs developed with taxpayer money through the National Institute of Health free of charge—no royalties. Even though he talks tough, Trump lets these companies sell imported medicines manufactured in China and India with inadequate FDA inspections of foreign plants.

Torrents of Trump tweets somehow overlooked H.P. Acthar Gel, a drug produced by Mallinckrodt to treat a rare infant seizure disorder, which increased in price from $40 per vial to $39,000 per vial! Other drug prices are booming cruelly upward, while Trump blusters, but fails to deliver on his campaign promises.

For years our country’s political and corporate rulers have saddled college students with breathtaking debt and interest rates. Student debt is now at $1.5 trillion. Both corporations and the federal government are profiting off of America’s young. In no other western country is this allowed, with most nations offering tuition-free higher education.

On May 2, 2019, The New York Times featured an article titled, “Tuition or Dinner? Nearly Half of College Students Surveyed in a New Report Are Going Hungry.”

When you read the stories of impoverished students, squeezed in all directions, you’d think they came out of third-world favelas. At the City University of New York (CUNY), forty eight percent of students had been food insecure in the past 30 days.

Kassandra Montes, a senior at Lehman College, lives in a Harlem homeless shelter. Montes  “works two part-time jobs and budgets only $15 per week for food… [She] usually skips breakfast in order to make sure that her 4-year-old son is eating regularly.” Montes said: “I feel like I’m slowly sinking as I’m trying to grow.”

When you don’t have a living wage, have to pay high tuition, are mired in debt, and live in rent-gouging cities, where do you go? Increasingly, you go to the community college or college food pantry. In a nation whose president and Congress in one year give tens of billions of dollars to the Pentagon more than the generals asked for, it is unconscionable that students must rely on leftover food from dining halls and catered events, SNAP benefits, and whatever food pantries can assemble.

The CUNY pantries are such a fixture in these desperate times that they are now a stop on freshman orientation tours.

As long as we’re speaking of shame, what about those millions of middle and upper middle class informed, concerned bystanders. They’re all over America trading “tsk tsks” over coffee or other social encounters. They express dismay, disgust, and denunciations at each outrage from giant corporations’ abuses, to the White House and the Congress’ failings. They are particularly numerous in University towns. They know but they do not do. They are unorganized, know it, keep grumbling, and still fail to start the mobilization in Congressional Districts of likeminded citizens to hold their Senators and Representatives accountable.

For Congress, the smallest yet most powerful branch of government, whose members names we know, can turn poverty and other injustices around and help provide a better life for so many Americans. These informed, concerned people easily number over 1 percent of the population. They can galvanize a supporting majority of voters on key, long-overdue redirections for justice. Redirections that were mostly established in Western Europe decades ago (For more details, see my paperback, Breaking Through Power: It’s Easier than We Think).

These informed, concerned people—who don’t have to worry about a living wage, not having health insurance, being gouged by payday loans, and having no savings—were called “the contented classes” in The Culture of Contentment, a book by the late progressive Harvard economist John Kenneth Gailbraith. His main point—until the contented classes wake up and organize for change, history has shown, our country will continue to slide in the wrong direction. He said all this before climate disruption, massive money-corrupting politics, and the corporate crime wave had reached anywhere near their present destructive levels.

The question to be asked: Who among the contented classes will unfurl the flag of rebellion against the plutocrats and the autocrats? It can be launched almost anywhere they please. A revolution can start the moment they decide to prioritize the most marginalized people in this country over their comfort.

An Open Letter to the Environmental Community

May 3, 2019

To the Environmental Community:

In 2003, political strategist Frank Luntz wrote a confidential Republican Party memo on what he called “the environmental communications battle.”

In that memo, Luntz advised Republicans to change the words they used to meet their ends. “The scientific debate is closing but not yet closed,” he wrote. “There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science,” Luntz proposed using the phrase “climate change” instead of “global warming.” His reasoning: ”…while global warming has catastrophic communications attached to it, climate change sounds a more controllable and less emotional challenge.”

Like it or not, Frank Luntz had a point. When I was growing up in New England, “climate change” meant the changing of the seasons: spring, summer, autumn, and winter.

Today, in the midst of increasingly alarming scientific studies and giant storms, the necessary response has been diminished by this widely-accepted softening of the words we use to describe the dangerous reality that stands before us. Language matters!

I recently reached out to two leading and widely respected ecologists, Paul Hawken and Bill McKibben, to get their input on the mainstream usage of the benign phrase “climate change.” McKibben now uses the far more potent phrase “climate chaos.” Hawken believes the proper term is “climate volatility.”

One thing is abundantly clear―it’s time to change the words to meet the peril! As Confucius said: “If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything.”

Would you join us in replacing the use of the all-together benign phrase “climate change” with variations of more grave language? Consider the following alternatives: climate crisis, climate catastrophe, climate disruption, climate upheaval, or even global warming. Whatever choice of words, we should stop using “climate change.”

Sincerely,

Ralph Nader

Trump vs. Congress and Our Constitution

By Ralph Nader

May 2, 2019

Donald Trump is the most impeachable president in American history. Many Democrats, however, are running away from the word “impeachment” for tactical political reasons. Some Democrats say they have a sworn duty under the Constitution to present articles of impeachment for a vote in the House of Representatives, regardless of the refusal by the Republican controlled Senate to hold a trial.

Interestingly, when Republicans in the House impeached President Bill Clinton in 1998, he was more popular in polls than Donald Trump is now. The Republican controlled Senate, however, failed to get the two-thirds vote needed to remove President Clinton from office. Clinton’s offenses – lying under oath and obstruction of justice pale in comparison to the many mega offenses of Trump.

The six major House Committees are investigating issues ranging from his tax returns and business dealings to the documented serial obstructions of justice documented in the Mueller Report. As these investigations move well beyond what is already on the public record and more Americans learn their contents, there will be more than enough to substantiate numerous articles of impeachment. Plus a new one of Trump’s own creation— the wholesale, broadside obstruction of all these Congressional investigations, defying subpoenas for sworn testimony and documents, amounting to a gigantic contempt of Congress – itself an impeachable offense.

Trump is trying to bar key witnesses from testifying. He is suing his own accounting firm and Deutsche Bank to shield his sordid business relationships and potential tax violations.

I’ll bet he’s never even read our Constitution – he says out loud that whatever Congress does on impeachment, the Supreme Court will rescue him. Donald, when it comes to Congressional impeachment and conviction, the decision by Congress is final.

The House Democrats can strengthen their case with the American people by connecting impeachable offenses with actions that endanger the lives, health, and economic well-being of adults and children.

For starters, Trump and his henchmen have brazenly, openly, and defiantly refused to faithfully execute the laws of the land as required in Article 2, section 3 of the Constitution. By not enforcing the law, he has opened the floodgates for deadly emissions from various industries that are getting into the lungs of millions of Americans. By allowing more pollution into water, air, food, and workplaces of the American people by immobilizing, if not firing the federal cops on the corporate crime beat, pulling back on existing enforcement, eliminating critical safeguards on the books, and cutting enforcement budgets, he has jeopardized the health of millions of Americans. This is a gift to the lethal coal industry, the reckless drug industry, the chemical pesticide companies, the oil, gas and nuclear industries and all those extractive companies licking their chops to plunder more of our beautiful public lands such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and our national forests.

Physicians have pleaded with the Trumpsters to protect the vulnerable infants and children from toxics and micro-particulates in the air and water. “Hell no,” cry his craven gangsters who were chosen to run our health and safety agencies precisely because they want to run them into the ground.

For the first time ever, life expectancy in the United States is declining. This lawlessness is way beyond what should be excused by “prosecutorial discretion.” Trump’s defiant wholesale repeal of the rule of law begs for impeachment.

Trump’s impeachable brew is deep, hot, and deadly. He violates the constitution, federal statutes, and international treaties with his war crimes anywhere he wants to conduct them around the world. John Bolton, the unconfirmed national security advisor and Mike Pompeo, his secretary of state, are looking for new wars – whether in Iran or Venezuela. Bolton and Pompeo are prime examples of unindicted war criminals.

These men violently threaten regimes, except those run by Trump’s favorite dictators (he says he’s “fallen in love” with North Korea’s Kim), as if there are no laws whatsoever to restrain their dangerous missions. The fact that previous Presidents like Clinton, the two Bushes, and Obama committed war crimes does not exonerate Trump. Congress is also culpable. It has to stop the lawless foreign/military policies of Empire that eventually will boomerang and undermine our nation’s national security. It has already produced devastating costs in casualties and dollars.

Impeachable offenses include violating Article I, section 8 by conducting wars of choice without a Congressional declaration and other provision of the Constitution (Article 1 section 9 clause 7) and statutes banning spending tax monies without Congressional appropriation. Consider the support of the war on Yemen and bombing of Syria with immense civilian destruction as illustrations.

This is the road to tyranny and the de facto overthrow of our “constitutional order.”

Then there are Trump’s campaign finance violations, his tax frauds, and his threats to use blanket pardons of Trump associates who are now convicted criminals. Not to mention Trump’s “indifference to wrongdoing,” in the words of Charles Black, the late, eminent constitutional scholar. Such “indifference” Black declared “may be in effect equivalent to ratification of wrongdoing.”

Another standard for impeachment is the widely quoted criterion by Alexander Hamilton – behavior that constitutes “abuse or violation of some public trust.” How about Trump’s over ten thousand recorded lies or misleading fabrications? How about his bigotry, misogyny and lying about his sexual misconducts and payoffs? How about Trump allowing the enrichment of his businesses (which he refused to sell or put into a blind trust) by foreign governments spending lavishly at his hotels and other properties, in violation of our Constitution’s emoluments clause?

Our Founders condemned behavior, shorn of minimal honor and integrity that brings the Office of the Presidency into disrepute and undercuts the legitimacy of the U.S. government or the ability of the government to function.

Recall the five week shutdown of the U.S. government by our pouting juvenile president over not getting his porous border wall funded. Trump’s actions shut down critical, life-saving governmental services. That tantrum alone should be an impeachable offense.

The Congress was handed a mass of evidence by the Mueller Report and Congressional hearings are likely to find this evidence will provide a solid basis for impeachment. Bear in mind, Mueller decided he couldn’t recommend any criminal enforcement due to his hands being tied by a Justice Department “opinion,” not a law, that sitting Presidents could not be criminally indicted. Instead he punted his damning report to Congress with such statements as “Our investigation found multiple acts by the president that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations, including the Russian-interference and obstruction investigations.” Over a dozen listed acts, to be specific.

As the laws start catching up with Trump, he will resort to raucous mass rallies where he will warn of violence in the streets, as he did during his campaign in 2016 when discussing his potential loss. He will start military actions, which explains why he had to pressure former generals, Mattis and Kelly, to resign from the Department of Defense and White House. Trump doesn’t like generals who advocate restraint.

Trump himself has said that he will be secure so long as the police and military are with him. Get ready for a fast-approaching major constitutional crisis with Congress and adherents of the rule of law.

Our lying, lawless President is about to face the laws of the land, backed by our Constitution. It is time for Republicans to start looking at themselves in the mirror of history. And it is time for all Americans to challenge their elected officials to stand tall and uphold the rule of law.

Safeguarding our democracy requires nothing less. For more information on impeachment, listen to my interview with scholar Alan Hirsch, author of Impeaching the President: Past Present and Future: https://ralphnaderradiohour.com/impea...

Letter to Boeing’s Board of Directors

April 26, 2019

Mr. Robert Bradway, Mr. David Calhoun, Mr. Arthur Collins Jr., Mr. Kenneth Duberstein, Admiral Edmund Giambastiani Jr., Ms. Lynn Good, Mr. Lawrence Kellner, Ambassador Caroline Kennedy, Mr. Edward Liddy, Mr. Dennis Muilenburg, Ambassador Susan Schwab, Mr. Ronald Williams, and Mr. Mike Zafirovski

Dear Directors:

As you know, Boards of Directors have distinctly independent and primary responsibilities for the conduct of the public corporation. This is the case notwithstanding the numerous ways that the officers of the corporation have managed to blur the lines between the roles of boards and management.

As you know, the respected Institutional Shareholders Services (ISS) has urged Boeing shareholders to vote to divide the roles of the Chairman of the Board and the CEO between two different people. Your CEO has opposed this division—one that is widely supported by specialists in corporate governance. Also, you are aware of the recommendation by Glass Lewis to replace Mr. Lawrence Kellner as chair of the audit committee for inadequate supervision of risk management, saying “We believe the audit committee should have taken a more proactive role in identifying the risks associated with the 737 Max 8 aircraft.” Perhaps Caroline B. Kennedy might be a good replacement. This assumes that she stays on the Board at this time of crisis and safety mismanagement by Boeing’s top executives, disregarding their own engineers and pursing a reckless course of unstable design of the 737 MAX causing the Indonesian and Ethiopian crashes that took the lives of 346 innocents.

Shareholders and the traveling public deserve to know what you knew about the 737 MAX design, from the beginning, and when you knew it. Not having an independent staff, your official information probably came mostly from CEO Muilenburg. However, you should share with the public how you processed any whistleblower, media (such as contained in the December 2018 article of the Wall Street Journal), and additional sources of information before and after the Indonesian and Ethiopian crashes.

As multiple investigations by the Congress, the NTSB, the Department of Transportation’s Inspector General, and the Justice Department’s criminal probe mature (forget the rubber stamp FAA), more attention should and will be paid to the role of the Boeing Board of Directors. Citizen and other groups will be urging Chairman Peter DeFazio (D-Oregon) of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee to request that you appear at the Committee’s forthcoming public hearings.

I strongly recommend that at your annual meeting on Monday, you all stand in a full minute of silence for the memory of 346 people whose lives were taken from them so preventably, leaving behind thousands of grieving family members and friends.

Sincerely,

Ralph Nader

P.O. Box 19312

Washington, DC 20036

Tel: 202-387-8034

Boeing Mismanagers Forfeit Your Pay and Resign: An Open Letter to Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg

April 26, 2019

Dennis A. Muilenburg

Chairman, President, and

Chief Executive Officer

The Boeing Company

100 North Riverside

Chicago, IL 60606

Dear Mr. Muilenburg:

On April 4, 2019 you somewhat belatedly released a statement that “We at Boeing are sorry for the lives lost in the recent 737 MAX accidents.” You added that a preliminary investigation made it “apparent that in both flights” the MCAS “activated in response to erroneous angle of attack information.”

Your acknowledgement of the problems with the 737 MAX somehow escaped inclusion in your messages to shareholders, the capital markets, and the Securities and Exchange Commission. It is now stunningly clear that your overly optimistic outlook on January 20, 2019 – after the Indonesian Lion Air crash – was misleading. Whatever the public learns, day after day about the troubles of your company, it is still far less than what Boeing knows will come out day by day, and not just about the deadly design of the 737 MAX.

Your narrow-body passenger aircraft – namely, the long series of 737’s that began in the nineteen sixties was past its prime. How long could Boeing avoid making the investment needed to produce a “clean-sheet” aircraft and, instead, in the words of Bloomberg Businessweek “push an aging design beyond its limits?” Answer: As long as Boeing could get away with it and keep necessary pilot training and other costs low for the airlines as a sales incentive.

To compete with the Airbus A320neo, Boeing equipped the 737 MAX with larger engines tilted more forward and upward on the wings than prior 737’s. Thus began the trail of criminal negligence that will implicate the company and its executives. The larger engines changed the center of gravity and the plane’s aerodynamics. Boeing management was on a fast track and ignored warnings by its own engineers, not to mention scores of other technical aerospace people outside the company.

The Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) software fix or patch with all its glitches and miscues is now a historic example of a grave failure of Boeing management. Yet, you insist the 737 MAX is still safe and some alteration of the MCAS and other pilot advisories will make the aircraft airworthy. Aircrafts should be stall-proof, not stall-prone. Trying to shift the burden onto the pilots for any vast numbers of failure modes beyond the software’s predictability is scurrilous. The Boeing 737 MAX must never be permitted to fly again – it has an inherent aerodynamic design defect. Sell your Boeing 737NG instead.

No matter your previous safety record of the 737 series, Boeing doesn’t get one, two, or more crashes that are preventable by adopting long-established aeronautical knowledge and practices. You are on the highest level of notice not to add to your already extraordinary record of criminally negligent decisions and inactions. Result – 346 innocent people lost their lives.

Boeing management’s behavior must be seen in the context of Boeing’s use of its earned capital. Did you use the $30 billion surplus from 2009 to 2017 to reinvest in R&D, in new narrow-body passenger aircraft?  Or did you, instead, essentially burn this surplus with self-serving stock buybacks of $30 billion in that period? Boeing is one of the companies that MarketWatch labelled as “Five companies that spent lavishly on stock buybacks while pension funding lagged.”

Incredibly, your buybacks of $9.24 billion in 2017 comprised 109% of annual earnings. As you know, stock buybacks do not create any jobs. They improve the metrics for the executive compensation packages of top Boeing bosses.

To make your management recklessly worse, in December 2018 you arranged for your rubberstamp Board of Directors to approve $20 billion more in buybacks now placed on pause.

Then, after the Indonesian crash, came the second software-bomb that took away control from the pilots and brought down Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 on March 10, taking the lives of 156 passengers and crew. At the time, you were way overdue with your new software allegedly addressing the avoidable risks associated with the notorious 737 MAX.

Don’t you see some inverted priorities here? Don’t you see how you should have invested in producing better aircraft? Instead, your top management was inebriated with the prospect of higher stock values, and higher profits by keeping your costs lower with that “aging design” of the Boeing 737s. You guessed wrong – big time for your passengers as well as for your company.

Boeing is in additional trouble that reflects poor management. On March 22, 2019, the Washington Post reported that NASA’s Administrator, Jim Bridenstine said “the agency is considering sidelining the massive rocket Boeing is building because of how far behind schedule it is.”

And now, the agency is about to announce another major delay in the high-profile spacecraft Boeing is building to fly astronauts to the International Space Station.

Then on April 21, 2019, the New York Times in a lengthy front-page story, based on “internal emails, corporate documents and federal records, as well as interviews with more than a dozen current and former employees,” reported that your South Carolina factory, which produces the 787 Dreamliner, “has been plagued by shoddy production and weak oversight that have threatened to compromise safety.”

It is not as if you are receiving anything but top dollar payments for these military (the Air Force tanker) and government contracts. You overpay yourself at over $23 million in 2018, which comes to about $12,000 an hour!

In the midst of these accusations, whistleblower lawsuits, alleged retaliations by management, the Times reports your pace of production “has quickened” and that you are eliminating “about a hundred quality control positions in North Charleston [South Carolina].” Why?

Big corporations are run like top-down dictatorships where the hired hands determine their own pay and strip their shareholder owners of necessary powers of governance. Your Board of Directors should disclose what you told them about the 737 MAX and when they knew it.

Already, corporate crime specialists are making the case for you and other top Boeing managers, having refused to listen to the warnings of your conscientious engineers, regarding the redesign of the 737 MAX, to face criminal prosecution. Note BP pleading guilty in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, to eleven counts of manslaughter in 2013.

Glass Lewis urges removal of Boeing audit committee head Lawrence Kellner for “failing to foresee safety risks with the 737 MAX aircraft,” reported the Financial Times, on April 16, 2019.

Consider, in addition, the statement of two Harvard scholars—Leonard J. Marcus and Eric J. McNulty, (authors of the forthcoming book, You’re It: Crisis, Change, and How to Lead When it Matters Most).

“Of course, if Boeing did not act in good faith in deploying the 737 Max and the Justice Department’s investigation discovers Boeing cut corners or attempted to avoid proper regulatory reviews of the modifications to the aircraft, Muilenburg and any other executives involved should resign immediately. Too many families, indeed communities, depend on the continued viability of Boeing.”

These preconditions have already been disclosed and are evidentially based. Your mismanagement is replete with documentation. Management was criminally negligent, 346 lives of passengers and crew were lost. You and your team should forfeit your compensation and should resign forthwith.

All concerned with aviation safety should have your public response.

Sincerely,

Ralph Nader

Letter to Dennis A. Muilenburg, CEO of Boeing

By Ralph Nader

April 25, 2019

Dennis A. Muilenburg

Chairman, President and

Chief Executive Officer

The Boeing Company

100 North Riverside

Chicago, IL 60606

Dear Mr. Muilenburg:

On April 4, 2019 you somewhat belatedly released a statement that “We at Boeing are sorry for the lives lost in the recent 737 MAX accidents. These tragedies continue to weigh heavily on our hearts and minds….” You added that a preliminary investigation made it “apparent that in both flights” the MCAS “activated in response to erroneous angle of attack information.”

These and other remarks reflect years of mismanagement by Boeing executives, now tragically bearing bitter fruit. Your acknowledgement of the problems with the 737 MAX somehow escaped inclusion in your messages to shareholders, the capital markets and the Securities and Exchange Commission. It is now stunningly clear that your overly optimistic outlook on January 20, 2019 – after the Indonesian Lion Air crash – was misleading. Whatever the public learns, day after day about the troubles of your company, it is still far less than what Boeing knows will come out day by day, and not just about the deadly design of the 737 MAX.

Your narrow-body passenger aircraft – namely, the long series of 737’s that began in the nineteen sixties was past its prime. How long could Boeing avoid making the investment needed to produce a “clean-sheet” aircraft and, instead, in the words of Bloomberg Businessweek “push an aging design beyond its limits?” Answer: As long as Boeing could get away with it and keep necessary pilot training and other costs low for the airlines as a sales incentive.

Boeing kept on this track until the competition from its only competitor, Airbus, came along with its A320neo. The year 2011 was a crucial period for the company. Top management was into preliminary work on a new aircraft and then panicked over Airbus’s success. To compete with Airbus, Boeing equipped the 737 MAX with larger engines tilted more forward and upward on the wings than prior 737’s. Thus began the trail of criminal negligence that will implicate the company and its executives. The larger engines changed the center of gravity and the plane’s aerodynamics. Boeing management was on a fast track and ignored warnings by its own engineers, not to mention scores of other technical aerospace people outside the company. The Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) software fix or patch with all its glitches and miscues is now a historic example of a grave failure of Boeing management. Yet, you insist the 737 MAX is still safe and some alteration of the MCAS and other pilot advisories will make the aircraft airworthy. Aircraft should be stall-proof, not stall-prone. Trying to shift the burden onto the pilots for any vast numbers of failure modes beyond the software’s predictability is scurrilous. Deplorably you are still pushing to end the grounding for the 737 MAX and resume delivery of nearly 5000 orders worldwide. The Boeing 737 MAX must never be permitted to fly again – it has an inherent aerodynamic design defect.

No matter your previous safety record of the 737 series, Boeing doesn’t get one, two or more crashes that are preventable by adopting long-established aeronautical knowledge and practices. You are on the highest level of notice not to add to your already extraordinary record of criminally negligent decisions and inactions. Result – 346 innocent people lost their lives.

A reckless salesman, driving dangerously to reach a customer and close a deal, causing a collision and death of a family in another motor vehicle, does not get to be exonerated from a manslaughter prosecution by saying he has a 25 year good driving record.

Boeing management’s behavior must be seen in the context of Boeing’s use of its earned capital. Did you use the $30 billion surplus from 2009 to 2017 to reinvest in R&D, in new narrow-body passenger aircraft?  Or did you, instead, essentially burn this surplus with self-serving stock buybacks of $30 billion in that period? Boeing is one of the companies that MarketWatch labelled as “Five companies that spent lavishly on stock buybacks while pension funding lagged.”

Incredibly, your buybacks of $9.24 billion in 2017 comprised 109% of annual earnings. As you well know, stock buybacks do not create any jobs. They improve the metrics for the executive compensation packages of top Boeing bosses. Undeterred, in 2018, buybacks of $9 billion constituted 86% of annual earnings.

To make your management recklessly worse, in December 2018, you arranged for your rubberstamp Board of Directors to approve $20 billion more in buybacks. Apparently, you had amortized the cost of the Indonesian Lion Air crash victims as not providing any significant impact on your future guidance to the investor world.

Then came the second software-bomb that took away control from the pilots and brought down Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 on March 10, taking the lives of 156 passengers and crew. At the time, you were way overdue with your new software allegedly addressing the avoidable risks associated with the notorious 737 MAX.

Don’t you see some inverted priorities here? Don’t you see how you should have invested in producing better aircraft, if you wished to compete with Airbus, whose engineers were allowed to do their job and avoid design instabilities? Instead, your top management was inebriated with the prospect of higher stock values, through stock buybacks and higher profits by keeping your costs lower with that “aging design” of the Boeing 737s. It now is apparent that you guessed wrong – big time for your passengers as well as for your company and its shareholders.

Boeing is in additional trouble that reflects poor management. On March 22, 2019, the Washington Post reported that NASA’s Administrator, Jim Bridenstine said “the agency is considering sidelining the massive rocket Boeing is building because of how far behind schedule it is.”

According to a second Washington Post, March 22, 2019 article, the delay in the “scheduled maiden launch in June 2020” and the “billions of dollars over budget” had NASA’s leaders in a fury. Last year, NASA’s inspector general excoriated your company, revealing it has already spent over $5 billion and is “expected to burn through the remaining money by early this year (2019), three years too soon, without delivering a single rocket stage,” wrote the Post.

On March 13, 2019, Bridenstine said “although NASA still steadfastly supports the massive rocket, known as the Space Launch System (SLS), the agency would consider sidelining it and instead using commercially available rockets for the mission known as Exploration Mission-1 (EM-1).” This announcement before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee “set off shock waves… a major blow to NASA’s flagship rocket program and its main contractor, Boeing.”

And now, the agency is about to announce another major delay in the high-profile spacecraft Boeing is building to fly astronauts to the International Space Station.

On March 28, 2019, the World Trade Organization (WTO) after 14 years, issued a final ruling that Boeing received an illegal U.S. tax break from the state of Washington in prohibited subsidies under international trade rules. Boeing has long been a recipient of various kinds of extensive corporate welfare before and after it became a U.S. monopoly.

Then on April 21, 2019, the New York Times in a lengthy front-page story, based on “internal emails, corporate documents and federal records, as well as interviews with more than a dozen current and former employees,” reported that your South Carolina factory, which produces the 787 Dreamliner, “has been plagued by shoddy production and weak oversight that have threatened to compromise safety.” These problems have persisted notwithstanding two documentaries, commencing in 2013, produced by Al-Jazeera investigators reported similar problems. The Air Force last month temporarily stopped deliveries of the KC-48 tanker after finding random objects inside the new planes, causing Will Roper, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force to exclaim “To say it bluntly, this is unacceptable.”

It is not as if you are receiving anything but top dollar payments for these civilian and military aircraft. Or, you are underpaid at over $23 million in 2018 which comes to over $12,000 an hour.

In the midst of these accusations, whistleblower lawsuits, alleged retaliations by management, the Times reports your pace of production “has quickened” and that you are eliminating “about a hundred quality control positions in North Charleston [South Carolina].”

Boeing shareholders and your compliant Board of Directors should be advising you that the scheduled one hour annual shareholder meeting is not nearly enough time for you to explain these matters to shareholders in Chicago on April 29, 2019. Big corporations are run like top-down dictatorships where the hired hands determine their own pay and strip their shareholder owners of necessary powers of governance. Do not push this envelope, further. Your Board of Directors should disclose what you told them about the 737 MAX and when they knew it.

Already, corporate crime specialists are making the case for you and other top Boeing managers, having refused to listen to the warnings of your conscientious engineers, regarding the redesign of the 737 MAX, to face criminal prosecution. Note BP pleading guilty in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, to eleven counts of manslaughter in 2013.

Already, the kindly corporate crisis specialists are issuing warnings, along with the mild ones by the shareholder service firms such as Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), which urges separation of the roles of the Chairman of the Board and CEO, both of which you hold. Further, Glass Lewis urges removal of Boeing audit committee head Lawrence Kellner for “failing to foresee safety risks with the 737 MAX aircraft,” reported the Financial Times, on April 16, 2019.

Consider, in addition, the statement of two Harvard scholars—Leonard J. Marcus and Eric J. McNulty, authors of the forthcoming book, You’re It: Crisis, Change, and How to Lead When it Matters Most. These gentlemen did not achieve their positions by using strong language. That is why, the concluding statement in their CNN article on March 27, 2019, merits your closer attention:

“Of course, if Boeing did not act in good faith in deploying the 737 Max and the Justice Department’s investigation discovers Boeing cut corners or attempted to avoid proper regulatory reviews of the modifications to the aircraft, Muilenburg and any other executives involved should resign immediately. Too many families, indeed communities, depend on the continued viability of Boeing.”

These preconditions have already been disclosed and are evidentially based. Your mismanagement is replete with documentation, including your obsession with shareholder value and executive compensation. There is no need to wait for some long-drawn out, redundant inquiry. Management was criminally negligent, 346 lives of passengers and crew were lost. You and your team should forfeit your compensation and should resign forthwith.

All concerned with aviation safety should have your public response.

Sincerely,

Ralph Nader

P.O. Box 19312

Washington, DC 20036

Children’s Moral Power Can Challenge Corporate Power on Climate Crisis

By Ralph Nader

April 16, 2019

The famous anthropologist, Margaret Mead, once said to me that children have a distinct moral authority to change some of their parents’ habits or opinions. She gave use of seat belts and smoking cigarettes as examples.

Indeed, most of us know instances when sons and daughters have looked into the eyes of their fathers and mothers and urged them to wear their seatbelts or stop smoking. They say in their own plaintive way that they want mommy and daddy around for them. Many mothers and fathers have had such experiences.

Many parents and corporate executives are doing slow motion dances round global climate disruptions, despite the brutally visual and scientific evidence of our climate crisis. The rising tide of worldwide protests in recent months by young students cutting classes to shake up their elders should be a wakeup call and a sign of more activism on the horizon. Earth Day on April 22nd should give them another visible platform.

Last year the Global Youth Climate Strike manifested itself in Sweden, where it was started by a then fifteen year old teenager, Greta Thunberg. Every Friday she stood in silent protest outside the historic Swedish Parliament in Stockholm.

On March 15, an estimated 150,000 European students left school to protest. In Sweden, Germany, France, Britain, and other countries, these youngsters admonished adults, who have the power to urgently diminish greenhouse gases by cutting the use of coal, oil, and gas, and expanding the use of renewables and energy conservation.

In India, demonstrations were about the suffocating air pollution. In South Africa, protestors spoke about the worsening droughts.

At a rally in Washington, DC, eight year old Havana Chapman-Edwards told protestors at the U.S. Capitol: “Today we are telling the truth and we do not take no for an answer,” according to the New York Times.

Protestors already see the truth in the South Pacific’s rising sea levels and the Arctic Circle’s melting ice.

These youngsters can argue their case with facts and figures, with stories of record-setting fires, floods, tornados, and hurricanes and species extinctions. But they are viscerally feeling the impact of climate crisis and fearing for their lives before reaching middle age.

As University of Maryland Professor Dana Fisher told the Times, children are afraid of the tumultuous world they will inherit. Their elders are not protecting them.

Greta, the emerging spokesperson for this escalating youth agitation put it wisely: “There is a crisis in front of us that we will have to live with for all our lives, our children, our grandchildren, and all future generations.” The movement has much more room to grow, but we are depending on them developing a strong, organized voice, while retaining their individual spontaneity.

Not surprisingly, climate deniers took to social media to falsely declare that environmental groups were using the students. In fact, this outburst was quite commendably a result of students taking what they’ve learned seriously.

In England, students are insisting their government declare a state of emergency to highlight the severity of the threat. They want more material on global warming in their national school curriculum.

Some teachers and principals in the U.K. don’t like students missing classes and are trying to block or penalize those who do. But many school leaders are approving such brief intermissions to help save the planet. Sixteen year old Bonnie Morely decried the politicians for being “asleep at the wheel. We have to wake them up and I think thousands of kids on the streets will do just that.”

How about millions of them! Their numbers are growing, with some demonstrations reaching tens of thousands. In France, over 2 million students signed petitions. Some politicians are chiding them about the costs of their demands, as if energy pollution and toxic waste are not costly to people, as if the costs of violent weather patterns aren’t costing huge sums of money and lives already.

In Brussels, Belgium, 18 year old Liam pointed to “a growing momentum,” but he told a Times reporter maybe it should become more disruptive to attain more attention. “Maybe we should change the timing of the protests to rush hour.”

The youngsters understand the problem and want solutions now to counter the current omnicidal lethargy. Although some companies get it—such as the sterling Patagonia and Interface corporations in the U.S.—most large companies either are resisting, engaging in “greenwashing” lip service, or taking the smallest of steps for public relations purposes.

The people of our tormented Planet must pull together as if there was an impending invasion from Mars. Fortunately, the urgent pathways to be pursued are full of favorable economic efficiencies and good jobs. Think of solar energy installations, weatherizing homes and other buildings, modern public transportation, grants to speed up climate chaos mitigation, and economies moving to net or even negative carbon impact. The known remedial technology is far ahead of its mandated applications by sluggish legislators and their myopic corporate paymasters.

Children can and do communicate with each other often and freely around their community, country, and globe. The faster trivial text messages are replaced by texts calling for a relentless call to action, the better. Students taking to the streets and taking on legislators will advance the fight for a safer planet and a more just society.

Stay tuned! This is only the beginning of the world’s children raising adults to a maturity that faces the awful, onrushing realities.

Bully Donald’s Firings: Why do They Slink Away & Stay Silent?

By Ralph Nader

April 11, 2019

Snarling Donald Trump, after being selected as President by the Electoral College, brought one undeniable quality to the office – a lifetime of bullying people below him. During his career as a failed gambling czar and corporate welfare king, deceitful Donald bullied his employees, (many of whom are undocumented), consumers, and creditors (profitably jumping ship before he bankrupted his shareholders).

He honed his bullying skills through his television program – The Apprentice – where he dramatically kicked participants off the show each week using his catchphrase, “You’re fired!”

Donald has fired many of the officials he appointed. He was, however, too cowardly and discourteous to fire his appointees directly or privately. He would fire them by tweets or have someone on his staff perform the deed, while he would publicly degrade and humiliate the same people he had often flattered.

Past Presidents have privately expressed unhappiness with a subordinate official and let officials resign “to spend more time with the family” or use some other face-saving explanation.

Not vengeful, ego-maniac Donald. He needs to blame everyone but himself for all his blunders, stupidity, and misjudgments. All the time!

Most recently, he fired his Secretary of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen, holding her responsible for the increase in southern border crossings. But it was loudmouth Trump himself who induced the latest surge of immigration. Desperate immigrant families fled countries (often U.S. backed dictatorships) upon hearing Trump’s threat to completely close the border and stop permitting entry for asylum-seekers escaping violence, chaos and persecution.

After naming Jeff Sessions, his first 2016 campaign supporter in the Senate, Attorney General Trump went berserk when Sessions did the right thing and recused himself in March 2017 from supervising the Mueller probe of Russian interference in the 2016 elections.

Time and time again, Trump would publicly unleash invectives about Sessions—whom he initially showered with praise. Right after the 2018 elections, Trump sent his Chief of Staff, former General John F. Kelly, to  order Session’ resignation. Trump couldn’t muster the minimal courage to do it himself. But then what can you expect of a gung-ho war promoter who evaded the draft after he graduated from a military academy.

Soon it was Kelly’s turn. Trump harangued Kelly privately and publicly for months – Kelly told associates that he had never been treated so crudely. Trump pushed Kelly out. Before that he pushed out his once praised Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, whom he later called “dumb as a rock.”

Soon Trump started letting it be known that he was displeased with former General Jim “Mad Dog” Mattis, the Secretary of Defense. It seems that Mattis, who is loved by his soldiers, was trying to restrain the true “mad dog outlaws” – John Bolton, Trump’s national security advisor, and Mike Pompeo, Trump’s second Secretary of State. Both of these militant warmongers didn’t like Mattis’ restraint, as is often the case with men who have never seen bloody combat. Flatterers of Trump, these two lawless lawyers (Bolton of Yale Law School and Pompeo of Harvard Law School) may yet embroil the U.S. in an unlawful, undeclared war. Their first preference is Iran.

After Mattis departed, Trump kept verbally going after him. He tried to camouflage Mattis’ resignation, under pressure, as a “retirement.” When that didn’t work he exclaimed “What’s he done for me?” It wasn’t enough that Mattis reluctantly went along with Trump’s grandstanding order by sending soldiers to the Mexican border where, under federal law, they could do no fighting, only housekeeping tasks.

Trump had David Shulkin, the head of the Veteran’s Affairs, fired because he tried to persuade Trump not to move veteran’s health care into the hands of avaricious corporate vendors.

Trump has fired many other high ranking officials as well. James Comey, the former head of the FBI, and just last week the head of the Secret Service Randolph Alles, are examples. And after officials leave, he keeps blasting them. Psychologically unstable, he even continues his assault on deceased Senator John McCain. Donald’s replacements, such as the immensely cruel corporatist, Mick Mulvaney, acting White House Chief of Staff, almost invariably, have to meet the test of unctuous flatterers.

What is remarkable is that after most of these people are “unceremoniously expelled” and their reputations damaged, they slink away without fighting back. (The fired VA chief did make the rounds of TV interviews for a week making his case).

The fired officials are not without their circles of significant influence. They have serious fears about Trump’s impulsiveness, his indifference to pressing realities, his weaknesses for flatterers and Donald Trump’s dangerous agenda for our country. James Comey has been writing op-eds critical of Trump, but not urging any mobilization of his establishment colleagues against Trump’s re-election.

It has been argued that the people Trump has thrown out cannot get real traction to resist, Trump because he flatters the armed forces and cunningly lavishes them with larger budgets than they even request. He takes on the Federal Reserve – the bastion of the big banks – but he gives banks special tax escapes and pushes for dangerously weaker regulation of Wall Street.

None of this should diminish the declared patriotic aversion of former Trump administration officials to what Trump is doing to the country on many fronts. What they can do is start a third party Republican-style challenge to Trump and give more than a few million, reasonable, and troubled Republicans a place to go in 2020.

Boeing’s Homicides Will Give Way to Safety Reforms if Flyers Organize

By Ralph Nader

April 4, 2019

To understand the enormity of the Boeing 737 Max 8 crashes (Lion Air 610 and Ethiopian Airlines 302) that took a combined total of 346 lives, it is useful to look at past events and anticipate future possible problems.

In 2011, Boeing executives wanted to start a “clean sheet” new narrow body air passenger plane to replace its old 737 design from the nineteen sixties. Shortly thereafter, Boeing’s bosses panicked when American Airlines put in a large order for the competitive Airbus A320neo.  Boeing shelved the new design and rushed to put out the 737 Max that, in Business Week’s words, was “pushing an ageing design past its limits.” The company raised the 737 Max landing gear and attached larger, slightly more fuel efficient engines angled higher and more forward on the wings. Such a configuration changed the aerodynamics and made the plane more prone to stall (see attached article: https://www.aviationcv.com/aviation-blog/2019/boeing-canceling-737-max).

This put Boeing’s management in a quandary. Their sales pitch to the airlines was that the 737 Max only received an “amended” certification from the FAA. That it did not have to be included in more pilot training, simulators, and detailed in the flight manuals. The airlines could save money and would be more likely to buy the Boeing 737 Max.

Boeing engineers were worried. They knew better. But the managers ordered software to address the stall problem without even telling the pilots or most of the airlines. Using only one operating sensor (Airbus A320neo has three sensors), an optional warning light and indicator, Boeing set the stage for misfiring sensors that overcame pilot efforts to control the planes from their nose-down death dive.

These fixes or patches would not have been used were the new 737’s aerodynamics the same as the previous 737 models. Step by step, Boeing’s criminal negligence, driven by a race to make profits, worsened. Before and after the fatal crashes, Boeing did not reveal, did not warn, did not train, and did not address the basic defective aerodynamic design. It gagged everyone that it could.  Boeing still insists that the 737 Max is safe and is building two a day, while pushing to end the grounding.

Reacting to all these documented derelictions, a flurry of investigations is underway. The Department of Transportation’s Inspector General, Calvin L. Scovel III, is investigating the hapless, captive FAA that has delegated to Boeing important FAA statutory and regulatory duties. The Justice Department and FBI have opened a criminal probe, with an active grand jury. The National Transportation Safety Board, long the hair shirt of the FAA, is investigating. As are two Senate and House Committees. Foreign governments are investigating, as surely are the giant insurance companies who are on the hook. This all sounds encouraging, but we’ve seen such initiatives pull back before.

This time, however, the outrageous corner-cutting and suppression of engineering dissent, within both Boeing and the FAA (there were reported “heated discussions”) produced a worst case scenario. So, Boeing is working overtime with its legions of Washington lobbyists, its New York P.R. firm, its continued campaign contributions to some 330 Members of Congress. The airlines and pilots’ union chiefs (but not some angry pilots) are staying mum, scared into silence due to contracts and jobs, waiting for the Boeing 737 Max planes to fly again.

BUT THE BOEING 737 MAX MUST NOT BE ALLOWED TO FLY AGAIN. Pushing new software that will allow Boeing to blame the pilots is a dangerous maneuver. Saying that U.S. pilots, many of whom are ex-Air Force, are more experienced in reacting to a sudden wildly gyrating aircraft (consider the F-16 diving and swooping) than many foreign airline pilots only trained by civil aviation, opens a can of worms from cancellation of 737 Max orders  to indignation from foreign airlines and pilots. It also displays an aversion to human-factors engineering with a vast number of avoidable failure modes not properly envisioned by Boeing’s software patches.

The overriding problem is the basic unstable design of the 737 Max. An aircraft has to be stall proof not stall prone. An aircraft manufacturer like Boeing, notwithstanding its past safety record, is not entitled to more aircraft disasters that are preventable by following long-established aeronautical engineering practices and standards.

With 5,000 Max orders at stake, the unfolding criminal investigation may move the case from criminal negligence to evidence of knowing and willful behavior amounting to corporate homicide involving Boeing officials. Boeing better cut its losses by going back to the drawing boards. That would mean scrapping the 737 Max 8 designs, with its risk of more software time bombs, safely upgrading the existing 737-800 with amenities and discounts for its airline carrier customers and moving ahead with its early decision to design a new plane to compete with Airbus’s model, which does not have the 737 Max’s design problem.

Meanwhile, airline passengers should pay attention to Senator Richard Blumenthal’s interest in forthcoming legislation to bring the regulatory power back into the FAA. Senator Blumenthal also intends to reintroduce his legislation to criminalize business concealment of imminent risks that their products and services pose to innocent consumers and workers (the “Hide No Harm Act”).

What of the near future? Airline passengers should organize a consumer boycott of the Boeing 737 Max 8 to avoid having to fly on these planes in the coming decade. Once Boeing realizes that this brand has a deep marketing stigma, it may move more quickly to the drawing boards, so as to not alienate airline carriers.

Much more information will come out in the coming months. Much more. The NASA Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS), which receives incident reports from pilots, air traffic controllers, dispatchers, cabin crew, maintenance technicians, and others, is buzzing, as is the FlyersRights.org website. Other countries, such as France, have tougher criminal statutes for such corporate crime than the U.S. does. The increasing emergence of whistle-blowers from Boeing, the FAA and, other institutions is inevitable.

Not to mention, the information that will come out of the civil litigation against this killer mass tort disaster. And of course the relentless reporting of newspapers such as the Seattle Times, the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Washington Post, and AP, among others will continue to shed light on Boeings misdeeds and the FAA’s deficiencies.

Boeing executives should reject the advice from the reassuring, monetized minds of Wall Street stock analysts saying you can easily absorb the $2 billion cost and move on. Boeing, let your engineers and scientists be free to exert their “professional options for revisions” to save your company from the ruinous road you are presently upon.

Respect those who perished at your hand and their grieving families.