The Top 40

The trick is to hire people at wages and benefits significantlly higher than what the job is actually worth. After a couple of years the hires will have spent up to the new lifestyle and be unable or unwilling to leave it. Then they will do whatever they are told and complain they that are not paid enough to do it, in an industry that should never have existed in the first place. This is in the nature of government.

Why are almost all airport workers and airport taxi drivers from Somalia?

Current airports are nothing higher than the "Bus Station" they have replaced.

The TSA empoyees are typically people who like to wear uniforms and exert power over others. You know, like soldiers and cops. Only none of the TSA wonks could get those jobs. It's a perfect fit - unfotunately for those of us who must fly.

This was one of Bush's true mistakes/failures. At the time, the debate was airport security provided by the airport operator, or the Federals. Bush said, I don't care, you guys decide, and hurry up. The Repubs pushed for decentralized, the Dems for a federal service (another union power base, of course).

If it had been decentralized, then the role of the Feds would have been settings standards, continuous testing, and compliance auditing. No airport would have dared to allow their standards to slip, because it would mean the threat of immediate shutdown by the Fed inspectors. It would have meant a smaller federal workforce, with a higher skill level. And it would have kept the security providers and security tester/inspectors at arms length.

So the jerky power-mad Federals would only have to interact with the airport managers, and not the flying public. And each airport manager would be keenly aware that if their security personnal acted like jerks, their flying customers would take their business elsewhere.

Bush, of course, was no defender of federalism. He loved heedlessly accumulating power in the central government as much as all of them.

Private security would have worked fine, but only if they were free to focus their attention on people they considered to be potential terrorists, and deny them entry on airplanes. Alas, that would have run afoul of federal antidiscrimination laws, and everybody involved knew it.

I predicted in an e-mail shortly after 9/11 that because of political correctness, the government would end up treating each and every American citizen as a potential terrorist. It gives me no pleasure to have been proven right by events.

ricki,
Exactly!!! I'm angered every time I go through airport no security because of the obvious sham that it is. By focusing on everyone you're by default focusing on NO ONE. I'd guess 80+% of the flying public could be easily and securily identified as no threat and sent through minimum to non security process.

Our current process is beyond stupid, it is dangerous.

Oh and I'm also very uncomfortable in a large group of sub 90 IQ people, particularly when they're uniformed.

When you practice multiculturalism this is the outcome you expect. After all, there MUST be an equal threat that all people of these cultures present to the government authorities. And goodness we can not use any judgement to discern who might be a problem ahead of time. EVERYONE is the problem. We've become a nation of dipshits.

At least TSA got the positions correct: the Mohammedan on her knees before a bride of Christ.