Taxpayers are Spending $8 Billion Annually to be Molested by the TSA

The TSA: Ruining Lives Over Forgetfulness (Excerpt)

It's reaching a point where anyone with a government badge has absolute power over the ordinary citizen. The ruling elite have bought the bureaucrats' loyalty and allegiance to the beast that is world government by providing them with a standard of living well above that of the people who pay for their salaries and benefits.

January 18, 2012

A Nation in Peril - ...None of its employees anywhere at any time has ever apprehended an actual terrorist. Ergo, it manufactures bad guys from absent-minded victims lest taxpayers ask why they’re spending $8.2 billion annually on the TSA’s silly “security.”

Why don’t the intrepid sheeple brave enough to risk aviation’s gulag say “no” to such obviously self-interested bullying?

And to such peril. I don’t know about you, but if one of the 16 terrorists the TSA missed on 23 occasions from 2004-2008 were to board my flight, I’d be mighty grateful for the Chinese student’s stun-gun or the legislator’s pistol.

Yet the TSA strips passengers of every weapon but their teeth, leaving only the terrorists who easily circumvent its nonsense armed. Why?

The idea that disarmed passengers are safe passengers dates to the 1960s — but it has absolutely no research undergirding it. Rather, it was a political response to the “skyjackings” plaguing the late ‘60s and ‘70s.

Ironically, the U.S. government at first encouraged skyjacking as a tactic against Fidel Castro’s communism. But it seems none of these whiz-bang policy wonks ever realized dissidents could skyjack planes to Cuba as well.

In 1969, hijackers commandeered 82 of the millions of flights worldwide that year. Most such crimes “were generally carried out by four general categories of perpetrators,” Bartholomew Elias explains in his book, Airport and Aviation Security: U.S. Policy and Strategy in the Age of Global Terrorism; those “categories” consisted of “socio-political extremists; criminals seeking to escape prosecution; extortionists seeking ransoms; and the mentally disturbed.”

Hijackings are dramatic events that grab everybody’s attention; when newcasts showcased one every four or five days, the Feds had all the excuse they needed to meddle. And so the FAA imposed requirements for “security” — as if airlines weren’t already scrambling to protect their property and customers.

But recent legislation thwarted them, increasing the menace. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited vendors offering “public accommodations” from “discriminating” against members of questionable groups, such as “socio-political extremists” or the “mentally disturbed,” and constrained the airlines from actually, effectively safeguarding their flights.

Instead, the FAA insisted they substitute checkpoints to disarm passengers — though no one then or since has ever proven that robbing passengers of self-defense protects them. Nor has anyone researched whether checkpoints are the best method for finding weapons; indeed, the government’s own statistics on how many explosives and guns screeners overlook when tested eloquently argue that just about any other tactic would perform better.

But without abolition of the TSA and FAA, and the return of the responsibilities they arrogated to the airlines, ineffective checkpoints and the whole security circus is probably here to stay.

1. First, government reaps a huge political payoff: Politicians and bureaucrats appear to be doing something — never mind what, or if it accomplishes anything — to prevent terrorism while completely controlling passengers.


2. Second, their cronies who supply the materials and technology for the charade reap even more tangible rewards: billions of dollars in sales. These corrupt corporations will fight tooth-and-nail to preserve their profits.


3. And third, the Feds have spent four decades convincing Americans that guns on planes spell certain doom and that checkpoints are all that prevent flights from exploding mid-air. So far, indoctrinated passengers closely clutch the very chains that bind them.

All that means hapless scapegoats will continue finding themselves behind bars as the American police-state intensifies.

Pay Scales at TSA (2010)

NTEU represents 150,000 employees in 31 agencies and departments and is aggressively organizing thousands of TSA employees at airports nationwide. TSA is a unit of the Department of Homeland Security, where NTEU already is the exclusive representative for the 24,000-member U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) bargaining unit. [Source]

From the Transportation Security Agency Website

Pay Band	Minimum	Maximum
A	$17,083	$24,977
B	$19,570	$28,546
C	$22,167	$33,303
D	$25,518	$38,277
E	$29,302	$44,007
F	$33,627	$50,494
G	$39,358	$60,982
H	$48,007	$74,390
I	$58,495	$90,717
J	$71,364	$110,612
K	$85,311	$132,237
L	$101,962	$155,500
M	$120,236	$155,500