Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Corporate Baggage



Airlines will make around $3B more this year charging for bags. This is a revenue stream that did not exist before deregulation of the industry and another example of a ‘BWC’ fee. That stands for my ‘Because We Can’ invention that covers every raise or surcharge or rate increase the public is forced to endure while the raisers of those costs reap ever increasing profits for ever decreasing services merely, well because they can.  Who's going to stop them?
Gold Mine for Airlines
I don’t have the exact figure on how much the airlines pay baggage handlers whose numbers have dwindled due to corporate cost analyses but I am willing to bet they don’t share in the windfall.
The airlines will say that the increase in fuel costs caused their increase in fees but the numbers don’t completely add up and even if they did why hide the fare increase?
Telling a traveler that he has to pay extra to carry some luggage is like selling a car and then asking the buyer if he’d like a steering wheel with his purchase.
But airlines are not the only culprit in this corporate scheme to milk humans out of every remaining penny they have.
Anyone alive on Long Island is well aware of the inept Long Island Rail Road and it's ever increasing fares to complement their ever decreasing level of service or competence.
Note that the railroad considers its trains to be on time if they are only 5.9 minutes late!
Most riders would not 5.9 minutes late as on-time but rather a miracle!
But I digress.
A quick check into the business world reveals that most corporations have amassed unprecedented and record profits; cash cushions of nearly unimaginable amounts all while claiming that the current administration in DC has left them with a terrible feeling of uncertainty that is causing them to NOT hire new workers.
Does not knowing if you will triple your profits rather than merely doubling them next year constitute an uncertainty?
This absurd rationalization pervades every corner of every industry and threatens to eradicate the middle class completely.
But while I and many others write about the path we’re on nobody seems to have a solution.
One reason is that a major political party doesn't see the above AS a problem to be fixed.
The Republicans feel that the business world and the banks in particular should not be regulated at all, or if so we should allow them to self regulate.
Millions of potholes nationwide
Sounds like Mr. Romney’s call for illegal aliens to self-deport and equally as naive.
One possible solution to the job loss in America is right under our noses or rather under our feet.
Suddenly not an uncommon thing
Our nation’s infrastructure (a word former President Bush had trouble even saying) is crumbling. A no-brainer (The fix, not him although...) would be to start hiring workers nation-wide to save our streets, and highways, and bridges, and on and on.
Disaster on the clock!
The amount of architects and planners alone would take a chunk out of the unemployment numbers and therein is the problem.
Allowing anything to help the economy while the right wing controls the purse strings of the House and President Obama is still in office is anathema.
To paraphrase Senator McJowls, aka Mitch McConnell, an elected official sworn to help America in return for a huge undeserved salary; free health care; retirement funds for himself and family and exceptional perks far beyond his worth, “We simply cannot give this pretender a win.”
So there goes infrastructure repair!
And with it any hope of fixing America.
But I am not just talking about the roads anymore.  Now I speak of the entire experiment that is America.
One political party gets their marching orders only from the wealthiest of the country. They have now brazenly taken to fixing elections so even when the masses rise up against their terroristic-like tactics it will not be enough since their votes will not be counted.
And many on the right feel that is as it should be.  "The poor made their own beds and chose to be poor so their votes should not count!"
Never happen till Congress
finds out how to give
Exxon the profits
It is the ruling class that will decide when and where workers will be hired and what those workers should do.
There are many public works programs and ideas such as alternative energy as a way to ensure that the world as we know it will still exist in 50 years that are being blocked by the ruling class and their puppets in Congress.
They will not give in unless and until we bow to their superior intellect and allow them to reap any profits from any new industry.
We are now used to paying for luggage when we fly but until we divest ourselves of the evil and brain-dead, dead weight baggage in Congress we will never get anywhere!
I hope this is not just a
Pie in the Sky.

1 comment:

Reschzoo said...

From Facebook:

Zead Lloyd: "truth"

Thanks Zead, I try.

And also from FB:
Carrie Cullen: Some very good points, although preaching to the choir here concerning me. Now if we could just get the hijacked Republicans to turn off that tv channel they are so fond of watching...

And thanks to my FB friend Carrie. Obviously an intelligent lady.