In January, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sponsored a conference called PrivacyCon, reports Sam Biddle of the The Intercept, where most of the presenters had financ
ial ties to Google. This is yet more evidence of our observation in March that top FTC officials, led by FTC Chair Edith Ramirez, act like Google employees. According to Biddle:
Google’s ties to PrivacyCon are pervasive enough to warrant interrogation. As a case study in how pervasive and well-concealed this type of influence has become, PrivacyCon is hard to beat.
Authors of a whopping 13 out of 19 papers presented at the conference and 23 out of 41 speakers have financial ties to Google. Only two papers included disclosure of an ongoing or past financial connection to Google.
Back in March, we called the FTC/Google relationship the most extreme example of “regulatory capture” that we had seen in Washington in recent years. … Read More ➡
Al Sharpton’s heart is still in New York City. But these past several years his head has been in Washington, retooling his nonprofit National Action Network into a congressional lobbying powerhouse. The group is trying to secure passage of wide-ranging legislation, part of which is a Senate bill to make far more difficult for white police to question or arrest black criminal suspects without inviting legal repercussions upon themselves and their departments. The likely result would be even more of the rapidly escalating violence in the nation’s streets. NAN and the youthful demagogues known as Black Lives Matter have been catalysts in this public safety disaster. Yet to the participants on NAN panels last Tuesday at the Rayburn House Office Building, the main focus was “white racism.”
It began at the fringes. And almost at warp speed, the campaign for a $15 an hour federal minimum wage has taken center stage. The Democratic Party has made it part of its platform. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton supports it. Her intraparty rival, Bernie Sanders, has sponsored a bill to achieve it. Cities such as Los Angeles, Seattle and Washington, D.C., plus the states of California and New York, have passed laws to phase it in. Heavily promoted by organized labor, supporters insist a $15 an hour minimum is way overdue. The current $7.25 an hour, they say, has not kept pace with the cost of living, driving many Americans into poverty. This claim is way off-base. And their legislation, if fully realized, would leave a trail of frustrated job seekers and shuttered businesses. In some places, this already has begun to happen.
The ambush murders of five Dallas police officers on July 7, followed ten days later by the murders of three Baton Rouge cops, outraged the nation. To the social media network of provocateurs called Black Lives Matter (BLM), however, these massacres were equivalent to recent white police “murders” of blacks. Though evidence negates such equivalence, many journalists are insisting that we see these events through the group’s lens. Rather than objectively pursue truth, they selectively use facts and manipulate language to propagate the view that blacks are being targeted for death and are justified in taking matters into their own hands. Case in point: Last December, as part of its annual Person of the Year issue, Time magazine praised BLM as having “weaponized protest.”
Alana Goodman in the Washington Free Beacon today reports that Bill Clinton gave some thirty speeches for fees totaling $7 million, but that the actual identities of the sponsors is a “mystery.” The speaking fees were apparently routed through speakers bureaus and other entities, which the Clintons reported on Hillary’s disclosure forms as the source, obscuring the actual payer of the fees. From the article:
In the wake of the murder of three police officers in Baton Rouge, we are today asking Eric Schmidt of Google, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, and Jack Dorsey of Twitter to end their personal and corporate support for Black Lives Matter (BLM). The letters read in part:
The sniper-style murders of five Dallas police officers last Thursday night should provoke universal outrage. Yet many observers are justifying them. While not defending the killings, they are assuming moral equivalence between the massacre and earlier deaths of criminal suspects in police custody. They claim the murderer, a black ex-Army reservist, Micah X. Johnson, killed by police during a standoff, was a “lone wolf,” not one of the peaceful protestors. This is nonsense. The tactics differ; the goals are the same. Dallas Police Chief David Brown, also black, admits Johnson was driven by a hatred of whites. And that’s what drives Black Lives Matter, the social network behind protests in Dallas and other cities that enables this attitude.
Come July 1 is D-Day. On that date, Puerto Rico is set to default on nearly $2 billion in bonds, about $800 million of which is of the general obligation type. In response, Congress is wrapping up legislation that would allow the island to declare bankruptcy on $18 billion of over $70 billion in outstanding debt. On June 9,