More reasons you need to be concerned about monopolies and oligarchs

 Yet another interesting interview by Russell Brand on why you should be worried about the current situation:

Wanting strong data protection laws isn't "privilige": it's sanity.

The billionaires made money on your information. And it all gets scarier.

Tucker Carlson calls for Breaking Up Google!

 No wonder he's under attack by the "left".

 

I started watching him because of the covid thing. I don't agree with him a lot of the time, but he does give an alternative take on the stories in the news. Greg Gutfeld is fun to watch as well.

Sky News Australia is also an interesting view.

Why would I like these sources? It was because the US Main Stream Media was too sycophantic to the Biden-Harris ticket and uncritical of the Covid thing.

Anyway, it's amusing to watch Tucker mention breaking up Google. It would get really interesting if they went all the way. I mean breaking up Bezos' monopoly, which included WAPO. And how exactly did Facebook make all that money?

By selling your information.

That's what makes these companies really frightening by trashing our rights: especially the right of privacy. They are the basis of something called surveillance capitalism.

He could also talk about how weak US Data Protection laws happen to be, which is why those trashy background check sites exist. But even more importantly, failure to have strong data protection laws are what allowed for surveillance capitalism to make billions off of our data without our consent.

Or the ability to correct mistakes in that data.

Socialism isn't making money off of the work of others, that's capitalism. And surveillance capitalism is making money off of people's data. And it's making some people very rich.

Amazon is the 16th Corporation that Quits ALEC - Sunshiny News on a Rainy Thursday

 I've referred here before as the member corporations and corporation/ industry lobbyists as Corp-o-rats.  The image at left personifies that perfectly.
The image on the right - feel free to enlarge, print, and color - is holding a cup full of money,
which brilliantly represents the collection of corp-o-rat welfare that ALEC does so well for their corp-o-rat members. 

Thanks to our commenter Democommie for calling my attention - and now yours - to something I did not realize, a fact which has been under-reported.  THIS week is National Small Business Week!   The cartoon below reflects how the corp-o-rats, including WalMart as one of the core companies running ALEC, impact small businesses owned by individuals who are part of our communities on Main Street.  WalMart is of course involved in scandals about Bribery and cover ups in other countries; they're involved in ALEC corruption (by the World Bank definition) here in the U.S.

People for the American Way just issued this press release, with some really great news in fighting the good fight to push back corporate greed, special interest money and corruption in government.  Unfortunately, there is no indication other core business interests will abandon their ALEC activity, and there are indications that other activities which had been pursued by these interests with the cooperation and apparent corruption of conservative legislators under cover of other conservative organizations.  The World Bank describes corruption as the use of public office for private gain.  That appears to describe ALEC and a large number of conservative, almost exclusively Republican politicians.  Those politicians who get rewarded directly and indirectly through ALEC and related entities operated by the same people, are out to push this agenda they call freedom, but is another word for slavery to corporations, including deregulation that damages us all, and which pushes corporate costs of doing business on all of us without our consent, from too few food inspectors to protecting energy companies engaging in fracking, to trying to gut the EPA, hoping to sell harm to the public by re-labeling it as 'freedom'.  If there were truth in advertizing, it would be spelled 'freedumb'.:

From People for the American Way:

Amazon.com Drops ALEC, PFAW Encourages Others to Follow

Amazon.com is now the 16th major corporation to cut ties to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), according to reports. The announcement came after more than 500,000 petition signatures– collected by People For the American Way, ColorOfChange.org, CREDO Action, Progressive Change Campaign Committee, SumOfUs and Fuse Washington – were delivered at an event outside the company’s shareholder meeting in Seattle. The petition called on Amazon.com and other corporations to stop funding ALEC, of which Amazon.com had been a member since 2011.
Michael Keegan, President of People For the American Way, issued the following statement:
“Amazon.com has heard the voices of the half million people who signed this petition, and today they did right by their customers. But the ALEC agenda continues to harm many more people across the country. Responsible businesses have no reason to fund ALEC’s agenda, which hurts the working families they depend on. The corporations that have yet to leave ALEC should realize that standing up for their consumers is the best business decision they can make.”