This morning The Boeing Company announced that the chief of Boeing’s commercial airplane division, Stan Deal, is leaving immediately. Chief executive officer Dave Calhoun is stepping down at the end of the year. Chair of the board Larry Kellner will not stand for reelection.
“America deserves better than a feeble, confused, and tired Donald Trump.” Well, that line needs to go up all over social media today.
Love the comparison of the Boeing disaster to the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, and Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su's quote about it. It's so dystopian that any decent citizen would buy this nonsense about the evil "Deep State" when the federal government exists, as she says, to create “programs that generations of Americans have relied on for economic security and dignity, including a nationwide minimum wage, health and safety regulations, restrictions on child labor, and more.”
The public deserves an explanation as to why the court lowered Donald's bond.
On the face of it, there was no good reason for it and their decision has every appearance of favoritism. There are many others who had worse circumstances and their bonds weren't reduced. It wasn't ever proposed or considered - so why him??
While Reagan joked that "I'm with the government and I'm here to help." and his then henchmen said things like "I want a government so small I could drown it in a bathtub", so-called free market Republicans worked across generations to establish a perspective that government is bloated, ineffective, and if it weren't for taxpayers having to fund all of the 'unnecessary' regulations (like worker safety, food safety or air travel safety, for example), taxes would be much lower, and workers would be much better off.
This was an important frame. It provided the opening for the GOP to make changes in a intentionally complex taxation code that vastly reduced tax responsibility for Americans accumulating significant wealth through exceptionally high income (CEO's for example), investment, and inheritance (by framing estate taxes as 'death' taxes -and some great detail as to why in political linguist George Lakoff's "Don't Think of an Elephant"). The Reagan/Bush/Trump/GOP-led changes are fundamental reasons a hedge fund manager might pay a lower percentage of taxes than a public school teacher or a first responder.
The concept expressed in Heritage's Project 2025 is to replace public sector employees with those who despise the actual programs agencies are established to serve. When you deconstruct their position, it is to staff public service with people who all believe the public is better served by private sector enterprise.
I've asked this question before. Can you imagine being the hiring manager for a computer chip manufacturing company (now operating in the United States with thanks to the Biden/Harris administration and the CHIPS and Science Act), and someone you are considering for hire tells you they dislike the company, the company has the wrong mission, and everyone here is probably lazy, slow, and should be fired. The objective of the "loyalty" component of Project 2025 is to control and decimate the public sector, shift responsibilities to private employers -where the primary objective is to maximize a return on investment instead of important societal benefits and outcomes. It is also to attack and erode regulation and enforcement from within government (instead of, or in combination with attacking public safety regulations in the judicial system).
HCR, as an historian, has a point of view that goes beyond the immediate news to make connections and illustrate principles. News that reveals that impartial, expert government servants have been essential to ensure airplane safety, worker protection, and technologies to address climate change. The connections, beyond the immediate news, that all these things are potentially under threat. That is why HCR's commentary is so valuable.
The criticism of Donald Trump issued by the Biden Administration was a welcome development. This is not going "low" - these criticisms are accurate, as stated. Trump is “weak and desperate", his fund-raising is bad, he has not been out on the campaign trail like Biden has been, and his speeches are getting more outrageous every week, with viral quotes that cannot possibly be bringing in new supporters. His Project 2025 agenda is indeed "dangerous" and threatens to turn the U.S. into "illiberal" Hungary. Trump has shown no physical stamina, has offered innumerable "confused" statements in his speeches, and is regularly described as looking "tired.” It is just that the Administration needs to have the courage to say the truth. This is not only useful to bolster the contrast with Biden's laundry list of accomplishments, but also is politically smart, since there is nothing more likely to increase the probability of additional Trump missteps than to needle his phenomenally fragile personality. This will not push undecided voters away, since these criticisms can be justified as accurate, with concrete examples. I have a 24-Page Word documents of nothing more that incoherent, dangerous and/or inaccurate statements by Trump just since 1/8/2024, less than 3-months. Those who dismiss these critiques are dyed-in-the-wool Trump supporters for whom nothing the Biden Administration says will ever make a difference.
“. . . He doesn’t appear to be a fan of it.” Indeed. Yet, he gets endless gifts from the courts that normal folks could never expect.
Sad that the NY appellate court is so tone-deaf, or simply lazy that they felt no need to explain their wildly favorable ruling for Cheetolini. Reeks of corruption, especially coming in the nick of time with no explanation.
Putting a stay on the other penalties is even more inexplicable. Sad that justice seems to be little more than a wistful dream, or something inflicted only on the non-wealthy.
There are other very significant moves that the Biden administration has made in an effort to unrig a crucial aspect of our economy.
'Why the Biden Administration Is Suing Apple and Investigating Big Grocers' (The New Yorker Mag., excerpt)
'A new generation of trustbusters is trying to use anti-monopoly laws to roll back concentrations of economic power.'
By John Cassidy
'The Department of Justice’s antitrust division made headlines last week by suing Apple and accusing the company of monopolizing the smartphone market and its associated services. The iPhone-maker “has maintained its power not because of its superiority, but because of its unlawful exclusionary behavior,” the U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said, at a public briefing in Washington.
'Meanwhile, in a move that received less attention, the staff of the Federal Trade Commission, the other big agency entrusted with enforcing competition laws, released a lengthy report on another increasingly concentrated part of the economy: the grocery industry. The F.T.C. report said that some big food-and-beverage retailers exploited the supply-chain disruptions associated with the covid-19 pandemic to squeeze their suppliers and “further hike prices to increase their profits.” In a statement accompanying the release of the report, Lina Khan, the F.T.C.’s chair, said that dominant retailers “used this moment to come out ahead at the expense of their competitors and the communities they serve.”
'Khan and Jonathan Kanter, who is the head of the D.O.J.’s antitrust division, are the leaders of the Biden Administration’s effort to confront big businesses that it claims are exploiting their market power to enrich themselves to the detriment of their clients and the market as a whole. This campaign has sometimes been a rocky one. The antitrust agencies have lost some big court cases, including an effort to block Microsoft from taking over the game maker Activision Blizzard, but they have successfully scuttled a number of deals, such as a takeover of the book publisher Simon & Schuster by Penguin Random House and a tie-up between American Airlines and JetBlue. In any case, an aggressive antitrust policy has become one of the defining features of this Administration, and it will surely continue if Joe Biden gets reëlected.'
'After Biden was elected President, in 2020, he nominated Khan, Kanter, and others associated with a new antitrust movement that traces its roots to Louis Brandeis, the early-twentieth-century trustbuster and Supreme Court Justice.'
'Biden also set up the White House Competition Council, which includes officials from many different government agencies. Although the President was hardly known as a scourge of corporations, he sounded some distinctly Brandeisian themes, declaring, in July, 2021, “Capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism—it’s exploitation.”
'Lately, he has been criticizing big corporations for price gouging, imposing junk fees, and shrinking the size of their products while maintaining prices—a phenomenon known as shrinkflation.'
'The revival of antitrust-enforcement efforts goes well beyond the issue of whether Snickers bars have shrunk. (After Biden suggested, in his State of the Union address, that they had got smaller, Mars, the maker of the caramel-peanut bars, issued a statement denying it.)
'Kanter, Khan, and their allies are basically claiming that rising monopoly power is a serious problem in many different parts of the economy, not just the technology sector, and that the country’s courts and policymakers need to address it aggressively across the board. The D.O.J.’s Apple lawsuit and
the F.T.C.’s report on the grocery industry illustrate many of the issues at stake.'
'At last week’s press conference, Kanter compared the government’s case against Apple to three famous anti-monopoly cases from the past: Standard Oil, A.T. & T., and Microsoft. During Bill Clinton’s Presidency, the Justice Department brought the Microsoft case, in 1998, accusing the software giant of exploiting its grip on the operating-system market to create a stranglehold for Web browsers, by forcing computer-makers to bundle Internet Explorer on its devices. The government argued that this tactic deprived consumers of choices and stifled innovation. In the Apple case, the Justice
Department is making a similar argument, claiming that Apple used technology restraints and restrictive contracts to keep smartphone users and application developers confined within its proprietary ecosystem, where it can charge high prices and fees. “Today, we stand here, once again, to protect competition and innovation for the next generation of technology,” Kanter said.
'The Justice Department’s complaint, which referenced internal communications from Apple that were subpoenaed, detailed a number of tactics that the company allegedly used to bolster and maintain its monopoly power. These included restricting the ability of iPhone users to download cloud-based games; refusing to integrate other text-messaging apps with its own iMessage system; and blocking “super apps” that would allow iPhone users to carry out a number of online activities (such as shopping, exchanging payments, and chatting) from within one application. The complaint also said
that Apple executives were concerned that, if iPhone users downloaded a super app, it would be easier for them to switch to a cheaper smartphone. The lawsuit quoted one Apple manager as saying that allowing super apps would “let the barbarians in at the gate.”
'The corporate behavior detailed in the F.T.C. report had less to do with technology innovation and more to do with sheer size. Between 1990 and 2019, the report noted, the four biggest grocers have increased their combined market share from fifteen per cent to more than thirty per cent. The report was based on information from three grocery retailers (Kroger, Walmart, and Amazon), three large food wholesalers (Associated Wholesale Grocers, C&S Wholesale Grocers, and McLane Company), and three big food producers (Kraft Heinz, Tyson Foods, and Procter & Gamble).'
'During the pandemic, as the big retailers experienced significant shortages and increases in the cost of the goods they sold, they used their size to pressure suppliers to favor them over smaller competitors for deliveries, and also raised their prices to cover their extra costs, the report said. Hiking their prices was a perfectly legitimate reaction, but the report presents prima-facie evidence that the grocers went beyond simply recuperating rising costs. As they raised their prices, their profit margins—the difference between their total revenues and total costs—reached six per cent in 2021, compared to 5.6 per cent in 2015, and then rose further, to seven per cent in the first nine months of 2023, when the rate of inflation was already coming down. “This profit trend casts doubt on assertions that rising prices at the grocery store are simply moving in lockstep with retailers’ own rising costs,” the report said. It also called on the full commission and Congress to look into this issue.'
'Apple, in a public statement, said the Justice Department’s lawsuit “threatens who we are,” and, if successful, would “set a dangerous precedent, empowering government to take a heavy hand in designing people’s technology.” Reacting to the F.T.C. report, the National Grocers Association, which represents independent grocers, said it confirmed that “national chains or so-called ‘power buyers’ are abusing their immense economic power to the detriment of competition and American consumers.”
'Given the glacial pace at which antitrust cases move through the courts, the Apple lawsuit likely won’t be resolved until the next Presidency. The Justice Department case that led to the breakup of A.T. & T. lasted eight years, and the Microsoft case took about three and a half years until a settlement was reached. Time isn’t the biggest challenge facing the Justice Department and F.T.C., though—that’s the U.S. court system. In the course of the past half century, many judges have applied a strict consumer-welfare standard to antitrust cases, which in practice means the government has to show that a certain corporate action or merger either led to higher prices or is likely to lead to them. In the high-tech
industry, particularly, where many apps and services are distributed at zero price, this standard is often difficult to apply. The courts, including the Supreme Court, in the 2004 Trinko case, have also adopted a skeptical attitude to claims that companies should be obliged to do business with potential competitors.'
'The Untied States’ antitrust laws date to the Sherman Act of 1890 and the Clayton Act of 1914. In many cases—such as those relating to price-fixing and other blatantly anticompetitive agreements, or tying requirements of the sort employed by Microsoft with its Internet Explorer browser—these laws are adequate for the task. But they weren’t designed for the digital age, and there is a clear need to update them for the twenty-first century. In recent years, the European Union has gone at least some way to show how this could be done, introducing a Digital Markets Act and a Digital Services Act, which laid down new guidelines for dominant players, including rules designed to make their platforms more open to app designers and other companies. Considering the gridlock on Capitol Hill, there is little immediate prospect of similar legislation in the United States. In this challenging environment, the new trustbusters have little option but to plow ahead and make their cases in the courts of justice and public opinion. That’s what they are doing. ♦' (The NEW YORKER) See link below, which could not be gifted.
This morning The Boeing Company announced that the chief of Boeing’s commercial airplane division, Stan Deal, is leaving immediately. Chief executive officer Dave Calhoun is stepping down at the end of the year. Chair of the board Larry Kellner will not stand for reelection.
Good!
Then take all the over-educated, under-intelligent MBAscum too damn stupid to know the pointed end goes in front, stand them against the nearest hangar wall and "let 'em have it." And if there are any of the McDonnell-Douglas morons still around, throw them out the upper-story windows face first. Bill Boeing, Donald Douglas, and James McDonnell will be standing at the pearly gates cheering.
American aerospace is such shit now - like everything else in American business, the MBAs who know the price of everything and the value of nothing have financialized things to the point of no return. To an MBAscum, the fact the door flew off the airplane means there's another "revenue stream" for fixing it.
The Airplane Guys who created the companies would have been embarrassed to let a piece of shit like the 737Max out the hangar door. (or the F-35 Flying Swiss Army Knife or most everything they've created in the past 40 years) Such a piece of crap would have embarrassed them. The 737 is a 60 year old design, but the pinstriped pimps in the widgetmaker suites are too cheap to hire designers who could create an actually-new improvement - it might drive down their stock options, the only thing important to them.
Letting accountants (and that is all the MBA degree is) decide anything more important than whether or not to order Chinese takeout for the lunch meeting is the wrong move. Every time.
[H]is efforts are overwhelmingly fixed on evading justice or mooting judgments he’s already lost by any means necessary. He’d ideally like to prevail in these efforts before the election, but the task will become much easier if he’s able to win or steal the presidency despite the legal peril.”
I always lie for my alibi; and when COVID came, I watched people die. I shouted out "Who's killing liberty", when after all, it's the GOP.
The Biden campaign said, “America deserves better than a feeble, confused, and tired Donald Trump,” which we can take to mean a man with dementia who is progressively getting worse each day. And that is good news. Nature is *compensating Donald Trump quite fairly even if our 'justice' system does not.
1) Who is this appeals court? 2) "Trump Social" has overnight put him into the world top 500. (But I think I read somewhere that its readership is shrinking).
It’s refreshing to see Biden hit back. I’ve been waiting a long time for Dems to respond to the outrageous attacks waged against them by an infantile playground mentality GOP. John Kerry should have taken on the Swift Boaters with his fists. Hillary was overconfident and passive.
So much for "no one is above the law." Thousands of poor people are having their lives ruined sitting in jail because they cannot afford bail and a billionaire gets special treatment.
What all of us should be asking is "why are we flying". I understand the value of people crossing boundaries, but the reality of people flying all over the place has an unacceptable carbon foot print, which is unlikely to be solved any time soon via electric airplanes powered by wind and solar. And so flying has got to stop.
“America deserves better than a feeble, confused, and tired Donald Trump.” Well, that line needs to go up all over social media today.
Love the comparison of the Boeing disaster to the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, and Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su's quote about it. It's so dystopian that any decent citizen would buy this nonsense about the evil "Deep State" when the federal government exists, as she says, to create “programs that generations of Americans have relied on for economic security and dignity, including a nationwide minimum wage, health and safety regulations, restrictions on child labor, and more.”
The public deserves an explanation as to why the court lowered Donald's bond.
On the face of it, there was no good reason for it and their decision has every appearance of favoritism. There are many others who had worse circumstances and their bonds weren't reduced. It wasn't ever proposed or considered - so why him??
Thank you Heather.
While Reagan joked that "I'm with the government and I'm here to help." and his then henchmen said things like "I want a government so small I could drown it in a bathtub", so-called free market Republicans worked across generations to establish a perspective that government is bloated, ineffective, and if it weren't for taxpayers having to fund all of the 'unnecessary' regulations (like worker safety, food safety or air travel safety, for example), taxes would be much lower, and workers would be much better off.
This was an important frame. It provided the opening for the GOP to make changes in a intentionally complex taxation code that vastly reduced tax responsibility for Americans accumulating significant wealth through exceptionally high income (CEO's for example), investment, and inheritance (by framing estate taxes as 'death' taxes -and some great detail as to why in political linguist George Lakoff's "Don't Think of an Elephant"). The Reagan/Bush/Trump/GOP-led changes are fundamental reasons a hedge fund manager might pay a lower percentage of taxes than a public school teacher or a first responder.
The concept expressed in Heritage's Project 2025 is to replace public sector employees with those who despise the actual programs agencies are established to serve. When you deconstruct their position, it is to staff public service with people who all believe the public is better served by private sector enterprise.
I've asked this question before. Can you imagine being the hiring manager for a computer chip manufacturing company (now operating in the United States with thanks to the Biden/Harris administration and the CHIPS and Science Act), and someone you are considering for hire tells you they dislike the company, the company has the wrong mission, and everyone here is probably lazy, slow, and should be fired. The objective of the "loyalty" component of Project 2025 is to control and decimate the public sector, shift responsibilities to private employers -where the primary objective is to maximize a return on investment instead of important societal benefits and outcomes. It is also to attack and erode regulation and enforcement from within government (instead of, or in combination with attacking public safety regulations in the judicial system).
HCR, as an historian, has a point of view that goes beyond the immediate news to make connections and illustrate principles. News that reveals that impartial, expert government servants have been essential to ensure airplane safety, worker protection, and technologies to address climate change. The connections, beyond the immediate news, that all these things are potentially under threat. That is why HCR's commentary is so valuable.
The criticism of Donald Trump issued by the Biden Administration was a welcome development. This is not going "low" - these criticisms are accurate, as stated. Trump is “weak and desperate", his fund-raising is bad, he has not been out on the campaign trail like Biden has been, and his speeches are getting more outrageous every week, with viral quotes that cannot possibly be bringing in new supporters. His Project 2025 agenda is indeed "dangerous" and threatens to turn the U.S. into "illiberal" Hungary. Trump has shown no physical stamina, has offered innumerable "confused" statements in his speeches, and is regularly described as looking "tired.” It is just that the Administration needs to have the courage to say the truth. This is not only useful to bolster the contrast with Biden's laundry list of accomplishments, but also is politically smart, since there is nothing more likely to increase the probability of additional Trump missteps than to needle his phenomenally fragile personality. This will not push undecided voters away, since these criticisms can be justified as accurate, with concrete examples. I have a 24-Page Word documents of nothing more that incoherent, dangerous and/or inaccurate statements by Trump just since 1/8/2024, less than 3-months. Those who dismiss these critiques are dyed-in-the-wool Trump supporters for whom nothing the Biden Administration says will ever make a difference.
“. . . He doesn’t appear to be a fan of it.” Indeed. Yet, he gets endless gifts from the courts that normal folks could never expect.
Sad that the NY appellate court is so tone-deaf, or simply lazy that they felt no need to explain their wildly favorable ruling for Cheetolini. Reeks of corruption, especially coming in the nick of time with no explanation.
Putting a stay on the other penalties is even more inexplicable. Sad that justice seems to be little more than a wistful dream, or something inflicted only on the non-wealthy.
There are other very significant moves that the Biden administration has made in an effort to unrig a crucial aspect of our economy.
'Why the Biden Administration Is Suing Apple and Investigating Big Grocers' (The New Yorker Mag., excerpt)
'A new generation of trustbusters is trying to use anti-monopoly laws to roll back concentrations of economic power.'
By John Cassidy
'The Department of Justice’s antitrust division made headlines last week by suing Apple and accusing the company of monopolizing the smartphone market and its associated services. The iPhone-maker “has maintained its power not because of its superiority, but because of its unlawful exclusionary behavior,” the U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said, at a public briefing in Washington.
'Meanwhile, in a move that received less attention, the staff of the Federal Trade Commission, the other big agency entrusted with enforcing competition laws, released a lengthy report on another increasingly concentrated part of the economy: the grocery industry. The F.T.C. report said that some big food-and-beverage retailers exploited the supply-chain disruptions associated with the covid-19 pandemic to squeeze their suppliers and “further hike prices to increase their profits.” In a statement accompanying the release of the report, Lina Khan, the F.T.C.’s chair, said that dominant retailers “used this moment to come out ahead at the expense of their competitors and the communities they serve.”
'Khan and Jonathan Kanter, who is the head of the D.O.J.’s antitrust division, are the leaders of the Biden Administration’s effort to confront big businesses that it claims are exploiting their market power to enrich themselves to the detriment of their clients and the market as a whole. This campaign has sometimes been a rocky one. The antitrust agencies have lost some big court cases, including an effort to block Microsoft from taking over the game maker Activision Blizzard, but they have successfully scuttled a number of deals, such as a takeover of the book publisher Simon & Schuster by Penguin Random House and a tie-up between American Airlines and JetBlue. In any case, an aggressive antitrust policy has become one of the defining features of this Administration, and it will surely continue if Joe Biden gets reëlected.'
'After Biden was elected President, in 2020, he nominated Khan, Kanter, and others associated with a new antitrust movement that traces its roots to Louis Brandeis, the early-twentieth-century trustbuster and Supreme Court Justice.'
'Biden also set up the White House Competition Council, which includes officials from many different government agencies. Although the President was hardly known as a scourge of corporations, he sounded some distinctly Brandeisian themes, declaring, in July, 2021, “Capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism—it’s exploitation.”
'Lately, he has been criticizing big corporations for price gouging, imposing junk fees, and shrinking the size of their products while maintaining prices—a phenomenon known as shrinkflation.'
'The revival of antitrust-enforcement efforts goes well beyond the issue of whether Snickers bars have shrunk. (After Biden suggested, in his State of the Union address, that they had got smaller, Mars, the maker of the caramel-peanut bars, issued a statement denying it.)
'Kanter, Khan, and their allies are basically claiming that rising monopoly power is a serious problem in many different parts of the economy, not just the technology sector, and that the country’s courts and policymakers need to address it aggressively across the board. The D.O.J.’s Apple lawsuit and
the F.T.C.’s report on the grocery industry illustrate many of the issues at stake.'
'At last week’s press conference, Kanter compared the government’s case against Apple to three famous anti-monopoly cases from the past: Standard Oil, A.T. & T., and Microsoft. During Bill Clinton’s Presidency, the Justice Department brought the Microsoft case, in 1998, accusing the software giant of exploiting its grip on the operating-system market to create a stranglehold for Web browsers, by forcing computer-makers to bundle Internet Explorer on its devices. The government argued that this tactic deprived consumers of choices and stifled innovation. In the Apple case, the Justice
Department is making a similar argument, claiming that Apple used technology restraints and restrictive contracts to keep smartphone users and application developers confined within its proprietary ecosystem, where it can charge high prices and fees. “Today, we stand here, once again, to protect competition and innovation for the next generation of technology,” Kanter said.
'The Justice Department’s complaint, which referenced internal communications from Apple that were subpoenaed, detailed a number of tactics that the company allegedly used to bolster and maintain its monopoly power. These included restricting the ability of iPhone users to download cloud-based games; refusing to integrate other text-messaging apps with its own iMessage system; and blocking “super apps” that would allow iPhone users to carry out a number of online activities (such as shopping, exchanging payments, and chatting) from within one application. The complaint also said
that Apple executives were concerned that, if iPhone users downloaded a super app, it would be easier for them to switch to a cheaper smartphone. The lawsuit quoted one Apple manager as saying that allowing super apps would “let the barbarians in at the gate.”
'The corporate behavior detailed in the F.T.C. report had less to do with technology innovation and more to do with sheer size. Between 1990 and 2019, the report noted, the four biggest grocers have increased their combined market share from fifteen per cent to more than thirty per cent. The report was based on information from three grocery retailers (Kroger, Walmart, and Amazon), three large food wholesalers (Associated Wholesale Grocers, C&S Wholesale Grocers, and McLane Company), and three big food producers (Kraft Heinz, Tyson Foods, and Procter & Gamble).'
'During the pandemic, as the big retailers experienced significant shortages and increases in the cost of the goods they sold, they used their size to pressure suppliers to favor them over smaller competitors for deliveries, and also raised their prices to cover their extra costs, the report said. Hiking their prices was a perfectly legitimate reaction, but the report presents prima-facie evidence that the grocers went beyond simply recuperating rising costs. As they raised their prices, their profit margins—the difference between their total revenues and total costs—reached six per cent in 2021, compared to 5.6 per cent in 2015, and then rose further, to seven per cent in the first nine months of 2023, when the rate of inflation was already coming down. “This profit trend casts doubt on assertions that rising prices at the grocery store are simply moving in lockstep with retailers’ own rising costs,” the report said. It also called on the full commission and Congress to look into this issue.'
'Apple, in a public statement, said the Justice Department’s lawsuit “threatens who we are,” and, if successful, would “set a dangerous precedent, empowering government to take a heavy hand in designing people’s technology.” Reacting to the F.T.C. report, the National Grocers Association, which represents independent grocers, said it confirmed that “national chains or so-called ‘power buyers’ are abusing their immense economic power to the detriment of competition and American consumers.”
'Given the glacial pace at which antitrust cases move through the courts, the Apple lawsuit likely won’t be resolved until the next Presidency. The Justice Department case that led to the breakup of A.T. & T. lasted eight years, and the Microsoft case took about three and a half years until a settlement was reached. Time isn’t the biggest challenge facing the Justice Department and F.T.C., though—that’s the U.S. court system. In the course of the past half century, many judges have applied a strict consumer-welfare standard to antitrust cases, which in practice means the government has to show that a certain corporate action or merger either led to higher prices or is likely to lead to them. In the high-tech
industry, particularly, where many apps and services are distributed at zero price, this standard is often difficult to apply. The courts, including the Supreme Court, in the 2004 Trinko case, have also adopted a skeptical attitude to claims that companies should be obliged to do business with potential competitors.'
'The Untied States’ antitrust laws date to the Sherman Act of 1890 and the Clayton Act of 1914. In many cases—such as those relating to price-fixing and other blatantly anticompetitive agreements, or tying requirements of the sort employed by Microsoft with its Internet Explorer browser—these laws are adequate for the task. But they weren’t designed for the digital age, and there is a clear need to update them for the twenty-first century. In recent years, the European Union has gone at least some way to show how this could be done, introducing a Digital Markets Act and a Digital Services Act, which laid down new guidelines for dominant players, including rules designed to make their platforms more open to app designers and other companies. Considering the gridlock on Capitol Hill, there is little immediate prospect of similar legislation in the United States. In this challenging environment, the new trustbusters have little option but to plow ahead and make their cases in the courts of justice and public opinion. That’s what they are doing. ♦' (The NEW YORKER) See link below, which could not be gifted.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/why-the-biden-administration-is-suing-apple-and-investigating-big-grocers
This morning The Boeing Company announced that the chief of Boeing’s commercial airplane division, Stan Deal, is leaving immediately. Chief executive officer Dave Calhoun is stepping down at the end of the year. Chair of the board Larry Kellner will not stand for reelection.
Good!
Then take all the over-educated, under-intelligent MBAscum too damn stupid to know the pointed end goes in front, stand them against the nearest hangar wall and "let 'em have it." And if there are any of the McDonnell-Douglas morons still around, throw them out the upper-story windows face first. Bill Boeing, Donald Douglas, and James McDonnell will be standing at the pearly gates cheering.
American aerospace is such shit now - like everything else in American business, the MBAs who know the price of everything and the value of nothing have financialized things to the point of no return. To an MBAscum, the fact the door flew off the airplane means there's another "revenue stream" for fixing it.
The Airplane Guys who created the companies would have been embarrassed to let a piece of shit like the 737Max out the hangar door. (or the F-35 Flying Swiss Army Knife or most everything they've created in the past 40 years) Such a piece of crap would have embarrassed them. The 737 is a 60 year old design, but the pinstriped pimps in the widgetmaker suites are too cheap to hire designers who could create an actually-new improvement - it might drive down their stock options, the only thing important to them.
Letting accountants (and that is all the MBA degree is) decide anything more important than whether or not to order Chinese takeout for the lunch meeting is the wrong move. Every time.
[H]is efforts are overwhelmingly fixed on evading justice or mooting judgments he’s already lost by any means necessary. He’d ideally like to prevail in these efforts before the election, but the task will become much easier if he’s able to win or steal the presidency despite the legal peril.”
I always lie for my alibi; and when COVID came, I watched people die. I shouted out "Who's killing liberty", when after all, it's the GOP.
Pleased to me'cha; hope you guess my name...
"Cause confusing you is the nature of my game...
Thank you, Heather.
The Biden campaign said, “America deserves better than a feeble, confused, and tired Donald Trump,” which we can take to mean a man with dementia who is progressively getting worse each day. And that is good news. Nature is *compensating Donald Trump quite fairly even if our 'justice' system does not.
*FMI read Emerson's essay Compensation: https://emersoncentral.com/ebook/Compensation.pdf
1) Who is this appeals court? 2) "Trump Social" has overnight put him into the world top 500. (But I think I read somewhere that its readership is shrinking).
It’s refreshing to see Biden hit back. I’ve been waiting a long time for Dems to respond to the outrageous attacks waged against them by an infantile playground mentality GOP. John Kerry should have taken on the Swift Boaters with his fists. Hillary was overconfident and passive.
I read a lot of news about all of this today, particularly from 'Daily Kos' and also reviewed the invective from Trump et al. 😉
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/3/25/2231478/-Trump-s-Hail-Mary-to-avoid-coughing-up-all-that-cash-works-for-now
Much to my consternation I saw ZERO mention of Hunter Biden. 🤔
I am at a loss -- ¿can somebody explain this aberrant behavior by these M.A.G.A.-types? 😵💫
So much for "no one is above the law." Thousands of poor people are having their lives ruined sitting in jail because they cannot afford bail and a billionaire gets special treatment.
What all of us should be asking is "why are we flying". I understand the value of people crossing boundaries, but the reality of people flying all over the place has an unacceptable carbon foot print, which is unlikely to be solved any time soon via electric airplanes powered by wind and solar. And so flying has got to stop.
Thank you, Heather.
“America deserves better than a feeble, confused, and tired Donald Trump.”
As often happens, your last word is my takeaway.