Thousands of Southwest Airlines flights were cancelled in the last week, stranding hundreds of thousands of passengers across the country. And the only thing Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg did was send an angry letter to the airline. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more. Link - https://www.commondreams.org/news/buttigieg-backlash-airline-debacle Link - https://truthout.org/articles/southwest-prioritized-shareholder-gifts-instead-of-tech-upgrades-union-demanded/ Check out our merch by visiting our store: https://www.buyrof.com/ Subscribe to our podcast: http://www.ROFPodcast.com Become a member today!: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYWIEbibRcZav6xMLo9qWWw/join Support us by becoming a monthly patron on Patreon, and help keep progressive media alive!: https://www.patreon.com/TheRingofFire Spread the word! LIKE and SHARE this video or leave a comment to help direct attention to the stories that matter. And SUBSCRIBE to stay connected with Ring of Fire's video content! Support Ring of Fire by subscribing to our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/theringoffire Be sociable! Follow us on: Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/RingofFireRadio Twitter: https://twitter.com/RingofFireMedia Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ringoffirenetwork/ *This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos. Thousands of Southwest Airlines flights were canceled in the last week, stranding hundreds of thousands of passengers across the country. And the only thing our transportation secretary did was send an angry letter to the airline. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins joins me to talk about what's happened. He needs a hell of a lot more than an angry letter to the airline, doesn't he? You know what bothers me about this is the week before all this catastrophe started, he's on the air saying, you know, DOT, we have it under control. Travel, there's not gonna be any impediments this year. Everything's good. But what we've learned now is time and time again, mayor Pete was told, take a look at the airlines, they're getting ready to crumble where it comes to heavy traffic. Go ahead. You know, this is a really interesting story here, because at, at first I talked about this last week and I said, listen, this guy's not to blame. Obviously, you know, as the transportation secretary, he oversees it, but he didn't do this. But when you look into this and you look at what Ro Khanna and Bernie Sanders did all the way back, in I think April, they told him, listen, we've got major problems with these airlines. We've gotta do something about it. But then 4th of July weekend comes and goes. Thousands of people stranded just like over the holiday. Nothing happens. Thanksgiving, same thing happened. A month later, Christmas and New Year's holiday, same thing happened. So Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna warned about it for almost a year, telling him, you have to do it and laying out what he needed to do. Farron, they gave him the details. Yes. Okay. Ro Khanna and Bernie Sanders said, here, you don't seem to understand what the hell you're doing in Department of Transportation. So let us help you. So they said, the problem you got with these airlines is they've taken all of this money from the government, remember during the covid issue, billions of dollars. And that, rather than putting it into their infrastructure, rather than taking their computer system that was way, way outdated, especially Southwest Airlines, way outdated. Rather than making improvements, they paid themselves bonuses. They paid themselves dividends. They bought back their own stock. And so this guy knew. They're, look, Democrats who wanna support Mayor Pete as if he's really, really a presidential hopeful, come on. I mean, this, this guy has no chance in a president, presidential run. But the, the guys people that wanna support him say, look, he didn't know. If I hear he didn't know one more time, I will scream. He clearly knew the details of it, the infrastructure failure, the software failure. They didn't even buy new software. Every, all the other airlines were buying new software because they said, we're worried about this. He's told specifically this airline didn't do something about it. Well, and you also have the, the airline unions, the, the pilots groups, the flight attendants groups that have been warning Southwest itself for years, saying, your system is so outdated, you can't even keep track of us. You don't know where we are. Mm-hmm. when you need us. Mm-hmm. And they warned him again, this is gonna cause problems. It's gonna cause delays. You don't have a proper system to reach out to us and get us in there. You don't even have a system like the other airlines do in place for when this flight is canceled, how to reroute it. You've done no planning at all for your airline. Yeah. It's, it's even worse than that. It, when you take it down to the, to the, the very basics. ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJwC6oxJmyg

*Upgrade your closet with Rhone and use code ROF to save 20% at https://www.rhone.com/ROF Donald Trump once said that The New York Post is his favorite newspaper, but that's probably not the case anymore. After his announcement on Tuesday evening, the Post had a small line on their front page that simply said "Florida Man Makes Announcement," a play on the infamous "Florida Man" headlines that circulate around the internet. Trump isn't getting the warm welcome that he had anticipated with his announcement, as Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains. Link - https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-favorite-newspaper-florida-man-1760085 Check out our merch by visiting our store: https://www.buyrof.com/ Subscribe to our podcast: http://www.ROFPodcast.com Become a member today!: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYWIEbibRcZav6xMLo9qWWw/join Support us by becoming a monthly patron on Patreon, and help keep progressive media alive!: https://www.patreon.com/TheRingofFire Spread the word! LIKE and SHARE this video or leave a comment to help direct attention to the stories that matter. And SUBSCRIBE to stay connected with Ring of Fire's video content! Support Ring of Fire by subscribing to our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/theringoffire Be sociable! Follow us on: Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/RingofFireRadio Twitter: https://twitter.com/RingofFireMedia Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ringoffirenetwork/ *This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos. Donald Trump's 2024 presidential campaign is not off to a good start after his lackluster speech on Tuesday evening, because on Wednesday morning, the New York Post, which Donald Trump once said was his favorite newspaper in the country, rather than praise Donald Trump, rather than talk about how great it is that he's in the race on the front page of their newspaper, on the very bottom, they had one line that said, Florida man makes announcement. That is how the New York Post treated Donald Trump's Tuesday night presidential kickoff. Florida Man makes announcement. And if you opened the paper, it actually got so much worse from there, because on page 26, not even worthy of being like towards the front of the paper, page 26, the headline ran been there, dawned that, and this is what they had to say about Donald Trump running for office again with just 720 days to go before the next election. A Florida retiree made the surprise announcement Tuesday night that he was running for president in a move no political pundit saw coming. Avid golfer, Donald J. Trump kicked things off at Malago, his resort and classified documents library. He has stated that his qualifications for office include being a stable genius. Trump also served as the 45th president. This is of course a Ruddock Murdoch, a Rupert Murdoch owned newspaper that, again, Donald Trump once said was his favorite newspaper, and they have reduced him to some kind of crackpot down in South Florida who does in fact spend his days golfing and suddenly decided, you know what? Wouldn't it be cool to be president? That is how they are treating Donald Trump. The man that they once went to bat for, right? The New York Post during the Trump administration was all in on it. They wanted the wall. They wanted Trump to succeed. And then of course, immediately after he left office, that's when Murdoch's paper turned against him. Other Murdoch papers have done the same thing. Fox News is starting to show a lot more cracks about whether or not they even like Donald Trump. So things aren't going well. When conservative media does not unite, their power absolutely diminishes because that is one of the great powers of conservative media, whether it's Fox News, the newspapers, the independent little conservatives out there secretly being funded by billionaires on their YouTube channels. They're usually all in lockstep, but now they're not. So you do not have that unified megaphone voice of conservatives out there supporting Donald Trump, and that is going to hurt him. You Have have plenty of very loud conservative voices out there saying, we need Ron DeSantis, or We need literally anybody else other than Trump. And if that division continues, Donald Trump is not going to be able to get the same kind of support that he has enjoyed from his hardcore base ever since he stepped onto the political circuit. So a fractured conservative media is a good thing. That is what we want to continue seeing, because if they all unite behind Donald Trump, that's going to increase his power and of course increase the likelihood of him winning a Republican primary and possibly even more. ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFLTcrfVAuM