RALPH NADER URGES BIDEN: HOLD BOEING ACCOUNTABLE FOR FAULTY JETS

Foremost US consumer advocate and four-time presidential candidate Ralph Nader has urged US President Joe Biden to hold Boeing accountable for their faulty 737 Max jets that crashed in Ethiopia and Indonesia, killing 346 people.

In an interview with Amy Goodman for Democracy Now!, Nader said the Trump administration’s $2.5 billion settlement with Boeing over the manufacturer’s faulty 737 MAX jets amounts to a “slap on the wrist.”

One of the victims was Nader’s 24-year-old grandniece Samya Rose Stumo. Nader says the Biden Justice Department should reopen the previous administration’s settlement and hold Boeing fully accountable.

“This is just another example of giant companies getting away with their corporate criminality — a shocking sweetheart deal, an insult to the memories of the lost ones, and further endangering the safety of air travelers in the future,” he said.

He added: “Well, that’s important. He has got to keep that $15 minimum wage, which is staggered over four years, by the way. And Bernie Sanders is pleading with him and Senate Democrats to keep it in. It has state and local aid. It has aid for children. It has aid to education.

It has aid to health and vaccine and all the rest of that in the COVID crisis. And it’s very important. It has got to be managed in a way so corporations who don’t deserve it or professional sports teams who don’t deserve it don’t get the money. That’s what happened last time. And then there are hundreds of billions of dollars of unspent money, still—unspent—from the Trump administration that needs to be applied to the current state of the economy.”

Nader wants to roll back the dismantling and illegal shutting down of enforcement agencies such as the workplace safety agency OSHA, environmental agency EPA, Food and Drug Administration, the auto safety agency, the FAA.

“He has got to roll back those executive orders, roll back those criminal non-enforcement rules that Trump actually put in place overtly earlier in 2020. He then has to appoint some good people and back them up. He already has appointed some good people to the Security Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, and a very good appointee to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Rohit Chopra, but he has got more to appoint and he has got to back them up… Biden has got to expand the regulatory budget, which is so tiny it’s absurd. The budget for OSHA is $500 million, which is what we have spent every year to pay for the embassy in Baghdad in Iraq after that criminal war by Bush and Cheney. And fourth, he has got to make sure that Congress elevates corporate crime reform to the highest visibility.”

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