Boeing’s steady decline as a world-class manufacturing enterprise (let alone as a Wash. state employer) continues with the announcement that the new 7E7 jet’s wing assemblies will be subcontracted to Japanese companies.

Michael Chrichton’s otherwise pathetic mid-’90s thriller novel Airframe, set at a fictionalized Lockheed, has a big subplot predicting this, and denouncing the export of the US aerospace biz’s most important proprietary technology.

I’d denounce it too, if I thought denouncing it’d accomplish anything. Today’s Boeing, though, seems to care about nothing but its own short-term stock price.