No joke: FTC boss goes on the Daily Show and is told Apple tried to block her Generally the head of US government agencies and comedy don't mix, but on Monday night Lina Khan, boss of the Federal Trade Commission, was on the Daily Show recounting how the agency is going after Amazon, Facebook and others over monopolistic practices. She also got evidence of her persona non grata status with Cook & Co. …
The USA fought a war to be free from UK monarchy rule
They then instigated a whole system to LOCK its people down and install a new monarchy of money.
But tech are just the latest overlords and the final beauty is that the government is now $32 to in debt which can never be repaid.
As the USA collapses those money people will just head elsewhere.
Americans get your house in order get your country back.
It has taken a women from the EU to start the ball rolling.
But tech are just the latest overlords and the final beauty is that the government is now $32 to in debt which can never be repaid.
32 bucks, eh? I think I can cover that.
That should qualify me for the Secretary of the Treasury position in a tRump administration, I wot.
> The USA fought a war to be free from UK monarchy rule
Strange, I thought it was all about "no taxation without representation", "a continent being controlled by an island" etc and they'd have rebelled equally whether Britain was an anarchy, a Grecian-style democracy, a military dictatorship, a religious dictatorship or an old fashioned monarchy. Clearly I was taught wrong and it purely the horrors of a parliamentary democracy plus a constitutional monarch that got everyone's dander up.
On a totally different subject, remind me again of how the State Of The Union address has been treated in recent years, compared to how it was originally intended?
It was kind of both. The taxation issue certainly got a lot of people angry, to judge from how much is written about it, but they were also influenced by ideas about political philosophy which originated from people who had no taxation-based complaints against the British government. Had they somehow arrived at a resolution around the tax issue, and I'm not sure how they would have managed that, that could have ended it in the mid 1760s. By the mid 1770s, they had more complaints to do with liberty* and governance**, and a tax law change wasn't going to fix them.
* Liberty: theirs, not anyone else's.
** Governance: not democracy, at least not yet. The complaints had to do with things like law enforcement practices and chains of command, not just who gets to vote for what.
The taxation without representation excuse was just that, an excuse for a bunch of privateers and traders who didn't want to have to pay tax on their semi-illicit trading to rile up the general populace to rebel so that they could eventually carry on trading on their own terms, and maybe get some power over a government at the same time.
And the US has continued in a similar vein ever since, with robber barons and businesses controlling the government, sometimes openly, sometimes covertly.
You should look into the Boston Tea Party a little closer. It was the employees of the ultra wealthy, pissed off that the *reduction* in tax on tea imports, as requested. They were sent to throw the tea in the harbour as a protest, as it was going to ruin their fat profits.
Yes, yet again, the capitalists wrote the script, paid the actors, and paid for the start of the act.
But tech are just the latest overlords and the final beauty is that the government is now $32 to in debt which can never be repaid.
That debt also doesn't need to be repaid (mostly to itself or the Fed, who won't be rocking up with Bailiffs at the White House any time soon).
The thing to remember is that money isn't really real. It's just a means of exchange issued by the government. What's real is the infrastructure - bridges/roads/hospitals - that people build in return for it, or the services they render along the way. That of course isn't money - it's wealth (national wealth - publicly owned property).
If they put a bit more money into circulation to stimulate wealth production then that's fine (within reason). Taxes don't - directly - pay for public services. Tax money is burnt in a furnace and the govt issues new money for spending (the lack of an intermediary step means they can never go "overdrawn" or have a cash-flow crisis as such). The only restriction on how much new money they can print is demand-pull inflation (excess demand beyond what the economy can supply), which must not be confused with supply-push inflation induced by externalities like global oil prices.
"Government Debt" is just an function of trying to treat currency issuance like a business with double-entry book-keeping. As long as it's denominated in your own currency (which means all this only applies to UK/US/Japan/etc - not Eurozone governments, who cannot print Euros), you can always service it. And if we really get pent up about it, then all we have to do is pull a bit out of circulation via taxation and squeeze the money supply.
Billionaires should certainly pay more in taxes than they currently do, but if we forced every U.S. billionaire to liquidate their assets and left them all penniless and begging in the streets, it would still only cover about one sixth of the national debt, or half of one year's government spending. Way too many people think taxing billionaires more would solve all of our problems, when it is spending that is the real issue.
"Billionaires should certainly pay more in taxes than they currently do, but if we forced every U.S. billionaire to liquidate their assets and left them all penniless and begging in the streets, it would still only cover about one sixth of the national debt, or half of one year's government spending. Way too many people think taxing billionaires more would solve all of our problems, when it is spending that is the real issue."
There's a big difference between somebody having a billion dollars and somebody with a billion dollars of income. It can also depend on how you do the adding up. Elon Musk keeps getting characterized as the richest man in the world, yet he many actually be underwater given how far Tesla stock prices have dropped. Somebody that does have a billion in assets may not be all that liquid. The largest share of that wealth will be invested in numerous businesses, stock, funds and land. Their actual wealth is going to fluctuate hourly.
The thing that should scare people is government coming for assets and taxing owned things even further. Somebody owning land will be paying taxes on that land and any income it might generate. Why would it be reasonable for government to layer on another tax because that person happens to own much more land than many others? Where does the bar get set and once defined, chances are high it will keep getting lowered until it captures more and more people. It then gets into situations where a family might own a cattle ranch or a sheep farm and the assets might be a fair bit of money, but the income is a borderline loss and all it does is provide salaries. One more tax would mean the family needing to sell land, equipment and livestock to pay the taxes and anybody buying only a portion wouldn't be able to make a go of it since they wouldn't have enough scale. What happens then? Doesn't the government seize the property? What do they do with it as they have created a world where it isn't worth buying and selling it for $1 drives down the value of the surrounding property. The US government has demonstrated that it can't make a go of running a brothel.
Until you print too much money (hyper inflation)
Indeed - see comment on "within reason".
It's worth noting this has never actually happened to any sort of normal country.
Zimbabwe and Venezuela both held debt in foreign currency.
Likewise, people pipe up "ah, but the Weimar Republic!". The Weimar experienced hyper-inflation because their debt (war reparations) was denominated in Dollar, Sterling and Francs. Once they'd handed over their reserves, they had to go to the foreign currency markets to buy more. This worked to a point. But having saturated the FOREX markets, the buying power of the Mark dropped. In response they started printing Marks in order to buy more currency, which led to the (obvious) vicious spiral. It's more or less impossible to induce hyper-inflation simply through normal domestic spending or excess consumer demand (which will self-correct to a point, at least for commodities with elastic demand, less so for basic inelastic energy needs, etc) - hyper-inflation requires a government to do something really daft like dumping heroic amounts of new money straight into the FOREX markets and crashing the exchange rate.
It also depends on a but on whether a country has a functional economy - which post-War Weimar didn't. Zimbabwe & Venezuela also lacked that industrial base to give the markets confidence in their spending. For all the USA's woes, they do still have quite a strong manufacturing base (e.g. Cat/Deere/etc), as well as the big strips of IP/services/finance on the coasts. There's an economy there to back up their spend.
As it currently stands, there seems little risk that the global commodity markets will switch from USD.
For purely domestic investment, you can almost print whatever you like. If an American worker is willing to take USD to build a new bridge/road/railway, then that has no impact on inflation. Of course if they take that money and try and spend it on foreign goods, then that will see an outflow which nudges the inflation figures. But mostly they don't - the overwhelming majority of that money will be re-spent and circulate within the US (taxes, food, bills, etc) which is why the markets have generally reacted positively to Biden dropping a trillion bucks on (long-overdue) infrastructure spend.
the "Money Standard", for a long time this has been the US $ but if they ever loose that....then the USA is in deep shit.
Economists reckon that the US$'s seigniorage for being the international settlement currency is 10-15%. It that were to be lost it would be unfortunate but not deep shit territory. Imports would cost more and reduce, exports would be cheaper for the purchasers so would grow, but the average USian wouldn't see much happening.
It is a means of keeping score.
After a fashion. But not really. The thing is... the debt isn't really debt. Not the way you think of it.
"Government debt" is just bonds - US Treasury Bonds or Bank of England Gilts. Treasury Bonds are known as "Yellow Dollars" because they're basically the same as cash ("green dollars") but they pay interest. The Federal Reserve could convert all bonds into "Green dollars" today with a few taps on a keyboard and poof, the "National Debt" would be gone. They won't of course, because if they don't issue bonds, then they have limited control over setting interest rates. It is in their interest that institutions hold a mix of green dollars and yellow dollars. And when they run short of one or the other, they can just print or burn money (quantitative easing and tightening).
All the mithering about the deficit or "debt" is actually bollocks because the whole thing is funny accounting from people desperate to pretend that issuing a currency is in some way akin to running a household because they've never skimmed Keynes or taken the time to understand Macroeconomics 101.
The truth is that for a currency-issuing government to run a balanced or surplus budget for more than a year or two is fundamentally unsustainable because by taxing more than they spend, they remove liquidity from the economy. We know this because the USA has done it 6 times. Each run of surplus-budgeting was followed by economic slowdown or indeed outright recession. Clinton ran a surplus for a couple of years and the press started talking about "life after debt". Until some grown up economists and the Fed sat them down and said "no, we need debt on the books, and if the economy is growing then we need to inject extra fluidity into the system". They knew that Andrew Jackson ran the US down to zero debt in 1835... by 1837 the US was in deep depression.
A country that is racking up trillions in debt at a faster and faster pace isn't playing the game very well. There are consequences.
What game? If they're racking up debt, it's usually because foreign countries are willing to send that country their manufactured goods in return for disney dollars. That speaks very well of their faith in your economy - that they want to hold your currency.
So what? What are the consequences? Bailiffs at the White House door? Lol.
When we say "US debt to China is high", all it means is that the Bank of China has converted a lot of the "green dollars" in their account at the Federal Reserve into "yellow dollars". The US Government will never struggle to pay that off because they can always service Dollar-denominated "debt". What's more, the US has done well out of this. The US has received a great deal of wealth (manufactured product) in return for some slips of paper (or accounting entries at the Fed) which the US Government can always issue more of.
This is completely different to Weimar, Zimbabwe or Venezuela who ran their own currency, but denominated their debt in other currencies.
Nor is Greece relevant. As a currency-using nation (Euros), Greece had no ability to manipulate interest rates or print money to service debt. Only the ECB could do that. Eurozone countries have to balance their books the same way that the New York State Government or the Greater London Authority do (sort of, except that there's lots of chicanery behind the scenes - the ECB dump a few billion euros into the Bank of Greece every month so they can "pay" their "debt". The whole sovereign debt crisis never went away in 2011 - the ECB just prints money to stop countries defaulting. Greece is not the only one. When you're setting a single interest rate for the Euro which covers economies as disparate as Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal and Greece, you always have to do a bit of shuffling of money to sort out the ones who are getting screwed by the interest rates). When you hear pundits say "the US is at risk of a Greek style debt crisis", you can safely ignore everything else they've said. It is literally impossible for the US to suffer a Greek-style debt crisis.
Since the ECB is not tied to any one country, nobody seems to think about the fact that they're printing cash or define it as "national debt", because it can't be assigned to any one nation. Put simply, it's complex enough that most peple's eyes glaze over and they go "but look, the US has issued a lot of bonds, and people really want to buy them... that's um... terrible?".
I bet she even brought her own socks with her so she didn't have to accept the EULA that USAian socks have.
I know you're part joking but I really don't think you should be "bigging up" the Chinese government. A place where you need government registered ID and enough earned "social points" to do a lot of things we simply take for granted. I never earned a single house point at a school, so I don't stand a chance of earning government mandated social points in order to buy food or pay my bills.
The FTC having such a small budget and workforce isn't surprising if you take into account that Republicans don't want it to exist, and Democrats are beholden to corporate overlords for campaign money. The former is the same reason the IRS has such a small enforcement division, even though every dollar spent on enforcement returns almost three in owed taxes.
This is all more evidence that we need to move to exclusively public funded elections to help minimize the grossly outsized influence of the top 1% of earners in the US.
Laz, bad short sighted move to taxpayer fund politicians campaigns. Simply empowers duopolies in political parties. See mess in Oz for starters. New movements are outfunded from start and old guard well funded. Better to limit size and frequency of donations and ensure at cost of deregistration that only adult citizens of country can make donations or _any_ political assistance. In short, block damage to effecting the will of the citizens by nonhumans, aka companies, trusts and other legal fictions who are to be firewalled off from politics. Until political funding bodies learn to live in poverty, ensuring they focus on relevance to majority of citizens, special interests will continue to own parliament and bureaucratic elites discourses.
Here in His Majesty's (friendly) Northern Outpost there is a law limiting corporate and personal political donations to $5000.
So the oil and mining companies hired 1000s of 'consultants' and paid them $5100 and 'suggested' that they make a $5k personal donation to the right party.
The "Northern Outpost" also does not have Super PACs. In the US Super PAC contributions are not only unlimited, they are anonymous. And there is Trumps latest con to raise money and sell influence - Truth Social stock. Any person or country that wants to influence Trump's "policies" just has to help run up the stock value and be there when he is allowed to sell out.
"The FTC having such a small budget and workforce isn't surprising...."
Speaking as a regulator, I have to say that spending more money on regulators is not a popular course of action with any party, even outside the US. We get blamed when things go wrong, we don't even get noticed when things go right, and a good proportion of the masses genuinely believe that we're faceless, overpaid, underworked mandarins, whose very purpose is to undermine government.
With the best justice and laws money can buy!
It is very true that for all the hullabaloo about "capitalism good, socialism bad" and how the US is a bastion of the free market and all that nonsense from some quarters, you're hard pressed to find it in action. The SF Bay Area is one of the few in the country where you can actually find more than one ISP serving the same area, though usually it's a duopoly instead of a monopoly, so it's not a huge improvement. It's kind of ironic that for all the talk about how Europe is this evil bastion of socialism, it's more of a capitalist free market than the US. We're more of a Machiavellian state, where might equals money. Certain rich assholes, who shall remain nameless but one happens to own a failing social media company, can afford to fling lawsuits at people who do things they don't like all day long. Even if they all end up getting tossed out, it still requires the other party/parties to pay for their own legal counsel and respond. They may get reimbursed, but it'll likely be months, even years later. For some, that may be a death sentence for the organization.
Even worse is that roughly half the population is so brainwashed they have a sort of Stockholm Syndrome about the whole thing and actually believe that their getting screwed over by rich assholes is a GOOD THING. They'll fight tooth and nail to preserve the status quo, even though that status quo is what keeps them and their children in a perpetual state of poverty, and are actually suspicious of rich people who don't use their wealth to grind others under their boot heel. It's basically neo-feudalism, except feudal serfs had at least a few basic rights. The lord of the land was at least ostensibly responsible for protecting them from ne'er do wells and things of that nature. We don't even really have that anymore, especially if your skin doesn't happen to be white and/or your accent isn't one commonly associated with this country. Unless your rich, of course, then it's all just fine. You can buy your citizenship without having to go through all the usual hassle everyone else does.
IMO, the FTC needs to add to their list forcing Apple and Amazon to spin off their content production arms. AppleTV+ and Amazon Prime Video should be required to be independent of the parent company. There needs to be a firm firewall between different arms of companies, like how we (used to) demand banks clearly separate money people deposit into their savings vs that in investment accounts where a degree of risk is assumed.
"It's kind of ironic that for all the talk about how Europe is this evil bastion of socialism, it's more of a capitalist free market than the US."
I would love to know who exactly thinks that Europe is an evil bastion of socialism. Having lived almost in Europe almost my entire life I would be very quick to state that I don't see much of that socialism ( the only socialist aspect that I see are the health care systems but the buck stops there).. Here money rules just like most of the rest of the world.
I would suggest Cuba, or Venezuela as examples of evil bastions of socialism.
"IMO, the FTC needs to add to their list forcing Apple and Amazon to spin off their content production arms."
If they aren't going to go after Live Nation/Ticketmaster for predatory practices to take over the live music industry, how can they go after Apple and Amazon? Apple and Amazon don't hold a monopoly although in specific niches such as audiobooks, the FTC should take a very close look. There used to be in the US limits on how many media outlets (radio, TV, newspapers) a company could control which was eroding over time and completely collapsed under FCC director Agit Pai(d). Cory Doctorow has pointed out that almost no anti-trust litigation/regulation has been done in the US for decades and the companies know it so are back to their old tricks. I'm wary of government singling out or making exceptions for particular companies when it would be more appropriate to work on laws that apply universally or enforce the laws that are already in place.
Nicely illustrative of contemporary challenges to Freedom of the Press IMHO. Whenever "large corporations" own "mass" media (eg. "news"), one may expect the produced broadcasts to have a certain slant, not disfavorable to the corp's bottom line (exit objectivity). The same goes when media is controlled by authoritarian regimes.
It's good to hear J.S. talk like this, albeit obliquely, about why he canceled his "Apple TV+" current affairs program "The Problem with Jon Stewart" (last October).
Maybe he assumed that someone at Apple would at least try looking at his previous work. I am not very familiar with his previous work, but it sounds like he was interviewing similar people and coming to conclusions that weren't in line with the sponsors regularly. Perhaps he assumed that Apple wouldn't hire someone like that if they wanted to control him more tightly, because it's obviously not a good fit. Just like Musk hiring someone who didn't agree not to ask the interview questions like "aren't you having trouble getting advertiser revenue after you yelled at all the advertisers", they may not have paid attention to who they were hiring.
The FTC and SEC are all about severing their wallstreet/bank buddies a slap on the wrist to control markets. And take away freedoms eventhough they are unelected officials. A warning or guideline is okay.
But suing or restricting has been a weapon to kill innovation and freedom for the people.
Again taxation and NO representation with these corrupt officials.
Still no good reason for Apple to block their propaganda
You often see the phrase "Unelected Officials" used in a negative context, implying I guess that we would want everyone in public office to be independently elected. Thereby insuring their primary skill was Public Relations and Electability rather than any sort of competence for the role they're carrying out. Not sure this IS what we really want!
We have this over here in the treasonous colonies.
School boards and police chiefs are elected, and were a first step to political office - but now are more becoming a way to bully people.
It's a bit weird seeing billboards "Vote for Karen for School board". Officially in my town Political parties are banned from School board elections but it's pretty clear whose side the candidates are on.
Interestingly it's only public offices where actual competence is irrelevant. Nobody is electing the city's civil engineers or water treatment plant workers.
Judging by the mess these agenda driven school board nominees have pushed across many locations in the US, I think it's clear by now, competence needs to be looked at.
Indeed competence seems to be valued less and less in those who stand for election across not just the US, but many other democratically run countries.
> A warning or guideline is okay
That does not work, as well as self-control for poison in food or corruption or self-defined "compliance". Or for plane safety.
Only total pressure works. You will change your position as soon as you are affected :D.
The FTC and SEC are all about severing their wallstreet/bank buddies a slap on the wrist to control markets. And take away freedoms eventhough they are unelected officials.
This isn't the problem you think it is. If the wall street crowd don't like the outcome, they can just take a case to the err... politically appointed courts and their tame judges will tell those damn unelected officials that you can't just go around enforcing the law willy-nilly. You can only enforce it against the bad people. Which does not include people who donated to the politician who appointed that judge...
In any case, those "unelected officials" are bound by the laws that the rest of us are. They're simply enforcing the laws passed by the elected officials. Unless you're also in favour of fully dissolving all Police Departments, the FBI, Secret Service - I mean, those damn unelected officials going around arresting people, claiming they've "broken the law". Just who the hell do they think they are!?!
Thank you for that wonderful demonstration of my comment above about people with a kind of Stockholm Syndrome about being screwed over by the wealthy. No matter how long I sat around trying, I never would have been able to come up with something half as idiotic, and it would have failed to really capture the deluded stupidity of such people.
The FTC and SEC are all about severing their wallstreet/bank buddies a slap on the wrist to control markets. And take away freedoms eventhough they are unelected officials. A warning or guideline is okay....But suing or restricting has been a weapon to kill innovation and freedom for the people.....Again taxation and NO representation with these corrupt officials.
Well, I'm an unelected official working for a regulator. Me and my colleagues are a tiny handful of a few hundred against the several million employed in the businesses we regulate, our CEO is paid a tiny fraction of what these business pay their lawyers, never mind their CEOs. We don't sue people, we use delegated powers of secretaries of state, we're accountable to those elected officials, and if we prohibit or restrict some practice, some product, some behaviour, it's because there's clear evidence that it causes harm to citizens - usually after the event specifically because we give innovation the benefit of the doubt.
Now go away and learn how government operates, and whilst you're at it, keep in mind "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt."
The author's mention of Verizon charging $5 for SMS messaging is business-as-usual for telcos where service charges have little in common with service costs. In the 1980's, we were charged $1.30 monthly on our land lines for the convenience of TOUCH TONE dialing even though processing DTMF signals was cheaper and more efficient for the telco than PULSE dialing.
I also remember how the baby bells unleashed their lobbyists at the state level in a desperate attempt to exclude competition and preserve every possible revenue source, no matter how archaic.
The only way to know the true cost of a service is when there is healthy competition.
"The author's mention of Verizon charging $5 for SMS messaging is business-as-usual for telcos where service charges have little in common with service costs."
The cost of providing voice services was highly regulated, but not the addons. As a way to improve their bottom line and, therefore, stock price, those addons were billed at all the market would accept.
"On The Register, when folks get fined we generally cite the sometimes large figures involved as a proportion of current profit, to give some perspective. When the FTC imposed a $5bn fine on Facebook back in 2019 over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, for example, that amounted to one percent of its market cap."
OK, but market cap and profit are very different things, especially for a tech company. One percent of market cap could easily be 10 or 20 percent of yearly profit.
"One percent of market cap could easily be 10 or 20 percent of yearly profit."
And this is a problem, how?
A fine should be painful. It also makes the current management look bad which is even more of a punishment. If fines are 1% or less of annual profits, they can be seen as a cost of doing business especially if the prohibited act raised the annual profit by much more. Stockholders won't be happy if C-level execs are playing dangerous games.
I worked in the patent operations department when IBM first beat the Xerox suit (against IBM’s Copier Ii for infringing Xerox patents) then beat the antitrust suit. In both cases we (that’s IBM legal) threw money, lawyers, and massive quantities of documents at the opposition. Even the US government could not afford the legal talent required to mount a decent prosecution. That was just the beginning. I doubt things have changed much and the current top tech companies are sitting pretty much the here IBM was. It will take other tech to bring down the current monopolies, not the government.
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