Seismic because the judge's opinion is full of rhetoric associated with the surging #antitrust revival, sneeringly dismissed by corporate apologists as "#HipsterAntitrust." Young called America's airlines and "#oligopoly," a situation he blamed on out-of-control mergers. As @matthewstoller writes, this is the first airline merger to be blocked by the DOJ and DOT since deregulation in 1978:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/antitrust-enforcers-block-the-jetblue

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The judge wasn't shy about why he was reviving a pre-Jimmy Carter theory of antitrust: "[the merger] does violence to the core principle of antitrust law, 'to protect] markets –- and its market participants -- from anticompetitive harm."

The legal arguments the judge advances are fascinating and worthy of study:

https://twitter.com/johnmarknewman/status/1747343447227519122

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But what really caught my eye was @ddayen's #AmericanProspect article about the judge's commentary on the state of the #aviation industry:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/01-19-2024-how-boeing-ruined-the-jetblue-spirit-merger/

Why, after all, have Spirit and Jetblue been so ardent in pursuing mergers? Jetblue has had two failed merger attempts with Virgin, and this is the *third* time they've failed in an attempt to merge with Spirit.

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Spirit, meanwhile, just lost a bid to merge with Frontier. Why are these two airlines so obsessed with combining with each other or any other airline that will have them?

As Dayen explains, it's because US aviation has been consumed by monopoly, hollowed out to the point of near collapse, thanks to neoliberal policies at every part of the aviation supply-chain.

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For one thing, there's just not enough pilots, nor enough air-traffic controllers (recall that Reagan's first major act in office was to destroy the air traffic controller's union).

But even more importantly, there are no more planes. #Boeing's waitlist for airplane delivery stretches to *2029*. And Boeing is about to deliver a lot *fewer* planes, thanks to its disastrous corner-cutting, which grounded a vast global fleet of #737Max aircraft (again):

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-01-09-boeing-737-max-financial-mindset/

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The 737 disaster(s) epitomize the problems of inbred, merger-obsessed capitalism. As #LukeGoldstein wrote, the rampant defects in Boeing's products can be traced to the decision to approve Boeing's 1997 merger with #McDonnellDouglas, a company helmed by Jack Welch proteges, notorious for cost-cutting at the expense of reliability:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-01-09-boeing-737-max-financial-mindset/

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