I'm not a big fan of boycotts, but if you can avoid buying Nike, Best Buy, Levi Strauss and Target stuff, you might help stop their support of the global warming scam.

Crony capitalism is a stepping-stone to socialism. The term is used to describe the unholy, anti-citizen alliances between corporations and big government. These kinds of companies generally engage in massive lobbying efforts (read: backscratching) to coerce government into various taxpayer-funded schemes:

• by paying them directly through government purchases...
• by carving out market segments for them through regulation...
• and otherwise increasing profit margins by suppressing the free market.

With this as our context, let's examine The American Spectator's article entitled "What Do Nike, Best Buy, Levi Strauss and Target Have in Common?".

They all support EPA efforts to regulate greenhouse gases, even though that circumvents the citizens' right to have their elected representatives make U.S. laws. More on the Obama Administration overreach and his crony corporatists support at the National Legal and Policy Center blog today.

Heading over to the NLPC, we can discover the sordid details.

Earlier this month corporate climateers including Nike and 3M were given awards -- supposedly "the equivalent of an Oscar for the climate change mitigation world" -- for their efforts to reduce their carbon emissions... Nike also co-signed a letter to President Obama that called for U.S. leadership in an initiative to create and finance the Global Climate Fund, which was established at the UN climate talks in Cancun in early December.

Other members of [this group include] Levi Strauss & Co., Starbucks, Timberland, Best Buy, Ben & Jerry's, eBay, Gap Inc., The North Face, and Target Corporation. Mark them down as corporations who favor the circumvention of the peoples' right to have their elected representatives make U.S. laws.

Carbon dioxide is plant food. It can no more be a pollutant than water vapor or oxygen. The Marxist Left progressives believe, or want us to think they believe, that capping CO2 emissions can act as a thermostat on the climate.

The reality is quite different. Trying to control carbon dioxide is a money-making scam and it has been since the original IPCC reports that were issued by folks poised to make millions through inherent conflicts-of-interest.

Companies that feed this government-run monstrosity should be treated as the anti-free market pariahs they are.

Image: Fox News.

Facebook's 3rd Biggest Advertiser Accused Of Being Affiliate Toolbar Scam; Facebook Says It's Never Heard Of The Company

from the just-like-the-old-days... dept

There have been numerous reports lately concerning just how much money Facebook is making on ads. That's part of the reason it was able to get that otherworldly $50 billion valuation from some. However, some are noticing something fishy in the Facebook ad business. After seeing an AdAge article mention in passing that the third largest advertiser on Facebook is not a household namebrand, but rather Make-My-Baby.com. Google's spam-catcher-in-chief Matt Cutts did some digging and quickly noticed that the site appears to be a sketchy toolbar installer that tries to switch you to using Bing, and then it gets an affiliate cut of any search ads you click on going forward. Cutts also points out that the URL to tell you how to uninstall the toolbar leads to a 404 page not found -- and many folks have had difficulty uninstalling the toolbar.

Marshall Kirkpatrick, over at ReadWriteWeb, digs in deeper and wonders if anyone at Facebook or Microsoft is actually minding the store. Even if they didn't directly know this was happening, if this is really the third largest advertiser on Facebook, both of those companies had to know something was up, just based on the numbers. A company like Facebook is intimately aware of its third biggest advertiser, and if the company is really driving that much traffic to Bing, then Microsoft would surely know about it as well.

Of course, this is where the story gets more bizarre. While Microsoft's response to this story was to cut off the company, Facebook's response was to claim that the company isn't an advertiser at all, let alone the third largest advertiser on the site. So how is it that reports suggest the company is the third largest advertiser, when Facebook claims they're not an advertiser at all? The company does have a slight hedge, by saying that "any affiliates that try to push people there we would shut down." So it's possible that it was hidden through some sort of affiliate setup before Facebook caught it -- but no one seems to be revealing any of the details.

Either way, all of this sounds quite reminiscent of the old adware days, where all sorts of sketchy companies would trick people into installing software to scrape up affiliate revenue. We hadn't seen much of that lately, as many of the old players eventually got wiped out, but it's hardly a surprise that similar schemes would quickly jump up in a Facebook world, whether or not it was officially through Facebook's advertising functionality.

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Monday, January 24, 2011

Making Money Scam

Facebook's 3rd Biggest Advertiser Accused Of Being Affiliate Toolbar Scam; Facebook Says It's Never Heard Of The Company

from the just-like-the-old-days... dept

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