(Bloomberg) -- Swiss politicians across parties are seeking to cancel an order of three dozen F-35A fighter jets from US defense conglomerate Lockheed Martin Corp after President Donald Trump imposed some of the world’s harshest levies on the country.
Sorry, I haven’t been alive at any point where the beancounters at finance were not the ones running pretty much all well known American manufacturing companies/brands, for anything, cars, aircraft, tools…
Maybe possibly firearms is an exception.
Maybe.
Yeah, 30+ years is kind of a long time.
We were great at making stuff… and then all the mergers and acquisitions happened roughly under Reagan, and things just got more bad from there, NAFTA under Clinton, massive financialization, stock buybacks, private equity firms, CDOs, etc etc.
So yeah, we are no longer great at making stuff.
…
I grew up with a super rightwing dad explaining the ins and outs of what you’re describing happening to Boeing, where he worked most of his life.
He voted against literally everyone and everything that would have pushed back against the bean counters, and of course now more lately he’s voted for the idiots version of an ‘domestic industrial development policy’, ie, deport all our farm labor and slap import tariffs on literally everything, despite him knowing full well there are 0 complex mfg supply chains with a physical footprint on American soil that do not rely on imports.
People like him are why we were good at making stuff, why we no longer are.
30 years is more than enough time for a population to essentially unlearn a skill, at a societal level.
Yeah, it’s absolutely fucking tragic how McDD ended up zombifying Boeing after the latter acquiring the former - like a corporate ophiocordyceps unilateralis. They destroyed one of the most hardcore engineering-driven organizations in the world so they could get richer faster. Absolutely fucking travesty.
Agreed, complete fucking travesty.
As best I can tell, they also more or less also orchestrated the complete regulatory capture of the FAA, to rubber stamp and normalize their high bureaucracy, low actual safety and reliability paradigms.
Oh right, they also uh, totally don’t assassinate whistleblowers.
Totally don’t do that, nope, not at all, never.