stripped of seniority, benefits, and bargaining rights, and had been subjected to a massive pay cut
under threat of being turned out into the street. In 1985, t$87,000 at TWA, but less than $30,000 at Continental. The hourly cost of a flight crew for a DC-10he average yearly wage of a pilot was (^)
at American Airlines was $703, while at Continental it was only $194. It is an interesting
commentary on such wage gouging that Lorenzo neverthless managed to bankrupt Continental by
the end of the decade.
George Bush has been on record as a dedicated union-buster going back to 1963-64, and he has
always been very friendly with Lorenzo. When Bush became president, this went beyond the
personal sphere and became a revolving door between the Texas Air group and the Bush
Administration. During 1989, the Airline Pilots' Association issued a list of some 30 cases in which
Texas Air officials had transferred to jobs in the Bush regime and vice versa. By the end of 1989,Bush's top Congressional lobbyist was Frderick D. McClure, who had been a vice president and
chief lobbyist for Texas Air. McClure had traded jobs with Rebecca Range, who had worked as a
public liasion for Reagan until she moved over to the post of lead Congressional lobbyist for Texas
Air. John Robson, Bush's deputy Secretary of the Treasury, was a former member of the
Continental Airlines board of directors. Elliott Seiden, once a top antritrust lawyer for the JusticeDepartment, switched to being an attorney for Texas Air. [fn 11]
When questioned by Jack Anderson, McClure and Robson claimed that they recused themselves
from any matters involving Texas Air. But McClure signed a letter to Congress announcing Bush's
opposition to any govestrike in early 1989. Busrnment investigation of the circumstances surroundih himself has always stonewalled in favor of Lorenzo. During the earlyng the Eastern Airlines
months of the landmark Eastern Airlines strike, in which pilots, flight attendants, and machinists all
walked out to block Lorenzo's plan to downsize the airline and bust the unions, the Congress
attempted to set up a panel to investigate the dispute, but Bush was adamant in favor of Lorenzo
and vetoed any government probes. [fn 12]
Lorenzo's activities were decisive in the wrecking of US airline transportation during the Reagan-
Bush era. When Carl Icahn was in the process of taking over TWA, he was able to argue that the
need to compete in many of the same markets in which Lorenzo's airlines were active made
mandatory that the TWA work forccriteria pioneered with such ruthless aggressivity by Lorenzo have had the long-term of effect ofe accept similar sacrifices and wage cuts. The cost-cutting (^)
reducing safety margins and increasing the risk the travelling public must confront in any decision
to board an airliner operating under US jurisdiction. Eastern has disappeared, and Continental has
been joined in bankruptcy by Midway, America West, while Pan American sold off a large part of
its operations to Delta while teetering on the verge of liquidation. Icahn's TWA is bankrupt in everysense except the final technicalities. Northwest, having been taken through the wringer of an LBO
by Albert Cecchi, is now busy lining up subsidies from the state of Minnesota and other sources as
a way to stay afloat. It is widely believed that when the dust settles, only Delta, American, and
perhaps United will remain among the large nationwide carriers. At that point hundreds of localities
will be served by onlprice competition or any other form of competition. With that, air travel will float beyond the reachy one airline, and that airline will proceed to raise its fares without any fear of (^)
of much of the American middle class, and the final fruits of airline deregulation will be manifest.
In the meantime, it must be feared that the erosion of safety margins will exact a growing toll of
human lives in airline accidents. If such tragedies occur, the bereaved relatives will perhaps recall
George Bush's friend Frank Lorenzo.
And how, the reader may ask, was George Bush doing financially while surrounded by so many
billions in junk bonds? Bush had always pontificated that he had led the fight for full public
disclosure of personal financial interests by elected officials. He never tired of repeating that "in
1967, as a freshman member of the House of Representatives, I led the fight for full financial