Politicians care about getting elected, which means they don't want layoffs on their watch. Politicians don't care what the military thinks or else they'd stop funding a lot of dumb projects that the military doesn't give a shit about - of which there are many.
There are so many examples of congress putting their hand on the scale that I really don't understand the popular insistence that the military is the problem here.
Military brass don't control procurement. That would be Congress. In fact the military often frequently has systems it doesn't want/need precisely because Congress. See the Zumwalt destroyer and the Littoral Combat Ship.
Who else are they going to buy planes to bomb different-colored countries with? SpaceX? Airbus? It is to laugh.
When you get a company that is too big to fail, it rests directly on the government for not identifying and solving the issue earlier.
The latest big bomber purchase, B-21, went to Northrop Grumman, as did the not so recent B-2. Fighters have been going to Lockheed (F-22 and F-35).
The biggest recent win for Boeing was KC-46 tanker airplane, which is just modified 767. I suppose there is also the handful of F-15EXes that are vestige from their McDonnell Douglas merger.
It's a monopoly. Just break it up.
> How many jobs would be lost if that happened
"We don't negotiate with [economic] terrorists."
> especially in this economy?
$77b annual revenue. Positive quarterly growth rate the last 8 out of 12 quarters. Two global wars we refuse to negotiate peace in and Boeing is a major weapons supplier.
Then again, if you kill and scare enough people with faulty planes, the state of the economy will be immaterial to what will happen to your interests.
This is just so silly. Shutting down a company results in people losing their jobs. No terrorists involved.
I'm always baffled by this unholy protection of "jobs".
Making asbestos essentially illegal resulted in tens of thousands of people losing their jobs and shutting down coal plants will do the same.
It makes no sense to protect jobs at all costs, and doing so can have very bad outcomes.
If a company is doing something illegal or dangerous or that does not serve society anymore, we shouldn't bend over backwards just because people will lose their jobs.
I wasn't invoking any unholy protection of jobs. It's very clear the context I was replying to: that "job loss" isn't "economic terrorism".
Can we not treat the comment section as that party game where people only read the previous sentence of the story and write a follow-on sentence? You have the whole thread available to you.
And ending murder and child victims results in people (investigators, litigators, counselors) losing their jobs. Should we stop trying to solve these problems too?
There is an option to punish the first aspect while limiting the damage on the second one : the nationalisation of the company, with limited compasation to its shareholder. Strangely it seems to only be done or considered to save "to big to fail" business, such as bank, in time of crisis, not as a tool of law enforcement.
The fine is quite low.