Re Boeing: a now open letter to Sen Cantwell and Representatives Larson and Smith

The following letter was posted last week to the offices of Senator Maria Cantwell and representatives Smith and Larson. Cantwell chairs the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. Smith is ranking member of House Armed Services Committee. Larson is ranking member on House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and serves on its Aviation Sub-committee. These are powerful voices on trade, defense, transportation, aviation and the FAA.   

Fletch Waller

Senator Maria Cantwell

Representative Adam Smith

Representative Rick Larson                                                                                                                       21 May’24

 

Dear Senator and Representatives:

Boeing Corp is a national asset that is being diminished in value by feckless leadership that persists even after its problems and flaws have become so glaringly evident.  I write as a concerned citizen of Puget Sound; when I discuss Boeing with other non-employees, like myself, residents here in the greater Seattle area, I often get a rueful shrug, a "yeah, they have sure screwed up”, but no sense of being a constituent with a real stake in the company’s performance. Boeing is still, despite its administrative and manufacturing moves away from Puget Sound, our region’s largest employer. Its future is in large part ours.

The latest disheartening evidence that the leaders of Boeing just don’t get it is their $30 million goodbye gift to Calhoun, who was supposedly overseer of the company’s attempts to right its ship after causing hundreds of passenger deaths, losing market leadership to Airbus, losing millions of dollars, and causing its customers untold millions more as portions of their fleets were grounded. To add injury to insult, the Directors voted Calhoun onto the Board! What are they thinking!? It confirms my hunch that the directors don’t know what they don’t know. Moreover, it appears that they do not care to know.

The Directors are from away, as my Newfoundland grandfather would say. There is not one Puget Sound-based Director on the Boeing Board. Think of that: the largest employer in the region without one Director on its board who lives and works in the region.

It’s not just Puget Sound that has a large stake in Boeing’s performance and leadership, it’s the US’s also. As our nation’s largest exporter, all citizens have a stake. At a small dinner with Alan Mullally years ago, his first sentence in an after-dinner presentation to us was a stunner: “Britain, Germany, France and Spain are waging war on Puget Sound.” That was before Boeing leadership decamped to Chicago, before choosing as President a Jack Welch acolyte rather than a gifted, engineer problem-solver steeped in the aircraft business (and allowing Ford to benefit from Mullally’s skills and leadership), before shifting HQ again into the Washington DC area.

I don’t know aircraft or defense industries, but I do know first-hand of leadership and directorship. You three and all your constituents have a stake in how Boeing pulls out of its nose-dive. What are your options to intercede? To bring national interests to bear? To help restore the value of this national asset? Arise.

Sincerely yours, a frustrated and concerned citizen,

 FletchW

 Fletch Waller

Report from the Urban/Rural Divide

Week before last, with four fellow political progressives, I ventured into Eastern Washington to visit and converse with political conservatives about the urban/rural divide. We found on the surface pretty much what one might expect: the divide is real; the distrust deep and damaging, urbans more Democrats and rurals more Republicans. But beneath that superficial simplicity we found fascinating complexities, ambiguities, and sensitivities. It was a rich and rewarding experience.

The trip was organized by two folks from each side, urban and rural, blues and reds, under the dual umbrellas of One Small Step and Braver Angels. One Small Step is a creation of NPR’s StoryCorps. It brings together political opposites not to argue or convert each other, but to converse, to understand the roots of political views, of how one’s political beliefs were formed by family, by upbringing, by lived experience. The goal is to restore civility, to bridge the divisions that separate us, “to” (from StoryCorp’s mission statement) ”help us believe in each other” and in our democracy. Its method is to broker formatted conversations between opposites, one couple at a time. By engaging under agreed ground rules, we learn to listen to and respect one another. I have had three One Small Step conversations and look forward to more.

Braver Angels takes a slightly different approach but its purpose, “to de-polarize America,” is fully in sync with that of One Small Step. Braver Angels is a national movement that has grown out of 16 people, eight Donald Trump voters and eight Hilary Clinton voters getting together in a South Lebanon, Ohio church basement seven years ago to see if they could talk to each other without the rancor and disrespect they agreed are so dangerously divisive. They resolved to carry on, spread the idea and took the name “Better Angels” from Lincoln’s first inaugural address, in March of 1861 by which time seven Southern States already had voted to secede from the United States. Lincoln’s inspiring passage:

“We are not enemies, but friends. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

Yes, his appeal failed; God forbid we fail again. The risk is real. 

Despite a copyright challenge that forced a name change to Braver Angels, the organization now has branches in all 50 states. Rather than One Small Step’s person by person, get to know one another approach, Braver Angels takes on issues. 

Though still small (only 12,000+ dues paying members) but growing and in alliance with over 100 other orgs, they have held over 3,200 debates, live conferences, panelist conversations before audiences, Zoom conferences, and two annual, national conventions. You want to attend the convention? You must sign up with a politically opposite: voting delegates must be evenly matched, red and blue.

Generally, both Braver Angels and One Small Step find it easier to enroll blues than reds. Are you a Red; are you worried about our increasingly disrespectful and hostile polarization? Then, c’mon – sign up to one or the other or both and help de-polarize America.

            https://storycorps.org/discover/onesmallstep/

            https://braverangels.org/ -- issues basis

With whom did we meet and what did we do?

Our trip was arranged by Judie Messier, our go-to One Small Stepper. (All five of us are members of Wider Horizons, through which we have come to know one another.) We were hosted by and stayed in the home of two Utah-raised LDSer’s. Rural yahoos, right? Wrong! They are both graduate nuclear physicists, he retired from Rickover’s staff. She is a Republican of the Milton Freidman/Frederick Hyek schools and articulate on both, a district officer of Braver Angels, conflicted over a Trump candidacy and her vote. She says they likely call her a RINO. I would guess she will not vote for Biden. Her husband, a retired Commander, I’m guessing will vote party – while taking time to help his high school grandson with their physics homework. Yes, their; the grandson is transitioning with full acceptance and loving support of his grandparents. Not so simple after all. In their own way, as elite in their rural community as we urban “elites” about whom they complain. 

The #1 issue for our hostess: water and we west-side environmentalists who want to tear out the Snake River dams. She is the activist and a delightful conversationalist; he chooses to support her and stay in the background. New friends.

All five of us blues had One Small Step conversations. Mine was with a health care navigator and consultant, a conservative red, who worked in Seattle for most of her career but chose to return to her small-town roots where she helped found the co-housing venture in which she now lives. She is well-read, incisive, a jazz promoter, and a delightful luncheon companion. Again, not fitting any shallow stereotype of the red, rural conservative. We will stay in touch.

That evening there were fourteen of us for dinner put on by our hostess and host, we five progressives and nine small town or rural conservatives, all proponents of Braver Angels. At two tables of seven the conversations about urban and rural became candid, passionate, sometimes unguarded. After-dinner we all convened in the living room to share what we had learned and felt.

The next morning, we five watched a national Braver Angels Zoom conference on rural/urban relations moderated by Sue Lani Madsen, one of our dinner group the night before. Sue Lani is a very articulate journalist, activist, Republican leader, volunteer fireman (fireperson?) and skilled EMT. She also blogs. A recent entry: The party whose nominee is under 70 and does not have a worm in his brain wins.

After the Zoom session, we went out to the Madsen goat ranch in Edwall, WA. After 14 years as Range Management Specialist with the Natural Resources Conservation Service, Craig Madsen tired of bureaucracy and founded Healing Hooves, a weed control, vegetation removal, and ecosystem management company -- using goats, what else? He and his 250 goats serve individual households and land owners, and also have contracts with towns, school districts, hospitals, and so on throughout the state.  

Rural goats confront urban progressives (without revealing their political leanings.)

What did we hear?

It’s not just a Washington problem, of course. Like Seattle, Austin, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Chicago, Columbus, and countless other blue cities are afloat in seas of red. And the more urbanized the state, the more frustrated the rural dwellers. The most urbanized states: Cal @ 94.2%, Nev., N.J., Fla, Mass @91.3%. The Least urbanized: Vermont @ 35.1%, Maine, W. Va, Miss, Montana @53.4% (Where our kids and grandkids live: NY, @87.4, Washington @83.4, Michigan @ 73.5, Minn @ 71.9, Ark @ 55.5%) Perhaps this helps explain why some Oregonians (80.5%) want to secede and be annexed by Idaho (69.2%.)

It’s nothing new. The derogatory term “city slicker” is from the 19thC; “country bumpkin” dates back to the 17thC! Country folk have long been suspicious of and alienated from city dwellers; it’s deeply ingrained. My mother was an upstate NY, tiny-town girl. I recall my Grandmother’s outrage when my orphaned cousin, whom they raised as their son, brought home an “Eye-talian” girl.

We heard grumping about “elites.” Yet Sue Lani and Craig Madsen are elites; our physicists host and hostess are elites; the guy with a Masters in Agronomy from WSU farming and managing by computer hundreds of acres of wheat in the Palouse, he is an elite; the John Deere dealer with $4,000,000 of inventory on his small town lot is an elite.

We heard about rural areas not getting their Fair Share, whatever that means. In fact, most rural counties receive more state support for roads, schools and so on, than they pay in to the state in real estate and sales taxes. But that does not make the rurals feel any better.

The myth of the self-reliant homesteader is powerful. That they relied on the Federal government’s subsidies to the railroads, on the government to break treaties and confiscate native Americans’ lands, on government grants of homesteading rights and free land, are conveniently left aside: how the west was "won".  

Insights

Phil Gerson, one of we progressive urbanites, offered an important thought: people who are rooted in place – farmers, small town business owners, people who prefer their tight, comfortable community – are naturally cautious, read conservative, about changes to their place, whether it's changing government regulations, environmentalism, influx of immigrants, whatever. Their place is their identity. Little wonder, observed Phil, that people rooted in place are more likely than not to be conservative by nature.

By contrast, those of us whose identity has to do with skills and talents, are more mobile. We likely cluster in cities among a diversity of people and encounter a diversity of ideas. We can more easily than our rural cousins move from one city to another as the market for our skills and talents change. (I, for example, was raised in Washington -- the other Washington, schooled in upstate New York and Boston, raised my family in Minneapolis, and worked in Seattle, Southeast Asia, and Brig, CH. Now retired, it is I who is rooted in place, by choice.) 

Sue Lani observed that partisanship can be a healthy route to solutions. What we need, she said, is better partisanship, to which I would add, pragmatic rather than ideological partisanship. Sue Lani and Phil are working together to create a state-wide conference on urban/rural collaboration and cooperation, a worthy effort deserving of our support.

I come away impressed . . .

. . . by the values and character of those we met. These folks value honesty, enterprise, mutual support, and bonds of respect and community. They are likeable. If we can allow our and their better angels to prevail, we will bridge the natural divide between rural and urban, and truly make the American idea work again for all of us. If . . ..

Salmon, Cedar, Rocks, and Rain -- Right in Our Backyard

 I haven’t blogged in a while, blocked by appalling genocidal wars, campus demonstrations, civil and criminal trials, hometown-company mis-steps, and frightful polls, so a trip to the outdoors was tonic to clear the brain. Our friends Pam and Jim put us onto the Olympic Peninsula, just the tonic I needed.

 

Right in our backyard: Salmon, Cedar, Rocks and Rain*

Some of you, I am sure, are very familiar with the Olympic Peninsula. I did not discover the richness of the Olympic Peninsula and the Olympic National Park until recently – long after having put my backpacking and mountain hiking days behind me.

Hurricane Ridge, 1986

When I came here in 1985, at age 50, my then-wife had little interest in exploring the outdoors unless it featured fairways, sand traps, and greens and had a 19^th hole available. No way would she be sleeping on the ground, thank you very much. While she golfed at our place in Palm Desert, I had half the year, i.e., winter and early spring, based here in Seattle, but my job entailed constant travel. What little local exploration I did was pretty limited. I made one photo outing to Hurricane Ridge in spring of 1986 but that was it for the Olympics.

After our divorce in ’87, I resigned from the Seattle Golf Club (no one resigns from the Seattle Golf Club!), gave away the sticks and began to explore. But it was eastward I looked, toward ski areas, Alpine lakes, Mt. Rainier, and the Cascades. I climbed Rainier in ’88 (@14,411, highest in the lower 48.)

 After meeting Ann and marrying in ’91 it was skiing in the Methow and Sun Valley, mountain hiking on Rainier and in the Cascades, exploring Mt. Saint Helens; we climbed Adams together; sailed in the San Juans and Gulf Islands. I fly fished the Deschutes and in BC – but all this time, ignored the Olympics.

A month or so ago, with friends Jim and Pam, we planned an Olympics trip. I began to bone up on what this Olympic Peninsula has to offer. And OMG, what I have missed all these years!  

The Olympic National Park which centers the peninsula is, in the lower 48, the largest wilderness uncrossed by roads; you can drive 20 or so miles into it from various spots on its perimeter, but to go through it – only backpackers can navigate through the Dan Evans Wilderness which is the center of the park, a three-night, four day trek. Jumbled mountains, meandering rivers, fluky weather. Tuesday, Ann and I drove 18 miles from sea level in sunny Port Angeles to 5,200’ – one mile up in 18 miles --

Hurricane Ridge 2024

and into a full snowstorm that blocked all views of Hurricane Ridge.

We visited the Ho Rain Forest – nice but unnecessary for there are rain forests nearly everywhere on the peninsula’s Southwest side. But the Ho is the departure point for hiking to and climbing Mt. Olympus. Rain forests are spooky and silent -- not so silent if you stand still and listen hard, Moss-draped, gigantic, thousand-year-old spruces, pines, firs, cedars – myriad ferns and mosses: botany on adrenaline.

Can you picture the peninsula? It’s arrowhead-shaped, with its point, Cape Flattery, to the northwest, as far from Key West as you can get short of Alaska or Hawaii. It’s bounded on the north by the Straits of Juan de Fuca; on the east by Hood Canal; on the south by Grays Harbor, Hoquiam, Aberdeen and connections to Olympia; and on the west by the raging Pacific, which is anything but pacific along that 140-mile rocky, hay-stacked shore. (And it houses some delightfully, outrageously named towns: try Humptulips for one, or Dosewallops.)   

It was on that hay-stacked shore that we joined Jim and Pam at La Push, HQ of the Quileute Reservation. The town speaks of tribes without casinos or oil: trailers, RV's or ramshackle clapboard houses, yards full of junked cars and rusting appliances. The town lives on commercial fishing, logging, and tourism.

The Quileute Oceanside Resort is owned and operated by the tribe, so I mistakenly expected little. In fact, we shared a beautifully appointed two-bedroom house right on the drift-wood studded, surf-pounded beach with haystacks just off-shore. The house is quality construction and tastefully, fully appointed. 

The view from our living room @ Quileute Oceanside Resort

And those beaches -- #’s 1,2,3, and Rialto (I think the Quileutes need some branding help, don’t you?) -- those beaches go on forever. Did it rain? Of course: cold, wet, and windy – that comes with the territory. 

Quileute #2

But, if fresh water and lake lodges are your thing, stay as we did one night in Quinault Lodge on Lake Quinault, in the Quinault Indian Nation (no visa needed.) The room was a bit weird, but the restaurant is excellent and the staff couldn’t have been more pleasant and proficient. The menu creative and wine list ample. 

Lake Crescent is the lake not to miss. Stunningly beautiful, as pretty as any we hiked around in Switzerland during my tours of teaching hospitality management at University Center, Cesar Ritz. Lake Crescent Lodge we’ll try next time.

The Quileute and Quinault are two of six indigenous language families on the peninsula – Makah, Klallam, Chemakum, Twana, Chehalis, Quinault, and Quileute. There are nine major tribes within those language groups, all with their distinctive  traditions, their prides and woes, but all share a will to survive and thrive. In each of the nine major tribes there are sub-clans that claim their own distinct identities.

Some thrive more than others – the Quileute are dependent on fishing, lumbering and tourism; others have their casinos, some industry, but always tourism – theirs is the Olympic peninsula. Save for a few Anglo settlements such as around Gray’s Harbor and up at Port Angeles, Sequim, Port Townsend, the tribes and indigenous folk are the People of the Peninsula. This is their land; they have fought for it, care about it and fight for the right to be care-givers to it and its wildlife.

And if wildlife is your thing, have deer, Roosevelt elk, sea otters, river otters, black bear, (grizzlies may be coming,) grey whales, humpbacks, orcas, marmots, mountain goats (being removed and wolves being re-introduced), seals, lynx, cougar, bobcat, five species of oysters, eleven of clams, plus mussels, urchins, and over 300 species of birds. While Ann and I ate lunch along the shore at Port Angeles, we watched a river otter gathering her lunch off the rocks right below us.

And, of course, the salmon – five species of that miraculous, spiritual symbol of life sacrificed for generations to come. Frank N and I camped out by the Elwha twelve years ago, when the first dam was removed. Now the salmon have returned; harvestable, sustainable runs are nearly back.

Salmon, Cedar, Rock and Rain*. Go and explore this treasure of ours. All four sides of it – and if you’re still young enough, backpack that interior. The best wilderness area of the Lower 48 awaits you – right in my backyard.

Fort Worden (or is that a Hopper?)

*Plagiarism alert: I “borrowed” my title from Salmon, Cedar, Rock and Rain, a beautiful collection of essays about and photos of the peninsula edited by Tim McNulty and published by Braided River, an imprint of Mountaineer Books, 2024

Time Again to Re-set the Doomsday Clock?

It can't get much closer; it's already at 11:58:20, the closest to midnight ever. Even in the '62 Cuban Missiles Crisis, it was only set at 11:53 and after the US and the USSR demonstrated in '53 that each had a thermonuclear ("Hydrogen") bomb it was set only at 11:58. Subsequent treaties allowed it to be set back; those treaties have all been allowed to lapse.

Today, Narendra Modi proudly announced that India has developed and tested a MIRV-version of their Agni V ICBM. How glibly we toss about acronyms like MIRV and ICBM; will these be the labels on mankind's self-auto-da-fey? 

When a fascist, nationalist already hostile to a nuclear-armed Chinese hegemon and to a nuclear-armed, militant neighbor has obtained a thermonuclear-tipped intercontinental missile, should not the world shudder? Are Hindu Nationalists any more rational than fearful Muslim Pakistanis or blustering Russians or gun-toting Christian Nationalists or vengeful Jewish Israelis or hate-driven Palestinians or self-doubting Chinese autocrats? Who's next? North Korea maybe already there? Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, South Korea, Japan?  

If it was I, I'd set the clock at 11:59:30. Last night, we awarded Oscars for the sobering movie Oppenheimer, about how we got ourselves into all this. Day before yesterday, we sprang forward into Daylight Saving Time. Now we appear to be falling forward, a face-plant into a perpetual nighttime abyss, proudly clutching our nuclear toys.

My Version of the Golden Rule

 I've been re-reading Karen Armstrong's The Great Transformation, the Beginnings of Our Religious Traditions. I am getting more out of this reading than the last, 17 years ago; perhaps that's just getting older. Still, the "Golden Rule" is the foundational theme -- compassion, selflessness, ahimsa. As I reflect on this, a new formulation comes to mind, one I rather like:

Do Onto Strangers What You Would Have Your Family Do Unto You 

There is injustice in the world, selfishness, evil intentions, willful harm. Were I to act selfishly, intolerantly, to inflict intentional harm, I would expect my family to confront, resist, and constrain me. I would expect them to expect, in turn, that I acknowledge those I have harmed and make amends. If it is unintentional harm I have caused, I would expect them to confront me, forgive me, and help me make amends. And when I am in pain and need, I would expect my family to succor and nourish me. 

So I likewise should do for are we not all "the other?"     All strangers?     All family?

Where do we stand? What do we stand for?

Someone among you will charge me with ignorance of the nuances of diplomacy and foreign policy; guilty, as charged. Others will challenge that I don't understand Israeli or Palestinian trauma and scar tissue. Also probably true. 

But nonetheless, as a citizen, I can read: On Feb 23^rd of last year, The White House issued National Security Memorandum #18, “for” the Secretaries of State, Treasury, Defense, Commerce, and Energy, and “for” the Director of National Intelligence and the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. The subject: United States Conventional Arms Transfer Policy.

Having read that policy promulgated by the Biden White House (I urge you to do so: I couldn't get the link to work, so Google National Security Memorandum #18,) I must express my revulsion at our complicity in the Israeli – Palestinian struggle over how two peoples can occupy the same territory. Our veto of the UN call for a ceasefire is for me the final straw. Our nation’s back appears broken.

The ”policy” states

“Sec. 4.  Arms Transfers and Human Rights.  United States national security is strengthened by greater respect worldwide for human rights and international law, including international humanitarian law.  The legitimacy of and public support for arms transfers among the populations of both the United States and recipient nations depends on the protection of civilians from harm, and the United States distinguishes itself from other potential sources of arms transfers by elevating the importance of protecting civilians.  Strong United States human rights and security sector governance standards for arms transfers — in addition to ensuring compliance with end-use requirements and providing human rights and international humanitarian law training, as appropriate — encourage recipient governments to respect international law, human rights, and good governance, and help prevent violations of human rights or international humanitarian law.” 

That’s pretty clear, isn’t it?: we must curtail transfer of weapons to Israel.

Second, it appears to me that we should stop urging the two-state dead horse lying athwart Gaza, Israel, and the occupied West Bank to get up and move forward. The two-state idea is DOA, thoroughly killed by fundamentalist Jews and resentful Arabs in their disdain for one another’s views.

We also must stop dreaming of a single state in which Palestinians are treated as equals under the law; even Arab citizens of Israel are not equal, and are, today, having their citizenship rights further threatened by Bibi’s ultra-right partners who blackmail him with threat of jail.

Our veto of the security council’s call for a cease-fire shredded whatever residual respect the world might still have held for us as an exemplar of human rights and signatory of the UN Resolution on Human Rights, the lasting legacy of Eleanor Roosevelt. She would be ashamed, as am I.

“My Promised Land”, as Ari Shavit termed it, is a poisonous desert of distrust, discord, and duplicity. But we should be involved. We should be even-handed. We should encourage dialogue and listening. We should generously give medicine, food, supplies to and succor any people in need. We should press for an end to killing and support any cessation of hostilities, no matter how short or temporary, for only when the guns and bombs fall silent, can people hear one another. We should support and encourage – despite that this will be seen as “meddling” – those opposed to extremism on either side.

It's time to live up to our own ideals, even as the Israeli government, Hamas and the PLO do not live up theirs. 

My Month

Since the 12^th of January, Ann & I have spent 13 evenings here by ourselves. We have entertained friends and family four times, and attended one theatre production, one opera, eleven chamber music events, one symphony performance, and had four dinners out – three with each other and one with a large group of friends. I know – that’s 35 days out of 31 – it’s  nuts! E.g., Saturday, the 27^th : morning at Met’s Live in HD of Carmen and evening at SCMS's Winter Chamber Festival.

I’m not telling you this to tout lofty cultural taste or confess a psychotic, peripatetic drive but merely to confess it’s what we choose to do; perhaps a little too wound up in Seattle’s annual dead spot, especially in this year of no snow.

Well, that’s who Grandpa is, I guess. Still too tightly wound. (Is that wound, rhymes with sound, or wound, rhymes with spooned, which is how he likes to sleep?)