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Some of the world's biggest chip buyers, including Apple Inc (AAPL.O), Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) and Alphabet Inc's (GOOGL.O) Google, are joining top chip-makers such as Intel Corp (INTC.O) to create a new lobbying group to press for government chip manufacturing subsidies.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom says he'll have a plan within 60 days for dealing with the recent bankruptcy filing by Pacific Gas & Electric after years of devastating wildfires. Newsom said in his first state of the state address Tuesday that he has convened a team of the nation's best bankruptcy lawyers and financial experts from the energy sector. They will work with his administration to develop what he called a comprehensive strategy. He's promising to ensure that safe, affordable power will continue to flow. He says he'll seek justice for wildfire victims, fairness for the utility's employees, and protection...

The government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan rushed a financial agreement between Turkey and Qatar through Parliament for approval ahead of his decision to turn over a $20 billion tank and pallet factory to a company run jointly by his associates and the Qatari army. The deal, the avoidance of double taxation agreement, came just in the nick of time before the ErdoÄŸan government presented a multibillion-dollar national tank factory on a silver platter to Turkish-Qatari armored vehicle manufacturer BMC, a company run by Ethem Sancak, a member of the MKYK executive body of the ruling Justice and Development...

Crony capitalism – the close alliance of big business with government – leads not to free enterprise, but to its opposite, in which government, not the market, chooses winners and losers, through subsidies and other forms of largesse.  Adam Smith, the great philosopher of capitalism, understood that businessmen want to maximize profits, and how it is done is of secondary interest.  Indeed, he once said that when two businessmen get together, the subject of discussion is how to keep the third out of the market.  Adam Smith and more recent philosophers of the free market such as Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises,...

Webb’s new delay epitomizes the systemic incompetence of Washington. Despite being 13 years behind schedule and costing eight times more than originally planned, NASA and its contractors still couldn’t get things right....

James Comey has found a safe space at Disney’s ABC News -- Clinton crony Stephanopoulos is expected to use his booking of Comey .. to justify his eight-figure salary... the ABC star already is facing criticism that his background as a liberal political operative would make it hard for him to be objective. The interview will be a tall order for Stephanopoulos, and not just because he’s more than a foot shorter than Comey. The ABC star.. a liberal political operative ... “It'd be laughable to expect a former Clinton administration official to be fair ... The interview will be...

Eventually, the NFL-protest debate was going to get to crony capitalism, right? Right. The only question is which tax incentives would come under fire, and which actually matter. Donald Trump decided to take aim at the league’s “massive tax breaks” this morning, and demand a change in law to eliminate them: Why is the NFL getting massive tax breaks while at the same time disrespecting our Anthem, Flag and Country? Change tax law!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 10, 2017 “Why is the NFL getting massive tax breaks while at the same time disrespecting our Anthem, Flag and Country?...

'He missed a critical opportunity': Walmart CEO slams Trump for failing to 'unequivocally' reject white supremacists McMillon has criticized President Trump for failing to "unequivocally" reject white supremacists in aftermath of their violent rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. "As we watched events and response from President Trump over weekend, we felt he missed critical opportunity to help bring our country together by unequivocally rejecting appalling actions of white supremacists," McMillon wrote in statement posted to Walmart's website. snip McMillon's full statement: Respect for the individual is one of our core beliefs at Walmart. And the role we play in communities around...

I am ecstatic for Carrier employees! Their bosses just decided to keep shop onshore. What a relief for hundreds of workers. Merry Christmas Indiana! We don't yet know terms of the public/private deal that was cut to make the company stay, but let's hope every business is equally incentivized to keep Americans working in America. Foundational to our exceptional nation's sacred private property rights, a business must have freedom to locate where it wishes. In a free market, if a business makes a mistake (including a marketing mistake that perhaps Carrier executives made), threatening to move elsewhere claiming efficiency's sake,...

As sure as the sun rises in the east, crony capitalists know who butters their bread each day, and in 2016, they are rallying to support the Clinton dynasty and block the Trump insurgency. A recent headline trumpeted the result of a survey among the “Fortune 500” executives: “Not one of the top Fortune 100 CEO’s supports Donald Trump.”

Hillary Clinton spent the past two weeks rolling out economic proposals that include the "biggest investment in new, good-paying jobs since World War II" and a tax hike on corporations and the wealthy, which could create lucrative opportunities for many of the corporations that have lined her campaign coffers. She has proposed refurbishing the electrical grid to make it "clean," and establishing a government-run bank that would steer taxpayer funds toward the private companies that are chosen to implement her projects. One ambitious aspect of her plan involves extending broadband access to every American household by 2020. Similar efforts launched...

Documents obtained by several journalistic investigations reveal that Lafarge has paid taxes to the terror group to operate its cement plant in Syria, and even bought Isis oil for years. Lafarge also has close ties to Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Apart from being a regular donor to the Clinton Foundation, Clinton herself was a director of Lafarge in the early 1990s, and did legal work for the firm in the 1980s. During her connection to Lafarge, the firm was implicated in facilitating a CIA-backed covert arms export network to Saddam Hussein.

Politics Election 2016 Several GOP Business Leaders Are Backing Clinton Democratic presidential candidate to get backing from executives, some of whom cite unease with Trump’s candidacy By Laura Meckler June 23, 2016 12:09 a.m. ET More than 50 business executives, including several longtime Republicans, endorsed Hillary Clinton for president on Thursday as her campaign seeks to capitalize on discomfort with Republican Donald Trump. They include Jim Cicconi, senior executive vice president at AT&T Services Inc., and Dan Akerson, who held top positions at General Motors Co. and Nextel Communications Inc. A Clinton campaign aide provided the list. The endorsements reflect...

On Wednesday, the Senate passed a joint resolution that will effectively put an end to one of the most egregious programs that exists today: the U.S. Department of Agriculture catfish inspection program. It’s actually disappointing that the vote was as close as it was—55-43. It may sound a bit silly, admittedly, but this program created in the 2008 farm bill is a classic example of legislators pushing a program for the benefit of a very narrow special interest without regard for the harm to taxpayers, consumers, and other industries.

Ah, I remember that speech well. It was high-five material on conservative blogs for days, back when Cruz was still a populist hero to Trump fans rather than “Lyin’ Ted.” He delivered it last July, a month after Trump declared his candidacy, with the Trump/Cruz bromance still in full flower. Cruz was eager to impress Trump’s supporters in the belief that they’d soon stampede towards him as Trump inevitably collapsed in the polls. Fast-forward eight months and here we are: Sixty-three percent of Trump’s supporters say that if he earns more delegates than the other candidates but does not become...

Donald Trump has attacked Ted Cruz roughly a billion times over the last week for having taken out loans from Citibank and Goldman Sachs. Like most everything Trump says, his attacks are short on facts and even shorter on making sense. He claims somehow that Cruz attempted to hide the loans, even though he openly disclosed them on public filings (just not the right ones). Here he is, in fact, saying that Cruz is “worse than Hillary, if you think about it,” because of the loans: https://youtu.be/_NtpbWK5Kdg More specifically, Trump has repeatedly reiterated the claim (at the beginning of the...

Tesla has no more business being in business than Yugo. Which isn’t anymore. So why is Tesla? Because political correctness, crony capitalism – and a hallucinatory desire to believe in a mirage; to refuse to admit that what you think you see in the distance isn’t actually there; that your mind isn’t playing tricks on you. But then, the Yugo was just a bad car. The Tesla is a bad electric car – and the electric part effaces the bad part. Electric cars can do no wrong – to an extent that is quite literally unbelievable. Unless you’ve seen it...

As the U.S. Chamber of Commerce identifies its targets for the 2016 congressional cycle, Kansas representative Tim Huelskamp and other House Freedom Caucus members may well find themselves in the group’s crosshairs. According to sources familiar with its internal deliberations, the Chamber has discussed Huelskamp as a “prime target” for unseating. That the group may be laying the groundwork for a challenge several months in advance of the GOP primary in Kansas’s first district is one sign of a restive GOP establishment looking to strike back.

The crony in question is Sid Blumenthal, former White House advisor to Bill and longtime hatchet man for the pair. We already knew Blumenthal was running his own off-the-books intelligence operation for the Secretary of State. We also knew that he’d put a friend representing a pro-Putin pol in Georgia in touch with Hillary to lobby her on behalf of the Georgian opposition. And the reason we knew those things isn’t because Hillary Clinton voluntarily turned over Blumenthal’s communications to State as part of routine recordkeeping protocols. We know it because a hacker infiltrated Blumenthal’s e-mail account a few years...

Twenty-two of the 37 corporations nominated for a prestigious State Department award — and six of the eight ultimate winners — while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State were also donors to the Clinton family foundation. The published donor records of the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation don't give exact dates or amounts of its contributors, but it is possible to create a general timeline for when many of the corporations donated and when they were either nominated or selected for the award. Silicon Valley giant Cisco was the biggest foundation contributor nominated in 2009, giving the Clinton charity...