Call Them What They Are: Corporate Mobsters

How sweet it is to be a corporate criminal these days!

I don’t mean common price gougers, polluters, and such, but full-fledged, executive-suite mobsters. They run huge corporate syndicates, treating fraud and even murder as necessary business tools. For example, Boeing Incorporated.

In 2018, a Boeing 737 MAX passenger jet suddenly nose-dived into the Java Sea, killing all 189 people on board. A freak accident, declared top bosses of the multibillion-dollar giant, disavowing any responsibility. Indeed, even though he knew that the MAX had a fatally flawed maneuvering system, the CEO rushed out to assure fliers that the jet was “as safe as any airplane that has ever flown the skies.”

But, oops – five months later, another MAX nosedived in Ethiopia, killing 157 more people. Whistleblowers and federal investigators later revealed that the bosses had long been shortchanging safety in order to jack up profits… and their own pay. Last summer – in a rare legal victory over business-as-usual coddling of corporate abuses – Boeing had to admit that it “knowingly” defrauded safety regulators and was, in fact, guilty of the criminal violations. So, justice!

Uh… not quite. Just a few weeks later, Trump happened, and he immediately turned the Justice Department into a full-service corporate whorehouse. So, after Boeing donated a cool million bucks in tribute to the new president, Trump’s attorney generally obligingly decreed that the confessed corporate criminal could simply “withdraw” its guilty plea, pay a minimal fine for killing 346 people… and “move on.”

Politicians bark at us commoners: “Do the crime and you’ll do the time.” Unless, of course, you can buy a corporate Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card from a corrupt president.

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