Republicans in Congress could deposit their taxpayer-funded paychecks, use their taxpayer-funded health care, or spend their taxpayer-funded pension and still not believe in socialism.
Moments before Pope Francis began leading mass at the Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré Basilica outside Quebec City Thursday morning, two people made their way to the front of the altar to hold a brief, silent protest urging the pontiff to go further in his efforts for healing and reconciliation with Indigenous people in Canada.
The protesters held up a large banner that read “Rescind the doctrine” with the Pope and other members of the clergy standing steps away.
The banner is a reference to the Doctrine of Discovery, which is inspired by centuries-old papal bulls that justified the colonization, conversion and enslavement of non-Christians and the seizure of their lands — and, scholars say, laid the foundation for Canada’s claim to land and the Indian Act.
US lawmakers are eyeing votes before November’s midterm elections on legislation that marks the first major effort by Congress to regulate big tech since the inception of the internet.
The American Innovation and Choice Act, which has bipartisan support in the House and Senate, would lay down key ground rules for dominant firms including Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc., Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. and Microsoft Corp.
The measure is the product of years of effort, including a 16-month House probe featuring public testimony from the chief executive officers of Apple, Amazon, Google and Meta. The investigation by the panel, which published its final report last week, found the four companies use their platforms to dominate vast swaths of the internet—from social networking to mobile apps to e-commerce—often at the expense of smaller rivals.
The bill seeks to break the stranglehold the largest tech platforms have over their markets by prohibiting them from giving advantages to their own products and making it easier for rivals to communicate with customers and collect information about their users.
Tech companies are funding commercials against this. If you see something with a whole lot of fear mongering about prices and no more 2-day shipping from Amazon and finishing with “tell Senators Such-and-Such to vote no on S.2992!”…that’s this bill.
^Also claims that antitrust “threatens national security”
If any corporation wants you to actively work to get congress to fail a bill, then it is your duty to make sure that bill passes, because no corporation has your interest at heart and are only doing that to avoid losing power they shouldn’t have in the first place.
If you all don’t know about the Yes Men you really should check them out. They’re basically two generic looking white dudes who realized that by virtue of being generic looking white guys in Suits and being even moderately tech savvy in the early 2000s they could effectively con a wide variety of media outlets into thinking that they were legitimate representatives of whatever company they wanted, and utilized this platform mostly to critique and shame the companies they claimed to represent, and at the very least, severely publicly embarrass them, such as by offering to do a basic good thing and making the company go forward and publicly acknowledge something awful they caused AND openly admit that they refuse to take responsibility or to apologize of help, creating even more bad press for them and exposing them for the shit they are. Chaotic good shit.
Also, for the record, the survivors of the Bhopal disaster were largely grateful that they were bringing it back into the public consciousness. Because my first thought was that they would be upset that he got their hopes up.
