Scudrunners

@ Colonel Sanders

You've summed it up very well. Pilots are our own worst enemies.

Pilots make great contrarians when you're looking for investments - sell/short whatever they're buying and buy whatever they're selling!  ;D ;D

Met quite a few over the years who had lost lots of money in the Stock Market. Were still buying Stocks though.... ;D ;D

There's one more thing that you haven't mentioned and that's the people in Management at a lot of places.

All the biggest thieves/frauds/liars/incompetents I have ever met have been in Aviation.

Most of them are textbook Psychopaths/Sociopaths.

You cannot negotiate with these people - the last one I dealt with had my contract cancelled and basically had me thrown out of the country - these people just don't give a shit.

On the plus side I've gotten very good at identifying Psychopaths/Sociopaths - a useful skill.

[quote]the people in Management ... textbook Psychopaths/Sociopaths[/quote]

This is not unique to Aviation by any means.  Turds
do tend to float to the top.

[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron_scandal]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron_scandal[/url]

[quote]Enron was formed in 1985 by Kenneth Lay.

Several years later, when Jeffrey Skilling was hired, he developed a staff of executives that – by the use of accounting loopholes, special purpose entities, and poor financial reporting – were able to hide billions of dollars in debt from failed deals and projects. Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow and other executives not only misled Enron's board of directors and audit committee on high-risk accounting practices, but also pressured Andersen to ignore the issues.

Enron shareholders filed a $40 billion lawsuit after the company's stock price, which achieved a high of US$90.75 per share in mid-2000, plummeted to less than $1 by the end of November 2001.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) began an investigation, and rival Houston competitor Dynegy offered to purchase the company at a very low price. The deal failed, and on December 2, 2001, Enron filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code. Enron's $63.4 billion in assets made it the largest corporate bankruptcy in U.S. history until WorldCom's bankruptcy the next year.

[b]Many executives at Enron were indicted for a variety of charges and some were later sentenced to prison[/b][/quote]


[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MCI_Inc.# ... g_scandals]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MCI_Inc.# ... g_scandals[/url]

[quote]Beginning modestly during mid-1999 and continuing at an accelerated pace through May 2002, the company—directed by Ebbers (as CEO), Scott Sullivan (CFO), David Myers (Controller), and Buford "Buddy" Yates (Director of General Accounting)—used [b]fraudulent accounting methods to disguise its decreasing earnings to maintain the price of WorldCom’s stock[/b]

In 2002, a small team of internal auditors at WorldCom worked together, often at night and secretly, to investigate and reveal $3.8 billion worth of fraud.  Soon thereafter, the company’s audit committee and board of directors were notified of the fraud and acted swiftly: Sullivan was dismissed, Myers resigned, Arthur Andersen withdrew its audit opinion for 2001, and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) began an investigation into these matters on June 26, 2002 (see accounting scandal).

By the end of 2003, it was estimated that [b]the company's total assets had been inflated by about $11 billion.  This made the WorldCom scandal the largest accounting fraud in American history until the exposure of Bernard Madoff's $64 billion Ponzi scheme in 2008[/b].[/quote]

The list goes on, and on.

Should I mention the Wall St boys and their brilliant idea
about fraudulent derivatives that just about bankrupted
the world in 2008?

These are the people that pilots are negotiating with.
They are like Bambi on the Hwy 401, and this is why pilots
need an international cartel to represent them, with some
really nasty people on staff with very expensive 3-piece
suits and Ivy League MBA's that can go toe-to-toe with
any corporate psychopath.