Category Archives: Aviation Safety

It appears there are a lot of people who are outraged at Congressman John Mica, who represents Florida’s 7th Congressional District and who chairs the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure.

You remember Congressman Mica, don’t you?  We’ve talked about him before, and how he single-handedly caused the furlough of nearly 4,000 FAA employees and subsequently cost somewhere between 70,000 (low estimate) to 85,000 (high estimate) construction workers around the nation their livelihoods for nearly two full weeks.  Those are people who depended on those jobs to support families, pay mortgages, make payments on their cars, and pay tuition costs for their college-bound children this upcoming semester.

And then Congressman Mica went on vacation, fully intending to leave all these people out of work for five full weeks and probably much longer.  Nice guy.

The reason for the shutdown has been covered extensively, but in a nutshell it was over Congressman Mica’s objection to the very democratic principles under which he runs for reelection every two years.  Congressman Mica’s masters . . . excuse me . . . large campaign contributor Delta Air Lines . . . want to continue counting as “no votes” the ballots of those who are eligible but who choose not to participate in a union election.

Using that criteria, Congressman Mica himself would not have won reelection in his district even though he garnered 69% of the vote.

That’s because according to Congressman Mica, a ballot not cast should count as a “no” vote.

There were about 580,000 eligible voters in Congressman Mica’s district last election.  A little over 268,000—or just 46% of those eligible to vote—bothered to cast a ballot.  Of those 268,000 voters, Congressman Mica’s opponent took in 83,000 votes.  This means (according to the rules Congressman Mica wants reinstated when it comes to union elections) that Congressman Mica only received 32% of the eligible vote last election, and by his standards should not even be in office today because 68% of the eligible voters in his district “voted” against him.

But Congressman Mica doesn’t run under those rules, and wouldn’t willingly do so even if such a change were proposed.

There’s a word for that.

Congressman Mica took a lot of flack for this shutdown, even from within his own party, when he threw out of work somewhere between 75,000 and 90,000 wage earners.  He was shouted down from every corner of the country, from both sides of the aisle, and from the Op-Ed pages of several newspapers.  So, how did Congressman Mica react to all this directed anger?

He changed his story.  And now he’s attempting to rewrite history to repair his self-wounded image and reputation.  Here’s what’s happening in this latest outrage and direct insult to your intelligence:

Congressman Mica attempted to obfuscate his actions on behalf of Delta Air Lines by inserting into an FAA funding extension bill language that would have ended Essential Air Service (EAS) to rural communities, specifically targeting communities in states represented by his Democratic committee counterparts in the Senate.  How do we know that this targeted attack on EAS services was meant to pressure Senators on the union issue?

Because Congressman Mica said so himself.  Very, very publicly.  At a conference of airport executives, Congressman Mica stated before those assembled in the room:

“It’s (EAS funding) just a tool to try to motivate some action to get this (union elections issue) resolved.”

Congressman Mica then went on to say that if the union election issue were “resolved” (meaning resolved to his satisfaction and to hell with what anyone else thinks on the matter),  then:

“. . . the rest (meaning the FAA funding extension) can fall into place within twenty minutes.”

Those are Congressman Mica’s words before this whole thing blew up in his face and cost tens of thousands of workers their paychecks.  So, what is he saying about all this now?

All of a sudden it’s no longer about union elections at all, according to Congressman Mica who is now conveniently ignoring his earlier statements to the contrary—statements, I might add, that were made in front of a room full of witnesses and widely reported in the media.  Now, Congressman Mica is proclaiming to all who will listen that this whole shutdown was to save $16.5 million in EAS subsidies going to a select few airports . . . airports that just happened to be mostly concentrated in the aforementioned states represented by certain Democratic Senators who opposed Congressman Mica’s peculiar and , quite frankly, indefensible stand on democratic principles.

I’m not calling Congressman Mica a liar, but even the math makes a mockery of this latest claim.

For Congressman Mica to be believed now, one would have to ignore the fact that in order to “save” $16.5 million dollars, he was willing to forgo somewhere in the neighborhood of $350 million dollars in lost aviation tax revenue during the shutdown, the lost income taxes of the workers he heartlessly threw out onto the streets across America, and the amounts these workers then had to claim in unemployment benefits and for public assistance.

You would also have to believe that he was willing to cost the FAA an additional $525 million in lost aviation tax revenue had his shutdown gone for the full five weeks he was perfectly willing to endure and indeed intended by timing this “crisis” to coincide with the August Congressional Recess.

In other words, Congressman Mica wants you to now believe that he thought it a good idea to cost local, state, and federal governments upwards of a one billion dollars or more in economic damage and lost tax revenues to save the federal government $16.5 million in EAS subsidies.

Or, put another way, enough money to fund those subsidies for the next 60+ years.

“But wait—There’s more!” as Ron Popeil would say.

Now, Congressman Mica has gone on the attack against anyone who would remind people of his real and very publicly stated reasons for throwing tens of thousands of workers out of work and personally costing the FAA over a third of a billion dollars in lost revenue badly needed to maintain and upgrade this nation’s vital aviation infrastructure.

The Association of Flight Attendants is a prime example.  Members of the AFA recently picketed in Jacksonville, Orlando, St. Augustine, and at sites in Texas to bring attention to the totally unnecessary pain and suffering Congressman Mica caused because of his my-way-or-the-highway approach to legislation and his attempted extortion of sitting members of the U.S. Senate to acquiesce to his demands on behalf of campaign contributor Delta Air Lines.

Here’s what C0ngressman Mica had to say about the assembled demonstrators:

“They’re (AFA) being used as dupes and tools in a larger national debate.  And actually I feel kind of pity for them because of the way they’re being abused by some of the leadership in Washington.”

No “pity” for the tens of thousands of construction workers Congressman Mica sidelined.  No reference to how they were “abused” by him.  As for people being “duped,” that’s what Congressman Mica is attempting to do now that he’s been exposed for the callous, uncaring, abusive bully that he is.

And then there’s that “tool” word again.  Notice that?  Congressman Mica apparently likes that word very much.  Essential Air Service was merely a “tool” to be used to further his agenda on behalf of Delta Air Lines, and now those who would remind people of this are themselves “tools” (and “dupes”) being used (and “abused”) by those who oppose him.  Starting to get the big picture on this schoolyard bully, now?

Have you contacted your congressional representative yet?  Have you asked your representative why this man is still in charge of a committee as important to this nation as this?  If not, why not?  It only takes a minute to e-mail your representative and move to get Congressman Mica out of a position in which he can continue to do hundreds of millions of dollars worth of damage—locally, at the state level, and even federally.

Please act before it’s too late.  This latest extension runs out on September 16, and Congressman Mica has already demonstrated that he doesn’t care who or even how many he hurts when it comes to getting what he and Delta Air Lines want.  America can no longer afford Congressman John Mica as Chairman of the House Committee Transportation and Infrastructure.  The price is just too great.

It’s time to get serious for a brief moment.  We’ve had a lot of fun the past few weeks with blog entries dealing with humor, photography tips, and travel, but today I feel the need to use this forum as a public service of sorts.  Please bear with me, and we’ll get back to the fun stuff on Friday.  That’s a promise.  But, right now, I’m trying to save some people from serious, potentially devastating financial hardship.

Congressman John Mica (Florida Congressional District 7) personally and directly caused last Friday night the furlough of 4,000 government employees.  And along with those 4,000 employees went construction jobs for an estimated 85,000+ contractors.  All this occurred because, it appears, that Congressman Mica doesn’t believe in democracy.

Yes, you read that correctly.  One man—nearly 90,000 workers.  And all because that one man apparently doesn’t believe in the very democratic principles upon which he relies when he runs for reelection every two years.

Now, here’s the story:  The FAA is supposed to be funded in five-year increments through a piece of legislation called “Reauthorization.”  FAA Reauthorization allows the FAA to collect taxes and then use the revenue from those taxes to fund vitally important airport improvement projects that help keep this country’s aviation infrastructure functional.  But the last FAA Reauthorization bill expired several years ago, and because of petty bickering and, quite frankly, total incompetence from the Chairman of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, the FAA has been limping along under a series of twenty funding “extensions.”  Last Friday Congress adjourned without passing a twenty-first extension and, at the stroke of midnight Washington, D.C. time, extension number twenty lapsed.

And here’s why:  In most elections in this country—and even the rest of the world for that matter—the side receiving the most votes wins.  Up until very recently, this was not the case if you were an employee of either an airline or a railroad and you wanted to unionize.  In that case, the deck was stacked in management’s favor because anyone who didn’t vote on the question of unionization was automatically classified as a “no” vote.

See the inherent unfairness of this situation?  If we counted as a “no” the vote of everyone in this country who chose not to participate in an election, probably no current member of Congress would have been elected . . . including Congressman John Mica.  But Congressman Mica objects to this new rule that only counts actual ballots, so he attempted to thwart the rights of workers by demanding that a vote not cast once again be counted as a “no” vote in a union election.  He inserted that language into the twenty-first FAA extension knowing full well that it would never pass the Senate.

And then there was also a secondary issue of subsidized services to airports serving smaller communities.  It’s called Essential Air Service (EAS), and it’s something Congressional members from both parties have for decades deemed worthy of financing for those who do not live close to a major airport.  We subsidize postal service to rural areas.  We have subsidies for rural telephone/broadband and rural electrical service.  Rural areas in this country also benefit from federally-funded highways and interstates.  But if Chairman Mica has his way, we’ll start down the road of converting our rural areas into third-world enclaves left to fend for themselves with limited resources.

So, starting this past Saturday morning at one minute after midnight, 4,000 dedicated, hard-working FAA employees were furloughed.  Additionally, federally funded airport construction projects around the country ceased, resulting in the loss of yet another 85,000 construction jobs on top of those 4,000 federal positions.

But don’t go spending that money you think you just saved on airline taxes.  Chances are you won’t see it.  With three exceptions (kudos to Alaska Airlines, Spirit Airlines, and Virgin America for doing the right thing here), most airlines have raised their ticket prices by . . . wait for it . . . the exact same amount of those now defunct taxes.  Funny how that works.  The airlines are getting a huge boost in revenue courtesy of a man to whom they collectively gave $620,000 in campaign contributions in 2010.

Yeah, you read that right as well.  Tens of millions of extra revenue going to the airlines on a daily basis and 90,000 working-class Americans sidelined by a man who took in $620,000 from the former and couldn’t care less about the latter.

But Chairman Mica still collects his paycheck.  Remember that.  Remember that on November 6, 2012.  Remember that especially if you live in Florida’s 7th Congressional District.  Remind Chairman Mica how things work in a democracy, because he’s apparently either forgotten or flat-out doesn’t care.

If you find this as outrageous is do I, please contact your Congressional Representative and your two Senators and plead with them to put an end to this nonsense.  While you’re at it, ask your Congressional Representative why someone as incompetent and, yes, even dangerous as John Mica is in charge of such a vital House Committee.

For additional perspectives on this, check out these blogs:  Get the Flick (Another Mess from Mica) and MartinLady’s View Through the Looking Glass (Further Down the Rabbit Hole).