Get a clue fools: Jew S A is evermore controlled/dominated by monopolies, cartels, etc.

Apollonian

Apollonian

Guest Columnist
Almost Every Sector of the US Economy Is a Monopoly or an Oligopoly - Crushing the Working Man​

Link: https://russia-insider.com/en/almos...oly-or-oligopoly-crushing-working-man/ri25617

Shocking facts and statistics about how corrupt the US economy has become.

Michael Snyder (End of the American Dream) Mon, Dec 10, 2018 | 1200 Western Collapse

Editor's Note: This is manifestly true in telecommunications as amply demonstrated in Thursday's article: Russia: $10/Month for Superfast Broadband, in US $70 for Slower Speeds - Survey of 195 Countries. At America's tech leader and having the biggest economy, cellular and internet access should be the cheapest in the world, instead it is the most expensive, and it doesn't work as well. Another article the same day addresses the problem from a different perspective - Conservatives have swallowed the (((free trade))) ideology hook, line, and sinker: Conservatives' Obsession With Free Markets Is Foolish, and Not at all Conservative.

Vibrant competition is absolutely essential in order for a capitalist economic system to function effectively. Unfortunately, in the United States today we are witnessing the death of competition in industry after industry as the biggest corporations increasingly gobble up all of their competitors.

John D. Rockefeller famously once said that “competition is a sin”, and he was one of America’s very first oligopolists. According to Google, an oligopoly is “a state of limited competition, in which a market is shared by a small number of producers or sellers”, and that is a perfect description of the current state of affairs in many major industries. In early America, corporations were greatly limited in scope, and in most instances they were only supposed to exist temporarily. But today the largest corporations have become so huge that they literally dominate our entire society, and that is not good for any of us.

Just look at what is happening in the airline industry. When I was growing up, there were literally dozens of airlines, but now four major corporations control everything and they have been making gigantic profits…

AMERICA’S airlines used to be famous for two things: terrible service and worse finances. Today flyers still endure hidden fees, late flights, bruised knees, clapped-out fittings and sub-par food. Yet airlines now make juicy profits. Scheduled passenger airlines reported an after-tax net profit of $15.5bn in 2017, up from $14bn in 2016.

What is true of the airline industry is increasingly true of America’s economy. Profits have risen in most rich countries over the past ten years but the increase has been biggest for American firms. Coupled with an increasing concentration of ownership, this means the fruits of economic growth are being monopolised.

If you don’t like how an airline is treating you, in some cases you can choose to fly with someone else next time.

But as a recent Bloomberg article pointed out, that is becoming increasingly difficult to do…

United, for example, dominates many of the country’s largest airports. In Houston, United has around a 60 percent market share, in Newark 51 percent, in Washington Dulles 43 percent, in San Francisco 38 percent and in Chicago 31 percent. This situation is even more skewed for other airlines. For example, Delta has an 80 percent market share in Atlanta. For many routes, you simply have no choice.

And of course the airline industry is far from alone. In sector after sector, economic power is becoming concentrated in just a few hands.

For a moment, I would like you to consider these numbers…

Two corporations control 90 percent of the beer Americans drink.

•Five banks control about half of the nation’s banking assets.

•Many states have health insurance markets where the top two insurers have an 80 percent to 90 percent market share. For example, in Alabama one company, Blue Cross Blue Shield, has an 84 percent market share and in Hawaii it has 65 percent market share.

•When it comes to high-speed Internet access, almost all markets are local monopolies; over 75 percent of households have no choice with only one provider.

•Four players control the entire U.S. beef market and have carved up the country.

After two mergers this year, three companies will control 70 percent of the world’s pesticide market and 80 percent of the U.S. corn-seed market.

I knew that things were bad, but I didn’t know that they were that bad.

Capitalism works best when competition is maximized. In socialist systems, the government itself becomes a major player in the game, and that is never a desirable outcome. Instead, what we want is for the government to serve as a “referee” that enforces rules that encourage free and fair competition. Jonathan Tepper, the author of “The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition”, made this point very well in an excerpt from his new book…

Capitalism is a game where competitors play by rules on which everyone agrees. The government is the referee, and just as you need a referee and a set of agreed rules for a good basketball game, you need rules to promote competition in the economy.

Left to their own devices, firms will use any available means to crush their rivals. Today, the state, as referee, has not enforced rules that would increase competition, and through regulatory capture has created rules that limit competition.

Our founders were very suspicious of large concentrations of power. That is why they wanted a very limited federal government, and that is also why they put substantial restrictions on corporate entities.

When power is greatly concentrated, most of the rewards tend to flow to the very top of the pyramid, and that is precisely what we have been witnessing. The following comes from the New York Times…

Even when economic growth has been decent, as it is now, most of the bounty has flowed to the top. Median weekly earnings have grown a miserly 0.1 percent a year since 1979. The typical American family today has a lower net worththan the typical family did 20 years ago. Life expectancy, shockingly, has fallen this decade.

So what is the solution?

Well, one of the big things that we need to do is to stop crushing small business.

In America today, the rate of small business creation has been hovering near all-time lows and the percentage of Americans that are working for themselves has been hovering near all-time lows.

In order for more competition to exist, we need more competitors to enter the marketplace, but instead we have been crushing “the little guy” with mountains of regulations and deeply oppressive taxes.

And you know what? Many of the big corporations actually like all of the red tape because they know that they can handle it much easier than their much smaller competitors can. That gives them a competitive advantage, and it creates a barrier to entry that is difficult to overcome.

When I was in school, I was taught that one of the reasons why the U.S. system was so much better than communist systems was because we had so many more choices.

But today our choices are very limited in industry after industry, and the gigantic corporate entities that dominate everything don’t really care if we like it or not.

We can do so much better than this, but in order to do so we must return to the values and principles that this nation was originally founded upon.
 
Google-Facebook duopoly now commands 80% of ad market​

01/24/2019

Link: https://governmentslaves.news/2019/01/24/google-facebook-duopoly-now-commands-80-of-ad-market/

If you think the internet is under the control of Big Tech now, it’s going to get much worse this year, reports a State of Digital Media White Paper.

Consolidation of revenue continues, with Amazon, Microsoft, Oath, Twitter and Snap spending $29 billion, compared to Google-Facebook spending a staggering $169 billion in 2018.

With this blatantly left-leaning cartel totally dominating the digital advertising market with boycotts and blacklisting, it’s more bad news for free speech and the free press.

And that’s not the end of the story, according to the report. Over the next five years, this cabal’s growth is projected to grow in double-digits over the next five years – “making life miserable for everyone else, particularly publishers,” says the report.

Other highlights, or lowlights, of the report, depending on your point of view:

•Digital will encompass 50 percent of all ad spending in 2022.

•80 percent of all digital ad spend will go to the duopoly and next five years.

•The rest of the digital market will decline by 11 percent this year

CONTINUE @ WND [ck site link, above]
 
Kavanaugh Delivers: Sides With SCOTUS Libs to Knock Apple Down A Peg
Chris Menahan​

InformationLiberation
May. 13, 2019

Link: http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=60189

Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh delivered a savage blow to Apple CEO Tim Cook on Monday by siding with the Supreme Court's leftists to rule that Apple can be sued for their monopolistic practices.

From The Hill, "Supreme Court rules iPhone users can sue Apple over App Store prices":

The Supreme Court on Monday said that iPhone users can proceed with a class-action lawsuit against Apple over its control of app sales in a ruling that could threaten the company's exclusive marketplace of third-party software.

A group of consumers had sued Apple, claiming that the company's monopoly over its App Store led to inflated app prices. Apple disputed the legality of the suit, arguing the consumers had no standing to sue the company because it merely operated the App Store as an intermediary between users and the developers who make and sell apps.

Apple argued they're above the law but Kavanaugh gave them a kick to the teeth:

Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the opinion for the 5-4 decision, surprising many by breaking with his conservative colleagues and siding with the court's liberal justices.

The Supreme Court had ruled in 1977 in a case called Illinois Brick that only "direct purchasers" of products have standing to bring antitrust lawsuits. In his decision, Kavanaugh rejected Apple's argument that it was the app developers, and not the company operating the App Store, that sold the programs directly to users.

"Apple's theory would provide a roadmap for monopolistic retailers to structure transactions with manufacturers or suppliers so as to evade antitrust claims by consumers and thereby thwart effective antitrust enforcement," Kavanaugh wrote.

[...] "In this case, unlike in Illinois Brick, the iPhone owners are not consumers at the bottom of a vertical distribution chain who are attempting to sue manufacturers at the top of the chain," Kavanaugh wrote.

"There is no intermediary in the distribution chain between Apple and the consumer. The iPhone owners purchase apps directly from the retailer Apple, who is the alleged antitrust violator," he continued. "The iPhone owners pay the alleged overcharge directly to Apple."
Sounds logical to me.

I think in the past I might have shared articles favorable towards Apple on this case -- which was filed all the way back in 2011 -- but after Tim Cook joined with the ADL to declare war on free speech I'm now ecstatic to see him get knocked down a peg.

Kavanaugh seems to be a very smart man who is capable of seeing the world for what it is rather than being blinded by ideology and vague "principles" like Neil Gorsuch.

While I don't know if Tim Cook's behavior had any effect on Monday's ruling, this is more evidence showing Kavanaugh is not a mindless "conservative" who believes corporations have a constitutional right to crush Americans under their boots in the name of the "free market."
 
The Regulatory-Industrial Complex​

May 18, 2019 by Counter Markets
By Llewellyn H. Rockwell

Link: https://countermarkets.com/the-regulatory-industrial-complex/

[This article was originally printed in the Free Market, September 1990. It was reprinted in The Left, the Right, and the State (2008).]

Socialists want socialism for everyone else, but capitalism for themselves, while capitalists want capitalism for everyone else, but socialism for themselves.

Neither Ted Kennedy nor Jane Fonda practices a vow of poverty, nor are they taking any homeless into their mansions, while too many big companies try to short-circuit the market with government privileges. And one way they do it is through the regulatory agencies that acne Washington, DC.

If I may make a public confession (counting on the charity of Mises Daily readers): I used to work for the US Congress. I’ve since gone straight, of course, but the experience had its value, much as the future criminologist might benefit from serving with the James Gang.

For one thing, being on Capitol Hill showed me that, unlike the republic of the Founding Fathers’ vision, our DC Leviathan exists only to extract money and power from the people for itself and the special interests.

Ludwig von Mises called this an inevitable “caste conflict.” There can be no natural class conflict in society, Mises showed, since the free market harmonizes all economic interests, but in a system of government-granted privileges, there must be a struggle between those who live off the government and the rest of us. It is a disguised struggle, of course, since truth threatens the loot.

When I worked on Capitol Hill, Jimmy Carter was bleating about the energy crisis and promising to punish big oil with a “windfall profits tax.” But I saw that the lobbyists pushing for the tax were from the big oil companies.

And, after a moment’s thought, it was easy to realize why. There was no windfall-profits tax in Saudi Arabia, but it did fall heavily on Oklahoma. And as intended, the tax aided the big companies that imported oil by punishing their competitors, smaller, independent firms.

In the ensuing restructuring of the industry, also brought about by the price and allocation regulations of the Department of Energy, the big firms bought up domestic capacity at fire-sale prices, and then the Reagan administration repealed the tax and the regulations. Meanwhile, the big companies received contracts from the Department of Energy to produce money-losing “alternative fuels.”

In every administration, the tools of inflation, borrowing, taxation, and regulation are used to transfer wealth from the people to the government and its cronies.

At times, one or another of these tools becomes politically dangerous, so the government alters the mix. That’s why the Reagan administration switched from taxes and inflation to borrowing, and it’s why the Bush administration, with the deficit a liability, calls for more taxes, inflation, and regulation.

A tremendous amount is at stake in the re-regulation of the economy advocated by the Bush administration. Just one clause in the Federal Register can mean billions for a favored firm or industry, and disaster for its competitors, which is why lobbyists cluster around the Capitol like flies around a garbage can.

While claiming to need more money for — among other vital projects — a trip to Mars supervised by Dan Quayle, the president is boosting the budget of every regulatory agency in Washington.

Here are just some of those agencies, and the way they function: Founded by Richard Nixon, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is an antientrepreneur agency. Not only does OSHA target small- and medium-sized businesses, its regulatory cases are easily handled by Exxon’s squad of lawyers, while they can bankrupt a small firm.

Also founded by Nixon, the Consumer Product Safety Commission issues regulations drawn up in open consultation with big business — regulations that often conform exactly to what those firms are already doing. Small businesses, on the other hand, must spend heavily to comply.

Another Nixon creation is the Environmental Protection Agency, whose budget is larded with the influence of politically connected businesses, and whose regulations buttress established industries and discriminate against entrepreneurs — by, for example, legalizing pollution for existing companies but making new firms spend heavily.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development was founded by Lyndon B. Johnson, but its roots stretch back to the housing policy of the New Deal, whose explicit purpose was to subsidize builders of rental and single-family housing. Since LBJ’s Great Society, HUD has subsidized builders of public-housing projects, and of subsidized private housing. How can anyone be surprised that fat cats use HUD to line their pockets? That was its purpose.

The Securities and Exchange Commission was established by Franklin D. Roosevelt, with its legislation written by corporate lawyers to cartelize the market for big Wall Street firms. Over the years, the SEC has stopped many new stock issues by smaller companies, who might grow and compete with the industrial and commercial giants aligned with the big Wall Street firms. And right now, it is lessening competition in the futures and commodities markets.

The Interstate Commerce Commission was created in 1887 to stop “cut-throat” competition among railroads (i.e., competitive pricing) and to enforce high prices. Later amendments extended its power to trucking and other forms of transportation, where it also prevented competition. During the Carter administration, much of the ICC’s power was trimmed, but some of this was undone in the Reagan administration.

The Federal Communications Commission was established by Herbert Hoover to prevent private property in radio frequencies, and to place ownership in the hands of the government. The FCC set up the network system, whose licenses went to politically connected businessmen, and delayed technological breakthroughs that might have threatened the networks. There was some deregulation during the Reagan administration — although it was the development of cable TV that did the most good, by circumventing the networks.

The Department of Agriculture runs America’s farming on behalf of producers, keeping prices high, profits up, imports out, and new products off the shelves. We can’t know what food prices would be in the absence of the appropriately initialed DOA, only that food would be much cheaper. Now, for the first time since the farm program was established by Herbert Hoover, as a copy of the Federal Food Administration he ran during World War I, we are seeing widespread criticism of farm welfare.

The Federal Trade Commission — as shown by the fascist-deco statue in front of its headquarters — claims to “tame” the “wild horse of the market” on behalf of the public. Since its founding in 1914, however, it has restrained the market to the benefit of established firms. That’s why the chief lobbyists for the FTC were all from big business.

When then-Congressman Steve Symms (R-ID) tried to partially deregulate the Food and Drug Administration in the 1970s to allow more new drugs, he was stopped by the big drug companies and their trade association. Why? Because the FDA exists to protect them.

OSHA, CPSC, EPA, HUD, SEC, ICC, FCC, DOA, FTC, FDA — I could go on and on, through the entire alphabet from Hell. I have only scratched the villainous surface. But according to the average history or economics text, these agencies emerged in response to public demand. There is never a hint of the regulatory-industrial complex. We’re told that the public is being served. And it is: on a platter.
 
Justice Department launches Google anti-monopoly probe​

By Zero Hedge -
June 2, 2019

Link: https://www.intellihub.com/justice-department-launches-google-anti-monopoly-probe/

[ck site link, above, for charts]


Once shielded by the logic of Silicon Valley’s relentless churn of innovation – which dictated that no reigning tech empire could rule for long before going the way of Yahoo and AOL – tech giants like Facebook, Amazon and Google have been subjected to intensifying anti-trust pressure – Elizabeth Warren’s “Break up Big Tech”s billboard is only the latest example. Indeed, big tech trust-busting has become one of the few issues in contemporary Washington that garners genuine bipartisan support.

Since the Trump administration swept into power two years ago in spite of thinly veiled opposition from Silicon Valley – as it was later revealed, big tech effectively conspired with the Clinton campaign to hurt Trump’s chances – the drumbeat of unprecedented anti-trust scrutiny has grown steadily louder, facilitated by the president’s own publicly-voiced suspicions.

And on Friday, the levee finally broke.

Just before midnight on Friday, at the close of what was a hectic month for markets, WSJ dropped a bombshell of a story: The paper reported that the DoJ has opened an anti-trust investigation of Alphabet Inc., which could “present a major new layer of regulatory scrutiny for the search giant, according to people familiar with the matter.” The report was sourced to “people familiar with the matter,” but was swiftly corroborated by the New York Times, Bloomberg and others.

For months now, the FTC has appeared to be gearing up for a showdown with big tech. The agency – which shares anti-trust authority with the DoJ – has created a new commission that could help undo big-tech tie-ups like Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram, and hired lawyers who have advanced new anti-monopoly theories that would help justify the breakup of companies like Amazon.

But as it turns out, the Trump administration’s first salvo against big tech didn’t come from the FTC; instead, this responsibility has been delegated to the DoJ, which has reportedly been tasked with supervising the investigation into Google.

That’s not super surprising since the FTC already had its chance to nail Google with an anti-monopoly probe back in 2013. But the agency came up short. From what we can tell, it appears the administration will divvy up responsibility for any future anti-trust investigations between the two agencies, which means the FTC – which is already reportedly preparing to levy a massive fine against Facebook – could end up taking the lead in those cases.

Though WSJ didn’t specify which aspects of Google’s business might come under the microscope, a string of multi-billion-euro fines recently levied by the EU might offer some guidance. The bloc’s anti-trust authority, which has been far more eager to take on American tech giants than its American counterpart (for reasons that should be obvious to all), has fined Google over its practice of bundling software with its standard Android license, the way its search engine rankings favor its own product listings, and ways it has harmed competition in the digital advertising market.

During the height of the controversy over big tech’s abuses of sensitive user data last year, the Verge published a story speculating about how the monopolistic tendencies of each of the dominant Silicon Valley tech giants could be remedied. For Google, the Verge argued, the best remedy would be a ban on acquisitions – a strategy that has been bandied about in Congress.

Our best model for tech antitrust is the Department of Justice’s anti-bundling case against Microsoft in the ’90s, which argued that Microsoft was using its control over the PC market to force out competing operating systems and browsers. If you’re looking for a contemporary equivalent, Google is probably the closest fit. On a good day, Google (or Alphabet, if you prefer) is the most valuable company in the world by market cap, with dozens of different products supported by an all-encompassing ad network. Google also has clear and committed enemies, with Microsoft, Oracle, Yelp, and even the Motion Picture Association of America calling for restrictions on the company’s power.

But according to Open Markets’ Matthew Stoller, the best long-term remedy for Google’s dominance has more to do with Google’s acquisitions. “If you’re looking for a silver bullet, probably the best thing to do would be to block Google from being able to buy any companies,” says Stoller. “Suddenly, you have to compete with Google, you can’t just be bought out by Google.”

That might sound tame compared to Europe’s billion-dollar fines, but it cuts to the core of how Google is organized. The company has acquired more than 200 startups since it was founded, including central products like YouTube, Android, and DoubleClick. The company’s modular structure is arguably a direct result of that buying spree, and it’s hard to imagine what Google would look like without it. More recent buys like Nest have fallen under the broader Alphabet umbrella, but the core strategy hasn’t changed. Would Google still be an AI giant if it hadn’t bought DeepMind? Probably, but everyone involved would have had to work a lot harder.

Even better, anti-monopoly activists would have a bunch of different ways to block those acquisitions. The Department of Justice’s antitrust division hasn’t contested Google’s acquisitions so far, but it could always change its approach. The strongest fix would come from Congress, where Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) has introduced a bill that would place an outright ban on acquisitions by any company with a market cap higher than $100 billion. (As of press time, Google is worth roughly $840 billion.)

We feel it’s no exaggeration to say that this is only the beginning of what could become an epoch-defining story arch. And like every good story, this one will have main characters and bit players. As far as we can tell, one of the leading roles will likely be played by Justice Department antitrust chief Makan Delrahim, a previously obscure Trump Administration official who is now in charge of one of the most consequential investigations in recent memory.

Setting aside what it might mean for Silicon Valley, the investigation will also have major ramifications for markets, since shares of the big tech companies have been at the vanguard of the torrid post-crisis bull market. Though the influence of FANG stocks on overall market performance has waned this year, they remain hugely influential.

Tech giants are far and away the biggest contributors to SPX sales growth…

…and they have generated nearly all SPX after-tax adjusted profit margin since the crisis.

Given that big tech valuations are often based, at least partly, on the notion that these companies will achieve an unassailable market position, an anti-trust campaign could be extremely harmful not just for publicly traded tech giants, but for the entire Silicon Valley pipeline, as @SuperMugatu explains.

As a counterpoint, it’s worth remembering that the presence of two new business-friendly conservative judges on the Supreme Court will make the DoJ’s job that much harder, and could ultimately tip the scales in favor of Big Tech winning this battle.

News of the investigation could adversely impact shares of the big tech companies, which will in turn create a serious drag for the major indexes. For investors, it will be one more threat to a bull market which is already teetering thanks to President Trump’s trade war with China (and now Mexico).

We imagine we’ll be hearing more about the probe through both official and unofficial channels in the coming weeks.
 
See The Report Big Tech Fears​

The technocracy does not want anybody to share this link

Jon Bowne | Infowars.com - June 3, 2019

Link: https://www.infowars.com/see-the-report-big-tech-fears/

A Bloomberg opinion piece, of all sources, threatened the tech industry by titling the article “Google should be afraid. Very afraid”.

But has the Tech Industry gotten the message?

Replete with all of its hubris and billions flowing in from the Saudis and the Chinese, if Silicon Valley were a Country, it would be one of the richest on Earth.

It might as well be another country, it certainly holds the rights of its host Country in utter contempt which is why the Justice Department is finally doing something about it.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, “The Justice Department is gearing up for an antitrust investigation of Alphabet Inc.’s Google, a move that could present a major new layer of regulatory scrutiny for the search giant, according to people familiar with the matter.”

And REUTERS continued to analyze how the Tech Giants had rigged the game, writing, “One source said the potential investigation, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, focused on accusations that Google gave preference to its own businesses in searches. A spokesman for the Justice Department said he could not confirm or deny that an investigation was being considered. Google declined comment. Early in 2013, the FTC closed a long-running investigation of Google, giving it a slap on the wrist. Under FTC pressure, Google agreed to end the practice of “scraping” reviews and other data from rivals’ websites for its own products, and to let advertisers export data to independently assess campaigns. Google’s search, YouTube, reviews, maps and other businesses, which are largely free to consumers but financed through advertising, have catapulted it from a start-up to one of the world’s richest companies in just two decades.”

And AMAZON with its single-handed decimation of retail outlets is preparing for the worst as SF GATE reports “Amazon could face heightened antitrust scrutiny under a new agreement between U.S. regulators that puts it under closer watch by the Federal Trade Commission, three people familiar with the matter said. The move is the result of the FTC and the Department of Justice, the U.S. government’s leading antitrust enforcement agencies, quietly divvying up competition oversight of two of the country’s top tech companies, according to those people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the government’s work is confidential. The Justice Department is set to have more jurisdiction over Google, The Washington Post reported on Friday, paving the way for a potential investigation of the search-and-advertising giant.”

Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, Bezos’ Amazon, and Youtube’s cannibalistic algorithm are the crazed elephants in the room.

Zuckerberg’s lawyer recently argued that users have no expectation of privacy, which completely contradicts Zuckerberg’s claim that he will be making Facebook more private in the near future.
 
Bolshevik Big Business? Corporations Now Attacking Conservative Customers​

Written by Selwyn Duke

Link: https://www.thenewamerican.com/cult...orations-now-attacking-conservative-customers

[see vids at site link, above]

Nabisco mocks customers upset about a drag-queen Mother’s Day cookie ad. Burger King subtly encourages people to throw its milk shakes at anti-European Union populists. And a beer company advocates hitting such people “over the head with a brick.” Welcome to the new corporate activism and the principle “The conservative customer is always wrong.”

There was a time, not long ago, when businesses largely adhered to the old advice “Never discuss politics or religion.” And when explaining his lack of 1990s political activism, NBA legend Michael Jordan reportedly said, “Republicans buy shoes, too.” But that was before the advent of “woke” corporate activism.

There are, of course, the recent examples of big business threatening to leave states that enact politically incorrect (but morally correct) laws. For instance, Walt Disney Co., Netflix, and other corporations are claiming they may exit Georgia if the state’s new pro-life “heartbeat” bill goes into effect. Netflix has played this game before, too, having joined other entities in boycotting North Carolina after it enacted a pro-sanity “bathroom bill” in 2016. And the NCAA, NASCAR, and other businesses vowed to leave Indiana after the state passed its Religious Freedom Restoration Act in 2015. Sadly, Indiana and North Carolina both capitulated and watered down their laws to appease the “corporactivists.”

Yet more shocking still is a very recent development. A far cry from “The customer is always right,” Nabisco actually mocked customers who objected to a “drag queen” Chips Ahoy! Mother’s Day advertisement it created.

Of course, that the corporation thought such an ad (below) was a good idea in the first place is shocking itself.

As for Nabisco’s attacks on its customers, LifeSiteNews reported, “‘They’re big mad,’ tweeted Chips Ahoy!, followed by a crying emoji” (tweet below).

Then, at “3:33 p.m., when Twitter user ‘Kasy’ said, ‘ppl really bothered by a drag queen being in a commercial, imagine being so fragile,’ the Chips Ahoy! social media team chimed in again, and laughed at their customers: ‘convinced they didn’t even watch the video lol,’” LifeSiteNews also informed.

Nabisco’s social-media team later fell silent, either realizing their public-relations error or having been reined in by superiors. In fact, the corporation wouldn’t even respond to LifeSiteNews’ questions about the affair.

Then there was Burger King’s reaction to Brexit leader Nigel Farage having had a milkshake thrown at him late last month, prior to the European Union Parliamentary elections:

The fast-food chain later tried to walk back the tweet, but the meaning was clear.

Worse still, however, was a message from a beer company in Manchester, England. As PJ Media reported May 21, “‘Note to our customers: Please don't throw out beer over fascists,’ wrote Mike Marcus, the director and founder of the Chorlton Brewing Company. ‘Hit them over the head with a brick as is traditional.’”

“In his Twitter profile, Marcus describes himself as ‘Anti-fascist (any means necessary),’” PJ Media continued.

Far from falling silent, Marcus later responded to criticism by “arguing that his call for violence was ‘acceptable,’” PJ Media also informed. He did, however, subsequently lock down his Twitter account.

At least one company, though, is retreating from politics. After a long period during which sports network ESPN lost millions of subscribers, its new president, Jimmy Pitaro, announced last month that he would be steering his commentators away from ideological discussions.

But why did big business suddenly start alienating customers by taking controversial stands in the first place? FS1 host Jason Whitlock discussed this development, as it related to ESPN, on a late May edition of Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight (video below).

Whitlock’s basic point is that ESPN executives got caught up in the social-media Matrix. Because their commentators’ political positions were resonating well on Twitter, they assumed these expressed stances were marketing winners, or at least not liabilities. What they, quite stupidly, didn’t realize is that people responding to leftist commentary on Twitter are an unusually zealous, self-selected bunch. They do not represent an accurate cross-section of America, let alone ESPN’s viewership base.

This phenomenon perhaps influences many corporations, but there’s more to it. A related factor is that corporate pseudo-elites circulate in very left-wing pseudo-elite circles, in a liberal echo chamber. This isn’t an accurate customer cross-section, either, of course, but people can easily mistake their little world for the larger one if that’s all they see.

Also related is that a new generation has entered corporate America the last 10 to 15 years. These younger people are more left-wing, and they’re likely overrepresented among social-media team members.

But it’s not just that they’re perhaps more zealously ideological. Older generations were inculcated with a stronger sense of duty and propriety and greater impulse control. Many among the new guard, however, are more likely to let the personal influence the professional; they’re also more solipsistic, self-centered, and impulse-driven, making them less likely to sacrifice immediate emotional satisfaction in deference to their employer. They’re more apt to represent themselves and not their company — even on the job.

Another factor, however, is that today’s greater polarization and waxing left-wing zealotry may make staying neutral more difficult. There’s great pressure now on corporations to join the Left’s culture-war phalanx, with silence sometimes interpreted as tacit cooperation with the other side.

Of course, some may wish to applaud corporations for standing on — and supposedly being willing to lose money over — principle, even if it’s the wrong kind of principle. But not so fast.

Consider: While Google announced last year that it wouldn’t do artificial-intelligence work for the United States military, it’s helping the despotic Chinese regime censor and oppress its own people. Then, while “PayPal, Apple, Microsoft, and Coca-Cola, have criticized North Carolina’s new locker room and bathroom law as ‘discriminatory’ to LGBT people,” reported CNS News in 2016, “those same four corporations do business in Middle Eastern countries where homosexual conduct and cross-dressing are illegal.”

So much for principal — so much more for profits.

Some now complain about how certain corporations once had dealings with Nazi Germany, but contemporary big business may be even worse. Today’s corporactivism is merely the value-signaling of money whores — the spirit of greed hasn’t changed, just the spirit of the age.
 
It’s time for America to declare “D-Day” against the evil tech monopolists and their war against human rights​

Friday, June 07, 2019 by: Mike Adams

Link: https://www.naturalnews.com/2019-06...lare-d-day-against-evil-tech-monopolists.html

[see vids at site link, above]

(Natural News) On June 6, 1944, courageous American soldiers stormed the beaches of Normandy to save civilization from the rise of fascism and tyranny. Seventy-five years later, humanity is once again suffering under the brutal oppression and tyranny of the techno-fascists, with Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat, Wikipedia and other techno-fascists openly engaged in crimes against humanity and the suppression of basic human rights like the freedom to speak.

It is time that America launched a new “D-Day” military operation to overtake and dismantle the techno-fascists that now burn far more books than Adolf Hitler ever could have imagined. The arrogance and criminality of people like Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey exceeds the threat to humanity that was once wielded by the Third Reich. While the Nazi regime murdered six million Jews and caused untold human suffering across Europe, Russia and even parts of Africa and the Middle East, the techno-fascist regime that now dominates the internet threatens all humans everywhere on the planet through malicious assaults on human rights that include suppression of speech, economic sabotage, the promotion of fake news journo-terrorism, the organized smearing of patriots and Christians, and even the promotion of the attempted political coup against the United States of America.

Under the authoritarian regime of the techno-fascists like Google, Twitter and Facebook, human civilization itself is under assault, and the voices of freedom and independence are being snuffed out with each passing day. This can only lead to mass human suffering, enslavement and ultimately the mass killing of those who hold dissenting views. All the pillars of civil society are being destroyed by Big Tech, including journalism (now completely dead in America), the First Amendment and even the right to engage in commerce without torturous interference by the tech giants like Salesforces.com.

Big Tech is at WAR with freedom around the world… and it’s time for all free people to fight back and take down the techno-fascists

America must now respond to the techno-fascists with the same degree of courage and determination that we once used to halt the crimes against humanity carried out by the Third Reich. The technocracy is at war with humanity, and if humans ever want to be free again, they must rise up and organize at a national scale to defeat the techno-fascists while restoring the basic human right to speak in a public forum without politically-motivated interference.

Call your Senators, call the White House and call your representatives in the House. Demand decisive action to halt the techno-fascists and their censorship war crimes against humanity. If we do not defeat the techno-fascists, humanity will be enslaved, oppressed and mass murdered by authoritarian regimes around the world.

The liberation of humanity begins with the defeat of the techno-fascists

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Jack Dorsey must be prevented from ESCAPING his war crimes

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Judgement Day: Dave Hodges interviews Mike Adams on why Trump must ARREST the domestic traitors and stop the sabotage from within

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It’s time for America to declare “D-Day” against the evil tech monopolists and their war against human rights

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Here's good argumentation for break-up of the illegal monopolies pretending to being "privately owned" (therefore entitled to censor Christians, whites, et al.)

 
Trump: Tech companies, not Russia, trying to 'rig the election' ​

Link: https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/26/trump-tech-companies-2020-election-1383283

By KYLE DALY
| 06/26/2019 10:56 AM EDT
| Updated 06/26/2019 12:00 PM EDT

President Donald Trump today suggested tech giants like Google and Twitter are the greatest threat to the integrity of the 2020 presidential election — and said anti-conservative bias among the companies had a greater impact in 2016 than Russian meddling.

"Let me tell you, they're trying to rig the election," Trump said in a phone interview on Fox Business. "That's what we should be looking at, not that witch hunt, the phony witch hunt."

Charging Google with being "totally biased" in favor of Democrats and fomenting "hatred for the Republicans," Trump downplayed Russia's 2016 social media manipulation: "You know, they talk about Russia because they had some bloggers—and by the way, those bloggers, some of them were going both ways. They were for Clinton and for Trump."

Lawmakers, academics and U.S. intelligence officials are in broad agreement that Russia mounted a vast online disinformation campaign ahead of the 2016 election with the aim of inflaming American political and social tensions, supporting Trump's candidacy and depressing Democratic voter turnout.

Trump's comments reiterated claims that he and other prominent Republicans have made alleging that tech companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter are biased against conservatives and deliberately stifle their accounts and content. The companies flatly deny these allegations.

His criticisms came immediately after an extended broadside against Twitter for allegedly blocking people from following his account on the site, a claim the president has made repeatedly without evidence.

Twitter didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. A Google spokesperson said, "We build our products with extraordinary care and safeguards to be a trustworthy source of information for everyone, without any regard for political viewpoint," noting the company's publicly available criteria for determining the quality of search results.
 
Big Pharma Hikes Drug Price 879% And That’s Just One Of 3,400 So Far THIS YEAR​

 Posted on July 6, 2019Big Pharma

Link: https://www.naturalblaze.com/2019/0...-thats-just-one-of-3400-so-far-this-year.html

By Mac Slavo

Big Pharma continues to jack up the prices on the drugs they peddle. The price of one drug was hiked 879%, and that’ only ONE of the 3,400 price increases that have occurred so far this year.

Pharmaceutical companies raised the prices of more than 3,400 drugs in the first half of 2019, surpassing the number of drug hikes they imposed during the same period last year, according to an analysis first reported by NBC News. While the average price increase per drug was 10.5%, a rate around five times that of inflation, about 40 of the drugs saw triple-digit increases. That includes a generic version of the antidepressant Prozac, which saw a price increase of 879%.

ARS Technica reported that the surge in price hikes comes amid ongoing public and political pressure to drag down the sky-rocketing price of drugs and healthcare costs overall. In May of 2018, President Donald Trump boldly announced that drug companies would unveil “voluntary massive drops in prices” within weeks, however, Big Pharma didn’t announce any big drops or actually reduce their prices. Trump then went on to publicly shame Pfizer for continuing to raise drug prices. The company responded with a short-lived pause on drug price increases mid-way through last year, but it resumed increasing prices in January along with dozens of other pharmaceutical companies.

“Requests and public shaming haven’t worked,” Michael Rea, chief executive of RX Savings Solutions, told Reuters last December. His company helps health plans and employers seek lower-cost prescription medicines. It also conducted a new analysis of some drug prices.

It really isn’t a surprise that people are losing faith in Western medicine in record numbers in favor of a more natural and holistic approach. Cost is certainly one problem, but many experience debilitating side effects from Big Pharma’s drugs – and they then seek relief from those side effects by using other drugs laced with different synthetic chemicals. It’s a vicious cycle, and no one should be surprised by the rise in things like herbal tinctures, medicinal teas, and CBD oil.

The more than 3,400 drug price increases in the first half of 2019 is a 17% increase over the number of drug price hikes in the first half of 2018. So price increases are skyrocketing instead of going down. In addition to the Prozac generic, the drugs that saw triple-digit increases included the topical steroid Mometasone, which had a price increase of 381%. A pain reliever and cough medication (Promethazine/Codeine) saw a 326% hike while the ADHD treatment Guanfacine 2mg saw its price rise 118%.

The Trump administration has finalized a new rule that goes into effect this summer, and it states that drug companies must include the prices of their product in advertisements on TV. At that point, when the general public understands just how much these companies are ripping them off, they may make a more permanent turn away from Western medicine’s chemical treatments.

It’s difficult to say if the Trump administration’s rule will have any effect on drug prices or not.
 
EXCLUSIVE: Google to block all anti-cancer, “anti-vax” and anti-GMO websites at the browser level as tech giant goes all-in with pharma drug cartels​

Tuesday, July 02, 2019 by: Mike Adams

Link: https://www.naturalnews.com/2019-07...d-anti-gmo-websites-at-the-browser-level.html

(Natural News) By late 2020, Google’s Chrome browser will automatically block all so-called anti-cancer, “anti-vax” and anti-GMO websites as part of Google’s collapse into a Monsanto/Pharma criminal cartel. Users who want to visit websites that expose the scientifically-validated risks and potential harm of vaccines, chemotherapy, glyphosate or GMOs will have to switch to alternative browsers and search engines, since the Google.com search engine is already in the process of eliminating all such websites from its search results.

Within a year or so, the Google Chrome browser won’t even allow a user to visit sites like NaturalNews.com without changing the browser’s default settings. The only websites accessible through Chrome will be those which are “approved” to promote mass medication, chemotherapy, pesticides, vaccines, fluoride, 5G cell towers and other poisons that enrich powerful, globalist corporations while dumbing down the population.

This is the conclusion from a high-level source that told Natural News months ago about the coming purge of organics and natural health websites from Google — a purge that accelerated last week with the removal of Mercola.com and thousands of other natural health sites from Google search results.

The situation has become so insane that now Google is pushing search suggestions like “organics is a lie” and “supplements are bad.” Google’s algorithm has already been trained to claim that “GMOs are good” and “chiropractic is fake.” See the shocking proof here.

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The corporate establishment is now pushing total censorship to keep the public trapped in a cycle of disease, medication and ignorance

The war on health and nutrition is accelerating, and just today, the Wall Street Journal published an orchestrated hit piece against “Christ Beat Cancer” while calling for tech giants to ban all websites and content that discusses natural alternatives to chemotherapy and cancer surgery. Big Pharma is behind the push, of course, to scrub the internet of all content that threatens pharmaceutical profits or reveals the very real risks of using their medication, vaccine and chemotherapy products.

The only way Big Pharma can maintain its market monopoly position, in other words, is if the public is kept in the dark about the dangers of mass medication. Censorship has become pivotal to Big Pharma’s business model. Public knowledge is the enemy of pharma profits.

Now, Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are going all-in with the pharmaceutical giants and agreeing to engage in coordinated censorship of natural health information that might convince someone to avoid pharmaceuticals, vaccines or pesticide-saturated foods. Every person who eats organics or prevents disease using nutrition and herbs, after all, is a “lost revenue opportunity” from the point of view of the pharmaceutical giants. And to enforce the profit model, the tech giants are deliberately transforming themselves into anti-knowledge gatekeepers. Google search, for example, no longer returns information that contributes to human knowledge on health, vaccines or cancer. Instead, Google search results anti-knowledge results designed to prevent the public from learning new things about health, prevention and natural cures.

In doing this, Big Tech has agreed to collude with Big Pharma to wage an online drug racket that silences all speech which contradicts the propaganda and fraudulent science of the pharmaceutical industry, which is steeped in a long history of science fraud, bribery of doctors, running illegal experiments on humans, price fixing and much more.

Google will also penalize all websites that promote Donald Trump, Christianity or conservatism

The censorship of the tech giants won’t stop at natural health information, of course. Natural News has also learned that Google’s algorithms are being aggressively modified to penalize or block all websites that promote Donald Trump, Christianity or conservatism. This is being done at the browser level, where Chrome browsers will remotely download lists of websites to block or penalize.

The Chrome browser may either display a warning message when a user attempts to access one of the sites (i.e. “Warning: This site contains dangerous information,” etc.) or the browser may completely block the website, requiring the user to manually bypass the blocking in order to access the site.

In essence, websites that promote nutrition, natural health, herbal medicine or the healing arts will be categorized by Google as “malicious content” sites, similar to sites that contain hacking scripts or malware. This is all being put into place at the highest levels of Google and will affect all Google products, including YouTube, Google News and others.

Google to monitor users who attempt to access “banned” websites

According to our source, Google’s Chrome browser will also report back to Google when a logged in users attempts to access one of these sites, adding a “social penalty score” to that user, mirroring communist China’s social credit scoring system. This social scoring system will be later used by Google to deny services to users who are considered “untrustworthy” by Google.

Google Chrome is already well-documented to be “surveillance software” that spies on its own users. As published on EvilGoogle.news:

A new review has revealed that Google Chrome is shamelessly spying on its users — and collecting data on them to build profiles of their likes, interests and personalities. This “surveillance software” used to be the stuff of dystopian fiction nightmares but is now our unfortunate reality.

Geoffrey A. Fowler, a columnist for the Washington Post, took a deeper look at Google Chrome, and was shocked by what he found: It tracks everything — including your location, and even if you disable the feature. Now is the time to switch to a new web browser.

What the Washington Post did not report is that Google is building a China-steyle “social score” on each user, and that accessing “unapproved” websites that discuss nutrition, organics or alternative cancer treatments will results in a penalty for that user.

The penalty can be used by Google to block that user’s access to Gmail, Google Maps, Google Docs, YouTube or other Google websites and services. Although we don’t have any information yet to confirm this is happening, it is also theoretically possible for Google and Facebook to collaborate on penalty sharing so that users with negative scores would be locked out of their Facebook Libra cryptocurrency wallets, for example.

The censorship goes way beyond political targeting

Over the last year, Natural News has been warning the world that censorship is coming for health-oriented content, but almost no one believed the warning. Most publishers in the health and nutrition space said nothing while the tech giants were censoring political content, believing that they wouldn’t be affected because they only published food and health information, not politics.

But as we’ve seen over the last two weeks, the censorship aims of Google, Facebook and Twitter don’t stop at politics. The purge is now affecting health and nutrition websites, and “anti-cancer” or “anti-vax” websites are the primary targets right now, with everyone from Vimeo to MailChimp now banning vaccine awareness channels outright.

The truth is that too many people accepted the political censorship because they hated Trump, so they stood back and said nothing as the censorship machine expanded. Now, that same machine is engulfing health and nutrition content, steamrolling the very people who thought they would be immune to Big Tech’s criminal racketeering and fraud.

In truth, Google’s censorship is far from over. Unless something is done to restore free speech online, over the next few years the tech giants will annihilate all “anti-establishment” content from the web in the most massive online book burning the world has ever witnessed. No dissent will be allowed on any topic, including transgenderism, politics, open borders, finance or history. Google’s transformation into the Ministry of Truth will be complete, and social media will be nothing but an echo chamber of official lies repeated by obedient sheeple.

Unless the march of techno-tyranny is stopped, there will be no “alternative” media. There will be no alternative views allowed to circulate anywhere. The tech giants will rule the world with lies and coordinated censorship, annihilating all information sources that dare question the status quo on anything.

And in that world, no one will be safe. Because no one will be free to think, speak or share information without the authorization of the techno-fascists.

If this is the world in which you want to live, just do nothing… because that world is being constructed right now, and if you don’t resist it, that’s the world which will dominate society for the foreseeable future.

Or, humanity could choose to rise up and defeat that tech giants like we defeated the Third Reich. Humanity could declare war on the techno-fascists, taking them all offline and restoring freedom to humanity. It is doubtful, by the way, that government is going to do anything to stop the tech tyrants, since their censorship promotes the interests of globalist corporations and establishment power brokers. But truth be told, even the employees of Google are complicit in crimes against humanity, just like the soldiers of the Third Reich who slaughtered human beings in their quest for power.

What’s clear is that if humanity is to be free, Google and the other tech giants must be eliminated.

Until that day comes, here are some alternative information sources you can use to bypass Google:

Alternative browsers:

The Brave browser offers an alternative to Chrome, even though it runs on some Chrome code.

GAB is reportedly working on a free speech browser.

Alternative search engines:

Aside from the well-known DuckDuckGo.com search engine, there’s also GoodGopher.com which searches only the independent media.

Alternatives to YouTube:

With YouTube censoring channels that talk about anti-cancer foods and vaccine ingredients, you’ll want to move to alternative video platforms.

Bitchute.com and Brighteon.com are the two best alternatives we know of right now. Brighteon.com was built by us, and it is currently undergoing a transition to version 2.0, after which new features will be introduced, including channel subscriptions.

Alternative news aggregation sites:

Whatfinger.com is rapidly emerging as the best news aggregation site, and it’s updated far more rapidly than Drudge.

There’s also Censored.news and SteveQuayle.com, both of which feature news aggregation headlines of censored stories. In addition, there are many sites featuring collections of some original stories mixed with stories aggregated from other sites. These include BeforeItsNews.com, NewsWars.com and SGTreport.com, among others.

Alternatives to Twitter:

In addition to GAB.com which is well known as a free speech platform, Parler.com is rapidly emerging as a contender for the next social media hub for free speech. Brighteon.com will also feature twitter-like functionality later in 2019.

Note that both Google and Apple are actively blocking the apps for most of these sites and services. Both Google and Apple are criminal enterprises engaged in clear racketeering and monopoly behavior, yet so far, no one from the federal government has dared go after these tech giants for their obviously illegal behavior.

Start shifting NOW to alternative browsers, video platforms, social media platforms and search engines. Soon, the “mainstream” internet will allow no speech whatsoever unless that speech praises the pharma giants, the Democrat party, the LGBT agenda, anti-gun groups and so on.
 
Peter Thiel says FBI, CIA should probe Google​

Link: https://www.axios.com/peter-thiel-s...gle-9846a042-e689-49bc-bdc7-595988ce5d8c.html


Peter Thiel, billionaire investor and Facebook board member, on Sunday night said that Google should be federally investigated for allegedly aiding the Chinese military.

Why it matters: Thiel is the tech industry's highest-profile Trump supporter, and one of the most powerful players in Silicon Valley.

Thiel spoke at the National Conservatism Conference, a new event that bills itself as being focused on Trump-era nationalism, with part of his speech focusing on "three questions that should be asked" of Google:

"Number one, how many foreign intelligence agencies have infiltrated your Manhattan Project for AI?

"Number two, does Google's senior management consider itself to have been thoroughly infiltrated by Chinese intelligence?

"Number three, is it because they consider themselves to be so thoroughly infiltrated that they have engaged in the seemingly treasonous decision to work with the Chinese military and not with the US military... because they are making the sort of bad, short-term rationalistic [decision] that if the technology doesn't go out the front door, it gets stolen out the backdoor anyway?"

He also added that those questions "need to be asked by the FBI, by the CIA, and I'm not sure quite how to put this, I would like them to be asked in a not excessively gentle manner."

Thiel did not specifically mention Facebook, but it likely will be mentioned by later speakers at the conference, including Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who has agitated against big tech on the air, and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who is seeking to strip major web platforms of certain legal protections.
 
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Monsanto Paid Google To Censor Results; Operated Fusion Center To Discredit Journalists And Activists​

Link: https://www.activistpost.com/2019/0...r-to-discredit-journalists-and-activists.html
.
August 9, 2019
By Aaron Kesel

Monsanto (Bayer) operated an intelligence-gathering “fusion center,” to discredit journalists and activists, including singer Neil Young, and paid Google to bury results in its search engine, The Guardian, reported.

Activist Post previously reported that Bayer/Monsanto — the formerly merged company of potentially two of the evilest businesses in history — had kept a file of 200 names, including journalists and lawmakers in hopes of influencing their positions on pesticides according to French prosecutors.

Now, The Guardian has an exposé on Monsanto going a step beyond by spying on journalists through use of a Fusion Center type operation and paying Google to hide negative results.

The Guardian reports:

The records reviewed by the Guardian show Monsanto adopted a multi-pronged strategy to target Carey Gillam, a Reuters journalist who investigated the company’s weedkiller and its links to cancer. Monsanto, now owned by the German pharmaceutical corporation Bayer, also monitored a not-for-profit food research organization through its “intelligence fusion center”, a term that the FBI and other law enforcement agencies use for operations focused on surveillance and terrorism.
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The documents, originating from 2015 to 2017, were disclosed as part of one of numerous ongoing court battles on the health hazards of the company’s Roundup weedkiller.

According to The Guardian report, Monsanto also paid Google to promote search results for “Monsanto Glyphosate Carey Gillam” that criticized her work. Further, Monsanto PR staff internally talked about putting pressure on the Reuters news agency, stating they should “continue to push back on [Gillam’s] editors very strongly every chance we get,” and were hoping “she gets reassigned.”

As this author reported for Activate Now, Bayer/Monsanto was recently faced with a jury concluding that its Roundup product causes cancer. The finding was according to a second U.S. jury who ruled its Roundup weed killer was a carcinogenic substance that caused plaintiff Edwin Hardeman’s disease.

Another California man, Dewayne Lee Johnson, was awarded $289 million in August last year after a state jury found Roundup caused his own cancer. That award was later reduced to $78 million and is on appeal by Bayer.

Monsanto recently lost its third legal battle over its massively popular Roundup herbicide, facing a fine of $2.055 billion by a jury in San Francisco who ordered the chemical giant to pay Alva and Alberta Pilliod of Livermore, California, who said it caused their non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

The $2 billion in punitive damages and $55 million in compensatory is certain to be reduced by the trial judge or on appeal as David Levine, University of California, Hastings School of Law professor told the Associated Press, “There is zero chance it will stand.”

The Pilliods said they used Roundup once a week for nine months of the year for more than three decades before being diagnosed with cancer in 2011 and 2015, according to BuzzFeed News.

“We wish that Monsanto had warned us ahead of time of the dangers of using Monsanto and that there was something in the front of their label that said ‘Danger, may cause cancer,'” Alberta Pilliod said at the press conference. “It’s changed our lives forever. We can’t do the things that we used to be able to do, and we really resent Monsanto for that fact.”

Christopher Loder, a spokesman for Monsanto declined to comment on the existence of a fusion center, but said in a statement to The Guardian that the records show

…that Monsanto’s activities were intended to ensure there was a fair, accurate and science-based dialogue about the company and its products in response to significant misinformation, including steps to respond to the publication of a book written by an individual who is a frequent critic of pesticides and GMOs.

Loder added the documents were “cherry-picked by plaintiffs’ lawyers and their surrogates” and that the files did not contradict existing science supporting the continued use of glyphosate, “We take the safety of our products and our reputation very seriously and work to ensure that everyone … has accurate and balanced information.”

You know what the documents do show Loder? They illustrate that Monsanto was operating not as a corporation but as its own private intelligence service going after anyone who dared to criticize or challenge that its products caused health problems.

Activist Post has reported previously that Monsanto had Blackwater set up as its “Intel arm” by Cofer Black, the former head of the CIA’s counter-terrorism center. In 2008 Black traveled to Zürich to meet Kevin Wilson, a security manager for global issues at Monsanto. Black worked as the chairman for the Total Intelligence Consulting Company at the time, which was owned by Blackwater. During this meeting with Wilson, Black proposed to make Total Intelligence the “intel arm” of Monsanto.

Monsanto then hired Total Intelligence Solutions from 2008-09 under the agreement, contracting the firm to “infiltrate animal rights activist groups by having employees become legal members.” It also promised to monitor activists’ blogs and websites on Monsanto’s behalf.

As such it’s very interesting to know that Monsanto continued its intel operations after 2009, all the way up to at least 2017. Although it is unknown if Blackwater’s Total Intelligence was still involved in the monitoring operations.

Further, as a reminder to the reader, it is important to note: Monsanto is documented to have paid off Sir Richard Doll, a renowned cancer researcher, for 20 years. Doll received a consultancy fee of $1,500 a day in the mid-1980s for his research on Monsanto’s Agent Orange, finding the chemical didn’t cause cancer.

The Guardian also previously reported that Monsanto employed a number of corrupt tactics including ghostwriting studies (paying off researchers), interfering with regulatory agencies, refusing to conduct long-term safety studies all while spending millions of dollars on secretive PR campaigns to attack scientists and critics.

“Monsanto was its own ghostwriter for some safety reviews,” Bloomberg reported, and an EPA official reportedly helped Monsanto “kill” another agency’s cancer study. An award-winning investigation in Le Monde details Monsanto’s effort “to destroy the United Nations’ cancer agency by any means possible” to save glyphosate.

While Monsanto always insisted “glyphosate has a long history of safe use,” a study by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic” back in 2015.

One year later, another organization, PAN, the Pesticide Action Network International, issued a 96-page report stating that glyphosate contaminates the Global Ecosystem. That same year the FDA suspended testing for glyphosate residues in food. Those foods, according to a subsequent report by Food Democracy Now! and the Detox Project, included many of America’s most popular foods including – cookies, crackers, popular cold cereals, and chips. The chemical was also found in several wines including organic wines, baby food and formula, breast milk and even tampons.

Glyphosate is also sprayed directly on many types of conventional crops before harvest, including wheat, oats, and barley. In all, glyphosate is used in some fashion in the production of at least 70 food crops, according to the EPA, including a range of fruits, nuts, and veggies.

Glyphosate was also listed as a carcinogen on California EPA’s Prop 65 list in July of 2017, while a study published in January of 2017 proved that chronic consumption of low levels of Roundup (which contains glyphosate) caused fatty liver disease in animals.

Meanwhile, in another study scientists have found that exposing rats to ultra-low doses of Roundup caused liver and kidney damage.

Another study done by the WHO and UN experts at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) conflicted the IARC report and found that “glyphosate did not cause cancer and pose a risk to humans.”

An additional report earlier this year by the European Chemical Agency agreed with the FAO study stating that glyphosate was “safe.”

Monsanto now (Bayer) has an obvious conflicting record on whether or not its glyphosate chemical is safe or not.

One may wonder why they chose to go with Bayer instead of Monsanto, as Bayer also has a nasty history. No one is forgetting anytime soon that Bayer sold tainted hemophiliac medicine which caused users to contract AIDS, sorry PR reps.

Bill Maher runs down both evil companies’ so-called “achievements” in the video below, which includes “giving heroin to children as medicine, creating Zyklon B, PCBs, Aspartame, DDT, Agent Orange and of course Roundup!”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Bayer’s Roundup product isn’t the only product that causes problems; another commodity called Dicamba has also faced a backlash.

Dicamba has been under fire by farmers for causing widespread damage to their crops that are not GMOs designed to resist the chemical. Dicamba was even banned in Arkansas by the Plant Board, which Monsanto disputed and sued the group for acting outside its authority in prohibiting its herbicide’s use and failing to consider research Monsanto had submitted to federal regulators.

Dicamba is considered more toxic than glyphosate, but less toxic than 2,4-D, the third most common broadleaf herbicide. (Monsanto is working on crops that are resistant to 2,4-D, as well.) Yet, when used properly, dicamba is considered only mildly toxic to people, pollinators, wildlife, and aquatic organisms. There is no scientific consensus on whether it has cancer-causing properties, though the EPA says “Dicamba is not likely to be a human carcinogen.”

Then there is Monsanto’s product it canceled launching, called NemaStrike, which is designed to be applied to crop seeds to protect them from worms and other bugs. The launch was halted after reports indicated that it caused strange rashes on people who came into contact with the chemical.

There are now three cases against Bayer found to be guilty for causing cancer; a pending estimated 11,200 Roundup lawsuits by farmers, home gardeners, and landscapers; and a total of 13,000 plaintiffs claiming its glyphosate-based herbicides cause non-Hodgkin lymphoma and other cancers. There are also six more trials due to start this year alone in federal and state courts in the U.S. Bayer is going to have a busy time with litigation, especially since this piles on top of a flood of lawsuits over waterways contaminated with PCBs (chemical compounds used in transformers, paints, sealants), and fresh cases emerging over Dicamba.

According to U.S. Right To Know’s Monsanto Trial Tracker, which is run by Carey Gillam the next trial (Gordon v. Monsanto) is fixed for August which will be against Sharlean Gordon, a cancer-stricken woman in her 50s, currently set for trial in St. Louis County Circuit Court on Aug. 19th. However, a news update on August 7th stated the trial in St. Louis may be delayed pending a potential settlement.

Because of these lawsuits, Monsanto is having its dirty laundry aired out exposing the tactics Monsanto used to deny cancer risk and protect its prized chemical Roundup.

Citizens are growing increasingly aware that companies like Bayer/Monsanto are bad for their health and the environment. It’s heartbreaking to see a chemical company involved with the poisoning of U.S. families still poisoning people decades later.

What’s more worrying is that Monsanto ordered Blackwater to harass private citizens, paid off researchers and has had a revolving door in the U.S. for policy. All of this truly shows the extent of the stain of corruption that Monsanto has manufactured and been allowed to continue.

Now we have evidence Monsanto paid off Google, scientists, academics and more. That’s not all, we have undeniable proof that Monsanto threatened its critics, and may have broken privacy laws by spying on journalists, and activists alike.
 
Google is a direct threat to human freedom, and it must be dismantled or we will be forever enslaved​

Wednesday, August 21, 2019 by: Mike Adams

Link: https://www.naturalnews.com/2019-08...ntled-or-we-will-all-be-forever-enslaved.html

(Natural News) Google is not just a danger to human freedom in the online world; it’s a danger to all human freedom because the ability to control information is the ability to control minds and enslave humankind.

Through its actions to destroy human knowledge, blacklist natural health websites, alter the outcomes of elections, silence conservative speech, push toxic vaccines onto children, promote the prescription medications of Big Pharma, censor organics and push deadly chemotherapy, Google has proven it is a threat to humankind and must be dismantled.

Now more powerful than any government in the world, Google is a dangerous surveillance web that tracks your online searches, website visits, video views, online purchases, emails and physical locations. Beyond that, Google deliberately blocks independent media, conservative channels, vaccine safety videos and anyone who questions GMOs, Big Pharma, chemtrails or 5G networks.

Google has become pure evil, and it must be dismantled and permanently barred from all business operations. It’s time to rid the world of this evil, and President Trump can start by arresting Google’s top managers and CEO, all of whom have actively conspired to commit large-scale criminal election fraud against the United States of America (among other crimes).

Read more at EvilGoogle.news and watch my warning video here for more details:

https://www.brighteon.com/d9cb82ec-ae5f-4f0a-b92d-885c1e0bc1f0
 
Conservatives need to take on big tech now​

October 18, 2019 by IWB

Link: https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/conservatives-need-to-take-on-big-tech-now/

(Natural News) There is growing and bipartisan alarm among Americans about the “bad acts” of Big Tech companies. For far too long, Big Tech has gotten away with profiting from human trafficking, revenge-porn, the opioid epidemic and drug addiction, terrorism, and other forms of human misery, while engaging in egregious business practices like snooping, spying, political bias against conservatives, employee abuses, and anticompetitive conduct.

(Article by Mike Davis republished from TownHall.com)

Big Tech has engaged in this deplorable conduct largely free from any real oversight from Republicans or Democrats in Washington. That’s not surprising, especially if you understand the ways of the DC Swamp. Big Tech is “feeding chickens” — in the form of political contributions, cushy jobs and consulting gigs, and the like — to satiate the out-of-touch Ruling Class of the DC Swamp. Just like Big Tech Obama Democrats, Corporate Republicans take these handouts from liberal Silicon Valley executives, while taking potshots at principled Republicans and Democrats who dare to raise concerns about the Big Tech bullies. The DC Swamp is the only place on the planet where the reptiles lack backbones.

Fortunately, bold and courageous conservatives and populist progressives are stepping up on behalf of the American people in the fight against Big Tech. This includes new U.S. Senators Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), joining a bipartisan chorus of 51 attorneys general from across the United States.

We recently launched the Internet Accountability Project (IAP) with the goal of supporting bold, principled leaders who have the courage to stand up to Big Tech’s bad acts, hold them accountable, and give a voice to real Americans — especially grassroots conservatives — throughout the country.

Since our launch just a few weeks ago, we have already heard from many conservatives across America who have shared their stories of Big Tech censorship and their growing concerns about Big Tech, especially Google, Facebook and Amazon, taking more control of their data and eroding privacy rights.

Enough is enough. It’s time to re-boot Big Tech, upgrade and reform the sweetheart laws that protect them, and enforce the antitrust, consumer protection, and similar laws already on the books.

Enforce Our Antitrust Laws

We are pleased that the bipartisan 51 state attorneys general, along with a bipartisan group of lawmakers on the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, recently took the bold and courageous steps of investigating Big Tech under the antitrust laws. As conservatives, we should support law enforcement. A free market requires a functioning market, so we should praise government officials in their efforts to investigate and hold Big Tech accountable. Conservatives should not shy away from these antitrust investigations; we should support vigorous enforcement. After all, antitrust law enforcement is the great American solution to the problem of undue political and market power. Rather than impose regulations on every company in a sector using a regulatory hammer, antitrust law enforcement uses a scalpel and goes after only those companies that are harming markets. As conservatives, we believe that antitrust law enforcement is a better approach to take than heavy-handed regulation. We now have a populist Republican back in the White House, making it an opportune time for antitrust law enforcement to return to its roots and for antitrust law enforcers to rein in Big Tech. It is time for today’s Republicans to take on Big Tech using antitrust law enforcement, just like Republican trustbusters like President Teddy Roosevelt did before them.

Upgrade Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996

Beyond antitrust, conservatives should also look to modernize Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Section 230 was a well-intentioned piece of legislation back in 1996 when enacted. It was intended to protect Internet start-ups from being wiped out by defamation suits for content posted by users online. The big idea underpinning Section 230 was that the internet would be a thriving marketplace: competition online would be fierce because entry barriers for new websites were very low. In 1996, Congress believed that Section 230 was needed in order to protect nascent Internet companies. Of course, today’s Internet is nothing like the Internet lawmakers envisioned back in 1996 when they passed Section 230 into law. Fast forward to 2019 and instead of robust competition, for many people Google, Facebook, and Amazon are not just websites, they are the Internet. And they are no longer simply online chat rooms; when they censor conservatives, they are publishers of content. They should not be permitted to hold sway over our economy and our political discourse because they are protected from liability for their actions by Section 230. Instead, conservatives should see Section 230 for what it really is: a government subsidy to rich and powerful liberal corporations. Modernizing Section 230 to eliminate this government subsidy and make the platforms more accountable for their actions would be a good step in the right direction for conservatives.

Personal Data = Personal Property

Conservatives should also support the idea of data as a property right. Every year, and largely without our understanding, Big Tech makes hundreds of billions of dollars by harvesting our personal data. We are just beginning to comprehend the enormous cost in our loss of privacy for “free” social-media accounts, email addresses, and Internet searches. Creating a robust and interoperable market for data is a free-market solution to Big Tech’s dominance that would compensate and empower consumers, it would also foster marketplace competition and innovation by allowing consumers to decide which services get their business and which services do not.

What This All Means To Conservatives

As conservatives, we don’t want to see any economic activity over-regulated. Fundamentally, we’re advocating for the end to the “free ride” Big Tech has enjoyed over the last 25 years. These companies have abused their power and influence over our economy, our democracy, and our lives. It is important that conservatives join the movement to protect Americans from Big Tech’s unfettered political power, especially given that these companies have made no secret of their disdain for the president, the conservative movement, and the Republican Party, all while bowing to the whims of Beijing. The time is now for principled conservatives to join Senators Hawley and Blackburn and step up for the American people before it is too late. It is time to hold Big Tech accountable for their bad acts.

Read more at: TownHall.com [see https://townhall.com/columnists/mik...vatives-need-to-take-on-big-tech-now-n2554848 ]
 
Google Engineer Leaks Nearly 1,000 Pages of Internal Documents, Alleging Bias, Censorship​

By Petr Svab
August 14, 2019 Updated: August 20, 2019

Link: https://www.theepochtimes.com/googl...cuments-alleging-bias-censorship_3042234.html

A former Google engineer has released nearly 1,000 pages of documents that he says prove that the company, at least in some of its products, secretly boosts or demotes content based on what it deems to be true or false, while publicly claiming to be a neutral platform.

The software engineer, Zach Vorhies, first provided the documents to Project Veritas, a right-leaning investigative journalism nonprofit, as well as the Justice Department’s antitrust division, which has been investigating Google for potentially anti-competitive behavior.

“I thought that our election system is going to be compromised forever by this company that told the American public that it was not going to do any evil,” he told Project Veritas in a video published Aug. 14. “And I saw that they were making really quick moves. … They were intending to scope the information landscape so that they could create their own version of what was objectively true.”

Going Public

Vorhies said he worked for Google for eight years, making $260,000 a year, when counting in the gains from the Google stock he owns.

“I had every incentive in the world to stay at the company and just collect the paycheck,” he said, noting that most others would do that.

“But I could never live with myself knowing that, if Google was able to implement the plans that they were planning, that I, at the moment of choice, backed out because I was selfish.”

Vorhies first came to Project Veritas more than a month ago, disclosing some documents and answering questions with his face hidden and his voice disguised.

When he returned to work, however, Google sent him a letter demanding, among other things, that he turn over his employee badge and work laptop, which he did, and “cease and desist” from disclosing “any non-public Google files.” Afraid for his safety, he posted on Twitter that if something would happen to him, all the documents he took would be released to the public.

Google then did a “wellness check” on him, he said. The San Francisco police received a call that Vorhies may be mentally ill. A group of officers waited for him outside his house and put him in handcuffs. “This is a large way in which they intimidate their employees that go rogue on the company,” he said.

Vorhies then decided that it would be safer for him to go public.

Vorhies called Google a “political machine” bent on preventing anybody like President Donald Trump from getting elected again. He said there are other Google employees who “see what’s going on and they are really scared.”

Changes at the company that worried him started in 2016, he said.

The documents indicate that Google has ramped up emphasis on suppressing what it deems “fake news.” That has led it to review news content using a variety of manual and automated means to make calls on what is true and what is “misinformation” and sort results accordingly.

Most of the documents appear to pertain to Google News, an aggregator featured prominently at the top of the page for news-related search results.

Google News

One document describes “Project Purple Rain: Crisis Response & Escalation,” the goal of which is to establish “processes to detect and handle misinformation across products during crises” and “install 24/7 team of trained analysts ready to make policy calls and take actions across news surfaces including News, News 360 and Feed.”

“News” appears to pertain to “Google News” and “Feed,” a rebrand of the former “Google Now” product, showing news articles below the search bar on the Google mobile app.

Another document, a presentation that appears to date back to late 2017, explains that websites that apply to be included in Google News results need to pass an automated review that checks their technical parameters, and also a manual review of their “processes, policies, and editorial guidelines.” If accepted, the sites are then repeatedly checked and given “demotion penalties” for infractions.

Then, however, the presentation presents “potential” next steps, which included expanding its screening policies to cover “fringe/controversial” content, such as that which is “factually incorrect, fake, irrelevant.” Furthermore, the document suggests that Google should also address “sensitive” content, such as that which involves “hate,” “diversity,” and “bias” or is “geo-politically sensitive.”

One of the goals of the effort was a “clean & regularly sanitized news corpus,” it reads.

It’s not clear whether these steps have been implemented.

‘Fringe Ranking’

One of the documents says that Paul Haahr, Google’s principal engineer, leads the effort on “fringe ranking” with the goal of “not showing fake news, hate speech, conspiracy theories, or science/medical/history denial unless we’re sure that’s what the user wants.”

Combined with information from other documents, “fringe ranking” appears to mean that unless a user already knows what specifically to look for, Google will hide from the user anything it labels “fake news, hate speech, conspiracy theories, or science/medical/history denial.” Such information would then be effectively obscured from users who haven’t yet been exposed to it.

Feed Blacklist

Yet another document lists websites whose content is manually banned from showing up in the “Feed.”

It includes a number of fringe sites on the political right, the more prominent ones including thegatewaypundit.com, truepundit.com, and redstate.com.

It also includes some sites on the progressive left, including mediamatters.org, forwardprogressives.com, occupydemocrats.com, and learnprogress.org.

But it also includes relatively mainstream right-leaning sites such as dailycaller.com, louderwithcrowder.com, and newsbusters.org.

The list indicates it’s because those are “sites with high user block rate.” It’s not clear though why these sites would need to be blacklisted manually if a high block rate alone was to automatically place them on the list.

Videos Manually Rated

One presentation slide, apparently photographed from a computer screen, bears the title “Fake news & other fringe: Trashy recap” and says that “every day, top 250 videos [on YouTube] in top 26 locales are rated by multiple human raters” and that “Trashy filtering launched on [YouTube’s] Home [page], Search, Trending
  • , and Suggested [videos list].” This has led to a 50 percent decline in user complaints, it states.

    Tech companies that cave too easily to complaints have been mentioned by some conservatives as one of the underlying reasons for disproportionate censorship of right-leaning content. People on the political left are much more likely to call a variety of statements “hateful,” while those on the right tend to call the same statements “offensive, but not hateful,” a 2017 Cato survey found (pdf).

    Google, as well as other major tech companies, prohibit content they consider “hate speech”—itself a subjective standard impossible to enforce fairly, according to Nadine Strossen, a law professor and former president of the American Civil Liberties Union.

    Google hasn’t responded to a request for comment.

    Bias

    The documents Vorhies provided previously, together with his explanations and hidden camera recordings by Project Veritas of other Google employees, indicate that the company has created a concept of “fairness” through which it infuses the political preferences of its mostly left-leaning workforce into its products.

    Several studies have shown that Google News, in particular, is biased to the left.

    Google has repeatedly denied political bias in its products. Vorhies suggested, though, that Google tries to present itself as a neutral platform to preserve legal protection under Section 230, which shields internet services from liability for user-generated content.

    “Google is playing both sides of the game,” he said. “On the one hand, they’re saying they are a platform and that they are immune from being sued for the content that they host on their website. On the other hand, they’re acting as a publisher, in which they’re determining the editorial agenda of these certain companies, and they are applying that. If people don’t fall in line with their editorial agenda, then their news articles get deboosted and deranked. And if people do fall in line with their editorial agenda, it gets boosted and pushed to the top.”

    Robert Epstein, a psychologist who has spent years researching Google’s influence on its users, has published research showing that just by deciding the sequence of top search results, the company can sway undecided voters.

    Epstein determined that this has led to 2.6 million votes shifting in the 2016 presidential election to Trump’s opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. He warned that in 2020, if companies such as Google and Facebook all support the same candidate, they will be able to shift 15 million votes—well beyond the margin most presidents have won by.

    Trump has reportedly been working on an executive order to address politically biased censorship by social media companies.

    Correction: A previous version of this article inaccurately described the amount of documents that Zach Vorhies released. Vorhies released nearly 1,000 pages of documents, not nearly 1,000 documents. The Epoch Times regrets the error.

    Follow Petr on Twitter: @petrsvab
 
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