Saturday Commentary and Review #160 (The Very Late Post-Easter Edition)

Boeing's Suicides, The War on Citizenship, The USA as the Centre of the First World Government, Napoleon Bonaparte on the English, A Historical Panic in Zanzibar

Apr 02, 2024

Every weekend (almost) I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.

By now, most of you have heard of the increasingly popular concept known as “the competency crisis”. For those of you who haven’t, the competency crisis argues that the USA is headed towards a crisis in which critical infrastructure and important manufacturing will suffer a catastrophic decline in competency due to the fact that the people (almost all males) who know how to build/run these things are retiring, and there is no one available to fill these roles once they’re gone. The competency crisis is one of the major points brought up by people when they point out that America is in a state of decline.

As all of you are already aware, there is also a general collapse in trust in governing institutions in the USA (and all across the West). Cynicism is the order of the day, with people naturally assuming that they are being lied to constantly by the ruling elites, whether in media, government, the corporate world, and so on. A competency crisis paired with a collapse in trust in key institutions is a vicious one-two punch for any country to absorb. Nowhere is this one-two combo more evident than in one of America’s crown jewels: Boeing.

I’m certain that all of you are familiar with the “suicide” of John Barnett that happened almost a month ago. John Barnett was a Quality Control Manager working for Boeing in the Charleston, South Carolina operation. He was a “lifer”, in that he spent his entire career at Boeing. He was also a whistleblower. His “suicide” via a gunshot wound to the right temple happened on what was scheduled to be the third and last day of his deposition in his case against his former employer.

In more innocent and less cynical times, the suggestion that he was murdered would have had currency only in conspiratorial circles, serving as fodder for programs like the Art Bell Show. But we are in a different world now, and to suggest that Barnett might have been killed for turning whistleblower earns one replies like “could be”, “I’m pretty sure that’s the case”, and the most common one of all: “I wouldn’t doubt it”. No one believes that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself. Many people believe the same about John Barnett. The collapse in trust in ruling institutions has resulted in an environment where conspiratorial thinking naturally flourishes. Maureen Tkacik reports on Boeing’s downward turn, using Barnett’s case as a centre piece:

“John is very knowledgeable almost to a fault, as it gets in the way at times when issues arise,” the boss wrote in one of his withering performance reviews, downgrading Barnett’s rating from a 40 all the way to a 15 in an assessment that cast the 26-year quality manager, who was known as “Swampy” for his easy Louisiana drawl, as an anal-retentive prick whose pedantry was antagonizing his colleagues. The truth, by contrast, was self-evident to anyone who spent five minutes in his presence: John Barnett, who raced cars in his spare time and seemed “high on life” according to one former colleague, was a “great, fun boss that loved Boeing and was willing to share his knowledge with everyone,” as one of his former quality technicians would later recall.

Please keep in mind that this report offers up only one side of the story.

A decaying institution:

But Swampy was mired in an institution that was in a perpetual state of unlearning all the lessons it had absorbed over a 90-year ascent to the pinnacle of global manufacturing. Like most neoliberal institutions, Boeing had come under the spell of a seductive new theory of “knowledge” that essentially reduced the whole concept to a combination of intellectual property, trade secrets, and data, discarding “thought” and “understanding” and “complex reasoning” possessed by a skilled and experienced workforce as essentially not worth the increased health care costs. CEO Jim McNerney, who joined Boeing in 2005, had last helmed 3M, where management as he saw it had “overvalued experience and undervalued leadership” before he purged the veterans into early retirement.
“Prince Jim”—as some long-timers used to call him—repeatedly invoked a slur for longtime engineers and skilled machinists in the obligatory vanity “leadership” book he co-wrote. Those who cared too much about the integrity of the planes and not enough about the stock price were “phenomenally talented assholes,” and he encouraged his deputies to ostracize them into leaving the company. He initially refused to let nearly any of these talented assholes work on the 787 Dreamliner, instead outsourcing the vast majority of the development and engineering design of the brand-new, revolutionary wide-body jet to suppliers, many of which lacked engineering departments. The plan would save money while busting unions, a win-win, he promised investors. Instead, McNerney’s plan burned some $50 billion in excess of its budget and went three and a half years behind schedule.

There is a new trend that blames many fumbles on DEI. Boeing is not one of those. Instead, the short-term profit maximization mindset that drives stock prices upward is the main reason for the decline in this corporate behemoth.

Outsourcing and cleaning house:

Swampy belonged to one of the cleanup crews that Boeing detailed to McNerney’s disaster area. The supplier to which Boeing had outsourced part of the 787 fuselage had in turn outsourced the design to an Israeli firm that had botched the job, leaving the supplier strapped for cash in the midst of a global credit crunch. Boeing would have to bail out—and buy out—the private equity firm that controlled the supplier. In 2009, Boeing began recruiting managers from Washington state to move east to the supplier’s non-union plant in Charleston, South Carolina, to train the workforce to properly put together a plane.
But after the FAA cleared Boeing to deliver its first 787s to customers around the end of 2011, one of Swampy’s old co-workers says that McNerney’s henchmen began targeting anyone with experience and knowledge for torment and termination. One of Swampy’s closest colleagues, Bill Seitz, took a demotion to go back west. A quality control engineer named John Woods was terminated for insisting inspectors thoroughly document damage and repair performed on composite materials, which were far less resilient than steel. Good machinists and inspectors who wore wristbands in support of a union drive were framed with dubious infractions. “Everyone from Everett started dropping like flies,” remembers a former manager at the plant.
“There’s a form we all had to sign that says you take responsibility for anything that goes wrong, and it states pretty clearly that if something happens to a plane because of something you did wrong, you can face a major fine or jail time for that,” the manager recalled. “The Everett managers took that seriously. Charleston leadership did not.”

Check this out:

The bosses hit Swampy with a new initiative called “Multi-Function Process Performer,” through which quality inspectors were directed to outsource 90 percent of their duties to the mechanics they were supposed to be supervising. This was supposed to speed up production and save Boeing millions once it successfully shed the thousands of inspectors it intended to axe. Swampy believed relying on mechanics to self-inspect their work was not only insane but illegal under the Federal Aviation Administration charter, which explicitly required quality inspectors to document all defects detected, work performed, and parts installed on a commercial airplane in one centralized database. Swampy knew he was caught in a prisoner’s dilemma. If he went along, he was breaking the law; if he didn’t, whistleblowers who complained about unsafe practices were routinely terminated on grounds of violating the same safety protocols they had opposed violating.

Swampy decided to turn whistleblower:

He documented his discovery that machinists installing floor panels had been littering long titanium slivers into wire bundles and electrical boxes between the floorboards and the cargo compartment ceiling panels, where they risked causing an electrical short. A series of mysterious battery fires had already caused the FAA to ground the 787 for a few months just over a year after the first plane had been delivered. He wrote that 75 out of a package of 300 oxygen masks slated for installation on a plane did not actually pump oxygen. His team compiled a list of 300 defects on a fuselage scheduled for delivery, and he discovered that more than 400 nonconforming aircraft parts had gone missing from the defective parts cage and likely been installed on planes illegally and without documentation, by managers and mechanics desperate to get them out the door.

I didn’t like learning these facts, to be honest. It does not boost confidence in choosing to fly in a Boeing plane.

The 737 MAX fiasco:

It made him sick to think that the value of his Boeing shares had tripled over the same period during which he’d watched the company get so comprehensively dismantled. But it was downright surreal to watch the stock price nearly triple once more during the two years after he left the company.
Nine days after the stock reached its high of $440, a brand-new 737 MAX dove into the ground near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, at nearly 800 miles per hour, killing 157 people on board, thanks to a shockingly dumb software program that had programmed the jets to nose-dive in response to the input from a single angle-of-attack sensor. The software had already killed 189 people on a separate 737 MAX in Indonesia, but Boeing had largely deflected blame for that crash by exploiting the island nation’s reputation for aviation laxity. Now it was clear Boeing was responsible for all the deaths.
Swampy had no firsthand experience with the 737 MAX, but it was obvious that the ethos that drove the 787 plant had poisoned that program as well. He began sharing his story in media interviews, and soon the Department of Justice, which had opened a criminal investigation into the MCAS flight control system crashes that quickly widened to encompass the Dreamliner program, came calling as well.

The engineering that caused that issue was performed by engineers in India working for $9/hour. Good for the bottom line in the short term, but not good for the medium term, and certainly not good for those who perished.

Many want the future CEO of Boeing to have an engineering background in order to right the ship, but the report informs us that none of the main candidates being mentioned to take now available role have such a resume.

Click here to read the rest.

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Many of us are taught that elites are the key drivers of history, in that what they do as first adopters eventually trickles down to the masses. It is the elites who first chose to identify with certain identities such as nation and ethnicity, giving to those below them in the social order an idea about how to define themselves. Case in point: Christianity really began to pick up in the Roman Empire once certain segments of the elites were won over to it. The examples are endless.

In my first year of university, I was introduced to the idea that western elites were becoming “post-national”. It took me some time to really get a grip on this concept, as I admittedly had real difficulty in understanding how such a thing could be possible. “You either work on behalf of your country, or your work against it”, was how I thought. What I failed to understand was that the erosion of national sovereignty via globalism meant that the bonds between people and their country were loosening, and those that could do so were able to segue from one state to another. In retrospect, I was young and naive. I could have never imagined a scenario where a president of one country would become a governor of a region in another one, like Mikhail Saakashvili.

If the elites are becoming post-national, history suggests that the people will eventually follow. To be quite fair, this is already happening. Dual citizenship is quite common, with many people having one foot in one country, and another somewhere else. In the old days, such a thing would raise suspicions about loyalty, but those days are gone because the elites are themselves post-national. Nowhere is this trend more obvious than in the devaluation of the meaning of citizenship, as Michael Lind explains:

Does citizenship still mean anything? The question has been raised again by the appointment of Kelly Wong, a citizen of China who is a legal immigrant but lacks U.S. citizenship, to the Board of Elections in San Francisco. Wong and her colleagues will be responsible for supervising city elections in which, by law, she cannot vote.
The president of the Board of Supervisors that appointed Wong, Aaron Peskin, told The San Francisco Standard: “It’s about bringing a diversity of voices that represent different segments of society to the conversation.” Peskin’s comment illustrates the replacement of national patriotism among most progressives with a weird combination of post-national globalism and hard-edged racialism.
How can foreign nationals “represent different segments of society” when they are not even members of American society as defined by citizenship? Two answers are possible. One is that “society” for the purposes of “the conversation” in American politics and policy is not limited to American citizens but includes the 96% of the human race who are not Americans. Another, more territorially restrictive interpretation is that American society includes not only American citizens but foreign nationals residing on American soil, including those who are present in the U.S. in violation of U.S. law. Either definition of American “society” erases any distinction between U.S. citizens and people who are citizens of foreign countries but who may happen to reside temporarily on U.S. soil.

What’s the point of being a citizen in the first place if the benefits of it are continuously expanded to non-citizens?

Note that Peskin explained that the appointment of this Chinese national to a U.S. government body was important for “bringing a diversity of voices that represent different segments of society to the conversation.” By “diversity” most progressives mean race and gender, not diversity of class, worldview, or values. Presumably Wong would not object to being characterized as an affirmative action hire, because she is an employee of a left-wing nonprofit called Chinese for Affirmative Action whose name reflects the current progressive orthodoxy—disturbingly similar to right-wing racialism—that citizenship and nationality are unimportant, but biological race is central to your identity. In other words, to use the arbitrary racial categories enshrined in American law and progressive dogma, the most important differences are not among Americans (of all races) and foreign nationals (of all races) but among racial Asians (American and otherwise) and racial non-Asians (white, Black, Hispanic, Native American).
The idea that your biological race, as defined by the U.S. Census, is central to your identity but your citizenship or nationality is of lesser importance is enshrined in the practice and the theory of race-based affirmative action as it has been practiced in the U.S. since the 1970s. For decades Ivy League universities have admitted well-educated and often well-to-do immigrants from Africa to boost the numbers of their “Black students”—over the protests of Americans who call themselves American Descendants of Slaves (ADOS). By this logic, if a wealthy Nigerian or Ghanaian student can “represent” native-born Black Americans for diversity purposes in a U.S. university, then of course a Chinese national without U.S. citizenship can “represent” not only American citizens of Chinese descent, but also American citizens of Indian or Vietnamese or Filipino descent, who despite speaking different languages and having entirely different cultures and histories are nevertheless all lumped together under the racialist category of “Asian American” invented by the U.S. Census Bureau.

To me, the watering down of US citizenship and the extension of rights to non-citizens is part of the US Empire’s declaration that the entire world (and therefore everyone in it) is in America’s Zone of Interest, and that everyone is a Potential American.

Welfare benefits:

While federal law still forbids illegal immigrants from access to most federal welfare benefits (they can access some, including WIC coupons), a number of progressive states have showered legal privileges and benefits on foreign nationals who violate immigration laws. In 2022, 16 states and the District of Columbia—most of them one-party Democratic jurisdictions like California, New York, and Oregon—allowed illegal immigrants to get driver’s licenses. Having hesitated to endorse driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants during her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2007, Hillary Clinton endorsed the proposal unequivocally in 2015. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the state of California provided illegal immigrants with up to $1,700 in money from law-abiding state taxpayers, including a $500 prepaid debit card and $1,200 from the Golden State Stimulus Fund.
Under President Joe Biden, the IRS is now collaborating with New York state in arranging for illegal immigrants to get taxpayer money through welfare programs through New York’s “Excluded Workers Fund,” which subsidizes both ex-convicts and foreign nationals residing in New York in open defiance of U.S. immigration law. According to the IRS, “The IRS will assist eligible NY residents who are also ITIN applicants meet requirements for the New York State’s Excluded Worker’s Fund (EWF) payments. EWF provides income replacement checks to workers excluded from unemployment insurance most often due to immigration status.”

How is this not demoralizing for Americans, especially those recent arrivals who entered legally and worked hard to make something for themselves and their families?

Elites and golden visas:

One form of global arbitrage involves rich people obtaining so-called “golden visas.” Since the end of the Cold War, many countries have competed for foreign investment by granting citizenship or favorable legal immigrant status to foreign investors who spend money in the country. So-called “citizenship by invitation” (CBI) is particularly important for tiny nations that are tax and regulatory havens, like the tiny Caribbean island of Dominica (distinct from the Dominican Republic), which receives half of its government revenue from selling citizenship status to individuals and corporations.
But many large, developed democracies, including all of the Anglophone countries, now offer citizenship by investment. In the U.S. this takes the form of the EB-5 visa. In return for a minimum amount of investment in a commercial enterprise in the U.S. and a plan to create or preserve 10 permanent full-time jobs for qualified U.S. workers, a foreign investor or entrepreneur is entitled to a green card that can lead in a few years to naturalized U.S. citizenship.
As might be expected, the EB-5 program has been plagued by scandal since its creation in 1990. Abuses of the program often take two forms. One involves defining the distressed areas that are supposed to be targets of investment to include sites for luxury real estate. As Sen. Charles E. Grassley, R-Iowa, observed in 2019: “All of a sudden, investment dollars intended for communities in need were being sucked up for glitzy projects in America’s most well-to-do neighborhoods.” Another abuse has involved the bilking of gullible foreign investors—many of them Chinese—by American con artists, as part of real estate investment scams in Vermont, Texas, California, and elsewhere.

The rich and their encouragement of cross-border flows:

Even as globalization has created a global market in citizenship for the rich, mass immigration has also created an incentive for the global rich to encourage national governments to turn a blind eye to massive cross-border flows of illegal immigrants, many of whom work directly or indirectly for the affluent and wealthy in the “world cities” where both the rich and poor immigrants are concentrated. The traditional conception of exclusive national citizenship is being whittled away in the interests of wealthy holders of multiple passports and the immigrants—legal or illegal—whom they are disproportionately likely to employ.

The nation-state as an increasingly obsolete concept:

For many members of the economic and social elite in the era of globalization, the nation-state—with its shared sense of solidarity and obligation among its citizens—is obsolete. Enlightened progressives and libertarians alike view countries as mere territories—transient labor camps and global investment zones. Citizenship is of no more ethical or emotional significance to the global overclass than a gym membership. For the mostly immobile working-class majorities of all races in all countries, however, their political citizenship is their only claim on the favor of their own national government. The debate about citizenship, then, is not so much one between left and right as it is part of the contemporary class divide within every Western nation, including our own.

Citizenship meant being part of an exclusive community, where some (especially the USA) were more highly regarded than others. What’s the point of being a member of a club where non-members are increasingly entitled to everything that members receive?

“One World Government” has been a constant theme in conspiratorial circles for as long as I have been alive. Prevalent on the American right, the fear that mischievous politicians would degrade sovereignty by handing powers over to international bodies such as the United Nations was ever-present. I just need to type out three letters that you will immediately recognize to hammer home the point: NWO.

Stubbornly, the nation-state persists and one-world government is nowhere on the horizon. US hegemony is a matter of fact even if revisionist powers like China and Russia seek to upend this state of affairs. But what if the US Empire is a sort of one-world government that is already in place and we just don’t realize it? Samo Burja makes the case for this view:

The prospect of a world government has been seen as the inevitable future of humanity for centuries if not millennia. Many luminaries—from Immanuel Kant to H.G. Wells—spoke and wrote passionately in its favor, arguing it would produce a utopian world free of war, strife, perhaps even want, where humanity finally applied its talents to taming and remaking nature. Others issued dire prophecies and warnings of an inescapable dystopia, wrought by a great and terrible political Leviathan. Nearly all considered it a remote prospect. What if I told you world government has been achieved?

OK, but how?

The distinction between formal and informal arrangements is one that has to be given careful thought when thinking of any empire, especially a global one. King Herod was nominally a king of Judea, yet the presence of Roman soldiers is enough for everyone at the time, and today, to recognize this kingdom as part of the Roman Empire during his reign. This arrangement was common for the Roman Empire with the kingdoms of Mauretania, Cappadocia, Pontus, Bosphorus, and many others de jure or de facto sharing Judea’s status. The United States has many similar arrangements today.
American GIs landed in Iceland to take over its World War II occupation by Britain in 1940, and they never truly left, with Naval Air Station Keflavik operating to this day. From 1951 to 2006, the Iceland Defense Force that was tasked with defending Iceland was run not by the government of Iceland, which supports no standing army, but by the United States. By many estimates, 2% to 5% of Iceland’s GDP during this era was oriented to providing services to the base, similarly to how state spending on legions in ancient Britain sustained the Romanized economy there. This far-flung military garrison in a protectorate is but one of many Roman-like special relationships the United States cultivates. With nearly 5000 military sites worldwide, these bases themselves cover over 42,000 square miles of federal government territory, together approximately the size of the U.S. state of Virginia.
With 31 member states, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) includes the small nuclear-armed powers of France and the United Kingdom, manpower of over a billion people, accounts for over 50% of world military spending as of 2024, and holds three out of the five permanent seats on the United Nations Security Council. The much-discussed Article 5 of the treaty that gives NATO legal existence states that an attack on one signatory is an attack on all of them. This article was only invoked once in the history of the alliance, after the September 11th attacks on the United States in 2001. The alliance further obliges all member states to spend 2% of GDP on their militaries, a target many countries have fallen short of, but more have met since the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine. Beyond NATO itself, the United States has collective defense treaties with over a dozen nations, with Brazil, Australia, South Korea, and Japan being just a few of the more prominent examples.

Alright, but this explains empire, not one-world government.

The Five Eyes alliance with the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia further means the entire Anglosphere in practice shares all signals intelligence efforts to the point where such efforts can be thought of as a single supranational intelligence organization. This traces its origin to a secret treaty associated with the signing of the Atlantic Charter in 1941, which set U.S. and British goals for the post-war world. The Five Eyes is one of the most comprehensive espionage alliances in history.

The United Nations, World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund are nominally international institutions backed by U.S. diplomatic, military, and economic heft and are, of course, headquartered in either Washington D.C. or New York. According to one of these internationally-influential D.C.-headquartered institutions, the Atlantic Council, the U.S. currency itself is a major backbone of world government:
“The U.S. dollar has served as the world’s leading reserve currency since World War II. Today, the dollar represents 58 percent of the value of foreign reserve holdings worldwide. The euro, the second-most-used currency, comprises only 21 percent of foreign reserve holdings.”
This dollar dominance means that the Federal Reserve, based in Washington D.C., is perhaps the most powerful economic institution in the world, with decision-making power on an economic scale transcending the already vast 25.4% of global nominal GDP of the United States proper. Nominal GDP is a better proxy for trade power than GDP adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP) and is useful for thinking about what commands the flow of global goods and services into North America. This monetary importance will not be as easy to quantify for future archaeologists as that of the ancient Roman solidus, as it leaves no metal trace, but it will be universally attested in the written sources future historians are likely to have.
Preserving the “international rules-based order” on which such economic and institutional arrangements are built is often given as the moral underpinning of the deployment of the immensely powerful U.S. military. Sometimes this takes the form of large-scale invasions, such as in Iraq or Afghanistan. Other times they are more narrow and calculated interventions, such as the bombing campaigns on Yugoslavia or Libya, which took advantage of vast U.S. air power. Providing U.S. arms to client states or armed groups is also a favored strategy, such as in Syria or in Ukraine. The United States and its international system are not the first empire to claim universal legitimacy, but they are the first to back this claim of legitimacy with capabilities of a planetary scale.

I am still not convinced.

On the revisionist powers:

As we intellectually grapple with our present American Leviathan, the only plausible fledgling challenger that presents itself is China, with its economic growth and demonstrated capability of technological innovation, yet without a true international empire this challenge rings hollow. China aspires to be part of and perhaps even the inheritor of America’s order. Even this limited aspiration is of course something the United States might not cooperate with.
A bitter Russia remains, clinging to a claimed equality with the United States. It has proven itself capable of resisting U.S.-backed regime change or fragmentation, and since 2014 even of modest territorial expansion through war. It however hasn’t proved itself capable of tempting states to align with itself against the United States and is unlikely to do so in the future. This means it cannot unify any significant area of Eurasia as the Soviet Union once did. Modern Russia aims to assert itself as a great power, not a superpower, and cannot dismantle the world government but merely erode it.

First world government vs. first world government:

The international community—that almost but not quite admits to itself that it is a commonwealth—centered on the United States might, as it declines, end up being less than the first world government, merely the first world government. Even today, reviewing maps of various security and international political matters, for example which countries sanctioned Russia after its invasion of Ukraine, reveals that perhaps this international community is most assured in governing the First World: Europe, North America, and the rims of the Pacific Ocean. As its power is eventually challenged, it will retreat to those areas rather than persist in influencing the planet as a whole. Outside this reduced realm, and mostly unnoticed by those inside the First World, new political paradigms and empires will emerge first in Eurasia and eventually in Africa.
The forces that brought about the claim of world government in 1945 with the United Nations, and its reality in 1991 with the Soviet Union’s fall, are not unique to the United States of America. The second or third world government might well be American as well—the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinan reconquered Rome and Italy centuries after those lands passed into Ostrogothic political control—but it also might not be. China or, on a long enough horizon, even India present themselves as new potential centers of global empire.

This was a fun intellectual exercise, but I am sure that some will think it wankery.

Fisted by Foucault

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