Congress To Hold Ticketmaster Hearing After Taylor Swift Fans Experience Monopoly All Too Well

Among the most influential voters in America today: the rich, the well-connected, and apparently now, Taylor Swift fans.

The Senate’s panel on competition policy, antitrust, and consumer rights will hold a hearing to examine the lack of competition in the ticketing industry, announced Senator Amy Klobuchar on Tuesday. The news comes after Swift fans across the globe met exorbitant prices and exclusive availability for tickets to the superstar’s first tour in years.

“The high fees, site disruptions and cancellations that customers experienced shows how Ticketmaster’s dominant market position means the company does not face any pressure to continually innovate and improve,” said Klobuchar, chair of the panel. “That’s why we will hold a hearing on how consolidation in the live entertainment and ticketing industry harms customers and artists alike.”

Further details including the hearing’s date and witnesses are to be announced at a later date.

The announcement comes after a series of statements from officials expressing interest in taking on the issue.

Last week, Klobuchar sent a letter to Michael Rapino, CEO of ticketing giant Live Nation, expressing concerns about the ticketing industry’s monopolistic behavior, and questioning Rapino on whether Live Nation’s practices were working to mitigate those monopolistic tendencies.

Senator Richard Blumenthal and Representatives Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, David Cicilline, and Bill Pascrell joined Klobuchar in expressing concerns into the ticketing industry.

Cicilline, alongside Pascrell and Representatives Frank Pallone and Jerry Nadler, called on the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission in April 2021 to investigate ticketing giant Live Nation and its potential monopolistic practices.

And then on Monday—a day before announcing the hearing herself—Klobuchar, alongside Senators Richard Blumenthal and Ed Markey, sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, urging the Justice Department to investigate and “consider unwinding the Ticketmaster-Live Nation merger and breaking up the company.”

The fight spans beyond just months or even years. Decades ago, members of Pearl Jam had been advocating for the breakup of Ticketmaster’s hold on consumers. “All the members of Pearl Jam remember what it’s like to be young and not have a lot of money,” said guitarist Stone Gossard. “We have made a conscious decision that we do not want to put the price of our concerts out of the reach of our fans.”

And the struggle continues. Klobuchar, and the case of Taylor Swift—who was preschool age when Pearl Jam testified on the same issue—could help finally end it.

Donald Trump nominated three justices to this Supreme Court, but that fortunately hasn’t stopped the court from ruling in favor of the basic idea that nobody, not even Trump, is immune from the law.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court denied former President Donald Trump’s request to withhold his tax returns from a House committee seeking them.

The court’s order, unsigned and including no dissents or additional reasoning, directs the Treasury Department to finally turn over Trump’s returns. The House Ways and Means Committee have sought after the returns since 2019, after Trump refused to release them as a candidate during the 2016 election as is precedent.

In late October, a federal appeals court ruled against Trump, declining to reconsider an August ruling from a three-judge panel that also OK’d the House’s request to obtain the tax returns.

Things aren’t looking great for Team Trump generally.

Also on Tuesday, Senator Lindsey Graham was forced to testify before a Georgia grand jury over efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Last month, the Supreme Court ruled against Trump last month as he asked the court to intervene in the legal struggle surrounding the FBI’s seizure of classified documents from Mar-a-Lago.

And in January, the court declined to stop the National Archives from turning over documents to the House committee investigating the January 6 Capitol riot.

With the Supreme Court’s decision, Trump has exhausted every possible rung on the judicial ladder to avoid releasing his tax returns—which may prompt one to wonder why someone would work so hard to avoid just releasing them!

White House Chief Medical Adviser Anthony Fauci spent his last public briefing, on Tuesday, urging people to please get their Covid-19 shots and boosters if they haven’t already.

Fauci, who was the public face of the Covid response under the Trump and Biden administrations, briefed reporters from the White House for the last time before he leaves the government in December. He urged people to get up to date on their Covid and flu shots before winter.

“My message—and my final message, maybe the final message I give you from this podium—is that please for your own safety, for that of your family, get your updated Covid-19 shot as soon as you’re eligible to protect yourself, your family, and your community,” he said.

Fauci has served at the National Institutes of Health for 54 years, including leading the National Allergy and Infectious Disease Institute for nearly 40.

When asked how he wants people to remember him, Fauci replied, “I’ll let other people judge the value or not of my accomplishments, but what I would like people to remember about what I’ve done is that every day for all of those years I’ve given it everything that I have and I’ve never left anything on the field.”

Since the Covid-19 pandemic began, Fauci became a punching bag for the right as he pushed back on misinformation and conspiracy theories about the virus. Donald Trump called Fauci an “idiot” and a “disaster,” regularly belittled his public health advice, and then got his own Covid-19 vaccine in secret before he left the White House.

Dr. Anthony Fauci gave his last press briefing as a government advisor Tuesday, and Republicans ruined the moment by spreading falsehoods about him and the Covid-19 pandemic.

He urged people to stay up-to-date on their vaccines and boosters and condemned the spread of disinformation around public health.

In response, several Republican lawmakers said they would ask Fauci to testify over the handling of Covid-19.

Senator Rand Paul accused both him and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of animal torture.

During the briefing, a reporter for The Daily Caller tried to ask about investigations into the origin of Covid-19, another popular far-right conspiracy theory. Conservative figure and self-described fact checker Tom Fitton also tweeted about the investigation in Wuhan, China.

Fauci received praise since the start of the pandemic, particularly under former President Donald Trump’s administration, for his straightforward, fact-based briefings. But he quickly became a popular target for the far-right for promoting masks and vaccines and contradicting Trump. He began receiving death threats and had to increase his personal security.

It turns out that Sam Bankman-Fried’s failed cryptocurrency exchange was actually a thriving real estate business this whole time.

A new report indicates that Bankman-Fried’s parents, FTX, and senior executives bought at least 19 properties in the Bahamas over the last two years worth almost $121 million.

According to official property records recovered from Reuters, the purchases included luxury beachfront homes, and seven resort condominiums that cost nearly $72 million by themselves.

It was previously known that FTX and company executives held real estate in the island nation. The Bahamas, after all, was host to Bankman-Fried’s around-$40 million penthouse where he lived and worked (and reportedly did more) alongside nine of his colleagues. While Bankman-Fried enjoyed the company of his nine colleagues, he told Reuters that FTX provided free meals and an “in-house Uber-like” service around the island.

Nevertheless, the property records provide a better look at the sheer scale of the Bahamas purchases—and the inordinate wealth FTX previously had at its disposal while it now owes billions to creditors.

Since the collapse of FTX, upwards of 1 million creditors are down billions of dollars. Bankman-Fried secretly used $10 billion in customer funds to prop up his trading company, Alameda Research, and as Reuters reported last week, at least $1.5 billion of that money is now missing.

Earlier this month, FTX collapsed and filed for bankruptcy protection. The company said in a court filing on Saturday that it owes its 50 largest creditors more than $3 billion.

FTX was the third-largest exchange valued at nearly $32 billion before November 11, when Bankman-Fried announced that the company, alongside other entities including his trading firm Alameda Research, would file for bankruptcy.

Read more at Reuters.