by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts
PaulCraigRoberts.org
The US airline companies have bankrupted themselves by buying back their stock in an enrichment scheme for CEOs and board members (https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/03/david-stockman/the-crony-capitalist-thieves-are-back/). With the impact of the virus on their revenues, Congress is handing them a $50 billion bailout. Instead of being bailed out they should be nationalized.
In the health and economic crisis in which we find ourselves, the government is going to need all the public trust it can get. Bailouts of those who caused their problems and ours won’t meet the fairness test.
As I previously wrote, nationalization is a four-letter word for many, but it actually offers a chance to correct for the decades of deregulation and concentration and thereby restore competition to the economy. Nationalized banks too-big-to-fail, for example, can later be broken up and the pieces sold back into private hands. Commercial banks can again be separated from investment banks, and concentrated financial power can be broken.