Thousands of flights have been canceled for safety reasons, and as usual the corporate media are missing the larger issues.
One is that that FAA was so cozy with the airline industry that warnings from inspectors were being dismissed. This is a lethal echo of what happened in the economy, where lax regulation was the biggest cause of the subprime mortgage meltdown and wider credit crisis. The IMF calls it the worst shock to the world economy since the Great Depression. Not only did regulators look the other way, they enabled the crisis by pumping up a credit bubble. Regulators were told what to do by the industry.
The most radical reading of Milton Friedman and other conservative economists would say a company has no other responsibility than to make money for its shareholders. Everything else, to the extent that it is a good at all, will be taken care of by the market. There is no public good — that is a socialist construct. Presumably this means when poorly maintained airliners start dropping out of the sky, the surviving customers will chose other carriers.
In the real world, capitalism works for all when it is balanced by effective regulation, especially to ensure safety, competition, lawfulness and to prevent the formation of monopolies and cartels. It also thrives because of public works, projects that the market itself can’t achieve but nevertheless enhance productivity and quality of life.
Another shadow issue is how these airlines have spent years cutting staff and outsourcing maintenance, pushing out their most experienced — and most "expensive" — employees. Salaries for pilots (they’re not important, right?) and other workers have been slashed. Unions have been busted. The savings have gone to huge compensation for senior executives, and to a plutocracy on Wall Street. Even average shareholders have not benefited.
But the biggest problem — the one we dare not even talk about — is how the crisis at the airlines shows that the American transportation system is outmoded and broken. No presidential candidate is even mentioning this.
I guess Americans — and their media representatives — are so insular and ignorant that most don’t even realize this. Go to other advanced, populous nations, and the airlines are only part of the transportation system. There are also high-speed trains that not only provide choice but are actually faster than air travel in many cases. America is still stuck in the 1970s, only without the union mechanics and serious regulation of the airline industry.
Most places in America are totally dependent on airplanes and cars. In the 1960s and 1970s, this seemed like a dream of future mobility. It has turned out to be a nightmare of congestion, traffic jams, long waits, flight cancellations and being herded aboard planes like cattle or prisoners. Again, I am amazed that Americans never even question this outrageous situation, or they just whine.
High-speed rail should be a no-brainer in the populous, heavily urbanized nation we have become (remember, when today’s transportation system was being put in place, the nation had 168 million people — now we’re 300 million, mostly in large metros, and growing). Yet most dense city pairs and urban areas that could benefit from this choice don’t have it. Phoenix, the nation’s fifth most populous city, lacks Amtrak service or commuter rail. Amtrak struggles with a mere billion dollars a year in federal funding, a tight-fistedness that ensures less efficient and narrow service — and it’s still wildly popular.
No transportation system "pays for itself." Airlines get huge direct and indirect subsidies and their business model is still hopelessly broken. Yet politicians are afraid of pushing high-speed rail because of "cost" and "it will have to be subsidized." Meanwhile, they push billions to airlines and climate-changing highways (yes, rail can be much more energy efficient and lower emissions-per-passenger). The lost productivity from our outmoded system is staggering.
(It should also be recalled that as late as 1956, America has the most advanced passenger rail network in the world; we killed it by subsidizing highways and airports while taxing railroads).
The Democratic presidential candidates talk about "roads and bridges" as if it’s 1956. John McCain wants to abolish passenger rail. The world is in 2008 and rapidly leaving us behind, highly militarized to be sure, but rapidly losing ground elsewhere. This is a nation decadent and in decline, unable to move ahead, losing even the know-how to keep what it has.