#Big business

[reasonsforhope]

Article | Paywall Free

"A bid to break up Alphabet Inc.’s Google is one of the options being considered by the Justice Department after a landmark court ruling found that the company monopolized the online search market, according to people with knowledge of the deliberations.

The move would be Washington’s first push to dismantle a company for illegal monopolization since unsuccessful efforts to break up Microsoft Corp. two decades ago. Less severe options include forcing Google to share more data with competitors and measures to prevent it from gaining an unfair advantage in AI products, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private conversations.

Regardless, the government will likely seek a ban on the type of exclusive contracts that were at the center of its case against Google. If the Justice Department pushes ahead with a breakup plan, the most likely units for divestment are the Android operating system and Google’s web browser Chrome, said the people. Officials are also looking at trying to force a possible sale of AdWords, the platform the company uses to sell text advertising, one of the people said.

The Justice Department discussions have intensified in the wake of Judge Amit Mehta’s Aug. 5 ruling that Google illegally monopolized the markets of online search and search text ads. Google has said it will appeal that decision, but Mehta has ordered both sides to begin plans for the second phase of the case, which will involve the government’s proposals for restoring competition, including a possible breakup request.

The US plan will need to be accepted by Mehta, who would direct the company to comply. A forced breakup of Google would be the biggest of a US company since AT&T was dismantled in the 1980s."

-via Bloomberg, August 13, 2024

[reality-detective]

Nestle's scandals, scams and cover-ups 🤔

[margaretobrienpornpublisher]

Margaret O'Brien, Pornography Publisher

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

An estimated 31 million Americans have now been thrown off what’s been called “the hunger cliff.”

Those drastic cuts have food banks bracing for impact, and some grocery executives celebrating. On a late February earnings call of Grocery Outlet, a discount supermarket chain that relies on SNAP for a high percentage of its sales, the company’s chief financial officer cheered the coming reductions. “In many ways,” he told investors, it “is good for our model as those benefits decline.”

“It does put more pressure on those consumers, and they come to us to stretch their dollar,” he said of the impending cuts.

[degeneratedworker]

"You risk your life, Big Business rakes in the dough." Democratic People's Republic of Korea c. 1950s

[gloomcrawler]

[mayalaen]

Hi! I'm salty and here to complain about price gouging!

I recently needed some self-adherent wound wrap for my mom, and even though I have it at my shop, I checked how much it would be to have it delivered to my lazy ass.

Here's a screenshot from Walgreens:

This is brand name Band-Aid showing the price is $8.79 per roll. There was also a 2-pack of the Walgreens Brand for $7.99.

As many of you know, I own a tattoo supply shop, and I sell this very thing in my shop. It comes in various colors and I have both the 1 inch and 2 inch versions.

I pay $0.29 per roll for Sensi-Wrap (brand name) and other brands getting it by the case in bulk. If I buy it in super bulk, I can get it as low as $0.19 per roll.

Big companies get a bigger break on price than me, but even using $0.29 a roll as a starting point, that means they're selling at a 2,930.30% markup or a margin of 96.7%.

FYI the standard before the pandemic was a 40% margin, which gives you enough to cover your running costs plus allowing you to make a decent amount of money yourself to live on.

Companies took advantage of the pandemic and were doing 60% plus for a while, but post pandemic most settled at 50% margin.

A 96.7% margin is completely ridiculous, but a lot of big companies have started using 80% to 90% margins since the pandemic.

Buying from small businesses is a slower process because we can't get it to you within a few hours, but the savings are incredible!

We can't just charge whatever we want because not only do we have to complete with other small businesses, but we're not as greedy and corrupt as big business. We don't have CEOs making millions of dollars a year doing nothing in their big offices.

Big businesses have convinced you that it's too hard to go to stores or wait for things, so you think $8.79 isn't a big deal for a roll of stretch wrap. And then you see the Walgreens brand for $7.99 and think it's an awesome deal!

But walk into a brick and mortar or visit their online store, and you can get things like this from us for a reasonable price.

I sell this same product for $0.50 per roll. If you buy a case, I knock it down to $0.45 per roll. Same as all the other small businesses in the area.

Small businesses can't afford to advertise like the big guys, and we can't reach you on social media because of FB, Twitter, and Insta algorithms that favor big business, but we're here!

Support small businesses! We're not gouging our customers, but we're struggling because big business is too pervasive and influential. They're driving us out of business, and once that happens, they can set the prices with no competition.

I'm not posting this promote my own business. I'm not even gonna link to my business. I'm sharing this because I want everybody to support local small businesses 🥳

[businessmemes]

Hiroshi and Tyrese are REAL businessMEN and are visiting from the Kyoto offices this week. If you attempt to interact with them, or even make eye contact, you will void all banked PTO and must put your hand in the BOX for 20 minutes per offense.

[sachani]

no but falses big business plan could be the selling rivers to like x and beef etc

but it could also be the “free” rivers shes put in the neighbourhood ie around stress and iskall.

step 1 ~ flood the neighbourhood

step 2~ sell them bridges to get around

if there’s no problem create one and sell the solution 💗

[renee-ckstrong]

Big Business card looking great.

[ridenwithbiden]

"The Supreme Court overruled a key pillar of federal agency authority Friday, appropriating a massive amount of executive branch power to itself.

In overruling Chevron, a 40-year-old precedent, the Court decided that federal agencies no longer get to fill in the gaps of Congress’ laws with their experts’ own reasonable interpretation of how to carry them out; that authority now resides in the judiciary. It’s a power grab that the right-wing legal world has been marching towards for years — and they finally got a Court activist enough to do it.

Chief Justice John Roberts, often the tip of the spear for this movement, wrote the majority. Justice Elena Kagan, probably the Court’s best pro-agency voice, wrote the dissent, joined by her two liberal colleagues. Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas wrote solo concurrences.

Roberts completed the takeover with very little humility. The thinking underlying Chevron deference is that agencies are staffed by experts who understand the technicalities of their subject matter, and are best equipped to mold often broad statutes into day-to-day regulations. Judges, on the other hand, have no special insight into, say, the Environmental Protection Agency’s calculations to find permissible amounts of air pollution, or the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s experience with how factories should be laid out.

“Delegating ultimate interpretive authority to agencies is simply not necessary to ensure that the resolution of statutory ambiguities is well informed by subject matter expertise,” Roberts hand-waved.

(A dissenting Kagan quipped in reply to this section of Roberts’ opinion: “Score one for self-confidence; maybe not so high for self-reflection or -knowledge.”)

In fulfilling his right-wing mission, Roberts also pretended that letting judges, rather than agencies, fill in statutory specifics won’t result in a whipsawing based on the judges’ partisan leanings — since, per Roberts, judges don’t act on them. That’ll come as a surprise to the Biden administration, which has seen everything from power plant regulations to student debt relief summarily shot down by the conservative supermajority.

“Courts interpret statutes, no matter the context, based on the traditional tools of statutory construction, not individual policy preferences,” he intoned.

Gorsuch, son of an anti-agency EPA Administrator, cheered the elimination of “systemic bias in the government’s favor.” Thomas wrote that not only was Chevron deference wrong, it was an unconstitutional infringement on the separation of powers (the accumulation of executive branch power in the judiciary, on the other hand, does not seem to trouble him).

In her dissent, Kagan underscored the political mechanics underlying the majority opinion in usually bald terms for a justice on a Court so prizing comity and respect. She traced the conservatives’ recent rulings, in which they give themselves enough excuses to toss Chevron since it’s become outmoded anyway. In each, the majority grasped for novel reasons to ignore the precedent.

In a one-two punch, Kagan also pointed out that this kind of behavior, reverse engineering a string of cases to get a hall pass to overturn long established precedent, has become habitual.

“This Court has ‘avoided deferring under Chevron since 2016’ because it has been preparing to overrule Chevron since around that time,” she wrote. “That kind of self-help on the way to reversing precedent has become almost routine at this Court.”

Roberts tried to downplay the ramifications of the ruling by asserting that old agency cases decided by Chevron deference are still good law and beholden to the precedent the Court so blithely tossed away on Friday.

But Kagan countered that it was an unvarnished power grab.

“In one fell swoop, the majority today gives itself exclusive power over every open issue — no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden — involving the meaning of regulatory law,” she wrote. “As if it did not have enough on its plate, the majority turns itself into the country’s administrative czar.”

For this conservative Court, appointing itself “czar” of the administrative state meshes with its partisan leanings seamlessly. Particularly in the modern era, Democratic administrations seek to use agency power far more muscularly, to enact regulations more aggressively. Republican ones, concerned with unwinding regulation, have less to lose from running into a judicial buzzsaw.

Kagan lists a series of Chevron questions to show how out of their depth judges will be in their new czarist role: From the Food and Drug Administration, “When does an alpha amino acid polymer qualify as such a ‘protein’?” From the Department of the Interior, “How much noise is consistent with ‘the natural quiet’? And how much of the park, for how many hours a day, must be that quiet for the ‘substantial restoration’ requirement to be met?”

“The majority disdains restraint,” she concluded, “and grasps for power.”

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

By Stephen Millies

Every worker has the right to withhold their labor. Concerted action and collective bargaining by workers are supposed to be protected by law. That hasn’t stopped President Biden from demanding on Nov. 28 that Congress stop over 100,000 railroad workers from striking. Biden insisted that Congress enforce a tentative deal “without any modifications or delay.”

[contac]

[ohmy80s]

Bette Midler / Big Business (1988)

[kp777]

AOC Takes The Gloves OFF On James Comer And The GOP

TYT Investigates

July 1, 2024

AOC slams House Republicans over their disgusting efforts to rollback discrimination protections.

[reality-detective]

You won't see very many commercials like this, real or fake. 👇

Have you ever wondered why more companies aren't speaking up? It's because those who aren't, are in on it. Ya think these corporations should get their balls out of their money vaults and start doing what is right?

We've already seen many executives from major big businesses resign and slip into the shadows(some were executed), you can expect to see more of them disappearing.

Pay Attention 🤔