On Wednesday, Florida Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz introduced a new amendment to the House Judiciary Committee hearing rules, which would require lawmakers to recite the Pledge of Allegiance before each meeting. Gaetz’s proposal was likely aimed at embarrassing Democrats on the committee, who opposed the requirement. The pledge has been used as a political weapon numerous times in U.S.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Ticketmaster is under fire from the Senate’s top antitrust legislator for appearing to abuse its monopolistic position over the ticket market in the wake of the platform’s snafu when Taylor Swift concert tickets went on sale this week.
On Wednesday, Senate Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights Subcommittee Chair Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) sent a letter to Ticketmaster CEO Michael Rapino, saying that the company appears to be abusing its grip over the market, which she said resembles a monopoly. In her letter, she cited issues that have plagued ticket buyers in recent years, like high fees that can almost equal the price of a ticket itself.
“Ticketmaster and LiveNation dominate the live entertainment supply chain with powerful positions in primary ticketing, secondary ticketing, concert promotion, artist management, tour sponsorships, and event venue operation,” Klobuchar wrote. “Ticketmaster’s power in the primary ticket market insulates it from the competitive pressures that typically push companies to innovate and improve their services. That can result in dramatic service failures, where consumers are the ones that pay the price.”
Klobuchar went on to say that “there have been numerous complaints about your company’s compliance” with an antitrust consent decree that it signed in 2010 when it merged with Live Nation. “I am concerned about a pattern of non-compliance with your legal obligations,” she wrote.
The lawmaker added in a Twitter post on Wednesday that “What is going on with Ticketmaster is an example of why we need strong antitrust enforcement! Monopolies wreak havoc on consumers and our economy.”
Antitrust experts say that the merger of Ticketmaster and Live Nation — which they say happened as a result of lax antitrust regulation — has laid the groundwork for Ticketmaster’s current grip on the market.
NEW: Ticketmaster is destroying live music.
Their scam fees now cost as much as 78% of a ticket. They control the events, the venues, even the artists.
There’s a movement pushing the Justice Department to take on their monopoly. @Doctorow breaks it down. pic.twitter.com/Ai0AwuVJQX
— More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) October 19, 2022
Though Ticketmaster claims it only dominates about 30 percent of the concert market, analytics companies have found that it captured 66 percent of sales among major ticket platforms last year. Meanwhile, in 2010, the Justice Department found that Ticketmaster’s hold over major concert venues was over 80 percent — and that was even before regulators allowed the merger to go through.
The merger has not only hurt consumers, but also the music scene at large, experts have found, as smaller venues and artists are hurt by the company’s dominance and control over the industry.
Concertgoers often have no choice but to use Ticketmaster, however. On Tuesday, as tickets for Swift’s tour went on sale, the website crashed and fans waited for hours in the digital queue just to have tickets sell out; tickets then began popping up on resale sites like Stubhub for tens of thousands of dollars.
Ticketmaster also made headlines this summer when Bruce Springsteen fans, hoping to see Springsteen on his first tour in years, went to purchase early access tickets on Ticketmaster only to see tickets being sold firsthand for up to $5,500 due to Ticketmaster’s dynamic pricing system that adjusts ticket prices based on demand.
Numerous House representatives and senators have called for Ticketmaster to be broken up in recent days.
“Daily reminder that Ticketmaster is a monopoly, its merger with LiveNation should never have been approved, and they need to be reigned in,” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) on Twitter. “Break them up.”
Rep. David Cicilline, who previously sent a letter to the Department of Justice asking for an investigation into the company, wrote, “[Ticketmaster]’s excessive wait times and fees are completely unacceptable, as seen with today’s [Taylor Swift] tickets, and are a symptom of a larger problem. It’s no secret that Live Nation-Ticketmaster is an unchecked monopoly.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Democratic congressman David Cicilline of Rhode Island circulated a letter to party colleagues this week, seeking cosponsors for legislation that would bar former President Donald Trump from running for president again in 2024.
Trump announced that he is running for president again during a rally at his Mar-a-Lago estate on Tuesday evening. That same day, Cicilline circulated a letter seeking to disqualify Trump from higher office, citing Trump’s actions on January 6, 2021, when a mob of his loyalists attacked the U.S. Capitol building shortly after he gave an incendiary speech outside the White House.
“Give the proof — demonstrated through the January 6th Committee Hearings, the 2021 impeachment trial, and other reporting — that Donald Trump engaged in insurrection on January 6th with the intention of overturning the lawful 2020 election results, I have drafted legislation that would prevent Donald Trump from holding public office again under the Fourteenth Amendment,” Cicilline wrote.
Cicilline, who served as an impeachment manager during Trump’s first impeachment trial, did not say when he planned to submit the legislation for Congress to consider. He did urge other lawmakers to cosponsor his legislation by Thursday, however.
Cicilline’s bill “details testimony and evidence demonstrating how Donald Trump engaged in insurrection against the United States” based on revelations made during the January 6 committee’s hearings, his letter says.
According to the letter, the bill also specifically showcases how Donald Trump:
…engaged in insurrection when he helped to plan and encouraged the insurgence on January 6th despite knowing that the election results were lawful; attempted to intimidate state and federal officials when they did not support his false claims and unlawful plans; tried to manipulate Mike Pence into unlawfully refusing to certify the election results, despite Mr. Pence’s and legal advisors’ assertion that he held no such authority; and supported the violent insurrection at the Capitol on January 6th, refusing for hours to denounce or act against the mob and putting thousands of lives in danger.
Cicilline’s bill may face legal challenges, as the amendment he cites doesn’t outline a specific process for labeling a person an insurrectionist. The amendment does state, however, that Congress has the authority “to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article” — in theory paving the way for Cicilline’s legislation to be used to deem Trump unfit for office.
According to Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, no person who has previously taken an oath of office in the U.S. may serve in any governmental office again if they have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”
Cicilline isn’t the only person attempting to bar Trump from serving in office again. Earlier this month, president of the nonprofit watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) sent a letter to Trump warning that the organization would sue to block him from running.
“The evidence that you engaged in insurrection as contemplated by the Fourteenth Amendment — including by mobilizing, inciting, and aiding those who attacked the Capitol — is overwhelming,” CREW president Noah Bookbinder wrote to Trump.
“Let our message be clear,” Bookbinder went on. “If you seek office despite being disqualified under the Constitution for engaging in insurrection, we and others loyal to the Constitution will defend it.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Comedian Chris Rock once ribbed Michael Jackson for arriving at a court appearance “looking like Cap’n Crunch.”
“Who’s your lawyer?” the comedian exclaimed. “Franken Berry?” His joke referred to the Frankenstein-inspired mascot of the classic pink monster cereal that arrived on supermarket shelves in 1971.
Cap’n Crunch and Franken Berry. This is how I’m feeling after watching Donald Trump’s impeachment defense team defenestrate what remained of their reputations on the first day of his Senate trial. Yesterday’s twin-bill performance by Bruce Castor and David Schoen will linger in the annals of publicly distributed gibberish until the last star winks out of the sky.
The presentations by Castor and Schoen would have been bad enough in a vacuum, but they were rendered all the more ludicrous in the bright light of the presentation put forth by the House impeachment managers. Opening with a harrowing 13-minute video that set Trump’s words on January 6 beside the violent actions of his followers, Representatives Jamie Raskin, David Cicilline and Joe Neguse walked the chamber through a cogent, often riveting civics lesson on why they were all there.
Each manager shined in turn, but it was Raskin’s closing remarks that lent the proceedings the emotional gravitas they deserved. After having buried his son only the day before, Raskin brought his daughter and son-in-law to the Capitol on January 6 so they could witness the Electoral College certification. All was most conventional, Raskin explained, until he heard the “haunting” sound of a furious mob attempting to batter down the chamber doors.
“Senators, this cannot be our future. This cannot be the future of America,” Raskin tearfully implored the room. “We cannot have presidents inciting and mobilizing mob violence against our government and our institutions because they refuse to accept the will of the people under the Constitution of the United States.”
Castor, for his part, rose in response to Raskin and ran headlong into his own belt sander. By the time he was finished, he had committed the mortal sin of admitting Trump had lost the election: “The object of the Constitution has been achieved. He was removed by the voters.” He even suggested the proper course of action instead of impeachment was to see the former president arrested: “If people go and commit lawless acts as a result of their beliefs and they cross the line, they should be locked up.”
The word “meandering” does not do Castor’s presentation justice; he was the summer fly that can’t find its way out the open window, and so does lazy eights in the air until it dies of exhaustion.
Schoen’s version of events hewed closely to the grievance mainline that most Trump defenders cling to in the absence of cogent argument. His main points can be summed up (and rebutted) as such:
How dare the House managers attempt to overthrow the will of millions of voters? (It’s called constitutionally mandated oversight, that whole checks and balances thing.)
Democrats don’t care about unity, they just want to destroy the country. (Says the guy defending the guy who turned a mob loose on Congress to try and keep his gig.)
“This trial will tear this country apart, perhaps like we have only seen once before in our history,” Schoen bullyragged. (Suggesting the trial is the problem, and not the crime spree that required it.)
“Castor started out trying to schmooze the senators and then went woolgathering all over the lot,” writes Esquire blogger Charles P. Pierce. “If there was a theme to Castor’s presentation, it was pitched at a frequency that I couldn’t hear. Schoen at least was able to get from A to B to C without breaking his leg chasing butterflies.”
All in all, Schoen’s bit was a grand return to the phenomenon of the Audience of One: The only person Schoen was performing for was not in the building but was down in Florida seething at the TV. Trump’s team, by all reports, really let the boss down yesterday.
“Mr. Trump, who often leaves the television on in the background even when he is holding meetings, was furious, people familiar with his reaction said,” reports The New York Times. “On a scale of one to 10, with 10 being the angriest, Mr. Trump ‘was an eight,’ one person familiar with his reaction said.”
The odds of Trump’s conviction at the conclusion of this trial remain fantastically long, but cracks have begun to appear. Castor and Schoen were so bad that GOP Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana went sideways and voted with five other Republicans to proceed with the trial. “They did everything they could but to talk about the question at hand,” said Cassidy. “And when they talked about it, they kind of glided over it, almost as if they were embarrassed of their arguments.”
Can’t imagine why they’d feel that way.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is playing coy about what his final vote will be, though he did vote against continuing the trial yesterday. “Additionally,” reports Talking Points Memo, “McConnell has reportedly given his Republicans Senate colleagues the green light to vote with their conscience and convict Trump if they so choose.”
The House managers bagged one new Republican vote yesterday thanks to the strength of their presentation and the staggering weakness of Trump’s defense. They need 11 more to reach the threshold of conviction, and McConnell just let his dogs off the leash. Today’s presentation will reportedly include dramatic security video footage of the Capitol attack the public has never seen before. We may see more new names added to the “Yes” votes soon enough.
Still, it remains farfetched to hope that enough Republican Senators will cross the line to conviction. The shabby presentations by Castor and Schoen underscore this; they believe they have already won, so why bother putting effort into the defense? It was deliberately insulting, a taunt: Look how I can spew nonsense and still win was yesterday’s message from Trump’s team, and they’re right. For the moment, anyway, these low men still hold the high ground.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
