Free Republic

An interview between Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and CNBC host Joe Kernen boiled over Friday morning, when the two sparred over Vice President Harris’s recent pledge to ban price gouging if elected in November. Harris unveiled her economic plans last week, including the proposed ban, which would give the Federal Trade Commission the ability to investigate companies that increase their prices during periods of higher inflation. “This could be another tool in toolbox,” Warren said of the proposal, before Kernen interrupted. “Senator how would this policy do that,” he asked. Warren replied, “I let you finish your argument, did you...

You don't have to like Wall Street to recognize that they know which side of the slice their bread is buttered on. They know their onions what makes them money and what doesn't, premised on what makes an economy go fast, and what makes an economy screech to a halt. So now we have this: Charles Gasparino @CGasparino Breaking: Wall Street research departments working overtime this weekend to alert clients about the potential far left even socialist economic agenda of @KamalaHarris since her speech Friday, particularly her call for price controls. Even the gentle souls of finance can’t escape the...

CNN destroyed Kamala Harris’s Soviet-style price controls proposal and said it would lead to higher prices and shortages. Kamala Harris traveled to North Carolina on Friday to announce a Communist-style price control scheme to combat the inflation crisis she created. Harris cast the tie-breaking vote on the so-called ‘Inflation Reduction Act.’ The IRA made inflation unbearable for Americans. Food prices are skyrocketing because of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Biden recently turned his ire toward grocers and said he is going to send state attorneys general after them for price gouging. Grocers are not price gouging. The annual profits for...

Vice President Kamala Harris kicked off her campaign speech in North Carolina on Friday announcing her new economic plan that would give about $1.7 trillion in handouts to those struggling in the current Biden-Harris economy and set price controls on groceries. Her economic plan includes measures to ban federal “price gouging” – stopping sellers from setting unfair prices on groceries – giving out $25,000 to help first time home owners with their down payments and up to a $6,000 tax break for lower and middle income families who have a child in their first year of life. The Trump campaign...

Vice President Kamala Harris promised to prioritize a price-fixing plan on "day one," but commentators asked why she hasn't brought down inflation already while in the executive branch. "When I am President, it will be a day one priority to bring down prices," Harris declared in a Thursday night social media post. "I’ll take on big corporations that engage in illegal price gouging and corporate landlords that unfairly raise rents on working families." But the vice president and presidential hopeful faces one unique challenge in arguing about policy, the fact she has failed to enact such changes over the course...

Acknowledging that "since President Biden's attempt to use the 'bully pulpit' to try to shame corporate price gougers into accepting a fair mark-up approach hasn't worked," Democrat presidential nominee Vice-President Kamala Harris said "I will be taking a more aggressive approach. Within the first 100 days of a Harris/Walz administration we will issue a matrix delineating the fair prices for every major consumer product. I will instruct the Federal Trade Commission to monitor compliance and punish those businesses that violate our guidelines." She called this approach "the only sure way to put a lid on the inflation caused by the...

“The goal of Socialism is Communism.” - Valdimir Lenin All we had to do was sit back and wait. Kamala Harris's a first quasi-solid policy proposal was plagiarized directly from Donald Trump. It was Trump's proposal to end taxes on tips. Then Harris decided that she thought of it. Now we have her first real policy and it's everything you'd expect from her. She needed a villain - it's the food industry- and she has decided on a plan to slay the demon. She will lower your food costs by making food disappear. Vice President Harris on Friday will outline...

WASHINGTON, March 15 (Reuters) - The U.S. government said on Wednesday it would subject 27 drugs to inflation penalties, a move that will reduce out-of-pocket costs for Medicare recipients by $2 to as much as $390 per average dose. President Joe Biden's signature Inflation Reduction Act includes a provision penalizing drugmakers for charging prices that rise faster than inflation for people with disabilities or age 65 and older on the government's Medicare health program. "Starting on April 1, Medicare beneficiaries will pay lower coinsurance for Part B drugs that raise prices faster than inflation," White House Domestic Policy Adviser Susan...

The price of eggs has skyrocketed in recent months, up 138% year-over-year last month. A dozen eggs now averages about $4.25, due in part to avian flu, which is tearing through poultry farms across the U.S.—wiping out some 58 million birds in the last year. But there’s another culprit, says a farm advocacy group: price gouging. America’s largest egg producer saw a 600% jump in profits in the last quarter... ...“Avian flu is not manufactured—it’s real,” says Joe Maxwell, the co-founder of Farm Action. “But the dominant firms are using that supply chain disruption to gouge the consumers...” ...Overall, U.S....

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Frustrated by how much they were paying for health care, two groups of California workers sued one of the nation’s largest hospital systems. One group secured a half-billion-dollar settlement. The other lost in court. Both cases took nearly a decade to resolve, highlighting the difficulty patients and their employers often face when trying to corral the ever-increasing costs of health care. Now, instead of relying on the market or the courts to keep health care prices in check, California Gov. Gavin Newsom wants to order the state’s hospitals, doctors’ offices and insurance companies to keep their...

The Government decision to introduce minimum unit pricing on alcohol this week has been welcomed by Alcohol Action Ireland. The new law will largely affect alcohol sold in off-licenses, shops and supermarkets. For that past decade, the Government has been seeking to bring in minimum unit pricing as part of a number of measures to help reduce the harm caused by excessive alcohol consumption. The aim is to change dangerous patterns of alcohol behavior particularly amongst young drinkers, who are buying cheap alcohol before they go out in what is known as pre-drinking. This alcohol will now be more expensive...

Former Bumble Bee CEO Sentenced To Prison For Fixing Prices Of Canned Tuna Christopher Lischewski, former Chief Executive Officer and President of Bumble Bee Foods LLC, was sentenced to serve 40 months in jail and pay a $100,000 criminal fine for his leadership role in a three-year antitrust conspiracy to fix prices of canned tuna, the Department of Justice announced. Lischewski was charged on May 16, 2018, in an indictment returned by a federal grand jury in San Francisco. After a four-week trial in late 2019, he was convicted on the single count of participating in a conspiracy to fix...

Virginia lawmakers have passed a bill that would see insulin prices capped at $50 per month, potentially making the state the third to set limits on the cost of the life-saving medication.

Miami, FL ~ Tuesday, February 25, 2020 Remarks as Prepared for DeliveryGood morning.  It’s great to be in Miami and among so many leaders in the antitrust community.  I’d like to thank Margaret [Sanderson] and Jason [Gudofsky] for hosting this event and the opportunity to be here and provide an update on criminal antitrust enforcement. Whenever we prepare an update on our program, it is a great opportunity for us to step back and think about our mission and consider how what we are doing works towards accomplishing it.  For the criminal program, our mission is to deter, detect, and...

Department of Justice Office of Public Affairs FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Friday, February 14, 2020 A federal grand jury returned an indictment against Hitoshi Hashimoto and Hiroyuki Tamura for their role in a global conspiracy to fix prices for suspension assemblies used in hard disk drives, the Department of Justice announced today. Hashimoto and Tamura, both Japanese citizens, are former top sales executives at NHK Spring Co. Ltd. (NHK Spring), which has pleaded guilty and been sentenced to pay a $28.5 million fine. The indictment, filed yesterday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges that, from at...

Attorneys general from more than 40 states are alleging the nation’s largest generic drug manufacturers conspired to artificially inflate and manipulate prices for more than 100 different generic drugs, including treatments for diabetes, cancer, arthritis and other medical conditions

It’s a tuna takedown. On Thursday, the Justice Department announced that food company StarKist Co. could pay a fine of as much as $100 million after pleading guilty to fixing prices on canned tuna from 2011 through at least 2013. StarKist, which has agreed to cooperate with the investigation, is the second company to plead guilty in this case: Bumble Bee did so last year and was fined $25 million for participating in the fishy conspiracy. The extent of the conspiracy, and the effect on consumers, has not been disclosed, but that does not change this core truth: the scheme...

For Roberto Dip, the president of a professional soccer team in Honduras, everything seemed to be business as usual Friday morning as he talked to a sports reporter about the new coach his club hoped to hire. Hours later, Dip was arrested on a warrant drafted by a New Orleans-based FBI agent accusing him of illegally plotting to increase the cost of shipping cargo from the United States to Honduras and other places. Dip – who owns a freight shipping company with offices in the New Orleans area and Baton Rouge – is facing charges of breaking federal anti-trust laws...

The more I research progressivism to discover ways to use their history against them, the more I understand why nobody's ever really done this before. Nobody actually wants the answer to the question because it always leads back to Theodore Roosevelt. In today's episode of erased history, or how American progressive historians have turned TR's legacy into the American version of a picture missing Nikolai Yezhov, we examine how price controls, contrary to popular belief, was not first implemented by Nixon, or Franklin Roosevelt, or even Woodrow Wilson as a part of the effort for World War I. But it...

Danish conglomerate A. P. Møller-Mærsk’s shipping arm, Maersk Line, has been issued with a summons by antitrust authorities in the US. The company is subject of an investigation into suspected price fixing along with a number of other large container shipping companies, according to a Wall Street Journal report. The summons were handed out during a raid on a San Francisco meeting attended by 20 bosses of the industry’s biggest companies, says the report. …