[legitster]

Well, the MD acquisition didn't happen in a vacuum. At the time Airbus was becoming a government-backed behemoth, and the US government was allocating all of their political capital and military procurement at MD. So the whole point of acquiring MD was to get more favorable government treatment.

What followed was not necessarily even about cost-cutting - they wanted to spread out the production of their aircraft from centralized locations (easy to QC) to cover as many different congressional districts and reap the maximum amount of political capital.

[SleepilyLimping]

Isn't it wondrous what lobbying can do?

[legitster]

If you have a weed problem, I'm not sure it's worthwhile to blame the weeds. There's a higher level problem here with how government procurement and tax structures works, and just with how incentives are aligned this kind of stuff is bound to happen regardless of whether lobbying is explicitly allowed or not.

[nickff]

In this instance, it seems like the government was actually pressuring the government to do its bidding, rather than the other way around. There have been many articles written about the ways the Clinton administration pressured Boeing to purchase McDonnell Douglas (which was suffering from the cancellation of many military programs).