Schumer’s Family Business

September 7, 2022September 7, 2022 Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)1 Comment

Blackstone just hired Chuck Schumer’s son-in-law as a lobbyist, the latest of his relatives to take a job at a company lobbying the Senate on major legislation.
Schumer’s Family Business

Book publishers just spent 3 weeks in court arguing they have no idea what they’re doing

August 30, 2022August 30, 2022 Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

On August 22, oral arguments ended in the Justice Department’s antitrust trial to block the book publisher Penguin Random House from merging with rival Simon & Schuster. The result of the trial, which is expected to be decided later this fall, will have a massive impact on both the multibillion-dollar book publishing industry and on how the government handles corporate consolidation going forward. Perhaps fittingly for a case with such high stakes, the trial was characterized by obfuscation and downright disinformation nearly the whole way through.
Book publishers just spent 3 weeks in court arguing they have no idea what they’re doing

Everyone pays the cost as the rich keep spending

August 30, 2022August 30, 2022 Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Everyone pays the cost as the rich keep spending

Meanwhile, the Biden White House is doing what it can to buffer inflationary pain for working people. It has been releasing strategic petroleum reserves in a partly successful effort to lower prices at the pump, extending pandemic-era caps on some student loan payments and pushing for antitrust action in areas where corporate concentration (which has grown hand in hand with financialisation) may be responsible for some inflationary pressure.

But more changes are needed. The success of corporate lobbyists in overturning efforts to roll back carried interest loopholes are shameful. Student debt forgiveness — no matter how generous it is — will not change the fact that the cost of four years of private university in the US (an elastic cost that can be bid up indefinitely by the global rich) is nearly double the median family income. Housing markets continue to cry out for major reform.

I suspect it will take a younger generation to push through these sorts of systemic changes. They simply don’t have as much asset wealth to protect.

Baby Formula Crisis Requires Urgent Action to Address Shortage of Vital Nutrition & Price Gouging

July 25, 2022July 25, 2022 Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Four corporations control 90% of the baby formula market in the United States, and as a national baby formula shortage drags on, it has impacted working-class families of color the most. We get an update from Democratic Congressmember Ro Khanna of California, who just wrote an open letter urging leaders of federal agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration to take bolder action to address the shortage. Khanna discusses efforts to increase production domestically and supplement the shortage with formula from other nations, and why he is calling for President Biden to go further and pass antitrust laws to reduce reliance on corporate monopolies for vital products. “Why is it that we are so dependent on one or two manufacturers in this country?” says Khanna. “This is a problem not just in baby formula.”
Baby Formula Crisis Requires Urgent Action to Address Shortage of Vital Nutrition & Price Gouging

Democrats Hope To Gotcha The GOP With Doomed New Net Neutrality Bill

July 21, 2022July 21, 2022 Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

As we’ve long noted, the Trump era attack on net neutrality was one of the more grotesque examples of regulatory capture and corruption in Internet policy history.
The rules, which imposed some very modest restrictions on giant telecom monopolies to prevent them from abusing market power, were very popular among consumers of all political stripes. And the Trump FCC’s repeal involved using a lot of outright lies and even fake and dead people to reduce the oversight of extremely unpopular telecom monopolies.
Despite the Democrats controlling the FCC for more than a year and a half, they still haven’t done anything about it.
Democrats Hope To Gotcha The GOP With Doomed New Net Neutrality Bill

Google tells Congress the proposed antitrust bill would hinder its censorship efforts

June 23, 2022 Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | June 9, 2022
Google continues to lobby and campaign against legislative efforts aimed at curbing its monopolistic power, this time openly, in a blog post.
Google tells Congress the proposed antitrust bill would hinder its censorship efforts

Privacy and security: The bills would create greater incentive for companies to improve privacy and security, while carefully protecting their ability to make those improvements.
National security: In contrast to misleading claims to the contrary, the bills have multiple layers of provisions protecting American national security and do not create significant new risks. Rather, the bills can restore competitive pressure that supports American dynamism and global technology leadership.
Content moderation: The bills preserve platforms’ abilities to moderate content as they see fit. The bills create a very high bar for disgruntled complainants seeking to abuse competitive provisions to advance content moderation grievances.
Definitions of covered platforms: The bills’ definitions of covered platforms offer functional, well-informed ways to get at gatekeeping platforms of most concern, while effectively excluding smaller businesses.

Hidden Anti-Cryptography Provisions in Internet Anti-Trust Bills

June 23, 2022June 23, 2022 Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

by Bruce Schneier
Two bills attempting to reduce the power of Internet monopolies are currently being debated in Congress: S. 2992, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act; and S. 2710, the Open App Markets Act. Reducing the power to tech monopolies would do more to “fix” the Internet than any other single action, and I am generally in favor of them both. (The Center for American Progress wrote a good summary and evaluation of them. I have written in support of the bill that would force Google and Apple to give up their monopolies on their phone app stores.)
Hidden Anti-Cryptography Provisions in Internet Anti-Trust Bills

Previously:

Google tells Congress the proposed antitrust bill would hinder its censorship efforts

Biden regime wants private companies to censor online speech

April 28, 2022April 28, 2022 Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | April 26, 2022
The White House continued pressuring the tech giants to censor content that it deems to be “misinformation” yesterday by throwing its support behind the use of Section 230 and antitrust reforms to combat misinformation.
Biden regime wants private companies to censor online speech

Renegade: Weaponising Our Rights

March 29, 2022March 29, 2022 Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Published: 18 March 2022 Guests: Alfred de Zayas
Link to original article.
Weaponising Our Rights
Many Western organisations urgently need reviving, especially in the face of rising global authoritarianism, the weaponisation of human rights, a failing legacy media and the unintended effects of sanctions.
Renegade: Weaponising Our Rights