Tears For Boeing

The editors and publishers of the Seattle Times and P-I seem to have an undying enchantment with the Wealth and Power that is Boeing. As Media Watch has been steadily documenting for months now, items on Boeing, along with the other local sacred cow, Microsoft, dominate local papers. The type of news the dailies focus on, however, is at least as revealing as the obsession with Boeing itself. It reveals an unwavering commitment to producing a paper custom-designed for the needs of a small portion of the population--investors.

Therefore, it's no surprise that the two papers recently announced a plan to consolidate their efforts to create one large paper serving all of King County--the Boeing Bulletin for Investors. The new paper will display sharp pictures of Boeing-made military jets in shadowy rooms, plus the newest in Boeing's production lines being modeled on the runway. It will run articles about wacky commanders Condit and Stonecipher hamming it up at their outdoor barbecues. It will cheer when new aircraft orders are announced or when legislation and tax laws lucrative to Boeing investors are passed.

Of course, the new paper won't want to spoil the investors' good moods--so it will obfuscate the links between Boeing's operations and U.S. Foreign Policy, programs of military Keynesianism, the harmful effects lobbyists have on democracy, or the transfer of resources from the poor to the wealthy. There will never be mentions of Boeing's abysmal environmental and worker safety record, its army of over 70 lobbying firms pulling strings and filling coffers inside the Beltway, its efforts to bust unions and outsource production to numerous countries (China being only the most visible) with horrific labor and human rights records. Readers will stay blissfully unaware of Boeing's reliance on taxpayer dollars, or its own evasion of taxes at every level, or the impact of Boeing's new focus on military sales--producing weapons designed to incinerate civilian populations and marketed to dictators eager to use them.

Oh, wait! Looking over the past year's papers, it seems that the P-I and the Times already perform all these appreciated functions. Maybe that new merger will go more smoothly than the recent McBoeing merger. The investors hope so--considering the recent "bleak" news that Boeing will post a $700 million third quarter loss for 1997.

The news about the quarterly loss, shrieked loudly on the front pages of the Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday editions of our fair city's dailies, doesn't mean much to most of us. It is clear that these articles are written for a special audience. That audience includes that small fraction of Western Washington residents wealthy or dumb enough to hold high-valued Boeing stock. The number of Boeing investors who gather at annual meetings at Boeing HQ could only fill a small auditorium.

Of course, these are the only people that matter.

Some might argue that since McBoeing employs tens of thousands here in the Pacific Northwest, that this news is relevant to a wider audience. This is hardly the case. The teary-eyed announcement means little for workers, as the fiscal loss is due to snake-swallowed-the-pig glitches in production stemming from Boeing's acquisition of McDonnell Douglas earlier in the year. Boeing's overall work force size is secure (though Boeing's stated intent to move its base out of Seattle, and its use of more and more non-U.S. facilities, bodes poorly for local workers--a story not well covered by local media). Numbers of airplane orders are soaring, and long- term profits are assured. The current "losses" are simply because Boeing underestimated the time and cost of refitting its production lines to accommodate new orders, and did not complete sales of enough aircraft this quarter to post a profit.

In fact, the problems with production have actually revealed a need for more skilled workers--wouldn't prospective hirings seems like a good thing? Apparently, no.

Some might argue that since Boeing pays so many taxes in to the state/county coffers, this information would be relevant to a broader base of people. While it is certainly true that the propagandistic pages of Seattle's dailies implicitly equate Boeing's economic health with that of the residents of the region, the third quarter fiscal news has no effect on public institutions--for example, direct or indirect tax revenues-- either.

It's important to steer clear of the paradigm promulgated by the press that what is good for Boeing is good for the rest of us. Sure, Boeing's activities generate some revenue for public entities and employ people, but there is a larger question of civic priorities that can not be settled by adding up dollars and cents.

Boeing is generating income manufacturing weapons of death and mass destruction, and receiving public dollars to subsidize production and research for such items. At the height of the Cold War, in 1979, Pentagon spending (Boeing's new raison d'etre) was greater than federal aid to cities by a factor of two. Today, that ratio has stretched to five-to-one.

Furthermore, the percentage of Boeing's revenue paid in taxes dropped from 2.6% to 1.6% over the last five years. Boeing paid no federal taxes at all in 1995, getting a $33 million rebate instead, despite record profits generated by the usual combination of corporate welfare and downsizing. The long-term inevitabilities for Seattle and the county are indeed "bleak," although it's not because Boeing is posting a third quarter loss. It would be wise to read our local papers in this context--as Investor Bulletins--to make sense of the fluff and economic news hype shoved down our throats.