The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle

Commentary on the Flux of Events

Granted, I'm an amateur economist, but I don't think the airlines are ever coming back to financial solvency or to the robust condition they enjoyed before year 2001. In his cheerleading yesterday, George Bush inadvertently revealed some sad and ugly truths about the American economy -- that it has been composed of sheer fluff like theme park attendence and other forms of tourism. In the era of austerity that we have entered, tourism will be about the last thing people are apt to spend money on, and we should be prepared for this, not continue nourishing the delusion that we can have an economy based on an endless chain of hamburgers and entertainments.

The best shot that the airlines have to avoid collapse right now is to aggressively join in an effort to ressurect a meaningful national rail service -- especially for those trips in the 500-mile range that have caused all the "congestion" in US airports. By the way, freight has got to be considered a crucial part of this. The lack of public discussion about on this subject reveals a huge failure of the American imagination.

The commercial air industry faces not only horrendous security problems, and customer confidence problems, but an even greater and probably fatal problem: the coming disruption of world oil markets. Like the national chain discount stores, airlines can only run profitably if the supply of fuel is absolutely guaranteed and reliably cheap. Disrupt that equation just a little bit and the airlines are finished as we have known them.

America has an enormous job to get on with here at home: the downscaling of our hypertrophied living arrangements. Nurturing the delusion that we can keep on visiting each other's theme parks is a disservice to the public interest.