Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing Highlight

What happened at Boeing reflects the same forces that have roiled corporate America since the Reagan revolution ushered in an era of imperial leaders like Welch, obsessively focused on stock market investors. The same year that Boeing bought McDonnell Douglas, the Business Roundtable, a lobbyist for the largest U.S. corporations, did away with any pretense that employees, customers, or communities also had important voices. The group declared that the first duty of any company was to shareholders; everything else would follow, as if by some natural law. In 1997, this new statement of purpose was uncontroversial enough that few newspapers even carried a story about it. It was the fulfillment…