Monetary Barbarism at United Airlines

by OSCAR ZAMBRANO

United Airlines reminds us we’re increasingly becoming a nation of brutes and boors, people who are sadistic to the ones below them and servile to their superiors: The worst of all possible combinations.

Coarse, stupid, violent and loud, the mythical Ugly American is on the rise, even though he was never only mythical.

At this rate we will see the erosion of social media and our collective voice.

Goon-like and militant, those jingoistic jack booted bastards abusing the flying public take their orders from high-end executives in the corporate boardrooms of America.

Corporate boardrooms are the modern temples of lucre, where high-wire casino capitalism artists put at risk other people’s money and not their own.

This monetary barbarism is a social cancer. Along with their bought-and-paid-for politicians, these high-finance demolition experts are wrecking both planet and society in their arrogance and entitlement. Thinking they know better than the rest, they’re blind to their own self-destruction.

But they too shall pass, I say, even though their day of comeuppance couldn’t come too soon. And yet when it does, it will be temporary because one person’s ruin is another person’s opportunity, and too few remember the past well enough to effectively learn anything from it.

But coming back to the airlines. Have you noticed we no longer can assume the mandatory emergency safety position of head down near the knees the FAA used to command?  Try that now, you’ll break your teeth on the backrest of the seat in front of you, a seat so claustrophobically close it’s also crushing your knees! Airlines have paid legislators to make legal what is clearly illegal: packing people like sardines with no room for effective movement of any kind.

In our market-fundamentalist American society everything is now getting reduced to a commodity: Peanut butter and people, pork bellies and iron ore, fish and airline tickets.  In the smoothie of Money we’re all poured into the bloody blender of profit, where everything and everyone comes out the other end neatly homogenized as units of yield, which are then easily quantified in the metrics of pure gain.

Follow the money and you’ll get to see what is really happening.

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