DuPont (the chemical company) has been dumping PFOA/C8 chemicals into various waterways, causing cancer and birth defects[0] across hundreds of towns and cities in various parts of the US for decades[1], and when the EPA told them to stop and fined them something like $17M (for a company that makes tens of billions of dollars a year), they promptly switched to a different chemical process to produce Teflon that resulted in identical health issues[2].

Did any of their executives see any criminal charges? Of course not.

The Devil we Know is a great documentary, by the way.

[0]:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorooctanoic_acid#Healt...

[1]:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuPont#Perfluorooctanoic_aci...

[2]:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GenX

What you seem to be missing is the idea of the rule of law, and perhaps also the idea of only punishing those who are moral responsible.

How many people do you think have moral culpability for this fiasco? Twenty? One hundred? Boeing employs more than 150,000 people. You want them all to lose their jobs based on the actions of 100 people? You want a battalion of rednecks to "mop up" (kill?) 150,000 people for the actions of 100?

If you want to fire a bunch of executives (and maybe some engineers), I'm fine with that. You want some to go to jail? Sure. You want the stockholders to take a bath? Makes sense to me. Destroy the whole company? No, I don't think that's a reasonable response. An emotional one, maybe, but not a reasonable one.

> If a person had gone out and murdered two planefuls of people

How can this possibly be murder? Negligence, man-slaughter, maybe, I don't know the facts. But how could it possibly meet any standard required for murder?

Not sure how it works in the US, but in Germany this would be possible. Here, it doesn't have to be "intent", meaning you want it to happen. There is another concept called "billigend in Kauf nehmen", which means you know your actions could cause this, but don't care if that's the outcome. This is different from plain negligence, where you just believe it won't happen.

Are you proposing that an armed militia hunting down Boeing employees is somehow going to improve the situation??

This is not going to be popular, but I'm pretty sure it would!

The reason of all this negligence and death of passengers is exactly this: The worst they can do to us is force our CEO to step down and put what a 1% of our profits in form of financial penalties? We will survive and this is worth cuts!

It seems most likely to be a mix of ignorance, greed, and incompetence on the part of a fairly small number of Boeing employees and executives. Meriting prison time? Probably, actually. Meriting mass murder?... I mean, really?

Well, it's over 100,000 people, is one thing.

More seriously, the real question is why the CEO of Boeing doesn't get forced out. It would seem time for the board of Boeing to do their job, if only in order to save their pocketbooks. It is dismaying that they haven't even done that.

Look at the Boeing board members. They are responsible for Boeing's current trajectory. Expect Nikki Haley to hold anybody accountable?

For one, they provide jobs for more than 150,000 people, not including contractors and vendors. Would you prefer those people all land on unemployment overnight? The people who did this should be punished, sure, but that shouldn’t make all of these people liable.

If they can’t recover, the company will be sold off for parts. That’s pretty standard in the corporate world. But to say we should somehow punish middle-class people trying to do good work by disappearing their employer because of some bad actors within the ranks of the company is a bad take.

Eh... As attractive as it sounds, and as viscerally satisfying as the Sheriff's posse approach would be, the problem is that everyone is entitled to due process.

And in terms of criminal liability, that involves stapling the crime to various real people, and proving a case against them.

At a minimum, Boeing is facing potential exposure for: -Corporate Manslaughter -Fraud -Securities Fraud -Criminal Negligence -Product Liability

Those are just the major ones I can think of off the top of my head. There's probably interesting flavors of

-Making false statements to Federal Agents -Perjury

And a host of other exotic crimes players in this debacle can be charged with, if you had an AG with the interest and will to hit them with every reasonably provable charge.

Magic 8 ball says there will be investigations into the part played by executives, getting to the root of who was pushing the deceptive documentation, design, and sales decisions.

They get criminal charges. Boeing gets sued for securities fraud and settles or otherwise pays out.

Civil suits for victims family's will likely be paid by insurer's/the Federal Government (likely pitched as a surprising diplomatic concession, really a National Security concession).

FAA or Congress may surprise and crack down on Boeing, laying down a plan where the executive leadership gets swapped out, mandatory culture/operational revamp under Federal supervision for some number of years. (Boeing has too much National Security impact to have the plug completely pulled).

Mmmm. MAX probably get refits/regulatory waivers of various flavors; pilots/Flight Attendants will be the primary determinant on how much has to get done. Combined Boeing/Pilots/Flight Attendants Unions run a PR campaign, vouching for MAX's safety. Planes return to service, and eventually the public begrudgingly returns to their normal flying habits.

737 line is probably officially on it's deathbed. FAA may see some major scrutiny, and possible budget increases depending on political will.

And the world turns.

You think the EU will roll over for Boeing?

Magic 8 ball is... Inconclusive.

<shakes for more detail>

Boeing will likely have to submit to additional certification internationally, and possibly additional retrofits to bring it into parity with at a minimum the same level of redundancy that Airbus is held to (for the EU at least).

Enough dice were cast that it would be diplomatically/economically inconvenient for the EU to lock out the MAX entirely without seriously inconveniencing every other country that invested in building out their fleets with them.

8 ball is not saying that the EU doesn't have the wherewithal to stone wall Boeing, but... somehow more air traffic is likely to be seen as more satisfying to the palate in the long run than any gains to be had by grandstanding too hard against American Corporate Corruption in the short term.