Funny
episode affecting the CVG Board:
Date:
12/6/2013 1:39:49 AM
To:
marksztanyo
Subject:
CVG board votes to hire investigator for butt-dialed call
To view the
contents on cincinnati.com, go to: http://news.cincinnati.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/201312042113/NEWS/312040145
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December 7th Anniversary of
Pearl Harbor
From: George Chaudoin
Date: 12/7/2013 8:18:21 AM
Subject: REFLECTIONS ON PEARL HARBOR
On The Green Side
George
Tour boats ferry people out to the USS
Arizona Memorial in Hawaii every thirty minutes.
We just missed a ferry and had to wait thirty
minutes.. I went into a small gift shop to kill time. In the gift
shop, I purchased a small book entitled, "Reflections on Pearl Harbor "
by Admiral Chester Nimitz.
Sunday, December 7th, 1941-- Admiral
Chester Nimitz was attending a concert in Washington D.C. He was
paged and told there was a phone call for him.
When he answered the phone, it was President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt on the phone. He told Admiral Nimitz that he
(Nimitz) would now be the Commander of the Pacific Fleet.
Admiral Nimitz flew to Hawaii to assume
command of the Pacific Fleet. He landed at Pearl Harbor on Christmas Eve,
1941. There was such a spirit of despair, dejection and defeat--you would
have thought the Japanese had already won the war.
On Christmas Day, 1941, Adm. Nimitz was given
a boat tour of the destruction wrought on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese..
Big sunken battleships and navy vessels
cluttered the waters every where you looked.
As the tour boat returned to dock, the young
helmsman of the boat asked, "Well Admiral, what do you think after seeing
all this destruction?"
Admiral Nimitz's reply shocked everyone
within the sound of his voice. Admiral Nimitz said, "The Japanese
made three of the biggest mistakes an attack force could ever make, or God was
taking care of America. Which do you think it was?"
Shocked and surprised, the young helmsman
asked, "What do mean by saying the Japanese made the three biggest
mistakes an attack force ever made?"
Nimitz explained:
Mistake number one:
the Japanese attacked on Sunday
morning. Nine out of every ten crewmen of those ships were ashore on
leave. If those same ships had been lured to sea and been sunk--we would
have lost 38,000 men instead of 3,800.
Mistake number two:
When the Japanese saw all those battleships
lined in a row, they got so carried away sinking those battleships, they never
once bombed our dry docks opposite those ships. If they had destroyed our
dry docks, we would have had to tow every one of those ships to America to be
repaired. As it is now, the ships are in shallow water and can be
raised. One tug can pull them over to the dry docks, and we can have them
repaired and at sea by the time we could have towed them to America. And
I already have crews ashore anxious to man those ships.
Mistake number three:
Every drop of fuel in the Pacific theater of
war is in top of the ground storage tanks five miles away over that hill.
One attack plane could have strafed those tanks and destroyed our fuel supply.
That's why I say the Japanese made three of
the biggest mistakes an attack force could make
or
God was taking care of America ..
I've never forgotten what I read in that
little book. It is still an inspiration as I reflect upon it.
In jest, I might suggest that because Admiral
Nimitz was a Texan, born and raised in Fredricksburg,Texas--he was a born
optimist.
But anyway you look at it--Admiral Nimitz was
able to see a silver lining in a situation and circumstance where everyone else
saw
only despair and defeatism.
President Roosevelt had chosen the right man
for the right job. We desperately needed a leader that could see silver
linings in the midst of the clouds of dejection, despair and defeat.
There is a reason that our national motto is,
IN GOD WE TRUST
Why have we forgotten that?
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From: Dave Norvell
Date: 12/7/2013 6:31:03 AM
Subject: Fw: Interesting Post on AA Merger
It's so much easier watching the circus than being in one of the
rings..
Congressman Ed Marky (D Ma) posted the following on the TWA pilots
message board 3/6/2013
Hi Everyone,
It's been quite some time since I've posted here, but I was
encouraged to do so by some TWA friends
who are active on this board. We are in regular contact and I had
recently sent them my views
regarding the merger. They suggested I post those thoughts here
for whatever they're worth.
I noticed on another thread that this had been posted and it got me
thinking that perhaps I
could help set the record straight:
"It is still American Airlines. "new" AA is the
surviving carrier. This was a classic all stock
merger with ownership consisting of 72% AA stock/debt holders and
28% US stock/debt holders.
USAirways did not buy anyone. Future employees will come to
work for American Airlines as in the
past. USAirways will join the
dozens of airlines who no longer exist."
With all due respect, in my opinion I don't think anything could
be further from the truth. The
fact is, the 72% AA ownership consists primarily of creditors as
well as a small union interest,
mostly pilots. The stockholders will see their holdings wiped out
as is usually the case in
bankruptcy situations.
The fact is that US Airways management will be in charge and AA
management will hold only a
minority of seats on the new board of directors. AA is NOT going to be
running this show -- US
Airways will be calling all of the shots. This is a self-inflicted
wound on the part of inept AA
management aided by deceptive and ill-conceived tactics on the part of
the duplicitous APA
leadership at the AA pilots union. Under the merger agreement, AA
CEO Tom Horton will remain
as a non-executive chairman (ie no real authority) for only
a year after which he goes away. US CEO Doug Parker is going to be the CEO
running the show into perpetuity.
The whole thing is a sad state of affairs. AA was never bankrupt
to begin with. You aren't
bankrupt when you file BK with $4.5 billion cash on hand. You're
not bankrupt when you need
debtor in possession financing and you're not bankrupt when
your multi-billion dollar 'largest
airplane order in history' remains untouched with no cancellations nor
even any deferred
deliveries. The whole thing is a scam. Former AA CEO Gerard Arpey
resigned largely because he was
opposed.
AA thought they could lower costs, especially by imposing
unilateral labor contracts on their
work groups, particularly their despicable pilots union. The union
got the last laugh, making a
side deal with US while being employed by AA -talk about
treason. The AA pilots union leaders
are truly idiots -- they think they're gonna get a smooth
seniority integration with US, but the
US pilots still operate under two separate contracts along with
fences, and have for the
last seven years since America West and US Airways merged. That's
seven years of pilot food
fights over there at US that are STILL going on because the two
pilot groups have been unable to
settle their differences.
That's where Doug Parker, CEO of US came from -tiny America West. He
pulled off a similar coup
when he was able to take over much larger US, again with the help
of US's BK. After getting the
AA pilots and F/A's on board, he then slickly got the AA creditors
on board too, convincing them of
the need for new management. So the whole AA BK thing backfired on AA
management. What AA isn't
saying is that tiny US, which is half their size, is taking over
AA and they were able to do it by
leveraging AA's self-imposed vulnerability as a result of the
bankruptcy process assisted by
duplicitous labor groups, the APA in particular. What we
don't know is whether Parker will turn
out to be another Frank Lorenzo. I have my suspicions and I think
the AA pilots will ultimately get screwed. Just repeat after me –you were
bankrupt, you're lucky to have a job", etc, and all the other stuff AA
unions told TWA workers when they stapled them to the bottom.
My thinking has been that the Department of Justice should approve
the merger despite the
clear anti-trust implications, bad as it is for competition and
the free market, simply because
they allowed the UA/CO and DL/NW mergers to go through and it would
be inequitable to then deny
AA/US the same opportunity. UA/CO and DL/NW both
leveraged phony bankruptcies in a similar fashion
To what we're seeing now. Neither merger should have passed DOJ
Anti-trust muster and been
approved, but in those cases both partners were in Chapter 11 BK
as part of their merger
strategy.
Now, I'm beginning to rethink this and I'm not so sure the
DOJ should allow this merger. To claim
that giant AA can't compete unless they merge, or that smaller US
can't survive when they are
consistently at the top in terms of profitability, is self evidence of
how ludicrous
their arguments are. Reducing the US airline industry to three giants
and some smaller,
domestic low-cost carriers is not a good thing. It boarders on
monopoly power. We've already been
there with four giant Wall Street banks that were
(and remain) too big to fail. In fact, they're
bigger than ever after the government compelled them to absorb
"smaller" failing banks such as
Washington Mutual and Wachovia. These giant banks brought our
economy to its knees and then to add
insult to injury, we taxpayers had to bail out the bastards!
In addition, what has AA done with previous mergers? Nothing but
utterly waste a ton of
money. Absolutely zip. What remains of TWA's people, facilities, hubs,
aircraft, and other
assets? Nothing. You may recall the sworn testimony before
Congress at that time by both
then AA CEO Don Carty and TWA CEO Bill Compton promising that the
AA/TWA deal would save 20,000
TWA jobs, TWA's STL hub and Kansas City maintenance base, among
other things. These would
all be lost without that deal they said, and government opposition
to the agreement quickly
evaporated.
AA had also previously bought AirCal and Reno Air and absolutely
nothing remains of either of
them as well, and that happened within a year or two of AA buying them.
So what he hell did they
buy them for to begin with? Ditto with US's purchase of PSA.
It was the result of AA abandoning the AirCal and Reno assets and US
doing likewise with PSA that opened the door really wide for Southwest to
waltz into California and the west and take over, which they've done in
spades thank you very much.
What we really need is new bankruptcy laws. Corporate interests
who are far from actually
bankrupt should not be allowed to use/abuse these laws in order to
lower costs by squeezing their
workers dry, not to mention screwing vendors, suppliers,
lenders and other providers and
creditors. Meantime those same bankruptcy laws, which
were revised about ten years ago by the
Republican controlled Congress and the Bush administration, were also
changed at that time to
really screw the little guys. While corporations file phony BK's
to unilaterally cut their costs,
individuals can no longer relieve themselves of unsustainable
debt. That's right, the laws were
rewritten to require individual filers to submit a repayment plan
to the courts.
These BK's certainly don't hurt the credit of big airlines, but
little guys not only have their
credit destroyed by the BK filing, they cannot even walk
away from their debts --and that
INCLUDES unsecured debts like credit cards. You know, all those
generous credit card providers
(see above mentioned too big to fail banks) who charge
exorbitant interests rates that in another
era would have been considered usury, justify
these ripoff rates by claiming that they're
taking more risk by providing unsecured credit. Now the BK
laws make the little guys who are
genuinely bankrupt pay back that unsecured credit. Individual BK now resembles
chapter 11,
not chapter 7. The whole damn thing is upside down. Good, decent
taxpaying citizens who
encounter hard times -- many as a result of the economic collapse
caused by the Wall St. banks --have their feet held to the fire while
those big financial institutions, major airlines, and all
kinds of other corporate interests, walk away Scot free, at the
expense of those same
taxpayers! How outrageous is that??
As far as the situation in which AA and its people now find
themselves, there's plenty of
arrogance and blame to go around including AA management, the APA,
the FA's union which has
been no angel in this either, and the general atmosphere of
both corporate and union greed and
mistrust. It distresses me greatly to see this, but the bottom line
is, American Airlines as we
know it is going away. The "new" American Airlines will
be what was formerly known as US
Airways.
OK, that's my missive for the day.
Take care,
Marky
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