May 7, 2017
French Heavy Weight Championship!
Le Pen VS Macron
Macron and Le Pen go to second round in French election – as it happened
Tale of the Tape
1.
She Promises to Remove
Illegal Immigrants from the Country.
2.
She Also Wants to Restrict
Legal Immigration.
3.
She Says She Will Ban Symbols
of Religion in Public.
4.
She Wants to Renegotiate With
the European Union & Possibly Withdraw From It.
5.
She Wants to Cut Taxes &
Lower the Retirement Age.
1.
He Is a Former Member of the
Socialist Party But Is Now Running Under the Centrist “En Marche!” Movement.
2.
He is Pro European Union.
3.
He Is For Strengthening the
EU’s Borders But Says France’s Security Policies Have Unfairly Targeted Muslims.
4.
He Promises to Make France
More Business Friendly.
5.
He Wants to Increase Defense
Spending & Is in Favor of Intervening in Syria
****************************************************************
“Large centers of private power are dangerous to the continuing
vitality of a free people.”
Is It Time to Break Up Google?
In just 10 years, the world’s five largest companies by market capitalization have all changed, save for one: Microsoft. Exxon Mobil, General Electric, Citigroup and Shell Oil are out and Apple, Alphabet (the parent company of Google), Amazon and Facebook have taken their place.
They’re all tech companies, and each dominates its corner of the industry: Google has an 88 percent market share in search advertising, Facebook (and its subsidiaries Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger) owns 77 percent of mobile social traffic and Amazon has a 74 percent share in the e-book market. In classic economic terms, all three are monopolies.
We have been transported back to the early 20th century, when arguments about “the curse of bigness” were advanced by President Woodrow Wilson’s counselor, Louis Brandeis, before Wilson appointed him to the Supreme Court. Brandeis wanted to eliminate monopolies, because (in the words of his biographer Melvin Urofsky) “in a democratic society the existence of large centers of private power is dangerous to the continuing vitality of a free people.”
We need look no further than the conduct of the largest banks in the 2008 financial crisis or the role that Facebook and Google play in the “fake news” business to know that Brandeis was right.DYI: Article from the New York Times editorial page written by Jonathan Taplin director emeritus of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab and the author of “Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy.”
Taplin states further into the article penning
a possibility these companies could be treated as natural monopolies such as AT
& T before its eventual breakup. Nothing
could be further from the truth as these high tech companies have none of the
technical issues associated with electric utilities or land line telephone
companies. That nonsense is being perpetuated
by the likes of Google and Facebook in an attempt to maintain their
monopolistic market share. The
government’s incentive to protect these mass communication platforms from
competition is for the political elites to control the news flow to the public. In other words, Facebook and Google enjoy
their monopoly – independent news organizations are driven off – allowing the
political elites to “pump out” massive amounts of propaganda.
All and all, a surprisingly good article from
the New York Times.
What we face today is the scourge of mega
corporations in bed with big government. What is required is Trust Busting;
unfortunately I don’t see any movement in this area by the Trump Administration
(I voted for him) as Congress is NOT required as the Sherman Antitrust Act has
been on the books for over 100 years; it simply needs to be enforced.
DYI
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