#axios

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Kevin Robillard at HuffPost:

Donald Trump’s White House kicked a HuffPost reporter out of the pool of journalists set to follow the president on Wednesday, breaking with decades of precedent, and insisting they have the ability to pick and choose which reporters cover the president. The White House also kicked the Reuters wire service out of its spot in the pool for Wednesday, escalating a fight which began after the White House insisted The Associated Press comply with Trump’s decision to arbitrarily rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” The moves fit in with the increasingly authoritarian nature of Trump’s second term, which has seen him deploy the federal government to go after his critics and political enemies, and work to expand the powers of the executive branch to unprecedented levels. “HuffPost condemns this egregious violation of the First Amendment. Americans deserve fair and honest reporting on their president,” HuffPost editor-in-chief Whitney Snyder said. “The White House must stop this cowardly behavior and restore HuffPost’s place in the press pool immediately.” HuffPost White House reporter S.V. Dáte, who questioned Trump on Air Force One earlier this month, was set to fill the spot typically reserved for a print reporter in the pool, which tracks the president throughout the day and sends updates to the broader group of reporters who cover the president. For decades, the White House Correspondents’ Association has determined the rotation of reporters who fill spots dedicated for radio, television, print and wire service reporters. But after 10 p.m. on Tuesday night, the White House informed Date there was “no room” for him in the pool. A reporter from Axios, a digital publication famous for its extreme commitment to brevity, is instead serving as the print pooler. There is also only one wire service in the pool instead of the typical three, while spots were handed to Newsmax and The Blaze, two right-wing outlets. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, a failed congressional candidate, announced the White House was taking control of the pool during Tuesday’s press briefing, saying it needed to ensure access to new news outlets.

Tyrant 47’s White House has bumped HuffPost and Reuters from the White House Press Pool in favor of right-wing state propaganda organs Newsmax and TheBlaze and access journalist purveyors Axios.

This is all about ensuring only Trump-favorable outlets get to cover him in the press pool while freezing out even mildly critical outlets such as the AP and HuffPost.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Live Nation/Ticketmaster is buying Congress

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me THURSDAY (May 2) in WINNIPEG, then Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), Tartu, Estonia, and beyond!

Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. Monopolies are intrinsically destabilizing and inevitably implode…eventually. Guessing which of the loathesome monopolies that make us all miserable will be the first domino is a hard call, but Ticketmaster is definitely high on my list.

It's not that event tickets are the most consequential aspect of our lives. The monopolies over pharma, fuel, finance, tech, and even beer are all more important to our day-to-day. But while Ticketmaster – and its many ramified tentacles, like Live Nation – may not be the most destructive monopoly in our world, but it pisses off people with giant megaphones and armies of rabid fans.

It's been a minute since Ticketmaster was last in the news, so let's recap. Ticketmaster bought out most of its ticketing rivals, then merged with Live Nation, the country's largest concert promoter, and bought out many of the country's largest music, stage and sports venues. They used this iron grip on the entire supply chain for performances and events to pile innumerable junk fees on every ticket sold, while drastically eroding the wages of the creative workers they nominally represented. They created a secret secondary market for tickets and worked with ticket-touts to help them run bots that bought every ticket within an instant of the opening of ticket sales, then ran an auction marketplace that made them gigantic fees on every re-sold ticket – fees the performers were not entitled to share in.

The Ticketmaster/Live Nation/venue octopus is nearly impossible to escape. Independent venues can't book Live Nation acts unless they use Ticketmaster for their tickets. Acts can't get into the large venues owned by Ticketmaster unless they sign up to have Live Nation book their tour. And when Ticketmaster buys a venue, it creams off the most successful acts, starving competing venues of blockbuster shows. They also illegally colluded with their vendors to jack up the price of concerts across the board:

https://pascrell.house.gov/uploadedfiles/ful.pdf

When Rebecca Giblin and I were writing Chokepoint Capitalism, our book about how tech and entertainment monopolies impoverish all kinds of creative workers, we were able to get insiders to go on record about every kind of monopoly, from the labels to Spotify, Kindle to the Big Five publishers and the Google-Meta ad-tech duopoly. The only exception was Ticketmaster/Live Nation: everyone involved in live performance – performers, bookers, club owners – was palpably terrified about speaking out on the record about the conglomerate:

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

No wonder. The company has a long and notorious history of using its market power to ruin anyone who challenges it. Remember Pearl Jam?

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/pearl-jam-taking-on-ticketmaster-67440/

But anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. Not only is Ticketmaster a rapacious, vindictive monopolist – it's also an incompetent monopolist, whose IT systems are optimized for rent-extraction first, with ticket sales as a distant afterthought. This is bad no matter which artist it effects, but when Ticketmaster totally, utterly fucked up Taylor Swift's first post-lockdown tour, they incurred the wrath of the Swifties:

https://www.vox.com/culture/2022/11/21/23471763/taylor-swift-ticketmaster-monopoly

All of which explains why I've always given good odds that Ticketmaster would be first up against the wall come the antitrust revolution. It may not be the most destructive monopolist, but it is absurdly evil, and the people who hate it most are the most famous and beloved artists in the country.

For a while, it looked like I was right. Ticketmaster's colossal Taylor Swift fuckup prompted Senator Amy Klobuchar – a leading antitrust crusader – to hold hearings on the company's conduct, and led to the introduction of a raft of bills to rein in predatory ticketing practices. But as David Dayen writes for The American Prospect, Ticketmaster/Live Nation is spreading a fortune around on the Hill, hiring a deep bench of ex-Congressmen and ex-senior staffers (including Klobuchar's former chief of staff) and they've found a way to create the appearance of justice without having to suffer any consequences for their decades-long campaign of fraud and abuse:

https://prospect.org/power/2024-04-30-live-nation-strikes-up-band-washington/

Dayen opens his article with the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, which is always bracketed by a week's worth of lavish parties for Congress and hill staffers. One of the fanciest of these parties was thrown by Axios – and sponsored by Live Nation, with a performance by Jelly Roll (whose touring contract is owned by Live Nation). Attendees at the Axios/Live Nation event were bombarded with messages about the essential goodness of Live Nation (they were even printed on the cocktail napkins) and exhortations to support the Fans First Act, co-sponsored by Klobuchar and Sen John Cornyn (R-TX):

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/arts/music/fans-first-act-ticket-bill.html

Ticketmaster/Live Nation loves the Fans First Act, because – unlike other bills – it focuses primarily on the secondary market for tickets, and its main measure is a requirement for ticketing companies to disclose their junk fees upfront. Neither of these represents a major challenge to Ticketmaster/Live Nation's control over the market, which gives it the ability to slash performers' wages while jacking up prices for fans.

Fans First represents the triumph of Ticketmaster/Live Nation's media strategy, which is to blame the entire problem on bottom-feeding ticket-touts (who are mostly scum!) instead of on the single monopoly that controls the entire industry and can't stop committing financial crimes.

Axios isn't Live Nation's only partner in selling this distraction tactic. Over the past five years, the company has flushed gigantic sums of money through Washington. Its lobbying spend rose from $240k in 2018 to $1.1m in 2022, and $2.38m in 2023:

https://thehill.com/business/4431886-live-nation-doubled-lobbying-spending-to-2-4m-in-2023-amid-antitrust-threat/

The company has 37 paid lobbyists selling Congress on its behalf. 25 of them are former congressional staffers. Two are former Congressmen: Ed Whitfield (R-KY), a 21 year veteran of the House, and Mark Pryor (D-AR), a two-term senator:

https://www.bhfs.com/people/attorneys/p-s/mark-pryor

But perhaps the most galling celebrant in this lavish hymn to Citizen United is Jonathan Becker, Amy Klobuchar's former chief of staff, who jumped ship to lobby Congress on behalf of monopolists like Live Nation, who paid him $120k last year to sell their story to the Hill:

https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/lobbyists?cycle=2023&id=D000053134

Not everyone hates Fans First: it's been endorsed by the Nix the Tix coalition, largely on the strength of its regulation of secondary ticket sales. But the largest secondary seller in America by far is Live Nation itself, with a $4.5b market in reselling the tickets it sold in the first place. Fans First shifts focus from this sleazy self-dealing to competitors like Stubhub.

Fans First can be seen as an opening salvo in the long war against Ticketmaster/Live Nation. But compared to more muscular bills – like Klobuchar's stalled-out Unlock Ticketing Markets Act, it's pretty weaksauce. The Unlocking act will "prevent exclusive contracts between ticketing services and venues" – hitting Ticketmaster/Live Nation where it hurts, right in the bank-account:

https://www.klobuchar.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2023/4/following-senate-judiciary-committee-hearing-klobuchar-blumenthal-introduce-legislation-to-increase-competition-in-live-event-ticketing-markets

It's not all gloom. Dayen reports that Ticketmaster's active lobbying in favor of Fans First has made many in Congress more skeptical of the bill, not less. And Congress isn't the only – or even the best – way to smash Ticketmaster's criminal empire. That's something the DoJ's antitrust division could power through with a lot less exposure to the legalized bribery that dominates Congress.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/30/nix-fix-the-tix/#something-must-be-done-there-we-did-something

Image: Matt Biddulph (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/mbiddulph/13904063945/

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

--

Flying Logos (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Over_$1,000,000_dollars_in_USD_$100_bill_stacks.png

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[corporationsarepeople]

[thenewdemocratus]

Jake Tapper & Alex Thompson: How Joe Biden Handed the Presidency to Donald Trump

“At a fateful event last summer, Barack Obama, George Clooney, and others were stunned by Biden’s weakness and confusion. Why did he and his advisers decide to conceal his condition from the public and campaign for reëlection? President Joe Biden got out of bed the day after the 2024 election convinced that he had been wronged. The élites, the Democratic officials, the media, Nancy Pelosi, Barack…

[deadpresidents]

Mike Johnson is the least experienced Speaker of the House in 140 years.

[eretzyisrael]

By  Ryan Saavedra

President Joe Biden threatened to cut U.S. support for Israel in a private call with Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week after Israel killed multiple top terrorists in the region.

The call, which included Vice President Kamala Harris, came after Israel killed Fuad Shukr, Hezbollah’s top military commander, on Tuesday and is believed to be behind the Wednesday killing of Ismail Haniyeh, the top leader of Hamas. Shukr was targeted after Hezbollah murdered 12 children inside Israel over the weekend and Haniyeh was targeted in response to the October 7 attacks.

Axios reported that Biden and his aides were furious after Israel carried out the strikes and demanded that Netanyahu move toward a hostage deal with Hamas. The Biden-Harris administration has repeatedly blamed Israel for not securing a hostage deal with Hamas even though it is Hamas that has repeatedly led negotiators along and backed out of talks.

The report said that Biden warned Netanyahu “that he expects no more escalation from the Israeli side,” even though Israel was protecting itself against those who are responsible for killing large numbers of Israelis.

“Biden also warned Netanyahu that if he escalates again, he shouldn’t count on the U.S. to bail him out,” the report added.

[georgiapeach30513]

From IG stories.

[gamer2002]

This is the most journalism in the history of journalism

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Marcie Jones at Wonkette:

Trump’s chief of staff, Florida woman Susie Wiles, sat down with Axios to let them know there’s not going to be any backbiting in the new administration. LOLOL! “My team and I will not tolerate backbiting, second-guessing inappropriately, or drama. These are counterproductive to the mission.” Hahaha! Good fucking luck with that gameshow host’s team of D-minus-list self-dealing showboats. Or as they’ve been known to dramatically bite at each other behind one another’s backs to the Daily Mail, “'grifters,' 'hucksters,' 'profiteers' and 'cranks', and ‘hustlers looking to make a buck’.” The Mail also added that they are “corner-cutting, scandal-prone, profit-hungry confederates.” And being from Baltimore, we’d say “crabs trying to drag each other to the bottom of the barrel.” Remember a few months ago when Wiles sent out an email demanding no leaks to the press, which was leaked within minutes to the press?

Just last week she sent out another missive, “reiterating that no member of the incoming administration or Transition speaks for the United States or the President-elect himself” and that “all intended nominees should refrain from any public social media posts,” which was also leaked within a day, and nearly universally ignored by the compulsively-tweeting talent pool of top minds that she and the future president have assembled (though SecDef nom Pete Hegseth does seem to have figured out that shutting up is actually his best move for now).

Susie Wiles can try to enforce a “no drama” rule in the Trump Administration all she wants, but in reality, someone’s gonna break it within a week or less in the new administration’s term.

[grits-galraisedinthesouth]

Intellectually honest discussions about "The Joe Biden Story" May 19th 2025

"Literally, the oil slick off the window. That's why I, and so damn many other people I grew up with, have cancer." -Joe Biden July 20th 2022

Kim Strassel speaks to WSJ about Biden and 2020

Current Affairs reviews "original sin"

[vyorei]

For fuck saaaake 💀

[larrywilmore]

Keep talking!

No, no, more is better! I could keep Alex Isenstadt talking all day. We want to hear it ALL!

Listen to our full conversation

[joe-england]

Tariffs, DOGE impact is mostly absent from Treasury data — for now

[georgiapeach30513]

[gamer2002]

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[nosferdoc]

“We've all resigned ourselves to a second Trump presidency.”

— A senior House Democrat as quoted in Axios July 14, 2024.