Reminder: Please write to Henry Waxman's House Government Oversight and Reform Committee and your representatives in Congress today! Please see www.thelastinspector.com or my last post to this blog for details!


Today is another post by other members of forums I have visited. You probably won't be able to read it directly from this blog,but if you click on it, it will open in a readable (uncompressed) form:




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They have also seen what I have seen at Boeing. I am not alone by far, I know. That is why I am being made an example of what happens to those who tell on Boeing.

Reminder: Please write to Henry Waxman's House Government Oversight and Reform Committee and your representatives in Congress today! Please see www.thelastinspector.com or my last post to this blog for details!

Today I wanted to start to spotlight some quite thoughtful writings by others on forums I have visited. You probably won't be able to read it directly from this blog,but if you click on it, it will open in a readable (uncompressed) form. Here is the first one:




I don't know who this person is, but at least they make some good points.

Sorry for the delay in posting. "Writer's block" is no stranger to me. I just wanted to point you over to my main web page, www.thelastinspector.com , so you can write in support of an investigation by Henry Waxman's House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform of the FAA fraud that the DOT OIG inexplicably refused to perform. Other than to say that (my "read between the lines" extension of the comment in parenthesis) "the FAA has their own investigators (so we don't need to do our jobs to independently investigate agency misconduct)." Never mind that the OIG didn't even refer my case to the FAA's "investigators" for investigation.

This urgently needed investigation has still not started, thanks to the OIG's purposeful inaction and obfuscation, aping those same qualities in portions of the FAA they defer to.

With the OIG it was like hiring an exterminator to go under the house to see the vermin you had just seen under there and exterminate them, but they refused to do it because they were too scared to do their jobs.

What is needed now is for someone with real integrity and no ties to the FAA to do the job, and that is Mr. Waxman and his committee. He is a person with so much integrity he has to often drag some of his committee's members kicking and screaming down the path to perform their jobs of oversight when powerful interests are involved, as they are in this case.

So, go to my main web page and write today. The stakes for you and your loved ones couldn't be higher.

You would have to wonder what is wrong with the legal system if you know both all that I know and all the similar stuff that you likely have heard about the subject in the media.

The O.J. trial. U.S. Attorneys fired for charging Republicans with crimes instead of Democrats when the scales of justice are supposed to be blind. The Supreme Court unable to make anything other than a 5-4 decision along partisan lines, imperiling our democracy and showing the highest court in the land is incapable of deciding a case on legal grounds due to inherent bias, making real justice no more fair (and perhaps much less so) than tossing a coin to make the decision.

Then there are the "lower" and "logically" less able and more biased courts, prosecutors, and attorneys in the levels below the Supreme Court. You would hope somewhere in this system there was somebody that followed the rules and did their jobs, even if the Supreme Court is unable to. A prosecutor's office. A company's legal department. A private legal firm. An attorney.

It seems finding people of integrity in the legal system is as slapdash as it was to find such people in my department when I was an inspector at Boeing. I was almost alone in being the one with enough integrity to do my job while being pressured not to do it by people without integrity.

Take the Boeing Legal department, for instance, which I tried to report fraud to on two occasions and who are assisting in my persecution now. They have many attorneys in house who presumably had to pass the bar and have to stay members of the bar to continue their profession.

Why weren't any of them kicked out of the bar association when they advised Boeing that the State Department had no authority to keep them from exporting militarily sensitive devices on aircraft to proscribed countries without an export license? It would seem like an open and shut case. The State Department prevailed over the Boeing legal department's wrong legal opinion that may have placed our country in danger. Boeing had to pay a $15 million dollar fine. But why weren't the attorneys who made that obviously incorrect decision fired or disbarred to keep them from making such huge "errors" in the future? Your guess may be as good as mine. There seems to be a lack of accountability in the profession. Or did Boeing's attorneys give the errant legal opinion and let the militarily sensitive technology on the airplanes deliver just because Boeing needed to deliver the airplanes to meet revenue and profit targets? That might explain both the highly questionable opinion by Boeing's attorneys and why Boeing deferred complying with State Department requests for Boeing to apply for export licenses before delivering such airplanes on multiple occasions. It also explains why such attorneys were not fired or debarred for incompetence. They were just doing their jobs. But that would have made them even better candidates for disbarrment, you would think.

But since when did attorneys stop advising comnpanies how to avoid legal problems by ensuring they complied with laws, and stop advising companies how to minimize the damage from any accidental breaking of the law, and start advising their companies how to break the law with impunity?

I saw that in the same Boeing legal department. They refused to end the fraud in quality assurance I reported to their chief counsel on two occasions, and instead seemed to pull out all the stops in ensuring that fraud was not ended, as a naive person like me (at the time) might have expected. Hell, the Chief Counsel of Boeing showed up at the doorstep of my work not to help end the fraud, but instead to decide how to dispose of me, who they viewed as the real problem. You would think any attorney involved in this covering up of this fraud and the resulting retaliation against me would be a prime candidate for disbarrment. But I have no knowledge of any of them being disbarred. To this day they labor to cover up the same fraud I reported to them over five years ago. Their spokespeople have repeatedly lied to the press about it also, both in responding to the inevitable defects that such a quality system lets deliver to the fleet (in which they said something like "we have multiple layers of inspection that would never allow such defects to leave our production system" which most people inside and outside Boeing know is untrue) and in responding to my persecution at their request (saying something like "we have processes in place to address such concerns" while not stating the fact that those processes didn't work to end the fraud I reported or the related problems in the quality system I also reported). Indeed, my prosecution is just one part of their plan to cover up the noted fraud.

But if private legal departments operate thusly, what about our prosecutors? Wouldn't those attorneys who work on our dime spot such fraud and the related efforts to cover it up by placing false reports to the police to get people trying to end it arrested and the information they were gathering for the relevant authorities confiscated? Nope. They apparently do what the Boeing legal department wants them to do, not what is in the interests of the public or public safety. They decide to participate in the cover up by attacking the messenger of the fraud. Of course, maybe it is not incomptence or corruption that caused our public attorneys to act against their professional ethics. Maybe Boeing's chief outside law firm contributing to the campaign of the prosecutor who faces his first election for King County Prosecutor in a few months played a part. I don't know if Boeing is helping his election directly yet, but they have certainly proven themselves arrogant enough to do so. Souldn't these types of activities cause these prosecutors to get disbarred as well? It would seem so. I don't see the bar association condoning this type of behavior.

So, if private and public attorneys are becoming corrupted and are working together to silence people like me that seek to end corporate fraud and don't seem to face any consequences for that corruption, what is the hope for us not to devolve further into some kind of Fascist nightmare of a state where corporations run all branches of the government, and not us? Individual attorneys that want to take on such monoliths at their own cost? Who would end up getting disbarred? The corrupt attorneys or the ones seeking to end that corruption?

We are at a dangerous point in America, especially when a progressive State like Washington experiences this kind of corruption bordering on Fascism. Will it get better, or worse? Will someone in the legal systems of governments and corporations stand up and actually do their jobs like they are supposed to even if they won't get disbarred if they violate bar association ethical requirements? Will anyone at the bar association stand up and do their jobs to get rid of these people that are affronts to their profession?

Who knows? I am just one insignificant "victim" of unethical public and private attorneys working together that should probably be disbarred for incomptence and/or corruption. There will be others, unless someone, like I did in my job as an inspector at Boeing, stands up and actually does their job with the required ethics.

Boeing seems to really be at a sweet spot financially right now, and this time is really what the fraud documented on this site is all about, and why Boeing refuses to end it to this day—its all about the money. Remember Boeing’s solely Cost and Schedule driven production process documented elsewhere on this site of which this blog is a part? The “pushing garbage out the door” production system that one of the inspectors on my crew rightly called it? Right now is the reason for all of this fraud—the “sweet spot” where Boeing is pumping out airplanes (or “garbage” in the view of my inspector coworker) at such a clip and so cheaply with every corner than can be legally and illegally cut (as documented on my web site with the massive rollerstamping of inspections off that were never actually done) that they are reaping immense rewards to the bottom line for their lawbreaking—much more money than any bank robber has succeeded in stealing or has even ever dreamed of stealing.

It is this time that Boeing was seeking to maximize the rewards of by refusing on multiple occasions to end the fraud in quality assurance I brought to the Boeing Board’s attention. To Boeing, the ends (the bottom line) surely justifies the means, just as it does for the bank robber who doesn't care how many people are killed during the robbery as long as they meet their targeted quota of cash. If you look at today, it seems Boeing has succeeded in their plans—the stock price is up, profits are record breaking, and they are well on their way to getting anyone who dared to stop their bottom line ballooning fraud that places millions of innocent lives at extra risk sent to prison by a prosecutor’s office that will do their “dirty work,” no matter how offensive to the public interest and to the law.

They likely sit in their board rooms smoking cigars and snickering that the people that attempted to bring them to justice or to compliance with the law now are “on their way to prison” instead of themselves, who they deep down know are the ones who should be put there. They also know life is not fair, which they know to be true by their own position in life—a position that would have been filled by a vastly more ethical person if life was indeed fair, and people were rewarded for good deeds, and not rewarded for breaking all the rules in order to get the required result. Since life is not fair, they have no obligation to cede their positions to the people that would occupy those spots in a hypothetical “life is fair” world. Indeed, if they did so their executive coworkers would consider them to have gone insane.

Such is executive life at the most arrogant company on the face of the planet. It is why the morale of those that don’t only care about the money is so low. They see the company talk about ethics once a year, then watch the rest of the year as their management acts any way but ethical. They, as I did, know the way they are supposed to act, and it definitely is not to turn your boss in for unethical conduct to the oxymoronically named “Boeing Ethics Department.” To do so would be suicide for your career, as it was partially for mine. They might just place you under surveillance, considering you a threat (albeit a small one) to their continued unethical existence, as seems to have happened in my case.

If you are placed under such surveillance for turning in an ethics complaint and therefore exposing yourself as a potential problem for the company, be sure you don’t so much as spit on the sidewalk. If you do and they consider you enough a threat to their criminal enterprise, they will have you prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law for doing so after terminating you to keep you from witnessing and documenting more wrongdoing at the company. Believe me, I know. Even if your only crime was to attempt to make public their crimes to get the public to pressure their representatives to end them after you had exhausted all other official channels to end the fraud after Boeing ensured those agencies did not expose, investigate, and/or end it, Boeing will make special efforts to come after you. Believe me, I know. They will lie to the police, making you out to be a corporate espionage artist, when the know intimately what you did was not for your own benefit, but placed your job at risk in order to protect lives—lives Boeing intentionally has placed at extra risk just to maximize their Bottom line.

So, whatever you do—do not go to the Boeing “Ethics” Department under any circumstances. In doing so you are exposing yourself to extreme risks to your own livelihood, while getting your ethical complaints actually investigated and righted, no matter how much evidence you have of wrongdoing, is next to nil, especially if it is an allegation against a corrupt manager.

Boeing protects internal lawbreaking if the risk reward/ratio makes it lucrative, as it does in the fraud in the QA department noted on my site that makes all inspections of Boeing planes extremely suspect. They, not you who fund them, own the FAA, which should be the agency to bring in the FBI to stop this fraud. But like Arthur Anderson and Enron, the FAA is an enabler and protector of this fraud that even they cannot say with a straight face does not place lives at risk, in the highly unlikely event they confirmed its obvious existance at all.

While Boeing may go down in history as the Enron that was never caught because of their carefully cultivated power over our public officials and agencies (even to the point that Washington State’s two Senators, who are Democrats and will fight for the people on all other occasions, will not touch Boeing, no matter how detailed someone documents the crimes of Boeing placing lives at risk and sends such evidence to them. They will stand up against the president, but they cower when faced with the power of Boeing. Indeed, they have been called the “Senators from Boeing,” and while you can expect them to stand up for the public’s rights against powerful corporations, just don’t expect them to do so against Boeing, even if the very lives of the public is at risk. Unfortunately, they are still better than Republicans, even if they act just like a Republican would and carry Boeing’s water, no matter how bad its stench.

Boeing depends on time making all things pass, while its corruption endures. People naïve enough like me to expect their government representatives to grow a backbone and even stand up to Boeing’s misconduct will come and go, thanks to corrupt government agencies under Boeings control that should be investigating and prosecuting the massive fraud at Boeing rather than the people that tried to end that fraud when they refused to do their jobs. When the police and prosecutors ignore obvious fraud at major corporations in their city and county, and even condone and protect such fraud by arresting and prosecuting people like me that won’t stop their efforts to do so any other way, then who is left to end such Boeing fraud? The media? Public outrage? Me? Our Democracy only works if everyone takes part in it and performs their role in its continuance. In this kind of Fascism that results when Boeing controls our government more than we do, Democracy cannot hope to be restored without brave action by the media investigating who is right, and who is wrong in an unbiased way and reporting it, or the public becoming outraged by corporate sponsored Fascism taking root in America and writing letters to the editors and to their Congress asking for action, and protesting if they do not act.

Boeing is not an evil corporation. It is just now run by a cabal of corrupt individuals that, whether they realize it or not, are just a number like they treat any other employee and should be just as replaceable. Boeing can survive this era of internal corruption only if it casts off all managers involved in this corruption, releases its control of government officials and has those it knows are guilty of crimes (quid pro quo jobs, etc.) prosecuted and begins anew with a totally different culture. I think employees would like this new culture of actual integrity—not the carefully molded by PR shell of integrity Boeing has today that hides the rotten core beneath it. It would be more like the “family” atmosphere before the unholy McDonnell Douglas merger that infected Boeing management with that culture that ultimately destroyed the company. Employees could follow the laws and regulations again without fear of reprisal for doing so. Ethics complaints would be actually investigated and the chips let fall where they may, especially in cases of management misconduct.

Of course, a new class of employees at Boeing would be “harassed” and “retaliated” against. The employees who participated in and took advantage of the old corrupt system to persecute anyone trying to end that corruption would be endangered. No longer could they have their “welfare jobs” in inspection—they would actually have to get off their arses and do their jobs before stamping inspections off. They would have to do their critical jobs well, or they would be let go. This would result in the most egregious rollerstampers being fired because they would not know how to actually perform the inspection jobs they had been doing for years. And inspectors who did their jobs would be recognized and rewarded, not harassed and fired as in the past corrupt system. The company culture would exist again that was always legally required to exist, but because of Boeing’s absolute power over oversight and law enforcement agencies, was never required to exist because it was more lucrative for those government officials to let chaos and corruption ensue.

Boeing is doing so well financially now and their competitor is so on the rocks that they can actually afford to become the ethical company with integrity described above and still have healthy margins. If they did so, they might find that actually building an airplane whose quality, safety, and reliability was ensured as required is more lucrative to the bottom line than just pretending to do so via happier customers who become repeat buyers more often and might be willing to pay a premium for airplanes that were actually inspected when they were produced to ensure they met engineering requirements and were in a condition for safe operation, and might be happier with the fewer turnbacks, late departures, in flight engine shutdowns, maintenance costs, and hull loss accidents that resulted from Boeing acting with integrity of its own free will, and adhering to regulations and laws rather than ignoring them when they think it is convenient for the bottom line (as they did in the QRS-11 case I helped “out,” as well as the inspection fraud detailed on my site).

And maybe then Boeing people can feel real pride in what they built and delivered to customers—a pride that people like me close to the production process have never felt because of the fraud we witnessed. Sure, mechanics and inspectors feel pride today in what they produced just as they would feel pride in anything they produced, no matter what its objective quality was, but a pride born of ignorance (intentional or not) cannot match a pride born rightly from fact. No, not a pride born out of the current statistics that, for instance, in the case of the 747, would make a “prideful” person have to justify their pride by stating that “I built 1369 widgets and only 45 of them crashed with only 3757 people killed, but a pride that matched the data, say, “I built 1369 widgets and all are still in service and no one died or was injured on any of them.”
I realize the statistics I quoted are not perfect (from www.aviation-safety.net ), but they are used for illustrative purposes only. I think some of those fatalities might have to do with navigation systems making the plane stray into hostile territory, etc.

The point being, that would you feel pride in a product you built if you built 1369 of them, 45 of them failed at their intended purpose, and 3,757 people die as a result? I doubt it. I’m just trying to show that pride can be based on ignorance of the facts, as I think it is in many cases at Boeing. Sure, you could have thought you did the best job you could in your part of building the plane, but even if you were not wrong and your work was flawless, that doesn’t mean the guy next to you didn’t screw up and the defect wasn’t found by the decrepit quality system noted on my web site. So, if you know some people don’t care as much as you or can’t do as good a job as you and you know about all of the rollerstamping going on that lets such defects deliver to customers undetected, how can you feel any pride in what you built? Correct. You can’t. That doesn’t mean, however, other people won’t.

So hopefully one day will come when Boeing will not be so dependent on government corruption, and instead will focus on complying with laws and regulations. Then, perhaps, you can feel pride instead of revulsion for your management, and feel real, deserved pride in your work without trying to discount people’s deaths as meaningless in the scheme of things, as is commonly done today.

Many people have focused on Boeing management’s care less attitude about its own employees, where they are treated more like cockroaches than human beings. But that is just scratching the surface of the true nature of Boeing management. A much more insidious nature lies beneath as noted on my web site that is much more important to end because it places lives, and not just livelihoods in danger.

At least, if I’ve done anything against this self-perpetuating fraud at Boeing it is to ensure blame falls where it is due when the next plane crashes because of this fraud. They cannot truthfully say now that they weren’t aware of the fraud going on under their watch. Or its cover up, of which my prosecution is an integral part.