Companies such as John Deere, Garmin, and Philips have collectively spent millions on lobbying efforts related to the National Defense Authorization Act, particularly concerning repair issues.
Amazon has sought a tax abatement that would see its datacenter exempt from paying property taxes for 30 years in exchange for the funding of local schools and infrastructure projects. The people up on city council are, for the most part, good people. They care about the community, [but] they have been taken advantage of by these companies.
Trump ran on a promise to lower costs on day one, but a year into his presidency, the real beneficiaries are his billionaire donors. Instead of making life more affordable for everyday Americans, Trump has used the presidency to enrich himself and his billionaire allies, while making the largest cuts to Medicaid and food assistance in history and leaving working families behind.
Kennedy told reporters at a White House press briefing earlier on Wednesday that the old pyramid which was introduced in 1992 was scientifically bogus. It discouraged protein and healthy fats, he said, by advocating Americans eat about twice as many servings of bread as it did meat and dairy products. He said the old pyramid was a byproduct of corporate influence on government guidelines. These guidelines replace corporate-driven assumptions with common sense goals and gold standard scientific integrity, Kennedy said.
The mega-rich have always been willing to hire, promote, and fund people willing to unquestioningly run interference for their interests while making them feel like their near-pathological selfishness, hoarding of money and power, and total disregard for the public interest is somehow morally justifiable. CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss is simply another in a long line of feckless water carriers for the 1 percent.
Predicting the future of journalism with any precision may be a fool's errand, though the broad - and mostly bleak - contours are obvious enough: local news will still face collapse; public trust will continue to buckle under the twin pressures of social media brain rot and partisan echo chambers masquerading as "news." AI experimentation will carry on, though previous overinvestment will hopefully cool, and most of the genuinely useful applications will be internal tools.
Trumpism wants to capture your attention. And it won't hesitate to colonize, with the approval of its leader, all the world's main information outlets, streaming media and video game platforms. Emerging from the effervescent magma of the MAGA universe, a group of powerful businessmen are in orbit around Trump, fattening his businesses and helping him expand the reach of his ultraconservative rhetoric.
In 2023, truck manufacturers struck a deal with the California Air Resources Board to drastically reduce emissions and invest in electric trucks. This summer, however, several of the companies - Daimler Truck, Volvo Group, Paccar and Traton - backed out of the partnership and sued California, with support from the Trump administration. Now fossil-fuel-aligned corporations are leveraging political connections to weaken oversight, erode environmental protections and entrench their dominance.
The World Health Organization Foundation took an increasing amount of dark money from corporate donors during the three years since its 2020 inception, research has shown, raising concerns among some experts and campaigners that big business is playing a larger role shaping the institution's policies. Through the end of 2023, the last year for which records were available, the foundation had taken about $83m in corporate donations,
"Over the last two nights, the NBA didn't just stage a show—they sold the stage, the script, and the orchestra pit to an insurance giant... It was branded content."
The BBC instructed Evan Davis to drop his podcast about heat pumps, seen as steering into public controversy, despite less scrutiny on politically charged content from others.
