1. President Obama should instruct his Attorney General to start enforcing the nation’s antitrust laws the way Democrats used to do. Once upon a time, monopoly and oligopoly were illegal in America. Our ancestors believed, correctly, that concentrated economic power was incompatible with democracy in all sorts of ways. Since the days of Ronald Reagan, however, every succeeding administration has chosen to enforce the antitrust laws only if the monopoly or oligopoly in question threatened to cause big price increases for consumers — and sometimes not even then. This has come to mean that nearly all mergers and takeovers are permitted, and that achieving monopoly has once again become the obvious strategic objective of every would-be business leader. Unrestrained corporate power naturally yields unrestrained wealth for corporate leaders and their Wall Street backers. In a recent essay in Harper’s Magazine about inequality (once Obama’s favorite subject), the economist Joseph Stiglitz declared monopoly to be one of the main culprits: “The most successful ‘entrepreneurs’ have figured out how to create barriers to competition, behind which they can earn huge profits. It is not a surprise that the world’s richest person, Bill Gates, earned his fortune through a company that has engaged in anticompetitive practices in Europe, America, and Asia. Nor that the world’s second richest, Carlos Slim, made his fortune by taking advantage of a poorly designed privatization process, creating a virtual monopoly in Mexico’s telecom industry. . . .” Barack Obama could change the entire thing—could bend the inequality curve itself—merely by deciding to enforce the nation’s antitrust laws in the same way that administrations before Reagan did. The laws themselves were written a century ago, so our current, useless Congress would have no say in the matter. 2. Investigate and prosecute fraud committed during the housing bubble. This one would require a little urgency, since we are getting close to the statute of limitations, but it’s the right thing to do—hell, it borders on existential necessity. No one cares about the gargantuan civil settlements the Justice Department has been winning from the Wall Street banks. The law enforcement community, for their part, has been content to blame individual homebuyers for the disaster that sank the economy. The leaders of Obama’s justice department, meanwhile, worry themselves sick that prosecuting financiers might damage the banks and the economy. “Too big to jail” is a philosophy that will curdle patriotism and kill idealism for years to come—an ironic end to a presidency that began with so much “Hope.” It is Obama’s greatest failure; indeed, it borders on an outrage. He can still salvage the situation, however, by investigating and prosecuting high-ranking financiers for the obvious wave of fraud that puffed the bubble to begin with. Doing so would signal that no one is above the law; that America insists on accountability even for the very rich. It might even make the president a hero overnight. 3. Make it clear that he will no longer tolerate the college tuition price spiral. President Obama loves to encourage young people to get themselves a college education. The bachelor’s degree, he thinks, is the golden ticket that makes a career and everything else possible. For society as a whole, it’s the platinum bullet that will solve tough problems like inequality and the collapse of the middle class. What the president hasn’t been able to do is talk the colleges themselves into playing along. Obama can make sure each student has sufficient federal loans, and he can come up with a decent loan-forgiveness program. But he has been unable to stop his friends in academia from ripping those students off, from burdening them with debts so overwhelming that they may never be able to escape. With a little originality, however, Obama can get started on the problem. The federal government has enormous leverage over the nation’s colleges and universities thanks to its massive funding of higher education. And the time to use that leverage is now.
Posted on: Sun, 17 Aug 2014 23:29:24 +0000
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