The Boeing 737 MAX and The Crash Of Capitalism
INDRAJIT
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Boeing's greed and the corruption of the US political system allowing the airlines to "regulate themselves" brought on the latest 737 Max disaster. Now Airbus is eating their lunch.
Ifanything symbolizes the suck of late-stage capitalism, it’s the ‘door’ blowing off a 737 MAX, sucking a boy’s clothes out, and falling into a schoolteacher’s backyard. These planes fucking suck, but people have to keep riding around in them because they’re somebody’s investment. The 737 MAX is simply too big to fail, despite being an obvious failure, over and over again.
America doesn’t make things anymore, and neither does Boeing. They just rebrand, reboot, and loot the corpse of the 20th century until it’s unrecognizable. The Boeing 737 is a 50-year-old airframe that some marketing idiot just slapped the word MAX on, like it’s a flavor of Mountain Dew. They might as well call it the 737 EXTREME, which is the experience of riding one. The thing has crashed itself, blown out doors midair, and the engine can melt itself if the pilot isn’t careful. These are not isolated problems, they are simply the downstream effects of having stupid fucking ideas in the first place.
A first look onto the door plug by NTSB investigators (Photo: NTSB) (Via AVHerald)
Take the 737 MAX crashing itself, which I’ve covered at length. The management decided to put a giant modern engine on a low 1960s airframe and it just didn’t fit. Just look at how squashed these modern engines look on such an old plane, and how high up the MAX engine is on the wing. This is what ‘financial’ engineering looks like.
(Via Indrajit)
To make the 737 MAX ‘work, they had to put the engine way forward and up on the plane, and it doesn’t work! This fundamentally changes the plane’s center of gravity and makes it ‘pop a wheelie’ in certain conditions, ie stall out and crash. To ‘solve’ this problem they wrote a software ‘fix’ that forced the nose down, involuntarily. That ‘fix’ got stuck and crashed multiple planes, in absolutely horrifying dips and dives that eventually grounded the whole fleet (temporarily), and hundreds of people (permanently). The problem was not the software or the engine, it was putting one century’s engine on another century’s airframe, so MBAs could save a bit of money. It, of course, cost more money in the long run, but who gives a shit? They got their bonuses and only failed upwards, while the planes they built kept crashing.
Now take the new problem. ‘Doors’ flying off midair. The 737 was initially designed to carry just over 100 people but has been stretched and contorted to fit double that, in multiple configurations. One of those configurations has a ‘false’ emergency exit (a ‘plug’), which is what recently blew out midair. Now, who is responsible for this part? Well, some outsourced company named Spirit Aero made the thing and Boeing assembled it, so effectively nobody. Which is the bigger problem underneath all of this.
As I wrote about Boeing’s Culture Crash, Henry Stonecipher destroyed Boeing as an engineering company in the 2000s. Like the rest of the American economy, he prioritized outsourcing in order to make short-term gains, leading to the destruction of Boeing as an engineering company. Quite intentionally. As Stonecipher said in 2004, “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. It is a great engineering firm, but people invest in a company because they want to make money.”
Under Stonecipher, Boeing fired engineers, outsourced production, and the company has devoted 92% of cashflow to buybacks and dividends since 2014. They’re not actually in the plane business anymore, they’re in the branding and assembly business, and now these planes are disassembling midair and killing the branding. Because this is what happens when you have MBAs designing planes instead of engineers. They make good money and shitty planes. It was the triumph of short-term thinking, and only now do we get the long-term reckoning. As predicted. As Stan Sorscher, a Boeing physicists and union leader said in 2002:
In 2002, Sorscher, who had started working for the union full time, made his case to a Wall Street analyst in Seattle, arguing that bottom-line business models did not apply to building airplanes. The analyst cut him off. “You think you’re different,” he said, according to Sorscher. “This business model works for everyone. It works for ladies’ garments, for running shoes, for hard drives, for integrated circuits, and it will work for you.”
Taken aback, Sorscher said: “Let’s build an airliner with this business model. If it works, you and everyone who looks like you will be happy. And if I’m right, then we’ll all be very unhappy.”
This is the suck of late-stage capitalism. Boeing is a symptom of what Jamie Merchant calls“the abolition of the market without planning.” When you have companies that are too big to fail, regulators in a revolving door with industry, and government bailouts for the inevitable failures, you get central unplanning. You get planes crashing out of the sky and then going back on the market until their doors fly out, because what the fuck is anybody going to do about it? There are no actual rules to capitalism, it’s just rule by capital.
Jan 22, 2024
In any sane market, the 737 MAX wouldn’t be made, because it’s stupid, has wasted time and money, and kills people. But airplanes are a global duopoly, and a duopoly is just a monopoly with two orifices to go fuck yourself in. When Airbus slapped a new engine on an old airframe, Boeing just did the same thing. There’s no competition here, just shoddy cloning.
In any sane market, this product would not continue to be sold, after proving so fatally flawed (literally). But they keep selling it! They just keep patching up the Frankenplane and it keeps on lumbering from disaster to disaster, with different parts falling off or malfunctioning. Regulators go along with this, because they’re as corrupted as everything else in the American government. Indeed, in response to another design flaw (the deicing system melting the engine if left on), Boeing simply applied for an ‘exemption’. That’s the gall of these people. They think themselves above both market forces and government. Even though the planes are crashing, the oligarchs are high-flying.
Boeing was the quintessential American company, and in it you can see what America has become. A manufacturing powerhouse turned a financialized laughingstock. Boeing doesn’t make planes, it just makes money, and the same could be said about the American economy. In the short-run this is an orgy for oligarchs, but in the long-run it’s ruin. As Boeing dissident Dr. L.J. Hart-Smith said in 2001, “A strong case is made that it will not always be possible to make more and more profit out of less and less product and that, worse, there is a strong risk of going out of business directly as a result of this policy.”
However, it seems that not just Boeing but the 737 MAX will never go out of business, but that doesn’t make the risk disappear. It just accumulated upwards. The problem simply moves from the scale of a bad door, to a bad company, to a bad nation, to a bad Empire. The United States keeps having and bailing out bad company after bad company and all of that risk keeps piling up on the national balance sheet. They can keep doing this as long as the rest of their White Empire keeps paying tribute (called buying treasuries), but Boeing also makes shitty military equipment and the Empire itself is crumbling all over.
At some point, the deficits will add up, the debts will come due, and America and its whole White Empire will undergo what engineers called ‘Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly.’ This seems impossible but one can’t imagine the side of a plane falling off, until it does. This will happen the way Hemingway described bankruptcy, ‘gradually, then suddenly.’ Like the door blowing out a Boeing 737, an airframe from an air empire that peaked in 1967, and has only been cannibalizing itself ever since.
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Did you sign up yet for our FREE bulletin? This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORSThe corporate media, Gaza and the death of television actor Matthew PerryPlease share this article as widely as you can.
Kevin Reed, David Walsh
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Editor's NoteI recall coming to the exact same infuriating conclusion as the authors when I first observed how the mainstream media—especially television— consumed inordinate amounts of time reporting on and memorialising Matthew Perry, properly classified in this article as a minor actor whose death could hardly match the world-historical genocide of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, with the full military, diplomatic and media support of the US government and its usual accomplices. This is a cultural critique whose main talking points should be embraced by the (true) left and widely shared on all available platforms. —PG |
The corporate media, Gaza and the death of television actor Matthew Perry
Television actor Matthew Perry, best known for his portrayal of the sarcastic-cynical character Chandler Bing on the sitcom Friends, died on Saturday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 54 years old.
The actor was found unresponsive in a hot tub behind his house, according to law enforcement sources, who spoke to the Los Angeles Times.
Matthew Perry, 2013
While no drugs were found at the scene, sources told the Times, “prescription medications were recovered at the home and hence toxicology will be part of the investigation.” The Los Angeles County coroner’s office, which has deferred its findings pending further testing, will determine the cause of death.
Perry was nominated for several Emmy awards for his role in all 234 episodes of Friends (1994-2004) on NBC and for appearances as an associate White House counsel in the fourth and fifth seasons (2003) of the popular The West Wing political drama for the same network.
Perry, born in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 1969 and raised in Ottawa, Ontario, spoke publicly for many years about his struggles with substance abuse and addiction. In a memoir published a year ago, Perry recounted that he became an alcoholic at age 14 and later became addicted to pain killers following a jet ski accident at age 28. At one point, he admitted he was taking 55 Vicodin pills per day.
The actor suffered many health problems caused by opioid abuse, including spending two weeks in a coma and undergoing 14 stomach surgeries. Perry explained he could not remember three years of his life while appearing on Friends. He also revealed he had had 15 stays in rehab and 65 attempts at detoxification. At one point during an emergency treatment, Perry’s family was told by hospital staff that he had a 2 percent chance of survival.
By all accounts, despite his serious illnesses, Perry was a decent and caring man who admirably dedicated himself and his estimated $100 million personal wealth to helping others with similar addictions.
In a 2022 podcast to promote his memoir, Perry said, “The best thing about me, bar none, is that if somebody comes to me and says, ‘I can’t stop drinking, can you help me?’ I can say ‘yes’ and follow up and do it.” Perry then added, “When I die, I don’t want Friends to be the first thing that’s mentioned. I want that to be the first thing that’s mentioned. And I’m gonna live the rest of my life proving that.”
While Perry’s demise is certainly tragic and shocking, it is not entirely surprising. He is one of a very long list of Hollywood and music industry celebrities who have met death as a result of alcoholism or drug abuse, or both. That phenomenon is so often part of the lifestyle or associated with the devastating ups and downs of stardom in the cruel, rapacious multi-billion dollar entertainment industry, which specializes in damaging human beings. Nothing is so destructive in American popular culture as success.
In this context, however, readers should consider critically the inordinate attention, airtime and front-page column inches given over by the corporate media to reporting on the life and death of Matthew Perry, who was, by any objective measure, a relatively minor figure in television acting.
The evening television news programs Sunday devoted a third or more of their time to Perry’s passing, with anchors reading somber, pretentious obituaries and “on-the-spot” reporters chiming in with superficial and predictable biographical details. The coverage was vast, omnipresent but thoroughly shallow, with the usual media combination of titillation and moralizing about such celebrity deaths. The emphasis given to the actor’s death seriously suggested that this was the most important development going on in the world this past weekend.
In the first place, this is a conscious attempt to black out the horrifying genocide and ethnic cleansing being conducted against the Palestinians in Gaza by the Israeli military, with the enthusiastic support of the White House and Congress and every Western power. Moreover, the news media in the US is engaged in deliberately concealing the size and significance of the massive demonstrations occurring on every inhabited continent against the Israeli mass murder. The death of Matthew Perry, from the point of view of the American media, largely an arm of the Pentagon and CIA, came as a godsend—Here was something they could truly sink their teeth into!
The disproportionate attention paid to Perry was a transparent effort to divert public attention from one of the greatest war crimes committed since the end of World War II, a war crime being carried out in the manner of the Nazis. The political and media establishment is terrified of the widespread public opposition to the mass death and destruction and that opposition’s increasing depth and breadth within the population. The establishment is desperate to find ways and means of keeping the reality from reaching the public.
The news media is not interested in or capable of telling the public the truth about what is happening in Gaza, even though workers and young people are finding out about it anyway, especially through the social media activity of those not controlled by any state apparatus or “authoritative” news source.
There are other issues here as well. No doubt the great financial success of Friends, some of whose leading performers were talented, but which, in the end, was a banal and lazy series, resonates with the people who run the entertainment industry. They are perpetually obsessed with finding new means of packaging unchallenging material to the public in “unusual, edgy” ways. The dull and apathetic presented as sexy and hilarious—how can the Friends formula be repeated?
Many of those who run film and television belong to Perry’s generation. In some fashion, they identify with him, possibly what was weakest about him, or at least they are drawn to the drama of his life as a central and vital one. To such people, frankly, Perry’s story is more weighty and compelling than the death of 10,000 Palestinians and the threat to hundreds of thousands more.
Drug addiction is a mass phenomenon, but its association with wealth, privilege, boredom and having too much time on one’s hands, is not the story of opioid addiction in the working class and among the most oppressed.
Again, we point to the appalling fact, which needs to be remembered, that in the midst of a bloody war awash with crimes of a world-historical character, major US television news programs and newspapers devoted much of their time and energy to treating the death of a minor television actor. To the extent that the mass murder in Gaza is not reported and exposed, the liars and scoundrels who own and run the media become the accomplices of the murderers.
New Russian sanctions incoming.
Sort of... pic.twitter.com/zf0Jfu1fxB— Mats Nilsson (@mazzenilsson) June 14, 2023
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PARADIGM SHIFT
An astonishing thing has happened in America that has never occurred in the lifetime of anyone now living. No, it’s not the crushing win of Trump in Iowa, nor the absurd determination of Democrats to run the senile ninny who has made a joke of our Presidency for another term. These, in their way astonishing, are mere trivialities in this time of universal lunacy and deceit. The CIA remains one of the main manufacturers and disseminators of US/imperialist propaganda—disinformation, false flags, demonisation campaigns, etc.—around the globe. I mean an honest to god paradigm shift everyone can see that official wise men with public platforms and megaphones have not announced, or perhaps even noticed. I’m talking about the first clear, undeniable instance of the failure of the American Empire’s Propaganda Machine. It has been clear for decades, generations, that the American political elite has no regard for, and no sense of responsibility to, the actual needs and desires of the ignorant, disorganized public. It has always dealt with their inchoate hopes by indoctrination, by arousing and enlisting their imbecile enthusiasms in a mythology of tawdry, tribal patriotism based on the premise that they are a glorious, superior people whose leaders courageously embody and implement their magnificence all over the world. The techniques of propaganda are refined, but their effect is entirely due to grotesque pandering to the worst susceptibilities of the human ego: the desire to assert one’s superlative worth as a member of a powerful, violent, conquering nation. The force of that tactic, endlessly repeated, rendered American citizenry, with rare exceptions, one solid, deluded, unthinking mass, devoted to whatever vicious, imperial ends the political elite intended. Their trained mass response, sure as that of performing seals, has, for the first time ever, failed in regard to the Gaza genocide. Both parties in Congress are solidly behind their putative leaders in full support of whatever violence Nazi Zionist Israel inflicts on the Palestinian people. This is true across the spectrum, from the pathetic halfwits and defectives in the MAGA sump to mock-noble, self-declared moral poseurs such as Bernie and AOL. Tlaib is the one outcast who has dared to affirm the humanity of Palestinians, while the rest join solemnly to prevent a ceasefire, which would, they say, balk the Zionist’s “right of self-defence”. With this level of unanimity, solid from the addled, babbling, derelict President down, presented forcefully, continually, to the nation from every organ in the Propaganda Machine, the certain positive response was confidently awaited. It has not come. In spite of all our corrupt, Zionist-owned government has done to enlist its support for the wholesale murder of a people, the American public has not bought it, and is not coming around. By an overwhelming majority Americans reject the message of the Machine, and adamantly disapprove of the Israeli genocide. Try to recall a single moment when the diktat of the Machine was not ingested and regurgitated by the whole American public. It took years and thousands of body bags to sour them on the Viet Nam horror. The whole country was galvanized behind the lies that led to wars on Afghanistan, Iraq and its nonexistent WMDs, and it embraced the obscene “War on Terror” with all its follies. Recall the wildly dishonest demonization of Qaddafi, Assad and Iran that Americans swallowed. When Putin was Hitlerized for exposing U.S. treachery in expanding NATO to Russia's borders, and defending ethnic Russian Ukrainians from attacks by rabid Ukronazi Banderites, Americans ate it up and roared approval. Xi of China is the next candidate for diabolization, but this first failure of the Machine will create doubt as to the ability of our rotten government to manage its victim people. The question now is whether The Empire’s iron grip on their minds has been permanently impaired by its total, and totally despicable, support for the criminal brutality of an evil and illegitimate state. It will be a delicious irony if the billionaire Zionists who bought our Congress find that the felon state it has supported against American interests has destroyed itself, and broken the death grip its money has exerted in subverting and betraying us all. Depending on the endgame of the Zionist genocide—chiefly, on whether their murderous barbarity results in a deadly regional war—the effect on The Empire will be either crippling international infamy, or perilous, punishing engagement in a war that has the potential to utterly destroy many nations, including ours. The American Empire has not represented the interests of its people for decades, if it ever did, and has only kept them in a kind of mental and emotional lockdown through controlling their perception of reality. Nothing has been done for the generality of Americans since the last great threat to Capitalism in the Great Depression, which resulted in Social Security and Medicare. It is intriguing to wonder what grand advancements might come for The People if the state were to be run for their benefit. That, of course, will never happen under Imperial Capitalism which will fight to the end for its absolute rule by any means possible until it self destructs from massive and insoluble financial fraud, or is hammered and obliterated in an intentionally provoked war. T.S. Elliot predicted long ago that the world would not end “in a bang, but a whimper”. This seems unlikely now when the likely ends are implosion or explosion. How profoundly sad it will be if the American people have thrown off the terrible strait jacket of imperial mind control just when it doesn’t matter any more.
Paul Edwards
"By an overwhelming majority Americans reject the message of the Machine, and adamantly disapprove of the Israeli genocide..."
Associate Editor Paul Edwards is a genuine Renaissance man, gifted with many talents and participant in many events and struggles of our tormented times. Our colleague Jeff Brown, who did a fine interview with him, sums it up thusly: “Paul’s life story is worthy of a biography: a rebel youth growing up, traveling and working around the world and then a long career as a Hollywood writer. Through it all, he has never lost his lifelong wrath against US imperialism and global capitalism, while seeking social and economic justice for humanity’s 99%…”
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| Did you sign up yet for our FREE bulletin? This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORSAMERICAN FASCISM – BIDEN? TRUMP? THE NEOCONS???Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise.
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The Paths of a money obsessed culture lead but to the mass grave...
Garland NixonGarland wades into the swamp of misleading political labels and currents agitating Americans, and concludes that the nation is in a fundamental crisis, with the masses of ordinary citizens facing a still largely hidden ruling class whose ability to govern and exercise options has been severely curtailed by the weight of their own arrogance and stupidity. This class faces insurmountable problems on several fronts: (1) I has lost the respect and obedience of a huge segment of the population, especially the younger generations. Any call to arms to fight Russia, China, Iran or someone else in distant lands will be met now with massive refusal and probably rebellion. (2) It is foolishly provoking enemies who are now not only peer powers, but may actually be far superior in key areas, such as military power. (3) It faces deep fractures and ungovernability within its own ranks, as a result of its foolish and heavy-handed demonisation of Donald Trump, and the massive dissatisfaction he represents across all popular social layers. The upshot is that they are now left with the old tool of ruling classes in trouble, fascism, but this may not so easily implemented in the US due to the anomie observed among the masses, so the Western global ruling class, with HQ in Washington, is concentrating on defending the official lying narrative, while the world drifts from one near terminal crisis to the next. Trump, of course, given his appalling ignorance and jingoism, may end up making matters just as bad and possibly worse. In that sense, he may prove a mere continuation of the Biden disaster.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR / SOURCE
Garland Nixon is a radio and television talkshow host & vlogger, and leading anti-imperialist geopolitical analyst residing in the Washington, DC area.
Garland Nixon is a radio and television talkshow host & vlogger, and leading anti-imperialist geopolitical analyst residing in the Washington, DC area.Print this article
The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.
Unfortunately, most people take this site for granted.
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| Did you sign up yet for our FREE bulletin? This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORSJust saying: Who runs Hollywood? C’monPlease share this article as widely as you can.
JOEL STEIN
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