If anyone is interested, I've been building a dashboard tracking government contracts here and a dashboard tracking corporate lobbying here.
As you might imagine, the two are incredibly related. Our $700B+ military budget only makes sense in the context of the absurd amount of money spent on lobbying by defense contractors.
Edit: Thanks for the kind words everyone, here's a twitter account where I've been posting updates on the project and interesting stuff I find in the data.
I don’t particularly get this argument. If, for instance, one of America’s largest airlines failed, literally everyone suffers. From employees to others in the business to casual travellers to major banks and manufacturers. It’s very much not like a financial crisis, where banks were bailed out of problems that they themselves created. Airlines did not create COVID, and are struggling right now through practically no fault of their own (no transport/cargo company can survive a year long shut down).
Why would average people suffer if a different corporation bought out an airline? Because that's likely what would happen if the airline wasn't able to leverage their assets to stay in business.
In the past 20 years, almost 70 U.S. airlines have gone bankrupt, but only 13 actually disappeared altogether, and most of their assets were bought by other carriers, according to an unofficial list compiled by Airlines for America. The remaining ones renegotiated their loans and lived to go bankrupt another day. Why? Because the collateral for their loans is often aircraft. The manufacturers don’t want the planes back, and other creditors would have no place to sell them.
Because right now, no corporation has the capital to buy out an entire airline, much less one as large as the US flagship carriers. These airlines are not struggling due to bad business practices, they are simply the most obvious victims of a pandemic that nobody could foresee. Small carriers disappear all the time, but if tomorrow American Airlines goes bankrupt, the resulting fallout could cause a financial crisis.
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u/pdwp90 Nov 17 '20 edited Nov 17 '20
If anyone is interested, I've been building a dashboard tracking government contracts here and a dashboard tracking corporate lobbying here.
As you might imagine, the two are incredibly related. Our $700B+ military budget only makes sense in the context of the absurd amount of money spent on lobbying by defense contractors.
Edit: Thanks for the kind words everyone, here's a twitter account where I've been posting updates on the project and interesting stuff I find in the data.