Consumer Watchdog – Home - Blog Posts

The U.S. Justice Department is serious about probing the Google Books settlement for possible anti-trust violations. Consumer Watchdog was one of the first organizations to ask the department to investigate.

A federal appeals court has ruled in favor  of  new U.S. Patent and Trademark Office  regulations that would curtail abusive behavior by patent applicants and improve patent quality.

The president talked and joked easily with America from Jay Leno's couch last night, as close to a fire side chat as it gets in these times. Leno is no Jon Stewart but Obama did offer some clues as to where his financial regulatory approach is going. 

Sen. Chuck Grassley, the top GOP politician in the health care reform debate, is positive that Americans don't need an option to private, for-profit health insurers. He sees his anything like offering Medicare as a voluntary option to consumers as a deal-killer, according to CQ.com (subscription barrier). A guy with Grassley's mind-set must also see private contractors as the saviors of Iraq and AIG as the model for a healthy, deregulated financial system.

The fallout from the bonus scandal at AIG could help bring about a change in federal research funding policy that would benefit taxpayers.At least that's Dave Jensen's view, expressed on his widely respected blog, The California Stem Cell Report.

After Enron's fraud on California during the 2001 electricity crisis became clear, a lot of politicians felt they had to give back their Enron contributions.  Our consumer group was the beneficiary of a few of those returned dollars, since we fought the energy industry's deregulation schemes.  Now Open Secrets reports AIG's contributions, from employees and related political action committees, to federal lawmakers totaled $9.3 million over the last decade, with an exact 50%-50% split between Democrats and Republicans. AIG sure knows how to hedge its bets.

A newspaper reporter just called to ask about the state of privacy under electronic medical records, which will now be spreading thanks to $20 billion in the federal economic stimulus plan.  Electronic medical records can help avoid medical mistakes, like those suffered by Dennis Quaid's newborn twins, but the privacy protections under the stimulus bill need to improve.

Does OilWatchdog troll gossip sites? Well, how else to stumble on the Conde Nast Portfolio cover of Sarah Palin, with leftover photos from her Vogue shoot and a bottom line that she's not governing anything, including Alaska's dreamed-of natural gas pipeline. But the real prize is another story in the same issue, by Peter Waldman, on Exxon and its dinosaurish, hole-digging CEO, "T Rex" Tillerson vs. the era of Obama.

President Obama has told Treasury Secretary Geithner to "pursue every legal avenue" to block $165 million in bonuses to American International Group executives. Come on, this isn't rocket science, it's derivative trading. Here's a simple way to get the job done without filing a lawsuit.

One of the editors of Adbusters magazine has a populist strategy to create an online revolt against Google's latest forray into targeted online advertising, a tactic that Congress Quarterly reports, from behind its subscription wall, caught the eye of federal lawmakers Wednesday.