I’m a little late on the gloating on this one, but I was certainly happy to see DOC head Eldon Vail step down from his post earlier this month after he got busted having an affair with a subordinate. Although if this state had a press corps that considered coverups of lying corrections officers as newsworthy as marital infidelity, he would’ve resigned over a year ago.
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Lee, I’m not with you on this one. These things happen. This guy isn’t some rightwing, family values sort of hypocrite. He didn’t lie. When caught, he resigned. Immediately. It’s not like he’s Louisiana Senator David Vitter (diaper me, baby,please?), or something. I don’t think gloating is right here.
FINALLY!
He should have been fired two years ago for the shit going on in the prisons.
Prison should be hard time, not Prisneyland.
fuck him….I dont care if slept with some ho, his record should have been enough to have him removed…but our Queen decided to play politics instead…fuck her too.
2
Thank you for your thoughtful, dispassionate comment.
@3 He had his head so far up his ass it was hard to hear what he said.
I posted a comment in these threads some time ago about Vail’s resignation. In that comment, I observed that Vail accepted responsibility for his actions, made no excuses, and voluntarily tendered his resignation — and noted that’s a refreshing change from the stonewalling we usually get from politicians.
And, not to put too fine a point on it, but the unwillingness of political figures to accept responsibility for their screwups pales when compared to the utter lack of accountability and responsibility we get from the private business sector. Today’s CEOs and Wall Street bankers make people like Vitter look like Boy Scouts.
To follow up on RR’s post at 5, lets review with the conduct of a person who has held positions of President, Chairman of the Board, and CEO of our region’s largest employer, Boeing.
From the time he was brought on board at Boeing for a “one-year” term as President as part of the Boeing-McDonnel Douglas merger, Stonecipher instilled himself with a permanant presence at Boeing, appointed his M-D underlines to run all Boeing subsidiaries, divisions, and business units, and soon gained control of the Board as well by convincing Conduit to appoint Stonecipher loyalists to the board. When some M-D executives in Boeing Defense screwed up and made illegal offers to Darlene Runyun, he avoided any personal responsibility for training and putting those underlings in those positions, and instead convinced Condit to fall on his own sword and resign, and for himself to take the full helm of the company – arguing that Condit had to take responsibility for ethical and moral problems at the company.
At that point Stonecipher was already pushing an initiative to have Boeing divest itself of all means of producing the parts, and instead merely doing final assembly. His vision was that Boeing’s value was only in the name, and that contractors could produce everything. The plane would come into the factory with only three days of work to snap together, slap on the name-plate (you will see it in the doorway if you look up while boarding the plane), and then send it into the paint hanger before delivery to Boeing.
To make sure Boeing couldn’t easily reverse course on this philosophy, he laid off the workers who knew how to make the parts, and had the tooling scrapped.
This paid off personally rather well for Stonecipher, because his stock options went up in value as the earnings-to-assets ration was impacted by him getting rid of assets and employee costs. But in the long term it hurt Boing considerably, and is a major part of the three-year delay in delivering the Boeing 787 to customers – to the point where some analysts have predicted Boeing will never make a profit on the 787-8, despite orders in the 1,000 airplane range. (They do hope to make a profit on subsequent versions, such as the 787-9 and 787-10).
But all this was just fine with the board. Sure, there were some rumblings in the local press as some Boeing engineers and analysts tried to warn Boeing that giving up the parts production process resulted in the loss of profits on the sale of the parts, not only for the initial aircraft but for future spares. And the local press is always concerned that Boeing’s employee count here might decrease. But most such concerns were dismissed – indeed scoffed at- by both Boeing executives, most of the national press, and corporate executives elsewhere. “It’s a different world, you just have to accept it and learn to live with it” were the substance of their rebuttals.
So Stonecipher set up Boeing to fail, in the long run. He had some experience at it, after all – he had done the same thing at McDonnel-Douglas when he delayed developement of new airplanes so he could milk the profit off existing designs. When the orders ceased coming in for new MD airplanes because their design was dated and unable to compete with Boeing and Airbus, he tried a crash course to develop what ultimately became the B717 after the merger, but it was far too little, too late. Faced with the possiblity of bankruptcy or a hostile takeover, Stonecipher managed to use the one card he had left in his hand – the threat of a merger with Airbus – to compel Boeing to agree to a merger. But Stonecipher was clearly the card shark in this game – the comment heard frequently at Boeing is that McDonnel-Douglas bought Boeing with Boeing’s own money.
So after putting Boeing on a path toward it’s own ultimate destruction (if not reversed quickly enough), what brought Stonecipher down? He had an affair with a subordinate. At that point, the hypocracy between Stonecipher’s insistence on ethical conduct, combined with him forcing the resignation of Condit on ethical grounds (although Stonecipher was more at fault than Condit in that issue), was too much for the Board to bear. He had to go.
So destroying a great American company is fine. Just don’t get caught having an affair with a subordiante.
Funny how all of you are ignoring his terrible record on the job and trying to spin it into the evul boeing cumpuny.
Could you find a more idiotic tangent rhpee?
# 7: Boeing’s not evil. I’m a big fan of Boeing, although I disagree with some of it’s business decisions over the past decade or so.
And your post just confirmed the aptness of my point: screwing up on the job doesn’t seem to get high officials fired, either in government or in private industry. But screwing an underling does – as long as the screwing is literal, not merely figurative.
7, 8 – You could argue that Boeing is an “evil” company — remember the contracting scandal that sent a top Pentagon official to jail? Remember all the workers who got sick from chemical fumes in the new carbon-fiber manufacturing process? Remember the $25,000 toilet seats? But hey, I’m okay with Boeing’s criminality. Why? Because I own Boeing stock, that’s why. When it comes to watching my Boeing stock go up, I don’t give a shit how they make money, as long as they make it! The humanitarian side of my on-line political persona goes completely down the drain when it’s money you’re talking about. When it’s time to rake in filthy lucre I’m every bit as greedy, rapacious, and devoid of conscience as any Republican! In fact, I used to be a Republican, and this tendency must be a residual effect of my sordid political past — becoming a Democrat after being a Republican is kind of like trying to get rid of a persistent cancer; no matter how much tissue you cut out, you can never quite get all of the last remaining cancerous cells, and after a time the bastards come back. That’s why cancer and Republicanism are incurable; the most you can hope for is remission. Rabbits aren’t supposed to be humanitarians anyway; we’re not humans, so how can you expect me to be a humanitarian? I really ought to be a rabbitarian. Every morning when I wake up and look at the stock market ticker I thank the Great Mother Rabbit Spirit for Boeing’s evil ways — if it wasn’t for bastards like Stonecipher and the current guy (I forget his name), I might have to get a job and WORK for money, GMRS forbid!!! So, I have no problem with “evil” Boeing … as long as my stock goes up.
It’s hard to believe some of our trolls still think I’m a commie, isn’t it? I’m so fucking capitalist I make Republicans blush.
Why We Still Need Unions
When Republican say we don’t need unions, what they really mean is they don’t need unions, because it’s clear that workers need unions. Here’s why:
http://lifeinc.today.com/_news.....on-members
So, maybe we shouldn’t give up our union rights just yet. Maybe we should FIGHT to keep those hard-won rights that our forbears shed their own blood for, so we’d have a better future than they did.
Troll Alert: The Rodent is not a pinko bunny.