I wanted to write a quick note to you to urge you to work on rejecting any merger between Delta Airlines and Northwest Airlines.

My occupation is as a software programmer, and I'm just a consumer and a mildly frequent passenger (so I don't pretend to be an expert in the industry), but I can't imagine there is any easy way for lobbyists to sugarcoat the fact that recent airline mergers have been uniformly bad for everyone (e.g. TWA and Reno Air being acquired by American Airlines, where St. Louis airport has been decimated; USAirways swallowing America West and the organizational chaos that's resulted). There's no indication that the combined Delta/Northwest airlines would be any different. The executive teams have made many nice promises, but as soon as the merger goes through they're likely to forget those promises and close hubs, offshore & outsource work and lay off thousands of domestic employees, and of course raise prices. This certainly goes against the intent of Congress when airline deregulation was passed years ago: just like AT&T has acquired all the "Baby Bells" to strengthen their pricing positions and reduce competition, these airline mergers also reduce competition.

I do realize that rising fuel costs mean higher fares, and that's very reasonable. But the airlines are playing games with consumers (advertising "each way" fares before adding on a pile of taxes and arbitrary fees), and this merger proposal serves as a reward and permission for them to continue their bad behavior.

This is a transaction designed primarily to line the pockets of "current" stakeholders (executives, investment companies) while continuing to hurt consumers and "former" stakeholders (long term & loyal employees & unions who held shares of the companies before bankruptcy, now worthless).

Please consider the impact to consumers and employees and I hope you'll work for healthy competition and against any further consolidation of the airline industry.