313
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 19 May 2024
313 points (98.8% liked)
World News
31838 readers
826 users here now
News from around the world!
Rules:
-
Please only post links to actual news sources, no tabloid sites, etc
-
No NSFW content
-
No hate speech, bigotry, propaganda, etc
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
Of course he had bombshells to drop. All of the things that he had done through the legal system were done in the hopes of achieving legal victory. When that process ended, the next step would be the court of public opinion. There's an awfully big difference in impact on the general public versus reading what someone wrote and hearing them talk about it live on TV or the internet. When you can ask them questions and get detailed answers, that adds a greater level of weight to the entire issue.
It's interesting that you would bring up half of the timeline and ignore the other half. You know, the part where problems happening to airplanes in the very recent past connects with actions that happened 7 years ago. When people want explanations for what's going wrong now, of course they're going to want to talk to people who were around when it started to go awry.
And I'm not saying you're right or wrong about the accuracy of the police investigation. But I do think your analysis of the pressures on him and the current public climate is inaccurate.
Well, you don't understand the legal system at all.
You cannot submit new evidence in appeal, and again, the appeal was of the lawsuit for the Wrongful Termination. The whistleblowing was a separate item handled 7 years ago.
John Barnett had not worked for Boeing for 7 years, that's why that's the only part of this timeline that mattered. He turned over the evidence that he had, and literally could not collect more, because he was forced into retirement.
There's a chance he might have been called on for testimony by someone investigating the current and ongoing issues, but he had already submitted extensive sworn testimony on the subject, so there would be little need.
But that wrongful termination lawsuit, that was personal to him, and he was losing the final appeal. Hell, the reporting at the time of his death even said that he "retired" rather than being forced out of the company. That alone should tell you something.
But no, you want to spin an outlandish conspiracy theory based on a complete misunderstanding of the law and this man's life, all to say that Boeing, an admittedly evil company, is evil in a more personal way instead of the nebulous greed based evil that infects every corporation. The truth is, the company and its executives don't fucking care.
They're shielded from liability and have gotten their payouts, they ruin lives, and their greed has resulted in deaths as planes fall from the sky, but they admit no wrong doing and pay a small fine out of the employee pension fund. That's the true conspiracy. Not some made up contract killing of a man who was no threat at all, because all of his evidence was submitted to authorities 7 years ago.
I don't want to spin anything, and I've been wrong about a lot, but it's kind of sad that you went into attack dog mode and then completely overlooked the important details. Please do better.
You keep focusing on how John worked for them 7 years ago and totally ignore the present. People today are worried about Boeing now, and when they want to learn more about how things went wrong, they will look to people who used to work for Boeing. Retired whistleblowers are excellent candidates for talk show TV, YouTube, podcasts. That type of negative exposure could easily turn the general public, lawmakers, government oversight employees, against the company.
Gigantic companies don't care about wrongful termination lawsuits. That's chump change. But potentially losing lucrative government contracts, or potentially seeing your executives locked up because now public pressure is strong enough that regulators are forced to investigate, that type of stuff scares the big bosses.
I'm not saying that shady actions happened in this situation. I haven't looked into it. The police did, and in theory they did a proper job, but we've seen the police botch investigations in the past, too. That brings up an interesting tangential issue, which is that when your investigators have a long history of incompetence, it's harder to rule out conspiracy theories.