“How can that be?” you ask. “Joe Biden hasn’t transformed the Middle East into peaceful democracies like George W. Bush did. Nor has he ended racial and partisan animosity in America like Barack Obama did, or drained the swamp like Donald Trump did. What has Biden done?” He has taken on a challenge as big as his three predecessors’ ambitions: breaking corporate monopoly power and restoring healthy competition.
Look at the ambitiousness of Biden’s people. “She was put in this role to shake things up” is a profile of Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission. She is one of a group of Biden appointees to key offices, including Jonathan Kanter (DOJ Antitrust), Gary Gensler (SEC), and Rohit Chopra (CFPB). Their task is to promote competition (the source of all capitalism’s benefits), mainly by breaking monopolies. The people Biden chose for this task are not timid, half-ass compromisers (unlike every other political appointee of the last fifty-five years who got put anywhere near the real problems). As the Khan profile puts it, they are people “who think excessive corporate power lies at the root of most social ills,” and they are absolutely correct.
The effects of excessive corporate power spill everywhere, and Biden is aligning the whole government with his July 2021 Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy: “The Order includes 72 initiatives by more than a dozen federal agencies.” Party leaders (and big donors) are resisting this radical new direction (or return to basics) for the Democratic Party. But from net neutrality to stopping meatpackers’ domination of farmers, from the right to repair to the uses of personal data, Biden is challenging monopoly power. If you want to know why American health care is bizarrely expensive yet also incompetent, why baby formula can stay out of stock for three desperate months due to a single plant having troubles, why we can’t meet our own semiconductor needs, why we can’t build electric vehicle charging stations at anything like a reasonable pace, why college costs so much, why the Pentagon’s contractors can’t build new weapons systems that are completed before they’re obsolete, why labor unions in America got crushed and wages for most of us have stagnated for fifty years, why rents are exorbitant, why a computer glitch in one airline can practically shut down air travel for a day, if you wonder about these and a thousand other small (and large) constant hits to the quality of our daily lives, the answer to your question is monopoly power. Even the headline-grabbing disasters—wars, environmental catastrophes, refugee migrations—are always partly, and often mostly, driven by excessive corporate power.
Too Big to Fail
Saying Biden has taken on this fundamental problem doesn’t mean he is solving it. But he is, slowly. Progress is difficult because the forces arrayed in support of monopoly power are entrenched in every institution of our society, and they have controlled government policy (and government appointments) for as long as anyone can remember. Reagan blessed the Chicago School’s “big is good, big is efficient” mantra, pretty much ending antitrust enforcement for forty years. Corporate concentration exploded. Now, every senior official, every manager, every judge, in every large business and institution in our country has spent their entire career in a culture that took unchecked corporate power as a simple fact of life, the iron law of our economy. And all of this was tacit, complex, and hidden from the American public. Until the Great Recession. The 2008 meltdown brought the concept of “too big to fail” into the public’s consciousness, as big banks stole six trillion dollars of middle-class home equity and not a single executive (or even flunky) was prosecuted. But now we know.
“Too big to fail” started the slow burn among citizens that finally allowed the anti-monopoly movement (crying in the wilderness for decades) to get some traction. The movement now has real power because Biden supports it. The FTC has begun blocking mergers and the DOJ is prosecuting anticompetitive behavior. The formerly unchallenged lords of the universe were caught flat-footed, because they always before had a veto on those dweeby, goody-two-shoes anti-monopolists getting into office. And they are furious. (...)
Taking on monopolies has produced a string of accomplishments. The hearing aid monopoly was broken and prices plummeted. Insulin prices are capped at $35 a month. Pay-day lender interest rates are capped at somewhere around 40 percent, rather than the hundreds of percent interest these predators were charging (specifically, their loophole around state caps was closed). Non-compete clauses that block ordinary employees from changing jobs, or negotiating on fair terms with their bosses, are being outlawed. Mandatory arbitration that deprives employees of the right to take grievances to court are starting to head that way, too. Mergers and acquisitions have tanked. Private equity sharks are laying off staff. Those infuriating “junk fees” tacked onto bank accounts, tickets, hotels, and everything else are being exposed and curtailed.
Monopoly is so destructive that just beginning to challenge it produces a wealth of small benefits. But they are small, and they will be temporary, unless the system that enables monopolies is changed down deep.
by Jerry Cayford, 3QD | Read more:
Image: Biden: Mueller / MSC, CC BY 3.0 DE; Brandeis: Harris & Ewing, photographer, Public domain; both via Wikimedia Commons[ed. Not sure how much Biden is actually directing policy (or any president, for that matter) - more like his administration, which seems composed of many smart, forward-thinking, pragmatic, well-seasoned staff. That's where success (and progress) lays. Contrast to Trump, who micro-managed every decision and made sure everything flowed through him, whether he knew anything about an issue or not (or the nuances thereof). If you're tired and want to see an executive who's actually smarter than their staff (and most everybody else), see here. The only reasonable choice in my opinion.]
