When movie star, incredibly wealthy, so very important Cate Blanchett flies — and flies and flies and flies — all around the world for her career and the parties and the other perks that separate her and her chums from us ordinary working drays, she buys a ticket just like anyone else.
Except, of course, when Blanchett buys one, it is to be presumed she is not back in steerage with the rest of us cattle.
Or she flies a charter with NONE of us cattle.
Either way, she is NOT penalized for the amount of flying she does.
There isn’t some clerk on hand, tallying up how often she is on a plane and charging her extra, so she isn’t penalized because she jets all over the world at a moment’s notice.
She should be.
She should have to pay four times as much as the actual cost of her flight, because she enjoys a lifestyle that allows her to spend huge amounts of fuel and pump incredible amounts of toxic fumes into the air, which we who just stay down here on the ground, are forced to breath.
Why Blanchett isn’t voluntarily dumping her money for our betterment is a mystery, because she is certainly speaking volumes about how everyone else should be forced to pay and pay and pay.
Sure, it’s another celebrity-inspired case of “do as I say, not as I do.” And you don’t have to look far to see it going on. You can just look at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., Washington, D.C. to find plenty of it.
Blanchett is leading the celebrity charge right now for a rather large tax increase in Australia, aimed as penalizing businesses that have too large of a carbon footprint.
Oh, they package it as a tax on “polluters,” but let’s be perfectly honest.
What is getting pumped out of those jets when Blanchett and her comrades flock to Cannes is not rose petals, so who will they identify as “polluters?”
So far it appears to be industry.
Everyone with a right mind wants to see cleaner industry.
Everyone with a right mind wants to see industry.
What we are seeing from these celebrity drum-beaters is a very selective movement to identify businesses they’d just as soon see closed down.
No thought to the consequences on us drones.
No thought to what the workers in those industries are supposed to do without jobs.
In fact one has to wonder if Blanchett and the rest of the celebrity spokespeople have enough of the ball to recognize that if they put enough of us out of work, there will be no one left to spend hard-earned money to see their increasingly lame motion pictures.
After all, Cate, what goes around comes around — and that goes for carbon footprints, too.
— Chuck Smith