McCain and the Aircraft Lobby

[swag]

Source: Washington Indepedent

http://www.washingtonindependent.com/5415/mccain-and-the-aircraft-lobby

. . .

Boeing’s labor dispute is just the latest twist in a tangled seven-year defense contracting fiasco to procure “gas stations in the sky.” But it’s also something more. It raises questions about whether Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the Republican presidential nominee, is the crusader against Washington corruption that he claims to be.

In 2001, the Air Force handed the tanker contract to Boeing, the largest aircraft manufacturer in the world. But in 2005, the Air Force terminated the deal after McCain led a three-year investigation by the Senate Armed Services Committee that unearthed potentially illegal conduct by Air Force and Boeing officials. At the time, the media hailed McCain as a heroic, lonely crusader who had saved taxpayers millions of dollars.

But there may have been another side to McCain’s investigation — one that may undercut a central premise of his presidential campaign: that he will be a reformer as president.

Here’s the issue. The Associated Press revealed in March that five registered lobbyists for EADS were working for McCain’s presidential campaign, including Tom Loeffler, who served as the campaign’s co-chairman. Also, in 2006, McCain wrote two strongly worded, and likely influential, letters to the Pentagon, arguing that EADS acceptance of European Union subsidies should not be factored into who gets the tanker contract.



Read more: http://www.washingtonindependent.com/5415/mccain-and-the-aircraft-lobby

[Gillian]

1. No news here.

All bushies are crooks

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

2. McCain gets a pass on this one

Boeing should have been banned from the tanker competition permanently for the leasing scandal and far more people, up to and including then Boeing CEO Phil Condit should have gone to prison.

The EADS tanker also would have seen an Airbus A330 assembly line built in the United States, a plane that will be built for decades to come. The 767 tanker would have been building a handful of planes and turning out the lights, all the while ripping off the US taxpayer.