Two pilots and two crews. Two aircraft in mortal danger. Fate is not always the hunter.
As almost everyone knows, Capt. Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger was the pilot of US Airways flight 1549, which last January suffered a bird strike just after leaving LaGuardia Airport that rendered both engines inoperable. Sullenberger performed the remarkable water landing on the Hudson, in the heart of New York, saving all 150 passengers.
Less remembered is a commuter flight from New York City that crashed near its destination of Buffalo the next month, killing 49 aboard and one on the ground. And herein lies yet another tragic, disturbing story about two Americas.
The serious journalism from the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and others has shown some of the factors that were perhaps involved in the Buffalo crash. The pilot, Capt. Marvin Renslow, had repeatedly failed flight tests and had never been properly trained to respond to the very emergency that prompted the plane's lethal stall. Although 47, Renslow had only joined the airline in 2005 after graduating from "a pilot training academy," according to the Journal. His co-pilot, 24-year-old Rebecca Shaw, talked on the cockpit voice recorder about her inexperience in dealing with the icy conditions that they were encountering. Both pilots seemed unaware until the last seconds of the mortal peril into which they were blundering.
The airline is Colgan Air Inc., a division of Pinnacle Airlines Corp., which flew as Continental Connector. As the Journal notes, the small company has "benefited as major U.S. airlines began subcontracting increasing numbers of smaller routes to low-cost commuter carriers." Colgan carries 2.5 million passengers a year. The pilots were low-paid and faced fatigue from the long commutes to their demanding flight schedules. Shaw was paid about $16,000 a year. (The Times had more on the grueling, McDonald's-jobs existence here).
By contrast, Sullenberger, 57, an Air Force Academy graduate, is a former fighter pilot, who had been flying commercial airliners for 29 years. He is a safety expert for US Airways. He is a union member. In addition, he was assisted by a veteran co-pilot and a seasoned team of flight attendants, also represented by a union. Although US Airways has cut his pay by 40 percent and terminated his pension in recent years, he and his crew represent the best of what was once the U.S. airline industry.
It reminds me of a wonderful American Airlines ad back in the 1990s, when flying was still pleasant, before greed and fear had turned it into a prison experience. The ad talked about how no American plane flew until the airline's tough and demanding union mechanics gave the go-ahead. It was accompanied by shots of the mechanics at work and their tough and demanding faces. Safety first.
All around the economy, companies are pushing out their most experienced — and "high cost" — employees. Outsourcing and offshoring continue even as millions lose their jobs. Americans seem happy to vilify unions, not the bosses with their Caligula-like compensation and incompetence. Wal-Mart is the model: low pay, fearful workforce, fire at will, few benefits, long hours.
It's frightening to see this extended to the airlines, from cheap, inexperienced pilots to the outsourcing of maintenance. And lacking high-speed rail and the fine passenger rail system we once enjoyed, most Americans have no choice but to fly. Sully's airline industry has been sacrificed as more and more wealth and real productivity is wrung out of the American economy for the benefit of a minority of investors, CEOs and financial players, whose ever bigger risks and swindles crashed the economy.
Sully's airline is among the "legacy" carriers, considered a liability. Just as our infrastructure, including outdated air traffic control
system, has become a liability, for fixing these things would require
something other than endless tax cuts. Just as all the infrastructure of the American middle class — good jobs, pensions, health care, retirement benefits — is fading. And where these remain, as with the automakers, they are considered liabilities.
Liabilities to whom, exactly? Who controls our government and our future? We the people? Or the moneyed elite, ruling by the majority's inattention, fearfulness and ignorance? Sen. Dick Durban famously said the banks "own" the Congress. Who else does?
Two pilots and two crews. Two aircraft in mortal danger. Two Americas. Fate is not always the hunter.
Well, it’s fairly obvious who owns this country. We just went through a sorry episode in the Senate where they rejected limits on credit-card interest rates. Only 33 senators favored it.
We’ve been getting daily doses of alternative reality since early Reagan. It tells people that “producers” create wealth and that unions and workers are “takers”. Getting workers to believe that they’re parasites is no mean feat but such are the advantages of talk radio, a Total Explanation, and repetition.
The architects of this economic meltdown have been subjected to only fitful review of their moral hazard. Meanwhile, homebuyers have been tea-bagged and scapegoated by people like Rick Santelli. It’s little wonder that people think unions brought down the Big Three. Absent a truly independent media, corporate propaganda will fill the void.
My next-door neigbhor lives paycheck to paycheck, making an okay wage as a utility company foreman. To listen to him you’d think he was possessed by an incubus of Ayn Rand. Still, he sees himself as a victim – of blacks and Mexicans.
It’s interesting to consider that social conservatives are losing the Culture War but the Laffer Wing of the right is still holding its own. Somehow, millions believe they’re “rugged individualists” while collecting Social Security or military pensions. How did so many end upside down in reality? Answer that and maybe we can find a way out of our Orwellian political discourse.
The co-pilot was paid so little that she was forced to live with her parents, commute across the country (from her home in Seattle to her airbase in Newark), and at one point, she held a second-job in a coffee shop to make ends meet.
She was also sleep deprived (due to the overnight commute and the absence of times and places provided for the pilots to rest) and had sent text messages complaining she didn’t feel well.
In addition, the company does not make cost of living adjustments to its salaries for pilots living in areas with higher than average cost of living expenses (like New York City), though it does make them for managers sitting behind desks.
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Co-Pilot-of-Doomed-Buffalo-Flight-Paid-16K-a-Year-.html
As for the company’s claim that the pilot had falsified his resume, that’s fairly common across industries: the real problem was the failure of the company to devote the cash and human resources to performing competent background checks on its applicants, and in failing to offer adequate pay and safe working conditions to attract qualified applicants to begin with. (One wonders whether, in fact, they knew exactly what they were getting and decided that, on the basis of statistical risk, it was worth it.)
Obviously, they were intent on cutting costs to the bone at every point except where executive compensation was concerned, in order to increase owner profits. And, from a bottom line standpoint, it may well be warranted, unless the company can be held accountable in criminal or civil court to a degree that (more than) offsets their cost savings to date and (potentially) in future (unless their exploitative practices are legally barred).
As for Soleri’s comments, they, too, are right on the mark. And note that the oligarchs can’t run things without the able assistance of a contented gatekeeper class, well compensated by “kidnapper candy”, who must manage the system on a day by day basis to keep things running smoothly and keep complaints and dissent at manageable levels.
As the New Economy results in continued income stagnation and erosion of benefits and job security for the middle class, the facade will slowly begin to crumble. Educated and intelligent individuals, relying on their own personal experiences and observations rather than the media’s explanations and representations, will increasingly be inclined to ask basic questions (including “Why aren’t basic questions being asked?”) and to doubt the premises being offered.
The best antidote to hypnosis is a cold bucket of water in the face. Just how many get that bucket, and how fast, depends on the greed of the oligarchs. Increasingly heavy-handed, crude, and monolithic propagandizing by the status quo, in the face of countless individual counter-examples, will eventually pass the tipping point of maximum returns and undermine itself. But it’s not an overnight process.
My take on social revolutions is that the sustainable ones have involved a gradually widening sharing of power and resources, in which minority groups of critical importance have developed, first, class consciousness, and then revolutionary consciousness, organized by leaders from within their own ranks.
This is true, for example, of the Magna Carta, in which the most important barons (those necessary to run the daily affairs of the king) forced the capitulation of the monarchy: Clause 61 established a committee of 25 barons “who could at any time meet and overrule the will of the King, through force by seizing his castles and possessions if needed. This was based on a medieval legal practice known as distraint, but it was the first time it had been applied to a monarch. In addition, the King was to take an oath of loyalty to the committee”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta
The American revolution took things a bit further still, when a larger group of land-owning citizens, whose efforts were necessary to manage the agricultural and mercantile affairs of the colony (then the main source of profit both for locals and their royalist masters in England), decided that they could take control of the means of production, thereby cutting out the parasitical overclass of absentee owners and landlords that had been taking the lion’s share of the proceeds.
Of course, the new system of government was biased in favor of the local landowners and merchants: as such, it was a transition, not from royalism to democracy, but from royalism to republicanism, in which states were initially free to exclude from the electoral franchise, not merely women, other races, slaves, and indentured servants, but freemen with insufficient land holdings.
This revolutionary government initially included an upper legislative body (the U.S. Senate) that was appointed by state legislatures rather than popularly elected, whose members were generally wealthy; and an electoral college to insure that the President would not be determined by popular vote. It was not until 1913 that the U.S. Senate became a body elected by popular vote; not until later in the same century were racial and gender barriers to the electoral franchise eliminated.
At each step, as formal political controls were relaxed, the need for financial control (over candidates’ electoral viability via campaign financing) and for information control (to influence the broadening electorate) became more and more important.
In each case of social revolution, it was the gatekeeper class which took control. As the economic system became larger and more complex, and the need for more gatekeepers increased (not just 25 barons, or a few hundred large landowners, but a much larger middle class of managers, technocrats, and specially educated and trained workers), the extension of political privilege was demanded and ceded.
Extrapolating this historical trend, the next sustainable social revolution should be led, not by the plebes, but by the middle class.
The oligarchs understand this very well. The elite media is geared toward gaining the support (or at least the absence of coherent and sustained opposition) of the middle class. The middle class is the lever by which a tiny but exceedingly influential fraction of the population (the owner class) implements and manages its policies among the masses.
Even to the extent that lowbrow elements (like talk-radio) are aimed at undermining, conditioning, and dividing the working class, it is also a form of pressure (in the form of a highly managed “public opinion” exploiting a vocal and vociferous minority of listeners) brought to bear against the middle class gatekeepers, lest they ever imagine that they can draw for support from a more popular wellspring than their masters: neither the English barons, nor the American Founding Fathers, nor contemporary middle-class progressives, can lead a social revolution without a credible, underlying threat of broader popular support.
Jon,
Sen. McCain says he wan’t back an immigration reform bill without a temporary worker program, presumably one that puts workers on a path to a green card and citizenship.
What do you think of this idea, and of “comprehensive immigration reform” generally? And do you have any thoughts about Agjobs?
What do you make of the argument that our immigration policy is importing a new underclass?