This didn't come out of nowhere. Southwest's growth strategy has seen the airlines add more planes and routes without a comparable investment in back-end systems, including crew scheduling systems. SWA's unions have spent years warning the public that their employer's #ITInfrastructure was one crisis away from total collapse.

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But successive administrations have failed to act on those warnings. Under #Obama and #Trump, the DoT was content to let "the market" discipline the #monopoly carriers, though both administrations were happy to wave through anticompetitive mergers that weakened the power of markets to provide that discipline. Obama waved through the United/Continental merger and the Southwest/AirTran merger, while Trump waved through Virgin/Alaska.

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While these firms were allowed to privatize their gains, Uncle Sucker paid for their losses. Trump handed the airlines $54 billion in #CovidRelief, which the airlines squandered on #StockBuybacks and #ExecutiveBonuses, while gutting their own employee rosters with early retirement buyouts:

bloomberg.com/opinion/articles…

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Incredibly, the airlines got even worse under the #Biden administration. In the first six months of 2022, US airlines cancelled more flights than they had in all of 2021, while the airlines increased their profits by 45% - and kept it, rather than using it to pay back the $10b in unpaid refunds they owed to fliers:

economicliberties.us/press-rel…

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Economic Liberties Releases Model Legislation to Eliminate Airlines’ Liability Shield - Economic Liberties Releases Model Legislation to Eliminate Airlines’ Liability Shield

^{Jimmy Wyderko (American Economic Liberties Project)}

Dozens of state attorneys general - Republicans and Democrats - wrote to Transportation Secretary #PeteButtigieg, *begging* him to take action on the airlines. After months without action, they wrote *again*, just days before the Christmas meltdown:

levernews.com/state-officials-…

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State Officials Warned Buttigieg About Airline Mess

Before the holiday travel nightmare, attorneys general begged the Transportation Secretary and Congress to crack down.

^{The Lever}

For his part, Buttigieg claimed he was doing all he could, trumpeting the order to refund fliers as evidence of his muscular regulatory approach (recall that these refunds have not been paid). He assured us that the situation "is going to get better by the holidays."

youtube.com/watch?v=6FlD6fHq8-…

But the numbers tell the tale. Under Buttigieg, the DOT "issued fewer enforcement orders in 2021 than in any single year of the Trump and Obama administrations."

economicliberties.us/press-rel…

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Economic Liberties Releases Model Legislation to Eliminate Airlines’ Liability Shield - Economic Liberties Releases Model Legislation to Eliminate Airlines’ Liability Shield

^{Jimmy Wyderko (American Economic Liberties Project)}

As the crisis raged, enraged fliers and opponents of unchecked corporate power blamed Buttigieg. So did opportunistic, bad-faith Republicans looking to score political points. The "liberal" media lumped all this criticism together, insisting that Buttigieg had done everything in his power and declaring it unreasonable to expect the Transport Secretary to prevent transportation catastrophes:

levernews.com/the-partisan-gho…

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The Partisan Ghost In The Media Machine

Media outlets no longer consider government malfeasance newsworthy if reporting on it might offend audiences’ partisan loyalties.

^{The Lever}

Buttigieg's defenders trotted out a laundry list of excuses for the failure, ranging from the nonsensical to the implausible to the contradictory - Pete's Army continued to claim that the aviation meltdown was the weather's fault, even after Buttigieg himself went on national TV to say this wasn't the case:

twitter.com/GMA/status/1608075…

Buttigieg is the Secretary of a powerful administrative agency, and as such, he has broad powers.

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Neither he nor his predecessors have had the courage to wield that power, all of them evincing a kind of #LearnedHelplessness in the face of industry lobbying. But there is a difference between *being* powerless and *acting* powerless.

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To see what a fully operational battle-station looks like, cast your eye upon FTC chais #LinaKhan, whose agency has a long history of dormancy in the face of corporate power, but which Khan has transformed - not through ideology, but through *competence*. Khan - and her fellow Biden administration trustbusters Jonathan Kantor and the recently departed Tim Wu - have an encyclopedic knowledge of their powers, and they haven't been shy about using them:

pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/adm…

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Over the Christmas break, even as the airline industry was stranding Americans far from their families, Khan proposed a rule to ban #NoncompeteAgreements, which are widely used to prevent low-waged workers like fast-food cashiers from quitting their jobs and seeking better pay from competitors:

mattstoller.substack.com/p/ant…

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Antitrust Enforcers to Ban Indentured Servitude

Yesterday, the Federal Trade Commission proposed a ban on non-compete agreements that prevent workers from switching jobs. This move could boost wages by $300 billion a year, or $2000 per worker.

^{Matt Stoller (BIG by Matt Stoller)}

These are, as Matt Stoller writes, a form of indentured servitude, used by private equity crooks to lock in their workforces. "30% of hair stylists works under a non-compete, as do 45% of family physicians." Noncompetes destroy the livelihoods of workers who start their own businesses, too: "One comment to the FTC came from a graphic designers for signage who was bankrupted by a lawsuit from her control-hungry former boss and a small town judge":

regulations.gov/comment/FTC-20…

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