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Mamdani Announces 'Click-to-Cancel' Rule to Combat Subscription Traps, Junk Fees
"If you can sign up with one click, you can cancel with one click," said New York City's democratic socialist mayor.
Jul 10, 2026
In a move proponents say will save constituents up to $162.5 million annually, Mayor Zohran Mamdani and other New York City officials on Friday unveiled a "click-to-cancel" rule aimed at ensuring people can end online subscriptions as easily as they start them.
Days after entering office in January, Mamdani signed a pair of executive orders, "Combating Hidden Junk Fees" and "Fighting Subscription Tricks and Traps"—his 9th and 10th mayoral edicts—to protect consumers and make it easier "for New Yorkers to know the real price of what they are buying and to stop paying for the services they no longer want."
Following up on the orders, Mamdani and New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP) Commissioner Samuel A.A. Levine proposed a rule "requiring transparent, all-in pricing that bans hidden junk fees, alongside a final 'click to cancel' rule that guarantees consumers can cancel subscriptions as easily as they sign up for them."
The landmark proposal is part of Mamdani's affordability agenda, which includes the rent freeze and universal childcare programs he's partially enacted, as well as the free city buses, municipal grocery stores, affordable housing expansion, and redistributive taxation his administration is pursuing.
“For years, companies have built their business model around making it harder for working people to hold onto their money,” Mamdani said during a Friday press conference at Asser Levy Recreational Center in Manhattan's Kips Bay neighborhood. “Whether it’s hidden fees that suddenly appear at checkout or subscriptions that take one click to sign up for and a dozen steps to cancel, the result is the same: Working people pay more while corporations profit. That ends now. If you can sign up with one click, you can cancel with one click.”
Levine said that “these two rules will ensure that the price you see is the price you pay—no hidden charges, no endless subscription services, and no advantages for businesses that cheat. Requiring companies to compete on price will lower costs for all New Yorkers and level the playing field for honest businesses.”
Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice Julie Su spoke at the press conference, saying, “Every dollar a family loses to a hidden fee or a subscription they couldn’t cancel is a dollar stolen from them, a dollar that could have gone toward rent, groceries, childcare, or anything else."
"And just as important, the hours spent trying to cancel a subscription or membership you no longer want is stolen time," the former acting US labor secretary added. “That’s what affordability means in practice—closing the small holes that drain people’s paychecks and their time month after month. These rules put New Yorkers back in control.”
Former Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan—who implemented a similar rule while serving in the role during the Biden administration before it was killed after President Donald Trump returned to office—also spoke Friday, arguing that “nobody should be trapped in subscriptions they can’t escape or stuck paying junk fees they can’t avoid."
“These predatory tactics cheat people out of billions of dollars each year," she added. "With today’s rules, Commissioner Levine and DCWP are cracking down on corporate ripoffs, protecting families and honest businesses alike. The Mamdani administration’s work to tackle the affordability crisis and promote economic fairness continues to set a new standard nationwide, modeling effective governance and a relentless focus on using all of the city’s levers to improve life for New Yorkers.”
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'Absolutely Unprecedented': Trump Lackeys Crushing Efforts to Rein in Price-Hiking Corporate Mergers
“Consumers are getting really screwed by all of this,” said one critic.
Jul 09, 2026
Political appointees installed by President Donald Trump are overruling career attorneys inside the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division, intervening to weaken or halt investigations into major corporate mergers in a way never seen before, MS NOW reported Thursday.
Three unnamed sources told the outlet "that DOJ staff have privately complained that the Trump administration is essentially deciding not to enforce antitrust laws that are critical to keeping companies from becoming single-source providers and being able to charge enormous sums for their product or service."
According to MS NOW:
The two mergers that DOJ leaders are ramming through include two low-cost Mexican air carriers, Viva Aerobus and Volaris, who announced their plans to merge last year, and the proposed merger of the Italian firm Saipem and UK firm Subsea7, who together control a sizable portion of sales for equipment used for subsea oil operations. Major oil companies, including ExxonMobil, Petrobras and TotalEnergies, have filed formal objections with federal regulators about the latter merger, arguing to antitrust regulators that the combined firms will create a subsea monopoly that will increase costs, delay critical projects and force clients into expensive, long-term contracts.
Experts say the aforementioned mergers are likely to drive up prices US consumers pay for airfare to Mexico and at the gas pump, yet again giving the lie to Trump's "America First" pledge.
Current and former DOJ officials described Trump's interference as without precedent.
“It’s unilateral surrender on antitrust enforcement; it’s absolutely unprecedented,” Bill Baer, the former assistant attorney general for the antitrust division during the Obama administration. “It’s definitely going to hurt consumers. It means prices will go up, concentration is going to increase—and quality often diminishes when you have only a few firms operating in the same market.”
The DOJ Antitrust Division was originally launched more than a century ago during the tail-end of the Progressive Era to combat monopolies and enforce antitrust legislation like the Clayton Antitrust Act and the Gilded Age-era Sherman Act. It was formally created during the Great Depression following weak enforcement of the Sherman and Clayton acts, as the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration viewed concentrated corporate power as a threat not only to consumers but to democracy itself.
While the postwar decades saw relatively aggressive antitrust enforcement by presidents of both major parties, the Reagan administration adopted a much more permissive merger philosophy that laid the groundwork for decades of consolidation across industries that has continued to this day, despite limited antitrust revivals during the Obama and Biden administrations.
Biden-era Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan and DOJ officials pursued a more aggressive antitrust agenda that Trump has been rolling back in favor of deregulation. Critics have pointed out that Trump has sometimes used antitrust mechanisms selectively, targeting certain media or technology companies for political reasons rather than consistently applying a broad anti-monopoly approach.
According to an article published last month in The Wall Street Journal, Stanley Woodward, the senior DOJ official now overseeing antitrust enforcement, has told department lawyers that he favors resolving cases through settlements rather than taking corporations to trial. Some antitrust attorneys interpreted the remarks as a directive to avoid litigation and seek settlements in ongoing and future cases. Critics say Woodward’s posture could weaken the DOJ's ability to challenge monopolistic mergers in favor of fast-tracked settlements.
"He's taking litigation off the table, and you don’t get a settlement absent a litigation threat,” one person with knowledge of Woodward's actions told MS NOW. “I can’t think of an administration in history that would want to run antitrust policy like this.”
“Consumers are getting really screwed by all of this,” the person continued. “We’re talking 10 years of consumer harm that can’t be undone.”
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'Families Shouldn’t Pay the Price' for Monopolies: Mamdani Pushes Regulators to Reject Western Union Merger
The proposed deal "would represent a direct wealth transfer—one that would further strain the already challenging economic circumstances facing New York City’s immigrant communities," said the city's mayor.
May 14, 2026
With the Trump administration refusing to take substantive antitrust action—reaching a recent deal with a meat company accused of price fixing and settling a Biden-era lawsuit that accused Live Nation of monopolizing live entertainment—New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is using his influential position to urge the blocking of a corporate merger that he says would harm working families across the city.
Mamdani wrote to the New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS) late last month, outlets are reporting this week, urging the state financial regulator to block Western Union's $500 million merger with International Money Express, or Intermex.
With 4.5 million users, Intermex has a small fraction of Western Union's customer base of 150 million people who use wire transfer services. But Mamdani wrote that over the past decade the smaller company has "nearly tripled its share of remittances sent from the United States"—transfers of money that immigrants send back to their families in their home countries.
"In the US-to-Ecuador and US-to-Nicaragua corridors, Intermex’s market shares are 34% and 36%, respectively," wrote the mayor, showing that it is "winning customers away from Western Union, the historic market leader."
With immigrants increasingly using remittances to secure financial stability in case they are swept up in the Trump administration's mass deportation operation, "remittances are a crucial lifeline for New Yorkers and their communities abroad," wrote Mamdani.
On social media Thursday, Mamdani added that "families shouldn’t pay the price for corporate monopolies."
He told DFS that maintaining competition between providers of the service keeps prices for families "more competitive, encourages compliance with relevant consumer protection and disclosure requirements, and incentivizes reliability."
"The proposed merger would change that. By eliminating competition between Western Union and Intermex, the deal could lead to
higher fees (including those the businesses may fail to disclose), disadvantageous rates, worse terms, poorer service, and other impacts to these communities," wrote Mamdani, who has centered his agenda as mayor on making New York City more affordable for working families. "In short, it would represent a direct wealth transfer—one that would further strain the already challenging economic circumstances facing New York City’s immigrant communities."
The mayor noted that immigrants' access to affordable remittance services are already under threat, after the Republican Party's One Big Beautiful Bill Act imposed a 1% excise tax on cash remittance transactions.
"Now, this merger threatens to impose a new private tax on these same remittances, in the form of higher, supracompetitive prices that will flow directly to Western Union’s corporate coffers," said Mamdani.
Responding to the mayor's call for the merger to be blocked, Western Union claimed in a statement to DFS this week that the companies, should they be permitted to merge, would still provide "accessible and affordable" remittance services.
The mayor cited several US Supreme Court rulings that have found corporate mergers that would substantially lessen competition to be illegal and said that despite legal precedent, "the Trump administration has declined to challenge the merger on antitrust grounds."
"But that is not where the story ends," wrote Mamdani. "Instead, the deal still requires a series of money transmitter license approvals, including from the New York State Department of Financial Services."
"The conditions for disapproval are clearly met here," the mayor continued. "The transaction is manifestly against the public
interest, as it would lead to higher fees and worse rates for hard-working, disproportionately immigrant families, across New York City and the state—all to inflate Western Union’s balance sheet."
Semafor and The New York Times suggested that the influence of former Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan may have pushed the mayor to lobby DFS to reject the merger. Khan is an outside adviser to Mamdani and served as co-chair of his transition team.
While working in the Biden administration, Khan blocked and challenged major corporate mergers including Kroger's attempt to acquire Albertsons, Meta's bid to buy virtual reality app company Within, and JetBlue's proposed merger with Spirit Airlines.
Daniel Hanley, a senior legal analyst at the anti-monopoly group Open Markets Institute applauded Mamdani's decision to wade into the debate over Western Union's proposed merger.
"State and local officials can supplement law enforcement," said Hanley, "while the federal government abdicates its fiduciary responsibilities."
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'Decades in the Making': Antitrust Advocates Celebrate as Jury Rules Against Live Nation-Ticketmaster
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison called the verdict "a win for everyone who thinks concert tickets are too damn expensive."
Apr 15, 2026
Antitrust advocates celebrated on Wednesday after a jury found that Live Nation and is subsidiary Ticketmaster were illegal monopolies who for decades systematically overcharged customers for concert tickets.
As reported by The Associated Press, the verdict against Live Nation and Ticketmaster could cost the two entities "hundreds of millions of dollars, just for the $1.72 per ticket that the jury found Ticketmaster had overcharged consumers in 22 states," and they could be forced to sell off some of the venues they own.
The case against Live Nation, which was brought by 33 states and the District of Columbia, was initially led by the US Department of Justice. However, under President Donald Trump, the DOJ last month reached a last-minute settlement with the company that would not require it to be broken up.
The state attorneys general, however, vowed to see the case through and were rewarded with a big verdict in their favor.
New York Attorney General Letitia James celebrated the verdict, describing it as "a landmark victory to protect New Yorkers from harmful monopolies."
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison called the verdict "a win for everyone who thinks concert tickets are too damn expensive," and declared himself "proud to have brought this lawsuit."
District of Columbia Attorney General Brian Schwalb noted Live Nation "has raked in billions in profits from an illegal monopoly that coerces venues, restricts artists, and exploits fans," and called the verdict "a massive win in the fight for fairness for local venues, artists, and fans."
Lina Khan, former chair of the Federal Trade Commission under President Joe Biden, hailed the verdict, but said it was just "a key first step towards ending Live Nation’s monopolistic control and securing real relief for those it harmed."
Lee Hepner, senior legal counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project, said the verdict was "decades in the making," and he cited iconic Seattle band Pearl Jam's fight against Ticketmaster in the 1990s to illustrate just how long it's taken to hold the company accountable.
"Pour one out for Pearl Jam, who testified before Congress in 1993 about Ticketmaster's abuse of the live concert industry," he commented.
The Roosevelt Institute took a shot at the Trump DOJ for bailing on the case, and noted the verdict against Live Nation "only happened because state AGs kept pushing after a federal settlement that let the companies off the hook."
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Lina Khan ‘Scouring New York City Laws’ to Help Zohran Mamdani Drive Down Prices
Khan and members of her team are reportedly "dusting off a little-used 1960s price-gouging statute" in an effort to bolster the mayor-elect's affordability push in New York City.
Dec 26, 2025
Former Federal Trade Commission chair and antitrust trailblazer Lina Khan is reportedly poring over New York City's laws to help Democratic Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani fulfill the central promise of his campaign: making the metropolis more affordable.
According to the New York Times, Khan—in her capacity as co-chair of the mayor-elect's transition team—"has spent weeks scouring New York City’s laws to find dormant or underused mayoral authority that could allow Mr. Mamdani to take action in a hurry."
Potential actions "include specific attempts to drive down apartment rental fees and utility costs and compel businesses to be more transparent about pricing," as well as "dusting off a little-used 1960s price-gouging statute and policing new protections for food delivery workers," the Times reported, citing three unnamed people familiar with internal discussions.
As head of the FTC under former President Joe Biden, Khan took groundbreaking legal action against major corporations such as Amazon and, in the words of one antitrust advocacy group, "reinvigorated enforcement of the Robinson-Patman Act, a long-dormant law designed to prevent price discrimination by big corporations, through two separate cases against PepsiCo and Southern Glazer’s—major victories for smaller and independent businesses."
Khan, according to the Times, hopes to spur similar action in New York City. Members of her team, which includes former federal regulators, have "studied a 1969 consumer protection law meant to prohibit 'unconscionable' business tactics, to potentially target hospitals and sports stadiums where consumers typically have little choice but to pay high prices for products that are cheaper elsewhere."
Additionally, the newspaper reported, "they have looked at whether food delivery companies, which wield significant power in the city, are complying with laws that protect their drivers, and whether landlords are complying with a newly enacted law barring many real estate brokers from collecting thousands of dollars in fees."
Douglas Farrar, a spokesman for Khan, told the Times that the former FTC chair and her team have "worked closely" with the Mamdani transition "to provide key research support on ideas for hitting the ground running."
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Pro-Israel Billionaire Who Led Mamdani Scaremongering Now Offers to Help NYC's Next Mayor
One social media user wrote that the hedge fund executive Bill Ackman "went from acting like Mamdani was going to import ISIS to extending a friendly handshake… in like six hours."
Nov 05, 2025
After his resounding election victory on Tuesday night, New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani's most prominent billionaire antagonist immediately pivoted to kiss the ring of the man he has spent the last more than half-year portraying as an existential threat to the city and the country.
Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman poured over $1.75 million into the mayor's race with a laser focus on stopping Mamdani, whom he often ambushed with several-thousand-word screeds on his X account, which boasts nearly 2 million followers. He accused Mamdani—a staunch critic of Israel—of "amplifying hate" against Jewish New Yorkers, while suggesting that his followers (which happened to include many Jewish New Yorkers) were "terror supporters."
Meanwhile, the billionaire suggested that the democratic socialist Mamdani's "affordability" centered agenda, which includes increasing taxes on corporations and the city's wealthiest residents to fund universal childcare, free buses, and a rent freeze for stabilized units, would make the city "much more dangerous and economically unviable," in part by causing an exodus of billionaires like himself.
In turn, Mamdani often invoked Ackman's name on the campaign trail, using him as the poster boy for the cossetted New York elite that was almost uniformly arrayed against his candidacy. In one exchange, Mamdani joked that Ackman was "spending more money against me than I would even tax him."
After Mamdani's convincing victory Tuesday night, fueled in large part by his dominant performance among the city's working-class voters, Ackman surprisingly did not respond with "the longest tweet in the history of tweets" to lament the result as some predicted. Instead, he came to the mayor-elect hat in hand.
"Congrats on the win," he told Mamdani on X. "Now you have a big responsibility. If I can help NYC, just let me know what I can do."
Many were quick to point out Ackman's near-immediate 180-degree turn from prophecizing doom to offering his help to the incoming mayor.
"This guy went from acting like Mamdani was going to import ISIS to extending a friendly handshake… in like six hours," noted one social media user.
But Mamdani graciously accepted the billionaire's congratulations when asked about them on Wednesday's "Good Morning America."
"I appreciated his words,” Mamdani said. "I think what I find is that there is a needed commitment from leaders of the city to speak and work with anyone who is committed to lowering the cost of living in the city—and that’s something that I will fulfill."
As Bloomberg and Forbes noted, Ackman was just one of many on Wall Street and from the broader finance world who came to kiss the ring.
Ralph Schlosstein, a co-founder of the investment fund BlackRock, Inc., pledged to work with Mamdani despite their different politics: "I do care deeply about the city, and I’m not going anywhere, whoever the mayor is. I’m going to do whatever I can to help him be successful," he said.
Another former BlackRock executive, Mark Kronfeld, said: "Is it a dystopian, post-apocalyptic environment because Mamdani has won? No."
Crypto billionaire Mike Novogratz even credited Mamdani with "tapping into a message that’s real: that we’ve got a tale of two cities in the Dickensian sense," and asked if the incoming mayor could "address the affordability issue in creative ways without driving business out."
But while Mamdani has left the door open to business, he has made it clear that he will not allow them to commandeer his work at City Hall.
After his victory, he called on his base of largely small-dollar donors to resume their financial support for him in order to fund "a transition that can meet the moment of preparing for January 1.”
He announced that this historic all-female transition team will include at least one renowned titan of economic populism, the trust-busting former Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, as well as other progressive city administrators with backgrounds in expanding the social safety net and public housing.
"I’m excited for the fact that it will be funded by the very people who brought us to this point," Mamdani said, "the working people who have been lost behind by the politics of the city."
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Trump FTC Deletes Lina Khan-Era Blog Posts Warning of Threat AI Poses to Consumers
The FTC quietly removed from its website an article titled "AI and the Risk of Consumer Harm" as the Trump administration looks to undercut efforts to regulate artificial intelligence.
Oct 20, 2025
The Trump administration's sweeping purge of government content that conflicts with its far-right ideological and policy project has extended to Federal Trade Commission blog posts warning about the threat that burgeoning artificial intelligence technology poses to US consumers.
Wired reported Monday that the Trump administration has, without explanation, deleted AI-related articles published by the FTC during antitrust trailblazer Lina Khan's tenure as chair of the agency. The headlines of two of the removed posts were "Consumers Are Voicing Concerns About AI" and "AI and the Risk of Consumer Harm."
The latter article, which can still be read here, states that the FTC "is increasingly taking note of AI's potential for real-world instances of harm—from incentivizing commercial surveillance to enabling fraud and impersonation to perpetuating illegal discrimination."
"As firms think about their own approach to developing, deploying, and maintaining AI-based systems, they should be considering the risks to consumers that each of them carry in the here and now, and take steps to proactively protect the public before their tools become a future FTC case study," reads the post, which was authored by staff at the FTC's Office of Technology and Division of Advertising Practices.
The page on the FTC website that previously hosted the article now displays an error message.
Wired noted that the Trump FTC's deletion of the Khan-era blog post is part of a broader scrubbing of government content critical of tech giants and artificial intelligence. In March, the outlet reported that Trump's FTC—currently led by Andrew Ferguson—"removed four years' worth of business guidance blogs as of Tuesday morning, including important consumer protection information related to artificial intelligence and the agency's landmark privacy lawsuits under former chair Lina Khan against companies like Amazon and Microsoft."
The mass removal of Khan-era posts marks a sharp—and potentially illegal—break from the previous administration's handling of government-hosted content that conflicted with its views.
"During the Biden administration, FTC leadership placed 'warning' labels on business directives and other guidance published during previous administrations that it disagreed with," Wired reported. One unnamed FTC source told the outlet that the Trump administration's removal of the Khan-era posts "raises serious compliance concerns under the Federal Records Act and the Open Government Data Act."
The Trump administration's deletion of government content critical of AI comes months after it released an "AI Action Plan" that watchdogs pilloried as a gift to large tech corporations and an attempt to hamstring future efforts to regulate artificial intelligence.
The plan calls for a review of all AI-related FTC investigations launched during Khan's tenure "to ensure that they do not advance theories of liability that unduly burden AI innovation."
Robert Weissman, co-president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, said in July that the Trump White House's AI plan was "written by Big Tech."
"A serious AI plan would recognize that the regulation to which this administration is so hostile facilitates innovation—it can help us ensure that we have AI for social good, rather than just corporate profit," said Weissman.
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Raucous Mamdani Rally Reveals Political Battle Stretches Beyond New York City
"We are here tonight because we are ready to turn the page on the cynical, broken, politics of the past,” said New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Oct 14, 2025
Standing at a podium that displayed the words, "Our Time Has Come," Democratic New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani and allies made clear on Monday night that the sign referred not only to working people across the five boroughs, but to people across the US whose interests have been abandoned by the political establishment in favor of corporations and billionaires.
Speakers at the rally included leaders who have emerged as targets of the Trump administration, such as New York Attorney General Letitia James, and people who have worked in government at the federal level, in the case of former Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan, and their comments suggested a focus that goes beyond the city and its upcoming election on November 4.
Khan, who spearheaded the Biden administration's efforts to protect Americans from corporate greed in the form of "junk fees" and megamergers, spoke out against "modern-day robber barons," and made clear that both major political parties are to blame for an economy where corporations and the ultrarich "wield extraordinary power."
"They hold enormous control over our paychecks, our bills, our time, and our futures," said Khan, who has sharply criticized the Trump administration for settling with Amazon in a customer deception case and for letting oil executives "off the hook" in a price-fixing scandal.
"But the good news is that nothing about any of this is inevitable," added Khan.
Mamdani has centered his campaign on making the city more affordable by expanding his fare-free public bus pilot program, providing universal no-cost childcare, and establishing a city-run network of grocery stores to compete with for-profit companies—and has reached out to New Yorkers from all walks of life, spending a day walking the length of Manhattan as well as using social media to engage with voters.
With top Democrats like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (NY) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (NY) refusing to endorse the party's candidate to lead the largest city in the nation, the mayoral race has teed up one of the latest battles between the party's progressive wing and the entrenched establishment—one that will hopefully send a resounding message to the party's leadership, said Khan.
"The days of Democratic leaders choosing to ally with titans of industry over working people are over," she said.
Despite his decisive loss in the Democratic primary in June, disgraced former Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo is running as an independent and is trailing Mamdani by double digits as he strives to make the state Assembly member's support for Palestinian rights a centerpiece of the campaign.
The tactic, also employed by Cuomo during the primary, has proven unsuccessful so far, with polls showing that support from the city's Jewish voters helped Mamdani win in June by more than 13 points. At the rally on Monday night, the crowd at one point erupted in cheers of, "Free, free Palestine!"
Mamdani turned his attention to Cuomo's enthusiastic participation in the oligarchic political system that's seen the former governor court the wealthy, including billionaire financier Bill Ackman, and tell rich donors in the Hamptons that he expected help from President Donald Trump to win the general election.
In the city and nationwide, Mamdani said, "we are an existential threat to billionaires who think they can buy our democracy."
The mayoral campaign represents “a choice between a mayor for those straining to buy groceries or those straining to buy an election," he said.
The state lawmaker condemned the president's anti-immigrant escalation, which has been on display in recent weeks in cities including Chicago and Portland, Oregon, and his attacks on protesters who hold anti-fascist views as well as left-wing groups that dissent against the president's agenda.
"We are in a period of political darkness,” Mamdani said. “Donald Trump and his [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] agents are snatching our immigrant neighbors from our city right before our eyes. His authoritarian administration is waging a scorched-earth campaign of retribution against any who dared oppose him.”
"And again and again," he added, "Trump has broken the promise he made to the American people that he would fight for the working class by taking on the cost-of-living crisis."
James joined the rally in her first public appearance since she was indicted by Trump's personal-attorney-turned-federal-prosecutor, US Attorney Lindsey Halligan, last week on allegations of bank fraud. Having successfully prosecuted the president for fraud, James has been a top target of Trump during his second term.
Along with defiantly speaking out against the indictment, which she called the weaponization of "justice for political gain," James said that as mayor, Mamdani would come to the defense of freedoms and institutions that are under attack across the US.
JUST IN: New York Attorney General Letitia James raises her fist in the air after being criminally indicted for bank fraud.
“We are here tonight because we are ready to turn the page on the cynical, broken, politics of the past,” she said at Zohran Mamdani’s rally.
lol. pic.twitter.com/FFSLJupvtl
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) October 14, 2025
"We are here tonight because we are ready to turn the page on the cynical, broken, politics of the past,” said James. "We are witnessing the fraying of our democracy, the erosion of our system of government... This, my friends, is a defining moment in our history."
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'Drop in the Bucket': Lina Khan Rips Trump FTC for Giving Amazon a Wrist-Slap Settlement
The Federal Trade Commission's decision to settle with Amazon would be "a big relief for the executives who knowingly harmed their customers," added Khan.
Sep 25, 2025
The Federal Trade Commission announced on Thursday it had reached a settlement with Amazon over allegations that the online retailer had tricked consumers into subscribing to its Prime service—but the woman who led the FTC under former President Joe Biden was not impressed.
According to the FTC, Amazon has agreed to pay $2.5 billion to settle claims that it deceived customers into subscribing to Prime and then deliberately made it difficult for them to cancel. In all, Amazon will pay a $1 billion civil penalty, as well as $1.5 billion in refunds to consumers who unwittingly subscribed to Prime.
FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson framed the settlement as a victory for the Trump administration and touted the deal as "a record-breaking, monumental win for the millions of Americans who are tired of deceptive subscriptions that feel impossible to cancel." Ferguson also said the settlement would ensure "Amazon never does this again."
Amazon, for its part, said in a statement that it didn't break any laws despite agreeing to pay out billions.
"Amazon and our executives have always followed the law and this settlement allows us to move forward and focus on innovating for customers," the company said. "We work incredibly hard to make it clear and simple for customers to both sign up or cancel their Prime membership, and to offer substantial value for our many millions of loyal Prime members around the world."
However, former FTC Chairwoman Lina Khan accused the agency of letting Amazon off easy, while describing the $2.5 billion settlement as a "drop in the bucket" for the tech giant.
"In 2023, we sued Amazon and several top executives for tricking people into Prime subscriptions and then making it absurdly difficult to cancel," she explained in a post on X. "This week marked the start of a historic jury trial, where American citizens would hear details of Amazon’s business practices and determine if it had broken the law. A couple of days into trial, FTC announces it has settled all charges, rescuing Amazon from likely being found liable for having violated the law and allowing it to pay its way out."
Khan added that the settlement was "no doubt, a big relief for the executives who knowingly harmed their customers."
Amazon currently has a market cap of over $2.3 trillion, meaning the $2.5 billion settlement represents a little more than one-tenth of 1% of its total worth. Its billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, is among the richest people on Earth, with an estimated net worth of nearly $240 billion.
Matthew Stoller, an antitrust advocate and researcher at the American Economic Liberties Project, faulted the FTC for letting Amazon settle without any admission of wrongdoing.
"A judge already ruled in summary judgment they violated the law," Stoller observed.
Amazon may not be completely out of the woods legally, however.
As NPR noted on Thursday, Amazon "still faces another, bigger federal lawsuit, in which the FTC has accused the company of functioning as a monopoly." That trial is currently projected to begin in early 2027, NPR added.
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'The Fight Doesn’t End Here': Despite Kimmel's Return, Accountability Demanded for Trump's FCC Chair, Media Execs
"Congress should investigate and put everyone involved under oath at a public hearing to get to the bottom of this threat to free speech," said the co-CEO of Free Press.
Sep 23, 2025
Jimmy Kimmel will return to the airwaves Tuesday night after his suspension by ABC was met with a massive public backlash. But while they say the comedian's reinstatement is cause for celebration, advocates say that it's just one small victory in a much larger fight against the Trump administration's campaign to censor dissent.
Andrew O’Neill, the advocacy director of the group Indivisible, which called on its members to boycott ABC's parent company Disney in response to the company's capitulation to President Donald Trump, said that Kimmel "wasn’t reinstated because Disney executives slept on it and had a change of heart."
"He’s back on air because those executives got a wake-up call from the American public," O'Neill said. "People all over the country showed up, canceling subscriptions, protesting outside ABC and Disney, Nexstar and more, and made it damn clear this political alliance with Trump was not in Disney’s best interest. Trump’s authoritarian playbook is unpopular, and when these CEOs comply, it’s not only cowardly. It’s unstrategic."
Kimmel's program was suspended last week after Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr threatened the broadcast licenses of local ABC affiliates, which led to pressure from the media conglomerates the Sinclair Broadcast Group and Nexstar to take action against Kimmel following comments he made criticizing Trump and his administration's reaction to the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.
Craig Aaron, co-CEO of the media monitoring nonprofit Free Press, said that Kimmel's reinstatement shows that "protest works." However, he said, "the Trump regime’s war on free speech is no joke—and it’s not over. Brendan Carr threatened the licenses of ABC affiliates with coercive, mafia-like threats because his boss in the White House didn’t like Kimmel’s views, a chilling First Amendment violation that would have forced any previous FCC chair to resign."
“The next time the Trump administration uses its power to shut down dissent, a rich and famous comedian likely won’t be the target," Aaron continued. "We are seeing journalists being fired and even deported for simply reporting the facts about this administration. Their stories are not making headline news, but the government’s attacks on their speech are no less important."
In the days after Kimmel was forced off the air, Trump also threatened to strip the broadcasting licenses of networks that gave him "bad press," saying, "They're not allowed to do that."
"While we’re glad Kimmel is back on air," O'Neill said, "the fight doesn’t end here. FCC Chairman Carr still must be hauled up to Congress to testify. Sinclair and Nexstar must commit to airing the program and drop their wild demands. And Bob Iger and Disney must make it clear they are fully opposed to being bullied by Trump and his cronies."
Sinclair and Nexstar, which own a combined 20% of ABC's local news affiliates, said Tuesday that they will refuse to air Kimmel's broadcast. In order for Kimmel to return, Sinclair—known for its efforts to push right-wing talking points into the mouths of local anchors—has demanded that Kimmel issue a public apology and make a "meaningful personal donation" to Kirk's family and to his conservative advocacy group Turning Point USA.
As Aaron noted, Sinclair and Nexstar, two of the US's largest owners of local media, are currently "lobbying for a major merger requiring FCC approval," which he said may explain why they were so eager to pressure ABC to comply with Carr's demands. Last week, Democrats in the House of Representatives called on Carr to resign from his post and threatened to subject him to an investigation.
Beyond Carr, Aaron said that "Congress should investigate and put everyone involved under oath at a public hearing to get to the bottom of this threat to free speech" including Nexstar founder Perry Sook, Sinclair CEO Christopher Ripley and chairman David Smith, and Disney's Iger, so the public can understand "what pressure the government put on these media companies and what they were promised in exchange for cutting shows from their lineup and silencing network voices."
Lina Khan, the former chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), told MSNBC's Ali Velshi that the Kimmel saga is emblematic of a much broader problem of capitulation by corporations that have grown less accountable due to unchecked consolidation.
"Overwhelmingly, we have seen that some of the most powerful corporations in this country... have chosen profit and self-enrichment over any kind of commitment to democracy or the principles of liberty," Khan said. "We've heard people say, 'Well, actually, we really need to protect and pacify corporate interests because they're going to be the ones that are going to stand up to government abuse. This moment should entirely disabuse us of that illusion."
She discussed that this moment comes after "40 years of a bipartisan choice to accept a philosophy that basically thought monopolies are good, that consolidation was good." This has been particularly evident in the media. As a recent article from the University of Chicago's business school notes:
In the past decade, consolidation of American TV broadcasting has accelerated and put 40% of all local TV news stations under the control of the three largest broadcast conglomerates: Gray Television, Nexstar Media Group, and Sinclair Broadcast Group. Their stations—each company now owns about 100 affiliated with ABC, CBS, FOX, or NBC—operate in more than 80 percent of US media markets.
"If you're somebody who cares about protecting democracy, of course, we need to care about voting rights, making sure that elections are fair," Khan said. "But we also need to make sure that we understand extreme concentration of economic power is incompatible with democracy, and that needs to be at the center of our democratic agenda too."
Update: This article has been updated to note additional reporting from the New York Times that Nexstar, as well as Sinclair, would refuse to air Kimmel's program Tuesday night.
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