Felons Fly Free
Boeing beats criminal charges for its deadly 737 Max crashes only to be accused of more negligence in this week's fatal MD-11 crash
This Week In Blunders – Nov. 2-8
“You want to be upper class, you want to be first class, but when the plane crash, everybody dead.” - Kanye West
It was like watching your drunk uncle beat a DUI charge only to watch him crack up his car again while pulling out of the courthouse parking lot.
A federal judge reluctantly dismissed criminal charges against Boeing on Thursday for the two 737 Max crashes in 2018 and 2019 that killed 346 people.
Within hours of that ruling, the aerospace giant was accused of more negligence in the fiery cargo plane crash that killed 14 people in Louisville, Ky. on Tuesday.
Their “recklessness has upended the lives and livelihoods of Plaintiffs and numerous Kentuckians, who live with trauma, fear and uncertainty,” according to a lawsuit from survivors, which also named UPS and General Electric.
A detached engine looks to be the cause of the latest crash. Sometimes they just drop like acorns from a tree. And today, Boeing recommended grounding all MD-11s. Yeah, so now they tell us.
The lawsuit alleges the MD-11 has a long history of catastrophic failures and that Boeing should have done something about it. Boeing didn’t make the plane, but it acquired its manufacturer, McDonell Douglas, in 1997 along with its liabilities.
It’s just another day in the life of an aerospace giant that has long been under fire for doing things on the cheap and fostering a culture of negligence.
Boeing was more or less caught red-handed.
In July, it agreed to plead guilty to a felony for its 737 Max crashes. But in December, federal Judge Reed O’Connor in Fort Worth, Texas, rejected the plea deal as too lenient.
That was under the Biden administration’s Justice Department. Under Trump, the effort got even more lenient with prosecutors filing a motion to drop the charges altogether.
On Thursday, O’Connor ruled on that motion and fretfully dismissed the case. He noted that prosecutors had Boeing dead to rights.
“The Government has a confession from Boeing, signed by the CEO and Chief Legal Officer, admitting to all the elements of the conspiracy charge against it,” he wrote.
Oh well. As Business Blunders observed last year, Boeing is already a felon for past infractions. What’s one more for a criminally charged corporation?
Read More: Con Air (Business Blunders)
Too bad for the families who lost loved ones. The government’s failure to take Boeing to task in a meaningful way hasn’t been easy for them to watch.
“When a company’s failures cost so many lives, ending a criminal case behind closed doors erodes trust … for every passenger who steps onto a plane,” said Paul Njoroge in a statement cited by the Associated Press.
Njoroge, who lives in Canada, lost his wife and three small children in the Ethiopia crash of a Boeing 737 Max in 2019. That year he testified to Congress, saying this:
“I stay up nights thinking of the horror that they must have endured. The six minutes will forever be embedded in my mind. I was not there to help them. I couldn’t save them.”
It wasn’t his job to save them. It was Boeing’s job to make planes that could fly them safely.
Look who else beat the rap this week
Two brothers cracked the code on Ethereum and downloaded themselves $25 million worth of the cryptocurrency in just 12 seconds.
Prosecutors called it fraud. The jury called it confusing. And on Friday a federal judge declared a mistrial.
Anton Peraire-Bueno, 24, of Boston, and James Pepaire-Bueno, 28, of New York, studied computer science and math at MIT. They used their brains to beat the blockchain and now they’ve beaten the justice system, too.
Read More: Ethereum Delirium (Business Blunders)
Jurors said they didn’t argue about the facts of the case. They just couldn’t agree on how any laws would apply to what prosecutors had described as a first-of-its-kind heist.
No word from prosecutors on a possible retrial. This is the third major crypto case they’ve bungled this year.
Avraham “Avi” Eisenberg, who was prosecuted for draining $110 million through a crypto pump-and-dump scheme, got off in May when a federal judge overturned his wire fraud conviction
And in August, a jury could not agree if Tornado Cash CEO Roman Storm laundered $1 billion in dirty crypto, as prosecutors had alleged. But it convicted him of a lessor charge.
The Justice Department is weak. Crypto is king. Especially if you can bag enough of it to afford good lawyers.
You can’t keep a cow from farting
JBS USA Food Co., the U.S. arm of the world’s biggest beef producer, promised customers and investors it would hit “net zero” greenhouse-gas emissions by 2040.
But how do you plug the gases from beef production?
Turns out the beef behemoth had no idea.
On Monday, New York Attorney General Letitia James announced a $1.1 million settlement with the company for lying about its plans to reduced its carbon hoof print.
Actually, it had no such plans. Just another case of shameless greenwashing to make consumers feel good while they eat the planet.
What did anyone think JBS was going to do? Ask its cows to politely hold it in?
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Terrific piece. I missed that about Boeing getting off. Probably many did, given the general mayhem.
My readings over the years have given me the impression that for many years Boeing had safety as their number one engineering priority. When they acquired McDonnell Douglas, the McDD people took over corporate management and the priority switched to minimizing cost. These tragic events can probably be traced back to the McDD people leading the company. The 737 Max design was built to minimize costs, when airplane experts have said that there should have been a entirely new design.