Politics Post Dobbs; ESG Beats Up Boeing; & EVs in a Death Spiral.
Enemies of the People: Minouche Shafik
In his Editor’s Column this week, Michael Walsh tackles the present state of abortion politics.
On Abortion, Take the Win and Move On
In Hollywood, there's an unwritten writers' rule that when you've sold the project "in the room," get up and leave before the execs change their minds. Similarly, a good field commander knows that when you've won the local engagement, stop fighting and transfer your energies and forces to another spot on the battlefield where the conflict is still raging. In other words, once the immediate battle has been won, move on to a different front.
With its Dobbs V. Jackson decision in June 2022, the Supreme Court did two things that ought to have appeased the Right: in the matter of abortion, it overturned its Roe v. Wade decision from 1973 and it upheld the constitutional structure of federalism. And yet for some in the Stupid Party, that's not good enough. Which delights the Democrats who, saddled with Joe Biden, are desperately seeking an issue around which to rally their troops this fall.
That Roe was wrongly decided had long been a cardinal belief on the Right, both as a matter of law and of principle; Roe was promulgated during the Warren Burger court, and the gaseous, soft-headed opinion (which built on the "emanations" and "penumbras" cited in Earl Warren court's 1965 decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, which had to do with contraception) was written by the other member of the "Minnesota twins," Harry Blackmun. It was absurd on its face, and it handed a destructive social-policy win to the Left, whose totalitarian impulse is always to nationalize every issue and, literally, make everything a federal case. Having made "states' rights" into a phrase of obloquy by attaching it to even the principled opponents of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, they proceeded to do the same with abortion, pivoting from "abortion advocacy" to "a woman's right to choose" and thus laying the onus on those who opposed baby murder.
Still, there was the matter of the pesky Tenth Amendment, the last of the Bill of Rights, which reads in plain English: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” And nowhere in the constitution was to be found the word "abortion." Accordingly, the practice had been left up to the several states, which could either outlaw it completely or extend it to the moment of birth, as they chose. The Left, however, is never content to live and let die when it can force its desires on the entire body politic, and so the battle was fought for nearly half a century. And then, suddenly, it was won.
A smart political party would celebrate its win and move on. But no: malcontents on the Right… immediately began pushing to severely restrict the practice nationally.
Joan Sammon wrote about one company which has been ravaged by ESG.
Boeing: From Aviation Excellence to ESG Disaster
Since late January much has been discovered about Boeing Corporation in the wake of a near mid-air catastrophe at 16,000 feet when a panel, known as, the left, mid-exit door plug, blew off an Alaska Airlines 737-Max 9 aircraft. The dramatic event has been punctuated by revelations by multiple whistleblowers describing failed quality-control processes, documentation inconsistencies, petty bosses, and an adherence to prescriptive management tactics that flowed from the corporate board and C-suite.
The disastrous list of failures offers a prescient example of how influences from outside a company and even from outside an industry can distract a board and C-suite from its core business and cause irreparable damage. The accounts reveal how the decisions of three decades ago have intersected with the decisions of three years ago, leaving in their wake the death of innocent people, the stench of mediocrity, and a litany of leadership lessons from which other corporate leaders can learn.
In the days following the January door plug blow out, a post appeared on an aviation blog written by an anonymous, purported current employee. The author flatly asserted that four bolts that were supposed to hold the door plug in place were "…not installed when Boeing delivered the plane [to Alaska Airlines], our own records reflect this." The whistleblower further described the Renton, Washington-based 737 production system as a “…rambling, shambling, disaster waiting to happen” -- even asserting specific details about the exact plane that lost the door plug mid-air.
This check job [of the door plug] was completed on 31 August 2023, and did turn up discrepancies, but on the RH [right hand] side door, not the LH [left hand] that actually failed. …it was inevitable something would slip through- and on the incident aircraft something did.
While the account is stunning on its face, it aligns with similar details revealed in a whistleblower lawsuit brought by former Boeing employee John Barnett about the 787 program in South Carolina. Details of that complaint describe a similar fundamental shift away from the two factors that had made the Boeing brand an industry leader -- precision engineering and quality manufacturing. The suit describes a contentious work environment that fostered speed over quality. It describes how managers worked to force out senior employees who remembered the higher standards and Boeing’s brand promise of decades ago.
Barnett ended up dying from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound, after day two of what was supposed to be three days of testimony about what he allegedly knew about the Boeing failures, and what he had done to try to correct or effect the defective manufacturing processes. Barnett's curiously timed death is considered by family, friends and his attorneys to be suspicious.
But for many, the issues revealed by whistleblowers and Boeing clients and their passengers earlier this year are not new. The C-Suite and board’s emphasis on cost-cutting, its inappropriate regulatory relationships, influences by activist organizations regarding ideological themes, and a disregard for safety were revealed during the lead up and in the aftermath of tragedy that in late 2018 and 2019 led to two fatal crashes-- killing a combined 346 people. In those cases, it was the decision by Boeing to use Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, known as MCAS without communicating its existence to airline customers and their pilots, that led to those crashes.
Buck Throckmorton wrote about EV companies entering the death spiral.
EVs Enter the Doom Loop
The irrational exuberance of the electric vehicle bubble is reaching its denouement, as legacy automakers are backing off of their previously ambitious EV sales and production goals, proposed new EV manufacturing plants are being suspended, and lithium battery manufacturing operations are laying off workers.
There is an almost predictable storyline in how these ventures have played out, which is reminiscent of the dot-com bubble of a quarter-century ago, except that the dot-com bubble wasn’t suffused in eco-virtuousness nor did the companies of its era receive such heavy public subsidization before going bust.
The typical boom-to-bust storyline of companies in the EV-era starts with the much-hyped announcement of a “transformational” new manufacturing operation that will be built, bringing hundreds (or thousands) of environmentally responsible jobs, generously funded with federal and state incentive dollars, to produce something that will satisfy the imminent demand for a product (EVs) that actually has no history of consumer demand.
Politicians then proudly pose for photo ops with the enviro-hustlers to whom they are handing out tax dollars. The company also goes public, and despite a lack of profit or meaningful revenue, its stock price soars. As product demand fails to develop, the company continues to produce press releases promising fabulous things to come, which credulous media sources breathlessly republish as news. But the lack of revenue and cash flow ultimately catch up with the company; promised expansions are canceled; the stock price collapses; and the story ends with the promised plant either closing or never getting built in the first place.
Jack Dunphy evaluated the mismanaged response to the protests at UCLA.
On the Violent Left, Eternal Recurrence
Have we learned nothing from the past? It’s not as though we need to explore antiquity for lessons in how to confront today’s issues. While such an exploration would no doubt be helpful, any effort in that direction is beyond – far, far beyond – the stunted intellectual capacities of our current crop of ruling elites, certainly to include our degreed betters running our so-called institutions of higher learning.
But is 2020 so shrouded in the mists of history as to be inaccessible to the people who hold themselves out as arbiters of all that is good and just? Apparently so. Consider: it was a mere four years ago that every major city in America was convulsed in the paroxysms of violence that followed the death of George Floyd. We must, said these lettered sophisticates, allow the oppressed to vent their outrage at the death of one of their own at the hands of state oppressors. To deter them in any way would only deepen their pain. And never mind that our hero of the moment had lived a life of depredation and was found to have consumed a fatal dose of fentanyl. Such trivial details need not dim the luster of the man’s memory.
A result of the ensuing anti-police hysteria, one that was easily foreseeable in nature if not necessarily in its horrifying scale, was that the number of homicides in the U.S. rose by nearly 5,000 from 2019 to 2020, and that nearly 3,400 of these added victims, 68 percent, were black. But there must be martyrs to the cause, after all, and who is to say how many of those 5,000 people wouldn’t willingly have sacrificed themselves in the name of a more just society? Eggs and omelets, right, comrades?
Still, one prays for more wisdom in those we’ve entrusted with authority. For the most part, we pray in vain. Witness the chaos this week on display on college campuses across the country, where we find that the protesters who brought so much death and disorder in 2020 have swapped their BLM T-shirts for kaffiyehs and adopted the Gazans as their Cause of the Season. Same clowns, different circus.
In the small hours of yesterday morning, police officers at last routed the motley rabble of such people who had been occupying the main quad on the campus at UCLA, arresting more than 200 of them and scattering the rest. Left behind were tons of assorted garbage and graffiti covering some of the school’s most iconic buildings.
UCLA administrators had taken a hands-off approach to the encampment for days, this despite the fact that some of the occupiers had taken it upon themselves to limit access to one of the school’s main libraries as final exams were drawing near. A request sent out days earlier to other University of California campuses for additional police officers was withdrawn, leaving the 65-man UCLA P.D. to cope with what was clearly an escalating problem.
Late on Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning, counter-protesters arrived on campus, apparently compelled to action in the absence of legitimate authority. They brawled with the occupiers for hours until a sufficient number of officers from the LAPD, the L.A. Sheriff’s Department, and the California Highway Patrol could be assembled and restore order.
It need not have come to this.
And Tom Finnerty blogged about a Climate Discussion Nexus video examining the environmentalist claims about rising sea levels around the globe.
Are Sea Levels Rising, or Are Cities Sinking?
That’s all for this week, but keep a look out for all of our articles over at The Pipeline!