The President’s power to act on inequality isn’t limited to executive orders
by David Atkins
As the right moans and cries about the President’s planned use of executive orders to implement policy insofar as he can given the utter intransigence of Congressional Republicans, it’s worth remembering that the President’s options aren’t limited to executive orders.
Certainly, he should be applauded for using the power of the White House to increase the minimum wage for federal contractors. But the President can do much more than that to address inequality.
By far the most salutary thing the President could do is to instruct the Justice Department to prosecute misdeeds in the financial sector. While there are many problems facing the American economy, one of the biggest is that there is simply no accountability for people at the top of the financial food chain. Sometimes an institution pays a meager fine, but the players themselves never go to jail unless they were caught swindling even bigger fish above them.
Making an example of a few of the reckless, unaccountable criminal greedheads at J.P. Morgan, HSBC and similar institutions would drive up the President’s popularity, return at least some belief in basic fairness to the general public, and put a chill on financial sector excesses at the same time.
The power of the Justice Department is second only to the power of the Defense Department in the President’s bag of tools. It can and should be used to improve and enforce economic fairness and restore a sense of public trust.
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