The interlocking directorate is anathema to trustbusters and corporate watchdogs. It occurs when a board member or top executive of one company sits on the board of another company, accumulating undue power over a given industry. When it reduces competition, the arrangement is forbidden by the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914.
If Henry De Lamar Clayton, the Alabama congressman who introduced the aforementioned act, were still with us, he'd presumably be shocked at the creation of the most far-reaching interlocking directorate in U.S. history. Obama Inc. has effectively won a seat on the board of companies at the heart of the nation's industrial production and its financial system. The robber barons of old would marvel at the tentacles of influence of Barack Obama, a CEO whose power would overawe J. P. Morgan.
In difficult negotiations with business, Obama now has the advantage of sitting at both sides of the table. This makes the art of the deal considerably simpler than when Donald Trump wrote about it years ago. Consider the matter of CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy), the mileage standards that have been resisted by automakers for decades in a multifaceted regulatory and legal battle featuring enviros, the state of California, and industrial-state lawmakers:
The other day, Obama snipped the Gordian knot in an offhand swipe with his fingernail clippers - he gathered Detroit's CEOs in the Rose Garden and decreed that they had to meet a drastic increase in the standards, to 39 mpg for cars in 2016.
He needn't bother with the traditional "jawboning" of an industry, the tiresome work of a Harry Truman or Lyndon Johnson - not when both General Motors and Chrysler continue to exist on the basis of Obama's good will. After their ['structured', by the White House] bankruptcies, the companies will give a 72 percent and 8 percent ownership stake, respectively, to the federal government...
[This is how tyrannies are established, one step at a time. It can happen here. It may be happening now.]
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