Biden For the People: A Historic Era of Righting Wrongs
In recent days the Biden administration has exercised its regulatory powers in ways that will affect virtually every American. Decades of inaction or reactionary policies are being undone, affecting the workplace, traveling, retirement investments, senior healthcare, and medical privacy.
I trust that Jim Miller will delve into the details on these pages, but new workplace rules are long overdue and deserve mention upfront. Eliminating non-compete clauses in employment contracts, means, among other things, that minimum wage fast food employees are free to change companies without fear of being sued. Expanding the definition of employees eligible for overtime will make life better for workers mischaracterized as management in just about every industry.
As of October, the Department of Transportation’s rules for passengers on domestic airlines and flights to and from the United States operated by foreign airlines just got a whole bunch more consumer-friendly.
Via the New York Times:
“Passengers deserve to know upfront what costs they are facing and should get their money back when an airline owes them — without having to ask,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg in a statement, adding that the changes would not only save passengers “time and money,” but also prevent headaches.
The department’s new rules, Mr. Buttigieg said, will hold airlines to clear and consistent standards when they cancel, delay or substantially change flights, and require automatic refunds to be issued within weeks. They will also require them to reveal all fees before a ticket is purchased.
As of September 23, 2024 Labor Dept rules will do more to protect consumers saving for retirement from improper retirement investment advice. Investment firms can no longer put their own financial interest ahead of the people they’re supposed to be serving.
Recent analysis by the Council of Economic Advisers of just one investment product — fixed index annuities — suggests that conflicted advice could cost savers up to $5 billion per year. Such conflicts can reduce retirement investors’ returns and increase costs that chip away at many workers’ savings.
The rule also ensures investment professionals can compete for business on a level playing field, instead of being hindered by a skewed system in which different standards exist for advice providers based on the products they recommend. Firms and investment professionals that are working hard to give advice in retirement investors’ best interest should not be penalized for responsibly managing their conflicts of interest and making prudent and loyal recommendations. Retirement investors are best protected by a uniform and protective framework.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, according to Vice President Kamala Harris, will insist on higher minimum staffing requirements for patients in nursing homes and receiving home care, as well as the workers who care for them. Home healthcare companies will now be required to spend 80% of the federal dollars they receive on workers’ salaries rather than administrative overhead.
Consumer organizations and labor unions pushed for the new rule, but nursing home operators strongly oppose the new mandate, saying it will force facilities to close because of a shortage of nurses. In response, Health and Human Services secretary Xavier Becerra told Tami Luhby of CNN that no one should live in facilities that are unsafe or should receive inferior care. Luhby noted that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in September launched a $75 million campaign to increase the number of nurses in nursing homes.
The Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Health and Human Services has announced they are strengthening a final rule regarding HIPAA medical privacy for people from traveling to states seeking to obtain abortion, contraception, or fertility treatments.
Via Daily Kos:
In the months since Roe vs. Wade was overturned, Republican attorney generals in 19 forced birth states are demanding the right for local law enforcement and prosecutors to obtain the health records of women who travel out of state for reproductive healthcare. This is further evidence that Republicans have no intention of simply allowing states to decide whether or not they want abortion to be legal within their borders–they wish to force their beliefs on the entire country–in fact, in the budget House Republicans proposed in March, they endorsed a nationwide abortion ban with no exceptions., not even for cases of rape or incest, or even the life of the mother.
Finally, an acknowledgement of dozens of big and small antitrust actions by the Biden administration.
So many parts of our economy are ruled by corporations who’ve basically bought out their competition. Forty-plus years of government regulation informed by the notion that efficiency was more important than competition or innovation have fostered a billionaire class that believes in nothing but shareholder return and executive avarice.
Mergers and acquisitions among big companies are getting more than a cursory look over; consumer concerns are now factored into oversight.
The FTC’s antitrust division and the Department of Justice are making herculean efforts to undo the economic perversion wreaked upon the country by corporations who believe they are too big to be regulated. Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft domination of various sectors is being challenged in courts with the notion that present circumstances are not beneficial to society.
As the Biden administration was getting prepared to assume power in late 2020, law professor Zephyr Teachout published a blueprint for monopoly busting in the New Republic. It concluded:
The real reason Biden should act is not that it is good politics, or that he has the vast regulatory state suddenly at his disposal, but because the crisis of entrenched corporate power is at bottom a mortal threat to a fair society and anything resembling a functioning democracy. As FDR said in that speech, the “new industrial dictatorship” is incompatible with democracy, and when “opportunity [is] limited by monopoly,” private enterprise becomes “privileged enterprise, not free enterprise.” People are suffering because big pharma demands outrageous prices, big ag and big tech steal their wages, and their communities are hollowed out by the great sucking sound of Wall Street’s private equity combine. And they are mad because they are also getting shut out of the democracy that is supposed to stop this from happening.
Joe Biden has wanted to be president his entire life, and when he set out on this third journey to the presidency, he had a vision: restore the America he knows. But he can’t. There’s no going back to Kansas—or Scranton, as the case may be. But there is a clear path to a more viable and equitable future—a unique chance not merely to build back better, as his campaign slogan had it, but to ensure that the American economy, like the government Biden is poised to lead, actually works for the American people.
PS – If you’re wondering why so many new regulations have been pumping out from the administration lately, be aware that new rules promulgated after late May could be overturned via the Congressional Review Act next year, especially if Republicans control Washington.
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Wednesday News to Peruse
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I Am a Jewish Student at Columbia. Don’t Believe What You’re Being Told About ‘Campus Antisemitism’ by Jonathan Ben-Menachem at Zeteo
As this national discourse over “campus antisemitism” reached a boiling point over the weekend, the Gaza Solidarity Encampment saw CUAD ( Columbia University Apartheid Divest coalition ) organizers lead joint Muslim and Jewish prayer sessions and honor each other’s dead. This is wholesome, human stuff – it doesn’t make for sensationalist headlines about Jew-hating Ivy Leaguers.
On Monday, I joined hundreds of my fellow student workers for a walk-out in solidarity with the encampment; we listened respectfully as a similarly sizable group of Columbia faculty held a rally on the library steps. Frankly, it didn’t feel much different from the environment during my union’s most recent strike on campus – I felt inspired again by my colleagues’ commitment to making Columbia a safer and better place to work and study.
Later that night, a Passover Seder service was held at the encampment. Would an antisemitic student movement welcome Jews in this way? I think not.
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Legal system closes in on crypto by Michael Hiltzik at the Los Angeles Times
What is driving the interest of politicians in promoting an asset class that hasn’t shown any value except where fraud or theft is involved? As is so often the case, it’s money — the green, foldable kind.
Crypto promoters have been stepping up their lobbying in Washington; crypto firms spent nearly $20 million on lobbying in the first nine months of 2023, according to the watchdog group Open Secrets.
As a push for a new regulatory approach, especially among House Republicans, dovetails with an election year, much more spending would appear to be in the offing. It’s a win-win-lose situation, with politicians and crypto promoters poised to win, and ordinary investors as well as the economy as a whole poised to lose.
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The Real Culprit in Our Housing and Homelessness Crisis: Wall Street by Thom Hartmann at the New Republic
As noted in a Wall Street Journal article titled “Meet Your New Landlord: Wall Street,” in just one suburb of Nashville, Spring Hill, “four firms … own nearly 700 houses … [which] amounts to about 5% of all the houses in town.”
This is the tiniest tip of the iceberg. The same thing is happening in cities and suburbs all across America; the investment goliaths use finely tuned computer algorithms to sniff out houses they can turn into rental properties, making over-market and unbeatable cash bids often within minutes of a house hitting the market.
After stripping neighborhoods of homes families can buy, they then begin raising rents as high as the market will bear. In Spring Hill, for example, the vice mayor, Bruce Hull, told the Journal you used to be able to rent “a three bedroom, two bath house for $1,000 a month.” Today, the Journal notes, “the average rent for 148 single-family homes in Spring Hill owned by the big four [Wall Street investor] landlords was about $1,773 a month…”
