Boeing: "Sorry about that"
Boeing may be a bad boy, as we've shown before, but that doesn't mean it can't play in the sandbox. A Wall Street Journal article ("Boeing Will Soon Be Free To Bid for Rocket Work", 4/5/2004) indicates that after eight months of sitting in the corner, Boeing is now eligible to bid for government rocket contacts in the US.
The Pentagon reached an agreement whereby Boeing will be obliged to pay a few million dollars and say they're sorry, in order to be eligible to bid for over $5 billion in rocket programs. Here's the original problem, as outlined by the article:
Air Force officials last year concluded that Boeing illicitly acquired and hid from the Air Force thousands of pages of proprietary Lockheed Martin Corp. documents, which gave Boeing an unfair competitive edge by helping it calculate the amount bid by its rival in a major rocket competition. The Air Force further concluded that over the years Boeing had provided "false and misleading" information to investigators about the extent of improper document-gathering. Last July, it stripped Boeing of $1 billion in launch contracts and suspended three of the company's units from bidding on new rocket business.
In other words, Boeing had to promise it wouldn't commit gross fraud again, at least not in the rocket bidding process. All is forgiven, thanks to there being so little competition. Boeing is necessary in order to have any competition at all in the rocket-bidding process, especially since we can't allow Europeans to bid on military projects. Furthermore, Boeing is too big and too important a part of American defense to fail, no matter what they do.
Oligopoly means never having to do more than saying you're sorry.
