'Facebook should be broken up': 

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Tue, February 1, 2022, 

New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sits down with Yahoo Finance Editor-in-Chief Andy Serwer to describe her strategy when grilling chief executives on Capitol Hill.

Video Transcript

ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: When you look at a company like Facebook-- you can't kind of put them all in a-- in the same boat. They do different things. But when you look at a company like Facebook and the completely corrosive ways that they have exercised an abuse, I believe, in-- in civil society writ large-- not just our democracies.

But you look at, for example, what we're hearing from other countries when we talk about production of vaccines or perhaps like what we can do to export, help them, they-- they say-- it's not just-- there are some things that the United States provide that are welcome. There's also things that we want the United States to stop exporting. And one of those things is disinformation and disinformation through US-founded companies like Facebook that have absolutely slowed and frankly sabotaged the global effort to fight against the coronavirus.

And we see this both-- this disinformation used both in-- in the public health sphere. We've also seen-- social scientists have truly shown the impact that Facebook has had in contributing to social violence and perhaps even accelerating at large scale very dangerous and some would call genocidal activities in places like South Asia, et cetera, human rights abuses and also hate here at home.

ANDY SERWER: But I'm curious what do you think we should do about them or what we should do to them, I guess.

ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: Well, Facebook should be broken up. We should pursue antitrust activity on Facebook, and there are so many different reasons why. They are acting as an advertiser. They are acting as both platform and vendor. They are a communications-- they are a communications platform, which has historically been a well-established domain of antitrust. And so because they are so many businesses and industries in one, the case is-- I believe-- right there in and of itself as to why they should be subject to antitrust activity.

AOC: ‘Not sure’ why Biden hasn’t

forgiven student loan debt

Tue, February 1, 2022,

New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joins 'Influencers with Andy Serwer' to discuss how student loan debt is weighing on the U.S. economy.

Video Transcript

ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: I cannot understate the danger and the risk economically, politically, and just where we are right now as a country of allowing the moratorium on student loan payments to lapse in May. If we just allow a-- a full, just continuation of student loan payments, we are talking about a catastrophic development for millions, the over-- almost 50 million student loan borrowers in this country. There were millions of student loan borrowers that were already defaulting going into the pandemic.

But more than that, we are at such a delicate point in the financial and just general economic recovery post-COVID that to then restart payments that are essentially the size of a mortgage payment, sometimes even larger, on a generation that was already so devastated not just by this but the recession, et cetera, I believe it could very-- it could throw out of balance already what is a very fragile recovery.

And not only that, but this forgiveness is on-- I mean, forgiveness is-- is the just thing to do. It's the right thing to do. Why the president hasn't done it yet, I'm not sure, but I-- I do think that this is an issue of increasing urgency. He has already indicated an openness to it. And he has actually already used his authority to forgive student loan debt in certain small, very narrow cases.

ANDY SERWER: Because there are people who suggest he doesn't have the authority. Is that a legitimate argument or just maybe a smokescreen?

ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: I don't think it's a legitimate argument. We've seen-- in fact, we've seen him use-- the same legal authority that-- that the president has used to suspend student loan payments is the same authority that he would use to cancel them. And not only that, but he has used that authority. He has indicated a willingness to use the authority. And I think that it would be extraordinarily important and urgent for him to do so.

ANDY SERWER: And what about the argument that it's a moral hazard? In other words, you're letting people off the hook by forgiving the debt?

ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: Well what I think is the true moral hazard here is the surging costs of education in the United States. What has actually created the moral hazard is this guarantee of saying, we will issue minors hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loan debt at almost any level with almost no limit. And we will allow colleges and universities to dramatically increase the costs of their tuition with the guarantee of that loan value on 17-year-olds.

So what is the actual true moral hazard here in the situation is the controls on the cost of education in the United States. And one very important control in this to that note is tuition-free public colleges and universities. Because then what that does is that it introduces competition into the market to which private universities have to actually meet a lower baseline. But people act as though it's just fancy public schools that are extremely expensive now. But public college tuition has also increased dramatically far beyond the pace of inflation.