(2023-01-10) Doctorow The Learned Helplessness Of Pete Buttigieg

Cory Doctorow: The learned helplessness of Pete Buttigieg. Southwest Airlines'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 IT Infrastructure was one crisis away from total collapse.

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. (antitrust)

While these firms were allowed to privatize their gains, Uncle Sucker paid for their losses. Donald Trump handed the airlines $54 billion in Covid-19 relief, which the airlines squandered on stock buybacks and executive bonuses, while gutting their own employee rosters with early retirement buyouts

the airlines got even worse under the Joe 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

Dozens of state attorneys general – Republicans and Democrats – wrote to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, begging him to take action on the airlines

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."

Buttigieg is the Secretary of a powerful administrative agency, and as such, he has broad powers. Neither he nor his predecessors have had the courage to wield that power, all of them evincing a kind of learned helplessness in the face of industry lobbying. But there is a difference between being powerless and acting powerless.

To see what a fully operational battle-station looks like, cast your eye upon Lina Khan, chair of the FTC, another agency that has a long history of dormancy in the face of corporate power, but which Khan has transformed – not through ideology, but through competence

Over the Christmas break, even as the airline industry was stranding Americans far from their families, Khan proposed a rule to ban noncompete agreements

Noncompetes are a scourge, and there should be bipartisan agreement on this. If you're a Democrat who believes in labor rights, noncompetes are manifestly unfair. But that's also true if you're a Republican who believes in competition and the power of entrepreneurship.

Section 5 gives the FTC broad powers to prohibit "unfair methods of competition" – an incredibly broad power to wield, and one that the FTC hasn't bothered to use since the 1970s

As David Dayen writes for The American Prospect, "the Department of Transportation has the exact same authority"...