Category Archives: ethics

Cancel the Contract

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And award it to another manufacturer. Former President and current President-elect Donald Trump (R) has long wanted a better aircraft for Air Force One, correctly identifying the current iteration as woefully limited in capability and badly obsolescent. Boeing has long had the contract for Air Force Ones, and they have the current contract to build a new, fully capable model.

Boeing is badly failing at this, too, even as it continues to fail at producing commercial aircraft, it fails at producing vehicles that can reach the ISS and return safely, its moon rocket is over budget and behind schedule, and on and on.

The long-delayed [Air Force One replacement] project has fallen so far behind schedule that Boeing has told the Air Force that it expects to deliver the new jets after Trump leaves the White House, according to people familiar with the matter. That means the airplanes wouldn’t be ready until 2029 or later.

And:

Boeing has booked more than $2 billion of charges tied to the fixed-price contract, which has gone over budget and been troubled by production glitches and management issues.
…
The delay is startling given that Boeing isn’t building the planes from scratch. During Trump’s first term, Boeing started to overhaul two 747s that were built for a Russian airline that never took the jets.

Such sloth is wholly unacceptable. It’s time to cancel the Boeing contract altogether and award it to a reputable company that will take seriously the task of building and outfitting a modern, fully capable Air Force One aircraft. The delay associated with the changeover, even if it involves building a new airplane from scratch, won’t be materially different from the delay Boeing presently is inflicting. Does anyone really have any confidence that Boeing would deliver soon after 2029?

Blame Someone Else

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Safeway is closing one of its San Francisco stores due to concerns about high crime rates and employee and customer safety in that store’s neighborhood. Oh, the hue and cry.

The Reverand Erris Edgerly, for instance, is crying foul.

It’s obvious the community has been struggling, but to just up and leave without calling a meeting, with no alternative for groceries, is upsetting. There was no community outreach at all.

It’s obvious that the crime rate in Edgerly’s community has been out of control for quite some time and the safety of his community members has been in the wind for all that time. From that, it’s just as obvious that community “leaders,” like the good Reverand, have contributed nothing useful to mitigating the situation (in truth, the city has done nothing, also, but that doesn’t excuse the community’s “leaders”).

Outreach would have been just more chit-chat and worse than pointless: advance notice of the store’s closing would have been too likely to trigger an accelerated spate of break-ins and lootings, exposing the store’s employees and customers to even more danger in that end game.

Maybe the Edgerlys of the neighborhood should look in a mirror to find some of the folks with whom to…outreach.

Not Entirely Alone

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Recall the Macy’s case where an employee succeeded in covering up, for a long time, more than $150 million in bookkeeping mistakes. Now Macy’s has finished its internal investigation and decided that the employee had been acting alone, making all those mistakes all by himself.

The employee told investigators about having mistakenly understated the amount of small parcel delivery expenses in late 2021, the person briefed on the probe said. Macy’s has said that the employee had responsibility for small package delivery expense accounting….
To hide the error, the employee continued to intentionally make erroneous accounting entries and falsify underlying documentation until the misstatement was discovered this fall….

Furthermore [emphasis added],

Macy’s didn’t say how it uncovered the erroneous entries or how they went undetected by the company’s auditor, KPMG.

Maybe the employee wasn’t acting entirely alone. He had the functionally ineffective assistance of too-inattentive supervisors, too-inattentive checkers of his work, and that auditor which maybe was just rubberstamping company books and collecting fees.

Macy’s management might want to expand its investigation and address those inadequacies.

I Have Questions

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Under subpoena, the far Left fundraiser ActBlue gave up documents to the House Administration Committee that showed that ActBlue did not begin automatically rejecting foreign donations (which I take to mean the organization made no serious effort at all) until last September.

Committee Chairman Bryan Steil (R, WI):

The documents provided to the Committee also confirm that ActBlue still accepted these concerning payment methods in July, a period when Democrats raised a record number of campaign money before implementing these safeguards.

My questions: to which Progressive-Democrats did ActBlue forward the money?

How much of those illegally accepted and then forwarded funds have those Progressive-Democrats returned to the donors, either directly or through ActBlue?

Not Necessarily

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The Supreme Court has the case of Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v Eagle County, which concerns an 88-mile railway bringing oil and farm goods out of rural Utah. It’s wholly contained within Utah. Colorado’s Eagle County is suing to block the Utah railway on the claim that the National Environmental Policy Act required the Surface Transportation Board to

analyze possible impacts as far away as the Gulf Coast, where the exported oil might be refined, and the environmental effects of “long-term employment and commercial activity” resulting from the railway.

The DC Circuit (! not the 10th Circuit, which includes both Utah and Colorado) agreed with Eagle County, which is why the case now is in front of the Supreme Court.

The Seven County argument is that

it shouldn’t have to analyze the environmental impact of anything not directly associated with railroads. It should be responsible only for the “proximate effects” of development over which it has regulatory authority.

The WSJ editors went on at length about why and how circuit ruling should be reversed, but they began with this:

[E]stablishing a predictable principle to guide future decisions about infrastructure development and prevent further litigation will be difficult. Litigants will have to parry a barrage of unpredictable hypotheticals….

Not necessarily. The guiding principle is clearly laid out by the Seven Counties: if the alleged environmental impact of a thing isn’t directly associated with that thing, there’s no analysis needed of that allegation. Full stop.

Regarding those “unpredictables,” there already is case law barring speculative lawsuits. Indeed, the Supreme Court already has repeatedly held that agencies needn’t consider indirect and unpredictable impact, most recently in Department of Transportation v Public Citizen. If litigation still gets out of hand, SLAP sanctions are available.

Eagle County’s case is just another of those quibbles for interference’s sake that the Court needs to stoutly chastise along with reversing the DC Circuit’s ruling.