delays

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.