Quote:
Tuesday, February 22, 2005
Scandals have a price; ask Boeing
By BILL VIRGIN
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST
The Boeing Co. must be wondering these days whether the continuing Defense Department scandals will ever go away, and what it might take to make them go away.
Last Friday former Chief Financial Officer Mike Sears was sentenced to four months in prison (thus earning one month less than Martha Stewart) and fined $250,000 for secretly negotiating to hire Air Force procurement officer Darleen Druyun while she was negotiating with Boeing for the lease of 100 Boeing 767s to be modified into tankers.
"Today's action brings this matter one step closer to closure," a Boeing statement said, adding that the company has been cooperating with the government "to achieve our mutual goal to finally resolve this matter."
The document also pointedly notes that the government has spent $2.5 million investigating Druyun's procurement decisions involving Boeing -- a sum that may well serve as a starting point for negotiations on a settlement.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/virgin..._virgin22.html
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McCain was a chief critic of the Boeing deal and helped this investigation. Why shouldn't Boeing pay a penalty for colluding to rip off tax payers?
Quote:
Wednesday, October 6, 2004
Boeing scandal shames America
Bribery of Pentagon official a national disgrace and an international scandal
By SIR ELDON GRIFFITHS
The Laguna Niguel resident is Chairman Emeritus of the World Affairs Councils of America
To Enron and Global Crossing, add another name that's zinging around the world, bringing shame on the U.S. government as well as to corporate America.
Darlene Druyen is a national disgrace. By cheating, lying and prodigiously misusing taxpayers' money, she and her cronies in the Pentagon and Boeing have exposed a culture of corruption in U.S. defense procurement that makes a mockery of Washington's complaints about bribery in other countries. How can Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld point his fingers at malfeasance in Saudi Arabia or crooks in China or Russia when one of the U.S. Air Force's top civilian contracts officers is revealed to have steered billions to Boeing in return for a $250,000- a-year job in its Washington office?
Darlene Druyen's role in the Pentagon was to lead a NATO program under which the U.S. and its principal allies would procure a fleet of early warning surveillance aircraft known as AWACS. The U.S. portion of this deal was to buy or lease 100 AWACS valued at $23 billion, with billions more in follow-up from other NATO nations. Critics like Sen. John McCain described the deal as a "folly" - but Boeing still got the job.And Druyen, upon her retirement, was duly named vice president of Boeing's missiles procurement division.
Last April, Druyen pleaded guilty to having "obstructed justice" by failing to come clean about this conflict of interest. Last week, she was due to receive a noncustodial sentence from the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va. Instead, she dropped a bombshell.
After being caught by a lie-detector test, Druyen revealed that she had previously misled investigators by secretly altering the journal that supported her version of events. The truth, she now admitted, was that while in office she had:
committed the Air Force to pay Boeing as much as $100 million more for its AWACS planes than she herself believed they were worth;
handed Boeing copies of a bid from its nearest rival, Airbus, whose price was lower;
signed off on a payment to Boeing of $412 million to settle a separate contract dispute over the production of its C-17;
awarded Boeing a further $4 million contract to upgrade the cockpits of C-130 transports - while dickering with the company over jobs for two of her relatives.
For her crimes, Darlene Druyen was sentenced to a fine of $5,000 and nine months jail. That means she'll be released not long after Martha Stewart. But here's the difference between these two lady felons. Stewart tried to save her own money when the stock market started to sink. Her crime, a serious one, involved insider trading. Druyen was another insider - a government insider who had sworn faithfully to serve the people of the United States. Instead, she abused that trust by trading official secrets, raiding the Air Force budget, cheating taxpayers of hundreds of millions and, worst, by staining the honor of the United States in the eyes of its closest allies.
All this in return for a job that Boeing carved out for her while she still was one of the government's top procurement officials, close to the top of the Pentagon payroll.
Darlene Druyen's malfeasance may well disappear from the headlines in America as the election campaign heats up. But not the rest of the world.
Already, America-haters are pointing to the Druyen-Boeing affair as proof of their contention that the $417 billion U.S. defense budget - from which Buy America laws exclude all but a few foreign suppliers - is a sinkhole of corruption. Airbus, which lost out on both the AWACS and air tanker bidding, will not rest until the Pentagon reopens the bidding.
http://www.ocregister.com/ocr/sectio...cle_265354.php
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But where do the Democrats stand on the deal?
Quote:
Angry Boeing supporters target McCain
March 8, 2008 9:44 AM ET
Associated Press All Associated Press news
WASHINGTON (AP) - Angry Boeing supporters are vowing revenge against Republican presidential candidate John McCain over Chicago-based Boeing's loss of a $35 billion Air Force tanker contract to the parent company of European plane maker Airbus.
There are other targets for their ire -- the Air Force, the defense secretary and even the entire Bush administration.
But Boeing supporters in Congress are directing their wrath at McCain, the Arizona senator and nominee in waiting, for scuttling an earlier deal that would have let Boeing build the next generation of Air Force refueling tankers. Boeing now will miss out on a deal that it says would have supported 44,000 new and existing jobs at the company and suppliers in 40 states.
"I hope the voters of this state remember what John McCain has done to them and their jobs," said Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., whose state would have been home to the tanker program and gained about 9,000 jobs.
"Having made sure that Iraq gets new schools, roads, bridges and dams that we deny America, now we are making sure that France gets the jobs that Americans used to have," said Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill. "We are sending the jobs overseas, all because John McCain demanded it."
http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/pro...308&id=8306595
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I hope the voters remember who saved them from another Boeing ripoff. Boeing will have to prove themselves. The Democrats are obviously in support of a culture of corruption, where no penalty is paid for doing so. They call that "Change you can believe in"!
__________________
Pushing back the frontiers of ignorance.
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06-05-2008, 11:29 AM
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