monopolies

While more Republican incumbents assess their party's-- and their own-- electoral prospects next year and respond by announcing early retirements, a flood of qualified Democrats are rushing to announce their candidacies across the country.

A draft piece of legislation in Russia’s Leningrad region seeks to force the operators of social media networks to register and verify users by checking official identification documents like passports. The aim is to prevent children from witnessing perverse content and being abused by insane individuals.
Although the legislation seems well intentioned, it is also far fetched, overly cumbersome and unlikely to get off the ground.

As you can see from the twitter time stamps, El Presidente-elect Señor Trumpanzee only got-- at most-- 6 hours sleep, probably less.

 Google says "Don't be evil." Look for their name as the third to sign on to NSA spying.by Gaius PubliusYes, we're talking about that Google and that Trump. Just two points first, before we look at Dave Dayen's report of the news.The Cult of the High-Tech Billionaire First, a little context.

With Raul Grijalva, Keith Ellison and Mark Pocan leading the way, the Congressional Progressive Caucus has just sent President Obama a letter about the skyrocketing profits of drug companies wrung from their policies of monopolization and price gouging. This is the letter:

I've been a big Clinton detractor and I don't plan to vote for her in November. That said, it's important to recognize the difference between her approach to the runaway prices of pharmaceuticals and Trump's approach. Trump doesn't seem intellectually capable of understanding the problem beyond a single incident and his "team" is ideologically bogged down to the extent of incapacity to recognize the systemic problem of monopoly.

Elizabeth Warren, like FDR who saved capitalism from its own excesses, isn't much liked by banksters and capitalists. The banksters have spent more money trying to defeat her than they have on any other Senate candidate in recent years-- although at the rate they're contributing against Alan Grayson's campaign in Florida-- he could soon catch up with her. "Strong healthy markets," Warren explained in a keynote address last week at the New America think tank in DC, "are the key to a strong, healthy America." That doesn't sound anti-capitalist to me.

We've been talking about the eye-popping corruption of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo-- and Democratic Party version of shady Republican governors Christie, McDonnell, Walker, and Deal, all of whom, like Cuomo, are under federal investigation.

"Comcast perfectly fits the old notion of monopolists as robber barons, so-called by analogy with medieval warlords who perched in their castles overlooking the Rhine, extracting tolls from all who passed.

In his 1995 article for Business On A Small Planet, Corporations and the Public Interest, Jonathan Rowe helped put the intent behind the rise of corporations into a perspective that has been lost over the decades.