Letters from an American - January 18, 2025

Episode Date: January 19, 2025

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Music January 18, 2025. Shortly before midnight last night, the Federal Trade Commission, or FTC, published its initial findings from a study it undertook last July large companies to turn over information about the data they collect about consumers, product sales, and how the surveillance the companies used affected consumer prices. The FTC focused on the middlemen hired by retailers. Those middlemen use algorithms to tweak and target prices to different markets. The initial findings of the FTC, using data from six of the eight companies show that those prices are not static.

Middlemen can target prices to individuals using their location, browsing patterns, shopping history, and even the way they move a mouse over a web page. They can also use that information to show higher-priced products first in web searches. The FTC found that the intermediaries, the middlemen, worked with at least 250 retailers. Initial staff findings show that retailers frequently use people's personal information to set targeted, tailored prices for goods and services, from a person's location and demographics down to their mouse movements on a web page," said FTC Chair Lena Kahn. The FTC should continue to investigate surveillance pricing practices because Americans deserve

to know how their private data is being used to set the prices they pay and whether firms are charging different people different prices for the same good or service. The FTC has asked for public comment on consumers experience with surveillance pricing. FTC Commissioner Andrew N. Ferguson, whom Trump has tapped to chair the commission in his incoming administration, dissented from the report. Matt Stahler of the non-profit American Economic Liberties Project, which is working to address today's crisis of concentrated economic power, wrote that the anti-trust enforcers, Lena Kahn et al., went full Tony Montana on big

business this week before Trump people took over. Stoller made a list. The FTC sued John Deere for generating $6 billion by prohibiting farmers from being able to repair their own equipment. Released a report showing that pharmacy benefit managers had inflated prices for specialty pharmaceuticals by more than seven billion dollars, sued corporate landlord Greystar, which owns 800,000 apartments for misleading renters on junk fees, and forced healthcare private equity

powerhouse Welsh Carson to stop monopolization of the anesthesia market. It sued Pepsi for conspiring to give Walmart exclusive discounts that made prices higher at smaller stores, left a roadmap for parties who are worried about consolidation in AI by big tech by revealing a host of interlinked relationships among Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, and Anthropic, and OpenAI, said gig workers can't be sued for antitrust violations when they try to organize, and forced game developer

Cognosphere to pay a 20 million dollar fine for marketing loot boxes to teens under 16 that hid the real costs and misled the teens. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sued capital one for cheating consumers out of two billion dollars by misleading consumers over savings accounts, Stoller continued. It forced Cash App Pervaer Block to give 120 million dollars in refunds for fostering fraud on its platform and then refusing to offer customer support to affected consumers. • Sued Experian for refusing to give consumers a way to correct errors in credit reports.

• Ordered Equifax to pay $15 million to a victim's fund for failing to properly investigate errors on credit reports, and ordered Honda Finance to pay $12.8 million for reporting inaccurate information that smeared the credit reports of Honda and Acura drivers. The Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice sued seven giant corporate landlords for rent fixing, using the software and consulting firm RealPage Stoller went on. It sued $600 billion private equity titan KKR for systemically misleading the government on more than a dozen acquisitions. Honorary mention goes to Secretary Pete Buttigieg at the Department of Transportation for suing Southwest and finding frontier for chronically delayed flights, Stoller continued. He added more

results to the list in his newsletter, Big. Meanwhile, last night, while the leaders in the cryptocurrency industry were at a ball in honor of President-elect Trump's inauguration, Trump launched his own cryptocurrency. By morning, he appeared to have made more than 25 billion dollars, at least on paper. According to Eric Lipton at the New York Times, ethics experts assailed the business as a blatant effort to cash in on the office he is about to occupy again. Adav Nodi, executive director of the nonprofit campaign legal center, told Lipton, It is literally cashing in on the presidency,

creating a financial instrument so people can transfer money to the president's family in connection with his office. It is beyond unprecedented. Cryptocurrency leaders worried that just as their industry seems on the verge of becoming mainstream, Trump's obvious cashing in would hurt its reputation. Venture capitalist Nick Tomeino posted, Trump owning 80% and timing launch hours before inauguration is predatory and many will likely get hurt by it. Yesterday, the European Commission, which is the executive arm of the European Union, asked X, the social media company owned by Trump-adjacent billionaire Elon Musk, to hand

over internal documents about the company's algorithms that give far-right posts and politicians more visibility than other political groups. The European Union has been investigating X since December 2023 out of concerns about how it deals with the spread of disinformation and illegal content. The European Union's Digital Services Act regulates online platforms to prevent illegal and harmful activities, as well as the spread of disinformation. Today in Washington, DC, the National Mall

was filled with thousands of people voicing their opposition to President-elect Trump and his policies. Online speculation has been rampant that Trump moved his inauguration indoors to avoid visual comparisons between today's protesters and inaugural attendees. Brutally cold weather also descended on President Barack Obama's 2009 inauguration, but a sea of attendees nonetheless filled the National Mall. Trump has always understood the importance of visuals and has worked hard to project an image of an invincible leader. Moving the inauguration indoors takes away that image though, and people who have spent thousands of dollars to travel to the Capitol to see his inauguration are now unhappy to discover they will be limited to watching his motorcade drive by them.

On social media, one user posted, Maggot doesn't realize the symbolism of Trump moving the inauguration inside. The billionaires, millionaires, and oligarchs will be at his side while his loyal followers are left outside in the cold. Welcome to the next four plus years. Trump is not as good at governing as he is at performance. His approach to crises is to blame Democrats for them. But he is about to take office with majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate,

putting responsibility for governance firmly into his hands. Right off the bat, he has at least two major problems at hand. Last night, Commissioner Tyler Harper of the Georgia Department of Agriculture suspended all poultry exhibitions, shows, swaps, meats, and sales until further notice after officials found highly pathogenic avian influenza or bird flu in a commercial flock. As birds die from the disease or are culled to prevent its spread, the cost of eggs is rising. Justice Trump, who vowed to reduce grocery prices, takes office. There have been 67 confirmed cases of the bird flu in the US among humans who have

caught the disease from birds. Most cases in humans are mild, but public health officials are watching the virus with concern because bird flu variants are unpredictable. On Friday, outgoing Health and Human Services Secretary Javier Becerra announced $590 million in funding to Moderna to help speed up production of a vaccine that covers the bird flu. Juliana Kim of NPR explained that this funding comes on top of $6 million dollars that Health and Human Services awarded to Moderna last July. The second major problem is financial. On Friday, Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen wrote to

congressional leaders to warn them that the Treasury would hit the debt ceiling on January 21st and be forced to begin using extraordinary measures in order to pay outstanding obligations and prevent defaulting on the national debt. Those measures mean the Treasury will stop paying into certain federal retirement accounts as required by law, expecting to make up that difference later. Yellen reminded congressional leaders, the debt limit does not authorize new spending, but it creates a risk that the federal government might not be able to finance its existing legal obligations that Congresses and Presidents of both parties have made in the past. She added, I respectfully urge Congress to act promptly to protect the full faith and credit of the United States.

Both the avian flu and the limits of the debt ceiling must be managed and managed quickly and solutions will require expertise and political skill. Rather than offering their solutions to these problems, the Trump team leaked that it intended to begin mass deportations on Tuesday morning in Chicago, choosing that city because it has large numbers of immigrants and because Trump's people have been fighting with Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, a Democrat. Michelle Hackman, Joe Barrett, and Paul Kiernan of the Wall Street Journal, who broke the story, reported that Trump's people had prepared to amplify their efforts with the help of right-wing media.

But once the news leaked of the plan and undermined the shock and awe the administration wanted, Trump's border czar, Tom Homan, said the team was reconsidering it. Yes.