Did Trump Cause The Plane Crash In Ethiopia? No... But It's His Fault

For anyone who thinks Maddow is only good for explaining complicated Putin-Gate conspiracy theories and related judicial developments, the video above is one of her best-ever segments... and unrelated to Putin-Gate. This is Maddow at her very best-- and probably started a ball rolling that put enough pressure on Trump for him to order the grounding of the Boeing 737 Max 8 jets "immediately." Key points about the two crashes of the Boeing 737 MAX 8:

• American pilots have been "describing the same sort of difficulty on take-off, the same specific problem where they are ascending after take off, rising towards the cursing altitude when something in the automated systems in that plane basically takes over and pulls the nose down."
• Although most other countries have banned the Boeing 737 MAX 8, our FAA issued a statement: "This far, our review shows no systemic performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding the aircraft."
• This could happen at anytime and "it just makes you wish and hope and pray for competency and capacity in the leadership you've got that has to deal with a crisis like this at all levels. This is the sort of thing that makes you want really good, really smart, really qualified people in place-- when a crisis like this arises. With this particular crisis happening now, at this point in our country, of course, we have some novel concerns right now in our country that we might not necessarily have with any other president in place... For example-- that statement from the FAA today, saying everything's fine as far as they can tell... no need to worry... That statement was put out in the name of the acting FAA administrator, Daniel K. Elwell... Why do we still have an acting FAA Administrator? ... President Trump had wanted to install as the Administrator of the FAA [a year ago] his own personal pilot, the guy who flies the Trump plane. Not Air Force One-- no, the one that says "Trump" on it.
• "Boeing has, in the works, a software fix that they believe will address that problem in these planes... a way to fix the accidental nose-dive problem... The fix had been expected early in January... U.S. officials have said that the federal government's recent shutdown also halted the work on the fix entirely for 5 weeks."

So why is this important? Is a picture still worth a thousand words? How about two-thousand with a caption? Or one-thousand five hundred words if the caption is in French?

This is how presidential candidate Marianne Williamson addressed the Boeing scandal in a note to her supporters this afternoon:

Question: Why was America the slowest, and most reluctant of the planet’s most advanced nations to ground their potentially dangerous fleet of Boeing Max 8's?

Answer: Because last year alone Boeing spent 15 million dollars and hired more than a dozen firms to lobby the government, to the point where the FAA now serves Boeing’s interests before it serves ours.

This is how our country operates now in situation after situation: the powers of our government are used to advocate for corporate profits more than for the people or planet on which we live.

And that is morally wrong.

The FAA seeking first to protect Boeing was not an isolated incident, but rather an example of how a corporatocracy operates. It is not just the FAA playing footsies with Boeing. The Department of Defense (DOD) acts at the bidding of the top five Defense Contractors, who hire one quarter of departing DOD employees every year. And of course the FDA shills for opioid-pushing pharmaceutical companies like Purdue, when these companies pay 45% of the FDA’s budget.

What are we to call this? There’s only one word for it, and that’s corruption. The nefarious influence of unlimited corporate money allowed to flood our political system has created a system of “dark money” that literally imperils the safety of our food, the safety of our environment, the safety of our health care, and even the safety of our skies.

Government “of the people by the people and for the people” has become a “government of, by, and for” the major corporate conglomerates whose money and influence dominate Washington.

And they do not just dominate Washington, I’m afraid. They dominate too often state legislatures and Governor’s mansions as well-- cutting educational funding, compromising safety standards for workers, lowering food and environmental standards, even seeking to suppress the votes of people who might rise up against this. All of this for the sake of an outdated, obsolete and increasingly dangerous economic ideology that turned America into a veiled aristocratic system, in which we steal from the many in order to bolster the profits of a very few.

We cannot function as both a corporatocracy and a democracy at the same time; we must choose between the two. Let’s become a generation of Americans who saw our country get way too close to the cliff, and then pulled it back. In fact, let’s get out of the vicinity of the cliff altogether. Let’s return the power of the United States government to the hands of, and placed at the service of, we the people to whom it belongs.

As citizens, we must rise up. We must not allow ourselves to be in denial about any of this, or distract ourselves from our responsibility as citizens to put our country back on track.