The Wall Street Journal Wonders Why There Are Suddenly So Many Sleazy Fees

Failures

from the dumb-questions,-asked-unseriously dept

I cut my teeth as a telecom reporter, so I spent a lot of time writing about how broadband monopolies and cable TV giants rip off consumers with sleazy, misleading fees. I also spent a lot of that time writing about how lobbying and regulatory capture have ensured that big companies see no meaningful penalties should they falsely advertise one price, then sock you with a bunch of spurious surcharges.

The Biden administration, for its faults, at least tried to tackle some of this. The Biden FTC considered new and popular rules outlawing “junk fees”. The Biden FCC also implemented rules that didn’t ban sleazy fees (unfortunately), but forced broadband ISPs to clearly list them out at the point of sale (something recently dismantled by the Trump administration).

The Trump administration (and its courts) has taken an absolute hatchet to U.S. consumer protection on regulatory autonomy, ensuring that the problem of predatory fees is much worse across every sector you interface with. So it was funny to see Wall Street Journal reporters recently openly wondering why there are so many shitty fees all of a sudden (non-paywalled alternative):

“An extra 3% for paying with a credit card. A 5% involuntary contribution to a restaurant’s employee wellness fund. $25 a month in addition to rent for trash collection.  

Consumers already weary of rising inflation are now contending with a new crop of costs that are hidden in plain sight. New fees or surcharges are popping up everywhere as companies search for ways to recoup their own rising costs while blaming outside pressures.”

The WSJ reporters and editors decided to cover soaring sleazy fees, but at no point in the article do they mention (even in passing) that Trump has dismantled most of the (already fleeting) efforts to rein in such predation. Or that the Trump Supreme Court has issued numerous rulings effectively making it almost impossible for regulators to fine corporations or hold them accountable for bad behavior.

The article mentions that the Trump FTC did grudgingly implement the Biden-era plan to ban junk fees, but they don’t think it’s worth mentioning that the Trump administration refuses to enforce it:

“The Federal Trade Commission banned drip pricing in short-term lodging and live-event ticketing in 2025, citing research showing that consumers were manipulated by low initial prices even when the full cost was eventually disclosed.”

They also don’t think it’s worth mentioning that the worst offenders of this kind of stuff, like Ticketmaster, were recently let off the hook by the Trump FTC via a piddly settlement (that left states, which had partnered with the FTC legally, high and dry). They’ve chosen to cover consumer protection, but not really. Not with any sort of interest in full, contextual reality.

While this particular instance is the Wall Street Journal, you’ll notice this same habit across most of corporate media. They’re dedicated to an alternate reality where Trump isn’t historically corrupt, and the regulators you’ve historically trusted to be at least semi-present to police the worst offenses are still dutifully on the beat protecting the public interest.

It’s of course a reflection of ownership bias seeping into editorial (most media owners are affluent Conservatives or Libertarians who like tax cuts, rubber stamped merger approvals, and mindless deregulation). But it’s also a form of weird normalization bias, where the reporters assume that because regulators have always been there (with natural partisan ebb and flow) they’ll always be there.

But they’re not there anymore. The damage will likely be deadly and permanent, impacting far more than just shitty, sneaky fees. And the press is doing a terrible job informing the public of that fact.

This is particularly amusing because the Wall Street Journal’s own reporting recently highlighted how even the semi-consistent folks within MAGA who sometimes supported things like functional antitrust reform have been easily ousted by lobbyists, but the reporters exploring “why are we getting ripped off more than ever by predatory corporations” aren’t willing to make the obvious connection.

Filed Under: antitrust, consumer protection, corruption, fees, ftc, hidden fees, junk fees, regulations, surcharges, trump

Nintendo’s Haphazard ‘Mario Maker 2’ Takedown Process Rife With Abuse

Failures

from the willy-nilly dept

We’ve talked for many years about Nintendo’s shotgun approach to IP enforcement, as well as its heavy-handed ToS enforcement policies that can include bricking customer consoles and/or banning their accounts if they do something Nintendo doesn’t like, even if it’s not strictly illegal. This has all set up an ecosystem where being a Nintendo fan and customer can feel like a dangerous prospect, where navigating a capricious company is supposed to be half the fun.

But when that same ecosystem is setup in a way that is wide open to abuse, the fun really begins. That appears to be what is happening right now as Nintendo is removing hundreds of Mario Maker 2 levels made by fans.

The common denominator for these level deletions appears to be the inclusion of a hashtag for “TeamShell,” which is a Discord server dedicated to sharing codes for levels made within the game. Notices about the removal from Nintendo indicate that they were deleted for including “advertising”, which is against Nintendo’s terms of service.

There is no indication that any money is changing hands here. Calling a hashtag to denote that a level was made with a specific Discord server in mind “advertising” is stretching the definition to the point of absurdity. On top of all of this, many of these levels are years old, causing the community to wonder why in the world this was suddenly happening now.

Then someone found this on another Discord server dedicated to the Mario Maker games.

So, who is LMT?

Turns out, the YouTube account linked to LMT’s Discord profile bears the pseudonym of someone called MT94. As explained in a post on AtWiki, MT94 was, at one point, the second-highest-rated Super Mario Maker player in the world.

Turns out that MT94 cheated their way to that ranking, and they achieved this by using three separate Nintendo Switch consoles. By consistently challenging their own accounts to co-op battles in the game, they managed to boost themselves up the rankings. After the community found out and reported them, MT94’s accounts were banned.

Now, I’ve seen some content out there indicating it was TeamShell that had a hand in exposing MT94’s alleged cheating, but nothing solid enough that I consider firm ground. But it’s clear that there is some kind of vendetta at work here. And, while most of you probably view the deletion of some Mario Maker levels as a tame story at most, it is having very real consequences due to how Nintendo conducts it business.

The truly sad thing is that Super Mario Maker users are also reporting that their Nintendo Switch accounts are being suspended as well, as there seems to be a sort of automatic system in place that suspends a Nintendo Switch account if it’s been associated with a certain number of reports.

Nintendo has a choice. It can remain heavy-handed in this manner when it comes to account suspensions for takedowns, but then it needs to actually investigate claims like this to ensure they aren’t falling for abusive takedown requests. Or it can ease up on the severity of its actions and allow for a counternotice system, or another manner for those falsely accused to avoid consequences.

What it should not be allowed to do is continue to let its own customers suffer severe consequences merely because the system it set up is so wide open for this kind of gleeful abuse.

Filed Under: fans, mario maker, takedowns, teamshell
Companies: nintendo

ACAB: Cops Are Bringing ‘Delinquency Of A Minor’ Charges Against Adults Who Assist Students During Anti-ICE Protests

Legal Issues

While the Trump administration’s extremely aggressive, thoroughly bigoted attempts to eliminate as many non-white people from this country as possible have resulted in some periodic push back from law enforcement officials, we can never forget that federal law enforcement officers are still just law enforcement officers. And, more often than not, they’ll always have the support of their brothers in blue, even though most federal officers prefer camo and face masks these days.

Law enforcement is self-selecting. The people who feel drawn to law enforcement are generally the last people you would want to become law enforcement officers. It’s rarely about being given the chance to serve, protect, and be an active part of your community. It’s almost always about having a badge, a gun, and accountability that’s inversely proportional to the amount of power you immediately obtain.

So, it comes as no surprise that cops who shouldn’t have any skin in the anti-ICE game are stepping up to punish people for daring to criticize the actions of those federal officers. And there’s probably a bit of backlash involved here as well, as this following report details the actions of California law enforcement officers who (one assumes) aren’t thrilled the state’s residents have managed to reclaim much of the power that has always been owed to the people.

Despite the administration’s on/off surges in “blue” states, the furor over ICE and its actions hasn’t died down, not even in California, where the administration rolled out its martial law beta test. At first, it was easy to pretend people protesting ICE were “woke radicals” or “antifa” or “paid organizers” or “lazy trans everywhere college students” or whatever. But it just kept going and expanding, clearly demonstrating a significant portion of the population wasn’t on board with roving kidnapping squads and murders of activists by jumpy recruits recently introduced to the wholly domestic War on Migrants.

Now that it’s everyone rather than just the usual left-wing agitprop cliches federal and local officers expected to confront during protests, cops in California are deciding it’s time to start arresting everyone.

The Clovis Police Department on Tuesday referred Alfred Aldrete, 41, for one count of contributing to the delinquency of a minor for his role in a February high school student walkout. 

“During the investigation, Aldrete was identified as being present during the walkout and allegedly involved in directing student activity and entering the roadway, which impacted traffic flow,” Clovis police said in a press release. “Investigators also identified Aldrete as being present during a separate student gathering in Clovis on Feb. 5 that occurred outside of school hours.”

Yep, that’s what the Clovis PD actually did: it equated an adult ensuring students made it to their planned protest safely with the sort of horrors — harboring runaways, providing drugs and alcohol to minors, etc. — people usually associate with the crime of “contributing to the delinquency of a minor.” Those would be the sorts of crimes actually prosecuted by county prosecutors under this statute.

This stat may explain why the Clovis PD thought it should explore the fringes of this statute for the sole purpose of punishing someone for speech they (and they people they serve, apparently) don’t care for:

[C]lovis, population 128,000, where Donald Trump won every precinct in the 2024 presidential election — some with more than 70% of the vote. 

That tracks. Fortunately, it doesn’t track as far as the District Attorney’s office:

A representative for Fresno County District Attorney Lisa Smittcamp in a written statement said prosecutors would not file charges against Aldrete.

Hooray for prosecutorial discretion, but in the non-pejorative sense! It’s an unexpected twist that only makes this further twist even more inexplicable:

Within a day of the walkout, Clovis police said they were considering charges against up to six adults under Section 272 of the California Penal Code, which is most often used to prevent chronic truancy. The Los Angeles Police Department has also said it’s considering charges against people who joined immigration-related protests under the same penal code section. 

At the beginning of Trump’s first martial law-esque surge, the LAPD (and the Los Angeles Sheriffs Department) were opposed to the insertion of National Guard units and other federal officers into the mix. Stating that they were capable of handling whatever minimal “violent protests” they had actually encountered, law enforcement officials made it clear that this federal interloping would only make a manageable problem unmanageable.

More than a year later, the LAPD has flipped the script from blue to red, declaring it’s willing to charge students for truancy (along with the adults who assist them) for participating in walkout that, at best, lasts a few hours. It’s not like these kids are quitting school to pursue a career in protesting. And it’s not like these adults are harming kids by helping them engage fully with their First Amendment rights.

It’s one thing to be the main characters in a pro-Trump town. It’s quite another to be part of the second-largest police force in the United States and decide it’s worth your time, money, and attention to punish people for peacefully protesting. Fuck right off, LAPD. And take the Clovis PD with you.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, acab, alfred aldrete, california, clovis pd, free speech, ice, lapd, mass deportation

Judge Tosses Trump’s Ridiculous $10 Billion Defamation Suit Against Rupert Murdoch

Defamation

from the with-friends-like-this... dept

Back in January of last year, the Wall Street Journal published a story about a leather-bound birthday book that Ghislaine Maxwell had assembled for Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday in 2003. The book included letters from various associates, and one of them bore Donald Trump’s name. According to the article, it featured a hand-drawn outline of a naked woman with typewritten text inside. The page was signed with a recognizable squiggly “Donald” signature positioned to mimic pubic hair and closed with the ridiculously creepy line: “Happy Birthday—and may every day be another wonderful secret.”

Trump denied writing the letter and called it “a fake thing” before suing the Journal, Rupert Murdoch, News Corp, and the two reporters for a mere $10 billion. Each count asked for at least $10 billion, because apparently that’s the going rate for Donald Trump’s hurt feelings these days.

On Monday, federal judge Darrin Gayles dismissed the lawsuit, finding that Trump hadn’t come anywhere close to adequately alleging “actual malice,” the standard required for a public figure to win a defamation claim. For those who follow this stuff, that’s about as unsurprising as it gets.

The actual malice standard, established in New York Times v. Sullivan decision, requires a public figure to show that the defendant either knew the story was false or published it with reckless disregard for the truth (which courts have interpreted to require that the publisher actually harbored serious doubts about whether the statement was true). It does not mean, as many people assume, the colloquial meaning of “malice”: that they just don’t like the person. Trump’s complaint was heavy on boilerplate language about malice and light on, well, anything resembling actual facts supporting it. Judge Gayles was blunt about the gap:

The Complaint comes nowhere close to this standard. Quite the opposite.

The “quite the opposite” is the fun part. Trump’s own complaint described the reporters reaching out to him, as well as the FBI and the Justice Department, before publication. Trump gave them a denial, which they printed; the DOJ didn’t respond and the FBI declined to comment. Trump’s argument was essentially that since he told the Journal the letter was fake before publication, running the story anyway proved they had serious doubts about its truth and therefore acted with actual malice.

You hear this a lot from SLAPP defamation filers, pretending that a mere denial by them means that anyone printing what they’re accused of is actual malice. But that’s not how any of this works. Just because you deny something, doesn’t automatically mean the journalists have to believe it’s false. Their evidence can (and often does) reveal that the subjects of their reporting are lying in their denials. A denial is not proof of falsity. It’s just proof that you’re denying something. The court wasn’t buying any of it:

To establish actual malice, “a plaintiff must show the defendant deliberately avoided investigating the veracity of the statement in order to evade learning the truth.”…

As the judge noted, printing Trump’s denial alongside their own journalistic findings demonstrated responsible reporting — the opposite of actual malice, which would require evidence that the reporters had serious doubts about the letter’s authenticity and deliberately avoided investigating further. Then printing the denial alongside the evidence, again, was the opposite of actual malice:

The Article also informed readers that President Trump decried the Letter as a fake and denied writing it. By “allowing readers to decide for themselves what to conclude from the [Article], any allegation of actual malice [is] less plausible.” Turner, 879 F.3d at 1274. See also Michel, 816 F.3d at 703 (holding that “reporting perspectives contrary to the publisher’s own should be interpreted as helping to rebut, not establish, the presence of actual malice.”)

The judge also, somewhat gently, reminded Trump’s lawyers that actual malice is an actual legal standard, not just ‘they don’t like me.’

President Trump’s allegation that Defendants acted with ill-will is insufficient to plead actual malice. Aside from being conclusory and without factual support, “ill-will, improper motive or personal animosity plays no role in determining whether a defendant acted with actual malice.”

Meanwhile, as this lawsuit wound through the courts, the very letter Trump claimed didn’t exist surfaced publicly. The House Oversight Committee subpoenaed the Epstein estate and obtained the birthday book. They released it publicly, and wouldn’t you know it, there’s a page that matches the Journal’s description of the letter exactly:

The judge couldn’t consider the produced letter at this stage of the litigation because Trump disputes its authenticity, which is his right procedurally. And the judge has to treat the claims in the complaint as true. But the rest of us sure can look at it. And judge for ourselves.

The court gave Trump until April 27 to file an amended complaint, and a spokesman for his legal team promised he would “refile this powerhouse lawsuit.” I suppose if you squint hard enough at a complaint a federal judge said “comes nowhere close” to meeting basic legal standards, “powerhouse” is one word you could use for it — just probably not in the way they mean.

The Journal’s defense team also sought attorneys’ fees under Florida’s anti-SLAPP statute. The judge denied the fee request for now, since Trump gets a chance to amend. But that request can be renewed, which means if the amended complaint fares no better, Trump could end up paying for the privilege of having sued the Journal over a story that appears to be true.

This is also a reminder of why we need stronger anti-SLAPP laws in every state, as well as a federal anti-SLAPP law.

This case isn’t over yet, but the judge clearly sees it as just as weak as we said it was when it was filed last year. As always, Trump files these vexatious lawsuits knowing none of them have a real shot — the goal is to burn time and money for media organizations, and scare some of them into softening their coverage or thinking twice before calling out his behavior.

The guy who presents himself as a champion of free speech remains the most anti-free speech president we’ve had in any of our lifetimes, consistently abusing the judicial system as a way to punish those who make him look bad.

Filed Under: actual malice, darrin gayles, defamation, donald trump, jeffrey epstein, rupert murdoch, slapp
Companies: news corp., wsj

Daily Deal: Geekey Multi-Tool

Deals

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

Geekey is an innovative, compact multi-tool like nothing seen before. It’s truly a work of art with engineering that combines everyday common tools into one sleek little punch that delivers endless capability. Geekey features many common tools that have been used for decades and proven essential for everyday fixes. It’s on sale for $23.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Filed Under: daily deal

Administration Apparently Planning To Blow Off FISA Court’s Ordered Fixes For Section 702

Legal Issues

from the domestic-surveillance-is-fine-if-we-do-it dept

It wasn’t all that long ago that GOP legislators were collectively stonewalling a clean reauthorization of Section 702. Three years ago, these legislators were seeking to end the FBI (and other IC components’) access to Americans’ communications via “backdoor” searches of the NSA’s supposedly “foreign facing” collections.

It wasn’t that the Republicans cared that Joe Public was being subjected to warrantless domestic surveillance. It was that they were being subjected to warrantless searches of their communications — something that came to light as the result of multiple investigations pertaining to Trump’s first administration.

Now that the GOP has control of the White House again, Republicans are back to not caring about the warrantless searches of US persons’ communications enabled by FISA loopholes very few congressional reps seriously want to see closed.

Another Section 702 reauthorization attempt is only weeks away. Reps who want more of the same thing we’ve been subjected to for decades have until the end of April to push a clean reauthorization through. Unfortunately for them, the FISA Court — while allowing the program to continue whether or not Congress can pass an extension — has made it clear the program needs to be overhauled because it’s still being routinely abused to perform warrantless searches targeting Americans’ communications.

The annual recertification, issued last month in a classified ruling, means that the program can continue to collect phone calls and emails through March 2027 — even if Congress fails later this month to renew the statute that underlies it.

But the judge who issued the March 17 ruling also objected to tools that agencies with access to the raw data — like the C.I.A., F.B.I. and National Security Agency — have created to allow analysts to process messages, according to unclassified talking points the administration sent to lawmakers in recent days.

The main issue is the filtering tool utilized by agencies with access to the NSA’s collections. The filter allows analysts to drill down the data to only return results pertaining to specific people who have communicated with a foreign person. It would appear agencies like the FBI are using this filter to search for US persons — something that’s supposed to be subjected to additional limitations.

From the talking points detailed by the New York Times, it seems that isn’t the case, which is why the FISA Court is ordering the government to “re-engineer the filter” to force analysts to comply with restrictions pertaining to access of US persons’ communications.

The Trump administration is allegedly “weighing” whether or not to comply with this FISA court order. The only thing that could make it comply would be to codify the order during the reauthorization process. This administration simply isn’t willing to do that.

The Trump administration wants Congress to extend the statute without changes. 

And that’s why Senator Ron Wyden is, again, letting the American public know the current administration is actively arguing against the privacy interests of millions of American citizens:

“The compliance problems are bad enough, but, incredibly, rather than fix them, the Trump Administration is considering appealing the court ruling so that they never have to. This is a highly aggressive and unusual move indicative of an administration that would exploit every angle to expand its surveillance at the expense of Americans’ rights.

“Instead of addressing these problems, opponents of reform are going to try to jam a straight reauthorization of section 702 through Congress next week, while the American people are still in the dark. That’s unacceptable. This court ruling needs to be declassified so that Americans can understand what the Trump administration is actually up to. And Congress must vote for real reforms to protect Americans’ rights.”

I won’t even factor in Trump’s opinion here, because it doesn’t really matter. He doesn’t know enough about anything to be considered qualified to engage in this discussion. Further, this isn’t even necessarily a Trump thing. Pretty much every presidential administration has been unwilling to upset this particular apple cart, even when plenty of evidence of extensive rot has been made public.

But this one’s particularly problematic for the GOP, which spent most of the Biden years claiming Section 702 abuse was evidence of a “deep state” conspiracy against Trump and his congressional supporters. Now, they’re arguing the opposite: that the “deep state” it so recently opposed should be allowed to do what it wants for as long as it wants to… so long as it’s not sweeping up their communications.

Status quo seems likely to prevail yet again, especially with the Trump Administration clearly interested in increasing the amount of domestic surveillance perpetrated by Intelligence Community components. After all, without it, the “worst of worst” day laborers and factory workers can’t be kidnapped by federal officers and members of the fearsome, centrally organized terrorist group known as “antifa” can’t get caught in dragnets that are supposed to be targeting foreign adversaries. It’s going to be more abuse for the stupidest imaginable reasons because that’s just how things are going to go as long as this iteration of the GOP remains in power.

Filed Under: backdoor searches, fbi, fisa, fisc, nsa, ron wyden, section 702, trump administration, warrantless searches

‘Trump Phone’ Sees Price Hike, But Still No Release Date (Or Actual Phone)

Scams

from the sucker-born-every-minute dept

Last year the fraud-prone Trump organization announced a half-assed wireless phone company. As we noted at the time, calling this a “phone company” was generous; it was a lazy marketing rebrand of another, half-assed, “MAGA-focused” mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) named Patriot Mobile, which itself just resold T-Mobile service. So basically just another lazy Trump brand partnership.

The centerpiece of this effort was supposed to be a “bold” new $500 Trump T1 smartphone that the Trump org claimed would be “proudly designed and built in the United States” and released sometime last August. Not only was the device never going to be made in the States (all mention of that was quickly stripped from press materials), the August launch date came and went with no Trump phone.

It’s now April of 2026, and while there’s still no phone (despite a long line of rubes having plunked down $100 deposits), there is a revamped Trump Mobile website and a renewed promise of a slightly different phone, according to The Verge. This includes a revamped and gaudy new mock up of what the gold Trump T1 phone is supposed to look like, should it ever actually be released:

You’ll notice that the phone looks suspiciously like the HTC U24 Pro, a phone released two years ago and available for as little as $460 on Amazon (even less on places like eBay):

While the original “Trump phone” was announced with a $500 price tag, the backers of Trump’s latest grift insist that price was “promotional,” and the full price tag will be closer to around $1000:

“The phone is now listed with a “promotional price” of $499, which used to simply be its standard price. The site is still accepting $100 deposits, with the promise that you can “lock in” the “promotional pricing.” When I spoke to executives Eric Thomas and Don Hendrickson in February, they declared that $499 had been an “introductory” price, which would be rising after the relaunch — though they promised that early buyers would still be charged $499 total, and that the new price would be “less than $1,000.”

So there’s no phone or release date, but there’s already been a price hike on a lazy rebrand of an existing phone they just needed to spray paint gold and slap a Trump logo on. There’s simply no reason that doing this very basic rebrand should have taken so long (assuming they do plan to eventually released a phone), but as a concept the whole thing remains very on brand.

Filed Under: branding, con, donald trump, mvno, smartphone, trump phone, wireless
Companies: trump mobile

The CDC Doesn’t Want You To See A CDC Report On How Effective COVID Vaccines Are

Failures

from the why-not? dept

One of the most remarkable staffing decisions of the second Trump administration has been to allow the anti-vaxxers to run America’s health agencies. While RFK Jr. and his cadre of lieutenants prattle on about how they’re going to be super transparent, data-driven stewards of American health, their actions have put the lie to all of it. Vague statements about diseases, disinformation about the cause and source of other diseases, missed appointment deadlines for key personnel are all combined to create an HHS full of chaos, confusion, and the storied practice of CYA.

But these are ideological people, with some of the stupidest possible ideologies governing their actions. That’s how you get a situation where the CDC produces a report on the efficacy of recent COVID vaccines, following commonly used methodology, only to have the acting CDC director bury the report because he doesn’t like what it finds.

CDC scientists and insiders told the Post that the COVID-19 vaccine study went through the agency’s standard scientific review process and was slated for publication on March 19 in the agency’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR). But acting CDC director Jay Bhattacharya blocked the scheduled publication and is holding the study, claiming he has concerns about its methodology.

According to a summary the Post obtained, the study concluded that between September and December of last year, healthy adults vaccinated with a 2025–2026 COVID-19 vaccine saw the risk of emergency department or urgent care visits cut by 50 percent, and the risk of COVID-19-associated hospitalizations cut by 55 percent, compared with healthy adults who did not get this season’s shot.

Bhattacharya reportedly took issue with the test-negative design of the study, which is a well-established method to examine real-world data on vaccine effectiveness. This type of observational study looks at people who have symptoms related to the disease of interest (in this case, COVID-19) and have the same test-seeking behavior. Those who test positive for the disease of interest become positive cases in the study, and those who test negative are test-negative controls. Researchers then compare the two groups based on vaccination status.

So there is no misunderstanding, Bhattacharya is completely full of shit here. He is not holding this CDC study back because he’s concerned about the test-negative methodology. I know that because the same CDC under the same acting Director published a study on the efficacy of flu shots that used the same test-negative method last month, a week before this same COVID vaccine study was to be published. If Bhattacharya had a problem with the method for the COVID study, why didn’t have the same problem with the flu shot study?

The answer is obvious: the methodology is not the issue here. Instead, the problem is the mRNA nature of most COVID vaccines. That, combined with Bhattacharya’s criticisms for COVID vaccines specifically, and his support for changing of the schedule and availability for them, means this study is at odds with his ideology and might be embarrassing for him personally.

Dan Jernigan, who headed CDC’s influenza division for six years and resigned last year in protest of Kennedy’s political interference at the agency, suggested to the Post that stalling the paper fits with Kennedy’s anti-vaccine agenda.

“The secretary has already taken steps to try and remove the availability of the vaccine from children and others, so if you’re putting out an MMWR that the vaccine is effective at preventing hospitalizations and medical care visits … that message is not in line with the direction you’ve been taking with the removal of the vaccine,” he said.

And there you have it: politics and personal CYA injected into matters of public health. Having those in charge of our health agencies prioritize their own personal stature over science, literally burying studies simply because they don’t like what they show, is certainly not going to lead to a more health America.

Filed Under: anti-vaxxers, cdc, covid, covid vaccines, jay bhattacharya, rfk jr.

John Deere Pays $99 Million To Settle ‘Right To Repair’ Class Action

Legal Issues

from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept

A few years ago agricultural equipment giant John Deere found itself on the receiving end of multiple state, federal, and class action lawsuits for its efforts to monopolize tractor repair. The lawsuits noted that the company consistently purchased competing repair centers in order to consolidate the sector and force customers into using the company’s own repair facilities, driving up costs and logistical hurdles dramatically for farmers.

John Deere executives have repeatedly promised to do better, then just ignored those promises. Early last year, the FTC and numerous states filed an antitrust lawsuit against the company for its efforts to monopolize repair. Though, with MAGA corruption purging any remaining antitrust enforcers from its ranks, it’s unclear if the FTC action will ever actually result in anything meaningful.

John Deere did however just have to pay $99 million to settle a different class action lawsuit brought by its customers. Under the settlement John Deere doesn’t admit to any wrongdoing, but will deposit the money into a fund to pay more than 200,000 John Deere owners for expensive dealership repairs since 2018.

In an announcement by the company, John Deere pretends they’re a consumer-focused enterprise:

“As we continue to innovate industry leading equipment and technology solutions supported by our world-class dealer network, we are equally committed to providing customers and other service providers with access to repair resources,” said Denver Caldwell, vice president, Aftermarket & Customer Support. “We’re pleased that this resolution allows us to move forward and remain focused on what matters most – serving our customers.”

Except if John Deere had cared about customer service, they wouldn’t be in this predicament.

In addition to intentionally acquiring repair alternatives to monopolize repair and drive up consumer costs, John Deere also routinely makes repair difficult and costly through the act of software locks, obnoxious DRM restrictions, and “parts pairing” — which involves only allowing the installation of company-certified replacement parts — or mandatory collections of company-blessed components.

More recently, the company had been striking meaningless “memorandums of understanding” with key trade groups, pinky swearing to stop their bad behavior if the groups agree to not support state or federal right to repair legislation. Several such groups backed off their criticism, only to have John Deere continue its monopolistic behavior, the FTC’s complaint notes.

The annoyance at John Deere’s behavior has driven a broad, bipartisan movement that’s in very vocal support for state and federal guidelines enshrining “right to repair” protections into law. Unfortunately, while all fifty states have at least flirted with the idea of a state law, only Massachusetts, New York, Texas, Minnesota, Colorado, California, Oregon, and Washington have actually passed laws.

And among those, not one has taken any substantive action to actually enforce the new law, something that needs to change if the movement is to obtain and retain meaningful policy momentum.

Filed Under: agriculture, class action, dealership, ftc, lawsuits, repairs, right to repair, tractors
Companies: john deere