Accuracy in Media Editor Roger Aronoff recently appeared on The Daily Ledger on the One America News Network to discuss an ongoing scandal at the Federal Aviation Administration which has prompted an investigation by the department’s inspector general.
Prior to 2014, as Aronoff reported in May, the FAA recruited its air traffic controllers from either the military or from the pool of people who had graduated after spending years studying and training at FAA programs called Collegiate Training Initiative, or CTI schools. However, it now uses a walk-in process combined with a biographical questionnaire asking questions such as, “How many sports did you play in high school?”
“And what this is really about is ethnic diversity,” said Aronoff on The Daily Ledger. Peter Kirsanow, of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, also came to the same conclusion.
“A news report quotes [Transportation] Secretary [Anthony] Foxx as telling Congress, ‘The FAA took an opportunity to take a broad opening of the aperture if you will to try to get a larger universe of applicants into the [air traffic control] program,’” wrote Kirsanow, according to Newsmax. “I don’t speak jive, but I am fluent in bureaucratese, and this is easy to translate: the FAA didn’t like the racial and gender composition of the people in its pool of potential air traffic controllers.”
“This is the safety of our planes flying in the air,” Aronoff emphasized. “And I can tell you from what I’ve learned is that there have been a number of very close calls…There have been many who have been thrown out of the system because they were so bad.”
The Fox Business Network (FBN) exposed back in May how a leader of the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees (NBCFAE) had distributed a recorded message detailing how its members could cheat on the biographical questionnaire. “But they have a recording that they tell you, they walk you through what to fill out so you will be able to pass this and get hired,” said Aronoff.
“This is a scandal that should be looked at constantly by the news media, but they are ignoring this,” Aronoff said. “It’s like Benghazi or the IRS scandal. [The media] consider it not even worthy of being discussed.”
After Aronoff published his initial article noting how The Wall Street Journal had reported on the change in FAA hiring standards, but not the Obama administration scandal itself, the Journal published an opinion article entitled, “Affirmative Action Lands in the Air Traffic Control Tower:”
After the FAA changed its screening process in 2014, thousands of applicants who were already in the pipeline—people who had obtained an FAA-accredited degree, taken the AT-SAT exam and had been designated ‘well-qualified’ to become air-traffic controllers—were told by the government that they would have to start the process again. ‘But this time, when they applied for a job, their college degrees and previous military experience would mean nothing,’ reported Fox Business. ‘They would now compete with thousands of people the agency calls ‘off the street hires’; anyone who wants to, can walk in off the street without any previous training and apply for an air traffic control job.’
In other words, the current policy is to deliberately favor less-qualified applicants over more qualified applicants in the name of obtaining the ‘right’ racial and gender mix among air-traffic controllers. Advocates of ‘diversity’ insist that discounting objective measures of ability and competence is harmless, but history shows that it can be deadly.
The Obama administration isn’t stopping there in its effort to create a progressive utopia of ethnic diversity, whether or not racial discrimination is, in fact, currently happening.
Stanley Kurtz, writing for National Review earlier this month, called it a “scandal that the mainstream press has largely refused to report on the Obama administration’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule:”
AFFH is easily one of President Obama’s most radical initiatives, on a par with Obamacare in its transformative potential. In effect, AFFH gives the federal government a lever to re-engineer nearly every American neighborhood—imposing a preferred racial and ethnic composition, densifying housing, transportation, and business development in suburb and city alike, and weakening or casting aside the authority of local governments over core responsibilities, from zoning to transportation to education. Not only the policy but the political implications are immense—at the presidential, congressional, state, and local levels.
Here is Aronoff on One America News’ “The Daily Ledger,” with Graham Ledger:
The nation is fiercely debating the Iran nuclear deal and the significance of the Ayatollah’s “death to America” tweets when the real problem is Iran’s sponsor, Russia, and its lunatic ruler, Vladimir Putin. By controlling the media, killing off the opposition, and smearing Ukrainian freedom fighters as Nazis, the former KGB colonel has his country worked into a collective frenzy over a concocted Western threat. Some experts believe Russia is preparing for nuclear war on a global scale. If Putin carries out his threats, America is no more.
In this case, the U.S. is facing not only a nuclear weapons program, which is the case with Iran, but what our top generals are calling an “existential threat” to our survival as a nation.
As the National Institute for Public Policy documents in the report, “Foreign Nuclear Developments: A Gathering Storm,” Russia has a new military doctrine that anticipates using nuclear weapons, and the regime has embarked on “a massive strategic modernization program to deploy new nuclear weapons and delivery systems.”
Not only that, but Russia has a ballistic missile defense to use against us.
Geopolitical analyst Jeff Nyquist tells Accuracy in Media, “The Russians became angry and threatening when NATO tried to build a very modest missile defense system to stop an Iranian missile. Yet Russia has over 10,000 dual purpose SAM/ABMs for defense against our missiles and will be deploying a new ABM prototype next year.”
He adds, “Russia has potential war winning advantages over the U.S. and NATO—not necessarily in the number of nuclear weapons but in the number of its ABM batteries, and the upgrading of these batteries with a new generation of interceptor rockets while the American side makes no effort in this direction. The U.S. ABMs in Alaska and California would be lucky to stop 12 Russian warheads.”
Despite the preoccupation with Iran’s nuclear program, Iran currently has nothing of that nature which can threaten the homeland of the United States. Yet, Russia can obliterate the United States, a fact that has been highlighted recently by no less than three top American generals. The term, “existential threat,” has been used repeatedly to describe the Russian challenge. That term means the Russians can destroy the United States as a nation.
Marine Corps General Joseph Dunford, nominated to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, “If you want to talk about a nation that could pose an existential threat to the United States, I’d have to point to Russia.”
His statement, made during his Senate confirmation hearing on July 9, got a significant amount of media attention. Similar warnings came from Army General Mark A. Milley, commander of U.S. Forces Command, who has been nominated to become the next Army chief of staff, and Air Force General Paul Selva, nominated to become Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
Dunford and the other generals acknowledge the real or potential nuclear threats from Iran, North Korea, and China. But it’s Russia that is deemed an “existential threat.” It is the most significant.
Some conservatives have been complaining that patriotic military officers are being purged from the Armed Forces. Well, it appears that the purge missed Generals Dunford, Milley, and Selva. These generals are taking a risk by going against the conventional wisdom of the Obama administration. Indeed, the White House and the State Department have gone out of their way to say that the Obama administration does not agree with the assessment that Russia is an existential threat to the United States.
For the generals to go public in this manner—and to contradict the official stance of the Obama administration—suggests that the threat from Russia is very real indeed, and may be more serious than they are willing to publicly acknowledge.
When you consider how the Iran nuclear deal came about, you begin to realize how serious it is. Obama actually thanked Putin for bringing it about.
The CNN story, “Obama, Putin congratulate each other for Iran deal,” demonstrates the nature of the problem. Although the story is designed to highlight the alleged positive roles Obama and Putin played in the deal, CNN reported that in a readout of the conversation between the two leaders, “the White House said Obama thanked Putin for Russia’s role in the Iran nuclear negotiations.”
Thanked Putin? This demonstrates something worse than the deal itself and the real nature of the Iranian threat. Putin should thank Obama because the U.S. is helping Iran, Russia’s client state, get tens of billions of dollars in international financial aid. Down the line, Russia gets U.S. approval to supply more weapons to the anti-American regime.
Iran is certainly a potential nuclear threat to Israel, the so-called “little Satan.” But the U.S. is the “Great Satan,” and our biggest nuclear threat at the current time is Russia, as our top military officers have said. Yet, Obama is treating Putin as an ally.
Israel and its defenders have to come to grips with the fact that Iran is a threat to the Jewish state, the region, and the world because of its Russian sponsorship. Iran can’t be viewed in isolation, apart from Russia. Indeed, Iran is considered to be part of a “strategic alliance” with Russia.
As we have noted on several occasions, the Iranian Ayatollah, Ali Khamenei, is KGB-trained, having been “educated” at the KGB’s Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow. This means he is under Russian influence, if not an agent.
Obama has a blind spot regarding threats from the Islamic world, and that includes Iran. But his unwillingness to face up to the Russian threat, which is more serious than any on the face of the earth today, puts the very existence of the United States in jeopardy.
Remember that Obama mocked Mitt Romney’s statement during the 2012 campaign that Russia was our geopolitical adversary. Obama hasn’t learned anything, despite the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He keeps refusing to supply Ukraine with heavy weapons to defend themselves. Praising the Russians for their role in the Iran deal signals something worse than just incompetence. It appears that Russia is exercising some sort of control over the Obama administration.
We got a taste of that control when it was reported that, on Independence Day, the Kremlin announced that Putin had sent Happy July 4th greetings to Obama. We only later learned that Putin, on the same day, had also sent nuclear-capable Russian bombers off the coast of California that had to be intercepted by American aircraft.
This duplicity is another sign of the lunatic mindset of the former KGB spy running the show in Moscow. This nuclear blackmail is much more serious than a tweet from the Iranian Ayatollah showing Obama with a gun to his head. Putin has a nuclear gun pointed at America and we have practically no defense against it.
No one calls the ruling class on their lies. With a dysfunctional media — that is now fully intertwined with the government — the American people are left bereft of real news and thoughtful analysis.
We live in an alternate reality. Nothing is real, except their lies and only their lies. Lies are now the truth.
As for me, I believe the secret side deals with Iran are quite specific. Incredibly specific.
And I believe they call for an international military alliance and a protective force for Iran. An international force, sponsored by the United Nations.
And that deal is to protect Iran… from Israel.
We already knew this administration represented an existential threat to Israel, from the 1967 “Holocaust borders” to its repeated intelligence leaks.
This sets the stage, ladies and gentlemen, for global aggression. Against Israel. And reprisals. Financial. Diplomatic. Even the boys in blue, firing their weapons for the very first time in recorded history.
