Out With a Bang: Enforcers Go After John Deere, Private Equity Billionaires

Mark

"... here’s a partial list of some of the actions enforcers have taken in the last two weeks."

The Federal Trade Commission

° Filed a monopolization claim against agricultural machine maker John Deere for generating $6 billion by prohibiting farmers from being able to repair their own equipment, a suit which Wired magazine calls a “tipping point” for the right to repair movement.
° Released another report on pharmacy benefit managers, including that of UnitedHealth Group, showing that these companies inflated prices for specialty pharmaceuticals by more than $7 billion.
Sued Greystar, a large corporate landlord, for deceiving renters with falsely advertised low rents and not including mandatory junk fees in the price.
° Issued a policy statement that gig workers can’t be prosecuted for antitrust violations when they try to organize, and along with the Antitrust Division, updated guidance on labor and antitrust.
° Put out a series of orders prohibiting data brokers from selling sensitive location information.
° Finalized changes to a rule barring third party targeted advertising to children without an explicit opt-in.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

° Went to court against Capital One for cheating consumers out of $2 billion by deceiving them on savings accounts and interest rates.
° Fined cash app purveyor Block $175 million for fostering fraud on its platform and then refusing to offer customer support to affected consumers.
° Proposed a rule to prohibit take-it-or-leave-it contracts from financial institutions that allow firms to de-bank users over how they express themselves or whether they seek redress for fraud.
° Issued a report with recommendations on how states can update their laws to protect against junk fees and privacy abuses.
° Sued credit reporting agency Experian for refusing to investigate consumer disputes and errors on credit reports.
° Finalized a rule to remove medical debt from credit scores.

BIG by Matt Stoller

Crash

AMEN to all of that. Still, it's barely a drop in the bucket That's how gargantuan this Economy has become. Oversight can decide to pick out only several egregious cases and deal with them. Federal agencies are horribly under-funded. The Repugnant majority is not going to change that.

Old_Joe

The Last Hurrah.

AndyJ

@Crash: "The Repugnant majority is not going to change that."

Right, but like OJ said, they're going to make the situation far worse. The pro-fraud, pro-consumer-ripoff party takes over the administration tomorrow.

JD_co

Sleep well knowing that corporate America will be entrusted to police themselves going forward. No accountability. No oversight.

Somebody else will try to clean up that mess exactly 4 years from now. And what a grand ole mess it will be.

Crash

+1. No doubt.

Mark

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”

― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

Crash

A more haunting (?) way to say it is attributed to uncle joey goebbels. Say the lie often enough, they'll eventually believe it. The environment is going to get very dark, coming up. Don't let go of Truth along the way.