#Maureen Price

[childofaura]

This has been in my head for a long time but how do you feel about Maureen Price? She recently did Goldmary and prior to Goldmary, she’s Louise and Natasha from FEH.

Ok I’ve been all over the place this weekend, so I apologize (part of it was being sick and part of it was Chapter MotherFucking Eleven) but now I can answer this.

Goldmary is one of Hortensia’s retainers, right? I can’t say that character really stood out much to me, ROSADO however… I was full on convinced that he was a girl because all the damn models are only shown from the shoulders up, and it took that cutscene with Hortensia and a visit to the wiki until I quite literally yelled out loud “OHHH HE’S A TRAP!” Which honestly, I think he’s one of the most prettiest traps of FE, given that Libra’s just got long hair and an actual female actress (which I hate, let a man with a soft voice play him!!), and Forrest is simply blond curls. I adore him, he’s just so cute.

ANYWAYS, sorry for the disconnected ramble. MAUREEN PRICE, let’s talk about her. Haven’t heard her Goldmary voice, but as a Sacred Stones player, she was an absolutely stellar pick for Natasha, and I like her Louise as well.

Her performance as Natasha and Louise is just so perfect. Both characters are kind and gentle, but with such vastly different energies; Natasha is quieter, more solemn, and more troubled, while Louise is warmer, more outwardly welcoming, and inviting. Both are still very solid performances, and I can’t wait for more Louise alts.

And I think she was a perfect pick for the two, especially Natasha. I’m very picky on Sacred Stones actors because that game was so near and dear to me (As I feel Ephraim, Seth, Valter, Marisa, Duessel, and Ewan were miscast, IN MY OPINION ONLY PLS DON’T BE MAD PEOPLE). But her Natasha is perfect and can be added to my list of the Stones characters I DO think were perfectly cast (Ross, Artur, Gerik, Joshua, Colm, Neimi, Tethys, Dozla, and… Cormag. Gosh damn, that will be a sad day if he gets an alt).

Frankly speaking, I can’t say her range is super amazing, but at least her emotional performance helps the two characters sound distinct from each other.

Overall, while I DO like her roles as Natasha and Louise, I have to currently give her a 7/10. That can change with more alts and more characters added to FEH, so once we see Goldmary added, I’m sure the score will be bumped up a little. Here’s hoping she gets more characters!

[softboysora]

Today is Quinella English VA (Maureen Price) 34th Birthday so happy birthday🎂🎉🎁

[dorawinifredread]

[themandalalady]

23-14 Practice, Practice, Practice

Download and color this week’s Mandala of the Week This week’s MotW is inspired by Jack Canfield’s “The Success Principles”, namely Principle #16: Be Willing To Pay The Price. He states “Behind every great achievement is a story of education, training, practice, discipline, and sacrifice. You have to be willing to pay the price….the willingness to do what’s required adds that extra dimension to…

[mostlysignssomeportents]

When private equity destroys your hospital

I'm on tour with my new novel The Bezzle! Catch me TOMORROW in PHOENIX (Changing Hands, Feb 29) then Tucson (Mar 9-10), San Francisco (Mar 13), and more!

As someone who writes a lot of fiction about corporate crime, I naturally end up spending a lot of time being angry about corporate crime. It's pretty goddamned enraging. But the fiction writer in me is especially upset at how cartoonishly evil the perps are – routinely doing things that I couldn't ever get away with putting in a novel.

Beyond a doubt, the most cartoonishly evil characters are the private equity looters. And the most cartoonishly evil private equity looters are the ones who get involved in health care.

(Buckle up.)

Writing for The American Prospect, Maureen Tcacik details a national scandal: the collapse of PE-backed hospital chain Steward Health, a company that bought and looted hospitals up and down the country, starving them of everything from heart valves to prescription paper, ripping off suppliers, doctors and nurses, and callously exposing patients to deadly risk:

https://prospect.org/health/2024-02-27-scenes-from-bat-cave-steward-health-florida/

Steward occupies a very special place in the private equity looting cycle. Private equity companies arrange themselves on a continuum of indiscriminate depravity. At the start of the continuum are PE funds that buy productive and useful firms (everything from hospitals to car-washes) using "leveraged buyouts." That means that they borrow money to buy the company and use the company itself as collateral: it's like you getting a bank-loan to buy your neighbor's mortgage out from under them, and using your neighbor's house as collateral for that loan.

Once the buyout is done, the PE fund pays itself a "special dividend" (stealing money the business needs to survive) and then starts charging the business a "management fee" for the PE fund's expertise. To pay for all this, the PE bosses start to hack away at the company. Quality declines. So do wages. Prices go up. The company changes suppliers, opting for cheaper alternatives, often stiffing the old company. There are mass layoffs. The remaining employees end up doing three peoples' jobs, for lower wages, with fewer materials of lower quality.

Eventually, that top-feeding PE company finds a more desperate, more ham-fisted PE company to unload the business onto. That middle-feeding company also does a leveraged buyout, pays itself another special dividend, cuts wages, staffing and quality even further. They switch to even worse suppliers and stiff the last batch. Prices go up even higher.

Then – you guessed it – the middle-feeding PE company finds an even more awful PE bottom-feeder to unload the company onto. That bottom feeder does it all again, without even pretending to leave the business in condition to do its job. The company is a shambling zombie at this point, often producing literal garbage in place of the products that made its reputation. Employees' paychecks bounce, or don't show up at all. The company stops bothering to pay the lawyers that have been fending off its creditors. Those lawyers sue the company, too.

That's the kind of PE company Steward Health was, and, as the name suggests, Steward Health is in the business of stripping away the very last residue of value from community hospitals. As you might imagine, this gets pretty fucking ugly.

Steward owns 32 hospitals up and down the country, though its holdings are dwindling as the company walks away from its debt-burdened holdings, after years of neglect that have rendered them unfit for use as health facilities – or for any other purpose. Tcacik's piece offers a snapshot of one such hospital: Florida's Rockledge Regional Medical Center, just eight miles from Cape Canaveral.

Rockledge is a disaster. The fifth floor was, at one point, home to 5,000 bats.

Five.

Thousand.

Bats.

(Rockledge stiffed the exterminators.)

The bats were just the beginning. One of the internal sewage pipes ruptured. Whole sections of the hospital were literally full of shit, oozing out of the walls and ceiling, slopping over medical equipment.

That's an urgent situation for any hospital, but for Rockledge, it's catastrophic, because Rockledge is a hospital without any hospital supplies. Steward has stiffed the companies that supply "heart valves, urology lasers, Impella catheters, cardiac catheterization balloons, slings for lifting heavier patients, blood and urine test reagents, and most recently, prescription paper." Key medical equipment has been repossessed. So have the Pepsi machines. The hospital cafeteria had its supply of cold cuts repossessed:

https://www.reddit.com/r/massachusetts/comments/1agc1j4/comment/kolicqo/

It's not just Steward's nonpayments that reek of impending doom. Its payments also bear the hallmarks of a scam artist on the brink of blowing off the con. The company recently paid off a vendor with five separate checks for $1m, each drawn on "a random hospital in Utah" (Steward recently walked away from its Utah hospitals; its partners there are suing it for stealing $18m on their way out the door).

This company – which owns 32 hospitals! – has resorted to gambits like sending photos of fake checks to doctors it hasn't paid in months as "proof" that the money was coming (the checks arrived 22 days later).

Steward owes so much money to its employees – $1.66m to just one doctors' group. But the medical staff keep doing their jobs, and are reluctant to speak on the record, thanks to Steward's reputation for vicious retaliation. Those health workers keep showing up to take care of patients, even as the hospital crumbles around them. One clinician told Tcacik: "I watched a bed collapse underneath a [patient] who had just undergone hip surgery."

Rockledge has nine elevators, but only five of them work – the other four have been broken for a year. The hospital's fourth floor has been converted to "a graveyard of broken beds." The sinks are clogged, or filled with foul gunk. There's black mold. Nurses have noted on the maintenance tags that the repair service refuses to attend the hospital until their overdue bills are paid. The fifteen-person on-site maintenance team was cut to just two workers.

Steward is just the latest looting owner of Rockledge. After the Great Financial Crisis, private equity consultants helped sell it to Health Management Associates. The hospital's CEO took home a $10m bonus for that sale and exited; Health Management Associates then quickly became embroiled in a Medicare fraud and kickback scandal. Soon after, Rockledge was passed on to Community Health Systems, who then sold it on to Rockledge.

Steward, meanwhile, was at that time owned by an even bigger private equity giant, Cerberus, which then sold Steward off. That deal was performatively complex and hid all kinds of mischief. Prior to Cerberus's sell-off of Steward, they sold off Steward's real-estate. The buyer was Medical Properties Trust, who gave Cerberus $1.25b for the real-estate: three hospitals in Florida and three more in Ohio. Steward then contracted to operate these hospitals on MPT's behalf, and pay MPT rent for the real-estate.

This complex arrangement was key to siphoning value out of the hospital and to keeping angry creditors at bay – if you can't figure out who owes you money, it's a lot harder to collect on the debt. The scheme was masterminded by Steward founder/CEO Ralph de la Torre. De la Torre is notorious for taking a massive dividend out of the company while it owed $1.4b to its creditors. He bought a $40m yacht with the money.

De la Torre was once feted as a business genius who would "disrupt" healthcare. But as Steward's private jet hops around "Corfu, Santorini, St. Maarten and Antigua" as its hospitals literally crumble, he's becoming less popular. In Massachusetts, politicians have railed against Steward and de la Torre (Governor Healey wants the company to leave the state "as soon as possible").

Florida, by contrast, is much more friendly to Steward. The state Health and Human Services Committee chair Randy Fine is an ardent admirer of hospital privatization and is currently campaigning to sell off the last community hospital in Brevard County. The state inspectors are likewise remarkably tolerant of Steward's little peccadillos. The quasi-governmental agency that inspects hospitals has awarded this shit-and-bat-filled, elevator-free, understaffed rotting hulk "A" grades for quality.

These inspectors jointly represent a mismatched assortment of private and public agencies, dominated by a nonprofit called Leapfrog, the brainchild of Harvard public-health prof Lucian Leape, who founded it in 2000. Leapfrog likes to tout its "transparent" assessment criteria, and Steward are experts at hitting those criteria, spending the exact minimum to tick every box that Leapfrog inspectors use as proxies for overall quality and safety.

This is a pretty great example of Goodhart's Law: "every measurement eventually becomes a target, whereupon it ceases to be a good measurement":

https://xkcd.com/2899/

But despite Steward's increasingly furious creditors and its decaying facilities, the company remains bullish on its ability to continue operations. Medical Properties Trust – the real estate investment trust that is nominally a separate company from Steward – recently hosted a conference call to reassure Wall Street investors that it would be a going concern. When a Bank of America analyst asked MPT's CFO how this could possibly be, given the facility's dire condition and Steward's degraded state, the CFO blithely assured him that the company would get bailouts: "We own hospitals no one wants to see closed."

That's the thing about PE and health-care. The looters who buy out every health-care facility in a region understand that this makes them too big to fail: no matter how dangerous the companies they drain become, local governments will continue to prop them up. Look at dialysis, a market that's been cornered by private equity rollups. Today, if you need this lifesaving therapy, there's a good chance that every accessible facility is owned by a private equity fund that has fired all its qualified staff and ceased sterilizing its needles. Otherwise healthy people who visit these clinics sometimes die due to operator error. But they chug along, because no dialysis clinics is worse that "dialysis clinics where unqualified sadists sometimes kill you with dirty needles":

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-dirty-business-of-clean-blood

The bad news is that private equity has thoroughly colonized the entire medical system. They took hospitals, fired the doctors, then took over the doctors' groups that provided outsource staff to the hospital:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/04/a-mind-forever-voyaging/#prop-bets

It's illegal for private equity companies to own doctors' practices (doctors have to own these), but they obfuscated the crime with a paper-thin pretext that they got away with despite its obvious bullshittery:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/21/profitable-butchers/#looted

The financier who decides whether you live or die depends on an algorithm that literally sets a tolerable level of preventable deaths for the patients trapped in the practice:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/05/any-metric-becomes-a-target/#hca

Private equity also took over emergency rooms and boobytrapped them with "surprise billing" – junk fees that ran to thousands of dollars that you had to pay even if the hospital was in network with your insurer. They made billions from this, and spent a many millions from that booty keeping the scam alive with scare ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/21/all-in-it-together/#doctor-patient-unity

The whole health stack is colonized by private equity-backed monopolies. Even your hospital bed!

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/05/hillrom/#baxter-international

Then there's residential care. Private equity cornered many regional markets on nursing homes and turned them into slaughterhouses, places where you go to die, not live:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/23/acceptable-losses/#disposable-olds

The palliative care sector is also captured by private equity. PE bosses hire vast teams of fast-talking salespeople who con vulnerable older people into entering an end-of-life system before they are ready to die. Thanks to loose regulation, the nation is filled with fake hospices that can rake in millions from Medicare while denying all care to their patients (hospice patients don't get life-extending medication or procedures, by definition):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/26/death-panels/#what-the-heck-is-going-on-with-CMS

If you survive this long enough, Medicare eventually tells the hospice that you're clearly not dying and you get kicked off their rolls. Now you have to go through the lengthy bureaucratic nightmare of convincing the system – which was previously informed that you were at death's door – that you are actually viable and need to start getting care again (good luck with that).

If that kills you, guess what? Private equity has rolled up funeral homes up and down the country, and they will scam your survivors just as hard as the medical system that killed you did:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/09/high-cost-of-dying/#memento-mori

The PE sector spent more than a trillion dollars over the past decade buying up healthcare companies, and it has trillions more in "dry powder" allocated for further medical acquisitions. Why not? As the CFO of Medical Properties Trust told that Bank of America analyst last week, when you "own hospitals no one wants to see closed." you literally can't fail, no matter how many people you murder.

The PE sector is a reminder that the crimes people commit for money far outstrip the crimes they commit for ideology. Even the most ideological killers are horrified by the murders their profit-motivated colleagues commit.

Last year, Tkacic wrote about the history of IG Farben, the German company that built Monowitz, a private slave-labor camp up the road from Auschwitz to make the materiel it was gouging Hitler's Wehrmacht on:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farben

Farben bought the cheapest possible slaves from Auschwitz, preferentially sourcing women and children. These slaves were worked to death at a rate that put Auschwitz's wholesale murder in the shade. Farben's slaves died an average of just three months after starting work at Monowitz. The situation was so abominable, so unconscionable, that the SS officers who provided outsource guard-labor to Monowitz actually wrote to Berlin to complain about the cruelty.

The Nuremberg trials are famous for the Nazi officers who insisted that they were "just following order" but were nonetheless executed for their crimes. 24 Farben executives were also tried at Nuremberg, where they offered a very different defense: "We had a fiduciary duty to our shareholders to maximize our profits." 19 of the 24 were acquitted on that basis.

PE is committed to an ideology that is far worse than any form of racial animus or other bias. As a sector, it is committed to profit above all other values. As a result, its brutality knows no bounds, no decency, no compassion. Even the worst crimes we commit for hate are nothing compared to the crimes we commit for greed.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/28/5000-bats/retaliation#charnel-house

[mutant-distraction]

Maureen Price

Saguaro Cactus Photo Bombing

Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. in Arizona from Arizona Highways

[billboard-hotties-tourney]

Okay, folks, the mini-tourney is inching closer to the finals, so I'm going to give a list of the competitors in the Miss Billboard Tourney in order to give everyone a chance to submit more propaganda. The nominees are:

Lale Andersen

Marian Anderson

Signe Toly Anderson

Julie Andrews

LaVerne Andrews

Maxene Andrews

Patty Andrews

Ann-Margret

Joan Armatrading

Dorothy Ashby

Joan Baez

Pearl Bailey

Belle Baker

Josephine Baker

LaVern Baker

Florence Ballard

Brigitte Bardot

Eileen Barton

Fontella Bass

Shirley Bassey

Maggie Bell

Lola Beltran

Ivy Benson

Gladys Bentley

Jane Birkin

Cilla Black

Ronee Blakley

Teresa Brewer

Anne Briggs

Ruth Brown

Joyce Bryant

Vashti Bunyan

Kate Bush

Montserrat Caballe

Maria Callas

Blanche Calloway

Wendy Carlos

Cathy Carr

Raffaella Carra

Diahann Carroll

Karen Carpenter

June Carter Cash

Charo

Cher

Meg Christian

Gigliola Cinquetti

Petula Clark

Merry Clayton

Patsy Cline

Rosemary Clooney

Natalie Cole

Judy Collins

Alice Coltrane

Betty Comden

Barbara Cook

Rita Coolidge

Gal Costa

Ida Cox

Karen Dalton

Marie-Louise Damien

Betty Davis

Jinx Dawson

Doris Day

Blossom Dearie

Kiki Dee

Lucienne Delyle

Sandy Denny

Jackie DeShannon

Gwen Dickey

Marlene Dietrich

Marie-France Dufour

Julie Driscoll

Yvonne Elliman

Cass Elliot

Maureen Evans

Agnetha Faeltskog

Marianne Faithfull

Mimi Farina

Max Feldman

Gracie Fields

Ella Fitzgerald

Roberta Flack

Lita Ford

Connie Francis

Aretha Franklin

France Gall

Judy Garland

Crystal Gayle

Gloria Gaynor

Bobbie Gentry

Astrud Gilberto

Donna Jean Godchaux

Lesley Gore

Eydie Gorme

Margo Guryan

Sheila Guyse

Nina Hagen

Francoise Hardy

Emmylou Harris

Debbie Harry

Annie Haslam

Billie Holiday

Mary Hopkin

Lena Horne

Helen Humes

Betty Hutton

Janis Ian

Mahalia Jackson

Wanda Jackson

Etta James

Joan Jett

Bessie Jones

Etta Jones

Gloria Jones

Grace Jones

Shirley Jones

Tamiko Jones

Janis Joplin

Barbara Keith

Carole King

Eartha Kitt

Chaka Khan

Hildegard Knef

Gladys Knight

Sonja Kristina

Patti Labelle

Cleo Laine

Nicolette Larson

Daliah Lavi

Vicky Leandros

Peggy Lee

Rita Lee

Alis Lesley

Barbara Lewis

Abbey Lincoln

Melba Liston

Julie London

Darlene Love

Lulu

Anni-Frid Lyngstad

Barbara Lynn

Loretta Lynn

Vera Lynn

Siw Malmkvist

Lata Mangeshkar

Linda McCartney

Kate McGarrigle

Christie McVie

Bette Midler

Jean Millington

June Millington

Liza Minnelli

Carmen Miranda

Joni Mitchell

Liz Mitchell

Marion Montgomery

Lee Morse

Nana Mouskouri

Anne Murray

Wenche Myhre

Holly Near

Olivia Newton-John

Stevie Nicks

Nico

Laura Nyro

Virginia O’Brien

Odetta

Yoko Ono

Shirley Owens

Patti Page

Dolly Parton

Freda Payne

Michelle Phillips

Edith Piaf

Ruth Pointer

Leontyne Price

Suzi Quatro

Gertrude Rainey

Bonnie Raitt

Carline Ray

Helen Reddy

Della Reese

Martha Reeves

June Richmond

Jeannie C. Riley

Minnie Riperton

Jean Ritchie

Chita Rivera

Clara Rockmore

Linda Ronstadt

Marianne Rosenberg

Diana Ross

Anna Russell

Melanie Safka

Buffy Sainte-Marie

Samantha Sang

Pattie Santos

Hazel Scott

Doreen Shaffer

Jackie Shane

Marlena Shaw

Sandie Shaw

Dinah Shore

Judee Sill

Carly Simon

Nina Simone

Nancy Sinatra

Siouxsie Sioux

Grace Slick

Bessie Smith

Mamie Smith

Patti Smith

Ethel Smyth

Mercedes Sosa

Ronnie Spector

Dusty Springfield

Mavis Staples

Candi Staton

Barbra Streisand

Poly Styrene

Maxine Sullivan

Donna Summer

Pat Suzuki

Norma Tanega

Tammi Terrell

Sister Rosetta Tharpe

Big Mama Thornton

Mary Travers

Moe Tucker

Tina Turner

Twiggy

Bonnie Tyler

Sylvia Tyson

Sarah Vaughan

Sylvie Vartan

Mariska Veres

Akiko Wada

Claire Waldoff

Jennifer Warnes

Dee Dee Warwick

Dionne Warwick

Dinah Washington

Ethel Waters

Elisabeth Welch

Kitty Wells

Mary Wells

Juliane Werding

Tina Weymouth

Cris Williamson

Ann Wilson

Mary Wilson

Nancy Wilson

Anna Mae Winburn

Syreeta Wright

Tammy Wynette

Nan Wynn

Those in italics have five or more pieces of usable visual, written, or audio propaganda already. If you have any visuals like photos or videos, or if you have something to say in words, submit it to this blog before round one begins on June 25th!

If you don't see a name you submitted here, it's because most or all of their career was as a child/they were too young for the cutoff, their career was almost entirely after 1979, or music was something they only dabbled in and are hardly known for. There are quite a few ladies on the list whose primary career wasn't "recording artist" or "live musician," but released several albums or were in musical theater, so they've been accepted.

[barry-j-blupjeans]

During the Day of Story and Song, Maureen Miller could only describe herself as feeling enlightened. An emotion she had not felt for years, at that point. Inside the Astral Plane, all her senses were both dampened and vehement. There was the coursing, crashing anger, but only after periods of such lowness that she was unsure if the Eternal Stockade had just consumed her entirely. Mostly, after finally breaking free, it was crushing guilt.

Maureen Miller was a proud woman. There was nothing worth pride in what she had done. She had stuck her head into a realm that no mortal or God were made to see and she had paid her price for it. Her mind hadn't been able to handle the pressure and because of that, she had lost herself. Not only her life, but her chance for a peaceful afterlife. She sought to escape and when she did? There was no justifying the way she acted on the Prime Material Plane, even if she had quite literally been driven to that point by the weight of a knowledge someone as small as her was not meant to hold.

She attacked her son. And, when she came to, Maureen figured that the Eternal Stockade was the right place for someone like her.

It was more bearable when you collected yourself back up. Maureen supposed that's why it was seen as a punishment for those who couldn't— the years she spent in here with her mind gone were torturous, a long loop of pain and rage where there. Whatever had driven you to breaking the laws of life and death now consumed you until you fizzled out or sought help.

It was chilling, hearing broken souls screaming until they lost their existence entirely. Maureen had been heading down that path once. There were others in here like her, of course, but it was rare. It was not often a soul could repent in this way, both physically and mentally.

But for her and the few others who did, the Stockade became a little less of an eternal tomb and a little more of a jail sentence. By the time they got to this state, they understood the weight of what they had done.

Most did, at least.

When Maureen built the Cosmoscope, there were no bad intentions. Only pure, unadulterated seeking of knowledge. After leaving the majority of the weight of that knowledge in her robot conduit back on the Prime Material Plane, she could no longer worry over it and thus, she had no explanation for her actions. She tried her best to unpack the little that she could remember. The dark force consuming planar systems, the Light, the research— but every meaningful connection sparked and fizzled out like a soldered wire. There was no moving forward from it.

Until the day Maureen looked out the window of her cell and knew she no longer had time to understand it. It covered the Astral Plane, taking hold of the sea. Maureen paced and thought and tried to act, but nothing would get her out of here. The other souls in the Stockade were growing restless— the corrupted ones banged against their walls, desperate for an escape, or to join in, Maureen couldn't say. And the ones like her— the ones who had finally realized what their actions had done? Maureen could see her fears reflected back in them.

The Eternal Stockade was just that— Eternal. But Maureen knew what the end of eternal looked like.

Story and Song was a wave. It was the silence in the middle of the storm, where the world-consuming force— the Hunger— paused and all the knowledge Maureen had been unable to access came flood back into her with a profound sense of understanding. And she knew these people— she knew them like she knew herself, like she had traveled with them for a hundred years, like she was the Light they sought after and she was the crew searching from it— and Maureen knew these people.

She laughed. It sounded more like a sob.

Lucretia had always been this dramatic, hadn't she?

The door to the cell hall burst open. But it wasn't the Hunger on the other side. Instead, the Reaper strolled it, a scythe materializing in his hand. He held the room at attention, just about the only person who could have drawn them back from the raging storm.

"I've got a deal to strike with you lot," he said. "Who's up for being put on probation?"

[survivingcapitalism]

What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

by Maureen Tkacik

March 28, 2024

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-03-28-suicide-mission-boeing/

John Barnett had one of those bosses who seemed to spend most of his waking hours scheming to inflict humiliation upon him. He mocked him in weekly meetings whenever he dared contribute a thought, assigned a fellow manager to spy on him and spread rumors that he did not play nicely with others, and disciplined him for things like “using email to communicate” and pushing for flaws he found on planes to be fixed.

“John is very knowledgeable almost to a fault, as it gets in the way at times when issues arise,” the boss wrote in one of his withering performance reviews, downgrading Barnett’s rating from a 40 all the way to a 15 in an assessment that cast the 26-year quality manager, who was known as “Swampy” for his easy Louisiana drawl, as an anal-retentive prick whose pedantry was antagonizing his colleagues. The truth, by contrast, was self-evident to anyone who spent five minutes in his presence: John Barnett, who raced cars in his spare time and seemed “high on life” according to one former colleague, was a “great, fun boss that loved Boeing and was willing to share his knowledge with everyone,” as one of his former quality technicians would later recall.

More from Maureen Tkacik

But Swampy was mired in an institution that was in a perpetual state of unlearning all the lessons it had absorbed over a 90-year ascent to the pinnacle of global manufacturing. Like most neoliberal institutions, Boeing had come under the spell of a seductive new theory of “knowledge” that essentially reduced the whole concept to a combination of intellectual property, trade secrets, and data, discarding “thought” and “understanding” and “complex reasoning” possessed by a skilled and experienced workforce as essentially not worth the increased health care costs. CEO Jim McNerney, who joined Boeing in 2005, had last helmed 3M, where management as he saw it had “overvalued experience and undervalued leadership” before he purged the veterans into early retirement.

“Prince Jim”—as some long-timers used to call him—repeatedly invoked a slur for longtime engineers and skilled machinists in the obligatory vanity “leadership” book he co-wrote. Those who cared too much about the integrity of the planes and not enough about the stock price were “phenomenally talented assholes,” and he encouraged his deputies to ostracize them into leaving the company. He initially refused to let nearly any of these talented assholes work on the 787 Dreamliner, instead outsourcing the vast majority of the development and engineering design of the brand-new, revolutionary wide-body jet to suppliers, many of which lacked engineering departments. The plan would save money while busting unions, a win-win, he promised investors. Instead, McNerney’s plan burned some $50 billion in excess of its budget and went three and a half years behind schedule.

Swampy belonged to one of the cleanup crews that Boeing detailed to McNerney’s disaster area. The supplier to which Boeing had outsourced part of the 787 fuselage had in turn outsourced the design to an Israeli firm that had botched the job, leaving the supplier strapped for cash in the midst of a global credit crunch. Boeing would have to bail out—and buy out—the private equity firm that controlled the supplier. In 2009, Boeing began recruiting managers from Washington state to move east to the supplier’s non-union plant in Charleston, South Carolina, to train the workforce to properly put together a plane.

[bracketsoffear]

Eye Poll II Round 1

Observants vs. Wan Shi Tong

The Master of Masters vs. Jessica Fletcher

Cypher vs. Columbo

Maureen Miller vs. Jadis

Ivy Alexandria vs. Timekeeper Cookie

Cecil Palmer vs. Vincent Price

Doc Scratch vs. Futaba Sakura

Sauron vs. the Man with the Upside-down Face

L.B. Jefferies vs. Big Brother

Angela vs. GLaDOS

Nicodemus vs. Ford Pines

Gretchen Wieners vs. Midnight Sparkle

The Wire vs. the Question

Ornithologists vs. Alec Hardison

Lemony Snicket vs. Apollo Justice

Hercule Poirot vs. Prak

[wholenessblooming]

“Women have to find autonomy before they can achieve wholeness. Examining the meaning of autonomy often involves discarding old ideas of success. Many women have sacrificed too much of their souls in the name of achievement. The rewards of the outer journey can be seductive, but at some point the heroine awakens and says no to the heroics of the ego. They have come at too high a price.

The heroine can say no to superwoman standards on the job or at home when she feels good enough about herself as a woman to acknowledge her human limitations. This may actually involve quitting a job and giving up power and prestige to feel again. Or she may decide that she doesn’t have to have the cleanest house in the neighborhood and that her children and husband can begin to do their share.

Finding the inner boon of success requires the sacrifice of false notions of the heroic. When a woman can find the courage to be limited and to realize that she is enough exactly the way she is, then she discovers one of the true treasures of the heroine’s journey. This woman can detach herself from the whims of the ego and touch into the deeper forces that are the source of her life. She can say, “I am not all things . . . and I am enough.” She becomes real, open, vulnerable, and receptive to a true spiritual awakening.”

Maureen Murdock, in the book The Heroine's Journey

[final-girl96]

My Boyfriend's Back Chapter Five

A/N: This is Part One. The next chapter will be smut! Not nice gentle smut either so that's your warning. Also, I highly recommend watching My Boyfriend's Back it's a good movie. It's on Amazon and YouTube for $3.99 it's also on Redbox for the same price.

Stu

I was surprised when I saw yn standing behind me with a bat in her hand. And when it finally clicked that Billy fucking called her at work and that was the reason she was there I was fucking pissed. I mean seeing her swing that bat in her hand and threaten me like she did had my fucking dick hard. But I could have fucking hurt her she would have just snuck up on me. I didn't want her to be a part of this. She didn't have anything to do with Billy's revenge against Sidney. Okay, sure, Maureen was her mother too. But she wasn't Billy's girlfriend.

When he had come to me about killing Maureen I had been hesitant at first. I didn't want to kill my girlfriend's mom. But I'm far too sensitive and gave in to peer pressure. Billy had called me out on the dark fantasy I had of what it would be like to kill someone. He's seen the dolls in the attic. We've both always had that darkness about us. We used to joke about it when we were alone. Then he came to me telling me he knew why his mom left him and that Maureen Prescott had to die. That we would be doing everyone a favor.

She was known to be the whore of Woodsboro. Everyone knew she slept around even yn. Sidney was the one that was in denial. And when Billy looked at Sidney he saw her mother. She looked more like her than yn did. I never wanted yn to find her mom like that. I felt guilty for a long time every time I looked at her. But then we started talking about killing other people. Casey and Steve were brought up and I jumped at it. Then we made more plans. There would be a fake attack on Sidney. Yn wasn't supposed to be a part of that.

Yn wasn't going to be a part of any of this. I had plans to slip her something. She would be asleep the whole time. Then when Billy and I were the last ones left she would be too and I would be the only person she had. She could be mine forever. But now I'm at the fucking police station watching comfort her sister while Deputy Dipshit tried to find their father. They wouldn't find him. He never left town. He's tied up in my basement until we need him. I met Billy's stare and slightly nodded my head. It was part of the plan. He was obsessed with following the fucking plan.

Once the girls were free to go Dewey led us out the back way to avoid the press. I couldn't wait to be famous for being one of the Woodsboro teens who survived a grief ridden man who went on a killing spree right before the one year anniversary of his wife's murder. Of course we didn't get away from the press completely. Gale Weathers was waiting for Sidney and yn as we walked out the door. To my surprise Sidney was the one to punch her.

"I need to go back to the house," yn said. I looked over at her before I started the car. "I left my stuff in my car including my keys. And I need to get a change of clothes." I nodded my head and started the car. "No problem. You okay? You wanna tell me what happened?" I asked. I know Billy called her, there was no way he didn't. She sighed, "he called me at work, the killer I mean. He said that he was watching Sidney and then said that I was going to find her the same way I found my mom." My grip on the steering wheel tightened.

"I rushed home. The doors were locked so I climbed up onto the roof and through my bedroom window." No matter how many times I've told her to lock her damn windows she never does. "And you just decided to threaten a killer with a baseball bat?" I asked. She shrugged, "well I wasn't going to go out with nothing. Just be happy I have some kind of weapon in my room. It makes up for not locking my windows." I laughed at her logic, "funny one, babe. I think when I get you back to my place I'm going to have to punish you." My dick was getting hard again thinking about what she had done.

When we got back to my house I was quick to grab her stuff for her. "What a gentleman," she said. "Anything for you, baby." I smirked. She rolled her eyes and walked into the house. As soon as the door was closed I took her stuff up to my roof. I don't know why she brought clothes when she has clothes here. When I went back downstairs yn wasn't anywhere in sight. "Babe?" I could feel my pulse quicken as I walked closer to the basement door. "Baby?" I spun around when I heard a bang coming from the garage.

I walked through the kitchen, into the laundry room where the door that led out to the garage was open. "Baby, what're you doing?" She looked over her shoulder, "beer." She held up two beers and I smiled. "Beer before bed?" I asked. "I'm not really tired," she sighed. I nodded my head and led her back into the kitchen. "How about we make some popcorn and watch a movie." She nodded her head and sat up on the counter. I started the popcorn and turned around so I could stand between her legs. "What movie do you wanna watch?" I asked, giving her a quick kiss.

"What about…My Boyfriend's Back?" One of her favorite movies. Not exactly a horror and more like a comedy. It's about a teenage boy our age who gets shot trying to impress his long-time crush only to die. Then he comes back from the dead determined to take her to prom. He's technically a zombie but not like the Night of the Living Dead zombies. She thought it was romantic that he came back from the dead to tell his dream girl he was in love with her. The ending was a bit of a twist but not surprising.

"Sure, baby, go put it in," I said, giving her a kiss and helping her off the counter. When I walked into the living room, a bowl of popcorn in my hand and a beer in the other, yn was stretched out on the sofa. The movie was paused waiting for me to get settled so we could watch it. I set the bowl on the table, sat down in the middle of the sofa and moved her legs so they were resting over mine. "Okay, you can start it." She smiled and pressed play on the remote. She was already immersed in the movie but I couldn't help thinking about seeing her tonight. I was pissed but also so fucking turned on.

[catsarno7024]

ΉЦЯƬ ƧӨ GӨӨD

Make sure to preorder this deliciously dark antho before the preorder price goes up!**

Mybook.to/villain-antho

A skitter down the spine. A dark chuckle floating on the breeze. A mask weaving in and out of the waning light.

This dark anthology is not for the faint of heart. Here, the masked men and serial unalivers play, and you are the toy.

Make sure your windows and doors are locked. Don’t answer any phone calls. And whatever you do, try not to scream.

Not that it matters anyway…

They found you, and now, they’ll do everything in their power to keep you.

Please join these mistresses of the dark as they show you just what it means to hurt so good.

Mania Balor

TL Reeve

Michele Ryan

Demi Lane

Bre Rose

Maureen Shigeno

Billie Blue

T.L. Hodel

KD Michaels

Ivy Graves

Kai Malik

RS McKenzie

Tia Fanning

Arden Wolfe

**Hurts So Good is a dark romance anthology that will make you question your darkest desires. Heed their warnings to determine if you can handle their brand of romance. 18+ enter if you dare.**

#knotandthornpress #anthology #hurtsogood #darkromance #heedtriggerwarnings #death #multipleauthors

[bellabrooks1510]

ΉЦЯƬ ƧӨ GӨӨD

Make sure to preorder this deliciously dark antho before the preorder price goes up!**

Mybook.to/villain-antho

A skitter down the spine. A dark chuckle floating on the breeze. A mask weaving in and out of the waning light.

This dark anthology is not for the faint of heart. Here, the masked men and serial unalivers play, and you are the toy.

Make sure your windows and doors are locked. Don’t answer any phone calls. And whatever you do, try not to scream.

Not that it matters anyway…

They found you, and now, they’ll do everything in their power to keep you.

Please join these mistresses of the dark as they show you just what it means to hurt so good.

Mania Balor

TL Reeve

Michele Ryan

Demi Lane

Bre Rose

Maureen Shigeno

Billie Blue

T.L. Hodel

KD Michaels

Ivy Graves

Kai Malik

RS McKenzie

Tia Fanning

Arden Wolfe

**Hurts So Good is a dark romance anthology that will make you question your darkest desires. Heed their warnings to determine if you can handle their brand of romance. 18+ enter if you dare.**

#knotandthornpress #anthology #hurtsogood #darkromance #heedtriggerwarnings #death #multipleauthors

[mutant-distraction]

Maureen Price

Cypress Swamp Natchez Trace NP

Covers parts of ALabama, Mississippi &

Tennessee.

[holmesxwatson]

Jeremy Brett: Playing a Part by Maureen Whittaker

I have the paperback version of this book, it's nearly 500 pages of detailed biography of Jeremy Brett with hundreds of pictures throughout and the version I have is coffee table size. It's organized by performance including his earliest work in school, through his stage, movie, and tv roles. I would describe it as an encyclopedia of Jeremy Brett, anytime I watch something new or rewatch an episode of Granada Holmes, I open to that section of the book to read about behind-the-scenes stuff and insights into the work.

There are hardcover and paperback versions of the book available and there's an option to purchase a black & white edition that lowers the price a little. The MX Publishing page linked below has links to both US and UK amazon purchase pages.

Maureen Whittaker is also the author of Jeremy Brett IS Sherlock Holmes (x)

book trailer on MX Publishing youtube (x)

interview with author Maureen Whittaker on La Gazette du 221b (x)

entry on Goodreads (x)

on MX Publishing website (x)