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Comment by stevehawk | Hacker News Reader

It's really disappointing to see this comment downvoted. Apparently we're all fine with blaming the current administration for not firing them but we're not ok with blaming a previous administration for hiring them?

We've also had countless posts talking negatively on the very merger that lead this iteration of Boeing (McDonnel-Douglas) with no regard for the administration that basically encouraged the merger.

It's okay to admit it guys: both parties suck and are corporate shills.

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> Apparently we're all fine with blaming the current administration for not firing them but we're not ok with blaming a previous administration for hiring them

One of these two parties has the ability to affect change. It's not the latter.

The official report just came out. On what grounds would the existing administration just fire upper level management at an early stage?

The appropriate response would be to force FAA to ground the planes (if and which FAA did not do themselves), and wait for the official report and then open an investigation in to Boeing and FAA. Time is a factor to take into account.

Appointing someone that ends up breaking the law vs. keeping someone that is known to have. These are not the same thing.

They're not the same thing, no. But that doesn't change the fact that stuffing the FAA with Boeing insiders is a dumb idea.

anyone who looks at my comments on Boeing knows I’m fairly critical. However, it’s probably fair to say anyone with any bonafides in commercial aviation by definition is a Boeing insider since it has either squashed or acquired all of its domestic competition. We talk all the time about banks are too big to fail yet when it comes to defense we simultaneously create projects that only Boeing can bid and look the other way when Boeing acquires companies that might represent an alternative while increasingly taking delivery of weapons systems that don’t work as intended. One doesn’t have to look that deep into history to see scandals like the Air Force tanker which rose all the way to the Supreme Court, or the failed SLS project which has sent so much pork spending to specific congressional districts that Spacex could build something like 300 falcon 9’s instead, to see that Boeing’s relationship with the US government is problematic at its very core. Blaming both parties is surface level equivocation that does nothing. The simple fact is Boeing is too big, they know it and the government knows it and unless we want our defense to be outsourced to foreign ownership, preserving this status quo is quite literally the only thing keeping Boeing from reverse-mergering itself out of this country. We have overlooked our own strategic resources - be it pharmaceutical, manufacturing, telecom, etc, for far too long and have pursued incredibly near-sighted policy objectives to our own detriment. In the spirit of HN, I’ve already gotten too political here but I will say one final thing: don’t equivocate both parties as equal, neither should you be complacent and assume what your party is telling you is the right direction either — there’s more to this issue than simply saying oh let’s arm the regulators with more regulations and vice versa.

> there’s more to this issue than simply saying oh let’s arm the regulators with more regulations and vice versa.

If it is, there’s no support for that claim in anything written in the message I reply to.

They should be rules against stuff like that. Our current head of Health and Human Services is a former pharmaceutical lobbyist...there are more examples...

It’s really disappointing to see that after all the crazy stuff done by the current administration, even after senators admitted the guilty of the current potus and declined to remove it, after he put in charge of containing the Coronavirus the least qualified person to do so while removing qualified people, there is still someone that has the nerve to say that both sides suck. It’s okay to admit it, you probably didn’t follow so much what happened in the White House and in the world in the last three years.

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