American Airlines About to Go Bust? Fine With Me.
I’ve never been a fan of government bailouts, saving the
asses of investors or this warped sales-pitch we accept about too big to
fail.
My dad had a couple of sayings I’ve
never forgotten. One was that (in his view) behind every great fortune,
there’s a crime. The second, and perhaps more pertinent to this
conversation, was that if you owe the bank $10,000 they own you, but if you
owe them $10 million, you own the bank.
The lessons here are naked for all to see: great wealth is
not only immune from the laws of the land, but protected by its gods
of government from financial loss.
American Airlines is a crap carrier
that’s squeezed its passengers in seat space, baggage and other ‘special
charges,’ snotty service and tossed in arrogant public relations as an
afterthought.
Rather than investing their recent
and substantial profits from lower fuel costs in cash reserves or improving the
flying experience (a bar so low it could be stumbled across), it threw the cash
at stock buybacks, pumping the share price and enriching its investors.
Meanwhile, it went to the banks and drank deeply at their
well, accruing a mind-boggling (I much prefer the term to gobsmacking) $25
billion in debt.
How does management, an almost
laughable term under these circumstances, ever hope to pay that off, with fuel
at record lows and passengers already lashed to the oars, their backs bleeding?
The answer is, they don’t.
CEO Doug Parker, paid $12 million
annually for the pillage and raping of a perfectly good airline, expects the
government to bail him out. And they likely will. It’s all they really know
how to do anymore, having ravaged their waistlines as well as their morals
feasting at the hog-slop we have come to accept as the Congress of the
United States of America.
In this era of socialism for the rich and capitalism for the
rest of we poor and ignorant citizens, bailouts are the name of the game.
You big-shots go ahead and roll the
dice at this Monopoly Board we call American business and we
citizen-suckers will provide the Get Out of Jail Free cards. It’s okay.
If you fuck up, we’ll clean up
behind you, straighten your necktie, settle your nerves with a scotch and soda
and fund you for another run at the casinos of Wall Street. We just can’t bear
to see you unhappy.
We’re sorry you broke the banks again, but daddy was right, you
own them and they own us. 36 million of us have lost our jobs, we’re
about to lose our cars, our credit-cards and our homes, but we understand
why we need to save your sorry asses and go back to our place at the oars.
It’s the new American Way. It’s how
we Make America Great Again and we know it’s our job to suck it up and
join the homeless. We’re ready to crown Jeff Bezos as the world’s first
trillionaire and if that means Amazon paying shit wages and avoiding their
taxes, we’re up for it.
Washington is right. Unions and
fair wages and freedom from want and hunger are all socialist bargains with the
devil and we’re sorry we ever brought them up. It’s our social contract for
forty million of us not to have health insurance, joblessness to be at 20% and
60% of our nation to be one small disaster away from bankruptcy.
We’re sorry we complained.
Please forgive us.