Posted on 07/08/2003 9:26:40 AM PDT by Willie Green
Edited on 04/13/2004 2:03:03 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
In "The 'F'-word" (Opinion and Commentary, June 22), Colin McNickle wrote that he got some flack when he used the word "fascistic" to describe Mayor Tom Murphy's "failed policy of command economics," e.g., "threatening eminent domain," etc., and that he used the "F"-word again to describe Gov. Ed Rendell's idea that the state be given a board seat at US Airways in return for a mega-million-dollar package of financial concessions.
(Excerpt) Read more at pittsburghlive.com ...
Funny, but Alabama asked for the same thing.
What is up with Alabama and Pennsylvania using state funds to bail out US Air?
There is a story in there somewhere, and the media isn't airing it.
No doubt there is a big-money Democratic Party donor at the root of this US Air bailout.
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The line between CorpRatism and Fascism is slim!
But too much regulation does become fascism, and we are seeing it here more and more.
"Right after then-Congressman Tom Daschle dumped his first wife for a younger, prettier one, the former Miss Kansas Linda Daschle went to work as chief lobbyist for the Air Transport Association, the airline industry’s main lobby; she then became the senior vice president of the American Association of Airport Executives; and these days hangs her hat at the pricey top Washington law/lobby shop Baker, Donelson, Bearman & Caldwell..."
Whew, if I only read the above quote, I'd have thought the authors were talking about the Clinton Administration (dripping sarcasm off).
This is scary reading, as one can easily see the steadily encroaching fascistic creep, we are all encountering in business.
Nice post. We're onto something here. The very real threat to the republic is the Party Politics Cabal. We need to catalogue the many incidences. To name a few:
(1) The Torricelli Cabal that saved the Torch from electoral humiliation and put Lautenberg into a Senate seat.
(2) The buying of Hitlery's Senate seat through presidential pardons and doing favors for campaign bucks.
(3) The Albany Cabal that is protecting the rump of a serial rapist.
(4) The buying and selling judgeships in Brooklyn with the fingerprints of the Democrat Party Cabal all over it.
(5) The Gray Davis Cabal .........
And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Before 9/11, Senator Daschle pushed through the sleazy deal in the backrooms of Capitol Hill that forced the FAA to buy defective baggage scanners from one of Linda’s other clients, L-3 International (from which Linda’s firm raked in $440,000 in the ’97–’01 period).
Under a provision Linda’s husband had slipped into the 2000 budget for the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), the FAA was required to buy one of L-3’s scanners for every one it purchased from the company’s competitors. The L-3 scanners were found to be substandard by DOT’s inspector general; FAA tests of the scanners showed high failure rates; and most have not yet been installed because of their defects (the one at the Dallas–Fort Worth airport — another of Linda’s clients — leaked radiation), which is a major reason DOT says it won’t be able to screen all luggage for explosives for years to come.
In one of those corporate-coddling moves for which the Clinton administration became infamous, President Bubba appointed Linda Daschle deputy administrator of the FAA, putting her in charge of regulating her once-and-future clients; and she wound up running the agency as acting administrator. This, of course, significantly boosted the Daschle family income by hyping the amount Linda could charge her clients when she left government service. She didn’t wait long to cash in. Example: While running the FAA, she awarded Loral Space Technologies (a major Democratic contributor that figured in the ’96 campaign-finance scandals) a nearly $1 billion contract from the federal government; after Linda passed through the revolving door to Baker, Donelson, Loral paid the lobby shop $740,000 in 2000-2001 for Linda’s services. When the FAA was pondering making mandatory a criminal-background check for all airport employees, Linda, who was then running the agency, vigorously opposed this common-sense move — echoing the position of the airline-industry lobby that had previously employed her.
A particularly odiferous episode involved charges that the senator and his wife had tried to sabotage safety inspections of an air-charter firm owned by Murl Bellew, a Daschle family friend who taught Tom how to fly. The scandal erupted and triggered an official investigation when a Bellew small plane chartered by the Indian Health Service crashed in North Dakota, killing the pilot and three doctors en route to an Indian-reservation clinic.
Forest Service inspectors had been arguing that Bellew’s firm should be banned from getting government contracts because the operation had been unsafe for years. Senator Daschle obligingly pushed legislation taking the Forest Service out of the business of inspecting small-plane carriers, and senior FAA bureaucrats said Linda had also tried to submarine a proposal to train Forest Service inspectors to conduct FAA investigations.
An FAA inspector reported a cover-up: Documents showing the Daschles’ assiduous efforts to minimize inspections of Bellew’s planes were shredded by FAA officials under Linda’s thumb. While an I.G. report failed to find Linda guilty of any lawbreaking, there’s an old saying in Washington: The scandal isn’t what’s illegal, the real scandal is what’s legal.
(6) Bush - Cheney/Halliburton
It's not unique to either half of the screw party system.
Regards
J.R.
Yes, but something **else** is going on under the radar here, Liz.What Willie posted contained an almost offhand reference to the state of Pennsylvania bailing out US Air.
Well, that's just how the press has been playing it down here; that the bailout of US Air by **Alabama** is just a normal, natural sidenote to daily business as usual.
But two states bailing out the same company for multiple-millions, with no story in either state mentioning that **other** states were also bailing out US Air??
And this isn't even the tiniest part of the **federal** bailout of the airlines. This is all local state money.
Makes ya wanna say hmmm...
"........maintained the skeleton of capitalism........government called the shots. Central planning replaced the "untidy" free market, and individual sovereignty was gutted.........rampant cronyism and corruption.........governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability........."
This is also why I've maintained that China has slipped from one Totalitarian ideology (Communism) to another: China is becoming a Fascist state.
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