Having fun with CaterAir (a smirk tale of crime)

[donsu]

http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/102004Burns/102004burns.html

In July 2003, the founder of the Carlyle Group, David Rubenstein, chatted with company investors and made several tape-recorded comments about a former director at one Carlyle subsidiary. The subsidiary was an ill-fated airline-food company named CaterAir, and the former director was one George W. Bush:

-snip-

CaterAir was founded in 1989, spun off from Marriott Corporation by a private investors' group including Bush supporters Daniel J. Altobello and Frederic V. Malek. From its beginning, its outlook was poor, "airline food" jokes aside. Marriott let the airline catering division go because it was suffering from thin profits and uncertainties in the airline industry. The Carlyle Group, where George H. W. Bush soon joined the board after leaving the White House in 1993, gave George W. Bush the directorship at CaterAir in 1990. Bush left the board in 1994 to run for governor of Texas. The following is a partial chronology of CaterAir's bumpy career during that interim:

-snip-

We report, you decide: who is mainly responsible for the airlines' laxity on 9/11 and other dates? The minimum-wage-paid, ill-trained "screeners" and their ilk? Or the overpaid and underperforming "managers" who spent decades lobbying for every conceivable tax break, government giveaway, and executive privilege, while simultaneously resisting every possible improvement in security, safety, and even cleanliness?

The conclusion is almost inescapable that if some managers had spent one-tenth the energy trying to prevent terrorism that they have spent trying to prevent unions, 9/11 would never have happened. Come to think of it, they could also have spent less time having fun and more time providing good service at reasonable cost.
-------------------------------------


the snipped portions contain all the factual goodies on the crimes, month by month.