[WTE_Galway]

Originally Posted by AndyJWest

Let's get this straight. Northrop Grumman have made it clear that 1C will have to pay a ridiculous sum of money for the privilege of illustrating the role of Grumman in WWII, and people here are suggesting that we should pay them? Yeah. Like there is nothing better we could do with the money...

Actually, with the sort of money they are demanding, we could probably fund an advertising campaign to point out how they are exploiting a past history funded via taxation to rake in profit, and how they'd rather hang on to their 'intellectual rights' than allow anyone to learn about the realities of WWII, even if only indirectly. In any case, there are plenty of things that IL-2 needs that don't involve paying off sharks - if their shareholders think that writing NG out of history is a sensible policy, let them...

+1

Just in case people have forgotten what sort of sleazy disgusting corporate lowlives they are proposing sending money to ...

http://www.wttlonline.com/ht/a/GetDo...ction/id/27283

Northrop Grumman Corporation, the giant defense contractor, has reach a consent decree with State’s Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC) under which it will pay $10 million in fines and $5 million for remedial actions to resolve charges that it committed 110 violations of defense trade controls, including the export to Russia of source code for components in Air Force One, the president’s plane.

http://www.crocodyl.org/wiki/northrop_grumman

The first major scandals in Northrop Grumman’s history came in the early 1970s, when the company, then known as Northrop Corp., was embroiled in controversies over illegal campaign contributions to Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign by company chairman Thomas Jones as well as some $30 million in bribes paid to foreign governments to win orders for fighter jets. A few years later, there were revelations that the company regularly entertained Pentagon officials and members of Congress at a hunting lodge on the eastern shore of Maryland. During the 1980s, Northrop was the subject of numerous investigations relating to alleged mismanagement during its work on the MX Missile and the B-2 Stealth bomber.

In 1989, Northrop was indicted on criminal charges of falsifying test results on cruise missiles for the Air Force and Harrier jets for the Marine Corps. Just as the trial in the case was about to begin in 1990, the company agreed to plead guilty to 34 fraud charges and pay a fine of $17 million. Under the plea agreement, federal prosecutors agreed to end the investigations relating to the MX and the B-2. However, the company agreed in 1992 to pay $4.2 million to settle a whistleblower lawsuit—brought without the involvement of the Justice Department—alleging that the company padded its invoices on MX missile guidance system work.

Grumman Corp., acquired by Northrop in 1994, brought with it a history of controversies on issues such as cost overruns in the production of F-14 Tomcat fighters for the Navy, production of defective municipal buses by its Flxible division (sold in 1983) and a bribery scandal involving Iran and Japan.

In 2000 Northrop Grumman paid $1.4 million to settle a whistleblower case alleging that the company overcharged the Air Force for B-2 bomber instruction and repair manuals. In a case inherited through the acquisition of TRW, Northrop Grumman agreed in 2003 to pay $111 million to settle claims that TRW overcharged the Pentagon for work on several space electronics programs in the early 1990s. Also in 2003, Northrop Grumman agreed to pay a total of $80 million to settle two False Claims Act cases, one involving work by Newport News Shipbuilding before Northrop acquired it in 2001 and the other involving the delivery of allegedly defective aerial target drones.

In 2004, Northrop settled for $1.8 million the remaining individual whistleblower case from the late 1980s involving cruise missiles. The following year it paid $62 million to settle the remaining claims relating to overcharging on the B-2 bomber program.

The false claims allegations continue. In March 2008 a whistleblower brought a lawsuit charging that Northrop Grumman’s Melbourne division with hundreds of millions of dollars of overcharges relating to the Joint STARS radar aircraft program.

Soon after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the company’s Vinnell Corp. subsidiary (acquired as part of the purchase of TRW in 2002) was awarded a $48 million contract “to train the nucleus of a new Iraqi army.” It botched the job so badly that the Jordanian Army had to be brought in to take over.

In 2007 it was reported that guest workers from India employed by Signal International, a Northrop Grumman subcontractor in Pascagoula, were being held against their will.