The crimes of Boeing and the case for expropriation

Boeing CEO David Calhoun testified before Congress today, an opportunity for politicians of both parties to issue insincere and hypocritical statements over the company’s atrocious safety record, including two crashes five years ago that killed 346 people.

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The basic issue, which of course none of the assembled Senators would speak of, is the subordination of such a basic social need as travel to private profit. This is what underlies the repeated actions the company has taken, revealed by numerous whistleblowers.

Among the whistleblowers was John Barnett, who died from a gunshot wound in March, only days after telling a friend, “If anything happens to me, it’s not suicide.”

Calhoun and other executives are paid tens of millions, hundreds of millions, or, in the case of Elon Musk, $45 billion, to ensure the endless flow of profits to top investors.

As with almost all major companies, among Boeing’s investors are top private equity funds like BlackRock and Vanguard, that control trillions of dollars.

Profit is extracted through the exploitation of the international working class, and all the necessary measures to guarantee safety are deductions from the bottom line.

With Boeing, to the profit motive is added the fact that the company is a top military contractor, with the closest ties to the state apparatus—and therefore is a critical component of American imperialism’s escalating global war.

The basic conclusion that flows from the endless string of disasters and safety violations is the need to transform Boeing and other gigantic corporations into publicly-owned utilities, run democratically on the basis of social need.

The entire transportation system, along with other critical social infrastructure—health care, education, housing, energy, etc.—must be operated on the basis of social need, not private profit.

Only in this way can workers be guaranteed the basic rights essential to modern society, including the right to safe travel.

Such a program, which is the only rational solution to what has been revealed in the Boeing scandal, is impossible without a frontal assault on the wealth and power of the capitalist oligarchs.

It requires the development of a movement in the working class to take political power, expropriate the capitalist oligarchs and establish a global, socialist society.