At midnight last Friday, a Congressional funding impasse led the Federal Aviation Administration into partial shutdown. As a consequence, some 4,000 FAA workers have been furloughed. Although crucial air traffic control functions continue, airport construction and collection of ticket taxes will halt until some solution is worked out. ThinkProgress reported that the root of the shutdown is a GOP effort to strip FAA employees of union rights -- what a surprise! According to the Washington Post, House Dems will introduce a bill to end the shutdown. But all this is just introduction, not the point of this post.
Seeking news about the FAA led me to this documentary which I highly recommend you watch. It's about Boeing allegedly knowing that production of some aircraft has been faulty, yet doing nothing to fix the situation. Toward the end, the report gets into the 'regulated-industry-as-customer' approach to oversight that characterizes the worst of our corporate-captured government's failure.
It's a great piece of muckraking journalism by al Jazeera English, a multi-faceted story about which I'd heard nothing until now. It was originally published in late 2010 but it remains relevant. It's a classic story of the public put into peril by corporate malfeasance in the name of profits, and enabled by higher-ups at a, ahem, responsive government agency. There's a cast of many, including honorable and courageous whistleblowers from the ranks of Boeing and the FAA -- people who put their public-interest ethics ahead of their careers and paid the price. Well worth your time. It's led me to check on which kind of aircraft I'll be flying on later this summer. Really.
