Elon Musk’s X was hit with a $140 million fine on Friday over alleged breaches of Europe’s Digital Services Act, the online safety law meant to protect the digital space by cracking down on illegal or potentially harmful content, in a move rejected by Musk and officials in the Trump administration in which he used to serve.
The fine stems from an investigation, launched in 2023, into X’s potential liability under the rules, which took effect about the same time Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in 2022, saying he wanted to promote free speech.
The European Commission cited X for its blue check-mark system, which allows users to subscribe to a tier of the platform that grants them a badge that had previously signified the person had been vetted and approved by X’s moderators. Musk’s management team put the new system into effect shortly after taking over, as Musk decried what he called a “lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark.” […]
Musk said Friday that X aimed to “democratize verification.”
There were more reasons as well having to do with advertising.
Look who’s stepping in to defend their boy:
Vice President JD Vance sharply criticized the decision in advance of the announcement, casting it as a fine “for not engaging in censorship.”
“The EU should be supporting free speech not attacking American companies over garbage,” he posted on X Thursday night. Musk soon responded, “Much appreciated.” Vance, Musk and X did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr criticized the decision on Friday, taking to X to accuse Europe of “fining a successful U.S. tech company for being a successful U.S. tech company” and attacking what he called the continent’s “suffocating regulations.” Musk reposted Carr’s criticism. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the fine “an attack on all American tech platforms and the American people by foreign governments.” “Absolutely,” Musk said on X, quoting Rubio’s comment.
Later Friday, Musk slammed the decision in a series of posts, pinning one to the top of his profile that read: “Freedom of speech is the bedrock democracy.” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick also jumped to X’s defense, alleging the DSA “is designed to stifle free speech and American tech companies.”
“We have made our position clear to our counterparts in Europe,” he added.
Mr. free speech not only wants to censor people he wants to prosecute them for speech he doesn’t like:
[F]ollowing the shooting of two National Guard members in D.C., Musk declared that “Falsely labeling non-violent people as ‘fascist’ or ‘Nazi’ should be treated as incitement to murder.”
They are looking for any excuse to split with Europe, even suggesting that we won’t defend them against Russia unless they bow down to Elon Musk:
“The nations of Europe cannot look to the US for their own security at the same time they affirmatively undermine the security of the US itself through the (unelected, undemocratic, and unrepresentative) EU,” Christopher Landau said on social media platform X on Saturday.
Prominent U.S. officials criticized Brussels after the European Commission slapped X with a €120 million penalty for breaching EU transparency rules earlier this week. Billionaire X owner Elon Musk, a major backer of U.S. President Donald Trump and the wider MAGA movement, threatened retaliation and called to “abolish the EU.”
Maybe it’s just trash talk, I don’t know. But these people are so extreme and so drunk with power I don’t think it’s wise to just discount what they are saying.
The Epstein files. I still wonder if what Donald Trump fears most that Epstein investigation documents will reveal is money laundering by him and his friends. I could be all wrong. But we’ll know in two weeks (Dec.19). Or will we?
Rep. Sean Casten (D) of Illinois (IL-6) elaborates on a New York Times story (gift link) on how cryptocurrency enables money laundering.
When the House and Senate marked up stablecoin legislation, we raised all of these concerns – their anonymity, their nearly perfect design for money laundering. All the barn doors were left wide open. It’s used for crime because that is its purpose. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/07/t…
The term “stablecoin” itself is misleading. These aren’t coins nor are they stable. They are a bit of computer code that you can buy for a dollar and gives the owner title to a dollar but can be infinitely and instantly transferred to any computer on the planet.
If you want to understand the problem with that, go watch literally any movie about money laundering. The bad guys need to transfer money but our banking system tracks dollar transfers. So they buy jewelry, or gold bars, or German bearer bonds and physically sneak that bulky thing through customs.
If you felt sorry for all the work our criminals went through, I would challenge you to come up with a BETTER work around than stablecoins. Click a button, transfer the code, sell your code for dollars, presto: money laundered.
I say they aren’t stable because for all of that to work, the issuers of the stablecoin have to have a robust, audited reserve of dollars to pay out when a claim comes in and the GOP blocked all our amendments to require audits and hold reserves in insured accounts. BUT…
Having sent a crappy bill to the Senate the Senate – per tradition – made our bill worse by adding a provision that says that in the event of a run on a bank holding stablecoin deposits, those deposits have a senior claim, above those of law abiding citizens in insured accounts.
IOW, rather than make stablecoins stable, the bill makes their inherent instability contagious, shifting their risk onto the larger banking system. It’s a direct wealth transfer from law abiding Americans to criminals.
You knew Casten would get there.
Going back to the movie references. It’s as if Chief Bogomil fired Axel Foley and then directed Taggart and Rosewood to force the Beverly Hills Savings & Loan to buy the drugs directly from Victor Maitland with customer deposits.
But it’s not a movie. There is a real life Victor Maitland here, who does not give a damn about the stability of the banking system but loves being able to facilitate money laundering. His kids are also in on the action. www.reuters.com/investigatio…
Before I wrap, let’s rebut a couple of the cryptobro nonsense that’s sure to pop up in the replies: 1) “You can’t use crypto to do blockchain” is not true as long as the system allows for anonymity, “mixers” (aka, digital money laundries) and chain-hopping.
(2) “regulators shouldn’t stop innovation”. There is no objection to innovation within the law. Innovation outside of the law is what Walter White did when he came up with blue meth. It ain’t good if it ain’t legal.
(3) “there are legitimate use cases for digital money”. OK fine. But with a HUGE caveat:
If industry and their legislative advocates refuse to craft rules so that crypto isn’t just a way to arbitrage existing money laundering rules while destabilizing our banks, one must conclude that the illicit “side hustle” is whole point.
All of which is to say that the problems flagged in that NYT article are not only predictable, but were predicted. They are on the record in our Congressional debates.
But Victor Maitland’s allies made the world easier for the world’s drug and child traffickers, terrorists and weapons smugglers with their eyes wide open. It’s going to get much worse until we have majorities who act more like Axel Foley and less like (pre-Breaking Bad) Jonathan Banks. /fin
Trump may or may not have fondled some of Epstein’s younger-side girls. He certainly has enough accusers among women. But abusing women has always seemed to be a Trump side hustle. Making money by crook is his principal obsession. Evidence is out there that he may have long used real estate to launder money for Russians.
Trump looked sideways at crypto at first. He prefers physical buildings he can point to and slap his name on. Then he flipped, or a switch did in his head. With cryptocurrencies he could make more with less of a paper trail. And here we are.
Somalis are “garbage,” and “we don’t want them in our country.” Migration from “all Third World countries” should be halted. Any foreign national deemed “noncompatible with Western civilization” must be deported.
His faculties visibly decaying, President Trump’s recent nativist rhetoric adds to past slurs that immigrants from “shithole countries” are “poisoning the blood” of our country, etc.
Those around Trump have joined in the nativist fervor. The president’s comments about Somalis, made during a Cabinet meeting Tuesday, had Vice President JD Vance banging the table in approval. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called it an “epic moment.”
Former CUNY journalism professor, Jeff Jarvis, considers the Tumulty’s treatment of Trump, homeland security adviser Stephen Miller, Leavitt, et al. too tame, “Calling it nativism and calling on the history of the ’20s gets closer, but it should be noted that this is reaching a Nazi pitch.”
Careful where you point that thing
Tokyo Rose Garden (Leavitt) and DHS just got a clapback from the Washington Post in another Sunday story. Smears sometimes have a way of blowing back.
ICE in November arrested and began deportation efforts for Bruna Ferreira. Brazilian by birth, Ferreira is the mother of Leavitt’s 11-year-old nephew (Karoline Leavitt is his godmother; Ferreira is estranged from Leavitt’s brother Michael). She arrived in the U.S. as a child and overstayed her visa and is, in theory, legally protected and working under the DACA program.
DHS spokesliarTriciaMcLaughlin launched her standard smear campaign. DHS called Ferreira an absentee mother with a previous arrest for “battery” and a “criminal.” The Post makes clear this morning that overstaying a visa is a civil violation. If that makes Ferreira a criminal, then anyone who’s ever received a parking ticket is as well.
But DHS was spitting into the wind when it smeared Ferreira. The Post did some digging:
Ferreira’s legal status had long been a point of contention in her relationship with Michael Leavitt. After they broke up, Ferreira said in court records that Michael Leavitt had in the past threatened to try to get her deported.
In the text messages, Michael Leavitt denied seeking to have Ferreira deported.
“I had no involvement in her being picked up by ice,” he wrote Wednesday to The Post. “I have no control over that and had no involvement in that whatsoever.”
What goes around
Tokyo Rose Garden might have called off the dogs attacking her godson’s mother, but failed to:
Michael Leavitt is from a close-knit family with deep roots in New Hampshire. He also had legal issues: He was charged twice in New Hampshire with underage alcohol possession, resulting in a fine and then a guilty plea to a downgraded town ordinance violation.
In 2009, at 19, he was found guilty of drunken driving and fined $620. In 2011, Miami Beach police arrested him for disorderly conduct, alleging that he and another man were fighting in the middle of the street, stopping traffic. The charges were dropped, court records show.
Leavitt said he has been the more consistent and responsible parent in his son’s life and accused The Post in a text message of “trying to use this whole situation to push a narrative to smear me.”
What goes around comes around:
In court, Ferreira and Leavitt traded allegations of abuse and neglect. In April 2015, Leavitt sought primary custody of their son in a New Hampshire court, alleging that Ferreira had pushed Leavitt during an argument when the couple took a trip to Florida. He said she returned home without him, collected their son from his grandparents, and threatened to take him with her to Brazil.
Ferreira denied the claims and in court filings accused Leavitt of abuse, saying on the day of her baby shower he had drunkenly pushed her, punched walls and broken doors. After he won the $1 million, she alleged in court that he cheated on her and gambled away thousands of dollars. Ferreira’s lawyer said in a May 2015 court filing that Leavitt also “threatened to contact Immigration in an effort to have her deported.”
[…]
In April 2020, Ferreira returned to court alleging Michael Leavitt owed her thousands of dollars in child support and was refusing to let her spend time with her son. She also wrote that Michael Leavitt had “used intimidation” based on her “immigration status” to discourage her from visiting the boy. Leavitt denied the allegations in court records.
There is a lot of he-said, she-said in the Post report, as things go in joint custody cases. It seems Ferreira struggled to get on her feet after the separation and her life is now more stable. Or it was until ICE snatched her last month.
🚨Exclusive: Never-before-seen footage shows the moment ICE agents arrested a woman with family ties to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. FULL STORY AT THE LINK IN BIO!
Speaking of “non-linear”, that reminds me of a funny story (well, not “ha-ha” funny). I once had the privilege of seeing the late Jean Luc-Godard in the flesh before I had seen any of his films. […]
Be advised that this will not an assessment of his oeuvre. No one could accuse me of being a Godard scholar; out of his 40+ feature films, I’ve seen 12. And out of that relative handful, the only two I have felt compelled to watch more than once are Breathless and Alphaville.
The aptly entitled Breathless still knocks the wind out of me; it was (and remains) a freewheeling, exhilarating poke in the lens of conventional film making. And…sodamsexy. Despite its flouting of the rules, the film is (possibly) Godard’s most easily digestible work. Over the years, his films would become ever more challenging (or downright maddening). […]
Which brings us back to the news of Godard’s passing this week. I suddenly remembered attending an event in the early 80s that featured Pauline Kael and Jean-Luc Godard onstage somewhere discussing (wait for it) film. But since my memory has been playing tricks as of late (I mean, I’m 66…however the hell that happened), I thought I’d consult someone who was there with me…my pal Digby. She not only confirmed that she and I and my girlfriend at the time did indeed pile into Digby’s Volkswagen to see Kael and Godard (at the Marin Civic Center in Mill Valley, as it turns out), but somehow dug up a transcript of the proceedings.
There was much lamenting and gnashing of teeth when we realized this happened 41 flippin’ years ago (oh, to be in my mid-20s again). Anyway, the evening was billed as “The Economics of Film Criticism: A Debate with Jean Luc-Godard and Pauline Kael” (May 7, 1981). I recall primarily being super-jazzed about seeing Kael (I was more familiar with her work than Godard’s). I can’t recall a word either of them said, of course, but I do remember my surprise at how engaging and effusive Godard was (I had fully expected to see the “enfant terrible”).
You do get to see a bit of Godard, the enfant terrible in Richard Linklater’s très meta Nouvelle Vague, a heady and freewheeling backstage drama/fan fiction about the making of Breathless, the film that ushered in the French New Wave movement.
Speaking of “new wave”, I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that, despite the time period it recounts (with great verisimilitude) …there is something very punk rock about Linklater’s film. From a BBC Radio 6 piece:
When about 40 people saw the Sex Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester on 4 June 1976, they came away inspired. But they were inspired in a very Mancunian kind of way. Many people in the audience that night didn’t look at the Pistols and so much think: “I want to do that…” but instead, they looked at the young Londoners and thought “Come on, I could do way better than that!”
It’s thanks to that very Mancunian approach that we have some of the most thrilling music of the last 40 years. The creativity that sprang from the Lesser Free Trade Hall would loom large over the Manchester scene for decades. Without that 4 June gig – and the Pistols return visit six weeks later – there would be no Buzzcocks, Magazine, Joy Division, New Order, Factory Records, no ‘indie’ scene, no The Fall, The Smiths, Hacienda, Madchester, Happy Mondays or Oasis. […]
[Among a number of other future music luminaries] Morrissey was there. He “penned an epistle” about it to the NME. Morrissey would never merely write a letter. He was slightly sniffy about what he saw: “Despite their discordant music and barely audible audacious lyrics, they were called back for two encores.” He was sure he could do better.
Roll the clock back about 20 years before the Sex Pistols’ gig. Nouvelle Vague opens with the Paris premiere of Jacques Dupont’s La Passe du diablet. Among the attendees are Cahiers du Cinema film critics Godard (Guillaume Marbeck), Francois Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard), and Claude Chabrol (Antoine Besson). Also present are several more future film making luminaries. At the soiree afterwards, Godard makes no bones about his revulsion, saying (in so many words) “Come on, I could do way better than that!” (the Morrissey of his day?).
In 1959, Godard (emboldened by the massive success of Truffaut’s 400 Blows) makes the leap from critiquing to directing. Working from a “true crime” film idea by Truffaut about a French car thief and his American girlfriend, Godard casts then-unknown Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) and American star Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch) for the leads, and enlists war photographer Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat ) as DP.
From the first day on set (which seems to go nowhere fast), Godard’s producer, crew, and cast (with the possible exception of a happy-go-lucky Belmondo) are chagrined to learn that working with this neophyte director is going to be, at best, a trying experience. For example, Seberg (the most seasoned participant) is mortified that Godard is writing the script while he films (the idea of “rehearsals” amuses him to no end).
Despite their initial discomfort with Godard’s spontaneous, guerilla-style approach, the sense of unfettered creative freedom it unleashes becomes quite liberating for all involved (including this viewer).
That’s the beauty of what Linklater has achieved here; he not only offers a “fly on the wall” perspective with an uncanny recreation of the original production (right down to the camera work, film stock and screen ratio), but renews a film lover’s faith in a medium that has become more about bombast, box office, and back end than characters, concept, and conflict. Maybe its time to hit the “reset” button. And who knows…maybe some future innovator will watch Nouvelle Vague and say to themselves, “Come on…I could do way better than that!”
(Nouvelle Vague is currently streaming on Netflix)
Trump directed Kennedy on Friday to review the childhood vaccine schedule and potentially revise it to align with those of other developed countries, most of which recommend fewer shots.
The directive, in the form of an official presidential memo, was issued hours after federal vaccine advisers downgraded decades-old guidance urging newborn immunization against hepatitis B, a virus that causes severe liver disease, within the first day of life. Trump called the move “a very good decision” on social media.
“Study is warranted to ensure that Americans are receiving the best, scientifically-supported medical advice in the world,” Trump said in the memo.
The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices heard presentations Thursday and Friday at the agency’s Atlanta headquarters that questioned the wisdom of the U.S. vaccine schedule, citing those used in European countries like Denmark that recommend fewer shots for children. Public health experts — including committee liaisons representing American medical societies — countered their arguments, noting those nations’ smaller populations typically have access to universal health care that boasts high levels of prenatal care.
“In the United States, many of these infants are lost to follow up as soon as they leave the hospital,” said Adam Langer, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s hepatitis expert. “Denmark and, for that matter, virtually all other high income countries are not really peer nations.”
These people are simply against vaccine of all kinds and this is just the beginning. It’s not like Bobby and his freak show have tried to hide it. They believe people can get natural immunity from disease by contracting viruses and eating healthy food. They are idiots.
It’s not surprising that Trump has jumped on the bandwagon because he’s always thought autism was caused by vaccines. (I don’t know why he took such a particular interest in this subject sometime during the 2000s but I can guess.)
“Many parents and scientists have been questioning the efficacy of this ‘schedule,’ as have I!” Trump posted Friday on his social media platform, Truth Social. I am fully confident Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and the CDC, will get this done, quickly and correctly, for our Nation’s Children,” he added.
Kids will die because these people have empowered lunatics and morons to run our public health system.
Meanwhile, the President of Peace insists he’s all about saving lives:
President Trump on receiving the Fifa Peace Prize: “I don't know that I'm getting it, I haven't officially been notified. I've been hearing about a peace prize and I'm here to represent our country in a different sense … I don't need prizes; I need to save lives.” pic.twitter.com/oXz38Rw9RY
In 2026, Americans will get free admission to national parks on President Donald Trump‘s birthday but no longer on Juneteenth and Martin Luther King Jr. Day, according to the National Park Service website.
Previously, the National Park Service included these two federal holidays among its free-entry days for around 100 park sites.National parks ordered to check gift shops for DEI-type items
Federally recognized in 2021 under the Biden Administration, Juneteenth has been celebrated for more than a century and a half. The day commemorates the final end of slavery in Confederate states just after the end of the Civil War.
The NPS also added more free-admission days for next year – calling them “patriotic fee-free days” – such as Trump’s birthday on June 14, July 4th weekend and the 110th Birthday of NPS.
GUTFELD: “I love that the peace prize went to Trump and not Greta Thunberg.”@GillianHTurner: “Because it was created it for him.”@Gutfeldfox: “So?”
I’ve said it since 2017 at least, Democrats’ idea of finding a new gear is doing the same thing they’ve always done, the way they’ve always done it, just more of it. Democrats’ dogged “kitchen table” focus misses their most glaring problem: Democrats.
Polling from Data for Progress reached these conclusions about the popularity of progressive policies ahead of the 2018 elections:
Key Finding 1: Many progressive policies are incredibly popular Key Finding 2: Progressive policies poll well across rural, suburban and urban voters Key Finding 3: Some progressive policies are popular with Trump voters Key Finding 4: Progressive policies are popular with 2016 nonvoters
You get the idea. Democrats’ policy positions are popular. The problem is Democrats are not. In 2024 the country voted for Donald Trump, a con man, convicted felon, twice impeached, and instigator of the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Democrats keep pursuing policy answers to their political problem. They assume people voted for Trump because they are uninformed (low-information), or worse, simply racists. Yes, they assume that good policy speaks for itself. (It doesn’t.) Yes, Democrats suck at marketing their popular policies. But what they really suck at is selling Democrats.
Yes, recent polling suggests Democrats to be heavily favored in next year’s elections: (NPR, Nov. 19, 2025):
Heading into the 2026 midterm elections, there are some very big warning signs for Republicans in the latest NPR/PBS News/Marist poll.
The survey of 1,443 adults, conducted from Nov. 10-13, found:
Democrats holding their largest advantage, 14 points, since 2017 on the question of who respondents would vote for if the midterm elections were held today;
President Trump’s approval rating is just 39%, his lowest since right after the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol;
A combined 6-in-10 blame congressional Republicans or Trump for the government shutdown; and
Nearly 6-in-10 say Trump’s top priority should be lowering prices — and no other issue comes close.
The party out of power generally does wll in midterms, as Democrats likely will next year. And maybe epically better. But what happens in 2028? More “kitchen table” issues? More failed attempts at voter education and vilification of Republicans (who are hard at work now on doing that work for Democrats).
Democrats shouldn’t abandon “kitchen table” issues. The economy is still a driver of voter behavior. But what Democrats need is for voters (and more of them) to feel that Democrats see them and have their backs. It would be better if there were policies passed (actions) that proved it. In the minority and with Trump in the White House that’s going to be tough to pull off.
Democrats need to be liked. Take a lesson from the 2024 election. Having popular policies does not win presidential elections (and the power to appoint Supreme Court justices) when people dislike and distrust you. Democrats need to stop pursuing policy answers to their political problem. They need an image makeover.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren has long complained that corporations bilk consumers. Hidden bank and credit card fees, terms of service agreements pages long, class action waivers, binding mandatory arbitration, noncompete clauses, etc. Consumers daily step on economic land mines buried in legalese that only corporate lawyers might understand. Tricks and traps, Warren calls them. She proposed, lobbied for, and won establishment of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2011 to defend consumers. Business hated it. Through last December the CFPB had returned over $21 billion to consumers in “monetary compensation, principal reductions, canceled debts, and other consumer relief.”
Then in 2025 came Trump 2.0, Elon Musk, DOGE, and Trump’s acting director Russell Vought to neuter the CFPB. Their actions, Helaine Olen wrote, constitute “an overt power grab by Big Tech — and their gain could result in the rest of us losing much more than almost anyone realizes.”
All that is prelude to this report in The Guardian:
On a cloudy winter day, a state government inspector named Ryan Coffield walked into a Family Dollar store in Windsor, North Carolina, carrying a scanner gun and a laptop.
Inside the store, which sits along a three-lane road in a county of peanut growers and poultry workers, Coffield scanned 300 items and recorded their shelf prices. He carried the scanned bar codes to the cashier and watched as item after item rang up at a higher price.
Red Baron frozen pizzas, listed on the shelf at $5, rang up at $7.65. Bounty paper towels, shelf price $10.99, rang up at $15.50. Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, Stouffer’s frozen meatloaf, Sprite and Pepsi, ibuprofen, Klondike Minis – shoppers were overpaying for all of them. Pedigree puppy food, listed at $12.25, rang up at $14.75.
All told, 69 of the 300 items came up higher at the register: a 23% error rate that exceeded the state’s limit by more than tenfold. Some of the price tags were months out of date.
The January 2023 inspection produced the store’s fourth consecutive failure, and Coffield’s agency, the state department of agriculture & consumer services, had fined Family Dollar after two previous visits. But North Carolina law caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection, offering retailers little incentive to fix the problem. “Sometimes it is cheaper to pay the fines,” said Chad Parker, who runs the agency’s weights-and-measures program.
It’s not just Family Dollar stores. The Guardian reviewed records from Family Dollar and Dollar General stores in “45 states and more than 140 counties.”
The dollar-store industry, including Family Dollar and its larger rival, Dollar General, promises everyday low prices for household essentials. But an investigation by the Guardian found that the prices listed on the shelves at these two chains often don’t materialize at checkout – in North Carolina and around the country. As the cost of living soars across America, the customers bearing the burden are those who can least afford it – customers who often don’t even notice they’re overpaying.
These overcharges are widespread.
Dollar General stores have failed more than 4,300 government price-accuracy inspections in 23 states since January 2022, a Guardian review found. Family Dollar stores have failed more than 2,100 price inspections in 20 states over the same time span, the review found.
In Arizona, in New Jersey, Vermont, Wisconsin, and Ohio, state attorneys general have reached consumer fraud settlements with the two companies. Both declined to answer the Guardian’s questions about their practices. Dollar General has a history of chronic understaffing resulting in clutter and unsafe working conditions. It’s little wonder why their price tags are months out of fate.
This piece is striking for three reasons. First, insofar as this sort of cheating is common, it indicates that inflation could be greater than is generally recognized. Second, it brings home the problem of “affordability” in a way that many of us probably did not anticipate. If someone thought they were buying $80 of groceries, only to have the cash register ring up $100, it is understandable they would be upset. Finally, it shows how the Trump-Musk habit of laughing at consumer fraud has very real pocketbook effects.
If the practices are widespread enough beyond the dollar stores it could mean that inflation measured in the monthly Consumer Price Index (CPI) is understated. “It would take some footwork to answer this question,” Baker writes, “but my guess is that if companies know they can get away with cheating their customers, they probably do.”
Baker continues, and here we get back to the CFPB:
Trump has made a point of laughing at efforts to rein in corporate abuses of all forms. He has gutted the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Labor Relations Board, and many other agencies created to protect consumers, workers, and the environment. His sidekick, Elon Musk, thought it was hilarious that he was “deleting” the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency set up to prevent banks, credits card companies, and other financial institutions from ripping off their customers.
The mispricing of items at the checkout counter by major retailers would seem to be exactly the sort of reason for which God created government. (Lawsuits should work also, except the piece indicates that the Dollar chains largely preempt class-action suits by requiring arbitration. Good luck getting a lawyer to sue for being overcharged $20.) Anyhow, Trump’s laugh-at-corporate-crime approach is directly pulling money out of people’s pocketbooks in this Dollar chain story.
What Trump apparently thinks is all good fun, is companies making people pay more for the necessities of life. Yesterday, Trump told people that affordability is a “con job.” That could be right, although probably not quite in the way that Trump intended.
And these stores cater to (or take advantage of, pick one) low-income urban and rural communities lacking larger chain food stores (food deserts).
The Guardian again:
“My 87-year-old mother and I have frequented Dollar General for years, and there have been innumerable times we have made purchases that were well higher than advertised,” wrote Robert Hevlin of Dayton. “My mother and I have literally lost thousands over the years with this company, but both of us being on social security, we have little choice in where we shop.”
Yes, the Windsor, N.C. inspection dates from two years prior to Trump 2.0 taking office, but the report points up the chronic nature of corporate rip-offs Warren’s agency is meant to curb. Instead, Trump 2.0 is curbing the CFPB. And the grift goes on.
