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Contents on this page were published in the May, 1993 edition of the Washington Free Press.
WFP, 1463 E. Republican #178, Seattle, WA -USA, 98112. -- WAfreepress@gmail.com
Copyright © 1993 WFP Collective, Inc.
OPINIONS WE
COULDN'T KEEP
TO OURSELVES
Like old pros, the spin doctors at The Boeing Company again have anesthetized the citizens and media of Puget Sound into a state of hyper-gullibility.
Boeing's most recent company line is that it is laying off 19,000 workers over the next two years to streamline itself into a leaner, meaner corporate machine. (Despite a smaller workforce, a company that makes planes that drop jet engines in midair wants to cut its production time in half. Fasten your seat belts.)
By eviscerating its workforce, Boeing argues, it will be immunized from those bumps in the airline business that have led to corporate booms and busts, and with them, regional booms and busts. Firing what would be a standing-room-only crowd at the Coliseum is good news for the region, you see, not bad news.
Once again, Boeing chair/CEO Frank Shrontz has succeeded in using a spurious rationalization to put a happy face on patently bad tidings. We marvel at it.
What Shrontz isn't telling you is that the real reason for the enormous cutbacks is that the commercial airline business - as we have known it since Ronald Reagan deregulated the industry - has gone the way of the Spruce Goose. The current "bump" in the industry is more like a 767 slamming into the side of Mount Rainier.
Here's why:
After deregulation, commercial airlines went insane: buying hundreds of new jets, building giant airport "hubs" all over the country, expanding international flights, slashing airfares, offering countless enticements to travellers and so on. Regional airlines, like Braniff and others, couldn't hang with the big guys, who advertised and under-priced their smaller competitors into bankruptcy.
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The real reason for Boeing's enormous cutbacks is that the commercial airline business - as we have known it since Ronald Reagan deregulated the industry - has gone the way of the Spruce Goose.
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But - as was the fate of the S & L, banking and other recently deregulated industries - the airlines are rediscovering a painful, free-market reality after a decade of smoke-and-mirrors growth.
In a recent front-page article, the New York Times confirmed that the current airline bump is in fact the Big One. The artificially bloated industry, the paper quoted experts as agreeing, likely will re-settle to a mix of several large carriers with the return of regional airlines and perhaps a no-frills carrier or two.
It should come as no surprise. Early in the deregulation experiment it became obvious that there was a limit to how many new people could be romanced into buying an airplane ticket. The years that followed saw carriers engaged in a desperate, pathetic war of survival. The casualties are still being counted.
What does this mean for Boeing? Bad news, of course. And the company knows it. It's even resorted to launching an advertising campaign in the hope of persuading fliers to patronize only those carriers that use Boeing planes.
Desperate companies like Boeing do desperate things - like mislead the public, putting us in the position of having to read between the lines of press releases that only tell us half the story. By announcing that it wants to coast with 80,000 or so workers in Western Washington for the foreseeable future, Boeing is admitting that it does not expect the airline industry to turn around. It is also virtually admitting that it already has decided to build its new super-jet somewhere else.
But Boeing officials won't tell you that. They're too busy trying to come up with fairy tales about how layoffs can be good for you, and how recent environmental and growth management laws are getting in the way of their expansion plans.
Come on, Dr. Frank, snap us out of it.
We don't mean to be repetitive. But because the mass media spent only one day telling you about a United Nations report describing what amounted to a US government cover-up of human rights abuses and murder in El Salvador, we thought it was worth repeating.
On March 15, the UN told us that the Salvadoran government killed about 80 percent of the 75,000 people who died during the country's 12-year civil war. The Reagan and Bush administrations, the UN report said, knew about the military government's atrocious behavior, including some of the more gruesome instances of government-sponsored murder. But Reagan and Bush's minions continued to tell Congress and the public that the right-wingers running El Salvador were getting their act together on human rights.
The falsehoods were used to justify the sending of $6 billion to the Salvadoran government during the Reagan-Bush years. All the while, human rights organizations and the investigative news media were telling gruesome stories of the Salvadoran death squads.
But with the Salvadorans realizing that the US government would keep the lid on their brutality, why should they stop? And with the timid majority of the American public waiting for their government to tell them that the atrocities actually were occurring, mass opposition to the US policy toward El Salvador never materialized.
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The Reagan and Bush administrations knew about the Salvadoran government's atrocious behavior, including some of the more gruesome instances of government-sponsored murder.
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The United Nations found that US officials also knew about the Salvadoran government's plot that led to the 1980 murder of the archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Arnulfo Romero.
In another revelation, then-Secretary of State Al Haig opined that four Catholic churchwomen who were raped and then shot in the head at point-blank range in 1980 actually may have been killed while trying to run a roadblock set up by the Salvadoran National Guard. Those nuns can be pretty crafty, you know.
Rep. Robert Torricelli (D-NJ) pretty much summed up the whole nightmare:
"It is now clear that while the Reagan administration was certifying human rights progress in El Salvador, they knew the terrible truth that the Salvadoran military was engaged in a widespread campaign of terror and torture."
Sorry we had to repeat all of this. We didn't want you to forget.
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