What Would you Do if you were an Air Traffic Controller ?

“It is Better to Die on your Feet than to Live on Your Knees” – La Passionaria, A Valiant Communist who fought Franco and Hitler during the Spanish Civil War, 1936 to 1939

By David Gottfried

The massive Democratic Victories on Tuesday may wilt the withering stance and sadism of the Trump crowd, and may put a bit of swagger into the stride of progressives, but it’s a long way to home plate, and Trump will fight with all the ferocity of the Wicked Witch of the West. And when I dream of escaping to a tropical resort to celebrate our electoral triumph, I think of air traffic controllers.

I invite and urge my readers to tell us what they would do if they were an air traffic controller consigned to doing very important and taxing work without getting paid a dime.

Air Traffic Controllers save us from devastating, mammoth accidents. Without those technically proficient and talented employees, the silly rich bastards who fly back and forth from coast to coast at the drop of a hat would die in droves.

Now, we expect air traffic controllers to work without getting paid.

The republicans in the House and Senate are all on vacation, and they are getting paid, and they are all whores. After all, why do you think they have the best stock portfolios of any class of people in America. It’s because they trade on inside information all the time. More damningly, they are truly bribed all the time. One example out of hundreds: Why does Congress vote against limiting the amount of antibiotics fed to commercial livestock ? It’s because chemical companies pay Congressman to vote against limitations, and the excessive use of antibiotics increases resistance to antibiotics, and people feel that in the hospital when Grandma dies of pneumonia.

The Sachler family, which owns Perdue pharmaceuticals, and paid doctors to lie to the FDA by contending that Oxycontin was not very addictive, made billions of dollars by killing thousands of Americans. And the Sachler family didn’t have to pay a dime. How dare people condemn Mamdani for being a socialist. The capitalists are the people who should be berated, beaten and bludgeoned for condoning and perpetuating a system which rewards people who thrive by murdering people.

And while the Sachler family laughs its head off at conning and killing Americans, an Air Traffic controller can’t cough up the money to send his kid to an SAT prep course, his kid won’t get into Yale, and his spot at Yale will go to a kid from the Sachler family. (It’s no accident that for the past 10 years, the Ivy League has been morphing into what it was in the days of the Robber Baron; it is once again becoming a preserve for the very, very rich.)

And while more and more wealth is gobbled up by the confiscatory super-rich, environmental standards to keep carcinogens off the market are shredded, AI is being used to put people out of work and to sully and mar our lives with more and more fraud and deceit, people at the helm of capitalism deign not to build but to make money through speculation, short selling, crypto currency and are, at bottom crypto crooks, and men in the top stanine (Ninth) of wealth, on average, live 14 years longer than men in the bottom stanine of wealth.

Why should an air traffic controller work for free to safely land a plane that carries Elon Musk.

Life has been getting worse and worse for Air Traffic Controllers for a long time.

Do you remember Captain Sullenberger??

Several years ago, an airplane almost fell out of the sky over New York City. However, no one was killed because the pilot, captain Sullenberger, skillfully managed to gently touch down on the Hudson River.

Sullenberger was hailed and lauded by the media. But he was appreciated the way a sixth grader is appreciated for acing a math test. We give the sixth grader a stupid ribbon, but we don’t listen to what she has to say about education.

Captain Sullenberger was celebrated, but we made him behave like a dumb, unthinking mute. Almost none of the media outlets let him air his important criticisms of the airline industry.

Very simply, after the Air Traffic Comptroller’s strike of 1981, employees, in the airline industry, labored under the yoke of a capitalism more brutish and mendacious thanks to the ascendance of Ronald Reagan to the throne. First air Traffic Controllers, and then highly skilled people throughout aviation, were spat upon and suffered smaller wage increases, harsher working conditions and government policies that were never in any mood to heed the needs of highly skilled aviation employees.

And now the Government has decreed that they shall work without getting paid.

Isn’t it time that the Air Traffic Comptrollers gave our fascist government a taste of its own medicine.

The fascist fucks of the Trumpian Junta gleefully terrorize us:

a) They separate migrant children from their parents.

b) Alleging that they want to stop the influx of drugs, they bomb maritime vehicles. This way Trump is able to wage a war against Venezuela without Congressional approval, oversight, or involvement

c) They arrest people, who have done nothing wrong, and then deposit them in the prisons of tyrannical regimes

d) It stops funding SNAP, aka food stamps, even though Congress set aside SNAP money in the event of a government shut down.

e) It suggests that everyone who lives in Gaza should be ordered out of the territory and that the entire region should be transformed into a resort for the rich and famous.

f) It suggests annexing Canada, Mexico, Greenland and Iceland

g) It renames the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America

h) It relates to Israel the way Ancient Rome related to Herod’s ancient Israel, polluting the hearts of both America and Israel. And rule by Rome led to our banishment from the Promised land for 1900 years.
i) It cuts funding for medical research

j)It cuts funding for AIDS treatment

k) it disbands offices charged with monitoring deadly diseases, such as Ebola, reducing our ability to defend ourselves from the next plague of hellish microbes.

l) It frees the January 6 rioters

Isn’t it high time that we committed acts of terror, peaceful terror if you will.

Just as big business is using its digital prowess to put people out of work, we should use our digital prowess to commit relatively peaceful acts of terror against big business and the government.

After 9/11, we heard a lot of talk about “asymmetrical warfare,” or war in which a relatively small actor could challenge a much bigger and stronger foe by fighting battles on the smaller actor’s term. Obviously, that’s what Osama Bin Ladin did. I would not want to be a part of anything so bloodthirsty as the 9/11 monstrosity, but I would welcome terroristic plots that were, instead of violent, simply awe inspiring and eerie enough to induce a buckling of the knees and swift submission by the other side.

I propose:

Air traffic controllers, or sympathetic tech savvy people with drones, fly drones into Trump’s Ballroom, or the entire east wing of the white house, to dramatize our contempt for Trump’s egomaniacal architectural dreams and to demonstrate that the people have the power to destroy Trump. If this is done in the middle of the night, the loss of life should be minimal. If many drones struck at the same time, they might overwhelm and defeat the Whitehouse’s anti-aircraft assets.

Perhaps we can do something with driverless cars. One could program 1000 cars to collide into one another thereby creating a collision so epic as to make a quotidian auto accident quite cosmic. Of course, auto accidents tend to be violent. Ah, but the allure of the bloody, and the irksome and infuriating nature of Donald Trump, are so great that they can make commitments to nonviolence evanescent.

In any event, we may feast upon chilling political theatre if brilliant saboteurs used the State’s technocratic skill and computing prowess against the State to create spates of accidents, explosions and mayhem galore.