6:36
The Heritage Foundation is a fine institution that does excellent work on a number of topics. Unfortunately, it is also one of several conservative institutions in D.C. that takes money from Google — and it shows.
Yesterday, the think tank published a hitpiece about Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO)’s bill to end political censorship by big social media platforms.
Sen. Hawley, a freshman Senator elected in 2018, has become one of the most vocal critics of big tech in the upper chamber. His bill, which would amend Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), is a bold attempt to transform his rhetoric into action.
Hawley’s bill is called the Ending Support for Internet Censorship Act, and it takes aim at the most troublesome part of Section 230, the legal immunities that shield tech companies from lawsuits arising from the “good faith” censorship of content.
These are the provisions that allow tech platforms to disintegrate the social media presence of everyone from political activists to bustling online businesses with less due process involved than eviction from a neighborhood parking lot.
The bill is measured and nuanced in its approach. It takes care not to hurt small competitors to the established Silicon Valley giants. It would only apply to tech companies that have more than 30 million monthly active users in the U.S., 300 million worldwide, or more than $500 million in annual revenue.
Still, The Heritage Foundation is having none of it.
In an article attacking the bill, senior research fellow Diane Katz warns of dire consequences if Sen. Hawley’s bill were to pass.
Katz warns that absent the legal protections of Section 230, companies would risk a “barrage of lawsuits” if they are unable to satisfy regulators with their content moderation practices.
“Such a threat would likely provoke some platforms to either block all but the blandest content or refrain from curation altogether—and subject the public to the extremes of human depravity.”
The “extremes of human depravity?” What, like 4chan? Sorry, but that’s already allowed on the internet!
Plus, Sen. Hawley’s bill would only strip tech companies of their immunity to moderate a very specific type of content — political speech. It says nothing about “depravity,” which tech platforms would still be able to filter behind features like Google’s Safe Search.
Also, Katz seems to imply that tech companies aren’t already allowing “depravity” on their platforms, so long as it fits in with their worldview — note, videos promoting “Drag Queen Story Hour,” in which crossdressers read stories to children, can easily be found on YouTube. Unlike PragerU’s videos, they aren’t even hidden behind an age filter.
Katz also says that it is an “overwhelming task” for tech companies to prove the absence of bias to regulators. “Requiring tech companies to convey their proprietary intellectual property to government (to prove they are not acting in a discriminatory fashion) is an insupportable violation of property rights.”
This is a strange argument — companies have long been required to prove they are not acting in a discriminatory fashion. Does Katz support the repealing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act? It would certainly make her position consistent, if a little bold.
All the bill does is add political viewpoint to the list of categories that tech companies are not allowed to discriminate against. Honestly, this is something that should go beyond just tech companies — the concept of viewpoint discrimination is a massive wrench in the works of Diversity Inc., the kryptonite for workplace SJWs who love to bully and harass their conservative colleagues (especially in Silicon Valley).
It’s also highly necessary in a world where a few companies control virtually all communication, political or otherwise, on the internet. As Ann Coulter put it:
There’s a missing disclosure in Katz’s article — the fact that The Heritage Foundation takes contributions from Google. “Substantial amounts,” according to Google’s own transparency report.
It’s an important detail to disclose, because the article concludes with a talking point beloved of big tech advocates in D.C., namely that attempts to regulate Silicon Valley to stop political bias are no different to the Fairness Doctrine, a widely derided law from before the 1980s which forced broadcasters to be politically “balanced” in their coverage.
This argument is one of the top lines NetChoice, a D.C-based, conservative-focused lobby group that counts Google, Facebook, and Twitter among its clients. In January, NetChoice VP Carl Szabo testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee about why online platforms shouldn’t be subject to antitrust investigations — and the Fairness Doctrine comparison was at the forefront of his argument.
The Internet Association, the largest trade association representing Silicon Valley firms, takes a similar line. In an op-ed aimed at conservatives, the organization’s president wrote that new internet regulations could “spark a worse, more stringent version of the Fairness Doctrine.”
The Heritage Foundation is a think tank, and a think tank survives on the basis of donations. Still though, when its argument against Sen. Hawley’s bill is the same weak comparison made by Silicon Valley’s D.C. lobbyists in debates around completely different regulations, it’s hard to ignore.
The counter-argument? It hardly needs to be made, but obviously the businesses affected by the Fairness Doctrine never had anything like the legal immunities granted to tech companies that Sen. Hawley’s bill proposes to tie to political neutrality. Indeed, they still don’t, and that puts them at a massive disadvantage when competing with tech giants that have become publishers in all but name.
In a comment, Heritage Foundation media director Greg Scott said disclosure of the think tank’s Google funding was unnecessary because it didn’t affect their positions.
“For the same reason we didn’t [add a disclosure] when we publicly criticized Google/YouTube earlier this month for censoring a very popular Heritage video and when we called Google out for dissolving its AI board earlier in the year – because it is irrelevant. Total corporate support amounts to less than 2 percent of contributions and has exactly zero bearing on our policy positions.”
“No one should be surprised that Heritage favors consumer empowerment, opposes government intervention, and champions the free market. We always have – long before Google existed – and always will operate according to a core set of principles when evaluating policy proposals. The Heritage Foundation’s authority rests on the quality, rigor, depth, and independent nature of our research and analysis. Any suggestion to the contrary is false.”
Are you an insider at Google, Facebook, Twitter or any other tech company who wants to confidentially reveal wrongdoing or political bias at your company? Reach out to Allum Bokhari at his secure email address allumbokhari@protonmail.com.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News.
Josh
Hawley: GOP Must Defend Middle Class Americans Against ‘Concentrated Corporate
Power,’ Tech Billionaires
3 Nov 2019184
4:31
The Republican Party must defend America’s working and middle
class against “concentrated corporate power” and the monopolization of entire
sectors of the United States’ economy, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) says.
In
an interview on The Realignment podcast,
Hawley said that “long gone are the days where” American workers can depend on
big business to look out for their needs and the needs of their communities.
Instead, Hawley explained
that increasing “concentrated corporate power” of whole sectors of the American
economy — specifically among Silicon Valley’s giant tech conglomerates — is at
the expense of working and middle class Americans.
“One of the things Republicans
need to recover today is a defense of an open, free-market, of a fair healthy
competing market and the length between that and Democratic citizenship,”
Hawley said, and continued:
At the end of the day, we are
trying to support and sustain here a great democracy. We’re not trying to make
a select group of people rich. They’ve already done that. The tech billionaires
are already billionaires, they don’t need any more help from government. I’m
not interested in trying to help them further. I’m interested in trying to help
sustain the great middle of this country that makes our democracy run and
that’s the most important challenge of this day.
“You have these businesses
who for years now have said ‘Well, we’re based in the United States, but we’re
not actually an American company, we’re a global company,'” Hawley said. “And
you know, what has driven profits for some of our biggest multinational
corporations? It’s been … moving jobs overseas where it’s cheaper … moving your
profits out of this country so you don’t have to pay any taxes.”
“I think that we have here at
the same time that our economy has become more concentrated, we have bigger and
bigger corporations that control more and more of our key sectors, those same
corporations see themselves as less and less American and frankly they are less
committed to American workers and American communities,” Hawley continued.
“That’s turned out to be a problem which is one of the reasons we need to
restore good, healthy, robust competition in this country that’s going to push
up wages, that’s going to bring jobs back to the middle parts of this country,
and most importantly, to the middle and working class of this country.”
While multinational corporations monopolize industries, Hawley said the GOP must defend working and middle class Americans and that big business interests should not come before the needs of American communities:
A free market is one where you can enter it, where there are new
ideas, and also by the way, where people can start a small family business, you
shouldn’t have to be gigantic in order to succeed in this country. Most people don’t want to
start a tech company. [Americans]
maybe want to work in their family’s business, which may be some corner shop in
a small town … they want to be able to make a living and
then give that to their kids or give their kids an option to do that. [Emphasis
added]
The problem with corporate concentration is that it tends to
kill all of that. The worst thing about corporate concentration is that it inevitably
believes to a partnership with big government. Big business and big government always get
together, always. And that is exactly what has happened now with the tech
sector, for instance, and arguably many other sectors where you
have this alliance between big government and big business … whatever you call
it, it’s a problem and it’s something we need to address. [Emphasis added]
Hawley blasted the free
trade-at-all-costs doctrine that has dominated the Republican and Democrat
Party establishments for decades, crediting the globalist economic model with
hollowing “out entire industries, entire supply chains” and sending them to
China, among other countries.
“The thing is in this country
is that not only do we not make very much stuff anymore, we don’t even make the
machines that make the stuff,” Hawley said. “The entire supply chain up and
down has gone overseas, and a lot of it to China, and this is a result of
policies over some decades now.”
As
Breitbart News reported, Hawley detailed in the interview how
Republicans like former President George H.W. Bush’s ‘New World Order’ agenda
and Democrats have helped to create a corporatist economy that
disproportionately benefits the nation’s richest executives and donor class.
The
billionaire class, the top 0.01 percent of earners, has enjoyed more than 15 times as much
wage growth as the bottom 90 percent since 1979. That economy has been
reinforced with federal rules that largely benefits the wealthiest of wealthiest
earners. A study released last month revealed
that the richest Americans are, in fact, paying a lower tax rate than all other
Americans.
John Binder is
a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
Enough Is Enough’: Josh Hawley Calls for Sanctions on Mexican
Cartels
6 Nov 2019220
3:30
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) said Wednesday that “enough is enough” and
called on the U.S. government to sanction Mexican officials and cartel members
complicit in trafficking meth and killing Americans.
Hawley called for
harsh retribution against the Mexican cartels complicit in ambushing and
murdering nine American women and children near the New Mexico border.
In
the wake of the attack on Americans, as well as the Mexican cartels’ complicity
in Missouri’s meth crisis, the Missouri conservative called for the U.S.
government to sanction the cartel members who are “openly slaughtering American
citizens.”
“With
Mexico, enough is enough. US government should impose sanctions on Mexican
officials, including freezing assets, who won’t confront cartels,” Hawley
tweeted Wednesday. “Cartels are flooding MO [Missouri] w/ meth, trafficking
children, & openly slaughtering American citizens. And Mexico looks the
other way.”
Hawley
said that just over the last 14 days, there had been over 40 drug overdoses
coming from drugs across America’s southern border.
Hawley
continued, “In SW Mo last two weeks alone, over 40 drug overdoses &
multiple deaths from drugs coming across [the] southern border. Story is the
same all over the state. Cartels increasingly call the shots in Mexico, and for
our own security, we cannot allow this to continue.”
With Mexico, enough is enough. US
government should impose sanctions on Mexican officials, including freezing
assets, who won’t confront cartels. Cartels are flooding MO w/ meth, trafficking
children, & openly slaughtering American citizens. And Mexico looks the
other way
In SW Mo last two weeks alone, over 40 drug overdoses
& multiple deaths from drugs coming across southern border. Story is the
same all over the state. Cartels increasingly call the shots in Mexico, and for
our own security, we cannot allow this to continue
Hawley spent
much of his August recess traveling across rural Missouri, learning what
matters to the average Missourian.
This AM I had the great privilege of
meeting Brittany Tune, a nurse, a mother of two, a follower of God, and a
remarkable woman. Born & raised in rural Shannon Co., she has raised two
kids on her own while putting herself through nursing school & dedicating
her life to others
Brittany says meth is hammering this community. She has
many friends & family members who have been touched by this epidemic. She
worries about what it means for her own kids, ages 15 & 10. It’s much worse
now than when she was growing up, she says
In
an interview with Breitbart News in September, Hawley said that
meth coming from Mexico is destroying local Missouri communities.
“Come
with me to any town, any town in the state of Missouri of any size, and I will
show you communities that are drowning in meth, drowning in it. It is literally
killing people; it is destroying families it is destroying schools and whole
communities,” he said.
“Missouri
is a border state,” Hawley said, adding that “we have to got to secure the
border to stop the meth” and “stop the flow of illegal immigration.”
Hawley’s
remarks about the Mexican cartel attack on Americans mirrors that of President
Donald Trump, who said Tuesday that
the United States was ready for war against the drug cartels.
“This
is the time for Mexico, with the help of the United States, to wage WAR on the
drug cartels and wipe them off the face of the earth,” the president tweeted.
Trump
has campaigned on cracking down on violence on the southern border as well as
handling the drug cartels.
During
an exclusive interview with Breitbart News, Trump said he is “very seriously”
thinking of designating the drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations
(FTOs).
“It’s
psychological, but it’s also economic,” Trump told Breitbart News in March. “As
terrorists — as terrorist organizations, the answer is yes. They are.”
Sen.
Steve Daines (R-MT) told Breitbart
News in May that he would back Trump’s potential designation of the Mexican
cartels as FTOs and that seizing cartel leader El Chapo’s assets would build
the wall and make the cartels pay for it. In a similar manner to Missouri,
Daines told Breitbart News about how Montana has been ravaged by meth from
Mexican cartels.
Daines said that by seizing “billions” of El Chapo’s assets, it
“would absolutely fulfill President Trump’s promise to build the wall and make
Mexico pay for it. In this case, it would be a Mexican cartel paying for it
would be an excellent idea.”
Economists: America’s Elite Pay Lower Tax Rate Than All Other
Americans
The wealthiest
Americans are paying a lower tax rate than all other Americans, groundbreaking
analysis from a pair of economists reveals.
For the
first time on record, the wealthiest 400 Americans in 2018 paid a lower tax
rate than all of the income groups in the United States, research highlighted by the New York Times from
University of California, Berkeley, economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel
Zucman finds.
The
analysis concludes that the country’s top economic elite are paying lower
federal, state, and local tax rates than the nation’s working and middle class.
Overall, these top 400 wealthy Americans paid just a 23 percent tax rate, which
the Times‘ op-ed columnist David Leonhardt notes is a
combined tax payment of “less than one-quarter of their total income.”
This 23
percent tax rate for the rich means their rate has been slashed by 47
percentage points since 1950 when their tax rate was 70 percent.
(Screenshot
via the New York Times)
The
analysis finds that the 23 percent tax rate for the wealthiest Americans is
less than every other income group in the U.S. — including those earning
working and middle-class incomes, as a Times graphic shows.
Leonhardt
writes:
For
middle-class and poor families, the picture is different. Federal
income taxes have also declined modestly for these families, but they haven’t
benefited much if at all from the decline in the corporate tax or estate tax. And
they now pay more in payroll taxes (which finance Medicare and Social
Security) than in the past. Over all, their taxes have remained fairly flat.
[Emphasis added]
The
report comes as Americans increasingly see a growing divide between the rich
and working class, as the Pew Research Center has found.
Sen. Josh
Hawley (R-MO), the leading economic nationalist in the Senate, has warned
against the Left-Right coalition’s consensus on open trade, open markets, and
open borders, a plan that he has called an economy that works solely for the
elite.
“The same
consensus says that we need to pursue and embrace economic globalization and
economic integration at all costs — open markets, open borders, open trade,
open everything no matter whether it’s actually good for American national
security or for American workers or for American families or for American
principles … this is the elite consensus that has governed our politics
for too long and what it has produced is a politics of elite ambition,”
Hawley said in an August speech in the
Senate.
That
increasing worry of rapid income inequality is only further justified by economic
research showing a rise in servant-class jobs,
strong economic recovery for elite zip codes but not for working-class
regions, and skyrocketing wage growth for the billionaire class at 15 times
the rate of other Americans.
Census Says U.S.
Income Inequality Grew ‘Significantly’ in 2018
(Bloomberg) -- Income
inequality in America widened “significantly” last year, according to a U.S.
Census Bureau report published Thursday.
A measure of inequality
known as the Gini index rose to 0.485 from 0.482 in 2017, according to the
bureau’s survey of household finances. The measure compares incomes at the top
and bottom of the distribution, and a score of 0 is perfect equality.
The 2018 reading is the
first to incorporate
the impact of President Donald Trump’s end-
2017 tax bill, which was reckoned by many
economists to be skewed in favor of the
wealthy.
the impact of President Donald Trump’s end-
2017 tax bill, which was reckoned by many
economists to be skewed in favor of the
wealthy.
But the distribution of
income and wealth in the U.S. has been worsening for decades, making America
the most unequal country in the developed world. The trend, which has persisted
through recessions and recoveries, and under administrations of both parties,
has put inequality at the center of U.S. politics.
Leading candidates for
the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, including senators Elizabeth
Warren and Bernie Sanders, are promising to rectify the tilt toward the rich
with measures such as taxes on wealth or financial transactions.
Just five states --
California, Connecticut, Florida, Louisiana and New York, plus the District of
Columbia and Puerto Rico -- had Gini indexes higher than the national level,
while the reading was lower in 36 states.
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