90 Miles From Tyranny

Monday, December 28, 2020

Amazon hires lobbying firm connected to Biden’s top White House adviser

Amazon, the trillion dollar tech company, has hired lobbyist Jeff Ricchetti, whose brother will be the top White House counselor to Joe Biden.

Ricchetti’s firm, which he founded in 2001 with his brother Steve, the incoming Biden adviser, registered as a lobbyist for Amazon on Nov. 13.

According to disclosure forms filed with Congress, Ricchetti will lobby for Amazon on “[i]ssues related to COVID-19, including implementation of the CARES Act.”

Biden tapped Ricchetti, his longtime aide, to serve as his counselor on Nov. 16. CNBC first reported that Amazon had hired Ricchetti.

Ricchetti Inc. is poised to be a lobbying powerhouse in the Biden administration. Amazon is the 10th company the firm has registered as a client since May 1, 2020. Ricchetti has a stable of other corporate clients, but had inked only one lobbying deal since July 1, 2016, according to records filed with Congress.

Ricchetti Inc. registered in August to lobby on behalf of Applied Materials, a California-based firm that produces semiconductor materials. Ricchetti disclosed that he plans to lobby the White House and other executive agencies on U.S. trade policy with China.

Ricchetti also signed an agreement on Nov. 13 to lobby for Vaxart, a biotech company that is developing an oral vaccine for...

Dem Senate Hopeful Urged Americans To Follow Chinese State-Run Media

Jon Ossoff, a Democratic Senate candidate in Georgia, hyped the reporting of Xinhua News – a Chinese Communist Party-run news outlet – with a shoutout on Twitter and has shared clips praising the advances of China’s Navy.

The unearthed remarks – occurring on Twitter in 2012 – are in addition to Ossoff’s financial ties to another Chinese state-run media company – a relationship he failed to include on financial disclosures and labeled “paperwork oversight” by his campaign.

On November 7th, 2012 he encouraged Twitter users to “follow @XHNews (Xinhua – Chinese state media)”:

Xinhua – funded by the Chinese Communist Party and regulated by the regime’s propaganda department – was recently labeled by the U.S. Department of State as a “foreign mission” of the Chinese Communist Party.

The State Department described Xinhua as an integral component of the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda organs:

“Over the past decade and particularly under General Secretary Xi Jinping’s tenure, the CCP has reorganized China’s state propaganda outlets disguised as news agencies and asserted even more direct control over them. He has stated “Party-owned media must. . . embody the party’s will, safeguard the party’s authority … their actions must be highly consistent with the party.” In short, while Western media are beholden to the truth, PRC media are beholden to the Chinese Communist Party.”

Ossoff also shared a Chinese-language newscast from the state-run CCTV outlet hyping how “China’s jets landed on [an] aircraft carrier”:

The writeup accompanying the video – a fawning profile of the People’s Liberation Army penned by the state-run media outlet – hails the navy’s “achievement”:

After a few days of delay, President Donald Trump signed the COVID-19 stimulus bill on Sunday evening. Trump originally opposed the bill because it did not direct enough to individual Americans in the form of direct checks.

“As President, I have told Congress that I want far less wasteful spending and more money going to the American people in the form of $2,000 checks per adult and $600 per child,” Trump said in a statement.

According to White House spokesman Judd Deere, Trump will send the bill back to Congress with wasteful spending red-lined for removal.

“The President is sending a strong message that makes clear to Congress that wasteful items need to be removed. Sending back to Congress a redlined version, item by item, accompanied by the formal rescission request to Congress insisting that those funds be removed from the bill,” Deere explained.

“The President is signing this bill to restore unemployment benefits, stop evictions, provide rental assistance, add money for PPP, return our airline workers back to work, add substantially more money for vaccine distribution, and much more,” the spokesman added.

Deere also announced that the Senate will begin consideration of a bill that would increase stimulus checks to $2,000, substantially alters or repeals Section 230, and starts an investigation into voter fraud in...