Posted on 02/04/2008 8:00:16 PM PST by 7thOF7th
Pentagon officials will review a $40 billion Air Force program to buy 179 jet-refueling planes on Feb. 22, more than a week later than expected, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Defense Department said on Monday.
The meeting of the Defense Acquisition Board, headed by chief Pentagon weapons buyer John Young, had already slipped to Feb. 13 from late January.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
EADS/Airbus cannot receive this award. No way. No how.
So you favor jobs in liberal states like Illinois and Washington over jobs in conservative states like Alabama?
At least no one from EADS has gone to prison over the contract yet.
I notice that you weren't able to come up with any challenge to them. Better luck next try.
I’m not going to take the time to educate someone who clearly has no idea of the industry or the aircraft.
McCain talks about how he saved the taxpayers $2.5B by stopping this program. We probably have spent more than that keeping the KC 135 and KC10 operation in the interim. McCain calls progress, stopping a program. He never offered an alternative solution. How do we go to war without a flying texaco. Maybe thats why he calls it a 100 year war, it will take that long to get to the fight.
Kind of scary when you consider that he may be our next POTUS:-(
OK but just htis once for the uninformed:
Airbus: Long out of politics, former Progressive Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney was dragged back into the public arena, thanks to the RCMP and a lobbyist called Karlheinz Schreiber. As part of an investigation into Schreiber’s role in an alleged plot involving secret commissions and kickbacks in deals for the purchase of airplanes and helicopters, the federal Justice Department sent a letter to the Swiss government. The 1995 letter alleged that Mulroney was also involved in the arrangement, taking kickbacks on the sale of Airbus planes to Air Canada during his time as prime minister.
The French like to do certain things en masse. Ever since 1789, it seems, French workers have preferred to operate in a crowd. Each summer, they take off for August altogether. And now, it turns out, they have applied the logic of the mass movement to insider dealing: more than 1,200 people, including 21 senior managers, are being investigated for shedding their stock in EADS, the European group that makes Airbus aircraft, before the bad news about the A380 and the A350 seeped out into the market.
The scale of suspect trades – ten million shares allegedly sold by more than a thousand company insiders for a collective profit of more than €90 million (£62 million) – suggests that insider dealing was not considered scandalous but standard practice. Call it the Franco-German business model: employees who know about technical problems in the company are allowed to sell their shares before the reality reaches the markets...more at link
You really ought to be posting on DU. Throwing out innuendo that you can’t back up with facts. Let’s be kind and say that you are intellectually dishonest.
Now, in case anyone reading this is unaware of the facts, and could possibly be pulled in by your smears, I’ll go through the facts.
Boeing is headquartered in Illinois, and a contract to them would create jobs in Washington state. Illinois is a democrat stronghold, the childhood home of Hillary Clinton and the current home of B. Hussien Obama. Washington state is run by Gov. Chris (as she refers to herself) Gregoire.
As for the rest, are you trying to suggest that Darleen Druyun was never a Boeing employee? I don’t think you’d go out on that limb, which may be why you’ve been unwilling to back up your first comment.
It is difficult to imagine a scandal quite like Clearstream in the US, not that we don’t have a lot of our own corruption problems involving politics and the aerospace industry. US examples include the Lockheed bribe affairs of the early seventies and, more recently, the Darleen Druyan Boeing scandal; on the political side we’ve had everything from Watergate, the mother of all them all, to Randy Cunningham and his disgraceful behavior. However, nothing in American history can compare to the unfolding Clearstream scandal in France.
If G. Gordon Liddy, the leader of the Watergate burglers, had been an employee of Boeing or Lockheed instead of an operative of the Committee to Reelect the President, it might be possible to compare Clearstream to Watergate. Instead, this scandal involves at least one senior member of the EADS leadership team. From the corporation’s point of view its involvement in this affair was exceptionally stupid, but since when have human beings, even Frenchmen, been immune from stupidity?
For the space industry this means that two of Europe’s most important satellite and launch vehicle manufacturers are now caught up in an ugly political scandal. It a nutshell the Clearstream scandal involves a fake list of high-up people involved in French politics and industry who supposedly held illegal accounts at Clearstream, a bank in Luxembourg. The accusation was that these funds were kickbacks from, among other things, the sale of frigates to Taiwan. This dirty trick was intended to destroy the political career of France’s current interior minister, Nicholas Sarkozy. It is strongly suspected that the operations was carried out on behalf of the prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, Sarkozy’s rival, and possibly the French president, Jacques Chirac.
The man at the heart of the scandal is Jean-Louis Gergorin, who earlier this month quit as “Head of Strategic Coordination” at the European aerospace giant. Since then he has been definitively fired. The company naturally claims that Clearstream has nothing to do with EADS. However, the fact is that France’s defense industry is far more intimately involved with the government than in almost any other of the advanced democracies. Gergorin’s career has taken him from the best French universities to the Rand corporation in the US and then to the French Foreign Ministry where, in 1973 under Michel Jobert, he set up a Center for Analysis and Prediction.
Later, he became involved in a nasty fight between Thompson, which is now part of Thales, and Lagardere/ Matra, now part of EADS. Thompson was involved in a nasty scandal over the Taiwanese frigates. At one time he even claimed that “The (French) arms industry was in the hands of the Russian Mafia and that they had assassinated Jean Luc Lagardere (former head of Matra) in 2003.”
Either he is telling the truth on this or he is nuts: in either case it makes EADS look really bad. In the most likely case—that he is paranoid—the question has got to be asked by investors and customers of the conglomerate: how did he get to the top of the organization? Could it have something to do with the fact that the French government owns a 15% “Golden Share” of the company? The company’s customers and partners have got to be asking themselves how many others like him are in management.
For the space industry this means that two of Europe’s most important satellite and launch vehicle manufacturers are now caught up in an ugly political scandal. The corrupt relationships between political power and the aerospace industry in France that have now been exposed will have repercussions worldwide. Anyone in a non-French government or corporation who wants to buy a ride on an Ariane 5, or a satellite or space-qualified component from Astrium, will have to be extremely careful not to get caught up in what promises to be a long and drawn-out affair.
In the US, for example, every single contract the Defense Department has had with both EADS and with Thales will have to be reexamined in minute detail for signs of corruption and/or influence-peddling. No US major defense contractor can allow itself to be seen as having anything other than an arms-length relationship with these two firms until after the Clearstream affair is over and they have fully exonerated of any wrongdoing.
The leadership at EADS has claimed that this case is nothing like Boeing’s Druyan scandal. They are right: it’s worse. Boeing was, at least, abusing the system for its own greedy purposes. Gergorin and his associates were using the resources of the firm to play dirty political tricks on behalf of one ambitious presidential candidate against another.
At the inter-governmental level this scandal will force many of France’s international partners to reexamine their relationships with French government and industry if only to insure that they are not being manipulated for interior French political purposes. Foreign involvement in any aspect of this could involve years of investigations, millions of dollars in legal expenses, and do serious harm to any number of business and scientific relationships.
For the last two decades it has been obvious that the French government has a long-standing strategy to completely dominate Europe’s arms and aerospace industry. To achieve this they are willing to sacrifice any number of things, not the least of which are huge sums of French taxpayers’ euros. Any company that refuses to be “federated” into the French schemes earns itself a label of “Un-European”, as BAE did a few weeks ago when one French commentator called them “A US company with its headquarters in Farnborough”. The extraordinarily tight relationship between this industry and the highest levels of the French state apparatus make Washington DC’s “Iron Triangle” look like a loose tribal confederation.
At a time when the demand for launch services and high end communications satellites is slowly recovering and when the Ariane 5’s teething problems have been put behind it, the Clearstream scandal looks to be yet another obstacle to France’s ambitions to make the EU into a first-rate space power. The other European states, particularly Germany and Italy, who have now subordinated most of their space ambitions to those of Paris, must now rethink to what extent they want to be tightly bound to a company or companies who are now plunged into what promises to be a drawn-out, bitter, and politically destructive struggle.
You fail to realize that Boeing uses thousands of suppliers from all over the US and the World to make parts for the 767. These suppliers employ thousands of employees and generate millions of dollars of taxable income. I guess economics is not something you could understand.
As for Druyun, she was a US government employee not a Boeing employee during the bidding of the tanker program. She was hired after the award of the tanker. She was one of many in the chain who selected the Boeing tanker.
Well that clarifies things
I'll take that bet.
Yes, they have transferred more technology to Red China than did the Clintons.
As for Druyun, she was a US government employee not a Boeing employee
The record is pretty clear that she was working for Boeing, not the taxpayers, while she held her Pentagon job. The tanker was just one of several contracts that she steered to Boeing in exchange for consideration.
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