It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Saturday, October 02, 2021
It turns out Elizabeth Warren was right all along
Amanda Marcotte, Salon September 30, 2021 Senator Elizabeth Warren (Screenshot)
During the 2020 Democratic primary, Sen. Elizabeth Warren made fighting corruption her number one priority. It may not have seemed that way in the press, which tended to characterize the senior senator from Massachusetts as a female Sen. Bernie Sanders. Most coverage focused heavily on her bold economic ideas, such as a wealth tax. But when she was actually asked what her major focus in politics was, Warren never hesitated to say that fighting corruption should come first — because of her commitment to passing progressive economic policies.
"The rich and the powerful have been calling the shots in Washington forever and ever," Warren told Vox's Ezra Klein in 2019, explaining why she was intent on passing a massive anti-corruption bill meant to curtail the influence of lobbyists and influence of moneyed interests on Capitol Hill.
"Look closely, and you'll see — on issue after issue, widely popular policies are stymied because giant corporations and billionaires who don't want to pay taxes or follow any rules use their money and influence to stand in the way of big, structural change," she wrote in her plan announcement.
Warren's view is, sadly and perhaps surprisingly, not popular. Republicans clearly don't view corruption as a bad thing these days — that's one more reason why they love Donald Trump. But even on the left, where everyone says they're against corruption and voters in particular always sign off on the idea that ending corruption is a good idea, there's a gulf between saying you're against it and actually working to eradicate it. If more agreed with Warren to make corruption a priority target, we might not be watching President Joe Biden's bold agenda slowly fall apart now.
When it comes to brass tacks, not enough people are willing to put in the effort required to make fighting corruption a real agenda item. Activists are more likely to put their time into causes like health care and climate change. Democratic politicians, when they get power, are also attracted to policy fights that offer tangible rewards, such as increased social spending, rather than the more abstract and far-flung discourse about lobbyists and corruption. And voters definitely reward politicians for these priorities, which is one reason why Warren lost handily in the primary to Sanders and Biden.
But as the current debacle playing out on Capitol Hill demonstrates, Warren was right all along. Democrats and their voters may want to pass progressive legislation that addresses wealth inequality, climate change and lack of health care. But corrupt business interests keep stopping them. It's like trying to make a dress when someone keeps stealing your sewing machine. You can have the pattern and the fabric and the vision, but if you don't have the means to put it all together, you will never get that dress made.
Biden and Sanders are learning this the hard way as their dual vision for the Build Back Better plan — an expansive set of bills meant to address climate change, reduce poverty, ensure child care, expand health care, and build up American infrastructure, among other things — teeters on the edge of collapse. After spending months carefully constructing a two-track plan where moderate Democrats would support the progressive agenda, in exchange for progressives supporting the moderate agenda, a handful of centrist Democrats in the House and Senate are about to blow the whole thing up by reneging on their end of the bargain. And while there are multiple reasons for this backstabbing behavior, it's hard not to notice the undue influence of lobbyists.
The two biggest names in the Senate Betrayal Caucus are, of course, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Both are throwing their weight around, clearly trying to derail Biden's agenda while claiming to have no such intention. Instead, they come with an endless array of incoherent, even nonsensical, explanations as to why they can't just suck it up and vote for the two-bill track the Democratic caucus agreed to vote on. There's now an entire cottage industry built around psychoanalyzing these two: What do they want? What will get them to "yes"? Why won't they just tell us what they want, so we can give it to them? Why are they making so little sense?
Everyone has a favorite reason, but the likeliest is the boring one: They're being dodgy because they don't want to be honest about their real motives. Looking at their track records, it's hard not to notice that both deeply enjoy being wined and dined by some of the sleaziest lobbyists and fundraisers on Capitol Hill. Manchin, for instance, blew off fellow Democrats begging him to support voting rights in favor of going to a fundraiser held by oil and gas executives who have a financial interest in keeping working people from voting. Sinema is deep in cahoots with industry lobbyists who want to tank Biden's agenda, holding fundraisers with anti-Biden groups and taking money from the pharmacy industry, right before doing an about-face to block fair pricing drug policies she previously claimed to support.
It's not just those two. The price control policy for pharmaceuticals is one of the most wildly popular items in the Biden agenda — at least with voters. But a small group of Democrats in the House pulled that item out of the bill, and they're barely trying to pretend it's for any reason other than to appease pharmaceutical lobbyists. They likely know that politicians and voters may say they oppose corruption, but that actually doing something to stop it never becomes a priority.
Lobbyists have Sinema's ear, but her own party and voters do not. The Democratic party in Arizona is threatening a vote of no confidence against her, and her response was somewhere between a shrug and throwing them the finger. Activists are crowdfunding for a primary challenger against her. It is possible she is such an egomaniac that she thinks she's going to have a great re-election after teeing off her own voters, of course. But it's also hard not to wonder if she isn't influenced by the knowledge that she's all but guaranteed a well-heeled job in lobbying if she loses re-election. Notably, a lifetime ban on politicians becoming lobbyists is part of Warren's anti-corruption bill. If it was law, then Sinema might be making more pro-voter choices, rather than treating her constituents as an annoying inconveniences.
Corruption isn't a sexy issue, but focusing attention on it can pay huge dividends when it comes to advancing progressive causes. Take gun control, for instance. Decades of rational argumentation and emotional appeals did little to move the needle, policy-wise. Even in the face of children being murdered in schools repeatedly, Republican politicians have successfully blocked all bills, and Democrats didn't even bother making it a priority when they got power. Eventually, however, gun control advocates started to look away from the ideological arguments and toward the influence of the gun industry, through its main lobbying arm, the NRA.
Once they did that, real progress started to happen. Investigations revealed that the NRA was a thoroughly corrupt organization and that its leadership was on the take. Then the lawsuits started to fly. Now the organization is in very real danger of collapse — not because of its views, but because of its corruption. It might be too late, and Republicans may be too dug in on their gun mania to ever start to moderate. But without the NRA in their ear all the time, there could be a real chance to persuade even just a few Republicans to support common sense reforms that are backed by the majority of Americans. But only if the NRA is gone — and coming at them from a corruption angle was the path to this possibility.
It's admittedly a tough sell, even to Democrats. Most Democrats have been happy to back bills that tackle the issue in similar ways to what Warren proposes, and many seem to understand that they would benefit from a more level playing field, where wealthy interests have less influence over policy and politics. Still, as with most legislation that Democrats want to pass, anti-corruption bills have been torn apart on the shores of the filibuster. And the two people who are doing the most to make sure the filibuster remains and anti-corruption bills have no chance of passing? You guessed it: Manchin and Sinema. Corruption on Capitol Hill is a grotesque house of mirrors, and until that changes, real progress will be an impossibly tall hill to climb.
Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.
'Deeply dangerous': MSNBC host reveals the history behind the GOP embrace of a deadly conspiracy theory
Fox News' Tucker Carlson generated considerable controversy when, on his April 8 show, he promoted the Great Replacement Theory — a racist conspiracy theory that has become prominent in white supremacist and white nationalist ideology. And almost half a year later, Carlson is still claiming that President Joe Biden and other Democrats are trying to "replace" white voters with immigrants from developing countries. MSNBC's Mehdi Hasan called Carlson out on his show this week, warning that he is promoting a claim that "gets people killed."
The progressive firebrand described the Great Replacement as a "conspiracy theory so vile, so extreme, so dangerous" that it was, in the past, avoided by mainstream conservatives and kept "on the furthest fringes of the far right."
Hasan told viewers, "What is the Great Replacement? It's a story, or a theory if you will, about liberal elites secretly changing our demographics, helping Black and Brown immigrants to invade America and replace white people. It's a white supremacist story about so-called white genocide. Scary, right? Bonkers, too. And yet, this year, Fox's Tucker Carlson came along and thought, 'Hmmm, let's bring this idea into the light to a prime-time cable audience."
The MSNBC host went on to say that the Great Replacement Theory has become a "rallying cry for the neo-Nazi far right," noting that it originated in France with white nationalist author Renaud Camus and his book "Le Grand Remplacement." And Hasan noted that a series of terrorist attacks have been carried out by White supremacists who embrace and promote that theory.
"The Great Replacement Theory gets people killed," Hasan warned. "And yet, you now have Tucker Carlson — the most influential right-wing cable news host in America — defending it, promoting it, mainstreaming it. And elected Republicans are now following in his footsteps…. Members of the GOP are now openly trafficking in neo-Nazi rhetoric."
Hasan showed clips of Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Rep. Brian Babin of Texas promoting the Great Replacement Theory, arguing that "members of the GOP are now openly trafficking in neo-Nazi rhetoric" rather than simply using racist "dog whistles" like Republicans of the past. And he noted that Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida has vigorously defended Carlson by explicitly promoting the Great Replacement Theory by name.
"This is how white supremacy is normalized in America today: the marriage between Rupert Murdoch's Fox and Donald Trump's GOP," Hasan warned. "And they make us numb to this stuff…. This is a deeply dangerous moment for America."
New report details the dangerous weaponry brought by Capitol rioters — despite claims they were unarmed
Republican lawmakers have spent months gaslighting the American public on what transpired at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Although harrowing footage captured the deadly series of events that transpired, Republicans have adamantly attempted to downplay the incident and cover up multiple aspects of the insurrection.
One fact that hasn't received enough coverage — and has also been falsely denied by many figures on the right — is the serious weaponry brought by some of the insurrectionists.
According to Mother Jones, some of Trump's extremist supporters actually did carry guns into the federal building. "A Mother Jones investigation drawing on public video footage, congressional testimony, and documents from more than a dozen federal criminal cases reveals that various Trump supporters descended on DC that day armed for battle with guns and other potentially lethal weapons," the publication reports.
Multiple individuals are also facing charges of carrying firearms on U.S. Capitol grounds. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and court documents, "at least eight others carried knives or tasers at the Capitol, including two defendants who allegedly committed assaults with tasers." A number of others were also arrested in downtown Washington, D.C. Those individuals reportedly had " rifles, pistols, explosive materials, and large supplies of ammunition."
Despite the existence of evidence, Republican lawmakers have repeatedly pushed back against those claims. "This didn't seem like an armed insurrection to me," said Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) just weeks after angry Trump supporters stormed the Capitol. He added, 'When you think of armed, don't you think of firearms?'
During the hearings back in May, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) also claimed law enforcement officers found "zero firearms" on riot suspects. Former President Donald Trump had also echoed the same claim. "There were no guns whatsoever"' Trump said when he appeared on Fox News in July.
However, the defendants in the case appear to have made their intentions quite clear. One defendant, in particular, is Guy Reffitt of Texas. Facing a charge for unlawfully carrying a handgun, Reffitt sent a message to fellow members of the extremist organization known as the Three Percenters. He suggested that incidents like the Capitol insurrection are only the beginning of their efforts to take back the country.
"We took the Capital and put the POS Capital Hill on it's [sic] heels," said Reffitt, according to court documents filed by prosecutors. "This has only just begun and will not end until we The People of The Republic have won our country back. We had thousands of weapons and fired no rounds yet showed numbers. The next time we will not be so cordial."
Friday, October 01, 2021
Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin is ‘sexist and toxic workplace racing Elon Musk and Richard Branson’, 21 employees say
An open letter signed by 21 current and former employees of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin claim the company fosters a toxic and sexist environment (Picture: Getty Images)
An open letter signed by 21 current and former employees of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin claims the rocket company fosters a ‘toxic’ and sexist environment, leaving staffers feeling ‘dehumanized,’ and causing some to have suicidal thoughts.
The damning letter also accuses the spaceflight company, created by Amazon founder Bezos, of sacrificing safety to get ahead in the space race between billionaires.
‘Competing with other billionaires – and ‘making progress for Jeff’ – seemed to take precedence over safety concerns that would have slowed down the schedule,’ wrote Alexandra Abrams, former head of employee communications at Blue Origin.
Abrams, who was fired from Blue Origin in 2019, signed her name alongside 20 anonymous current and former employees.
Jeff Bezos’ staffers at Blue Origin claim the company cares more about competing with other billionaires and making profits than it does about safety (Picture: Getty Images)
‘When Jeff Bezos flew to space this July, we did not share his elation,’ the letter says. ‘Instead, many of us watched with an overwhelming sense of unease. Some of us couldn’t bear to watch at all.’
Detailed in the letter are accusations that Blue Origin and Bezos promote a culture of toxicity and sexism.
According to the letter, numerous senior leaders at Blue Origin have been ‘known to be consistently inappropriate with women’.
The letter acknowledges that gender gaps are common within the space industry, but continues to detail the extensive sexism employees faced.
According to an open letter signed by 21 current and former Blue Origin staffers, there are numerous senior leaders who have been ‘known to be consistently inappropriate with women’ (Picture: AP)
‘Another former executive frequently treated women in a condescending and demeaning manner, calling them “baby girl”, or “baby doll”, or “sweetheart” and inquiring about their dating lives.’
This behavior was so well known, the letter alleges, that women at the company would warn new female employees to stay away from that particular executive, who was only fired when he physically groped a female subordinate.
With more than 3,600 employees mapped across the globe, the company’s entire senior technical and program leaders are men. The overwhelming majority of staff are also white and male, the letter states.
Employees who raised concerns regarding the safety of the company’s rockets were dismissed as Bezos raced to compete with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Virgin Galactic founder Ricard Branson.
Safety concerns are another highlight of the letter, which alleges that ‘some of the engineers who ensure the very safety of the rockets’ were either forced out or paid off after internally voicing criticisms.
In a statement, the Federal Aviation Administration said they are reviewing the safety concerns brought up in the essay.
Staffers also say they have raised environmental concerns at company town halls that have been left largely unaddressed. The company’s headquarters that opened last year in Kent, are not LEED-certified and were built on wetlands that were drained for construction, they say.
Current and former staffers of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin say their experience at work was ‘dehumanizing’ (Picture: Getty Images)
Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith personally told one of the letter’s signees to not ‘make it easy’ for employees to ask questions at town halls, one of the only available forums for live discussion.
Inner critics who spoke up were also forced out, according to the letter.
The toxicity goes as far as senior leadership looking to take a toll on their employees’ mental health.
According to the letter, memos from those leaders reveal the company needs to ‘get more out of our employees’ and that employees should consider it a ‘privilege to be a part of history’.
A directive of the company, in pursuit of SpaceX, in that ‘burnout was part of their labor strategy’, the letter claims.
Former and current employees say their experience at Blue Origin was ‘dehumanizing’ and that they are ‘terrified of speaking out against the wealthiest man on the planet’.
Not that it would help Bezos’ staff, some of whom have even experienced suicidal thoughts after having their ‘passion for space manipulated in such a toxic environment.’
‘If this company’s culture and work environment are a template for the future Jeff Bezos envisions, we are headed in a direction that reflects the worst of the world we live in now,’ the letter says.
A Blue Origin spokesperson told Metro.co.uk that ‘Ms. Abrams was dismissed for cause two years ago after repeated warnings for issues involving federal export control regulations’.
‘Blue Origin has no tolerance for discrimination or harassment of any kind. We provide numerous avenues for employees, including a 24/7 anonymous hotline, and will promptly investigate any new claims of misconduct,’ the spokesperson stated.
‘We stand by our safety record and believe that New Shepard is the safest space vehicle ever designed or built.’
Nearly two dozen current and former employees including the company's former head of employee communications allege billionaire Jeff Bezos' rocket company Blue Origin has a toxic workplace.
In an essay posted online Thursday on the site Lioness, published Thursday, present and past Blue Origin workers including Alexandra Abrams, the company's former head of employee communications, said. the employees say they thought they joined the aerospace exploration company "to open access to space for the benefit of humanity."
Instead, they claim they were subjected to a harmful, sexist environment in which women are sexually harassed and safety concerns are disregarded.
A Blue Origin spokesperson said in a statement late Thursday that Abrams was "dismissed for cause two years ago after repeated warnings for issues involving federal export control regulations."
The spokesperson also said that Blue Origin has "no tolerance for discrimination or harassment of any kind. We provide numerous avenues for employees, including a 24/7 anonymous hotline, and will promptly investigate any new claims of misconduct. We stand by our safety record and believe that New Shepard is the safest space vehicle ever designed or built."
The workers' claims come more than two months after Bezos poured billions to fly out into space safely in his New Shephard rocket with three other passengers on board on July 20.
In the essay, the workers said they've had experiences they described as "dehumanizing," are "terrified of the potential consequences for speaking out against the wealthiest man on the planet."
Bezos, the founder and ex-CEO of Amazon, is reportedly worth more than $192 billion.
"We believe exploring the possibilities for human civilization beyond Earth is a necessity," they wrote. "But if this company’s culture and work environment are a template for the future Jeff Bezos envisions, we are headed in a direction that reflects the worst of the world we live in now, and sorely needs to change."
Even though workforce gender gaps are common in the space industry, the employees allege that Blue Origin has a "particular brand of sexism." All of the senior technical and program leaders are men, they said, and "numerous" senior leaders have been known to be consistently inappropriate with women."
According to the essay, one former executive frequently treated women in "a condescending and demeaning" manner, calling them “baby girl,” “baby doll,” or “sweetheart” while asking about their dating lives.
"His inappropriate behavior was so well known that some women at the company took to warning new female hires to stay away from him, all while he was in charge of recruiting employees," the essay said. "It appeared to many of us that he was protected by his close personal relationship with Bezos – it took him physically groping a female subordinate for him to finally be let go."
The workers said that Blue Origin's culture also took a toll on their mental health.
Many workers have "experienced periods of suicidal thoughts after having their passion for space manipulated in such a toxic environment." They also wrote that one senior program leader who spent decades in the aerospace and defense industry said working at Blue Origin was "the worst experience of her life."
‘Rife with sexism’: employees of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin describe ‘toxic’ workplace culture
Nearly two dozen current and former employees published an essay slamming Blue Origin’s safety and ethics culture
Twenty-one current and former employees of Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin published a damning essay on Thursday saying the company “turns a blind eye to sexism, is not sufficiently attuned to safety concerns, and silences those who seek to correct wrongs.”
Co-authored by Blue Origin’s former head of employee communications Alexandra Abrams, the essay describes multiple accounts of sexist and dismissive behavior from some of the company’s “one-hundred percent” male senior technical and program leaders and says “professional dissent at Blue Origin is actively stifled.”
The employees accuse the company’s CEO, Bob Smith, of brushing off dissent by discouraging staff from raising questions during internal town halls, asking a colleague to track “troublemakers or agitators,” and forcing out employees for speaking out about safety issues related to Blue Origin’s New Shepard tourism rocket. “Smith’s inner circle of loyalists makes unilateral decisions, often without the buy-in of engineers, other experts, or senior leaders across various departments,” the employees say.
In an interview with CBS this morning, Abrams, speaking out for the first time, said she was fired by Blue Origin in 2019, quoting her manager as saying, “Bob and I can’t trust you anymore,” referring to the CEO. “You cannot create a culture of safety and a culture of fear at the same time,” Abrams said in the interview. “I’ve gotten far enough away from it that I’m not afraid enough to let them silence me anymore.”
In a statement to The Verge, a Blue Origin spokesperson said, “Blue Origin has no tolerance for discrimination or harassment of any kind. We provide numerous avenues for employees, including a 24/7 anonymous hotline, and will promptly investigate any new claims of misconduct.”
The spokesperson also said Abrams was fired “after repeated warnings for issues involving federal export control regulations,” a claim Abrams denied to CBS News.
The essay, published on Lioness, a platform for whistleblowers, indicated Blue Origin sometimes overlooked safety issues to favor speed amid heated competition with other billionaire-backed companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX or Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic. “Competing with other billionaires — and ‘making progress for Jeff’ — seemed to take precedence over safety concerns that would have slowed down the schedule,” the employees said.
A spokesperson for the Federal Aviation Administration, which manages launch safety and oversees flights of Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket, said, “the FAA takes every safety allegation seriously, and the agency is reviewing the information.”
In the essay, the employees also recounted sexism from colleagues, including a former, unnamed executive who would call female employees “baby girl,” “baby doll,” or “sweetheart” and ask about their dating lives. “It appeared to many of us that he was protected by his close personal relationship with Bezos — it took him physically groping a female subordinate for him to finally be let go,” they said. Another passage included:
Additionally, a former NASA astronaut and Blue Origin senior leader once instructed a group of women with whom he was collaborating: “You should ask my opinion because I am a man.” We found many company leaders to be unapproachable and showing clear bias against women. Concerns related to flying New Shepard were consistently shut down, and women were demeaned for raising them. When one man was let go for poor performance, he was allowed to leave with dignity, even a going-away party. Yet when a woman leader who had significantly improved her department’s performance was let go, she was ordered to leave immediately, with security hovering until she exited the building five minutes later.
On top of the safety and sexism claims, the letter attacks Bezos and Blue Origin’s record on environmental issues. The employees say while Bezos touts his climate initiatives, Blue Origin has no plans to be carbon neutral or reduce its environmental footprint and that some machinery ordered by the company was done so without considering its waste levels or whether it’d need permits to manage the waste.
The employees also described harsh and demanding conditions that have “taken a toll on the mental health of many of the people who make Blue Origin’s operations possible.” The essay cites internal memos, including one that cast SpaceX as a model, “in that ‘burnout was part of their labor strategy.’” Blue Origin has struggled with internal strife in the past.
In 2020, The Verge reported that Blue Origin employees were outraged by the pressure they faced from senior leadership to continue in-person work and travel for a New Shepard test launch during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, when much of the country was locking down to curb the virus’s spread. Responding to employee concerns in one meeting, Jeff Ashby, the company’s senior mission assurance director and a former NASA astronaut, said: “I would say that you should ask yourself, as an individual, are you acting as a toxin in the organization, fanning discontent, or are you really trying to help our senior leaders make better decisions?”
Update, September 30th, 2:35PM ET: Adds additional information from the essay and a statement from the FAA.
Blue Origin employees say
they wouldn't feel safe riding
the company's rockets and
that it's 'lucky that nothing
has happened'
Morgan McFall-Johnsen
Jeff Bezos launched aboard Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket in July. Anushree Fadnavis/Reuters; Blue Origin
Twenty-one Blue Origin employees published a whistle-blowing open letter on Thursday.
Some said they wouldn't ride a Blue Origin rocket due to safety concerns.
In a scalding open letter, a group of current and former Blue Origin employees said they would not fly aboard the company's rocket because they don't think it's safe enough.
Jeff Bezos, who founded the company in 2000, launched to the edge of space aboard its New Shepard rocket in July. Since that flight, Blue Origin has opened ticket sales, and four customers are scheduled to launch on October 12. But the new letter says that Blue Origin's leadership has ignored employees' safety concerns in favor of "making progress for Jeff" and accelerating New Shepard's launch schedule.
The only named author on the letter is Alexandra Abrams, who used to head Blue Origin's employee communications. She published the essay on the website Lioness on Thursday but said that 20 other current and former Blue Origin employees cowrote it. None of those coauthors were named, but CBS News has spoken with five of them. The letter also made claims of a culture of sexism, harassment, and intolerance to dissent at Blue Origin.
The Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos with aviation glasses that belonged to Amelia Earhart. Joe Raedle/Getty Images
New Shepard has flown successfully 15 times without people on board and once with passengers, when Bezos went. The rocket has an emergency system that can jettison the passenger capsule away from a failing rocket if necessary.
But, the letter said: "In the opinion of an engineer who has signed on to this essay, 'Blue Origin has been lucky that nothing has happened so far.' Many of this essay's authors say they would not fly on a Blue Origin vehicle."
Two former Blue Origin employees confirmed to CBS News that they would not feel comfortable riding a Blue Origin spacecraft.
In a statement emailed to Insider, Blue Origin said that Abrams "was dismissed for cause two years ago after repeated warnings for issues involving federal export control regulations." Abrams has denied that she received any such warnings.
At least 17 top engineers and leaders left Blue Origin this summer, many of them in the week after Bezos' spaceflight, CNBC reported in August. The reasons for their departures aren't clear, though Glassdoor ratings suggest that just 19% of Blue Origin employees approve of its CEO, Bob Smith. That's compared to a 92% approval rating for SpaceX's Elon Musk and 77% for United Launch Alliance's Tory Bruno.
Blue Origin's statement also said: "We stand by our safety record and believe that New Shepard is the safest space vehicle ever designed or built."
But the open letter said that safety was "the driving force" behind the decision to publish for many of its coauthors. It also said that in 2018, when someone new took over one particular team, the manager discovered that the team had documented "more than 1,000 problem reports" related to the company's rocket engines. None of those reports had been addressed, the letter said.
What's more, the letter added that Blue Origin has frequently denied requests "for additional engineers, staff, or spending," while adding more responsibilities to teams that are too small to handle them.
"Employees are often told to 'be careful with Jeff's money,' to 'not ask for more,' and to 'be grateful,'" the letter said.
Commercial rocket passengers fly at their own risk
The New Shepard crew capsule parachutes to a landing at Blue Origin's Launch Site One in Texas on January 14. Blue Origin
Spaceflight is always risky. About 1% of US human spaceflights have resulted in a fatal accident, according to an analysis published earlier this year.
"That's pretty high. It's about 10,000 times more dangerous than flying on a commercial airliner," George Nield, a coauthor of that report, previously told Insider. Nield formerly served as the Federal Aviation Administration's associate administrator and led its Office of Commercial Space Transportation.
"In order to learn how to do this safer, more reliably, and more cost-effectively, many people believe we need to keep gaining experience by having more and more of these flights," he added.
No federal agency regulates the safety of passengers on private commercial spaceflights. For now, the Federal Aviation Administration's job is to ensure only that rocket launches are safe for people on the ground and don't pose a threat to other aircraft.
But in a statement emailed to Insider, the FAA said it was "reviewing" the open letter.
"The FAA takes every safety allegation seriously, and the agency is reviewing the information," the statement said.
FAA to Review Letter That Criticizes Blue Origin on Safety
U.S. aviation regulators said they are reviewing a letter signed by a former employee at
Jeff Bezos’ space company that claims the company prioritized speed over safety on some of its rockets.
The letter, published Thursday online, raised safety-related concerns and alleged instances of sexual harassment at Blue Origin LLC. One former employee at the company,
Alexandra Abrams, is listed as a public signer of the letter and confirmed she signed it. The letter said 20 other current and former employees also signed but didn’t name them.
In a statement, the Federal Aviation Administration said it was looking into safety allegations made in the letter and that it takes all such claims seriously. The aviation-safety agency regulates space launches and re-entries of space vehicles, as well as the operation of commercial launch sites.
Blue Origin said in a statement it stands by its safety record. It said that Ms. Abrams was fired for cause two years ago after repeated warnings about federal export control issues.
Ms. Abrams, who worked on employee communications at the Kent, Wash.-based company, said she never received warnings from management about that topic. She said what ultimately led to Blue Origin firing her was her objection to the company’s move to handle any sexual-harassment claims at Blue Origin in arbitration as per agreements with employees.
Blue Origin, founded by Mr. Bezos more than two decades ago, employs around 3,500 workers at facilities around the country, developing rockets, engines and other space vehicles. In July, the company completed its first space launch with people on board, flying the former Amazon chief executive and three others to the edge of space.
The letter said that at Blue Origin, competing with other space-industry billionaires like Elon Muskand demonstrating progress to Mr. Bezos “seemed to take precedence over safety concerns that would have slowed down the schedule.” It claimed that last year, company leaders wanted to scale up the number of flights on its New Shepard rocket, but some staff believed the push was compromising flight safety.
Blue Origin said it believes New Shepard “is the safest space vehicle ever designed or built.”
In July, before the company’s space flight with Mr. Bezos on board, the FAA issued a license to Blue Origin permitting it to launch people into space.
One unidentified former Blue Origin executive, according to the letter, called women terms like “baby girl” and asked about their dating lives before being let go because he groped a female subordinate.
Blue Origin declined to comment on specific allegations. In a statement, the company said it has no tolerance for discrimination or harassment of any kind.
“We provide numerous avenues for employees, including a 24/7 anonymous hotline, and will promptly investigate any new claims of misconduct,” the company said.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/69932029/1177532676.jpg.0.jpg)
