Today's WTF

Boeing has been one of the truly great airplane makers for 100 years.

In WW2, the B17 brought air crews home safe with battle damage so bad there was nearly as much airplane missing as there was airplane.

In the 1950s, when a lot of people figured Lockheed had commercial air travel sewed up with their Constellation, boom - here comes the Boeing 707, and the Jet Set was born.

Meanwhile, Boeing's B52 has been in service since the mid-1950s, and is expected to keep flying for another 25 or 30 years.

I say all that because the company has been run pretty badly for the last 10 years or so. Badly enough to have killed about 350 passengers because of poor quality assurance measures - software glitches that took down 2 of their 737 MAX airplanes, and most recently, a door blew off another airplane in mid-flight, and various other little mishaps that make me very glad I almost never fly anywhere anymore.

Anyway, it's pretty indicative of a fucked up situation here in USAmerican Inc, when the business culture allows for a guy who's been runnin' the joint (kinda into the ground, so to speak) gets a nice fat paycheck on his way out the door.

Departing Boeing CEO gets nearly $33 million in 2023 total compensation

April 5 (Reuters) - The 2023 pay package of Boeing's CEO, who recently announced his departure in the midst of a safety crisis, rose about 45% to nearly $33 million, the U.S. planemaker said on Friday.

Boeing said much of CEO Dave Calhoun's compensation is in deferred stock that has fallen in value following a January mid-air panel blowout.

The adjusted value of Calhoun's total 2023 compensation is $24.8 million, the company said in a regulatory filing. Boeing shares have tumbled nearly 30% this year as the company wrestles with quality concerns from regulators and customers following the Jan. 5 blowout on an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX 9 jet.

The proxy does not mention an exit package for Calhoun, who announced on March 25 that he will step down from the top job by year-end. In 2022, he received $22.6 million in total compensation, according to the filing.

Calhoun's potential retirement payouts were valued at more than $44 million as of year end 2023, the filing showed.

Production of Boeing's strong-selling 737 MAX has slipped in recent weeks as U.S. regulators step up factory checks and the planemaker seeks to boost quality. European rival Airbus has extended its lead in the market for single-aisle jets.

The crisis led to a broad management shakeup with Boeing board chair Larry Kellner and Stan Deal, head of the commercial planes business, also leaving. Chief Operating Officer Stephanie Pope has replaced Deal.

The board's new chair, Steve Mollenkopf, told shareholders in Friday's filing: "I promise that I personally, and we as a board will leave no stone unturned in our efforts to get this company to where it needs to be."

Calhoun took home $5 million in pay in 2023 after declining to be considered for his $2.8 million bonus, compared with $7 million in 2022. Earlier filings show Calhoun did not receive a bonus over the last three years.

Deal earned $2.6 million in actual pay in 2023 and his total compensation jumped 42% to $12.5 million, although Boeing estimates the current value at $9.7 million.

Boeing's board also decided this year that the value of long -term executive officer awards would be reduced by the percentage decline in the company's stock price since the blowout and the 2024 award date.

Due to that reduction, Calhoun will receive an award of $13.25 million in 2024, compared with a target of $17 million. A year earlier, the award was $21.25 million.

After two separate 737 MAX crashes in 2018 and 2019 that killed a combined 346 people, Boeing had revamped its executive compensation policies to emphasize product safety and quality.

In 2024, for Boeing's commercial airplanes, safety and quality will be assigned a weighting of 60% when deciding annual incentives, compared with a 40% weighting for financial performance.

Yeah, hey - I'm sure all those dead people feel quite a bit better now that the company has been more or less forced to make the executive committee's bonuses dependent on whether or not THEIR AIRPLANES FALL OUT OF THE FUCKING SKY.

Long-term incentive awards for Boeing's executive officers will also include new metrics, such as mandating an employee culture survey to assess safety management.

In February, an expert panel reviewing safety management found a "disconnect" between Boeing's senior management and employees on safety culture.

Rosanna Weaver, director of wage justice & executive pay at shareholder advocacy organization As You Sow, said she thinks Boeing is doing the right thing in rewarding safety, although such efforts should have been there "in the first place."

Profit-Taking Is The Norm

Smaller companies - the ones producing about 3% of the industry's revenue - came out with more than half of the new drugs.

While the big dogs - the ones raking in 86% of the revenue - produced only 36% of the new drugs.

Opinion

No, Big Pharma’s high prices don’t drive innovation

This year, for the first time, a handful of prescription drug manufacturers will negotiate with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services over how much taxpayers will pay for their costly drugs. Big pharmaceutical companies have long argued that such price negotiations will lower their profits, reducing their ability to innovate. But is that true?

Not according to an analysis we published at our think tank, the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity. Our research shows that the biggest drug companies largely fail to turn their enormous profits into discoveries. Instead, most innovation is taking place at small, unprofitable start-ups, whose drugs are largely excluded from Medicare’s new price negotiation system. When it comes to pharmaceutical innovation, smaller is better.

For our analysis, we reviewed 428 recent drug approvals by the Food and Drug Administration and surveyed financial data from more than 4,000 pharmaceutical and biotech companies. We found that large companies, defined as those with more than $10 billion in annual sales, produced 86 percent of the industry’s revenue but that only 36 percent of the drugs approved by the FDA. By contrast, emerging start-ups with less than $500 million in annual sales or less than $200 million in annual R&D spending produced 3 percent of the industry’s revenue but discovered more than half of all newly approved drugs.

You’d think that the biggest drug companies with the biggest R&D budgets would have the most productive research labs. But it doesn’t work that way.

Large companies tend to be bureaucratic, risk-averse and much more focused on increasing profits from their existing drug product lines. That’s partly because their largest and most influential shareholders care more about quarterly returns than long-term success. As a result, big companies overinvest in low-quality but “safe” ideas and underinvest in better but risky ones.

By contrast, smaller companies are nimbler and can better attract top scientific talent. The most creative scientists work at start-ups where they often have more freedom. Start-ups also let them generate far more wealth through stock options rather than through modest year-end bonuses at behemoths like Eli Lilly or AstraZeneca.

If large companies’ labs are so unproductive, you might ask, why are so many of the world’s top-selling drugs manufactured by bigger companies? Because of the FDA’s high regulatory costs. Smaller companies can’t always afford to conduct the large billion-dollar clinical trials required for approval. As a result, big companies treat emerging start-ups like their farm team, buying off their best drugs, raising their prices and reaping the profits.

Don't start thinking those high regulatory costs are always just unfortunate happenstance. Sometimes, the big companies lobby extra hard for costly regulation, in order to keep the smaller guys down, and make it easier for themselves to buy properties (eg: drug patents) at a bargain price.

And don't forget the billions in federal government research grants and subsidies funded through NIH.

US Tax Dollars Funded Every New Pharmaceutical in the Last Decade 

The good news is this is beginning to change. Emerging companies are increasingly taking their best drugs to market by themselves. In 2013, only 23 percent of successful drugs developed by emerging companies reached FDA approval under the original developer. By 2022, that share increased to 75 percent. If this trend continues, patients will benefit from a more competitive and diverse ecosystem of drug developers.

Opponents of drug-price negotiation on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley have no problem with large multinationals gobbling up smaller companies. Mergers and acquisitions, they argue, enable investors in those smaller companies to generate quicker returns, incentivizing further investment in start-ups.

But investors also make money if start-ups take their innovations all the way to market. In fact, over the long term, investors can make more money if start-ups become multibillion-dollar success stories rather than selling out at an earlier stage for lower acquisition prices. A more diverse ecosystem of successful, profitable biopharmaceutical companies will lead to more innovation, not less.

The drug negotiation provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act were designed with these considerations in mind. The law exempts from its process any drug representing more than 80 percent of a company’s sales to the Medicare program, effectively excluding emerging start-ups with one FDA-approved medicine.

And more affordable medicines benefit all Americans, not just seniors in Medicare, because all taxpayers fund the program through payroll taxes.

That’s why President Biden has proposed expanding Medicare price negotiations from 20 drugs a year to 50, a reasonable idea that would reduce the federal deficit and Medicare premiums. People often think the only way to make Medicare sustainable is to raise taxes or cut benefits. But reducing what Medicare must pay for the care seniors receive can also help accomplish this goal.

We can do other things to lower drug prices while protecting innovation. First, we can eliminate the Inflation Reduction Act’s punitive tax for companies that refuse to negotiate with the Medicare program. In a true negotiation, manufacturers should have the right to walk away from Medicare. They rarely will, given the value of Medicare’s 65-million-person market, but the right to do so will incentivize Medicare to negotiate in good faith.

Second, we can reduce red tape at the FDA and enable more drugs to reach patients after compelling midstage clinical trials. We already do this for cancer and HIV, and there’s no reason we shouldn’t do it for chronic diseases when scientifically appropriate.

The real barrier to innovation in drug development isn’t manufacturers’ ability to charge extortionate prices; it’s the ever-increasing cost of navigating the FDA’s approval process. In the rest of the economy, innovation drives lower prices for valuable goods and services. The pharmaceutical industry — and its regulator — should follow suit.

The Test

It's pretty appalling to keep finding out that so many Americans know so little about our history or our government.

The citizenship test has some of the easiest questions ever - stuff I was taught in grade school - starting like in 3rd or 4th grade.

Nobody's asking you to present a full dissertation on the details of our little experiment in democratic self-government, but holy crap, people, c'mon - ya gotta know some of this to be at least kind of effective in the whole democracy thing.

Democracy is not something we have

unless it's something we do.

And we have to know something about it

to make the damned thing work.

Check yourself:

The next time you hear somebody shit-talk immigrants for not knowing enough about USAmerica Inc, ask them a few of those questions.

We're told that publicly disclosed campaign money is a determinant factor in an election. And there's still some truth to that, but this is not 2009 (ie: before Citizens United v FEC), and we've drifted away from being the kind of democracy we keep telling ourselves we are.

Press Poodles need to start looking beyond what a candidate (particularly a GOP candidate) has in their "campaign war chest".

Any given Republican running for any given office can be pretty sure that whatever they spend on ads and such will be supplemented 3- or 5- or 10-fold by private (and anonymous) "donors" who are basically buying that candidate's vote at whatever level of government they're going to "serve".

And while there's a good bit of that on the Dems' side as well, I estimate a very large majority of it goes to the benefit of the GOP.

Why We Can't Have Nice Things

At the upper levels, "American entrepreneurship" is plain old ordinary bullshit.

• Start with your brilliant new idea
• Set it up as a "non-profit"
• Get government to pitch in
• Wire it so the tax-payer money being syphoned into your shell company is laundered and hidden, so it can be funneled into your very profitable subsidiaries
• Buy some politicians to cement your scheme in place, basically making it illegal not to do business with you

You pay a premium every month, but when you need care that shades even slightly away from the sweet spot on your insurance company's Favorites List, they'll deny you the care you need to live your bestest healthiest life.

50 million Americans are denied care in one way or another every year.

The big insurance companies have strangled healthcare providers to the point where they can own any given "private" practice, and have taken on the doctors as hired hands - subjecting them to all the shitty labor-fucking laws that they've paid their coin-operated legislators to put in place.

Corporate Plutocracy

is not coming.

It's already here.

USAmerica, Inc

... is nine kinds of fucked up - in one picture

Shell Deer Park chemical plant on fire 05-05-2023

with

Corporate bullshit slogan on a garbage truck

I don't see how we're gonna survive.

They Call It The American Dream

...because you have to be asleep to believe it.

It's not supposed to be The American Dream to head out on the morning of your 50th birthday realizing you'll be working the same crappy little job at the same crappy little wage for the rest of your crappy little life, while the drive time DJ tries to happy-talk you out of the feeling that you and everybody in your family would be better off if you had a fatal accident on the way to the office today.