Originally Posted by
WorldTraveler
Glenn Tilton, CEO of UAL, has been clear from 2002 when he started at United. He wants cross border mergers.
Now that we have Democrats in full control of the federal government, we will see if they will continue to subsidize failing companies like they have with the banks and GM.
Questions:
If United becomes too weak to survive on its own, or American, for that matter will the federal government step in?
Who is left in the domestic market to buy them?
Will the federal government force some domestic mergers along with some subsidies.
Is the US Treasury too broke to subsidize failure any longer?
Will the federal government be forced to relax foreign ownership rules to keep the airline industry competitive?
Please note this is not the start of a political debate. It is a serious non-partisan discussion of macro economic and policy issues facing the industry.
Of course it's political. Your obvious contempt of the other decisions of the current administration is quite out in the open.
How are those subsidies/assistance (whatever you want to call it) any different from the gov't sponsored sham bankruptcies that allowed massive cuts to employee pay and benefits under the guise of 'restructuring' while the upper managements laughed all the way to the bank?
Just sayin'....
Call it what it is at least. But it is political.
If the easy bankruptcy laws (which have since been change IIRC) had not existed, we would now probably be living in an airline world without United Airlines and US Airways. And maybe one or two others.
And anyway, distasteful as those bankruptcies were, many folks still have jobs because of them.
I also don't wish to make it political. This is not the place for that. But at the end of the day it can't really not be political. It's the nature of the beast when dealing with corporations worth billions of dollars and which employ tens of thousands of people, all of them voters.