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For Immediate Release
March, 25 2020, 12:00am EDT
Contact:
Sam Quigley
317-752-9150
OBSCENE: Patriotic Millionaires Slam Senate Bill Provisions on CEO Compensation
"It takes an utter lack of humanity to ignore the plight of millions of needy Americans and instead hand out millions to corporate CEOs"
WASHINGTON
Today details were released of the near-final form of the Senate's coronavirus stimulus bill. Despite the addition of some conditions on the corporations set to receive billions of dollars in assistance, the bill still does almost nothing to limit excessive executive compensation, putting the American taxpayer on the hook for multi-million dollar compensation packages for the CEOs of bailed-out corporations.
According to an analysis done by the Institute for Policy Studies, the CEOs of American Airlines and Delta could still be paid $7.5 million and $9 million respectively annually under the conditions set on airlines and other corporations receiving bailout money.
In respose to this news, the Patriotic Millionaires released the following statement:
"It is obscene that lawmakers - led by Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans - are using a deadly global pandemic as an excuse to hand already overpaid CEOs millions of taxpayer dollars. They had to be browbeaten into including reasonable provisions to help working people, but are apparently thrilled to hand huge corporations millions of dollars with essentially no strings attached."
Members of the organization added their own thoughts:
Morris Pearl, the Chair of the Patriotic Millionaires and a former managing director at BlackRock, Inc., said "Most taxpayers agree the CEO of American Airlines should not receive millions of dollars from American taxpayers in the middle of a global pandemic. It is appalling that Senate Republicans disagree with that."
George Zimmer, Founder of Men's Wearhouse and Founder and CEO of Generation Tux, said, "This entire $2 trillion dollar bill is a con on the American people. Just like the 2008 bank bailout, it hands enormous sums to big companies who could likely get it from Wall Street or other sources and gives relatively little to the millions of employees who desperately need help. It's unbelievable."
Stephen Prince, Vice-Chair of the Patriotic Millionaires and Founder and CEO of Card Marketing Services, said, "It takes an utter lack of humanity to ignore the plight of millions of needy Americans and instead hand out millions to corporate CEOs. But I guess poor people don't make big political contributions."
Scott Nash, founder and CEO of MOM's Organic Market and Patriotic Millionaire, said, "Even in a global pandemic, one should never underestimate the Republican Party's loyalty to its political donors. Protecting the vast wealth of corporate CEOs through the bailout legislation is morally and economically repellent corporate welfare."
For further comments or questions, please contact Sam Quigley at sam@patrioticmillionaires.org.
The Patriotic Millionaires is a group of high-net worth Americans who share a profound concern about the destabilizing level of inequality in America. Our work centers on the two things that matter most in a capitalist democracy: power and money. Our goal is to ensure that the country's political economy is structured to meet the needs of regular Americans, rather than just millionaires. We focus on three "first" principles: a highly progressive tax system, a livable minimum wage, and equal political representation for all citizens.
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Cloudflare Outage Ruin Your Morning? Consumer Groups Say Blame Profit-Hungry Big Tech Monopolists
"Congress and regulators must finally step in and crack down on anticompetitive behavior, opening markets, requiring interoperability, and ensuring smaller tech firms can compete," said one advocate.
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Just weeks after major Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure outages, Cloudflare on Tuesday became the latest company to "break the internet," prompting consumer watchdogs to take aim at Big Tech and call out industry consolidation.
"This outage is another brutal reminder that the internet is far too dependent on a tiny handful of tech giants," said Public Citizen's Big Tech accountability advocate, J.B. Branch, in a statement. "For years, industry lobbyists have insisted that deregulation would spark innovation from smaller companies. Instead, we got the opposite: mass consolidation of data, compute, and infrastructure into the hands of a few dominant firms whose failures now cascade across the globe."
"Governments and companies continuing to contract with the same handful of companies are increasing the fragility of both the internet and entire economies," Branch continued. "Congress and regulators must finally step in and crack down on anticompetitive behavior, opening markets, requiring interoperability, and ensuring smaller tech firms can compete so the entire digital economy isn't held hostage by the failures of a few dominant companies."
After Amazon's outage last month, Public Citizen and other groups—including the American Economic Liberties Project, Demand Progress Education Fund, and Tech Oversight Project—called on Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson "to swiftly conduct a market structure review of leading cloud services providers, including but not limited to Amazon, to assess how their market dominance and use of monopoly power to stifle competition is creating systemic fragility across industries."
"Big Tech is clearly creating systemic dangers that warrant proactive oversight and aggressive intervention by the FTC, on behalf of the American people and as soon as possible."
"This probe should also examine dependencies of key sectors (such as financial services, telecommunications, and government services) on any single cloud provider and the extent to which those dependencies pose systemic risks to data security and privacy and consumer protection, as well as to our open markets and the resilience of our national and global infrastructure systems," the coalition argued. "We urge you to then take robust agency action to counter these systemic dangers, particularly to bring diversification to the cloud industry."
"Given the enormous stakes, the FTC should not defer action until the next crisis—the FTC has the mandate, the requisite knowledge, and the legal authorities to tackle this challenge now," the coalition concluded. "Big Tech is clearly creating systemic dangers that warrant proactive oversight and aggressive intervention by the FTC, on behalf of the American people and as soon as possible."
Just a few weeks later, the Cloudflare outage on Tuesday impacted websites including ChatGPT, Coinbase, Dropbox, X, Shopify, Spotify, Zoom, the Moody credit ratings service, and many more. According to Cloudflare, the San Francisco-based company offers over 60 cloud services globally, and it protects "20% of all websites."
In a statement to Forbes, a company spokesperson said that "the root cause of the outage was a configuration file that is automatically generated to manage threat traffic. The file grew beyond an expected size of entries and triggered a crash in the software system that handles traffic for a number of Cloudflare’s services."
Stressing that there is "no evidence that this was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity," the spokesperson added that "we expect that some Cloudflare services will be briefly degraded as traffic naturally spikes post incident but we expect all services to return to normal in the next few hours."
Cloudflare also said on X—which is now working again—that "we always strive to be as transparent as possible in these types of situations, and we will be publishing an in-depth blog shortly."
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"Big Tech's relentless drive to become the only fish in the pond and centralize the internet in their hands threatens our economy and our national security," she added. "The FTC has the knowledge and the power to help prevent this from happening again. For all our sakes, the agency must take action immediately."
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Amid President Donald Trump's efforts to conceal the harmful consequences of his economic policies by hiding key data and replacing economists who tell harsh truths with partisan yes-people, a leading US think tank on Monday announced a new digital dashboard "to provide an accountability check" against attempts to manipulate and mislead the public.
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) says its new data accountability dashboard "serves as a one-stop shop" for economic data as federal statistic agencies (FSAs), once the "gold standard" for information, "face historically unprecedented threats from the Trump administration to their capacity and even their independence."
"This raises the specter of a future where FSA data cannot be relied upon to honestly report whether the US economy is experiencing dysfunction," EPI said.
In a bid to circumvent this, the EPI dashboard "displays a range of data not collected or disseminated by FSAs to shed some light on the economy during the pause in government data collection during the shutdown and—even more importantly—to provide an accountability check against efforts to manipulate FSA data in the future."
The federal statistical agencies (FSAs) that produce the gold standard economic data employers/investors/job seekers/workers/policymakers rely on to assess the health of the U.S. economy face unprecedented threats.We've pulled next-best data from non-FSA sources to help keep an eye on things. 1/
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— Economic Policy Institute (@epi.org) November 18, 2025 at 7:19 AM
As EPI senior economist Elise Gould explained in a statement: “The data collected by the federal statistical agencies are an incredibly valuable public good. While there would never be a good time to squander it, the absolute worst time to degrade data quality is when the economy is facing policy shocks that threaten to cause either a recession or an uptick of inflation."
"Given this urgency, we’re collecting all data we can to assess the economy’s health in this time when the gold standard data are under attack,” she added.
Trump's attempts to hide unfavorable economic data date back to his first administration, when he blocked or delayed economic analyses on the projected impacts of his tariffs. For example, half a dozen economists at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) quit en masse in April 2019, claiming they suffered retaliation for publishing reports that shed negative light on the president's trade and taxation policies.
In a related move that year, the USDA abruptly relocated its Economic Research Service main office from Washington, DC to Kansas City, Missouri, prompting another wave of resignations. ERS publications—including reports on farm income, rural economies, and trade impacts—dropped sharply, with key analyses delayed or blocked. Critics, including former agency officials, argued that the move to Kansas City was intended to conceal negative impacts of Trump's trade policies from the public.
During Trump's second administration, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick disbanded the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee (FESAC), a key body that worked under the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis to ensure that the federal government produces accurate data on economic indicators.
Trump also gutted the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Technical Advisory Committee, which had advised the Department of Labor about how economic changes can impact data collection. In August, Trump fired BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, baselessly accusing her of manipulating economic data to harm him politically by publishing a jobs report showing weak employment growth.
Two weeks later, the president nominated EJ Antoni, a senior economist at the Heritage Foundation described as a "partisan bomb thrower" who helped write Project 2025, a blueprint for a far-right overhaul of the federal government, to replace McEntarfer. Antoni stunned critics with suggestions including eliminating federal monthly jobs reports, and with his overall lack of data management experience. His nomination was later withdrawn amid mounting controversy.
Additionally, the Trump administration has summarily fired dozens of independent agency leaders, required every federal agency to have a White House liaison, and required ostensibly independent agencies to submit draft regulations to the Office of Management and Budget—headed by Project 2025 architect Russell Vought—for review before publication.
As Common Dreams reported, an analysis published in September by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities detailed how the Trump administration's politicization of data, combined with funding cuts, is making it more difficult for experts to determine how the president's policies are impacting US households.
From ending tracking of the impacts of climate-driven extreme weather, to removing a study from the Department of Justice website that showed violent attacks by far-right extremists outpaced those committed by the left, to removing questions about gender identity from key crime surveys, the Trump administration's attacks on information transcend economic data.
"The assault on data, research, and facts is fundamental to Trump and his authoritarian regime," Liza Featherstone, a contributing editor at The New Republic, recently wrote. "He seems to understand that data provides the basis for arguments, and he does not want any arguments. He also understands that facts and knowledge can only be nourished and sustained by institutions and experts, so he is destroying those institutions and pink-slipping those experts."
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"I’m very nervous about the size of these investments in these data centers," one tech CEO said.
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Tech industry insiders are growing more wary of a financial bubble in the artificial intelligence industry that many analysts have been warning could tip the global economy into a severe recession.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google parent company Alphabet, said in an interview with BBC published Tuesday that he believes the speculation currently pumping up investment in AI is akin to the kind of speculation that occurred in the late 1990s ahead of the dot-com stock crash.
"We can look back at the internet right now," he told BBC. "There was clearly a lot of excess investment, but none of us would question whether the internet was profound. I expect AI to be the same. So I think it's both rational and there are elements of irrationality through a moment like this."
PIchai said that he believed his firm would be well positioned to weather the bursting of an AI bubble, although he also cautioned that "I think no company is going to be immune, including us," were such a scenario to occur.
Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO of global payments network Klarna, told the Financial Times on Monday that while he still believed in the potential of AI, he also thought many of the biggest players in tech were vastly overspending to build out infrastructure that would not be needed to power the technology.
Siemiatkowski pointed to advances made this year by Chinese AI firm DeepSeek in vastly reducing the power needed to run AI as evidence that the energy-devouring data centers being constructed across the US would be a massive overbuild.
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Some major investors are also signaling that the boom may be over for AI.
MarketWatch reported on Monday that Palantir chairman Peter Thiel's hedge fund, Thiel Macro LLC, dropped all its shares in Nvidia, the US-based semiconductor giant that manufactures most of the chips used to power AI. The move by Thiel was revealed just one week after Japanese investment holding company SoftBank disclosed that it had divested its entire $5.8 billion stake in Nvidia.
Nvidia has also become a target for investor Michael Burry, who famously made a fortune by short-selling the US housing market ahead of the 2008 financial crisis, and who recently revealed that his firm was making bets against Nvidia and Palantir.
Concerns about a potential AI bubble have roiled global markets this week, and all major US stock indexes once again traded lower on Tuesday, marking the fourth consecutive losing session.
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