Normalizing abuse, violence and tyranny in America to protect corporate greed is now our way of life. Left and Right unite! Let’s destroy United Airlines and send a message to our overlords: enough!
We are becoming a class-ridden society. Citizens face violence and the threat of the law for exercising their ordinary rights–such as wanting to actually fly when they pay for a ticket.
Let’s all join together and for once hit back.
Put it this way: Here is something that members of Black Lives Matter and Fox News fans can unite on. It would be fun to all be on the same side for a change and show the world the basic decency that all ordinary Americans believe in from the Right to the Left and all points in-between.
United Airlines is a thug organization that assaults passengers in the name of keeping order when they kick people off flights. Why should we put up with this crap?
Here’s a golden opportunity to “adjust” the expectations of giant corporations that think they can do anything to us consumers.
We can send a message. It’s been done before.
Consider the epic six-week boycott of Massachusetts-based Market Basket supermarket chain in 2014 after beloved CEO Arthur T. Demoulas was deposed by his cousin, the company’s majority shareholder. Market Basket’s 25,000 employees and millions of supportive customers (including my family and me) boycotted of all 71-stores, turning a billion-dollar corporation on its head. They gave in and re-hired Arthur T. The issue was that he was spending “too much” money on taking care of all his workers. He also was “too generous” to consumers pricing quality goods far below what he could have. The corporate types were greedy and wanted him gone. The people hit back… and we won!
The horrifying video of a doctor being forcibly removed from a coach class seat on one of United’s planes went viral. It could have been inter-cut with passengers assaulted in airports for being “unruly” when all they are doing is asking questions. The corporate mentality could be summed up as– America you’re our bitch!
Trump voters and Liberals I ask you: Since when is it normal to allow the massive overreach of corporate authority backed up with the tools of law enforcement to handle mere business matters? Let’s learn to all get along as we join together … and demolish United.
The man was randomly selected to be bumped. He could have been a Trump voter or liberal Democrat, gay, black, white a member of the KKK or a vegan lefty… In other words he was all of us!
The airline needed to transport four employees on a sold out flight. And the man refused the way any right thinking Republican or Democrat would have– so the airline officials called law enforcement, and security dragged him, bloodied from the plane.
This “incident” is part of a pattern.
In a competitive market, the falling fuel prices of the last few years should have led to cheaper tickets. But that hasn’t happened. Instead, as the number of big airlines has been cut in from nine to four. We customers haven’t seen any benefit from cheap oil, and ticket prices have risen… now backed by the threat of violence.
Rather than functioning as a tool to advance United Airlines’ “sadistic commitment to cost control,” as the Financial Times’ Matt Klein described it, the government should actually enforce antitrust laws.
Instead, after rejecting American Airlines’ proposed merger with US Airways, the government approved the deal just three months later, after intense lobbying and revolving-door hiring.
United Airlines mugging a passenger so its own employees could fly is typical of the way we Americans now accept class differences.
Authorities are reacting to common disputes in increasingly off the wall aggressive ways. And the daily drip, drip, drip of news makes this seem “normal.” We have so normalized the disrespect and mistreatment of ordinary people by corporations and the super-rich that often it’s the victim who is attacked and the establishment defended.
Talk about blaming a rape victim for wearing a short skirt! A Kentucky newspaper published an article detailing the “troubled past” of David Dao, the doctor yanked off a Louisville-bound United Airlines flight… like that had anything to do with it. The airline at first said it was his fault for not complying!
This too is part of a bigger story: In America the law now enforces the elite’s bottom line with physical violence. A non-threatening older man is bloodied as a result.
Let’s make this into a consumer “Stonewall”/Market Basket “this-changes-everything” moment…
Be you of the right or left a gay-basher or a civil rights champion, a Trump-supporter or Bernie-fan, a Hillary-voter or Hillary-hater… it’s hard for any of us these days to imagine police handcuffing, harassing, and arresting gay people for just gathering—but that’s what happened, routinely, before Stonewall’s spontaneous uprising of gay men and lesbians in New York’s Greenwich Village neighborhood galvanized the gay-rights movement.
What began that hot summer night in New York City with a few hundred people ended up galvanizing a global community. After Stonewall, “coming out” became an act of political conscience, following the feminist mantra of “the personal is political.” In other words it was a this-changes-everything moment.
Let’s send a Stonewall-type Market Basket-Protests-type message: We of the Left and the Right alike are mad as hell and won’t take it anymore!
Will closing United fix everything? No. But bankrupting United is a start in changing the corporate view of the rest of us as their silent victim suckers. It’s easy: vow before whatever god you believe or none, to never, ever, ever book a flight on United again.
Here’s the hatch-tag we all can use: NeverFlyUnited. And next Thanksgiving, instead of all arguing with that Trump fan uncle or screaming at the family Liberal vegan aunt… we can all agree: we came together do do something for once and it worked!
If We The People of the Left and Right can be united on this (pun intended) and take down this giant thug bully… we might even start to believe we can come together and actually govern ourselves again as one people.
