Boeing’s Corporate Head Scratcher
— Bird’s-Eye View Of a Costly Corporate Decision
[Originally published as a Facebook Note on December 15, 2015 — edited]
I’ve told this story before, some of which is based on hearsay. Nonetheless here’s what I learned: My ex-girlfriend has a brother who was an architect assigned to work on Boeing’s new headquarters in Chicago, where the company had purchased million dollar Persian rugs for its Boeing chair and board rooms.
“… It had outfitted the Office of the Chairman atop its Windy City building with finery befitting a robber-baron mansion — ornate leather-and-wood executive suites, 19th-century Persian rugs and decorations that included a French barometer from the 1700s.”
Of course, in a Common Sense World any nice rug would have been fine!
But let’s cut back in time to when George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were gearing up for The War on Iraq, back when they were fine-tuning their Shock and Awe public relations strategies. Remember how the corporate media published relentless propaganda relative to Saddam Hussein opulently sporting golden palaces, gold toilets and furnishings, etc.? Remember how in a previous war a US public relations firm convinced Americans with front-page headlines that Saddam had removed babies from ventilators?
These days, we are informed about Russian president Vladimir Putin’s lavish and decorative secretive holdings and that it is only the Russian oligarchs who use and abuse, this while seldom heard-of, very clean American oligarchs remain perfectly-fine outstanding citizens whose names are graced upon hospital wings and all.
Good golly, who would ever believe such things?
Well, anyway. It was during the post-911 GOPwinger wars that Boeing was moving its corporate headquarters from Seattle to Chicago. So now comes the matter of Boeing’s multi-million dollar Persian rug for its new board room.
According to my on-the-scene ex-girlfriend’s brother, a huge debate erupted over whether holes should be cut into the very expensive Persian rug in order to facilitate cable/electronic hookups for audio-visual, computer connections, power point presentations and whatnot.
Simplified, the debate had to have gone accordingly:
QUESTION: So do we put holes in this very beautiful Persian rug?
ANSWER? Of course, we do!
ACTION: They did!
Given the genius of Boeing accountants (having paid taxes only three times in the past 12 years), US taxpayers likely paid for the damage to the extremely beautiful rug as it likely got factored into as an easy write-off!
Below, is the source for the meme information above:
