From the Open Markets Institute's Mat Stoller and Austin Frederick, who analyzed the FTC's panel, "The Current Economic Understanding of Multi-Sided Platforms," in which economic experts told the regulator that Big Tech's monopoly power just isn't a problem: "every single economist testifying on the issue of corporate concentration derived income, directly or indirectly, from large corporations. Beyond that, the hearing itself was held at the Antonin Scalia Law School, which is financed by Google and Amazon."
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The Environmental Defense Fund and the Southern Environmental Law Center sued the EPA to force it to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request for access to emails to and from thinktanks associated with the climate denial industry like the Heartland Institute, Plants Need CO2, The Right Climate Stuff, and Junk Science.
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The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is Elizabeth Warren's gift that keeps on giving -- one of the most effective US government agencies, handing out real punishment to banks that break the law, fighting loan-sharks that prey on poor people, and maintaining a database of vetted consumer complaints against banks that have ripped them off.
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Scott Pruitt, an asshole, was Donald Trump's pick to head the EPA.
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The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, founded by Elizabeth Warren prior to her career as a senator, was once the gem of the US political system, a consistently effective force for punishing finance industry wrongdoing, until Trump let Wall Street robber barons loose on it, under the direction of a lawyer who represented loan sharks before going to work for the Trump administration.
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Eight of Trump's 17 cabinet secretaries do not release any information about their travel schedules -- a standard practice under the Obama and GW Bush administrations; 4 others only release incomplete, "sporadic" information; Treasury only started releasing Munichin's schedule in November and six departments illegally withhold details on who their cabinet secretaries meet with (two released some information after being sued).
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The FCC's Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on killing Net Neutrality was flooded by anti-neutrality bots who submitted millions of comments under the names of fake people, dead people, and living people who supported Net Neutrality. The New York Attorney General has opened an investigation into this sabotage of the lawmaking process, but the FCC is obstructing justice, refusing to comply with requests that would help the AG get to the bottom of things.
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Trump FCC Chairman Ajit Pai -- a former Verizon exec -- says that we can count on ISPs to voluntarily refrain from abusing their natural monopolies to degrade service to their customers in order to maximize their profits.
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A group of 21 of the internet's most esteemed pioneers have written an open letter to the FCC's Congressional overseers that critiques the agency's foolish, self-serving description of how the net works in eye-watering detail.
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"Taking away #NetNeutrality is the Authoritarian dream. Consolidating information into the hands of a few controlled by a few. Dangerous territory". @MarkRuffalo; Ajit Pai: "These comments are absurd. Getting rid of government authority over the Internet is the exact opposite of authoritarianism. Government control is the defining feature of authoritarians, including the one in North Korea."
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The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is a rare gem in the US financial regulatory apparatus, a regulator that actually tackles fraud and criminality by monied, powerful financial institutions, exacts meaningful penalties from them, and forces them to stop. They're one of the only things standing between you and highway robbery.
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If Trump FCC chairman Ajit Pai had confined his attack on Net Neutrality to merely rolling back the 2015 Title II rules, he might have gotten away with it; but like the Republican plan to kill Obamacare, the Republican plan to rob the middle class to enrich billionaires, and, well, every other Republican plan in this administration, Pai's plan is so grotesque, so overreaching, so nakedly corrupt that it is likely to collapse under its own weight.
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When Trump's Health and Human Services secretary Tom Price lost his job for chartering private jets to fly him all around America, it left a vacancy in Trump's cabinet of billionaire gators that he's been filling the DC swamp with.
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When mainland US cities like Houston and Miami get hit by hurricanes, they rely on mutual aid deals with out-of-state and Canadian power authorities to rebuild, as hundreds of skilled maintenance workers flood in and work for free to get their grid up and running; but debt-crushed Puerto Rico is paying $300 million to Whitefish Energy, a two-person company from Trump Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke's hometown of Whitefish, Montana.
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Brett Gaylor from Mozilla writes, "The FCC received 22 million comments in response to its plan to repeal Net Neutrality legislation. So we've created a virtual way for you to drop 22 million virtual leaflets on Ajit Pai at the FCC headquarters. And we're almost there! Folks have dropped over twenty million so far, and in the process made weird cyber graffiti appear all over DC. Help us get to 22 million!" Read the rest
On September 29, weeks after Equifax admitted to having lost the most sensitive financial and personal information of 143,000,000 Americans (but a week before Equifax admitted that the total was actually 145,500,000) (and counting), the IRS awarded the company a no-bid contract for $7,250,000 to verify taxpayer identities and curtail fraud. Read the rest
