Making the Political Personal

Maybe because flying is something we all do and something we all dread, and because we've all been shafted by the airlines at least once or twice, yesterday's hearing about the closeness between airline chiefs and the FAA struck a nerve. But it's part and parcel of a continuing project to delegitimize regulation of any kind by installing as the chief regulators of industry the very people who headed those industries in the first place.

Three veteran Federal Aviation Administration inspectors told lawmakers on Thursday that their agency supervisors looked the other way while Southwest Airlines neglected to inspect planes as required, and continued to fly them even after discovering cracks in some of them.

The inspectors said that their F.A.A. supervisors knew of the problems but had discouraged them from pursuing the safety problems or addressing problems within the agency, even threatening to relieve them of their duties.

One was removed from his job as an office manager and another was encouraged to apply for a transfer, they said. A third said he was temporarily removed from his role overseeing Southwest, as a result of complaints by the airline.

It's just one example, but because we have a real stake in it, because our lives were basically put at risk because the FAA was in bed with Southwest Airlines, it made a real impact. You know, we all know that the President is eliminating numerous laws government the environment and Native American land management to put up his border fence, but most of us don't live there. We know that the military is using the FBI to obtain all kinds of private records on Americans, including phone and financial data, but we don't know which one of us is having their privacy invaded. We know that the Justice Department is firing lawyers not only for their political affiliation but their sexual orientation, but we aren't those lawyers, and while many of us have been victims of discrimination, it's still abstract. We know that private military contractors are unaccountable monsters whose employees commit crimes like rape and are never held to account, but we aren't involved intimately in the case. The airline issue is maybe a smaller thing, though if there was a crash it would have been scandalous. But we all have a stake in it. We all have a history with it. We can very easily see ourselves on that faulty airplane.

The project for progressives is to connect that feeling of outrage to the systematic conservative goal to deregulate all industry to maximize corporate profit. It's to connect this explicitly to conservatism, not George Bush or some other random legislator. This is a CONSERVATIVE vision of America.