The High Flying Profiteers And Suckers Like Me!

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

. 

Yesterday I wrote a short post about the over-supply in the oil market and how the price has fallen and likely to remain at lower levels for a while – major global catastrophes excepted of course.

The strange thing is – a little bit of sarcasm there, it’s not really strange at all – is that the substantial fall in oil prices has not led to the consumer paying less for their air fares. Gas prices for your car have come down, but the cost of your ticket on the airlines hasn’t. In other words air travelers – suckers like me – are paying the same for a ticket as we were before the oil slump.

I smell a bit of profiteering going on. More than a bit actually. Not to mention collusion between the bigger airlines to keep their ticket prices inflated.

Of course the big airlines counter with arguments like they have to buy their fuel well in advance and therefore they bought at the older, higher price. That may well be true but they are also buying right now at the much lower price which should more than compensate and mean a drop in ticket prices.

Yes – but I mean, no – don’t be silly, the poor airlines have had to invest a lot of money to upgrade their services, fleets and infrastructures.

I would believe that more if I weren’t still traveling on the same clapped out airplanes with wonky seats squashed up against each other in the sardine like manner we have come to hate but endure. On top of that we, the customers, now have to do most of the work for the airline staff like checking ourselves in, printing our own luggage tags, and so forth.

It is remarkable that not only does a significant drop in fuel costs lead to the same or higher airfares, but the much heralded mergers that we are told will increase efficiency and decrease costs also mean the same or higher air fares too.

What these consolidations, or mergers, really do is to reduce competition – there are only four major US airlines American-US Airways, Delta, Southwest and United – and allow airlines to set prices with little fear of being undersold. And in any case, what most of the public do not know is that airlines don’t price their flights based on their cost, they price it based on demand and demand does not seem to be very price sensitive.

It’s one of those heads they win tales we lose scenarios. So don’t hold your breath for anything more than a token drop in airfares in the near future.

.

====================================

.

Iowa? IOWA? Oh, no, NOT IOWA!

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

.

The Sunday Sermon

.

I read a strange thing on the internet the other day.

Not much unusual there, you could do that every day.

This was a study that found that Americans’ attitudes about whether the US should intervene in Ukraine is correlated with their ability to find the country on the map.

And even more strangely  –  perhaps  –  it was the Americans who COULDN’T find the Ukraine on a map who were more in favor of intervention!

Apparently  –  and I kid you not  –  some of the respondents thought that the Ukraine was in Iowa.

Europe with Ukraine highlighted USA with Iowa highlighted

Unfortunately the guys that think out American foreign policy are these sorts of people. The kind who just don’t know what they are talking about. The kind of bureaucrats who rub Preparation H on their elbows  –  if you see what I mean!

Recent history proves this beyond all reasonable doubt.

To add insult to injury so to speak, these know nothings who advise the President on foreign matters try to spin every situation by telling everyone that, even though it has massive debt already and is effectively bankrupt, the US must still be the world’s policeman and uphold democracy.

Why?

What business is it of ours?

And if we are so hell bent on ensuring democracy exists throughout the world why aren’t we intervening in one of the biggest dictatorships of them all, Saudi Arabia which was also the home of most of the 9/11 terrorists and of course Bin Laden’s mother country? But no, lets attack Iraq and Afghanistan instead!

For more than half a century American foreign policy has been dictated by a mindless mantra that “if the Russians are for it, then we’re against it”.

The rights and wrongs of any particular situation are not analyzed or discussed. The facts are never examined. The truth is not even looked for.

That is why US foreign policy has been such a shambles throughout the world and will continue to be so until basically the people directing it wise up.

As for the Ukraine?

First of all it is NOT in Iowa.

Second, the US has spent (wasted) $5 billion and more during the past twenty years on “democratization” programs in Ukraine, including efforts from the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, the International Republican Institute and the National Endowment for Democracy.

Third, yes there were elements within the Ukraine who did not like being subservient to Russia, but what happened in the Ukraine was that a democratically elected president, Yanukovych, was overthrown in February in what amounted to a coup d’etat.

Students of history will remember what a funk America was in when the Russians started to “assist” Cuba way back in the early 1960s, yet they can’t understand why Russian leader Putin doesn’t want a fully nuclear armed Ukraine as anything other than an ally on his doorstep.

Why can they not see that the strategy of absorbing Ukraine into NATO and stationing missile defense systems there, is bound to piss the Russians off in exactly the same way as events in Cuba did for the Americans?

The fact is, of course, that they probably do see that. And they don’t care. The name of the game here is not upholding democracy at all. Such a laudable goal is only a smokescreen. The name of the game is to try to curtail Russia by having Ukrainian missiles pointed towards Moscow instead of Washington, or Washington’s allies.

It’s a game plan that Putin sees quite clearly. To think that he will sit back and not respond is just a fantasy. Let’s hope that the idiots in Washington don’t land us with yet another catastrophe.

With their past record I wouldn’t count on it though!

.

=====================================================

.