Health advisory issued for rare bacterial infection that has claimed the lives of a dozen Americans

[ancianita]

19. The problem, again, is that

it's the "directly or indirectly" we have to prove. How does the DOJ go about investigating loss, harm and damage by polluters of air and water when Earth dynamics are also in the mix? That right there makes "who they are" impossible to pinpoint.

Can we make any connections that prove who is even "indirectly" responsible for the heatup of the oceans that cause hurricanes and cyclones? I seriously doubt it, and the polluters absolutely know we can't.

We have Big Tech doing business IN China, being breached/hacked IN China, and yet they stay for the profit, instead of being forced to return home to the U.S. They are indirectly causing aggressive Chinese hacking of our ambassadors and commerce department heads, but how do we prove it unless we demand they stand before Special Counsel grand juries and Congress to explain why they continually do business with an official hostile foreign country.

There is no legal fix for corporations that put us in national security danger. There is no "we" who will get out there and a) call them back to their home country, and b) hold them accountable to their home country.

One early example of how "we" fought Big Tech -- take the IBM PC:
IBM was a big, abusive monopoly long before tech monopolies like Apple and Google were in vogue. The company was tightly integrated with the US military and govt, and this afforded it a measure of security. Even though its rivals griped to Congress about its slamming them, the company fended off serious regulatory action for decades thanks to powerful friends in the Pentagon and other parts of the US apparatus.

Eventually IBM's luck ran out when in 1970, the DOJ opened up an antitrust case on it. Because IBM was a monopoly it had a LOT of money. Over the next 12 years, IBM outspent the entire Dept of Justice Antitrust Division, every year, in a war that came to be called the "antitrust Vietnam." IBM won. Sorta. 12 yrs later the Reagan admin. decided to drop the enforcement action and broke up AT&T instead, because it was so entwined with the US govt (as if IBM wasn't) and "politically" looked like breaking it up was like making govt smaller.

Then IBM backed off because the high-stakes battle with the US govt changed IBM and blunted its predatory instincts. IBM began to second-guess its commercial plans, steering clear of the kinds of things that the DOJ frowned upon. The DOJ didn't like it when a big company monopolized the parts of its products, so IBM made a PC that used commodity parts -- the kind that any manufacturer could buy on the open market. The DOJ didn't like it when companies tied their software to their hardware, so IBM decided not to make its own PC operating system. IBM's chair asked a friend on United Way's board if she knew anyone who could provide an OS for his company's PC. Her name was Mary Gates, and her son, Bill Gates, had a company that fit the bill: Micro-Soft (they dropped the hyphen later). Long story short -- today, IBM no longer even makes PCs.

This should give you an idea of who can make corporations play fair with consumers BUT how long that can actually take. How at scale expensive it is. The "we" who enforce our national security interests have to spend years corralling these Big Corps to do the right thing. And yes, they outspend us in the battles.

Since 9/11 we've been in a labeled a "battleground," and recently the US has been declared in a "state of emergency." But one wouldn't know it, with the govt's complacency about American Big Tech's shenanigans in China, and nevermind the other multinational polluters of oceans and air.

My point: all of this is much easier to say than to do.

In the meantime, we're behind the regulation curve, as Congress doesnt' even know enough to do investigative mop up. So yeah, we need a "we" to focus on preventing disasters while Congress trifles with our tax money and budget. Because the "we" that we have right now doesn't seem to be looking ahead at possible security disasters, nevermind natural disasters.