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)
Tuesday, May 17, 2022
Twitter Compares Cops' Treatment Of Buffalo Gunman With That Of Black Boy Accused Of Stealing Chips
Yolanda Baruch Mon, May 16, 2022,
After 13 people were shot, including 10 who were killed, during the recent mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, people took to Twitter to criticize the police handling of the gunman.
Payton Gendron allegedly opened fire at the Tops Friendly Market in a predominantly Black neighborhood, The Independent reports.
Authorities said the 18-year-old arrived at the grocery store around 2:30 p.m. on Saturday, wearing tactical gear and a helmet while carrying an AR-15 and a camera to livestream the assault on Twitch, which the service later removed.
When police took Gendron into custody, pictures captured the calm interaction between the officer and gunman.
The New York Times reports that Gendron was held for a mental evaluation in 2021.
The Associated Press also notes that Gendron’s mental health possibly played a role in his racially motivated massacre.
Twitter immediately noticed the treatment Gendron received after the shooting.
People also compared the police treatment of Gendron with the treatment a young Black boy who was recently accused of stealing a bag of chips.
People resurfaced a tweet from 2018 that compared the media’s perception of Michael Brown and the Austin bombing suspect Mark Anthony Conditt.
Despite the media’s perception of the gunman, video footage showed up-close shots of his weapon with the N-word and the number 14 — a known white supremacist code — scrawled in white paint on the barrel of his gun, according to The Independent.
Gendron also described himself as a fascist, white supremacist and anti-Semite. He allegedly regularly visited far-right platforms and message boards, including 4chan and Gab, that espoused white supremacist ideologies and conspiracy theories.
Buffalo police commissioner Joseph Gramaglia described the act as an “absolute racist hate crime,” CNN reports.
Fox News Is Already Using 'Violent' Video Games As Scapegoat For Mass Shooting THAT AND MENTAL ILLNESS Sisi Jiang Mon, May 16, 2022 An image of the supermarket where a shooter opened fire.
Time is a flat circle. The year is 2022, and a Fox News anchor recently asked an on-air guest whether or not he believed that video games enable mass shootings.
On Saturday, an 18-year-old white man named Payton Gendron opened fire on a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. He killed 10 people and injured three, the majority of which were Black residents. After planning his crime over Discord, he drove 200 miles in full tactical gear and streamed the shooting on Twitch. Gendron has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder.
Fox News brought in Bernard Zapor to discuss the causes of mass shootings. Zapor was a former special agent for the firearms division of the Department of Justice and a current college instructor in criminal justice. The news anchor Jon Scott asked Zapor: “It seems like things have gotten so much worse since video games became so realistic and so violent. Have you done research or learned that video games tend to just desensitize people to the actual result of pulling a trigger?” He made no mention of the shooter’s 180 page manifesto about being a committed racist.
While Zapor wasn’t as eager to relitigate the video game controversies of the 1990s, his response wasn’t necessarily more coherent: “I think in terms of causation, what the information shows us is as we become more disfranchised as individuals, and groups, people leave a faith for example, the family units become smaller or more disconnected, we live further distances. We’re communicating through a medium that was never really intended for human beings, which is online. Or through texting. Or these kinds of things. We get separated as humans to have connections that build inner morality.” So there you have it, folks: It’s not Call of Duty. It’s actually your cell phones and your social media accounts that are chipping away at your reluctance to open fire on innocent people.
No, it isn’t. It’s about the Great Replacement Theory, a false belief that there is a concerted effort to eliminate the white majority. It turns out, if you give white supremacists easy access to guns and tell them that minorities are going to spell the end of your race, they sometimes decide to commit horrible acts of violence. But Fox News is not going to make that connection while they play a national role in stoking fear about ‘illegal immigration’ and the declining dominance of white Christians.
The tragedy at Buffalo is not the first time that video games were blamed for mass shootings. The most famous example was the 1999 Columbine shootings. The Chicago Tribune reported that the perpetrators were fans of the video game Doom, and “used it to get ready for their attack.” After the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, Senator Joseph Lieberman said that young men like the shooter had a “hypnotic involvement with violent video games.” When asked about whether or not stronger gun control was the answer to gun violence, a Republican congressman said to NPR: “The biggest pusher of violence is, hands down, Hollywood movies, hands down, the video game market.” Fox News has previously written an article that connected first person shooter games with a gunman who attacked a Washington Navy Yard.
Despite politicians’ eagerness to find a plausible scapegoat for their own policy failures, major video game markets such as Canada, Europe, and Asia aren’t reporting hundreds of mass shootings every year compared to the United States.
According to the affidavit, Smith’s girlfriend told detectives that he had been delusional about Asian Americans ever since being involved in a car crash two years ago with a man of Asian descent. She said he had been admitted to several mental health facilities because of the delusions.
Whenever Smith is around an Asian American, “he begins having delusions that the Asian mob is after him or attempting to harm him,” his girlfriend told police. She said he was fired for “verbally attacking” his boss, who was of Asian descent.
Garcia declined to comment on whether Smith has been diagnosed with a mental illness or whether Smith legally obtained the gun used in the shooting, saying both questions are still being investigated.
The shooting in Dallas occurred a few days before a white gunman killed 10 Black people Saturday at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, and a gunman who authorities said was motivated by political hatred for Taiwan killed one person and wounded five Sunday at a southern California church where mostly elderly Taiwanese parishioners had gathered.
Anti-Asian violence has risen sharply in recent years amid the pandemic of COVID-19, which was first reported in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
Last year, six women of Asian descent were among the eight killed in a shooting at massage businesses in and near Atlanta, heightening anger and fear among Asian Americans. In February, a man from Midland, 330 miles (531 kilometers) west of Dallas, pleaded guilty to federal hate crimes for an attack in 2020 on an Asian family because he believed they were Chinese and responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic.
The salon in Dallas where the shooting happened is in the heart of Koreatown, which is in a part of the city that was transformed in the 1980s from an industrial area to a thriving district with shopping, dining, markets, medical offices and salons.
Authorities have said a man dressed all in black opened fire in the salon, then drove away in a maroon minivan. Garcia said investigators found that a similar vehicle had been reported as involved in two other recent shootings. Someone opened fire in an April 2 drive-by near the salon and Garcia said a similar vehicle was also linked to a May 10 shooting about 25 miles (40 kilometers) southeast of there. No one was injured in either of those shootings.
Garcia said the suspect walked into the salon with a .22-caliber rifle and fired about 13 times. One woman was injured in her arm, one in her foot and another in her lower back, he said. They have all been released from the hospital and are recovering, according to police.
One of the women injured in the shooting spoke Monday night at a community meeting with police. Her arm in a sling, she said in Korean that she was worried about how she would continue to make a living.
“There are lives that have changed forever because of this,” Garcia said Tuesday.
Police Sr. Cpl. Soo Nam also addressed the reporters at Tuesday’s news conference, delivering a statement on the arrest in Korean for Texas-based Korean-language journalists in attendance. Garcia said the department has 10 officers who speak Korean.
Dozens of people had filled a room at the Korean Culture Center of Dallas on Monday evening for the town hall meeting with police on safety. At the meeting, Garcia had assured attendees that detectives were working nonstop on the case. Some attendees expressed thanks to police while others asked questions on what was being done to make the community safer.
John Lee, a board member and previous president of the Greater Dallas Korean American Chamber of Commerce, said he thought it was healing for attendees get reassurances from police. He noted some attendees “were more angry and let it be known and some were a little more appreciative."
“I think the emotions ran the entire gamut from anger to pain to fear to all of that,” Lee said.
___
Associated Press writer Jill Bleed in Little Rock, Arkansas, contributed to this report.
Mexican president slams U.S. embargo on Cuba as 'genocidal policy'
Mexico's President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador attends
news conference at a military base, in Apodaca
Tue, May 17, 2022
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) -Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said on Tuesday the U.S. economic embargo of Cuba was "genocidal policy," raising the stakes in a standoff with Washington over its treatment of the Communist-ruled Caribbean island.
Lopez Obrador, a leftist who has repeatedly called for the United States to end the embargo, said earlier in May that he would not attend the U.S.-hosted Summit of the Americas next month unless all countries in the region were invited.
Speaking at a regular government news conference, Lopez Obrador said the United States "looked bad" in how it was treating Cuba, and urged Washington to end the embargo.
"It's a genocidal policy," Lopez Obrador said.
Still, he welcomed moves by the U.S. government on Monday that will ease some Trump-era restrictions on the island and increase processing of U.S. visas for Cubans.
Lopez Obrador on Wednesday is due to meet with a U.S. delegation for the Summit of the Americas in which he plans to explain why Mexico wants all countries in the region to attend.
(Reporting by Kylie MadryEditing by Dave Graham)
PURE $PECULATION
Ben Bernanke Says He Doesn't See Value in Bitcoin
Stephen Alpher Mon, May 16, 2022
Former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told CNBC on Monday that he doesn't believe bitcoin (BTC) works as money, a store of value or digital gold.
"If bitcoin were a substitute for fiat money, you could use bitcoin to go buy your groceries," he said. "Nobody buys groceries with bitcoin because it’s too expensive and too inconvenient to do that." he added, noting how it would be impossible to price something like celery in bitcoin because there's too little stability in its value.
Occasionally known as "Helicopter Ben" for suggesting in 2002 that the Fed could simply drop money from helicopters to ward off deflationary conditions – a comment the cypherpunks who laid the groundwork for Bitcoin were no doubt well aware of – Bernanke addressed the digital gold case for bitcoin. "Gold has underlying use value," he argued. "You can use it to fill cavities. The underlying use value of a bitcoin is to do ransomware or something like that."
Turning to monetary policy, Bernanke, who was behind the original zero interest rate policy and quantitative easing, criticized the current Fed for not moving quickly enough to tighten monetary policy in the face of advancing inflation.
Under even a "benign scenario," Bernanke said he expects the economy to slow and unemployment to rise, even as inflation remains high. "You could call it stagflation," he said.
Luna Foundation Guard says its Bitcoin reserves are down to 313 from over 80,000, and it will use ‘remaining assets’ to pay back ‘smallest’ stablecoin holders
Taylor Locke Mon, May 16, 2022, 8:09 AM·1 min read
Last week, Terra’s stablecoin UST began to crash far below $1, and its sister token Luna unraveled to nearly zero. Amid the chaos, many investors were wondering where LFG’s billions worth of Bitcoin went, which it originally obtained to defend UST’s peg.
Now, after days of silence, LFG shared that it has 313 Bitcoin left, down from its original 80,394 Bitcoin reserve. LFG also noted it has a few other assets, including UST, Terra and Avalanche.
LFG is “looking to use its remaining assets to compensate remaining users of $UST, smallest holders first,” it tweeted on Monday. “We are still debating through various distribution methods, updates to follow soon.”
Over the weekend, figures in the crypto community also suggested Terra disburse funds to “smallholders” impacted by the crash. Among them is Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.
Crypto: Stablecoin storm spreads after billions of tether is cashed out
Brian McGleenon Tue, May 17, 2022, A smartphone with Tether logo on it. Reuters/Dado Ruvic/Illustration
Crypto's stablecoin storm spreads as $7.6bn of USD tether is redeemed in the past week. The cashout looks likely to continue on Tuesday with impact on all major tokens including bitcoin.
On Tuesday the top two cryptocurrencies by market cap, bitcoin and ethereum, rallied 3% in 24 hours, with BTC at $30,667 and ETH at $2,091.
The cash-out of tether (USDT-USD) by crypto investors has escalated since the LUNA/UST crash last Wednesday.
The dramatic crash saw the algorithmic stablecoin UST terra, which had been pegged to the dollar one to one, fall to a low of $0.1.
A stablecoin is supposed to be a stable safe haven for investors to park their profits amid the volatility of the cryptocurrency market.
However, cryptocurrency investors now find they have nowhere to go amid signals of further volatility.
No stablecoin seems safe at the moment, and the only option is to hold blue-chip cryptos, such as bitcoin (BTC-USD) and ethereum, or cash out of the whole ecosystem into a traditional bank account.
The crisis deepens as ethereum, the second-biggest cryptocurrency by market cap, has fallen about 60% from its November record.
According to technical analyst John Roque of 22V Research, ethereum (ETH-USD) could drop another 80%.
Ethereum currently stands at $2,074, but Roque's downside target is around $420.
However, both bitcoin and ethereum have risen by around 3% in value in the last 24 hours, which would suggest wary cryptocurrency investors are parking their money in these blue chips until the current 'stablecoin' storm resides.
The market cap of tether has been dropping considerably since the blow-up of the USDT terra algorithmic stablecoin.
Tether's market cap has fallen from $85bn before the 'stablecoin storm', to a current value of $76bn
USDT, or tether, should not be confused with UST, called terra, which was the algorithmic stablecoin that crashed last Wednesday.
Unlike the UST terra algorithmic stablecoin, USDT tether is backed by US dollars as collateral.
However, its reserves are a point of controversy and only a fractional amount of the $4 of tether in existence may be redeemed for actual US dollars.
On Monday, the New York Supreme Court rejected Tether’s petition to block the public from receiving documents detailing the composition of its dollar reserves.
The recent crypto-market crisis involving stablecoins has caused industry experts to call for strong regulation, especially of stablecoins.
Speaking to Yahoo Finance, London-based fintech investor Viktor Prokopenya said: “Regulation will bring transparency to the market and end bad practices. Like all young technologies - crypto is only about a decade old, the industry has to grow up and out of its existing ways.
"The recent collapse of terra and tether and other stablecoins have shown a lack of transparency and an ironic ‘instability’ in a supposedly more ‘stable’ cryptocurrency."
The news comes as the UK Treasury is en route to legalise the use of stablecoins.
Last month HM Treasury tweeted: "Economic Secretary John Glen announced today that stablecoins will be brought into UK payments regulation.
"This places the UK financial services sector at the forefront of technology, creating conditions for stablecoin issuers and service providers to operate and invest."
Luna Foundation Guard has now dumped $2.4 billion from its Bitcoin reserves in failed attempt to defend TerraUSD peg
Woohae Cho—Bloomberg via Getty Images Christiaan Hetzner Mon, May 16, 2022, 8:51 AM·3 min read
Luna Foundation Guard, the second largest known holder of Bitcoin, liquidated almost its entire reserves last week worth billions in a failed attempt to defend the Terra UST stablecoin peg.
Ever since the collapse of UST and its sister governance token Luna, designed to maintain the peg through an algorithmic process of manipulating the latter’s money supply, the entire crypto community wanted to know just one thing: what happened to LFG’s prodigious Bitcoin holdings?
“Where is all the BTC (Bitcoin) that was supposed to be used as reserves?“ asked Changpeng "CZ" Zhao, head of crypto platform Binance. “Shouldn’t those BTC be ALL used to buy back UST first?”
The rest were liquidated between May 8th and May 10th, when Bitcoin traded between $31,000 and $35,000.
'Heartbroken about pain'
For investors in Bitcoin, this could be bullish as it removes uncertainty hanging over the price amid fears a whale as big as LFG would dump its holdings to defend the peg.
For Luna holders, however, Monday’s update suggests there is little remaining value left in the project apart from roughly $65 million in Avalanche, another $12 million in Binance tokens and the remaining $9.4 million in Bitcoin.
For Do Kwon, whose wife recently received police protection, there was little left to do but claim neither he nor any affiliated institutions try to earn profits by selling Terra UST and Luna during the collapse.
The South Korean native had gained a reputation for hubris, mocking critics that pointed to fatal flaws in the construction of his algo stablecoin. Only two months ago, he boasted his creation would eliminate one of Terra UST’s competitors, Maker Foundation’s Dai.
Goldman Sachs pushed staff to return to the office. Now the Wall Street bank is giving executives unlimited time off
Nicholas Gordon Mon, May 16, 2022,
Goldman Sachs emerged as one of the strongest advocates of a post-pandemic return to the office this year, but the fight for talent could be forcing the investment bank to reverse course and offer employees more time away from their desks instead.
In an internal memo seen by the Financial Times, the investment bank said it would offer junior staff a minimum of two extra days off each year. But senior staff will get an even bigger perk—one more commonly associated with Silicon Valley than Wall Street.
Starting May 1 partners and managing directors at Goldman Sachs can “take time off when needed without a fixed vacation day entitlement,” the memo said, as the investment bank gingerly follows tech firms like Netflix and Salesforce in offering staff unlimited time off.
Goldman Sachs declined to comment for this article. But forcing staff to take time away from the office is quite a U-turn for the bank, which desperately tried to get its staff back in the office as pandemic restrictions eased in the U.S.
In February last year, Goldman CEO David Solomon called remote work an “aberration." A month later, Solomon told Fortune that “part of [Goldman Sachs’] secret sauce is that [younger staff] come together and collaborate and work with people that are much more experienced than they are" adding that “for Goldman Sachs to retain that cultural foundation, we have to bring people together.”
Yet the bank has struggled to get its workers to comply with its "cultural foundation." Only half of employees showed up on the first day Goldman reopened its New York headquarters on Feb. 1, after closing the office for a month due to an Omicron-driven surge of COVID cases. And there are signs that Goldman’s return-to-office mandate may be affecting the bank’s ability to retain talent.
Junior bankers have reportedly complained about the bank's drive to get people back at their desks, and some have started interviewing for roles at tech companies that offer more flexibility, including Netflix, Google and Facebook. According to a Harris poll conducted for Fortune in February, about 50% of U.S. workers would accept a lower salary in exchange for an unlimited leave policy.
Other Wall Street banks are also struggling to get their workers back in the office. In April, JPMorgan said that it would allow half its workforce to work in hybrid or fully remote settings, despite CEO Jamie Dimon's earlier criticism of work-from-home arrangements.
However, experts warn that an unlimited paid time off policy could backfire if an office culture discourages taking a vacation, as workers do not have clear expectations of how much breaktime they actually get.
Goldman Sachs appears to have accounted for that. According to the memo, the bank will mandate that all staff take a minimum of three weeks off per year by 2023, including at least one vacation of a minimum five consecutive days.
Intel shareholders rejected the company’s executive pay program—putting the CEO’s promised $180 million pay package on the line
Ting Shen—Bloomberg/Getty Images
Sophie Mellor Tue, May 17, 2022
Intel shareholders voted against the company’s executive compensation program last week, which included part of a $178.6 million payout to CEO Pat Gelsinger, according to a regulatory filing published Monday.
Around 1.78 billion votes, making up around 54.2% of shareholders of the chip-manufacturing giant, were cast against the executive compensation, while 932 million votes were made in favor. Around 577 million votes abstained or were broker nonvotes.
The vote is advisory and won’t take immediate effect, but it indicates that a growing number of stockholders are pushing back on hefty executive compensation packages at Intel, which beat first-quarter results targets, but forecast lower growth for the second quarter. The vote also puts keener scrutiny on CEO Pat Gelsinger and his $43.5 billion plan to revive Intel, which includes a €33 billion European spending spree to expand Intel’s presence across the bloc and ease the semiconductor chip shortage.
The filing revealed that Alyssa Henry, an executive vice president at Square and 57th richest self-made woman, according to Forbes, was kept on Intel's board of directors by a narrow margin. While 1.36 million stockholders voted to keep her on as an Intel director, 1.34 million voted to kick her off—a rare close tally in a shareholder vote.
“We take our investors’ feedback very seriously, and we are committed to engaging with them and addressing their concerns,” Intel said in a statement to Fortune. The company added that it has taken specific steps to address investor questions and to clearly link pay to performance, but added that "there is clearly more work to do.”
The company also said, "Intel’s Board of Directors will work with Alyssa Henry to address the over-boarding concerns raised by stockholders." Executive pay pushback
This isn’t the first time shareholders have voted against executive compensation packages in recent months. Shareholders at AT&T, Phillips, and General Electric all voted against hiking CEO pay and executive compensation packages after poor results this year.
Proxy votes against executive pay at S&P 500 companies became more common last year, according to a report by As You Sow, a shareholder advocacy group focused on ESG matters. After many companies released earnings with "questionable practices and metrics"—easing performance targets during the COVID-19 pandemic, for example—shareholders voted to push back on executive compensation at record numbers.
In 2021, a record 16 companies had the pay of their executives rejected by more than half of their investors—up from 10 in 2020 and seven in 2019, according to the report.
In Intel's case, Gelsinger, who took over as CEO in February 2021, was hired to turn the company around and return it to its former glory. In the hopes of beating out rival AMD, Intel has been shoring up the company's presence and manufacturing capabilities in the U.S. and Europe.
A lot is riding on this for Gelsinger. If all goes according to plan and Intel’s stock triples in five years, the new CEO would take home the entire $180 million pay package signed in 2021.
“The Compensation Committee believed that having 73% of the CEO’s new-hire equity awards contingent on achieving ambitious stock price growth was in the best interest of Intel and its stockholders,” Intel said in its proxy filing published in May 2022.
Gelsinger’s payout is far from guaranteed as things stand today. Intel's stock is trading lower than when Gelsinger took the helm, a situation that was not helped by the company’s first-quarter earnings report; Intel forecast its second-quarter revenue and profit would come in well below Wall Street expectations, citing weak demand in its largest market (PCs) and increased supply chain uncertainty due to COVID-19 lockdowns in China. Shares in Intel fell 4% on the news.
JPMorgan shareholders vote disapproval of CEO Dimon's special payout
Tue, May 17, 2022 By David Henry
NEW YORK (Reuters) -In an unusual rebuke for Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co, shareholders on Tuesday clearly disapproved of the special $52.6 million stock option award directors gave him last year to stay on the job for at least five more years.
In an advisory say-on-pay referendum, only 31% of votes cast endorsed JPMorgan executive payments for 2021, according to a preliminary count announced at the company's annual meeting.
Because of the special award this year two major advisory firms, from which investors take their cue when voting, had recommended "no" votes on pay.
Institutional Shareholder Services Inc and Glass Lewis & Co criticized Dimon's options as lacking performance criteria for vesting.
In eight of the last 12 years JPMorgan had won approval from more than 90% of votes cast in its annual compensation ballots.
Dimon, 66, will keep the award, but such votes are closely followed as a test of investors' attitudes toward executive pay and what payouts they will tolerate.
Average support for pay packages at S&P 500 companies was 88.3% in 2021, down from 89.6% in 2020 and 90% in 2019, according to consulting firm Semler Brossy.
In response to the vote, JPMorgan directors pointed out through a spokesman the special award was extremely rare and the first for Dimon in more than a decade.
Directors said before the vote that the special award would not be recurring and "reflects the board's desire for him to continue to lead the firm for a further significant number of years."
The board said before the vote it made the award in consideration of Dimon's performance, his leadership since 2005 and "management succession planning amidst a highly competitive landscape for executive leadership talent."
If Dimon, a billionaire, keeps working at the bank for five years the options will vest, although he could still receive them if he leaves to work for the government or to run for public office.
Stock from the options must be held until 10 years after being granted.
The award was separate from Dimon's usual annual pay package, which was up 10% to $34.5 million for 2021.
The board prevailed in its recommendations on all other issues. All directors, including Dimon, were re-elected with more than 92% of the votes cast, according to preliminary figures.
Two shareholder proposals on fossil fuel financing received only 11% and 15% of votes cast, consistent with weak support recently for initiatives at Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo, as well as at big oil companies.
(Reporting by David Henry in New York. Additional reporting by Noor Zainab Hussain in Bangalore.Editing by Nick Zieminski and Chris Reese)
Boeing found a new headquarters. But customers fear it has ‘lost its way’
Boeing’s decision to transplant its corporate headquarters from Chicago to Arlington, Virginia, should have signalled a new chapter in the industrial giant’s history. Instead, the move has drawn criticism for taking management further from the company’s spiritual home, the commercial aircraft factories of Seattle, and closer to its defence operations.
Unions and industry experts have expressed disquiet, with some warning that the aerospace group is heading in the wrong direction just as it seeks to emerge from the tragic 737 Max crash crisis and setbacks on civil and military programmes that have dented investor confidence.
“It’s being perceived as an abandonment of the commercial aviation part of the company,” said Ray Goforth, executive director of the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace, which represents more than 14,000 Boeing employees.
Workers heard “‘nobody’s going to come fix the problems — they’re focused on where they can get more money’”, he added. “The company seems to move from magic solution to magic solution.”
The location of Boeing’s headquarters is a sensitive subject. The group shifted its head office from Seattle to Chicago in 2001, four years after merging with McDonnell Douglas. Critics say executives became more focused on wooing Wall Street than engineering excellence. Boeing spent more than $40bn on share buybacks between 2013 and 2019.
Boeing said the move, to a site a mile from the Pentagon, would bring it closer to customers and stakeholders as well as engineering talent, as it seeks to attract new hires. The company’s defence business brings in more revenue than its commercial arm.
Four of the US’s five biggest aerospace and defence companies will now be based in the Washington DC suburbs as Boeing joins Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), a US regulator that has increased its scrutiny of the company, is also located in the capital.
The debate about the wisdom of the shift in headquarters has been overshadowed by poor first-quarter results, which highlighted the challenges facing the company. Boeing last month revealed $1.2bn in charges in the first three months of the year, including $660mn related to the production of two Air Force One jets, the US presidential aircraft.
On the civil side, the company announced a further delay to its wide-body 777X aircraft to 2025, projected to cost another $1.5bn. Boeing is also making slower-than-expected progress on clearing an order backlog of hundreds of 737 Max jets that built up during the aircraft’s global grounding after two crashes in 2018 and 2019. Meanwhile, customer deliveries of the wide-body 787 Dreamliner remain on hold following quality control issues.
The bad news has weighed on its shares. Down 40 per cent since January, Boeing is the sole Big Five defence company stock to have fallen this year amid renewed investor enthusiasm for the sector in the wake of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
The repeated delays have frustrated some of Boeing’s largest customers, many of which are seeking to expand jet fleets as passengers return to the skies following the loosening of coronavirus pandemic curbs.
Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary said on Monday that sweeping changes were needed to Boeing’s senior management, while in February American Airlines said it had been forced to rearrange its summer schedule “due to Boeing’s continued inability to deliver our 787-8 aircraft”.
To make matters worse, Boeing’s arch-rival Airbus has built up a commanding sales lead in the narrow-body segment of the market. The European plane maker recently announced plans to aggressively step up production of its popular A320 family of jets, including with a second assembly line in the US at its operations in Mobile, Alabama.
“Clearly Boeing, especially on the commercial side, is experiencing great challenges,” said John Plueger, chief executive of Air Lease, one of the company’s biggest customers, which is still waiting on about a dozen 787 jets. “In our view, given the history that we’ve had with Boeing in the past year to two, we are hopeful that we can get at least one 787 by the end of this year. I hope I am wrong, I hope we get many more.”
The move to Virginia would “strengthen ties with defence and hopefully with regulators like the FAA, and that is fine”, Plueger added. “But in our view, there is nothing like eyeballs directly on the production line.”
Some of Boeing’s other customers have gone further, with Dómhnal Slattery, boss of the world’s second-largest lessor, Avolon, telling an industry conference this month that the company had “lost its way”. It needed to “fundamentally reimagine its strategic relevance in the marketplace”, he said, adding that this would require “fresh vision, maybe fresh leadership”.
The public rebuke is rare in an industry where disagreements are usually kept behind closed doors. Two other executives contacted by the Financial Times privately echoed the view that Boeing would benefit from fresh leadership and questioned its execution on key programmes. Dave Calhoun, Boeing’s chief executive and a long-term board member, promised greater transparency and a return to the company’s engineering roots when he took over from Dennis Muilenburg in 2019.
Boeing’s relentless production issues were “just the absence of leadership at the top”, said Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace consultant at AeroDynamic Advisory. He added that he was “baffled by the lack of a plan” for the company.
A person familiar with Boeing’s thinking insisted that management change was not needed to restore confidence. Boeing declined to comment on the matter.
Despite some customers’ frustration, the company has supporters and continues to win orders, including recently from Germany’s Lufthansa. Southwest Airlines chief Bob Jordan this year called Boeing a “terrific partner”.
But the group’s decision to move its headquarters has amplified concerns over production and engineering.
“If you look at the history over the last quarters — they have pretty much taken charges on every one of their major programmes, both in defence and commercial. What they do isn’t easy, building these machines, but they seem to be having more difficulties than their peers,” said Ron Epstein, analyst at Bank of America, adding that a lot of the issues had to do with “engineering”.
The company insists things have changed since the Max accidents. Calhoun last month defended the company’s culture on an investor call, saying: “I don’t attribute our certification issues and time lines to engineering shortfalls in any way.”
Boeing told the FT that it was taking “comprehensive actions to strengthen engineering excellence, enhance quality and drive stability and predictability through the business”. “We are a long-cycle business, and the transformative journey we’re on will be measured in years; not quarters or months,” it added.
Brian West, Boeing’s chief financial officer, said at a conference last week that the company was “on the verge of turning the corner”.
Its key milestones, he added, were to deliver 787s, to deliver more 737 Maxes and to generate sustainable cash flow. “Those three things are the most important elements that we think about day in and day out. And I believe that as we move through the course of the year, we’re going to start knocking down these milestones,” said West.
Generating cash flow is critical if Boeing — which still has $45bn of net debt — is to have the resources to fund investments, in particular in new aircraft, as the industry faces pressure over its carbon emissions. Some analysts believe the company will need to raise equity sooner rather than later.
Other long-term watchers have suggested the company might have to demerge its commercial arm from its defence business to survive — an idea rejected by a person familiar with Boeing’s thinking, who said “absolutely not”. Boeing declined to comment on the suggestion.
The coming months will be crucial for the group to convince investors — and customers — it is meeting its milestones. “[We] have always been a huge supporter and buyer of aircraft from the Boeing company . . . It has to be a reliable partner. It has to be able to deliver the aircraft that we have on order,” said Air Lease’s Plueger.
20 years later, 'Frankenfish' are strong and spreading, but the anglers are getting craftier SNAKEHEAD Jason Nark Tue, May 17, 2022,
WOOLFORD, Md. - A dozen or so dead northern snakeheads lay stacked in slime and ice behind a general store in Woolford on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Fisherman Caz Kenny reached into the cooler to highlight some of the controversial fish's finer points, such as the sharp, gnarled teeth behind its ghastly mug.
Kenny, a lifelong outdoorsman, has been sounding the alarm for years about the invasive species, a powerful predator native to Asia and Russia that was first discovered breeding on the East Coast in a small suburban Maryland pond on the other side of the Chesapeake Bay 20 years ago. They've since spread south to Virginia, north to New Jersey and likely beyond.
Kenny, 47, didn't filet the fish in the cooler behind the Woolford Store in Dorchester County, one of his hangouts, but he's seen his fair share of snakeheads splayed open and knows they're usually full of eggs and other animals. He rattled off a list, his voice a machine-gun staccato: minnows, bass, perch, crayfish, frogs, even baby ducks. "There's not one place here where they haven't had an impact," Kenny tells me as he hoists a thick eight-pounder from the cooler. "There's not a biologist around here that says we're okay."
Northern snakeheads were first seen in the spring of 2002 when an angler hooked one in a swampy pond behind a shopping center in Crofton, Md., about 30 miles from Washington, D.C.
When another was caught there and reported to Maryland's Department of Natural Resources, all aquatic hell broke loose, and the legend of the "Frankenfish" was born. Think of the "killer bee" scares of the 1970s and the media attention those received.
A Washington Post headline from July 2002 found that the "Freakish Fish Story Flourishes." This fish was able to gulp air and "walk." Horror movies were made - including one called "Snakehead Terror," starring the supermodel Carol Alt - and locals sold T-shirts.
How did the dreaded fish get here? Two snakeheads were released into the pond, The Washington Post learned, by a man who'd bought them from an Asian market in New York City, intending to turn them into soup.
For every outdoorsman like Kenny, who believes snakeheads will ultimately destroy local populations, there are others who have come to prize, even obsess over, the fish for its fighting prowess on the end of a fishing line. Many of those fishermen say they don't see that devastation in the places they fish. The two factions often mix it up in the half-dozen Facebook groups dedicated to snakeheads. (Full disclosure: I have caught a few dozen snakeheads over the years in New Jersey, and I've yet to kill one.)
Steve Kambouris, 38, a snakehead devotee from Dundalk, Md., believes the species will eventually be considered a nonnative game fish, something to market to sport fishermen, not a pest to eradicate. "I would say that anyone who says they are a trash fish hasn't caught one," Kambouris told me. "In terms of a sport fish, I can't think of any freshwater fish I would rather catch."
The biologists, of course, are more measured than both sides in their assessments. Twenty years, they say, is a blip on the biological timeline. "We should be concerned with invasive species because once they've become established, it's basically impossible to eradicate them, and control measures can be very expensive," says Steven P. Minkkinen, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. When it comes to snakeheads, Minkkinen says, "the genie is out of the bottle."
Minkkinen pointed to one study, a before-and-after look at fish populations in the Blackwater River watershed after snakeheads were established in 2012. The river and its vast tributaries are just a few miles from the Woolford Store and have become a hub for snakehead fishermen from all over the country. The 2018-19 study replicated a fish study conducted in the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge in 2006-07 and found declines in other prey fish populations. "The loss of these prey species could be in part due to presence of an additional top predator like Northern Snakehead," the study's authors wrote.
Snakeheads are tough. They can breathe oxygen out of water for days, and they don't flop on their sides like most fish. Snakeheads slither. During big rains, they often push into adjacent waterways. When the snakeheads were discovered, officials poisoned Crofton Pond to kill them, but the Little Patuxent River runs just feet away, and it's likely some fish or eggs got out or were moved by birds and turtles. They later became established in the Potomac River.
Snakeheads can be sold commercially but are difficult to catch in large numbers because they prefer shallow water with heavy vegetation, which few boats with nets can get to. One of the more successful ways to kill them has been nighttime bowfishing - using a bow and arrow - on smaller boats equipped with bright lights.
Fishermen find snakeheads tough to hook, on account of their hard, bony mouths, and they fight like pit bulls to break loose, even when they're inside your kayak. That's why most of the snakeheads in Kenny's cooler had holes in their heads from arrows, knives or screwdrivers: from when fishermen administer the coup de grace, as if dispatching a zombie.
"Man, as long as they're wet, they can live for days," Kenny said.
Kenny, like state and federal wildlife officials, wants fishermen to eat the snakeheads they catch. He promotes events, such as the Cecil County Snakehead Fishing Tournament, in which the snakeheads have to be brought to a weigh station for measurements. Since it's illegal to transport a live northern snakehead, they have to be dead. A screwdriver through the head usually does it.
Kambouris, on the other hand, hosts online tournaments where anglers submit their measurements with photos before releasing the snakehead.
Kenny's final argument for killing snakeheads was a freshly cooked plate of breaded fish sticks on a table outside the store. He took a swig of an energy drink, then encouraged everyone - a fellow fisherman, the store owner, this reporter and a photographer - to dig in.
"It's like lump crabmeat," he told us.
Some fish are so ugly that mariners and marketers changed their names to make them more palatable for the seafood industry. Snakeheads, with their bulging eyes and penchant for oozing slime, haven't had such a makeover - but once you eat one, it barely matters. Their meat is as white and flaky as any cod or flounder, perhaps even better.
The plate was empty in a few minutes, and there's at least one more fisherman who might carry a screwdriver in his tackle box now.
- - -
Jason Nark is a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and a freelance writer.
