Is Pete Buttigieg the worst Secretary of Transportation in history?
I can't think of a worst one in my lifetime.
Pete Buttigieg, the former McKinsey consultant who is now the transportation secretary, often acts as if crisis management is still his stock in trade. In his tenure as a cabinet member, he’s faced a number of high-profile disasters: the Southwest Airlines scheduling crisis of December 2022, when the cancellation of nearly 17,000 flights left roughly 2 million passengers stranded; the February 2023 derailment of a Norfolk Southern freight train carrying toxic chemicals in East Palestine, Ohio, which created an environmental disaster; and the emergency landing last Friday of a Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9 after a door plug blew out.Buttigieg has responded to each of these calamities in the spirit of crisis management, prioritizing the offering of soothing public relations messages over trying to find the root causes of problems. He seems to think his main job is to assure the American people that the system is in good working order rather than preventing repeated calamities. In the case of the Southwest Airlines meltdown, it took political pressure from lawmakers and the media to force Buttigieg to both investigate the company’s actions and impose a hefty fine of $140 million. With the Norfolk Southern train derailment, Buttigieg’s initial response was to again drag his feet and insist he had little power to act. Buttigieg later acknowledged that his diffident response and slowness to go to East Palestine was the wrong approach—if only in public relations terms.
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As The Lever reported on Monday: “Less than a month before a catastrophic aircraft failure prompted the grounding of more than 150 of Boeing’s commercial aircraft, documents were filed in federal court alleging that former employees at the company’s subcontractor repeatedly warned corporate officials about safety problems and were told to falsify records.”The news site adds that the former Spirit employees claim that the FAA “has failed to properly regulate companies like Spirit, which was given a $75 million public subsidy from Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s Transportation Department in 2021.”
This comes after another disastrous Transportation Secretary.
Comments
Unrelated, but..
totally unecessary
In a word….
.
yes he is. I’ve heard nothing about what he is doing about him doing anything about all the things that have happened that a transportation agent is supposed to be on top of.
But wait there’s more. I’m thinking that Pete is going to be the October surprise at the convention when he’s switched for Biden. He was promised something when Obama told him to drop out of the race for president and I don’t think he’d accept being secretary.
Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.
Who if not Biden?
Paul Craig Roberts believes the only option the Dems have is Hillary. He explains how he thinks this will happen. And then predicts the demise of the entire Western world by the end of the year.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mizuGhoJkU
Anya
Hillary is the sword of Damocles hanging over us
Until she shuffles off this mortal coil this will remain in effect.
Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.
Don't forget Nathan Robinson's two pieces on Pete:
All About Pete
-- and --
More About Pete
"there's something so especially sadistic about waving the flag of a country that you're actively destroying" -- Aaron Mate
So who was the best Transportatin Secretary?
Little Petey has nothing positive going for himself as far as I'm concerned. Easy for me to agree that he is the worst Secretary in the history of the DOT. But I couldn't tell you what constitutes good performance in that position, or who if anybody was a good one.
I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.
Infrastructure is a Socialist construct.
It requires support from every citizen of the nation, and it requires a unified vision, very large work projects that will benefit the future and future generations, and will be continuously subsidized and accessible to all people equally.
This concept is an abomination to industry and US capitalism. They don't want to build something that future generations will be able to profit from. They want to extract the profits right away and off-shore them — and leave the project underfunded and incomplete.
____________________
The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato
Wannabe oligarchs
unsuitable for high level government positions.
Thomas H. MacDonald
is arguably the best, although, to the best of my knowledge, he never held the actual title. His title was Commissioner of Public Roads. He was the person in Roosevelt's administration who did the original design recommendations on the National Defense Highway System, which we now know as the Interstates (in 1941).
It took until the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1952 (under Eisenhower) to actually fund it and really get started building it in earnest- but the journey of a thousand parking lots has to begin with a single step...
There were some good transportation people, perhaps a lot of them, back when we as a country used to build things. The yokels we have now just want to extract as much wealth as they can from the system (while it self-disassembles from rust and neglect), all the while tap-dancing away from any semblance of responsibility- or blame. Don't look to any modern politician for the building of *anything*: they are demolition people, not builders.
Twice bitten, permanently shy.
THIS.
This is THE problem, and they have got to be held accountable by any means necessary. They MUST all die in prison.
Any suggestions on how to actually do that? At least something for my ruinous-OCD brain to hopefully envision so I can at least not be any further inhibited and tortured by this for the next 24 hours?
In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.
Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!
Good point
It looks like a crisis of capitalism. When the economic incentives are to destroy things (or at least to rent them) rather than building things, then our economic system has outlasted its usefulness.
When I first read that review
....I thought that there was no way Buttigieg could fail so badly, unless he was forced to fail by industry special interests and their paid politicians.
I actually felt bad for him being coerced into failure and then taking the blame for neglect and incompetence. He strikes me as the the type who likes to succeed in the public eye. And not to take a hit for performing poorly.
Then I recalled that he and his preppy friends were the geniuses behind the Iowa Caucus delegate counting disaster that kicked off the 2020 Primaries. A silly technology event staged to obscure the Bernie Sanders win over Biden.
No doubt, his background as a CIA tool will help him shake off adversity and bad press — like it never happened. Buttigieg can probably expect a full ride in American politics. The Dems desperately need candidates who can mesmerize the emerging generations into accepting, and then justifying, the hypocrisy that passes for truth.
____________________
The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato
Mayo Pete
fits perfectly in the mold of McKinsey alums. Arrogant, incompetent, lazy, and unethical based on my personal experience of a few of them.
"McKinsey alums"?
Please remind me what that is; also, how did you come about your "personal experience" with them (whoever they are)?
In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.
Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!
The very short version -
A Mckinsey Sr. Partner (back when McKinsey was a partnership) pitched a new product line to the CEO of a mid-sized company that was a subsidiary of a large company. (McKinsey and this partner had a pre-existing relationship with this CEO and probably with the CEO of the parent company.) The CEO was intrigued but had no idea what the product was. For investigation and analysis of the proposal, he assigned the project to the Sr. VPs of the company's specialty departments. One of the VPs handed it off to his most out-of-the-box thinker, Joe. The other one, Bill, relished challenges and added a manager, Tom, much like himself and me to the team. I was the out-of-the-box member of the team because I was young (25) and a woman.
The four of us trekked down to Beverly Hill and met with the McKinsey partner and his client. Bill was gung-ho even though he didn't know what it was. The Tom was intrigued. Joe was skeptical. I didn't know what I was doing there. The preliminary report back to the CEO was good enough to keep the team intact for further study and hired McKinsey as our consultants. Two LA based McKinsey MBAs were assigned as our contact points for work we needed. Joe, Tom, and I were expected to add our assignment to our regular full-time workload. This was a highly confidential project and we were instructed not to talk about it to anyone outside the team. We came up with lots of questions that required research and passed that along to the MBAs. As they became too unresponsive to our requests, I began relying on the company librarians.
The MBAs and Bill pushed us to organize the product and introduce it to the market. One of the MBA kept tweaking his computer model that predicted huge revenues and profits at virtually no risk. He was always eager to make a trip to SF to show us the improved model that wasn't better than the prior one and produced nothing that we asked for. A few months in I began refusing to meet with him.
Joe described the effort as a series of turning over rocks and watching creepy things scurrying away. Tom was dogged, but in retrospect his experience should have given him a couple of legs up from Joe and me but it didn't. However, he did manage to find a corporate banker that freely offered to supply us with relevant information. Digging into that was sufficient to convince ourselves that we had to kill it. We did and joked among ourselves that we could end up with pink slips in our pay envelopes, but we recognized that the risk to ourselves was real.
While the project ended at that point, I learned much more after that. McKinsey had been double dipping. Charging a fee to us and the company that needed the product. A competitor of my employer had sold the product to one customer. A foreign consortium had sold many of them and a couple of years after we'd killed it, it blew up into a $300 million legal battle. (That's back when $300 million was serious money.)
While there are many cosmetic differences, once one grasped the essential obligation of that proposed product, it was no different from the surety bond guarantees for credit default swaps that bankrupted several monoline surety bond companies and put AIG into such distress that without a federal bailout it too would have gone under in 2008. A few years earlier, ten insurance companies and JP Morgan split a billion dollar loss on another version. It's very old wine (at least a hundred years old) that shysters keep trying to rebottle. A combination of accounting tricks and laying off the financial risk to a more well heeled company,
Uh, gee; THAT'S "the very short version"?
Maybe I'm just preoccupied after reading Matt Taibbi's grim report about the latest defeat/betrayal of the Bill of Rights, but I can't say I was able to process that terribly well.
In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.
Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!
Pete Butt
Few people and politicians have struck me as being as spineless milk toast (ok, mayo) as Petey Butt. Certainly at DOT like his predecessor, he has done nothing but run interference for corporate, like all our gov departments and agencies do now that we are an oligarchy.
I don't think the powers on the Blue Idiots squad think he could win very much at all.
My understanding is that IF:
a) Biden drops before the primary it becomes an open primary, and chaos.
b) once Biden makes the primary so is selected, after which they can make any cigar-filled backroom DNC decision they want without public input. It is binding.
So that is what they are aiming for. Keep Joe walking until selection.
Then all real hell breaks loose in that back room.
Have good days all!
We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.
both - Albert Einstein
Wow, okay; SUDDENLY IT MAKES SENSE.
Everybody was weirded out by the choice to make Buttihead head of a department he had no experience or expertise for (except the terminal-TDS-set, of course, and those who can ALWAYS be counted on to play apologist for anything; that's just how some hominids are programmed, I guess), but now - NOW! - that you explain his background...
...it makes perfect sense.
It's General Betray-Us all over again.
This is the Deep State's bog-standard MO and belief-system: "Nothing matters but PR. Sophistry >>> Science. A lie repeated loudly enough is The Truth."
In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.
Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!