Boeing is facing even more problems as workers have now gone on strike, which means an almost complete halt to all aircraft production for the company. The employees are fighting for better wages after the company gave a golden parachute to their former CEO who should probably be in prison. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: Boeing is facing even more problems as workers have now gone on strike, which means an almost complete halt to all aircraft production for the company. The employees are fighting for better wages after the company gave a golden parachute to their former CEO, who bankrupt this company. This guy has taken the company into absolutely disaster. What do they owe $300 billion? The debt is unbelievable. What is it? Something in excess of $300 billion.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. Several hundred. I know that for sure.
Mike Papantonio: $33 billion. I’m sorry.
Farron Cousins: So, you’ve got Dave Calhoun, who is the outgoing CEO. He’s the one who oversaw all their disasters, all their little plea deals with the DOJ, where he didn’t have to go to jail for his grotesque failures. He gets a golden parachute that could be worth up to $45 million. He was only CEO for three years, by the way. He made over $60 million during those three years. And the workers watching this, watching the corruption he brought to the company as he’s out the door are saying, listen, we’ve been screwed for 16 years, since the last time we had to go on strike. You gave us a little bit of a raise at that time. However, you took away most of our benefits.
Mike Papantonio: Right.
Farron Cousins: Here we are, 16 years later, we want it back. We want what we are owed because 15% of the cost that Boeing sells these plane for, only 15% of the cost goes towards their actual expenses, including labor.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. But Boeing says, oh, look how we treated you when we were making billions of dollars. Look how they treated them. They actually took benefits away from the workers while they’re given this cat who bankrupt the company, they’re giving him $15 million worth of stock, $45 million worth of total compensation. The numbers are crazy. The stock is in the tank. People won’t even buy their product because this idiot allowed the whole supply chain to fall apart. There was no quality assurance. And now you know what the argument is now, I don’t know if you’ve caught this, they’re trying to blame it on the workers. They’re trying to say, well, we need immigration right now to replace these workers. And you know what the workers were saying? The workers were saying, we don’t even have adequate kind of machinery to do what you’re asking us to do. We don’t have enough people for quality control. So now Boeing, who is $33 billion in the hole, is saying, no, it’s the workers, it’s the workers’ fault. That’s why we’re not giving ’em any breaks. At the same time, they’re giving $45.7 million to a guy who is an absolute failure. Golden parachute the rest of his life. He never has to work. What is he 67 years old?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. He’s got plenty of time to do whatever the hell he wants. He’ll probably end up at another company, by the way. They always do.
Mike Papantonio: Oh yeah. That’s how it works. Okay. You know what this is called? This is called quick profits disaster. There’s a term, and that is where a CEO moves into a company. The CEO says, I want to extract as much profit as I can in the 10 years, or the five years, or the four years that I might be here. So they extract every dime of profit. They build their own war chest, their own income, to a guy like this, $47 million and more and more every year. And at the same time, they put all the risks on the consumer, they put all the risks on the employees, and the employees are saying, don’t dare say this is our fault. Don’t you dare say this is our fault. We told you we needed better machinery. We told you we needed better oversight. We told you we needed more employees. But no, this guy thought, hell, I’m gonna make as much money as I can and move on. That’s the new norm for a CEO.
Farron Cousins: It is because going back to about the mid eighties ish, the average tenure of a CEO for major American companies, 15 to 20 years. These days it is three to five.
Mike Papantonio: That’s right.
Farron Cousins: Well, Calhoun had his three years, made over a hundred million dollars, including that exit compensation. I’m outta here. Deal with it.
Mike Papantonio: They literally teach this in MBA school, get in, maximize profit, get out.
Farron Cousins: Parasites.
Mike Papantonio: Parasites, take just like a locust. They’re like locusts moving around from company to company, extracting as much as they can. And that’s what this guy did to Boeing and Boeing is rewarding him for it. The guy should be in frigging prison. They should perp walk this guy because he knew exactly what was going on. Tell the viewers about the agreement that he violated.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. He had this agreement with the DOJ going back a couple years after the disasters that claimed the lives of hundreds of people across the globe. And the DOJ said, listen, all you gotta do for us to not prosecute you and send you to jail here, all you gotta do is just get the planes up to code. Right. We’re not even saying go above and beyond. We’re saying, do the bare minimum and don’t lie to us about it and you don’t have to go to jail. Well, a couple months ago, the DOJ says, all right, Boeing didn’t do it. They lied to us repeatedly. We’re not gonna punish them again. But we’re super serious this time. Don’t do it again. And that’s it. That’s the end of the story.
Mike Papantonio: It’s because they’re a defense contractor. Okay. And like it or not, we have a war economy. We have built a war economy that has been building since Bill Clinton was president of the United States. That war economy keeps building and building and building to where Democrats now align themselves with neocon war pimps. That’s the new norm. And that’s why we look at Boeing and say, well, by God, we gotta keep them alive. Really?
