Just over two years ago, on August 1st, 2006, Jim McNerney, CEO of Boeing, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) concerning the Boeing Global Settlement Agreement between the Justice Department and Boeing that settled the Boeing Tanker scandal and the Boeing theft and use of competition sensitive EELV bid data from Lockheed Martin to rig their bid and win the EELV competition for a relative pittance compared to what the DOJ career attorneys had wanted before they were overruled by Boeing friendly higher-ups at the DOJ.

Although he was obligated to tell the truth before the committee, he did not--especially at the point in the hearing in which he answered a question posed by John Warner, Chairman of the SASC at the time, concerning the existance of protections for whistleblowers at Boeing.

McNerney then lied a string of lies that any whistleblower at Boeing (or most likely, a whistleblower fired from Boeing like me, as whistleblowers are an endangered species and fair game until extinct at Boeing as soon as they out themselves as such to Boeing management) would be astounded that he would dare lie.

(Incidentally, Paul McNulty, the Deputy Attorney General who testified for the agreement just before McNerney testified that day, later resigned in disgrace from his job after being caught perjuring himself during testimony on the U.S. Attorney firing scandal before another committee of Congress. McNerney, however, is still Boeing CEO after arrogantly misleading Congress during the August 1st, 2006, SASC GSA hearing regarding the state of Boeing ethics programs and treatment of whistleblowers.)

The noted part of the hearing dealing with whistleblowers at Boeing is the only part of the hearing in my letter sent to every member of the SASC committee before the hearing that appears to have been read by any member of the committee at all, in the form of Senator Warner's question to McNerney. You can read my letters to the SASC concerning the GSA on my website.

Bonnie Soodik, at the time the head of the Boeing "Office of Internal Governance" (which, to whistleblowers like me, is an office akin to what the Gestapo was to anyone who opposed the Nazis) was also at the hearing.

But Doug Bain, former Chief Counsel of Boeing who personally saw to it I was retaliated against for my whistleblowing as one of his last acts at Boeing along with settling the GSA with the DOJ, wasn't there, though his replacement was. What should have been a lambasting of Boeing, however, turned out to be just a back slapping meeting all around. That is, when Boeing wasn't lying about its ethics program and whistleblower "protections."

View the below video of just one part of McNerney’s factually challenged testimony on that day before Congress and read my comments denoting the “factual errors” within it after it:



Click this link to download and view a small media file of the noted portion of Boeing CEO McNerney's testimony to Congress that makes a mockery of the truth regarding Boeing's true treatment of whistleblowers.

If you need to install RealPlayer, please click here.


Now that you have watched the video, I’ll point out where most of the mistruths are in Mr. McNerney’s portion of testimony to Congress in the video (my comments about the testimony are in parenthesis within it below) As you can see, they are numerous, indeed:


SENATE ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN WARNER:

I listened carefully, and it may well be that you covered this, but I'd like to focus on it.

We have learned through experience in our federal government problems (happen?) and we have instituted a whistleblower -- actually, it's a federal statute. And carefully in there is protection for any retaliation or reprisal.

I didn't hear as crisply as I'd like to what you have as a component of this overall and very impressive program you laid out (of) that tried and, I think, tested concept.

(Senator John Warner, who was chairman of the SASC at the time of this hearing, having to give up the chairmanship some four months later due to the Democrat’s winning control of the Senate in the 2006 elections, is one of the best Republicans in Congress. He possesses a code of honor and integrity many Republican lawmakers lost long ago due to the fact they let power corrupt them, and corrupt them nearly absolutely. But even a Republican with the stature of Warner has problems, as shown in this hearing.

Republicans, by the very platform they all rule by, share one “pair of pants” with business—especially powerful corporations like Boeing. So, they are limited in what they can say or do against even knowingly corrupt corporations, since being “Siamese twins” with them, they will kill themselves and their ideals of government by, for, and of business if they are too harsh with industry and investigate corrupt corporations such as Boeing in an unbiased manner and let the chips fall where they may.

Even Senator Warner however participates in the worst partisanship in the Senate most of the time with his votes and in preventing bills from coming to a vote of the senate by supporting his Republican leadership’s many filibusters of bills in misguided support of business concerns (real or imagined) over the common good (what is good for business and workers).

John McCain (one of the few SASC members to even show up for this hearing) deserved much credit at one time for being an exception to this rule in the case of his investigation into Boeing and Air Force misconduct. Sadly, it was a just a relatively small “maverick” phase in his Senate career and he was not consistent in it.

Even though he asked some of the tougher questions during this hearing, he participated in the back slapping all around as well, and was not as tough by far as he should have been. Sadly, McCain had to suck up again to the corrupt “I’ll scratch your back if you’ll scratch mine” ethos between the Republican party and the worst and most arrogant in industry in order to win the nomination and get the resources with which to run his campaign for president.

Tellingly, he made an “error” in his first debate with Obama when mentioning the 6.9 billion dollars he saved the taxpayers by killing the first tanker deal by mentioning Boeing by name during his boast about it. However, he did not make the same “mistake” during the second and third debates when making the same statement—he made a point not to mention Boeing in relation to the nameless tanker contract he said he killed thereby “saving” taxpayers 6.9 billion dollars during those last two debates. He apparently made a decision that to do so would hurt his electoral chances. But I digress.

I hope even you Republicans out there can appreciate why someone as anti-corporate corruption as I am does not favor Republicans in their present form.

But unfortunately, the Democrats have not been as good as they should have been by far in standing up against corporate corruption, but as a majority of Americans have finally decided (quoting a famous movie line), they are now “our only hope” in arresting corporate fraud and the havoc it has wreaked across our economy.

Senator Warner’s “this overall and very impressive program” comment during his question and other comments during even the tougher portion of his questioning belie his bias toward even corporations still as ethically challenged as Boeing, even at their lowest points, at which Boeing was during this hearing.)

MCNERNEY: We try to make as broad a set of provisions and mechanics available to our people, who want to bring forward problems that they've identified in the company.

Just as background, we get 12,000 inquiries a year into our ethics hotline, so to speak, which can be reached either via the telephone or via the Web. Most of these are inquiries about issues, how to do the right thing, information to help them do their jobs better. Some are serious matters.

(And there lies the rub and one of the huge and fatal flaws of the “Boeing Ethics Hotline” program Mr. McNerney is describing trying (and succeeding) to dodge Senator Warner’s real question: Boeing decides themselves what is a “serious matter.” And, as you might guess, what Boeing decides is a “serious matter” and therefore acts in some half or no hearted way to stop is a very small subset of the true number of “serious matters” reported to it through this system. I should know. When a company decides that inspectors rollerstamping mandatory inspections off on inspections of safety critical products like commercial and military airplanes is not a “serious matter,” then you can see the integrity the “Boeing Ethics” system really has, or, more accurately, does not have.)

WARNER: And that 12,000 is internal, or…?

MCNERNEY: Internal.

WARNER: Internal to the company?

(The reason Senator Warner seems surprised by McNerney’s answer to his question is that Senator Warner wasn’t asking about internal whistlblowers, quite obviously.

In the common usage of the term, “whistleblower” is almost always someone who has gone outside the company or government agency they work for once all internal efforts to get the company or agency to do the right thing have failed.

“Whistleblower” is not a term that characterizes people who do the right thing in a company and bring problems to their management’s attention who then fixes those problems. They are not “whistleblowers.” They are just good employees.

When they actually become a true whistleblower is when they bring problems or corruption to the attention of management and that management decides not to correct the problem, as they are fine with the problem or corruption continuing, and in many cases, are the root cause of the corruption themselves. Then they go outside the company to the relevant enforcement agency, law enforcement organization, and/or the press if government agencies are also compromised. That is what happened to me and many other real whistleblowers.

Mr. McNerney simply totally dodges the question by talking about internal controls Boeing implemented as part of the façade of reaction to being caught in the EELV and Tanker scandals with their “hand in the cookie jar.” Unfortunately Senator Warner does not dare to correct Mr. McNerney’s intentional dodge of the question or ask about what he was truly asking about at the end of McNerney’s “answer”—controls Boeing has or does not have in place for actual whistleblowers.)

MCNERNEY: This is Boeing people often asking questions, trying to figure out how to do the right thing.

WARNER: And that's been in place how long?

MCNERNEY: That's been in place since two years, I believe. At least since '03.

But the point is that some of these are serious matters, occasionally anonymous. And one of the mechanisms we have that directly bears on your question, Mr. Chairman, is we have a tracking system that we implement after someone comes forward. And they're often concerned about some kind of retaliation or intimidation post the disclosure. And we've got an actual tracking system where we work with people, regularly check in with them, and ask them in their view, are they experiencing any kind of retaliation?
And we track for a long time.

(This is the biggest lie in this portion of Mr. McNerney’s testimony. I have more experience than most with Boeing’s internal and external “tracking system” of retaliation against people that use the “ethics hotline” and whistleblowers like me who reported Boeing corruption to the relevant governmental oversight agency, and in my experience, no such tracking system existed at the time of Mr. McNerney’s statement, and I was an employee of Boeing for all but just over two months before Mr. McNerney made this ludicrous statement.

There is, however, a “tracking system” of sorts in place, although it is antithetical to the one Mr. McNerney describes. Most “callers” to the ethics hotline and actual whistleblowers of Boeing misconduct to government agencies are tracked with a tracking system, however that tracking system is much like the automated tracking system on an anti-aircraft or anti-missile gun, its sole purpose to dish out retaliation to those who report misconduct (especially management misconduct) to Boeing’s “ethics hotline,” or dare to become real whistleblowers and go outside the corrupt company in search of real action to stem the fraud they witnessed within the company.

Take my case for example. I was promised no retaliation against me by the Chief Counsel of Boeing, Doug Bain, after I had gone to the FAA and his office to stop the rampant fraud I witnessed in Boeing Quality Assurance Management. Did that mean I was not retaliated against? No. When I was retaliated against, did Boeing’s Chief Counsel stop it when I reported it? Also no. He just showed up at my workplace to ensure such retaliation was “on track.” And all of this was prior to my later contacts with reporters to go public with the story of Boeing Quality Assurance Management fraud that Boeing ostensibly fired me for.

My two contacts with the ethics department of Boeing were actually because of retaliation by Boeing management at my workplace against me for my whistleblowing and for my trying to do my job of inspection with some minimal level of integrity against management’s intimidation that I do otherwise.

That in itself proves no such tracking system existed, for they would have purportedly have contacted me before I endured enough harassment and retaliation in order to have no choice but contact them about it.

So, if you can’t believe Boeing’s Chief Counsel or CEO, who can you trust at the company? The answer is obvious.)

And that has been…And everybody in the company knows we do that.

(Another lie. How can everyone at Boeing know such a tracking system as Mr. McNerney describes exists when it clearly does not exist as he stated, and the vast majority of people at Boeing never heard of it? Especially people like me who went through both avenues to submit reports—both the “Boeing Ethics hotline (email actually, in my case)” and to the Boeing Legal department’s highest official?

Simply telling someone reporting ethical misconduct that retaliation won’t be tolerated, and then not only tolerating it, but helping initiate it and turning a blind eye to it as happened in my few cases is not such a “tracking system.”)

So that has been very helpful to get at that issue.

(Another untruth. I told you this portion of his testimony was riddled with them, one on top of another, in this case. How can something be helpful in alleviating people’s fears of retaliation if it does not exist?

They neither “regularly check in with them” nor do they “track for a long time” as McNerney prevaricated.

They do however have a system in which they track what they view as problematic “do gooders” that come forward and report things to “Boeing Ethics” or Boeing Legal, but that system is for ensuring retaliation happens, not the opposite as Mr. McNerney disingenuously told the committee.)

WARNER: And could you address the protection of any reprisal against him, or adverse to...

MCNERNEY: Well, that is a punishable offense in and of itself at our company -- anybody caught even looking like they're performing some kind of reprisal against somebody. It's a very serious matter. And that is an offense in and of itself.

(Another whopper! Of course, if he is speaking about an hourly worker performing a reprisal against another hourly worker he may be correct in a few cases, as hourly or non-management salaried workers are viewed as expendable by management at Boeing.

However, in the context of the question and answer, Mr. McNerney’s answer is another fabrication, for in one vast area of ethical complaints to “Boeing Ethics,” in fact the opposite is true—in the most common form of ethical violation at Boeing as shown by the very violations of the law Mr. McNerney sat down before the committee to obfuscate—ethical violations by Boeing management.

There is a modus operandi in “Boeing Ethics” that treats Boeing management as untouchable when it comes to ethical violations, especially for the most common allegations against Boeing management—those made by some non-management employee reporting directly or indirectly to that manager.

Any such person reporting Boeing management misconduct to “Boeing Ethics” had better have an unquestionable videotape of the reported manager’s misconduct, because the “rules of evidence” are vastly different for managers and non-managers who have ethical complaints against them. No such “gotcha on tape” evidence would be required for a non-manager to be investigated and pilloried for an alleged ethical breach, however, nothing lesser would be needed to make an ethical complaint against a Boeing manager “stick.” Never mind that any employee possessing such videotaped or taped evidence would be fired by Boeing and not allowed to present it because such taping is against company policy (for good reason, if you are one of the many unethical Boeing managers).

So Boeing management is pretty much teflon coated when it comes to ethical complaints, contrary to Mr. McNerney’s fabrication in this Congressional hearing of a “Boeing ethics system” that ignores such “hierarchy.” Nothing could be further from the truth at Boeing, and Mr. McNerney would have known that at the time of this testimony.

Sure, there are limited exceptions where management can be brought down by an ethical complaint from a junior employee. One of the very few would be when the manager’s misconduct threatens to cost the company much more in court if the company does not get rid of the manager when someone complains of their misconduct.

This applies most commonly in the case of when a manager is accused of sexual harassment. Every other type of harassment of employees is tolerated well at Boeing, it seems, but with a valid sexual harassment claim, the company will get rid of the manager to reduce its exposure to lawsuit in court. This is because of the success of (mainly women, of course) pressing for and winning huge judgements in court against companies who tolerate such behavior by management.

Even in these situations, however, Boeing management is treated with kid gloves by their management. They are usually given the most advantagous exit from the company they could hope for under such a situation. Many are given the option to simply retire rather than be fired for their documented sexual harassment.

I know of two such cases out of the three I “witnessed” over the years at Boeing.

The first one was when I was on the A-6 Re-wing project and my general supervisor was walked in on “boffing” a sealer lady on top of a desk by one of his managers who was checking out what I believe were noises he heard from the unoccupied office floor above the office area for the program. He walked into the office and his manager stopped and glanced at him for a moment, them went back to his “business” of “boffing” the sealer employee on the desk.

I’m not sure who made the complaint, the manager who walked in or the sealer, but shortly after the news of what had happened flowed through the small factory the general supervisor was given the choice of retiring or being fired. He retired, of course.

The other incident was with two managers at the Propulsion Systems Division of Boeing where I last worked. Two manufacturing managers had (I don’t know why the employee was with them, but it was supposedly business related) stopped by a strip joint while commuting from plant to plant with this woman employee who was a decade or decades their junior.

The woman (hourly) employee complained, and the General Supervisor involved was allowed to retire. Many people on the production floor enjoyed his departure as he was a very unliked character of questionable ethics before the strip club affair.

The first line manager involved apparently did not have the time to retire, so he was allowed to take a lead hourly position at Boeing in another area he may or may have not qualified to “bump back into” from his management job.

So Boeing is fairly consistent in my experience in giving sexual harassers “retirement” or alternate job “parachutes” rather than the firings hourly or salaried employees would have gotten in the same circumstances.

“Hierarchy free” “Boeing Ethics” program it is anything but.

There are even exceptions to this "rule," however, depending on which manager you are and who are your other friends in management.

Sometimes Boeing managers are let off scott free for such misconduct while the “sexually harassed” woman is the one fired.

One such incident happened in Everett when I worked there. A manager was “boffing” a woman sealer in a car in the parking lot outside the Everett plant. The bouncing motion of the car caught the attention of Boeing security, who found the two in a compromising position.

What was the result of the “Boeing Ethics” investigation? Hard to believe, unless you know the hierarchical “Boeing Ethics” system like subject matter experts like I do, but the sealer woman was fired because the manager was having sex with her in the car outside of her established break or lunch times. Since there is no established breaks or lunch times for Boeing managers, the manager was allowed to walk away scott free from the incident!

In fact, since Boeing management did not want to apparently have his well known actions to be a distraction in his area at the time of the incident, he gained a coveted management job on the flightline when they transferred him to another area to make him less known for his exploits. That is where I saw him, when I was working on the 777 PED (Passenger Entry Door) crew on the flightline.

So, management for the most part protects their own, and the “Boeing Ethics” program participates in that protection on behalf of management contrary to what Mr. McNerney testified to Congress here.)

WARNER: Was that laid out in this plan as a part of the plan?

MCNERNEY: Yes, it is. That is...

(Another fabrication.)

WARNER: And are you able to supply that to the committee?

MCNERNEY: Yes.

(Oops! I wonder what they had to gin up to submit to the committee on the issue? Unfortunately, due to such records not being available publicly without an act of Congress, we may never know. Since Senator Warner did not correct Mr. McNerney’s dodging of his question, it is doubtful that anything supplied to the committee in response to his request would be closely scrutinized even if it was in fact produced.)

WARNER: I think it would be helpful if it could be made part of the record.

MCNERNEY: OK.

WARNER: Thank you.

End of portion of testimony.

So, Mr. McNerney's fabrications of the effectiveness and even existence of the "Boeing Ethics Program" before congress aside (making him much like his two predecessor CEOs at Boeing), the above gives you some insight into the real "Boeing Ethics" program and how it serves to protect Boeing mismanagement and corruption and retaliate against those that dare to report misconduct in Boeing management through this corrupt "ethics" program. When even your own ethics program is corrupt, it is no huge surprise to find out the management of the company is similarly corrupt.

Now free of the "requirement" to have the facade of an ethics program as described above as part of the GSA as the GSA is now expired, "Boeing Ethics," at the behest of still corrupt Boeing management, is more free than ever to push the envelope and become the most ethically challenged "ethics program" at any corporation (if they weren't before the GSA expired), if they so choose.

Stockholders of Boeing don't have much farther to go than here to find out why management at Boeing is so broken and is so very unlikely to correct its own actions that will place the whole company at risk when oversight returns soon to Washington, D.C.

The following email was to Tim Vranna, who at the time was the managing "Senior Aviation Safety Inspector" who worked just under Kevin Mullin, at the time the FAA's Northwest Regional Manufacturing Inspection District Office Manager. "Ms. Lipski," was Vi Lipski, at the time Manager of the Transport Airplane Directorate, above Mr. Mullin.


From: GERRY EASTMAN
Sent: Tuesday, July 23, 2002 11:14 PM
To: tim.vranna@faa.gov
Subject: Letter request.


Dear Tim,

During our last phone conversation you requested a copy of the letter I received from FAA headquarters. You will find it attached. The signature on the letter is of Margaret Gilligan, Deputy Associate Administrator for Regulation & Certification, for Nicholas A. Sabatini, Associate Administrator for Regulation & Certification (see website http://www.faa.gov/avr/ if you have not associated with them in the past and you would like more information on their piece of the FAA pie). As you can see, the issue to be investigated is "your concerns of the (sic) Quality Assurance Management at the Boeing Company Commercial Airplane Group." In my letter to Administrator Garvey, I made it very clear that my concerns were about the Quality Assurance Management corruption at BCAG, not so much the havoc that corruption has caused to the BCAG Quality System, although that damage too must be documented and remedied, along with the management corruption that caused it. Hopefully your investigation is following those lines. My meeting with Tom Nakamichi on 1/11 and my email to Soheila Khosravani, among many other things in my report bear out that my allegations you confirmed were not simple oversights by an incompetent management, but were intentional acts in violation of the law to "create more value" (make more money for Boeing's bottom line by defrauding our customers and you) via noncompliance with inspection requirements to be performed on our safety critical products.

Regarding our last phone conversation, I still reiterate that I do not believe any sabotage of our Quality System by BCAG QA Management should be considered a "trade secret" and therefore kept out of your report to me. Crimes cna never be considered "trade secrets" in my view. You, the FAA, has the power to make both Airbus and Boeing play to the same rules--and those rules should be all above board and non-criminal. And they should especially not be criminal behavior, as I have detailed in my report, that results in possible past and future loss of many lives. I reiterate my staunch belief that individuals must pay heavy criminal and civil penalties for such QA Management corruption. That is the only way, If BCAG QA Management is left in place, to make QA Managers think twice before they similarly sabotage the QA System for profit again.

I realize it is difficult to investigate the very people that you may have had very amiable personal relationships with before my report. It is difficult to put aside feelings that "such a nice person" could have been lying to you all of the time when they told you they were doing their best to fix your concerns, when in reality they were dragging their feet on reforms while other QA management was at work trying to hobble the BCAG QA System further for "value." But past relationships must be put aside and the pure, hard data, like I have presented to you, looked at to find the truth in your investigation. I know how hard that can be. I had not wanted to believe the reality I have lived every day in the corrupt BCAG Quality System until Tom thrust that System in my face to view in all its unholy glory.

You might have wondered what experiences I have had while at Flight Test, across the street from PSD. You might have wondered if being in a different area of the BCAG QA System might have changed my belief, drawn from past personal experiences, that the BCAG QA System's corruption is systemic, across all of BCAG. If I was asked, "Has your past experience of systemic BCAG Quality System corruption been debunked by your transfer to Flight Test Inspection," I would not be able to say no, but I would have to say "hell no!" My desk is stationed in the Flight Test Lead office, a perfect position to keep track of the health of the Flight Test Quality System. And what I have heard in my short time there is not pretty, in the least. This is only the few things I can remember off the top of my head:

1. Engine runs are not being added to the Engine Logs (in effect, Boeing is lying about how much time is on the engines because of this). It is not a great amount of time, I guess, that an engine is tested on the ground, but I'm sure it adds up, especially on long test programs, or troubleshooting or testing engines on production aircraft (737 N2 tone comes to mind).

2. Shop routinely begins work before removals, work sheets, and NCM NCOs are written. When I said something about some struts I heard had been worked on without paper to authorize the work, an Airworthiness Inspector in the opposite cubicle said "Get over it. This is Flight Test."

3. When NT386 came in from Renton, apparently the pilots left the antiskid system off, burning up some tires on landing. During the troubleshooting and rework of that, a rudder message appeared on the maintenance display. It was checked out, and found to be a "hand tight" bolt in the rudder PCU system. I believe they also found a similar hand tight bolt in the Aileron system, also, on the supposedly fully inspected, flyable airplane. I know, and you probably know, that this is not the first instance of its kind on Renton roller stamped products.

4. (Name), Airworthiness Inspector said that his counterparts in Everett were allowing shop to do work without work sheets, and that "they would really be fucked" (his words) if you audited them.

5. You'd think these Airworthiness Inspectors would know what the hell they were doing, considering almost all of them have at least fifteen years with the Company. However, it seems not a day goes by when I don't hear them arguing between each other or among shifts as to what is the correct way to do their jobs, which they should know by now. It's the same old thing Tom told us about--"crews tearing themselves apart," with the inspectors who still believe in their jobs (like me) and the inspectors who don't care how or if they do their jobs (the ones that QA management is on the side of) sparring, with QA Management rooting for the "roller stamper" team. Do they step in and help the good QA in the fight as they ethically should? Hell no. They laugh on the sidelines as they watch inspectors like me get beaten up. A day or two ago it was the laughably simple subject of whether to write NCRs or REOs on BBJs. They kept arguing whether it was a delivered airplane or not. Eventually they found out it was still a Boeing airplane, even if BBJ had possession of it. So they had been writing REOs on BBJs apparently for quite some time, in error, as it was not a repair station airplane yet.

6. The QA Supervisor's main function at Flight Test seems to be to make sure there is not too many inspectors per airplane, which is the QA Supervisor's main trick to keep inspectors from really inspecting the airplane. They always seem shorthanded, and they loan out inspectors to Everett or Spares at the earliest opportunity to keep their headcount down. Of course, as always, inspection supervision is only concerned about how many hours an inspector spends on an airplane, not whether the inspector has enough time to inspect the jobs adequately. Once again, the are not doing their jobs, but only their bosses, Manufacturing Supervision's jobs, in only ensuring hourly beancount forecasts are not exceeded, and not ensuring their real jobs, ensuring Quality, are done. Like production QA, Flight Test QA spends more time trying to get rid of their inspectors than ensuring they do their jobs. Like self inspection in production QA, Flight Test QA Management is spending their time formulating schemes to get rid of the useless roller stamping inspectors after they trained them that way. It's something called "AML," and I don't know much about it.

7. (Name), A 34 year Boeing employee constantly gripes about what QA management is doing to the former integrity of the QA department, lamenting that "they have taken our power away to do anything." I guess he means that QA has become nothing more that a shell department that only looks like it is overseeing the work of Manufacturing. We have no power to actually do our jobs. I know that well. You know what happened to me when I tried to do my job. He is a mine of information.

8. Wonder of wonders! It is so uncanny how PSD was just a perfect example of the corruption of the rest of BCAG's Quality System. Guess what? The first two, and so far the only (they haven't called me back again yet (funny, that)) composite repair I have inspected at NBF (North Boeing Field) resulted in me having to write two FRR supplements for, guess what--insufficient cure of the parts! They were undercooked a full 30 minutes I believe, among other defects in the cure, and I could tell by the composite technician's reaction that noone had written up a discrepant cure before, just like at PSD!

So, I guess I'll leave it at that for now. As I said in my original 49 page report, I could go on forever about such items if I really tried to remember everything that happened recently, but I'll stop for now.

Feel free to call me on the cell phone, or any of the multiple other ways I gave you to contact me. I hope, in our last phone conversation, that your only investigating my "specific allegations" that were contrary to a specific FAA requirement did not mean you were giving yourself an out from investigating the items in my report that may require extra effort on your part to investigate. Remember, even though the FAA perhaps does not require a reallocation letter on engines or Unit Issue items, the FAA does require that we build our airplanes per type design, which lack of such reallocation letters would jeopardize. Also, I think I, and the public, deserve an unbiased and thorough investigation regardless of what you think of me or BCAG QA Managers personally. Let the chips fall where they may. The days of promoting the U.S Aviation industry are over. Safety of the public is now our chief concern.

In a meeting a few months ago at PSD, Tom said that you were close to pulling our PC. That kind of shocked me, as it obviously had nothing to do with my report at that time. I trust, if that was true, that with your investigation of my report, that such drastic action can at least be done in PSD's case while you are investigating the rest of BCAG with what you have learned in your investigation to confirm it's systemic proportions. Shutting PSD down for several weeks while it's Quality System is reconstructed from scratch and put under ethical management will definitely get the attention of the entire BCAG Management team, especially if you do not allow them to shift the work elsewhere.

I still think I deserve the chance to review Scott Peterson's responses to your letter confirming items in my report to give my opinion on the validity and appropriateness of their accusations/corrective actions. Please let me know when that opportunity comes. Please share this with Ms. Lipski as you think appropriate.

Sincerely,

Gerry Eastman

On rare occasions as a Boeing worker, your manager may actually express appreciation for your workgroup as being the company’s “most valuable asset.” The deluded in your group may actually feel your manager is expressing some genuine acknowledgement of the value of your workgroup’s hard work to the company itself. You know better, however.

The times when the company’s calling their workers “their most valuable asset” shows it’s true meaning for the company is in times like these, when their true value for their workers is laid bare for all to see.

The IAM (my union, of which I am still a member of even while “excommunicated” from Boeing for outing some of the bloodier skeletons in their closet to, unfortunately for the public, “Boeing owned” authorities and politicians) is now going through negotiations with the self described “most arrogant company on the face of the planet,” and Boeing’s arrogance is showing in full force during the process.

Despite a record 13 billion in profits over the last six years, the company is insisting on takeaways from union members in their “Best and Final Offer.” The medical plans proposed are riddled with them, despite medical cost increases moderating over the past few years from past excesses. They are even so “bottom line” and anti-worker focused that their contract denies workers a 40 cent per hour wage increase they would have gotten this month if the current contract had remained in force. They are taking advantage of the contract expiration to screw their “most valuable asset” in every way they can, in the proverbial ass, nonetheless.

This shows exactly what Boeing means by calling their workers to their faces their “most valuable asset”—they are not inferring that Boeing management values their workers in any way other that financially—it is merely an expression of what is chiefly on Boeing management’s minds when it relates to their workers, and especially unionized workers, who they cannot just pay whatever they wish to pay without negotiating with their representatives first.

Boeing views their workers as just numbers—financial numbers. Each is easily replaceable in Boeing’s view and has no value individually as a person to arrogant and heartless Boeing management. Boeing saying workers are their “most valuable asset” is not a complement to workers in any respect. It is just an acknowledgement by Boeing that it considers that the costs of pay and benefits for its workers are one of the largest line items in its budget, and therefore something it must cut in cost and numbers with the ruthlessness it has shown in the current IAM negotiations where their true view of employees as each having a target on their back for elimination has come into full view for all to see.

In fact, Boeing treats its employees like numbers almost every working day except yearly “family days,” where employees are showed how much they are valued by being offered the chance to come in on one of their few weekend days off to get free hotdogs and nearly valueless trinkets from Boeing suppliers for the kids.

Boeing managers even speak of employees like dirt and corpses, literally. Replacing employees who have left the company is called “backfilling.” When Boeing is behind on a program they speak of “throwing enough bodies at the problem to get on schedule.” They could use different terms that denoted they cared about their workers in these unguarded moments, but they do not. It is the Boeing corporate culture to treat their employees as valueless and worthless, except when it comes to the company money that they rue has to be spent on such mere “bodies.”

With the IAM negotiations, Boeing’s hardball tactics to pay not one more cent than they think they can possibly get away with is laid bare, laying bare their true lack of any respect for their workforce in the process.

Leading these negotiations on the part of Boeing is Doug Kight, a lawyer from Boeing’s infamously law breaking Boeing Legal Department. Mr. Kight was one of the senior attorneys there. He quite likely may know where all of the “bodies” are buried as far as Boeing’s “closet” full of skeletons goes. Being part of the Boeing Legal Department makes him part of a highly unethical group of lawyers that takes Boeing’s power and unequaled arrogance and don’t advise Boeing on how to stay within the law, as you might expect such an in-house legal department to do, but they instead advise Boeing on how to go about continuing to break the law, as I have noted elsewhere on my site. This malpractice of the law makes these lawyers accessories to the law breaking they are abetting.

But with the full arrogance and power of the Boeing company behind them and depending on them to continue to find ways for Boeing to push the envelope of corruption for further bottom line gains, these complicit attorneys apparently have little to worry about in being held accountable personally for such complicity. In fact, the opposite is true. Look at Mr. Kight's and other Boeing inside and outside attorney's houses and you will find that there are great rewards in so consistently helping the company do the wrong thing and leaving wrecked lives and our national security in the dust.

So, the union likely knew just what it was up against when Boeing assigned one of its best “bag men” as its chief negotiator. There is a reason Boeing calls one of its own programs for employees the “e-legal” program. And that reason is their total absence of any respect for the law due to their arrogance. When they were caught selling illegally militarily sensitive guidance chips that could be removed and “reverse engineered" for use for more accurate and reliable missiles as components of airliners to China and other proscribed countries, Boeing did not comply with our country's State Department’s demands for them to stop doing so without the required export licenses. They essentially just told our State Department to “shove it” and kept delivering that technology illegally as part of airliners to proscribed countries just so they could meet their delivery schedules and revenue and profit goals, our national security to Boeing's execs and attorneys be damned.

I have been through three strikes in my Boeing career. All were strikes that never had to happen if the company would have just sat down and negotiated in good faith with the union. Instead, Boeing avails itself of its habit of breaking regulations and laws by engaging in only surface bargaining, then just throwing down a months before written BAFO on the table at the last moment and telling the union to take it or leave it.

They also engage in other illegal activities such as what the union just exposed: Negotiating with individual workers rather than the union by in essence polling individual workers on what the minimum they would accept would be.

They do this not only because of their arrogant disdain for following the laws and regulations, but also for their goal of getting the best contract they could get for their own personal goals (management’s) approved via the best outcome they could envision—a vast majority of workers voting against the contract but just a few votes over one third of those workers voting not to strike, resulting in the contract the workers don’t want being accepted by default by the union as they cannot under those circumstances call a strike to force the company back to the negotiating table.

The company could care less if the vast majority of workers would be pissed off and resent the company for such an outcome. After all, worker morale has never been a real concern of Boeing management—getting the absolute cheapest possible “bodies” to do the work for their money is, instead. They are confident their corrupt management can “crack the whip” and make disaffected workers do their jobs despite poor morale. After all, they are just BEMS ID’d numbered “bodies” to Boeing management, any and all replaceable with a cheaper worker per the contract’s overly long and steep progression step increases if the senior workers at full pay rates can be made angry enough to leave.

Hopefully the workers will have sense enough to vote against this purposely low balled contract by Boeing and strike for their dignity and the interest of themselves as well as the other workers at Boeing and in the community whose wages and benefits are highly influenced by this IAM contract.

They will need good luck and hard work and sacrifice against the forces of arrogance, greed, and lawlessness that is the Boeing of today. I have helped more than most in last strikes. This time I won’t be able to be there, sadly. A good union man, I've never even thought about crossing the line. With Boeing, however, crossing any line, legal or not, to reach management’s personal financial goals is par for the course.

Now you know where the real greed lies--and it isn't with the union. Many non-thinking people of modest means have been brainwashed into believing Boeing workers are lazy and greedy and should be thankful for whatever scraps Boeing throws them, and if they don't like that, they should just leave their jobs rather than try to improve them. Such people are the worst miscreants among us. They have been raised to be management boot lickers and they will forever hold that lowly place and decry any worker who does not also bow down to their management and also lick their "boots." That is the workforce that we need to get rid of in this country--not the fine fighting machinists that even have raised those lowly miscreant bootlickers' wages by their bravery and sacrifice in standing up to their corrupt and greedy management. So if you are of the noted miscreant's beliefs, do everyone a favor and remove your uninformed and cowardly ass from this country and move to a fascist country that fits your corporate programmed belief system. Last I checked, the Constitution stated this was a country of people, and not of corporations and their boot lickers.

(Later comment--sometimes you re-read your stuff and are amazed. Perhaps too emotional at the end. Taking the other people's misinformed side in an argument is not always wise. We need the union haters here to help pay taxes for the stuff they supported, such as the Iraq War. Maybe some day they will lose their irrational hate for unions. But their is always a cure for the "union problem" if those who want them to go away want them to go away--treat workers fairly and with the respect they are due. Unfortunately companies like to take advantage of their workers in being Scrooge-like with pay, benefits, and raises, as well as taking advantage of the management-employee relationship to take their personal problems out on their employees. Until companies begin to do right by their workers, there will always be a merket for unionization. That is capitalism, which some capitalists seem to ignore. Unions are the hired representatives of the workers they serve.)

I apologize to all of you out there who have hoped that I could put the brakes on at least some of the fraud at Boeing that I have documented on this blog, my website, and in other correspondence and you may have witnessed yourself, but dealing with another disaster related to Boeing's not so subtle efforts to destroy my life for trying to bring some light to the dark corners of their closet of skeletons has taken up all of my time of late.

I have been going through a divorce, and there are many of you who know more than I what that entails. I certainly could use any advice any of you may have, especially for a man involved in a divorce in a system seemingly stacked against our gender, even if only older children are involved who want to live with their dad full time.

Many whistleblowers, I'm told, end up in divorces after some megalith corporation they have blown the whistle on, like I did against Boeing, has attempted to ruin their lives like Boeing has largely succeeded in ruining mine.

My case is not new in this regard. Such stresses that Boeing and a corrupt (Republican) King County Prosecutor's Office has imposed on my life in an effort to destroy me so I am no longer a threat (in Boeing's case) to the continuance of their corruption expose the strengths or weaknesses of a marraige. (As a side note, it is too bad in this day of a two party system that being Republican equates to being corrupt, and for protecting the corruption of powerful benefactors like Boeing, in the King Conuty Prosecutor's case.)

Although I have met several couples over the years in similar whistleblower situations as mine, I have never met one such couple in which their marraige was not strengthened through the trials imposed by the corrupt entity they were dealing with, although I know that that is not the norm for some, like in my case.

It would seem logical that a wife or husband would come to the aid of their spouse and support them like never before when they are under attack by an obviously corrupt private or government entity, as I was. Especially so when marraige vows infer such care for each other--that marraige is not only for the good times, but to help each other weather the storms of life as well.

I did take my vows seriously in that and all other regards. My wife did not.

This is not the place for too many details, but when times got tough, my wife got planning to go, and then left.

First she left me with the kids, which I was more than happy to continue to support and protect. When she realized that leaving without the kids (who hated her for doing so and for other actions she took against them before she left) was not to her advantage in a divorce, she came back to the house under the guise of supporting the children morally during my trial by Boeing (and their prosecutor) and working on our relationship.

However, she never returned my efforts to save our marraige, and when she was able to convince one of my daughters to leave with her, she took them both and left again at the earliest opportunity. My younger daughter decided to come back soon thereafter and live with me full time by her own choice. I will always be grateful to my younger daughter for having the maturity to see though her mother's manipulation and see her true character, then decide to stay with me instead of her mother.

Yesterday was our twentieth wedding anniversary. Most of that time was relatively happy as most marraiges go. Only the last few years of Boeing retaliation has been tough. My wife, however, is not one to forgive and forget. Quite the opposite. Of course a marraige in which a spouse only seems to remember the challenges in a marraige and none of the much more numerous good times is going to be difficult. I think this habit of hers is largely from the unhealthy example of her own parent's marraige, in which her father waited hand and foot on his wife as if she was a queen and not an equal in the marraige. A normally even tempered man, he went into uncontrollable anger if my wife or her brother even suggested their mother was anything but the queen of the house. Love was also not expressed in the house for the children. I can't imagine how that negatively affected my wife or her brother. Contrastingly, her decade younger sister was spoiled and treated like a child should be.

Although neither my wife or I had perfect examples in our parent's marraiges, I at least acknowledged that. I think my wife wanted to emulate the aberrant relationship between her father and mother. I wanted an equal partnership in our marraige, instead, and for us not to try to emulate such bad examples in our relationship. I make no claim to being the perfect husband. No husband is. But I always treated my wife with love and respect, even when she would not treat me that way. Her attempts to emulate some abnormal pre-set vision in her mind of what was the perfect marraige, perfect household, and expectations of a perfect husband resulted in her inevitable disappointment and considerable emotional abuse (and a few occasions of what I considered physical abuse) of the children as well as discord with me when I attempted to protect the children from such abuse and refused for the most part to let her emotionally abuse me except when it took her abusive attention off of the kids. The stress of Boeing's imposed termination and trial of me was a main factor in her actions. If someone in some agency or political office had stopped Boeing's fraud before I had to resort to finding undeniable proof of Boeing's and the FAA's working together fraud to get their attention, I would never have been placed in the position that allowed Boeing to arrogantly retaliate against me as they did. I think I could have been successful in strengthening our marraige and avoiding divorce if the right people had just stepped up and did their jobs. That was not what they chose to do, however. Corrupt and arrogant corporations like Boeing who have grown far too big (and therefore should be broken up ASAP) and powerful overcame their obligation to do the right thing and do their jobs.

However, in getting back to the divorce itself, I once again learned how biased the courts and those who pretend to be unbiased arbiters behind the court's benches really are when I went to my first real hearing on my divorce, where the woman commissioner who I later learned almost never rules for men before her gave my wife everything she asked for.

This was despite my wife abandoning her own children the first time she left with me taking care of them for most of the past year, and despite her lawyer not filing his lie filled paperwork correctly with the court before the hearing. We asked that they not consider their filings as they were not properly submitted so we had had no chance to respond to them, however the biased commissioner overlooked such major errors in deference to the woman before her as I heard later was her bias.

Too bad there is no mechanism for removing such biased judges so we can have the impartial arbiters of the law we are supposed to have, and not, as in this case, a woman comissioner with an axe to grind against men for some reason unrelated to any of the men, like me, asking for her unbiased and carefully considered decision in their hearing. Why she seems to hate men with a passion I do not know. Perhaps a long lost love crossed her, fostering a deep hate within her against all men, and a drive to get in a position, such as the comissioner she is in divorce court, where she can take revenge aginst that long lost love in the form of the men that come before her seeking the only thing that matters to them in their lives--the custody of their beloved children--I only know that this bias, whatever its cause, should disqualify her from her place as a family court commissioner.

So now I am essentially homeless, as the house went to the wife with primary custody of the children. Score one more for Boeing's agenda to ruin my life for daring to expose them for what they are and end just one facet of their ongoing "post GSA" corruption.

Surely some corrupt Boeing executives are dancing around somewhere in their overcompensated lives while reading this. So be it. But who really loses in this is my children, as well as those entrusting their lives to the compromised quality and safety of Boeing airplanes, who are also affected by these corrupt Boeing executives' larger corrupt acts.

As most of you probably know, late last week I entered into an agreement with the King County Prosecutor's office. If I cooperate per the agreement, the reduced charges listed in the agreement will be dismissed in January. Here are the links to the Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer articles on the agreement:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/l ... n11m0.html
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/ ... man11.html

I especially liked the Seattle Times article. The headline acknowledged my status as a whistleblower, and they went through the step (unknown to me until the article broke) of getting some 340 emails between Boeing and the King County Prosecutor's office that showed just how badly Boeing wanted to make an example of me by an all-out effort to ensure my conviction.

If the reporting is correct, King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg and others in the office came to their senses and resisted Boeing's extreme pressure to retry me so they would get another shot at shooting the messenger of their own fraudulent activities (me).

However, inexplicably, Senior Deputy Prosecutor Scott Peterson defied his superior's wants and pressed for a 2nd trial if I did not accept the continuance for dismissal which my attorney and I originally wrote and offered to the prosecutor's office, but was rewritten by Peterson and/or Boeing to the point where I did not want to accept it.

Perhaps later the reason Mr. Peterson defied his bosses and pursued a 2nd trial will become known in time. At this point I can think of only two possibilities (or some combination of both). Firstly, he was miffed that I exposed his own escape (with the help of friendly non-investigators that deferred to his position and power) from class B felony charges (a more serious felony than I was accused of) for his ramming a woman several times with his car because she was standing in a public parking spot he wanted, even over her dead body. And/or, the second reason, which would be that Boeing either pressured or "incentivized" him into defying his bosses and having him continue to move toward a 2nd trial of me.

So, this may be simply the effort to entrap me and do away with my jury trial rights that I noted in my previous blog, but I accepted it on the off chance it wasn't. Apparently compromised U.S. Attorney Carl Blackstone's threat of federal charges against me if I did not accept the badly rewritten agreement being nullified by a letter from him stating they would not try me if I took the agreement made the decision to sign it more compelling, although both Peterson and Blackstone quite well may have been bluffing about trying me again.

Blackstone is no stranger to withholding evidence required to be disclosed from defendents, just like Mr. Peterson. He withheld evidence from a defendent in a federal trial, and was admonished for it by a federal judge. Even though an appeals court reversed the monetary damages for his misconduct, the misconduct charge by the judge was not reversed. Federal prosecutors apparently have immunity if they engage in such misconduct as Mr. Blackstone was found to have engaged in. It defies common sense, but there is much in our federal and state justice systems that are anything but fair or balanced:

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/archives/ ... 120076.asp

I will continue my whistleblowing undeterred, just as I have done so despite Boeing's and the prosecutor's transparent attempts to interfere with such and discredit me.

The agreement does have an exemption to allow my whistleblowing on the Boeing frauds I witnessed and uncovered to continue, whereas, before the exemption, the agreement could be construed to silence such whistleblowing.

Most predictably, both Marc Boman of Perkins Coie and U.S. Attorney Carl Blackstone now deny the way events actually happened--they deny Boman used his friendship with Blackstone to have him threaten me with federal charges. This proves, I believe, that Boman's and Blackstone's such actions were unethical if not illegal. Why would they deny facts gained from unimpeachable sources otherwise? Their denial does indicate one thing, however--that their lack of ethics as noted in my last blog is the real deal, as people in their line of work (with the possible exception of Boman's) are not supposed to prevaricate thusly.

This may indeed be a figurative "deal with the devil," but I thought it was in my best interest even when considering the lack of integrity of the parties on the other side behind it. Neither the prosecutor or Boeing management are the devil, however, I hope you get my point. I call it so after a cartoon I saw long ago, with a guy sitting in a chair in front of a corporation CEO's desk. Behind the desk was seated the devil himself. And the devil/CEO in the cartoon said to the man who had just met him for the first time and was sitting agog in front of him, "who did you think was running this company?"