Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
March 8, 2008 By Eric Rosenberg, P-I Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- Supporters of The Boeing Co. blame Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, for the company's failure to win the lucrative $35 billion contract to build new Air Force aerial refueling tankers.
The Air Force last week awarded the contract to a team of Airbus parent EADS and Northrop Grumman Corp., triggering a firestorm from Boeing advocates who said the victory by the European-led consortium ignored American national security interests and would cost U.S. jobs.
Boeing advocates say McCain was a major force behind the Air Force decision to ignore the issue of government subsidies to Airbus when the tanker contract was put up for competitive bidding last year.
The issue of European government subsidies for Airbus has been raised for years by Boeing supporters who claim that those financial breaks have allowed the Toulouse, France-based company to undercut Boeing's prices and thus gain market share in the global competition between the two aircraft manufacturers. (Both the U.S. and the European Union, which claims Boeing also receives subsidies, have filed cases with the World Trade Organization.)
Boeing advocates assert that those same subsidies helped European Aeronautic Defense and Space Co. and Los-Angeles-based Northrop Grumman win the Air Force tanker project, with a value that could eventually top $100 billion.
The Air Force, which briefed Boeing on Friday about its contract decision, hasn't publicly revealed the specifics of why it gave the contract to EADS or the relative prices of the competing bids. But that hasn't stopped critics.
"The only reason that (Airbus) could even bid a low price is because they receive a subsidy," said Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., whose Seattle-area district includes thousands of Boeing workers. "Senator McCain jumped into this and said that they (the Air Force) could not look at the subsidy issue, which I think is a big mistake," he told PBS.
McCain himself has received support from the EADS North America executive suite. He has received more than $12,000 in campaign donations from some of the company's top U.S. officials, support that continued even as his presidential campaign was foundering in mid- to late 2007.
McCain's donors include EADS North America Chief Executive Officer Ralph Crosby and Senior Vice President of Government Relations Samuel Adcock.
Other EADS or Airbus employees gave donations to Democratic presidential hopefuls Sen. Hillary Clinton ($2,300 from Airbus Japan President Glen Fukushima) and Sen. Barack Obama ($350 from an EADS attorney).
McCain is also the only presidential candidate to have received donations from a top-level Boeing executive. Senior Vice President of Public Policy Tod Hullin gave $2,300. Obama and Clinton have received significant support from Boeing employees, but not from top executives.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said the Air Force was on course to give the contract to Boeing but then, "Senator McCain intervened, and now we have a situation where the contract may be -- this work may be outsourced."
Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., one of the top Democratic leaders in the House, also blamed McCain.
"The person that stopped (the tanker) from going to a U.S. company was Senator McCain," said Emanuel, "and now we are going to send major high-paying jobs overseas."
A former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, McCain was an outspoken critic of a previous tanker deal that Chicago-based Boeing had gained from the Air Force.
McCain's efforts scuttled that project in 2004 and helped uncover criminal wrongdoing on the part of a senior Air Force official and a senior Boeing executive. Both went to federal prison for conspiracy to violate conflict-of-interest rules after the Air Force official admitted steering huge contracts to Boeing, including a $20 billion project for tankers.
McCain later pressed the Air Force to ignore the issue of government subsidies to Airbus when the service solicited bids for the new tanker, contending that competition between Airbus and Boeing was more important than the issue of subsidies.
The tanker project, McCain wrote in a Sept. 8, 2006, letter to Gordon England, deputy secretary of defense, "will only succeed if it is supported by full and open competition, based on all applicable Air Force requirements, using objective, verifiable metrics."
Any consideration of subsidies by the Air Force "is inherently beyond the Air Force ability to judge and measure," McCain wrote. "As such it needlessly and, in my view, improperly injects into what should be a full and open competition an element of arbitrariness and capriciousness."
Unless the Air Force took subsidies off the table in the tanker project, "the Air Force will risk eliminating competition before the bids are submitted," he wrote.
He echoed his arguments in a follow-up letter with Robert Gates, then President Bush's nominee for defense secretary to succeed Donald Rumsfeld.
Sue Payton, the top acquisition official in the Air Force, told a House panel last week that when the service weighed the competing bids from Boeing and the Airbus-Northrop team, "subsidies are not taken into account within the evaluation criteria."
McCain shrugged off the claims by Airbus critics.
"I have always insisted that the Air Force buy major weapons through fair and open competition," he said in a statement.
P-I reporter Daniel Lathrop contributed to this report.
March 8, 2008 By Eric Rosenberg, P-I Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- Supporters of The Boeing Co. blame Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, for the company's failure to win the lucrative $35 billion contract to build new Air Force aerial refueling tankers.
The Air Force last week awarded the contract to a team of Airbus parent EADS and Northrop Grumman Corp., triggering a firestorm from Boeing advocates who said the victory by the European-led consortium ignored American national security interests and would cost U.S. jobs.
Boeing advocates say McCain was a major force behind the Air Force decision to ignore the issue of government subsidies to Airbus when the tanker contract was put up for competitive bidding last year.
The issue of European government subsidies for Airbus has been raised for years by Boeing supporters who claim that those financial breaks have allowed the Toulouse, France-based company to undercut Boeing's prices and thus gain market share in the global competition between the two aircraft manufacturers. (Both the U.S. and the European Union, which claims Boeing also receives subsidies, have filed cases with the World Trade Organization.)
Boeing advocates assert that those same subsidies helped European Aeronautic Defense and Space Co. and Los-Angeles-based Northrop Grumman win the Air Force tanker project, with a value that could eventually top $100 billion.
The Air Force, which briefed Boeing on Friday about its contract decision, hasn't publicly revealed the specifics of why it gave the contract to EADS or the relative prices of the competing bids. But that hasn't stopped critics.
"The only reason that (Airbus) could even bid a low price is because they receive a subsidy," said Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., whose Seattle-area district includes thousands of Boeing workers. "Senator McCain jumped into this and said that they (the Air Force) could not look at the subsidy issue, which I think is a big mistake," he told PBS.
McCain himself has received support from the EADS North America executive suite. He has received more than $12,000 in campaign donations from some of the company's top U.S. officials, support that continued even as his presidential campaign was foundering in mid- to late 2007.
McCain's donors include EADS North America Chief Executive Officer Ralph Crosby and Senior Vice President of Government Relations Samuel Adcock.
Other EADS or Airbus employees gave donations to Democratic presidential hopefuls Sen. Hillary Clinton ($2,300 from Airbus Japan President Glen Fukushima) and Sen. Barack Obama ($350 from an EADS attorney).
McCain is also the only presidential candidate to have received donations from a top-level Boeing executive. Senior Vice President of Public Policy Tod Hullin gave $2,300. Obama and Clinton have received significant support from Boeing employees, but not from top executives.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said the Air Force was on course to give the contract to Boeing but then, "Senator McCain intervened, and now we have a situation where the contract may be -- this work may be outsourced."
Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., one of the top Democratic leaders in the House, also blamed McCain.
"The person that stopped (the tanker) from going to a U.S. company was Senator McCain," said Emanuel, "and now we are going to send major high-paying jobs overseas."
A former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, McCain was an outspoken critic of a previous tanker deal that Chicago-based Boeing had gained from the Air Force.
McCain's efforts scuttled that project in 2004 and helped uncover criminal wrongdoing on the part of a senior Air Force official and a senior Boeing executive. Both went to federal prison for conspiracy to violate conflict-of-interest rules after the Air Force official admitted steering huge contracts to Boeing, including a $20 billion project for tankers.
McCain later pressed the Air Force to ignore the issue of government subsidies to Airbus when the service solicited bids for the new tanker, contending that competition between Airbus and Boeing was more important than the issue of subsidies.
The tanker project, McCain wrote in a Sept. 8, 2006, letter to Gordon England, deputy secretary of defense, "will only succeed if it is supported by full and open competition, based on all applicable Air Force requirements, using objective, verifiable metrics."
Any consideration of subsidies by the Air Force "is inherently beyond the Air Force ability to judge and measure," McCain wrote. "As such it needlessly and, in my view, improperly injects into what should be a full and open competition an element of arbitrariness and capriciousness."
Unless the Air Force took subsidies off the table in the tanker project, "the Air Force will risk eliminating competition before the bids are submitted," he wrote.
He echoed his arguments in a follow-up letter with Robert Gates, then President Bush's nominee for defense secretary to succeed Donald Rumsfeld.
Sue Payton, the top acquisition official in the Air Force, told a House panel last week that when the service weighed the competing bids from Boeing and the Airbus-Northrop team, "subsidies are not taken into account within the evaluation criteria."
McCain shrugged off the claims by Airbus critics.
"I have always insisted that the Air Force buy major weapons through fair and open competition," he said in a statement.
P-I reporter Daniel Lathrop contributed to this report.