Defense contract cheating will continue until more political leaders demand Pentagon accountability.

Boeing CEO Phil Condit has now fallen on his sword--or been pushed. The widening scandal around Boeing's revolving door jobs and other ethically dubious inducements in exchange for a lucrative new defense contract threatens to become the biggest US arms industry scandal since Lockheed tried to buy Japan. In the end, it took the pressure of two Senate Republican hawks, John McCain of Arizona and Peter Fitzgerald of Illinois, to force Boeing to face serious consequences for its latest unethical assault on taxpayer dollars.

Where were the other 98 senators? See no evil, hear no evil, smell no evil.

The Lockheed scandal occurred during the Reagan era of military spending largesse. It's a different, even more generous world today for military contracts, a world where taxpayer money flows like a rampaging river and the dam sluices are wide open. Even though Boeing executives fled Seattle for Chicago last year, Washington state still offers a telling case study of the political culture in which the corruption that accompanies such fortunes has been thriving of late. It's hardly an isolated example. Boeing's headquarters is now in Peter Fitzgerald's state--but there are no Fitzgeralds in most states and congressional districts where one or another military base or contractor brings home the pork.

In this past year's most notable farce, Washington's state legislature convenes again next month to wrestle with still more budget cuts--after enacting, with a strong push from Democratic governor Gary Locke, a deal last spring that lavished money on Boeing regardless of whether it locates a coveted new 7E7 final assembly plant in the state. Even though most of that project's components will be made overseas, the Locke deal could ensure state deficits for decades. It's estimated that even if the 7E7's promised 900 or so jobs do go to the Evergreen state, the state will collect at least $3.5 billion less in taxes than it otherwise would over the next 20 years. The package was so laden with gifts from our cash-strapped state that one provision even gave the company a $20 million tax credit for computer equipment it bought years ago. In some countries, that's called a bribe. Here, and in countless locales trying to lure the 7E7 project, it's yet another way Boeing makes money.

In Washington state, Boeing's original home, in exchange for decades of such fealty, the late Mr. Condit and other Boeing execs have steadily stripped many tens of thousands of jobs away from the Puget Sound, often outsourcing them to other countries. The company has also steadily moved, since the mid '90s, to reliance on military contracts; a good deal of Boeing's potential profitability now comes from its effectiveness in sucking at the federal taxpayer teat.

That's why the latest fiasco has struck so close to the company's bone--and why it's such a telling commentary on who our country's politicians are, and are not, looking out for when the Pentagon and truckloads of cash are in the house. Condit's forced resignation came two days after a letter from McCain and Fitzgerald urged the Pentagon to postpone a multi-billion dollar contract to lease and buy 100 new air-refueling tankers, a contract given the force of law by a defense appropriations bill signed by Pres. Bush last week.

Fitzgerald and especially McCain have been criticizing the tanker deal for months. Meanwhile, Washington state's senior senator, Patty Murray, was whimpering that the deal was already the "most scrutinized ever"--why look at it further? Only a month ago, in early November, Murray, Sen. Maria Cantwell, and Reps. Norm Dicks and Dick Larsen--all Washington state Democrats--were climbing over each other trying to claim credit for having "won" the tanker deal for Boeing--a company that no longer lives in their state and, increasingly, doesn't work there, either. When the scandal was revealed last week and two senior Boeing executives, Mike Sears and Darleen Druyen, were fired, Murray--ever the voice of accountability--weighed in: "I'm not part of Boeing's employee policies."

It's been years since Boeing was a Seattle hometown-boy-made-good story; its annual income now rivals GDPs of Eastern Europe's larger countries. But for its enthusiastic reliance on R&D, marketing, financing costs and military contracts paid for by American taxpayers, Boeing owes little loyalty to any country, let alone any state or metropolitan area. A relatively minor investment--a few dozen DC lobbying firms, a phalanx of former Congresspeople, DoD officials, and generals on its board and lobbyist rolls--gets the company a whole lot of our money, plus a few dozen Senators, several score of US Representatives, and more politicians in the 37 or so other states where Boeing has facilities of some sort. The military contractor world's other behemoth, Lockheed Martin, has the same sort of infrastructure of corruption. What's amazing is not that all the politicians become and stay bought--it's that they sell themselves so cheaply and faithfully.

In large part, this happens because we let it. Murray, Locke, and the rest face almost no organized public outcry when they give our future away based on an "it will create jobs" mantra that does not even come close to penciling out. The days of a "Senator from Boeing" should be long gone, vanished with offset deals and global outsourcing, with state and local fiscal crises caused in part by years of lavish corporate welfare, and with a post-9/11 spending environment in which vast fortunes are being slipped into military spending bills while nobody's looking.

The cost to us is the money Boeing doesn't pay in taxes, the money Boeing--and Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon and Northrup Grummon and all the rest--get from our taxes, and all the other ways that governments can't spend the lost money as a result: education, say, or health care, or job training for all those laid-off aerospace workers. For years, these companies have been successfully getting laws rewritten for their benefit; Boeing's collapsing tanker deal, like some of these companies' other fiascos in recent years, is less an aberration than a measure of such companies' ambition and willingness to push the envelope for the sole benefit of stockholders and stunningly overpaid executives like Condit. It's not just the tanker deal that reeks--it's the entire military budget, top to bottom, all of it a product of the same oversight-free culture.

As that envelope got shoved, it's a shame only two out of 535 Congresspeople cared enough to pursue Boeing's transgressions. Boeing doesn't need politicians like Patty Murray or Gary Locke looking out for them--but we do. It's time our elected officials decide whose side they're on.