BREAKING: Nikki Haley Resigns from Board of Corporate Giant Boeing Amid Bailout Push
Shane Trejo
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Boeing Co announced on Thursday that Nikki Haley, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and South Carolina governor, has resigned from its board following the announcement that Boeing was seeking a government bailout for coronavirus relief.
Boeing stock fell to as low as $92.41 on Thursday, the lowest the stock has been since spring of 2013. That is down 75 percent from last year when an Ethiopian airlines crash of a 737 MAX aircraft raised questions about the safety of Boeing’s airliners.
The corporate giant is demanding $60 billion from the government, otherwise they claim that 2.5 million jobs in the U.S. aerospace industry are at stake. Boeing has spent $43 billion in buying back its own stock in recent years, which has yielded roughly $17.4 billion in dividends, but now they want some payola from Uncle Sam.
One of the reasons industries are so short on cash right now is that they have spent billions buying back their own stocks instead of investing in their workers and saving for a rainy day.
That needs to be addressed NOW.
— Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) March 18, 2020
Analysts are saying that Boeing will likely go under if they do not receive the government assistance, and receive it fast.
“There are 2 million jobs on the line, and I think we must make sure that one of, if not the most important, company in this country remains solvent,” said Jim Cramer on CNBC. “Boeing needs this $60 billion … it’s not a plea from me, it’s a plea from the 2 million workers who are in its supply chain.”
Haley is apparently framing her departure as a revolt against cronyism and bailouts, but it’s more likely that she is leaving a sinking ship and attempting to save face.
Haley did not mind raking in Boeing’s dirty money when their sub-standard business practices, including an extreme amount of outsourcing, resulted in high-profile plane crashes costing hundreds of passengers their lives.
Big League Politics has reported on how Boeing outsourced key engineering jobs for their oft-malfunctioning airliners:
Boeing has been under fire lately for several deadly crashes involving its 737 Max aircrafts in 2019.
Bloomberg did a report back in 2019 spilling the beans on what potentially could have caused these crashes.
According to Boeing engineering veterans, the software mistakes that led to the deadly crashes, were allegedly the result of “a push to outsource work to lower-paid contractors.”
The Max software was developed when Boeing was down-sizing and cutting experienced engineers. The aerospace company was also pressing suppliers to cut costs.
According to Mark Robin, a former Boeing software engineer who worked in a flight-test group that supported the Max, recent college graduates working for Indian software developer HCL Technologies Ltd. occupied several rows of desks in offices across from Seattle’s Boeing Field.
The HCL coders were usually making designs according to specifications from Boeing. However, “it was controversial because it was far less efficient than Boeing engineers just writing the code,” Rabin claimed. Frequently, he recalled, “it took many rounds going back and forth because the code was not done correctly.”
… “Boeing was doing all kinds of things, everything you can imagine, to reduce cost, including moving work from Puget Sound, because we’d become very expensive here,” said Rick Ludtke, a former Boeing flight controls engineer who was laid off in 2017. “All that’s very understandable if you think of it from a business perspective. Slowly over time it appears that’s eroded the ability for Puget Sound designers to design.”
Rabin, the former software engineer, recalled one manager saying at a meeting that Boeing didn’t require the services of senior engineers because its products were allegedly “mature.”
Rabin, who was laid off in 2015, said, “I was shocked that in a room full of a couple hundred mostly senior engineers we were being told that we weren’t needed.”
Other aerospace engineers have commented on Boeing’s cutthroat business policies.
“Engineering started becoming a commodity,” claimed Vance Hilderman, who co-founded a company called TekSci that supplied aerospace contract engineers and began to lose work to overseas competitors in the early 2000s.
Haley is likely distancing herself from Boeing with her 2024 presidential ambitions in mind, as she hopes to co-opt President Trump’s “America First” movement back to globalism and neoliberalism.
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