By Jeff J. Brown
Pictured above: if you don’t want to crash your Boeing 737 Max 8 plane into a nose dive, you have to pay for two extra instrument add-ons! This is the psychopathic logic of capitalism and it is the 800-pound gorilla on the world stage that no one wants to talk about, with its never-ending cruelty, corruption, criminality and cronyism. This Indonesian transport official was explaining why the Lion Air plane crashed into the sea.
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Live from the streets of China, Jeff
Downloadable SoundCloud podcast (also at the bottom of this page), YouTube video, as well as being syndicated on iTunes, Stitcher Radio, RUvid and Ivoox (links below),
The incredibly cruel, corrupt, criminal history of the West’s crony capitalism, concerning the death of two- hundred-seventy-one innocents, in a pair of totally avoidable Boeing plane crashes, tells you everything you need to know about the mirage of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” and his even more mythical “free markets”. To call capitalism cruel, corrupt, criminal and crony is to repeat yourself five times. It’s all one, big hell-on-earth chainsaw of genocide, slavery, resource theft and war. Capitalism is incapable of surviving any other way.
Two Boeing 737 Max 8 planes went down, one Indonesia’s Lion Air and just recently, the other one was Ethiopian Air. Their tragic demises were almost identical in nature and credible reports came out that a “stalling software override” problem had long been well-known at Boeing, and very likely at FAA too, but in the name of capitalist greed, it was suppressed. Moon of Alabama completely exposed this crony capitalist horror show in blow by blow, evil detail (https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/03/boeing-the-faa-and-why-two-737-max-planes-crashed.html and https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/03/flawed-safety-analysis-failed-oversight-why-two-737-max-planes-crashed.html). The romantic sounding “laissez-faire” economics (it is French, meaning just let things take their course, come what may) is neoliberal propaganda brainwash for open season to lie, steal, rape and kill for individual profit.
Articles about the Lion Air crash began to peel the onion (https://www.rt.com/news/454274-indonesia-crash-flight-recorders/). It was even reported that a flight the day before was saved from the same Boeing design fault, thanks to a third pilot who happened to hitch a ride and figured out how to keep the plane from crashing (https://www.rt.com/news/454275-indonesia-crash-third-pilot/). Ethiopian Air did not train their pilots for the 737 Max 8. Boeing told all their customers it was unnecessary, since it as so similar to other models (https://www.rt.com/news/454391-ethiopian-airlines-pilot-training/). Of course, Ethiopian Air thought this was approved by FAA, which looked the other way (https://www.rt.com/news/454076-boeing-737-safety-analysis/).
FAA continued to whore for Boeing, insisting the plane was safe, thus endangering the lives of thousands of passengers (https://www.businessinsider.com/faa-says-boeing-737-max-8-is-safe-fly-despite-deadly-crashes-2019-3). This while everybody around the world, and China was one of the first, started grounding all their Boeing 737 Max 8 planes, but not the US and Canada (https://www.rt.com/business/454051-safety-or-cash-boeing-dilemma/ and https://edition.cnn.com/2019/03/12/africa/airlines-suspend-boeing-flights-intl/index.html) . Finally, with so much victims’ blood splattered over Uncle Sam’s face and hands, Trump intervened, shut it down in the US and called for an FBI investigation (https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/03/13/breaking-trump-grounds-boeing-737-max-8-and-9-airplanes/ and https://www.rt.com/usa/454344-fbi-faa-boeing-737-probe-crash/), the latter you know will be a total whitewash. Why? Crony capitalism works because it pays for the endless revolving doors between capitalism and government, where companies write the laws and then bribe and extort legislatures and courts to vote for them. Trump no sooner nominated a corporate yes-man to head up the FAA, a former Delta Airlines executive (https://www.rt.com/usa/454252-trump-names-faa-chief-boeing/). Above the level of mom and pop businesses, which I fully endorse, capitalism cannot function any other way.
To crown the pathological drive of profits over people and the planet, it was later discovered that if a Boeing customer wanted the instrumentation necessary to keep the 737 Max 8 from crashing, they had to pay for two extra add-ons (https://www.rt.com/news/454489-boeing-737-max-optional-extras/)! If you find this shocking, then you are brainwashed about capitalism and need to get smarter, before all of humanity is destroyed by it.
And of course like all over the neoliberal world, no one at Boeing and FAA has been arrested or resigned. The West’s psychopaths still run the show. Capitalism and accountability have always been a deadly oxymoron.
Not so in communist-socialist China. Every time there is a natural or humanmade disaster, those government and business people involved are immediately on the hook. For humanmade accidents, CEOs, officers, high-level managers, as well as those on the ground, and even board members are rounded up for questioning. If there is even a whiff of malfeasance, they are kept locked up, or restricted to house arrest, until an investigation is conducted. If they are charged with mismanagement, neglect or corruption, they are going to stand trial and if found guilty, they can lose their jobs, get kicked out of the Communist Party of China (CPC), pay fines, do prison time or even face execution if lives were lost and/or many people injured.
I wrote about this in detail in The China Trilogy (see below), about how tens of people did hard time for the melamine milk scandal here and war between national milk producers, Yili and Mengniu. Tens of people did hard time and several got a bullet in the back of their heads. I compared it to the Vioxx scandal in the West, which killed up to 500,000 victims, no apologies were given and management got huge bonuses for all the money they made for Monsanto and Pfizer. They are heroes on Wall Street and capitalist role models for the Fortune 500.
I also wrote about the recent vaccine scandal in China. Baba Beijing immediately swung into action, putting the world’s most functioning, participatory democracy to work (http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2018/07/27/vaccine-scandal-shows-just-how-democratic-and-participatory-is-chinas-democracy-china-rising-radio-sinoland-180727/). Accountability and communism-socialism are synonyms.
Baba Beijing’s government is not worm-eaten with corporate crooks, like in the West and rest of the neoliberal countries, which is most of them. The equivalent of the FAA in China is the CAAC. Its administrator is Feng Zhenglin, a CPC member, college graduate and credited senior engineer (http://www.caac.gov.cn/en/GYMH/LDJS/FZL/). The four deputies also have posted résumés. Li Jian is a CPC member, Civil Aviation Flight University graduate and a Level-1 pilot. (http://www.caac.gov.cn/en/GYMH/LDJS/LJ/). Dong Zhiyi has a PhD in Management and is a credited Senior Economist (http://www.caac.gov.cn/en/GYMH/LDJS/DZY/).
Wang Zhiqing is a CPC member and has a BS in Engineering (http://www.caac.gov.cn/en/GYMH/LDJS/WZQ/). Lyu Erxue got his Master ‘s Degree from the Party School of the Central Committee of the CPC. This means he’s the person in charge to make sure everybody at CAAC keeps their noses and bank accounts clean, to live and work by Mao Zedong’s timeless motto, Serve the People (http://www.caac.gov.cn/en/GYMH/LDJS/Lex/). All of them have lifelong careers doing just that, spending decades meritocratically earning their way to top-level management positions that concern the safety of millions of travelers.
I don’t know about you, but I’d rather have these guys overseeing China’s airlines and airways, and not a snake pit full of corrupt whores from Wall Street, hired from the very same companies they are supposed to monitor. I know Baba Beijing puts people’s safety over profit. I have friends who are pilots for Chinese airlines. They laugh about how many millions of liters of jet fuel are wasted in China, during take-offs and landings, because the national protocol is so conservative and slow. No one can argue about China’s flight safety record, which is one of the best in the world. This is because Baba Beijing is not infested with thousands of corporate lobbies and is not being bribed and extorted to pass “laws” written by the “regulated” corporations, to maximize profits at the cost of countless human lives and the desecration of Mother Earth.
[ ——————DO NOT USE OR WRITE BELOW THIS LINE—————]
Why and How China works: With a Mirror to Our Own History
JEFF J. BROWN, Editor, China Rising, and Senior Editor & China Correspondent, Dispatch from Beijing, The Greanville Post
Jeff J. Brown is a geopolitical analyst, journalist, lecturer and the author of The China Trilogy. It consists of 44 Days Backpacking in China – The Middle Kingdom in the 21st Century, with the United States, Europe and the Fate of the World in Its Looking Glass (2013); Punto Press released China Rising – Capitalist Roads, Socialist Destinations (2016); and for Badak Merah, Jeff authored China Is Communist, Dammit! – Dawn of the Red Dynasty (2017). As well, he published a textbook, Doctor WriteRead’s Treasure Trove to Great English (2015). Jeff is a Senior Editor & China Correspondent for The Greanville Post, where he keeps a column, Dispatch from Beijing and is a Global Opinion Leader at 21st Century. He also writes a column for The Saker, called the Moscow-Beijing Express. Jeff writes, interviews and podcasts on his own program, China Rising Radio Sinoland, which is also available on YouTube, Stitcher Radio, iTunes, Ivoox and RUvid. Guests have included Ramsey Clark, James Bradley, Moti Nissani, Godfree Roberts, Hiroyuki Hamada, The Saker and many others. [/su_spoiler]
Jeff can be reached at China Rising, je**@br***********.com, Facebook, Twitter, Wechat (Jeff_Brown-44_Days) and Whatsapp: +86-13823544196.
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