Did you fly this Thanksgiving? Now trying to get home?
Some stories for you to read in the airport or in the endless line at the security checkpoint......before you board your full flight and sit next to the sweaty fat guy.....
1/ The title of this story says it all...."Aggrieved Flyers Ask - What Now?"
How airlines are now profitable by adding on fees and limiting flights to drive up fares....making it even more miserable to fly.....
The airlines have already taken away the free meals and the pillows. They have been charging for checked bags and extra legroom and raising fares whenever they can get away with it. They have been packing more people onto planes as they slashed the number of flights scheduled each day. And passengers now have fewer options if bad weather cancels or delays their flights.
Now, just in time for the Thanksgiving holiday — traditionally the busiest time of the year — the Transportation Security Administration has imposed tough new security measures.
And that may have been the last straw for many travelers.
2/ Which leads into this story, how for many people the TSA controversy about the scanners and the invasive pat downs fuels their distrust of Government....
In this way, the “Don’t touch my junk” fiasco raises, yet again, what has become the central theme of Mr. Obama’s presidency: America’s faltering confidence in the ability of government to make things work. From stimulus spending and the health care law to the federal response to oil in the Gulf of Mexico, Mr. Obama has continually stumbled — blindly, it seems — into some version of the same debate, which is about whether we can trust federal bureaucracies to expand their reach without harming citizens or industry.
3/ And this time they are right to distrust the government.
Remember Michael Chertoff the head of Homeland Security [2005 - 2009] in the Bush Administration? Well he turned lobbyist and one of his clients is the company that makes the body scanners......so the reason we have these damn things is he used his juice to "persuade" the DHS to order these machines.....when you hear this stuff it just confirms how corrupt the system is, how lobbyists and corporations are making billions of taxpayer dollars through the back door....
It's also clear what they are doing to the travelling public flying economy. They are using phony terror alerts to justify the use of enhanced screening, which isn't needed, to ........
A/ make you afraid so you will agree to anything.....
"They're trying to scare the pants off the American people that we need these things," Hanni told The Huffington Post. "When Chertoff goes on TV, he is basically promoting his clients and exploiting that fear to make money. Fear is a commodity and they're selling it. The more they can sell it, the more we buy into it. When American people are afraid, they will accept anything."
B/ make you submissive. Now it's full body scans and patting down your "junk", and if you don't comply and submit to this BS it could be an $11,000 fine......
Chertoff's clients have prospered in the last two years, largely through lucrative government contracts, and The Chertoff Group's assistance in navigating the complex federal procurement bureaucracy is in high demand. One example involves the company at the heart of the recent uproar over intrusive airport security procedures -- Rapiscan, which makes the so-called body scanners. Back in 2005, Chertoff was promoting the technology and Homeland Security placed the government's first order, buying five Rapiscan scanners.
After the arrest of the underwear bomber last Christmas, Chertoff hit the airwaves and wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post advocating the full-body scanning systems without disclosing that Rapiscan Systems was a client of his firm. The aborted terror plot prompted the Transportation Security Agency to order 300 machines from Rapiscan. Yet last spring, the Government Accountability Office reported that, "It remains unclear whether [the scanners] would have been able to detect the weapon" used in the aborted bombing attempt. And according to a recent report by DHS's Inspector General, the training of airport screeners is rushed and poorly supervised.
4/ So it's a revolving door - get appointed to a Government post, could be defence, agriculture, security, anything.....do a few years and get some friends embedded in the department, leave and set up as a lobbyist promising access to the department you just left and your friends there buy your clients goodies. Everyone gets rich. We get hosed.
You really have to admire the brilliance of these bastards - they announce a major change to Airport Security days before the busiest time for flights of the year, and follow up on TV with "please don't disrupt families travelling".....never mind these scanners shouldn't be used for pregnant women because of the radiation, or that the patdowns are invasive and humiliating if you refuse the scanner.
The Web-driven protest campaign encouraging holiday fliers to opt out of the body scanners and choose the more time-consuming and physical pat-downs passed largely unobserved in key airports around the country.
Lines moved fairly quickly at security checkpoints, passengers generally refrained from complaint, and the chaos and congestion anticipated by many in the news media and feared by many travelers did not materialize. As for the new security measures, travelers for the most part accepted them with resignation or indifference.
Just a note - there is a special security line at most airports for First Class passengers and Business Class for International, and the really rich of course have their private jets, so making air travel miserable doesn't really affect the elites.....
So - to summarise......It's all getting a little clearer - the more the oligarchy can control us the more they can exploit us. It's all about money. This saga with the airport scanners is one of many stories of how we are becoming more and more helpless, and the system more corrupt.
In Tuesday's DDD I wrote this......
But I have difficulty understanding why they would take the risk of destroying the middle class and taking away even the meagre safety net for the poor we have now....the risk is riots, civil unrest and hungry rednecks with lots of guns. Unless the plan is to recreate the Russia of 100 years ago, with a fabulously wealthy elite, an upper middle professional class and peasants and serfs at the bottom.....
I gave this some thought, and I think it's because the oligarchy is global that they are indifferent to whether America's middle class survives or not. Almost all major American corporations pay very little tax, either because they have carved our tax exemptions from our politicians or they have factories and subsidiaries in China etc. that they transfer profits to.
They stay in the US because they now control it totally.....all three branches of Government with a populace that is economically frightened, or stupid because of the hopeless school system and the dumbing down of America, with a corporate media that has been gutted so the vast majority of voters never hear anything even close to the truth.
If anything, an informed, aware and politically active middle class is a danger to this corruption, so the quicker they can get rid of it the better....
Also in Tuesday's DDD was this link, and it's one of the best summaries of the deep hole you and I are in I have ever seen.....in fact of the hundreds of items I have sent out over the years this is one of the most informative and lays it right out there......so here it is again.
I urge you to take 3 minutes, open it, read it [and maybe buy the book].....and then think about what you can do to protect yourself and your family financially.....good luck.
And of course we finish with a joke....or sort of a joke anyway......
Have a booth that you can step into that will not x-ray you, but will
detonate any explosive device you may have on your body. It would be a
win-win for everyone, and there would be none of this crap about racial
profiling and this method would eliminate a long and expensive trial.
Justice would be quick and swift.
This is so simple that it's brilliant. I can see it now. You're in the
airport terminal and you hear a muffled explosion.
Shortly thereafter an announcement comes over the PA system, "Attention standby passengers. We now have a seat available on flight number 4665 ....
Paging maintenance. Shop vac needed in booth number 4."
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