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Facebook and Amazon are now the biggest bribers of Congressmen


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2021 Mar 27, 1:01pm   1,076 views  41 comments

by Patrick   ➕follow (55)   💰tip   ignore  

https://reclaimthenet.org/facebook-and-amazon-are-now-washingtons-biggest-lobbyists/

Amazon and Facebook have been the largest spender in corporate lobbying in Washington over the past two years, surpassing telecom providers and defense contractors. The large spending by Big Tech companies is a response to the increased scrutiny over their moderation policies and violations of antitrust.

According to a new report by Public Citizen, based on data by Center for Responsive Politics, Amazon increased lobbying spending by 30% to reach $18.7 million while Facebook increased by 56% to reach $18.7 million, between 2018 and 2020. The two tech companies were closely followed by telecom provider Comcast and defense contractor Lockheed Martin, which spent $14.4 million and $13 million respectively.

Facebook and Amazon were not among the top eighth largest corporate lobbying spenders in 2017. But over the last two years, they have opened their substantial wallets to lobbying teams in an attempt to influence policy in their favor.

“The foundation of the Big Tech companies’ influence are their lobbying teams, which use campaign contributions, existing relationships, and past experience to swing policy in their favor,” read the report by Public Citizen. “While not even in the top eight spenders in 2017, Facebook and Amazon are now the two largest individual lobbying spenders.”

The large spending by the two Big Tech companies has coincided with increased scrutiny over antitrust practices, privacy concerns, and content censorship policies.

Facebook, as well as Google, was the subject of an antitrust lawsuit brought by the Trump administration. All four Big Tech companies, Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook were implicated in a sweeping proposal for antitrust laws brought by House Democrats, that suggested the breaking up of the companies.

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1   Patrick   2021 Mar 31, 5:59pm  

https://reclaimthenet.org/facebook-deletes-major-trump-interview/

Facebook says even content “in the voice of Donald Trump” is banned, deletes major interview

Scorched earth censorship.

Facebook removed a video interview of President Trump with his daughter-in-law Lara Trump, a Fox News contributor. The social media company said that any content representing the “voice” of Donald Trump will not be allowed on Facebook’s main platform and Instagram.

On Tuesday, Lara uploaded a photo on Instagram of her sitting across from the former president, calling on followers to watch the interview that night.

Shortly after posting the image, a Facebook staff sent Trump officials an email warning that content “in the voice of President Trump is not currently allowed on our platforms (including new posts with President Trump speaking).”

The email further warned that such content “will be removed if posted, resulting in additional limitations on accounts that posted it.”

“This guidance applies to all campaign accounts and Pages, including Team Trump, other campaign messaging vehicles on our platforms, and former surrogates,” the email, whose screenshot was posted by Trump on Instagram, further stated.

Lara did not heed the warning, and posted the video interview on her Facebook page. Facebook removed the video and an employee sent a removal notice email.

“We are reaching out to let you know that we removed content from Lara Trump’s Facebook Page that featured President Trump speaking,” the email stated.


OK, people should never be using Facebook for anything anyway.
2   Patrick   2021 Mar 31, 6:04pm  

https://reclaimthenet.org/twitch-deletes-footage-of-george-floyds-death/

Amazon-owned Twitch deletes footage of the full details of George Floyd’s death, as shown in court

Twitch removed a video showing the full details of George Floyd’s death, which was shown during the trial of Derek Chauvin, the officer charged with the murder of Floyd. The Amazon-owned video streaming platform claimed the video violated its policies.

Unicorn Riot, a non-profit news site, said that Twitch suspended its account for 30 days for showing the court footage of the death of George Floyd. The video was shown to trial witnesses.


OK, people should never be using Amazon for anything anyway.
3   Patrick   2021 Apr 1, 2:42pm  

https://theintercept.com/2021/03/30/amazon-twitter-ambassadors-jeff-bezos-bernie-sanders/

Amazon ambassadors were trained to defend Jeff Bezos and clap back at Bernie Sanders under a program codenamed “Veritas.” ...

The document, produced as part of the pilot program in 2018 and marked “Amazon.com Confidential,” also includes examples of how its ambassadors can snarkily respond to criticisms of the company and its CEO. Several examples involve Sen. Bernie Sanders, a longtime critic of the $1 trillion firm who has been targeted by it in recent days. It also provides examples of how to defend Bezos.


The Chinese "50 Cent" program has come to America via Amazon.

https://epochtimes.today/chinas-50-cent-army-its-450-million-fake-posts-and-the-life-and-death-of-the-ccp/

Since 2000, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been mobilising 五毛党 colloquially known as the 50-cent army – internet trolls that sway public opinion in favour of the CCP.
4   Patrick   2021 Apr 5, 8:40am  

https://nypost.com/2021/04/05/us-regulators-find-amazon-illegally-fired-activist-employees-report/

A US labor agency has reportedly found that Amazon illegally fired two employees last year who had publicly blasted the company’s employment and environmental policies.

The National Labor Relations Board informed the targeted employees — Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa — that their terminations a year ago amounted to retaliation and that the agency would take action against Amazon unless it settled their cases, according to documents cited in a New York Times report.
5   Patrick   2021 Apr 6, 7:40pm  

Alternatives to Facebook:

https://reclaimthenet.org/free-speech-friendly-and-privacy-focused-social-networks/

Gab.com probably being the biggest of them.
6   Misc   2021 Apr 6, 8:58pm  

Let's see...the vote for unionization in Amazon's Alabama warehouse was 6 days ago. The outcome still has yet to be made public. You thought the presidential election took time to play out. There were only 6000 votes that needed tabulating.

The key is how many copies of Hunter's new book were sold through Amazon.

That's how these things are decided.
7   EBGuy   2021 Apr 7, 4:42pm  

National Association of Realtors is still the leader of the PACs, spending almost $4 million in the 2020 election cycle.
8   Patrick   2021 Apr 7, 5:21pm  

Big money is the core of corruption in America, and explains a lot of our problems.

https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/top-spenders

Top Spenders
Lobbying Client Total Spent
National Assn of Realtors $84,113,368
US Chamber of Commerce $81,910,000
Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America $25,946,000
American Hospital Assn $23,648,466
Blue Cross/Blue Shield $22,662,720
Facebook Inc $19,680,000
American Medical Assn $19,575,000
Amazon.com $18,725,000
Business Roundtable $16,970,000
NCTA The Internet & Television Assn $15,460,000
Comcast Corp $14,430,000
American Chemistry Council $14,000,000
Lockheed Martin $12,960,810
Boeing Co $12,630,000
Biotechnology Innovation Organization $12,560,000
CTIA $12,448,477
Northrop Grumman $12,050,000
Raytheon Technologies $11,960,000
American Bankers Assn $11,830,000
Unilever $11,460,000


It's also quite shocking how cheap it is to bribe the American government. These are sums that the spenders rake in in less than a day.
9   HeadSet   2021 Apr 7, 6:15pm  

Patrick says
It's also quite shocking how cheap it is to bribe the American government.

You are leaving out a few things. The above list is above board contributions only. It does not include "donations" to entities like the Clinton Foundation and Biden's foundation. It does not include high paying no-show jobs like Michelle Obama received. It does not include positions a company can give to a relative of a politician, nor does it include scholarships given to politician's children laundered through third parties. It does not include post political career jobs given a payback for what the politician did in office. It does not include the multimillion dollar book "advances" given as payback to politicians like Obama. It does not include $250,000 "speaking fees" like those given to Hillary when they thought she would President. How did a career politician like Nancy acquire a $200 million net worth? Same with Biden's wealth, plus his kid getting outrageous positions and compensation from Ukraine and China, jobs Hunter was in no way qualified for. The only way to rid the country of these sellouts is term limits.
10   WookieMan   2021 Apr 7, 6:31pm  

HeadSet says
The only way to rid the country of these sellouts is term limits.

Agree. But impossible. No one votes to end their own job. I wouldn't if I'm being honest.

Won't happen without some form of revolution and/or amending the Constitution. Term limits should be voted on by the public and not the people we voted in. A popular vote. I think it's a R&D thing both can agree on, at least those not in office. Hence why they should have no authority over it anyway.
11   Patrick   2021 Apr 7, 10:00pm  

HeadSet says
You are leaving out a few things. The above list is above board contributions only. ... It does not include high paying no-show jobs


True, I've heard that the real bribery is in the future jobs for doing our corporate masters' bidding today.
12   HeadSet   2021 Apr 8, 6:29am  

Patrick says
True, I've heard that the real bribery is in the future jobs for doing our corporate masters' bidding today.

Like Eric Cantor. Even though he was a Republican Speaker of the House, he got primaried out from his home district in Virginia. No problem, he then gets hires as a VP of an investment bank despite having no experience in that area. If your donors and bribers cannot get you reelected with campaign support, then will make sure you get a lucrative position if voted out.
14   Patrick   2021 Apr 8, 11:26am  

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-data-leak-idUSKBN2BU2ZY

Facebook does not plan to notify half-billion users affected by data leak

(Reuters) - Facebook Inc did not notify the more than 530 million users whose details were obtained through the misuse of a feature before 2019 and recently made public in a database, and does not currently have plans to do so, a company spokesman said on Wednesday.


"They trust me — dumb fucks" says Zuckerberg. (Yes, he actually said that way back when Facebook was starting, and clearly has the same philosophy now.
15   Ceffer   2021 Apr 8, 11:36am  

Timelines of Intel Agencies takeover of Internet Media:
16   Patrick   2021 Apr 8, 7:31pm  

The big tech companies are the Stasi now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi
17   HeadSet   2021 Apr 9, 6:56am  

Patrick says
The big tech companies are the Stasi now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi

No, Google is in a major supporting role, like the Austrian billionaire who laundered money and smuggled embargoed goods into East Germany for the Stasi. The real emerging Stasi is the Dem-FBI alliance that cooked up the absolutely phony Steele Dossier to go after a Republican President, do a dawn raid on Roger Stone (with CNN on-hand), plus is now making a massive effort to go after the 6 Jan Washington DC protesters while ignoring outright damaging riots by BLM and Antifa in Minneapolis and Portland. Also, impeaching a President just for looking into the blatant corruption of a Dem-Stasi asset, and impeaching the President even when the President was out of office because he gave a speech criticizing the Dem-Stasi around the time of the DC protest. Right now the Dem-Stasi are going into Trump's tax records trying to find anything to use against him, while totally ignoring all the Dem-Stasi members who became very rich only after getting into political office.
18   EBGuy   2021 Apr 9, 6:01pm  

Looks like Amazon defeated the unionization drive in Alabama:
William and Lavonette Stokes, who started work at the Bessemer warehouse in July, said the union had failed to convince them how it could improve their working conditions. Amazon already provides good benefits, relatively high pay that starts at $15 an hour and opportunities to advance, said the couple, who have five children.
“Amazon is the only job I know where they pay your health insurance from Day 1,” Ms. Stokes, 52, said. She added that she had been turned off by how organizers tried to cast the union drive as an extension of the Black Lives Matter movement because most of the workers are Black.
“This was not an African-American issue,’’ said Ms. Stokes, who is Black. “I feel you can work there comfortably without being harassed.”
19   just_passing_through   2021 Apr 25, 12:22pm  

So far this year I've managed to make zero purchases on Amazon. I do use them to find products but then go seek out another source and have saved money doing so. Not enough to justify the extra 5-15mins of searching but still. No Walmart either but Target once.

Also, no Chinese products. This week I received a salt and pepper mill set that cost me $100. It's quality though, Peugeot Saveurs, the oldest mill company in the world I think?

I bought a cheapy from Amazon last May made in China and it already broke due to plastic internals.

https://us.peugeot-saveurs.com/en_us/isen-natural-wood-salt-mill-with-crank-handle-18-cm-7.html
https://us.peugeot-saveurs.com/en_us/isen-matte-black-wood-pepper-mill-with-crank-handle-18-cm-7.html

I figure those last me for 30 years until I'm too arthritic and weak to turn the cranks and require an electric. Or maybe my robot assistant will just do it for me.
20   just_passing_through   2021 Apr 25, 7:17pm  

I say this only to walk out my door an hour later to find a shipment from Amazon. Despite ordering my light soy sauce from the company who makes it they used Amazon to ship it to me.
21   AmericanKulak   2021 Apr 25, 9:29pm  

I'll never forget how my wife tossed the $150 Beaver Hair Shave Brush I got at a place in Manhattan when we first moved in together.

"Dontcha have to throw these things out after a few uses"

SIGH.

(Sorry for off topic, thinking about buying nice shit).
22   just_passing_through   2021 Apr 25, 9:30pm  

hahaHAHAhahaha
23   HeadSet   2021 Apr 26, 4:38pm  

MisdemeanorRebellionNoCoupForYou says
$150 Beaver Hair Shave Brush

I used high quality boar bristle brushers that soft and applied lather well. Nothing beats such a hot shave. But I stopped when I could no longer find decent shaving soap.
24   Patrick   2021 May 3, 10:26am  

https://www.politico.eu/article/amazon-seller-data-company-sales/

Since then, reports of employees using third-party seller information to bolster Amazon's own sales and evidence of lax IT access controls at the company suggest that efforts to fix the issue have been lackluster.

The revelations come as trustbusters worldwide are increasingly targeting Amazon, including over how it uses third-party seller data to boost its own offerings. The European Commission opened an investigation into precisely this issue in November 2020, with preliminary findings suggesting Amazon had breached EU competition law.

“This is fuel for the suspicions I had,” Dutch internet entrepreneur Peter Sorber said when told about the audit. Sorber sold children's clothes on Amazon, but 18 months after setting up his "Brandkids" store on the platform and entering the required sales data, his products disappeared from the search rankings.

“You cannot ask a retailer to show his entire story with all sales statistics and then show that to your own purchasers. This is worse than not done. This is simply unfair competition,” Sorber said.


So if you sell on Amazon, they use your data to decide how best to kill you with Amazon's own products.

It's similar to what Microsoft did with 3rd party apps: if an app got popular, Microsoft would create its own clone and use the secret parts of the Windows API itself to give the Microsoft clone a performance advantage.
25   Patrick   2021 Jun 7, 2:46pm  

https://spectator.us/topic/amazon-exempt-biden-global-tax/

But here’s the rub. Not all multinational corporations have a profit margin of over 10 percent. Amazon, for example, had a profit margin of 6.3 percent of its $386 billion global profits in 2020. In other words, it is not going to be caught by this tax at all. Many other companies who do currently have profit margins above 10 percent will presumably already be thinking up ways of engineering margins below this threshold.
26   Misc   2021 Jun 8, 9:36am  

Patrick says
https://spectator.us/topic/amazon-exempt-biden-global-tax/

But here’s the rub. Not all multinational corporations have a profit margin of over 10 percent. Amazon, for example, had a profit margin of 6.3 percent of its $386 billion global profits in 2020. In other words, it is not going to be caught by this tax at all. Many other companies who do currently have profit margins above 10 percent will presumably already be thinking up ways of engineering margins below this threshold.


They will simply increase the compensation of their executives to avoid the extra taxes. ---- Win Win
27   Patrick   2021 Jun 10, 5:36pm  

https://reclaimthenet.org/lawmakers-demand-answers-on-facebook-censorship-at-behest-of-biden-administration/


Following the revelation that Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg was in email communication with the country’s top epidemiologist Dr. Anthony Fauci, House Republicans sent a letter demanding answers on why the company censored lab leak theories.

According to the Republican legislators, the emails suggest that Fauci advised Facebook to censor the lab leak theories.


Government officials getting private corporations to censor the public is effectively the same as government censoring the public.
28   HeadSet   2021 Jun 10, 7:12pm  

Misc says
They will simply increase the compensation of their executives to avoid the extra taxes. ---- Win Win

Ironic. Originally the "progressives" were talking about triggering a tax on a corporation when that corporation pays its CEO more than X times the average worker pay in that corporation.
31   Patrick   2021 Jun 28, 5:22pm  

https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_breakingnews/court-dismisses-federal-governments-antitrust-case-against-facebook_3878130.html?utm_source=patrick.net&utm_medium=patrick.net&utm_campaign=patrick.net

Court Dismisses Federal Government’s Antitrust Case Against Facebook
BY JACK PHILLIPS June 28, 2021

A federal court has dismissed two antitrust cases that were brought against Facebook, representing a significant setback for federal and state regulators in their attempts to rein in Big Tech.

The lawsuits were filed by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and state attorneys general seeking to break up what they’ve described as Facebook’s monopoly on social networking.


How convenient for Facebook. I wonder if all the data they collect on Americans might have something to do with the dismissals...
34   Patrick   2021 Jul 30, 11:52pm  

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employees-number-1-of-153-us-workers-head-count-2021-7

1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee

Amazon employs 950,000 workers in the US, the company said in its latest earnings report.
The US has a population of 261 million and an employed non-farm workforce of 145 million, per the BLS.
More people work for Amazon than are employed in the entire residential construction industry.
35   HeadSet   2021 Jul 31, 8:19am  

Patrick says
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employees-number-1-of-153-us-workers-head-count-2021-7

1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee

Amazon employs 950,000 workers in the US, the company said in its latest earnings report.
The US has a population of 261 million and an employed non-farm workforce of 145 million, per the BLS.
More people work for Amazon than are employed in the entire residential construction industry.

And WalMart is the number one non-government employer.
36   Patrick   2021 Jul 31, 11:22am  

Bezos and the Walton families are the greatest risks to Americans' finances, freedom, and safety.
39   Patrick   2021 Aug 22, 5:52pm  

https://reclaimthenet.org/facebook-suspends-canadian-political-candidate-marc-emery-during-campaign-season/


Facebook suspends Canadian political candidate Marc Emery during campaign season
For criticizing what he says is the "the evil Covid dictatorship."
40   Patrick   2022 Apr 8, 9:02pm  

https://theintercept.com/2022/04/04/amazon-union-living-wage-restrooms-chat-app/?source=patrick.net


AMAZON WILL BLOCK and flag employee posts on a planned internal messaging app that contain keywords pertaining to labor unions, according to internal company documents reviewed by The Intercept. An automatic word monitor would also block a variety of terms that could represent potential critiques of Amazon’s working conditions, like “slave labor,” “prison,” and “plantation,” as well as “restrooms” — presumably related to reports of Amazon employees relieving themselves in bottles to meet punishing quotas.

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