If you are a member of the flying public (and I certainly am), this is not good:
From the article:
The documentary features employees at the Boeing 787 Dreamliner Factory in Charleston, South Carolina, who say that safety concerns would keep them from flying. "I wouldn't fly on one of these planes," one worker says.
“I found that scrapped parts were put back on the airplane for years and years,” Merle Meyers, Boeing Quality Manager from 1979 to 2023, says in the trailer. “They were basically rotted. We’ll never know how many of these parts made it to airplanes.”
And here’s the money quote (emphasis mine):
“When the quality of Boeing suffers, people die,” David Gelles, author and New York Times journalist, says in a trailer for “Freefall,”…
This is a result of several factors, but IMHO, foremost among them are late-stage capitalism and a lack of accountability/consequences for bad corporate and individual behavior.
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One of the defining aspects of late-stage capitalism has been the emphasis on financialization of corporations (and the U.S. economy) over actually producing and providing core products and services.
From 1980 through 2006, the financial sector of the economy in the United States grew by nearly 60%.
Corporate CEOs figured out they could goose short-term company profits (and their own compensation), by turning to financialization of their companies, often at the expense of the quality of their core products/services.
Example #1. In recent years, the major U.S. based airlines have all lost money on their actual stated core business - flying passengers from point A to point B - while maintaining overall profitability through financial engineering, mainly with credit card offerings.
The Big Airlines Lost Money Flying Passengers Last Year. So How Did They All Turn Profits?
Published January 30, 2025
The four biggest U.S. airlines generated $200 billion in revenue last year. All of them lost money transporting passengers.
All four carriers—Delta Air Lines (DAL), United Airlines (UAL), American Airlines (AAL), and Southwest Airlines (LUV)—were profitable in 2024, posting a combined net income near $8 billion and operating income of $14 billion. But all four registered higher cost per available seat mile (CASM) than passenger revenue per available seat mile (PRASM). In other words, the airlines lost money doing the very thing they're ostensibly in business to do.
So how were they profitable? The carriers, whose expenses are led by salaries and aircraft fuel, are largely profitable because of lucrative co-branded credit cards.
In 2025, Delta, through its relationship with American Express, reported $8.2 billion in remuneration from credit cards while reporting net income of roughly $5.2B. For those who are math-challenged, this means AMEX payments equaled about 158% of net income (disclaimer: there are some costs to Delta associated with the credit card program, however Delta does not break out such direct-related expenses).
Example #2. General Electric was historically known as a manufacturing business. From roughly 1980 through 2000, GE was run by CEO Jack Welch. At the time, Welch was viewed by many as the GOAT of CEOs (for those who have lived in a cave for the past several decades, GOAT = “Greatest Of All Time”). Welch was praised for supercharging GE earnings and profits.
What actually happened is Welch discovered that GE Capital, the financing arm of GE, was actually an unregulated bank. Welch viewed this as an opportunity, turning GE Capital into the company's primary growth engine. By 2000, financial services accounted for more than half of GE's revenue, and by the mid-2000s, finance generated about half of GE's profits. GE Capital expanded into: consumer lending, credit cards, commercial real estate, auto loans, leveraged buyouts, and subprime mortgages. Importantly in corporate America, GE Capital became the mechanism that allowed GE to consistently meet Wall Street earnings expectations; financial engineering helped produce an extraordinary streak of roughly 80 consecutive quarters meeting earnings targets, with Welch increasingly relying on financial transactions (in lieu of performance from its core businesses) to smooth earnings.
The New Yorker article below provides further insight into how GE increasingly relied on financial engineering rather than industrial engineering, with R&D spending falling as a share of sales.
Ultimately, this corporate financialization may not have been such a good idea:
Sadly, Boeing did not escape this trend. Boeing was once known as the gold standard for airline manufacturing, and as an “engineering company run by engineers”. However, in 1997, Boeing merged with McDonnell-Douglas, another airline manufacturer. The M-D team eventually took over leadership within Boeing and brought with it a focus on financialization over engineering/safety.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The new CEO of Boeing says his company needs a culture change. If they manage that, it won't be the first. Boeing's critics contend that a culture change nearly 30 years ago is at the root of its current problems. Wailin Wong and Darian Woods of NPR's Planet Money podcast, The Indicator, have the story.
DARIAN WOODS, BYLINE: Chroniclers of Boeing's history point to 1997 as a turning point for the company. That year, Boeing acquired fellow airplane maker McDonnell Douglas.
CARL TACK: And then, effectively, McDonnell Douglas executives took over the company.
WOODS: That's Carl Tack. He's a former corporate lawyer and investment banker. Today he teaches finance at the College of William & Mary.
TACK: By all accounts, that changed the culture of Boeing, over a 20-year period, from a firm of engineers to, you know, a business run by not necessarily engineers. Boeing became much more financially oriented.
WAILIN WONG, BYLINE: This is financial engineering. Earlier, this mindset had transformed General Electric. It was during the tenure of legendary CEO Jack Welch. He was known for a relentless focus on short-term profits and boosting GE's stock price.
WOODS: Former GE executives took the Jack Welch playbook to other companies. And this group of alums included a CEO of McDonnell Douglas, who later became CEO of Boeing.
TACK: I can tell you the hallmarks of a financial engineering-run company, and they look a lot like GE in its heyday.
WONG: We're going to talk about two of these hallmarks - aggressive cost management, and distributing money to shareholders. So number one is pushing costs down. For Boeing, this meant layoffs, freezing out suppliers that refused to discount their prices and evaluating managers based on their ability to cut costs.
The ultimate result? Perhaps predictably, two tragic plane crashes for the 737 MAX model in 2018 and 2019, killing hundreds of people.
And this:
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Initially, there seemed to be significant ramifications to Boeing from the 737 MAX tragedies. Within days, the entire 737 MAX fleet had been grounded - either by airlines themselves or by national oversight organizations in different countries. Boeing lost approximately $34 million in market capitalization within two weeks.
Lawsuits were filed. Criminal investigations began. The timeline:
March, 2019. The DOJ opened a criminal investigation into Boeing's development and certification of the 737 MAX, including whether the company misled the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)
January, 2021. The DOJ charged Boeing with conspiracy to defraud the United States (specifically, the FAA Aircraft Evaluation Group). Boeing agreed to pay more than $2.5 billion to resolve the criminal case under a Deferred Prosecution Agreement.
May 2024: The DOJ concluded Boeing had breached the Deferred Prosecution Agreement after the January 2024 Alaska Airlines 737 MAX 9 mid-cabin door plug blowout.
July 2024: Boeing agreed in principle to plead guilty to a criminal fraud conspiracy charge, subject to court approval.
Ahhh, finally. Some accountability and consequences for bad actions, right?
Judge Agrees to Dismiss Boeing Criminal Case Tied to 737 MAX Crashes
Trump administration moved in May to drop charges, months after firm agreed to plead guilty to violating earlier settlement order
You see, early on in Trump 2.0, Trump and his cronies made a decision to de-emphasize and essentially stop and drop white-collar crime:
Trump Administration Upends Prosecution of White-Collar Crime
Justice Department has shifted away from several areas of enforcement while Trump’s pardons have undone prominent convictions
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The result? There is minimal incentive for Boeing (or other bad corporate actors) to change their behavior. The “Freefall” documentary coming out on Netflix details the very predicable outcome of this lack of accountability: despite public protestations to the contrary by Boeing executives, there is continued corporate malfeasance that is endangering people’s lives.
One more point. The statutorily created artificial entities known as corporations are not capable of making decisions. Decisions are made by actual living people within those corporations. While Boeing’s corporate decision to plead guilty to criminal fraud carried real ramifications for the corporation (before Trump’s DOJ expunged those criminal pleas), the people who actually made the decision(s) to commit fraud escaped any personal consequences. For Boeing and its executives, while the penalties might have been financially painful to the corporation and its shareholders (although likely only temporarily), those criminal penalties could be viewed as simply another cost of doing business.
Corporate status should never shield the people within from personal consequences for serious and felonious actions/decisions. Until that is the case, the late-stage capitalism model of corporate malfeasance in the pursuit of profit and wealth will continue to be business as usual, at the expense and well-being of everyday consumers.
