Airlines Can Treat You Like Garbage Because They Are an Oligopoly + Other related articles
This week, everyone is asking some variation of this question:
Why did law enforcement board the plane? Passenger wasn't drunk, disorderly, threatening. Is it police SOP To be at #United's beck & call?
There is actually a pretty simple answer. Why is an armed agent of the state using violence to enforce a contract freely entered into by two private parties? Because that is more or less how you define “classical liberalism.” You may have thought that buying a ticket and boarding a plane and even sitting in your assigned seat meant you had some “right” to “fly on the plane.” Legally and contractually, you do not. (Welcome, Tweeps, to your first reckoning with the inherent contradictions in the philosophical underpinnings of laissez-faire capitalism and its conception of “coercion.”)
Of course, this isn’t how capitalism is supposed to work. This isn’t how it’s sold to us. Goons dragging bloodied passengers off of airplanes shouldn’t happen in a world where people “vote with their wallets” and corporations compete with one another to attract consumers. This is the disconnect that has puzzled so many. The first hint to the answer comes in noting that this was not an isolated incident, and that this sort of corporate mistreatment of paying customers is not limited to United.
Why do these airlines sound so unapologetic on social media? Why aren’t the CEOs apologizing? Why does no one sound contrite? This isn’t how the outrage cycle is supposed to work!
When everyone gets mad at Pepsi, Pepsi has to apologize because it is very easy to not drink Pepsi. One must affirmatively choose to drink Pepsi; not drinking Pepsi is the default option. (Though, thanks to consolidation, it’s much harder to avoid Pepsico products entirely than you might think.)
The major American airlines, though, do not need to do anything to convince people to fly with them, because they all merged and consolidated until there were just four firms controlling the vast majority of domestic flights, and they have determined that it is in their collective best interest not to seriously compete with one another.
There used to be competition, which seemed-just like we were taught in high school economics-to bring lower fares and more routes to more destinations, but the airlines weren’t making enough money, so they consolidated into a few huge carriers, reduced service to medium-sized airports, and massively raised the cost of flying through both increased fares and skyrocketing fees.
In the three decades after the U.S. deregulated the airline industry in 1978, carriers chased market share at the expense of profits, losing tens of billions of dollars over the period. From 2008 to 2014, four mergers combined eight big airlines into four: American Airlines Group Inc., United Continental Holdings Inc., Delta Air Lines Inc. and Southwest Airlines Co.
This is called oligopoly, and, for airline shareholders, this is great! It truly is a new golden age of aviation, for people who fly in private jets but own stock in airlines. For the rest of us, this is most of why flying sucks now (the rest of it is the ever-expanding and largely incompetent security state), and also why United is not that worried about you sharing that video of a man being brutally dragged off their plane. They are not embarrassed, and you will not embarrass them. Airlines feel no need to perform the dance of corporate penitence. If you’ve chosen to fly somewhere, it’s probably because you don’t have a good alternative to flying, and you may not even have a good alternative to flying one particular airline:
At 40 of the 100 largest U.S. airports, a single airline controls a majority of the market, as measured by the number of seats for sale, up from 34 airports a decade earlier. At 93 of the top 100, one or two airlines control a majority of the seats, an increase from 78 airports, according to AP’s analysis of data from Diio, an airline-schedule tracking service.
What does United care if the internet is mad at it? The airlines divvied up the sky between themselves, and if you live or work in United territory, at some point you’ll face the real “choice” offered to consumers in a post-consolidation industry: flying with them, flying a more time-consuming and circuitous route with some other, probably equally horrible airline (if such a route is available), or not flying anywhere. Do you need to get from Fargo to Denver in a hurry? Congratulations, you are now a United customer.
This is the end result of decades of corporate consolidation-aided by economists and regulators and politicians from both parties-that has greatly enriched a few at the expense of workers, consumers, and citizens in general. People chose to create a world that allows what happened on that plane to happen. Direct your outrage at the policymakers, economists, and industry cartels that created this future.
You're Not Mad at United Airlines; You're Mad at America
There’s a saying that is sometimes attributed to Karl Marx or Slavoj Zizek-apocryphally, in both cases-that tidily sums up the existential angst some Americans feel at the start of a traditional work week:
"You don’t hate Mondays. You hate capitalism."
The simple thesis here is that there’s nothing intrinsic to “Monday,” which is just a word we’ve invented to delineate every seventh day, that makes your average 9-5 worker miserable. The despair comes from the system, which invests “Monday” with meaning-this is the day you return to the cycle of repetitive, unsatisfying labor that fills you with loathing and anxiety. This system is the thing you should rage against; this is the thing you should change. “Monday” is a metonym, but a deceptively harmful one-a metonym in camouflage-because it has a way of diverting a person’s attention from the boot heel that is grinding her soul into dust. Instead, she takes the oppressive system as a given, and transfers her negative emotions to an inanimate, meaningless symbol-”Monday”-that is both immutable and impervious, since it is, very basically, nothing more than a day of the week. You may as well get mad at a rock. The dual effect of this transference is to deny the person any chance at changing his circumstances-since blaming Mondays instead of capitalism turns potential activism into fatalism-and to shield the system from criticism and reform.
Okay. So you may have seen the situation on United Flight 3411 earlier today, when a passenger was forcefully dragged from his seat by cops after refusing to leave despite being randomly selected as a result of United over-booking the flight. It’s a disturbing scene, but no more so than any number of disturbing scenes you may have witnessed online.
So to recap, in a blind pursuit of profit, United overbooked the flight, didn’t offer enough to entice anyone to get off the plane, then in order to get their own employees on the flight, they removed ticketed passengers, and when one wouldn’t comply with their orders, they called the cops to pull a supposed doctor off the plane-bloodying his face in the process.
Weindling also answered the reflexive question: “Well, what were they supposed to do?”
I have an idea: don’t overbook the flight in the first place, and then make other people pay for your incompetence and greed…watching a multi-billion dollar business hire police to forcibly remove a paying customer not doing anything illegal is a jarring reminder of who really controls this country. Corporations clearly aren’t people, because citizens don’t have anywhere near this much power in the United Corporatist States of America.
Already, United is being demonized online, which is both satisfying and warranted. But let’s tell the deeper truth here-United made a dumb decision, but essentially they just got unlucky that the problem landed on their laps, and it was their dirty laundry that got aired. They are a cruel agent, without a doubt, but they are not some lone wolf-they are a product of an indifferent system that increasingly devalues individual life, and that system is called America.
We are the country where:
-The social safety net, once the strongest in the world, has been gradually dismantled by both major parties over three decades, leaving the poor and working classes vulnerable to increased poverty and immiseration.
-Labor unions, the only reliable form of protection for the American worker, have likewise been gutted as power amasses in the hands of corporations.
-There is virulent opposition from our elected representatives to the idea of universal health care; a system that is a reality in every other major western country. Our current tepid foray into universal waters, Obamacare, is compromised to its core by the overbearing influence of the pharmaceutical industry, and even this very small step forward would have been dismantled if only congressional Republicans could have agreed on the same plan to strip insurance from 24 million more Americans.
-Our economy is designed to transfer wealth and income into the pockets of those who need it least, and any opposition to this structural inequality is treated as political radicalism.
-Our current president won, in large part, because he represented a philosophy of fear and hatred toward outsiders. We will start wars in foreign countries that destabilize whole regions for no gain, but we will not accept refugees who have suffered unspeakably-sometimes at our hands-in these same countries. We will, in fact, contravene our stated principals of accepting the tired, the poor, the huddled masses, and actually enact policies designed to remove aspiring citizens from our country, to break up families, and further marginalize those who have nothing.
-Our police are empowered to shoot and kill our own citizens for dubious reasons, and-especially if the victim happens to be a minority-escape all prosecution.
-Harmful free trade agreements have been passed to milk profit from globalism, with no thought given to the loss of jobs, money, and dignity for American workers, or the slave wages and environmental destruction unleashed abroad.
-The agency designed to protect the environment in our country is now controlled by climate change deniers, which mortgages the future for our children and grandchildren and puts us further behind in a race we were already losing.
-What the hell, let’s repeat that one, since it seems important: Our planet is dying, and far from solving the problem, we’re now one of the world leaders in making it worse.
The reality is plain: United Airlines is not the disease. United Airlines is a symptom of an infected country whose institutions of power no longer respect the dignity or the sanctity of the individual life. They don’t care about you. (While you’re here, read this excellent thread by Patrick Blanchfield about power and conformity.)
It is commendable and necessary to direct your outrage at this particular corporation, on this particular day, but keep the larger truth in mind:
You are not mad at United Airlines; you are mad at America.
United is already nationalized - in Wyoming
There are two flights in and out of Laramie Regional Airport on most days. It’s a one-gate airport full of people shuffling grumpily and trying to pretend no one else is there in that distinctly Wyoming way. But it’s a lot of fun to fly in and out of Laramie. There are worse ways to start your day than stepping out onto a windy runway at dawn and seeing the sun come up over the mountains. On a clear day, you get a complete aerial tour of the rugged, low-slung Laramie Range. And best of all, you can usually tack on a connection to Laramie to any trip to or from Denver for only about $100.
Air travel to Laramie is affordable solely because of a federal initiative called the Essential Air Service program. Set up in the 1970’s, the EAS is basically a system of subsidizing air service to 150 or so rural communities, about a third of which are in Alaska. If this seems like the kind of generous program you’d have expected to get the neoliberal axe decades ago, consider that most airports kept open by the EAS are in deep-red congressional districts. Laramie is of course no exception.
Flights to Laramie are enjoyable and affordable because they’ve been deemed a public good and are supported by tax dollars as such. Maybe taxpayers in major urban areas don’t benefit (unless they want to go to Wyoming), but everyone else wins, airlines included. It just so happens that the airline benefiting from the EAS at Laramie Regional Airport is United.
By now, you’ve heard about the guy getting beaten up on the United flight. One bloodied passenger’s suffering has given us a whole host of good, righteous takes, with many more surely to come.
airlines are over-consolidated, under-regulated, killing local economies, closely intertwined with police and surveillance apparatuses
- Max Read (@max_read) April 11, 2017
But why is United an ungodly monstrosity elsewhere, and reasonably fun to travel with at my tiny home airport? I vividly remember one flight from Denver to Laramie that was held up for about 15 minutes because a teenaged passenger had left her phone in the terminal. The pilot didn’t care, probably because he was in such a good mood about the easy flight ahead of him. This kind of feel-good thing happens all the time on highly subsidized rural routes.
I almost wish the distinction here were purely anecdotal, so I could make the moral of the story that everything that happens in Wyoming is somehow better. That’s not the case. The branch of United that operates in Laramie exists in a separate realm in which we’ve decided that air travel should be accessible, broadly socially useful, and by implication more humane. All of this works only because of political quirks that have kept a good Carter-era program from being gutted. United is nice to you in Laramie because they’ve been partially nationalized.
Air travel’s status as a protected public good in rural areas is, circa 2017, almost accidental. Imagine how great things would be if we intentionally extended that genial protection to all air travel. At least then, you’d be able to call your senator if you got beat up on a plane by a cop.
The Airline Industry Is a Starving Giant That’s Gnawing At Our Economy
By now, you’ve probably seen this video of United Airlines refusing to let one of its passengers “fly the friendly skies.”
The airline had overbooked a Sunday night flight from Chicago to Louisville, Kentucky. When not enough passengers were willing to relinquish their seats voluntarily, a few were selected at random for de-boarding. One of those unlucky souls was, apparently, a doctor with patients to see the next day in Kentucky. He refused to exit the plane. So, security officials dragged him kicking and screaming - and bleeding - down the aisle. Some minutes later, they allowed him back onto the plane. Reflecting on his experience, the passenger stammered, “I have to go home … just kill me.”
From one angle, this incident might look too atypical to tell us much about the state of America’s airline industry. To travel by air, Americans must subject themselves to myriad indignities, including showing up for overbooked planes and learning gateside that they are no longer welcome aboard. But being randomly selected for assault by security personnel generally isn’t one of them.
It would also be reasonable to expect that the onboard assault of an elderly man, motivated solely by the United’s desire to save a few hundred bucks, might bring about some major changes. But the big airlines are dysfunctional at deeper level than most fliers realize. All industry forecasts paint greater consolidation, higher fares, and reduced service to midsize airports as the only path to sustained profitability. The incident on the Chicago tarmac might be a new low, but things are not going to get better anytime soon.
For decades, airlines have been cancelling low-volume routes, reducing service quality, raising prices, merging to achieve economies of scale, declaring bankruptcy, and sucking up billions in public subsidies, and the industry still teeters on the brink of insolvency. U.S. airlines were in the red for all but three years between 2001 and 2010, according to the industry’s trade group. Their net loss over that period amounted to $62.9 billion.
When the Carter administration began deregulating the airlines in the late ’70s, it did so in the name of fostering price competition. Sure, relinquishing public control might jeopardize smaller, rural cities’ access to convenient air travel, but free-market competition would also make flying more affordable for the vast majority of Americans.
But thanks in no small part to lax antitrust enforcement by President Reagan and his successors, deregulation ultimately turned a public quasi-monopoly into a private one. Or, as Phillip Longman and Lina Khan put it in a 2012 essay for Washington Monthly, Carter’s reforms shifted “control of the airline industry from experts answerable to the public to corporate boardrooms and Wall Street.”
This shift did little to nothing to make airfare more affordable in the long term. The cost of flying was actually declining at a faster rate before deregulation than it has since, according to a 2007 study in the Journal of the Transportation Research Forum.
But the shift has taken a big toll on customer service standards - and, more significantly, on the economic growth of America’s midsize cities. As Longman and Khan write:
The loss of airline service to rural and remote areas is an old story; by the 1980s, even some state capitals - such as Olympia, Washington; Dover, Delaware; and Salem, Oregon - became places you could no longer fly to except in a private plane. But over the last five years, service to medium-sized airports fell by 18 percent. …
St. Louis, for example, has seen “available seat miles” - an industry measure of capacity - fall to a third of their 2000 level, following the American Airlines takeover of TWA and Lambert International Airport’s subsequent downgrading as a mid-continental hub. Two of Lambert’s five concourses are now virtually empty, and another, which housed the TWA hub, is only partially used. A third runway - the building of which required demolishing hundreds of homes and cost local taxpayers a billion dollars to finish in 2006 - is now redundant. “This scenario,” notes Alex Marshall, a senior fellow at the Regional Plan Association, “can be likened to states building highways and then having General Motors, Ford, and other auto companies suddenly telling their drivers to use different roads.”
St. Louis’s loss of service comes despite the fact that the population of the St. Louis metropolitan area, the eighteenth largest in the U.S., grew by more than 4 percent between 2000 and 2010. The city is also the home of eight Fortune 500 companies and is a major center for such international players as Anheuser-Busch InBev, Monsanto, Boeing, Emerson Electric, Express Scripts, and Nestlé Purina. The GDP of the metro area, which is also propelled by such large research institutions as Washington University and a fast-growing medical sciences sector, rivals that of oil-rich Qatar. Yet like most other midsize American cities, St. Louis’s economic development is now hostage to the shifting, closed-door deals and mergers of a mere handful of airline executives and their financiers.
In the writers’ estimation, a return to robust antitrust enforcement can’t cure the airline industry’s “terminal illness” by itself, because:
[A]irlines - just like railroads, waterworks, electrical utilities, and most other networked systems - require concentration both to achieve economies of scale and to enable the cross-subsidization between low- and high-cost service necessary to preserve their value as networks. And when it comes to such natural monopolies that are essential to the public, there is no equitable or efficient alternative to having the government regulate or coordinate entry, prices, and service levels - no matter how messy the process may be.
Needless to say, radically increasing government regulation is a nonstarter in Trump’s Washington. And taking on the entrenched interests of the airline industry didn’t really fly in Obama’s, either.
Three years ago, the Obama Justice Department sued to block a merger between American Airlines and U.S. Airways, after concluding that “increasing consolidation among large airlines has hurt passengers … The major airlines have copied each other in raising fares, imposing new fees on travelers, reducing or eliminating service on a number of city pairs, and downgrading amenities.”
Then the airlines hired former Obama administration officials and well-connected Democrats to lobby on their behalf. Three months later, the DOJ cleared the merger for takeoff.
Still, it seems doubtful that our government will let a giant, profit-starved, private monopoly torture its customers and suffocate regional economies in perpetuity. And the growth strategies of our major airlines suggest they’re not going to stop doing either of those things on their own volition.
So maybe, someday, America will arrive at a sane air-transportation policy. But one thing’s for sure: All such departures have been delayed for four to eight years.
Towards Democratic Regulation of the Airline Industry
In the reaction to the the United Airlines fiasco, we see something very powerful. Americans are using words like corporate concentration and monopoly - and antitrust and regulation - to describe the reason David Dao was beaten. And how you ask a question, how you define a problem, leads to what kind of political system you will have.
Americans are finally pushing back on the anti-democratic arguments they were sold by some liberal Democrats and right-wing conservatives four decades ago.
In 1978, President Jimmy Carter, aided by Ted Kennedy, economist Alfred Kahn, and future Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, promoted what they called the “Deregulation” of the airline industry. What they actually ushered in was a new era of American inequality, one that resulted in the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a self selected few.
Now people are realizing that airlines are still regulated - they are simply regulated by giant corporations and self-serving financiers. They are regulated by a few airline CEOs, who choose routes, capacity, and ticket prices, as they alone see fit, destroying the economic viability of cities in quiet board rooms. They are regulated by asset managers on Wall Street who own chunks of each airline and carefully limit competition among them (but fly on private jets, so they don’t have to experience the system they run). They are regulated by poorly maintained reservation systems, which routinely break down, grounding massive numbers of airliners, as happened to Delta last week.
Now we’ve seen that America’s air transport system is also regulated by municipal police, called by airline bureaucrats to rough up customers who disobey them.
In short, the rhetorical trick behind the word “deregulation” has been unmasked. It will take time to filter outwards, but we can now ask the question of whether airlines will be regulated by ourselves in the form of a democratic government, or by and in the interest of airline CEOs and asset managers. Which means, it’s time for the public to begin to push hard for government regulation of the airline service - not only to avoid mishandling of over-bookings but to make sure these valuable public resources serves us and our communities.
Five years ago, the conversation about the brutal beating of David Dao would have headed in a very different direction. People would have complained about their rights as consumers. Politicians would have proposed bills on baggage fees, transparency in ticketing, and rights of consumers vis-a-vis overbooked flights. Today, the conversation largely centered around something much more fundamental - who regulates the airline industry? Is is it Wall Street? Or is it the public working through democratic government?
Even a journalist like Matt Yglesias, who once called Amazon a “charitable institution being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers”, had to concede that antitrust authorities had been too lax on airline mergers in the Bush and Obama years.
This is good. Still, it’s important to correct one of the key misunderstandings that is still underpinning the debate, and that is the legacy of what was then known as ‘Deregulation’. Yglesias’s piece was clear and well-written. It also simply repeats the history of deregulation as it has been told by its proponents from the 1970s onward.
That story is that though there were some problems with deregulation, costs were reduced for consumers because of elevated competition. Yglesias uses a chart to show that ticket prices have gone down from 1978 onward. If you look at the fine print of that chart, you’ll see it uses data from the ‘Air Transport Association’, which is the airline lobby. The Air Transport Association spends roughly $85 million a year in direct lobbying, and probably much more, ensuring that reporters tell the story they want to have heard.
In fact, deregulation didn’t do what its proponents claimed. A 1990 study by the Economics Policy Institute study showed that deregulation actually kept airline prices higher than they otherwise would have been (not to mention proponents of deregulation taking credit for the collapse in oil prices in the 1980s, which are a big input into airline costs). Indeed, to understand how bad and how expensive America’s airlines have become, just travel to Europe, and experience vastly superior service at cheaper prices.
There are other misleading markers in Yglesias’s story, like the implication that flying before 1978 was for the rich, “when people dressed for flights and service was lavish”. But the period before deregulation is when flying became a middle class transportation medium. In fact, “by 1977, 63 percent of Americans over eighteen had taken a trip on an airplane, up from 33 percent in 1962.”
That costs were high and flight was just for the rich is an important fake story, one that underpins the entire framework that Americans have been living under for four decades. What the airline industry is channeling through Yglesias and other defenders of corporate prerogative is that your ability to travel around the country demands that you accept an occasional bloody beating of someone like David Dao. Democracy might be good in theory, but it won’t deliver you airline ticket prices you can afford.
This is the opposite of the truth. Government action in the 1930s helped to break the patent pools strangling the aerospace industry, direct public financing helped accelerate its growth, and mail contracts helped subsidize early airliners. But it is regulation that is most misunderstood.
Prior to 1978, airlines were regulated by the Civil Aeronautics Board. Airline service was held to be a “public convenience and necessity” - much like a utility - and the CAB worked to ensure simple goals. One goal was to keep prices reasonable and customer service good. Another was to ensure that airline workers were treated fairly. A third was to make the airlines served all American communities fairly, and didn’t choke off traffic to certain cities and towns.
This regulatory regime grew out of the harsh treatment that Americans had suffered from the railroads in the 19th Century, where entire regions were undermined at the whim of a few financial barons. The CAB regulatory framework, designed in the 1930s, was written to protect the public from unpredictable and chaotic financial actors.
This regulatory regime worked well. Prices dropped dramatically over the course of several decades, as technological and operational improvements were passed on to passengers, workers, and communities at large. Americans began flying in large numbers and flying became a middle class means of transportation.
In the 1970s, many liberals - led by Carter-Administration official Alfred Kahn - began to embrace the long-standing conservative argument that public utility rules protected unionized employees at the expense of the “consumer.” Kahn was a key proponent of this philosophy, a Democratic economist who organized to place power over key public institutions into the hands of financiers. Kahn believed the best way to ‘help consumers’ was to let the “market” regulate business; although what he actually wound up accomplishing was to let big corporations and bankers regulate the business. This is the tradition to which Yglesias’s argument belongs, a 1970s pro-concentration mindset where democracy is irrelevant at best and harmful at worst, and the supposed “welfare” of the consumer is used as an excuse for concentrating private power over public spheres.
Initially, even as many routes disappeared, airline deregulation did seem to result in lower fares, particularly on trunk routes such as those from Los Angeles to New York. New business models, like discount airline People Express, emerged. Southwest, confined to Texas prior to deregulation, became a major airline competitor.
But cracks soon surfaced. By the mid 1980s, it became impossible to fly on a commercial jet to certain state capitals. Then the mergers and hostile takeovers ripped through the industry and startup airlines collapsed (something Kahn found very surprising). Carl Icahn bled TWA dry with aggressive financial tactics. Eastern Airlines and Pan Am went bankrupt.
Moving regulatory power from democratic bodies like the CAB to Wall Street led to a wave of mergers, concentrating the industry and putting regulatory power in the hands of a smaller and smaller group of financiers. And the process continued, with the Bush and Obama administrations overseeing a spate of tie ups that cut the number of traditional carriers down to three.
The result? Today, U.S. airline prices are higher than in Europe, service is far worse, and workers in the airline industry have much less power than they did. The regulatory changes and consolidation affects us not only as “consumers.” They have also made it much harder to get to and from many parts of America, including big cities like Cincinnati and St. Louis. As air service is cut, business moves out, shifting corporate headquarters and industrial activity to better connected coastal cities..
Even when airline managers try to compete with one another, Wall Street fund managers veto the attempt. A few years ago, Jet Blue drew up a strategy to compete aggressively on both price and quality with the major carriers. CEO David Cush said his goal was to “make a few hours out of people’s day a little bit nicer, more pleasant.” Wall Street analysts immediately attacked the company, and pressed Jetblue to charge for legroom, extra bags, and reservation changes. Jetblue caved.
In other words, the only ones who are not regulating the airlines are you and me, the people. The deregulation of the airline industry back in 1978 did not get rid of rules and regulations or even government. It just shifted the power to regulate from professionals working for the public to plutocrats working for themselves. And the bloody face of Dr. David Dao shows the face of that lie. Government hasn’t stepped ‘out of the airline market’. Government is now the enforcer of rules the airline barons put in place.
It’s time to recognize that airline “deregulation” has failed the public, and a new approach is necessary. Democracy once brought us cheap airfare and broad service, because we the people once decided that an airline industry needed to be shared among all of us and not privilege any one part of the country more than any other. We should move back to that system.
The right policy direction is clear. The government should move to undo some of the mergers of the Bush and Obama years, such as United’s takeover of Continental in 2010. The government should also move to ensure fair service for Heartland cities, if necessary cross-subsidizing routes with money that is currently going to executives and investors. This kind of democratic regulation is, frankly, inevitable. The economics of the airline industry are similar to those of railroads, so it’s no surprise that the elimination of rules designed to stabilize the system and protect the public have led to insolvent and poorly managed airlines and mistreatment of the public.
More broadly, it’s time for the public to recognize that there is no such thing as “Deregulation.” The choice is always simply between regulation by the public for the public or regulation by private powers for their personal benefit. In short, we must regulate our society through democracy, or the plutocrats will regulate our lives for us. And sometimes, as we saw with David Dao, they will use violence to get their way.
by Alex Pareene | By Shane Ryan | by Connor Wroe Southard | By Eric Levitz | by Matt Stoller
Why did law enforcement board the plane? Passenger wasn't drunk, disorderly, threatening. Is it police SOP To be at #United's beck & call?
There is actually a pretty simple answer. Why is an armed agent of the state using violence to enforce a contract freely entered into by two private parties? Because that is more or less how you define “classical liberalism.” You may have thought that buying a ticket and boarding a plane and even sitting in your assigned seat meant you had some “right” to “fly on the plane.” Legally and contractually, you do not. (Welcome, Tweeps, to your first reckoning with the inherent contradictions in the philosophical underpinnings of laissez-faire capitalism and its conception of “coercion.”)
Of course, this isn’t how capitalism is supposed to work. This isn’t how it’s sold to us. Goons dragging bloodied passengers off of airplanes shouldn’t happen in a world where people “vote with their wallets” and corporations compete with one another to attract consumers. This is the disconnect that has puzzled so many. The first hint to the answer comes in noting that this was not an isolated incident, and that this sort of corporate mistreatment of paying customers is not limited to United.
Why do these airlines sound so unapologetic on social media? Why aren’t the CEOs apologizing? Why does no one sound contrite? This isn’t how the outrage cycle is supposed to work!
When everyone gets mad at Pepsi, Pepsi has to apologize because it is very easy to not drink Pepsi. One must affirmatively choose to drink Pepsi; not drinking Pepsi is the default option. (Though, thanks to consolidation, it’s much harder to avoid Pepsico products entirely than you might think.)
The major American airlines, though, do not need to do anything to convince people to fly with them, because they all merged and consolidated until there were just four firms controlling the vast majority of domestic flights, and they have determined that it is in their collective best interest not to seriously compete with one another.
There used to be competition, which seemed-just like we were taught in high school economics-to bring lower fares and more routes to more destinations, but the airlines weren’t making enough money, so they consolidated into a few huge carriers, reduced service to medium-sized airports, and massively raised the cost of flying through both increased fares and skyrocketing fees.
In the three decades after the U.S. deregulated the airline industry in 1978, carriers chased market share at the expense of profits, losing tens of billions of dollars over the period. From 2008 to 2014, four mergers combined eight big airlines into four: American Airlines Group Inc., United Continental Holdings Inc., Delta Air Lines Inc. and Southwest Airlines Co.
This is called oligopoly, and, for airline shareholders, this is great! It truly is a new golden age of aviation, for people who fly in private jets but own stock in airlines. For the rest of us, this is most of why flying sucks now (the rest of it is the ever-expanding and largely incompetent security state), and also why United is not that worried about you sharing that video of a man being brutally dragged off their plane. They are not embarrassed, and you will not embarrass them. Airlines feel no need to perform the dance of corporate penitence. If you’ve chosen to fly somewhere, it’s probably because you don’t have a good alternative to flying, and you may not even have a good alternative to flying one particular airline:
At 40 of the 100 largest U.S. airports, a single airline controls a majority of the market, as measured by the number of seats for sale, up from 34 airports a decade earlier. At 93 of the top 100, one or two airlines control a majority of the seats, an increase from 78 airports, according to AP’s analysis of data from Diio, an airline-schedule tracking service.
What does United care if the internet is mad at it? The airlines divvied up the sky between themselves, and if you live or work in United territory, at some point you’ll face the real “choice” offered to consumers in a post-consolidation industry: flying with them, flying a more time-consuming and circuitous route with some other, probably equally horrible airline (if such a route is available), or not flying anywhere. Do you need to get from Fargo to Denver in a hurry? Congratulations, you are now a United customer.
This is the end result of decades of corporate consolidation-aided by economists and regulators and politicians from both parties-that has greatly enriched a few at the expense of workers, consumers, and citizens in general. People chose to create a world that allows what happened on that plane to happen. Direct your outrage at the policymakers, economists, and industry cartels that created this future.
You're Not Mad at United Airlines; You're Mad at America
There’s a saying that is sometimes attributed to Karl Marx or Slavoj Zizek-apocryphally, in both cases-that tidily sums up the existential angst some Americans feel at the start of a traditional work week:
"You don’t hate Mondays. You hate capitalism."
The simple thesis here is that there’s nothing intrinsic to “Monday,” which is just a word we’ve invented to delineate every seventh day, that makes your average 9-5 worker miserable. The despair comes from the system, which invests “Monday” with meaning-this is the day you return to the cycle of repetitive, unsatisfying labor that fills you with loathing and anxiety. This system is the thing you should rage against; this is the thing you should change. “Monday” is a metonym, but a deceptively harmful one-a metonym in camouflage-because it has a way of diverting a person’s attention from the boot heel that is grinding her soul into dust. Instead, she takes the oppressive system as a given, and transfers her negative emotions to an inanimate, meaningless symbol-”Monday”-that is both immutable and impervious, since it is, very basically, nothing more than a day of the week. You may as well get mad at a rock. The dual effect of this transference is to deny the person any chance at changing his circumstances-since blaming Mondays instead of capitalism turns potential activism into fatalism-and to shield the system from criticism and reform.
Okay. So you may have seen the situation on United Flight 3411 earlier today, when a passenger was forcefully dragged from his seat by cops after refusing to leave despite being randomly selected as a result of United over-booking the flight. It’s a disturbing scene, but no more so than any number of disturbing scenes you may have witnessed online.
So to recap, in a blind pursuit of profit, United overbooked the flight, didn’t offer enough to entice anyone to get off the plane, then in order to get their own employees on the flight, they removed ticketed passengers, and when one wouldn’t comply with their orders, they called the cops to pull a supposed doctor off the plane-bloodying his face in the process.
Weindling also answered the reflexive question: “Well, what were they supposed to do?”
I have an idea: don’t overbook the flight in the first place, and then make other people pay for your incompetence and greed…watching a multi-billion dollar business hire police to forcibly remove a paying customer not doing anything illegal is a jarring reminder of who really controls this country. Corporations clearly aren’t people, because citizens don’t have anywhere near this much power in the United Corporatist States of America.
Already, United is being demonized online, which is both satisfying and warranted. But let’s tell the deeper truth here-United made a dumb decision, but essentially they just got unlucky that the problem landed on their laps, and it was their dirty laundry that got aired. They are a cruel agent, without a doubt, but they are not some lone wolf-they are a product of an indifferent system that increasingly devalues individual life, and that system is called America.
We are the country where:
-The social safety net, once the strongest in the world, has been gradually dismantled by both major parties over three decades, leaving the poor and working classes vulnerable to increased poverty and immiseration.
-Labor unions, the only reliable form of protection for the American worker, have likewise been gutted as power amasses in the hands of corporations.
-There is virulent opposition from our elected representatives to the idea of universal health care; a system that is a reality in every other major western country. Our current tepid foray into universal waters, Obamacare, is compromised to its core by the overbearing influence of the pharmaceutical industry, and even this very small step forward would have been dismantled if only congressional Republicans could have agreed on the same plan to strip insurance from 24 million more Americans.
-Our economy is designed to transfer wealth and income into the pockets of those who need it least, and any opposition to this structural inequality is treated as political radicalism.
-Our current president won, in large part, because he represented a philosophy of fear and hatred toward outsiders. We will start wars in foreign countries that destabilize whole regions for no gain, but we will not accept refugees who have suffered unspeakably-sometimes at our hands-in these same countries. We will, in fact, contravene our stated principals of accepting the tired, the poor, the huddled masses, and actually enact policies designed to remove aspiring citizens from our country, to break up families, and further marginalize those who have nothing.
-Our police are empowered to shoot and kill our own citizens for dubious reasons, and-especially if the victim happens to be a minority-escape all prosecution.
-Harmful free trade agreements have been passed to milk profit from globalism, with no thought given to the loss of jobs, money, and dignity for American workers, or the slave wages and environmental destruction unleashed abroad.
-The agency designed to protect the environment in our country is now controlled by climate change deniers, which mortgages the future for our children and grandchildren and puts us further behind in a race we were already losing.
-What the hell, let’s repeat that one, since it seems important: Our planet is dying, and far from solving the problem, we’re now one of the world leaders in making it worse.
The reality is plain: United Airlines is not the disease. United Airlines is a symptom of an infected country whose institutions of power no longer respect the dignity or the sanctity of the individual life. They don’t care about you. (While you’re here, read this excellent thread by Patrick Blanchfield about power and conformity.)
It is commendable and necessary to direct your outrage at this particular corporation, on this particular day, but keep the larger truth in mind:
You are not mad at United Airlines; you are mad at America.
United is already nationalized - in Wyoming
There are two flights in and out of Laramie Regional Airport on most days. It’s a one-gate airport full of people shuffling grumpily and trying to pretend no one else is there in that distinctly Wyoming way. But it’s a lot of fun to fly in and out of Laramie. There are worse ways to start your day than stepping out onto a windy runway at dawn and seeing the sun come up over the mountains. On a clear day, you get a complete aerial tour of the rugged, low-slung Laramie Range. And best of all, you can usually tack on a connection to Laramie to any trip to or from Denver for only about $100.
Air travel to Laramie is affordable solely because of a federal initiative called the Essential Air Service program. Set up in the 1970’s, the EAS is basically a system of subsidizing air service to 150 or so rural communities, about a third of which are in Alaska. If this seems like the kind of generous program you’d have expected to get the neoliberal axe decades ago, consider that most airports kept open by the EAS are in deep-red congressional districts. Laramie is of course no exception.
Flights to Laramie are enjoyable and affordable because they’ve been deemed a public good and are supported by tax dollars as such. Maybe taxpayers in major urban areas don’t benefit (unless they want to go to Wyoming), but everyone else wins, airlines included. It just so happens that the airline benefiting from the EAS at Laramie Regional Airport is United.
By now, you’ve heard about the guy getting beaten up on the United flight. One bloodied passenger’s suffering has given us a whole host of good, righteous takes, with many more surely to come.
airlines are over-consolidated, under-regulated, killing local economies, closely intertwined with police and surveillance apparatuses
- Max Read (@max_read) April 11, 2017
But why is United an ungodly monstrosity elsewhere, and reasonably fun to travel with at my tiny home airport? I vividly remember one flight from Denver to Laramie that was held up for about 15 minutes because a teenaged passenger had left her phone in the terminal. The pilot didn’t care, probably because he was in such a good mood about the easy flight ahead of him. This kind of feel-good thing happens all the time on highly subsidized rural routes.
I almost wish the distinction here were purely anecdotal, so I could make the moral of the story that everything that happens in Wyoming is somehow better. That’s not the case. The branch of United that operates in Laramie exists in a separate realm in which we’ve decided that air travel should be accessible, broadly socially useful, and by implication more humane. All of this works only because of political quirks that have kept a good Carter-era program from being gutted. United is nice to you in Laramie because they’ve been partially nationalized.
Air travel’s status as a protected public good in rural areas is, circa 2017, almost accidental. Imagine how great things would be if we intentionally extended that genial protection to all air travel. At least then, you’d be able to call your senator if you got beat up on a plane by a cop.
The Airline Industry Is a Starving Giant That’s Gnawing At Our Economy
By now, you’ve probably seen this video of United Airlines refusing to let one of its passengers “fly the friendly skies.”
The airline had overbooked a Sunday night flight from Chicago to Louisville, Kentucky. When not enough passengers were willing to relinquish their seats voluntarily, a few were selected at random for de-boarding. One of those unlucky souls was, apparently, a doctor with patients to see the next day in Kentucky. He refused to exit the plane. So, security officials dragged him kicking and screaming - and bleeding - down the aisle. Some minutes later, they allowed him back onto the plane. Reflecting on his experience, the passenger stammered, “I have to go home … just kill me.”
From one angle, this incident might look too atypical to tell us much about the state of America’s airline industry. To travel by air, Americans must subject themselves to myriad indignities, including showing up for overbooked planes and learning gateside that they are no longer welcome aboard. But being randomly selected for assault by security personnel generally isn’t one of them.
It would also be reasonable to expect that the onboard assault of an elderly man, motivated solely by the United’s desire to save a few hundred bucks, might bring about some major changes. But the big airlines are dysfunctional at deeper level than most fliers realize. All industry forecasts paint greater consolidation, higher fares, and reduced service to midsize airports as the only path to sustained profitability. The incident on the Chicago tarmac might be a new low, but things are not going to get better anytime soon.
For decades, airlines have been cancelling low-volume routes, reducing service quality, raising prices, merging to achieve economies of scale, declaring bankruptcy, and sucking up billions in public subsidies, and the industry still teeters on the brink of insolvency. U.S. airlines were in the red for all but three years between 2001 and 2010, according to the industry’s trade group. Their net loss over that period amounted to $62.9 billion.
When the Carter administration began deregulating the airlines in the late ’70s, it did so in the name of fostering price competition. Sure, relinquishing public control might jeopardize smaller, rural cities’ access to convenient air travel, but free-market competition would also make flying more affordable for the vast majority of Americans.
But thanks in no small part to lax antitrust enforcement by President Reagan and his successors, deregulation ultimately turned a public quasi-monopoly into a private one. Or, as Phillip Longman and Lina Khan put it in a 2012 essay for Washington Monthly, Carter’s reforms shifted “control of the airline industry from experts answerable to the public to corporate boardrooms and Wall Street.”
This shift did little to nothing to make airfare more affordable in the long term. The cost of flying was actually declining at a faster rate before deregulation than it has since, according to a 2007 study in the Journal of the Transportation Research Forum.
But the shift has taken a big toll on customer service standards - and, more significantly, on the economic growth of America’s midsize cities. As Longman and Khan write:
The loss of airline service to rural and remote areas is an old story; by the 1980s, even some state capitals - such as Olympia, Washington; Dover, Delaware; and Salem, Oregon - became places you could no longer fly to except in a private plane. But over the last five years, service to medium-sized airports fell by 18 percent. …
St. Louis, for example, has seen “available seat miles” - an industry measure of capacity - fall to a third of their 2000 level, following the American Airlines takeover of TWA and Lambert International Airport’s subsequent downgrading as a mid-continental hub. Two of Lambert’s five concourses are now virtually empty, and another, which housed the TWA hub, is only partially used. A third runway - the building of which required demolishing hundreds of homes and cost local taxpayers a billion dollars to finish in 2006 - is now redundant. “This scenario,” notes Alex Marshall, a senior fellow at the Regional Plan Association, “can be likened to states building highways and then having General Motors, Ford, and other auto companies suddenly telling their drivers to use different roads.”
St. Louis’s loss of service comes despite the fact that the population of the St. Louis metropolitan area, the eighteenth largest in the U.S., grew by more than 4 percent between 2000 and 2010. The city is also the home of eight Fortune 500 companies and is a major center for such international players as Anheuser-Busch InBev, Monsanto, Boeing, Emerson Electric, Express Scripts, and Nestlé Purina. The GDP of the metro area, which is also propelled by such large research institutions as Washington University and a fast-growing medical sciences sector, rivals that of oil-rich Qatar. Yet like most other midsize American cities, St. Louis’s economic development is now hostage to the shifting, closed-door deals and mergers of a mere handful of airline executives and their financiers.
In the writers’ estimation, a return to robust antitrust enforcement can’t cure the airline industry’s “terminal illness” by itself, because:
[A]irlines - just like railroads, waterworks, electrical utilities, and most other networked systems - require concentration both to achieve economies of scale and to enable the cross-subsidization between low- and high-cost service necessary to preserve their value as networks. And when it comes to such natural monopolies that are essential to the public, there is no equitable or efficient alternative to having the government regulate or coordinate entry, prices, and service levels - no matter how messy the process may be.
Needless to say, radically increasing government regulation is a nonstarter in Trump’s Washington. And taking on the entrenched interests of the airline industry didn’t really fly in Obama’s, either.
Three years ago, the Obama Justice Department sued to block a merger between American Airlines and U.S. Airways, after concluding that “increasing consolidation among large airlines has hurt passengers … The major airlines have copied each other in raising fares, imposing new fees on travelers, reducing or eliminating service on a number of city pairs, and downgrading amenities.”
Then the airlines hired former Obama administration officials and well-connected Democrats to lobby on their behalf. Three months later, the DOJ cleared the merger for takeoff.
Still, it seems doubtful that our government will let a giant, profit-starved, private monopoly torture its customers and suffocate regional economies in perpetuity. And the growth strategies of our major airlines suggest they’re not going to stop doing either of those things on their own volition.
So maybe, someday, America will arrive at a sane air-transportation policy. But one thing’s for sure: All such departures have been delayed for four to eight years.
Towards Democratic Regulation of the Airline Industry
In the reaction to the the United Airlines fiasco, we see something very powerful. Americans are using words like corporate concentration and monopoly - and antitrust and regulation - to describe the reason David Dao was beaten. And how you ask a question, how you define a problem, leads to what kind of political system you will have.
Americans are finally pushing back on the anti-democratic arguments they were sold by some liberal Democrats and right-wing conservatives four decades ago.
In 1978, President Jimmy Carter, aided by Ted Kennedy, economist Alfred Kahn, and future Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, promoted what they called the “Deregulation” of the airline industry. What they actually ushered in was a new era of American inequality, one that resulted in the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a self selected few.
Now people are realizing that airlines are still regulated - they are simply regulated by giant corporations and self-serving financiers. They are regulated by a few airline CEOs, who choose routes, capacity, and ticket prices, as they alone see fit, destroying the economic viability of cities in quiet board rooms. They are regulated by asset managers on Wall Street who own chunks of each airline and carefully limit competition among them (but fly on private jets, so they don’t have to experience the system they run). They are regulated by poorly maintained reservation systems, which routinely break down, grounding massive numbers of airliners, as happened to Delta last week.
Now we’ve seen that America’s air transport system is also regulated by municipal police, called by airline bureaucrats to rough up customers who disobey them.
In short, the rhetorical trick behind the word “deregulation” has been unmasked. It will take time to filter outwards, but we can now ask the question of whether airlines will be regulated by ourselves in the form of a democratic government, or by and in the interest of airline CEOs and asset managers. Which means, it’s time for the public to begin to push hard for government regulation of the airline service - not only to avoid mishandling of over-bookings but to make sure these valuable public resources serves us and our communities.
Five years ago, the conversation about the brutal beating of David Dao would have headed in a very different direction. People would have complained about their rights as consumers. Politicians would have proposed bills on baggage fees, transparency in ticketing, and rights of consumers vis-a-vis overbooked flights. Today, the conversation largely centered around something much more fundamental - who regulates the airline industry? Is is it Wall Street? Or is it the public working through democratic government?
Even a journalist like Matt Yglesias, who once called Amazon a “charitable institution being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers”, had to concede that antitrust authorities had been too lax on airline mergers in the Bush and Obama years.
This is good. Still, it’s important to correct one of the key misunderstandings that is still underpinning the debate, and that is the legacy of what was then known as ‘Deregulation’. Yglesias’s piece was clear and well-written. It also simply repeats the history of deregulation as it has been told by its proponents from the 1970s onward.
That story is that though there were some problems with deregulation, costs were reduced for consumers because of elevated competition. Yglesias uses a chart to show that ticket prices have gone down from 1978 onward. If you look at the fine print of that chart, you’ll see it uses data from the ‘Air Transport Association’, which is the airline lobby. The Air Transport Association spends roughly $85 million a year in direct lobbying, and probably much more, ensuring that reporters tell the story they want to have heard.
In fact, deregulation didn’t do what its proponents claimed. A 1990 study by the Economics Policy Institute study showed that deregulation actually kept airline prices higher than they otherwise would have been (not to mention proponents of deregulation taking credit for the collapse in oil prices in the 1980s, which are a big input into airline costs). Indeed, to understand how bad and how expensive America’s airlines have become, just travel to Europe, and experience vastly superior service at cheaper prices.
There are other misleading markers in Yglesias’s story, like the implication that flying before 1978 was for the rich, “when people dressed for flights and service was lavish”. But the period before deregulation is when flying became a middle class transportation medium. In fact, “by 1977, 63 percent of Americans over eighteen had taken a trip on an airplane, up from 33 percent in 1962.”
That costs were high and flight was just for the rich is an important fake story, one that underpins the entire framework that Americans have been living under for four decades. What the airline industry is channeling through Yglesias and other defenders of corporate prerogative is that your ability to travel around the country demands that you accept an occasional bloody beating of someone like David Dao. Democracy might be good in theory, but it won’t deliver you airline ticket prices you can afford.
This is the opposite of the truth. Government action in the 1930s helped to break the patent pools strangling the aerospace industry, direct public financing helped accelerate its growth, and mail contracts helped subsidize early airliners. But it is regulation that is most misunderstood.
Prior to 1978, airlines were regulated by the Civil Aeronautics Board. Airline service was held to be a “public convenience and necessity” - much like a utility - and the CAB worked to ensure simple goals. One goal was to keep prices reasonable and customer service good. Another was to ensure that airline workers were treated fairly. A third was to make the airlines served all American communities fairly, and didn’t choke off traffic to certain cities and towns.
This regulatory regime grew out of the harsh treatment that Americans had suffered from the railroads in the 19th Century, where entire regions were undermined at the whim of a few financial barons. The CAB regulatory framework, designed in the 1930s, was written to protect the public from unpredictable and chaotic financial actors.
This regulatory regime worked well. Prices dropped dramatically over the course of several decades, as technological and operational improvements were passed on to passengers, workers, and communities at large. Americans began flying in large numbers and flying became a middle class means of transportation.
In the 1970s, many liberals - led by Carter-Administration official Alfred Kahn - began to embrace the long-standing conservative argument that public utility rules protected unionized employees at the expense of the “consumer.” Kahn was a key proponent of this philosophy, a Democratic economist who organized to place power over key public institutions into the hands of financiers. Kahn believed the best way to ‘help consumers’ was to let the “market” regulate business; although what he actually wound up accomplishing was to let big corporations and bankers regulate the business. This is the tradition to which Yglesias’s argument belongs, a 1970s pro-concentration mindset where democracy is irrelevant at best and harmful at worst, and the supposed “welfare” of the consumer is used as an excuse for concentrating private power over public spheres.
Initially, even as many routes disappeared, airline deregulation did seem to result in lower fares, particularly on trunk routes such as those from Los Angeles to New York. New business models, like discount airline People Express, emerged. Southwest, confined to Texas prior to deregulation, became a major airline competitor.
But cracks soon surfaced. By the mid 1980s, it became impossible to fly on a commercial jet to certain state capitals. Then the mergers and hostile takeovers ripped through the industry and startup airlines collapsed (something Kahn found very surprising). Carl Icahn bled TWA dry with aggressive financial tactics. Eastern Airlines and Pan Am went bankrupt.
Moving regulatory power from democratic bodies like the CAB to Wall Street led to a wave of mergers, concentrating the industry and putting regulatory power in the hands of a smaller and smaller group of financiers. And the process continued, with the Bush and Obama administrations overseeing a spate of tie ups that cut the number of traditional carriers down to three.
The result? Today, U.S. airline prices are higher than in Europe, service is far worse, and workers in the airline industry have much less power than they did. The regulatory changes and consolidation affects us not only as “consumers.” They have also made it much harder to get to and from many parts of America, including big cities like Cincinnati and St. Louis. As air service is cut, business moves out, shifting corporate headquarters and industrial activity to better connected coastal cities..
Even when airline managers try to compete with one another, Wall Street fund managers veto the attempt. A few years ago, Jet Blue drew up a strategy to compete aggressively on both price and quality with the major carriers. CEO David Cush said his goal was to “make a few hours out of people’s day a little bit nicer, more pleasant.” Wall Street analysts immediately attacked the company, and pressed Jetblue to charge for legroom, extra bags, and reservation changes. Jetblue caved.
In other words, the only ones who are not regulating the airlines are you and me, the people. The deregulation of the airline industry back in 1978 did not get rid of rules and regulations or even government. It just shifted the power to regulate from professionals working for the public to plutocrats working for themselves. And the bloody face of Dr. David Dao shows the face of that lie. Government hasn’t stepped ‘out of the airline market’. Government is now the enforcer of rules the airline barons put in place.
It’s time to recognize that airline “deregulation” has failed the public, and a new approach is necessary. Democracy once brought us cheap airfare and broad service, because we the people once decided that an airline industry needed to be shared among all of us and not privilege any one part of the country more than any other. We should move back to that system.
The right policy direction is clear. The government should move to undo some of the mergers of the Bush and Obama years, such as United’s takeover of Continental in 2010. The government should also move to ensure fair service for Heartland cities, if necessary cross-subsidizing routes with money that is currently going to executives and investors. This kind of democratic regulation is, frankly, inevitable. The economics of the airline industry are similar to those of railroads, so it’s no surprise that the elimination of rules designed to stabilize the system and protect the public have led to insolvent and poorly managed airlines and mistreatment of the public.
More broadly, it’s time for the public to recognize that there is no such thing as “Deregulation.” The choice is always simply between regulation by the public for the public or regulation by private powers for their personal benefit. In short, we must regulate our society through democracy, or the plutocrats will regulate our lives for us. And sometimes, as we saw with David Dao, they will use violence to get their way.
by Alex Pareene | By Shane Ryan | by Connor Wroe Southard | By Eric Levitz | by Matt Stoller