Mississippi Lawmaker Asks Holder to Block FEMA Trailer Sales on Antitrust Grounds
House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson from Mississippi asked Attorney General Eric Holder on Thursday to stop the government from selling thousands of FEMA trailers that were intended to house refugees from the 2005 Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and argued the sale raised antitrust concerns.
Some of the units posed health risks because they were contaminated with formaldehyde, and were never distributed, Thompson said. The industry expects that it will sell 203,500 trailers this year, he said, and the government has around 103,000 to get rid of. “We find it difficult to believe that dumping over 100,000 used [units]…will not create a substantial and negative effect on the price and supply of trailers,” he said.
Justice Department spokesman Charles Miller told the Associated Press that Holder’s office would respond to Thompson’s letter.
Read the letter here, and the Associated Press story here.
Varney Defends Ticketmaster Decision at SXSW
Executives from the now-combined ticketing and concert promotion behemoth Live Nation Entertainment didn’t show up at a popular music and tech festival in Austin this week. But Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Christine Varney was on hand yesterday at the South by Southwest conference, known as SXSW, to defend her decision to let the deal go through — with conditions.
Varney was “on the defensive” with a “contentious” audience skeptical of the merger, the L.A. Times said. “I know it’s not a satisfying answer,” she said, according to the paper’s music blog. “We are constrained by the law. The overlap that we found was in ticketing. That’s why the remedy rests in ticketing.”
The paper also reported that Varney urged the audience to tell the Justice Department if the behavioral remedies were working. “We’re talking to bands, managers, promoters, a lot of people, understanding how our proposed consent decree is working, not working,” Varney said. “But the only way we know if it’s working is to hear from you.”
Read that story here.
‘Kabletown’ Swallows NBC
The NBC sitcom 30 Rock continued its spoof on Comcast Corp.’s bid to takeover NBC Universal on Thursday, with a fictional Philadelphia-based company called “Kabletown” as a stand-in for Comcast. Last week’s episode debuted the cable giant as a “fine and generous company.” This Thursday night’s episode wasn’t quite as charitable. Kabletown, it turned out, gets 91 percent of its profits from pay-per-view pornography and was buying NBC as a tax write-off.
Watch the episode here.
