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US House 'Creator' of TSA Wants To Kill It
U.S. Representative John Mica (R-Florida), the sponsor of the original House bill that helped create the TSA, has become an outspoken opponent of the agency. In a recent interview, "Mica said screeners should be privatized and the agency dismantled." Mica seems to agree with other TSA critics that the agency 'failed to actually detect any threat in 10 years.' Mica is the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman and receives classified briefings on TSA. Perhaps we should trust him more than most people on this topic.
In an older ABC news article (ignore the unrelated video) Mica describes how he deals with security checkpoints. "He won't go through a full body scanner at an airport because 'I don't want them circulating pictures of my beautiful body' all over. He said he opts for a pat-down, and just 'closes his eyes and imagines a beautiful female.'"
Just what we want, to pay more for less security.
USA is on MY no-fly list.
This guy is spouting Republican talking points, saying the program is "creating too much bureaucracy" and "being wasteful government spending". Notice he doesn't actually care about the loss of privacy and rights. If he could contract a private company to strip search everyone and save money on the budget, he'd probably do it. Heck he might even be able to spin it off as "helping the job creators." Just because someone agrees with you an issue doesn't mean he agrees with you for the same reasons nor that you'd like the solutions he'd propose.
Not really no. The point of the TSA - a government agency that assumes accountability for security of air travel is good. The implementation as a long parade of security theatre which reacts as though past specific plans are guides to future threats is disastrously wasteful and ineffective, not to mention a drain on the economy when no one wants to travel for fear of being repeatedly groped, poked, and prodded by people in blue gloves who hate their jobs,
To be fair the idea is that the private screeners will have a vested interest in getting passengers through quickly (since they'll be paid for by airlines/airports) and will have no financial interest in tighter security (which is good, since nothing implemented post-9/11 has helped, so it's plenty tight enough.)
To be even fairer, screening used to be entirely private and it was just as effective and less intrusive without costing anything remotely close to $8 billion a year.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
If there is only one provider of the service, it does not matter if it is government or a private company. If you must use them or not fly it will always be "tough shit".
What makes you think that the airport cares whether you feel comfortable or not? The private firm, too, can tell you to go fuck yourself. They don't work for you, they work for whoever hired them. Private screening might still have "guidelines" that they will be required to follow, and I don't expect them to be too different from what we have with the TSA.
This argument would be more convincing if market competition in America actually worked the way free-market fundamentalists swear it works.
BTW, there's also a theory about how when the government gropes you, this is supposed to hurt their poll numbers and therefore their job security. You might even call it the central idea of representative democracy. Unfortunately that mechanism is just as broken as the "competition" one.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
Unfortunately, "Privatization" is typically used as a polite euphemism for getting the worst of both worlds. It is very rarely a synonym for "the state abandoning function X"; but rather for "The state hiring a contractor for function X" or (in the case of assets, rather than functions) "The state sweetheathearting off asset X"...
When somebody says "Privatize", you can usually expect that they are demanding that the public employees be fired; but that the function continue to be paid for by taxpayer money, and backed by whatever force of law it previously enjoyed, just now being wielded by the employees of whatever contractor scooped up the bid. At best, this is an improvement of degree(ie. if the prior employees were genuinely a mess and the new contractor is actually efficient at something other than landing contracts); but it is not an improvement of kind: it is still state agents, paid with public money, backed by force of law. The fact that they aren't those evil public-sector workers with their wicked unions and whatnot doesn't change that a bit.
Unless proven innocent by demonstrated presence of a spine and some affinity for actual freedom, anybody who wants to "privatize the TSA" should be treated in roughly the same way as those who have shepherded along the privatization of parts of the prison industry... Shockingly enough, when your "product" is incarceration, you turn all your vaunted-efficiency-of-the-private-sector toward moving more product... Should the TSA be sacked and replaced by SecuriDyne LLC, it is extremely unlikely that SecuriDyne will be any better an advocate for less, and less invasive, screening than the TSA is, why would they cut into their own market?
This is political hackery that boils down to the following:
#1) The job will be bid on via a no-bid contract to some firm that some senator is either friends with the owner or a part-owner thereof.
#2) All the current TSA employees will be fired.
#3) All the former TSA employees will be rehired by the private firm (such as Blackwater), at LOWER pay.
#4) Despite hiring everyone at lower pay, the contractor will bill the government double or more what it was costing the government to run the TSA by itself.
#5) Owner and Senator become super-rich, and lobby hard to have their personal income taxes cut because they are Job-creators.
#6) Deficit explodes due to cost-over-runs and how much money is being pocketed by owner/senator. Meanwhile Congress votes to cut taxes on the rich to "reduce" the deficit.
Is there any part of this I haven't covered? It's pretty obvious, and they've done it to us a million times and we let them do it more. The Rich get richer and the middle class becomes poor.
Thanks government for fucking me in the ass again.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
If a private health insurance company fails to cover your health problems, public opinion forces them to change or they go out of business from failing to provide health insurance coverage. If the government fails to cover your health problem, they tell you "tough shit".
Hmm, if that ACTUALLY worked, we wouldn't have the mess that is the current state of health insurance. The reality is if a private health insurance company fails to cover your health problems, then either you are stuck paying for it yourself because switching to a new policy won't pay for a procedure that occurred before you were covered (in the case of finding out your insurance won't cover something after the fact of). If you find out that a procedure you need won't be covered by your insurance company before hand, then you're still screwed because you have a "pre-existing condition" and thus no one will give you a new policy that'll cover it. At least not something you're likely to be able to afford.
As for public opinion, in general most people just take whatever coverage their job gives them and hopes it covers whatever they need. Which means there's no free-market. Health insurance is too important and thus people take whatever they can get that gives them what they think they need as cheap as they can get it. They'll deride, complain, and campaign against an insurance company but the company won't go out of business because people still need to have health insurance, even if the company says "Tough shit".
The difference is a single-payer system that will always cover your health problem versus a profit based company that says "Tough Shit" because you cost them too much.