ExclusiveAmazon Fights Against US States' Efforts to Ban Chinese Tech: Report | Business Matters (May 21)

Now for your business matters. The rich are getting richer. The 10 most wealthy Americans collected $365 billion over the past year, or $1 billion per day. Analysts from Oxfam compared the estimated wealth shifts of the top people on Forbes' real-time billionaire list from April 2024 through April of this year. Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, collected more than half of the total. He added $186 billion to his accounts. Others who saw their net worth increase by more than $30 billion each include meta head Mark Zuckerberg, Walmart heir Rob Walton, and investor Warren Buffett. Oxfam says the average U.S. worker earned just above $50,000 in 2023. Southwest has become the first U.S. carrier to roll out a new lithium battery policy. Starting next week, travelers will have to keep their power banks and portable charging devices in plain sight while on board. In a statement, the airline described the new rule as a first in the industry safety policy. A Southwest rep explained that if the battery overheats or catches fire, it could be put out faster this way. There have been an increased number of incidents of power banks catching fire during some flights. Some international carriers have similar rules in place, but the FAA currently does not require batteries to be separate from carry-on bags. The leaders of nine major U.S. airlines want Congress to take action to fix the air traffic control system. The airline's CEO wrote a letter to Congress saying, quote, serious upgrades need to happen now. The letter notes a shortage of air traffic controllers and inefficient operations are eroding safety. CEOs did praise the Department of Transportation's plan to upgrade air traffic control systems across the country. The airline's plea to Congress comes after a series of high-profile outages and delays caused by telecommunication problems and staffing shortages at air traffic control facilities. Next, coffee-loving travelers will please listen up. Duncan has partnered with Jet Blue Airlines and created this Duncan-themed airplane. The Brewing Altitude was unveiled last week at Boston Logan International Airport. Travelers were welcomed with Dunkin' Donuts and coffee to celebrate the Airbus A320's new paint job. Passengers on the celebration flight also received free Dunkin' coffee for one month. The unofficial Memorial Day weekend travel period starts tomorrow. AAA predicts more than three and a half million passengers will get on a plane between then and Monday. Those flights come as U.S. Transportation Department is moving to overhaul the nation's air traffic control system. Issues across the country are under scrutiny after outages at Newark's airport. Here's a closer look at the new FAA policy ahead of the holiday weekend. People would be surprised to learn that Newark's not alone. The FAA is reducing the number of flights at Newark Liberty International Airport by about 25 percent. Its new order limits them to 28 arrivals and 28 departures per hour for now. Those numbers are set to rise to 34 when some daily runway construction ends. The changes come as many Americans are preparing for Memorial Day weekend and the unofficial start of summer. But holiday travel isn't the reason for the new limit. They follow weeks of flight delays and multiple air traffic control outages. This system as a whole is is extremely fragile. It's it's aged to the point now we're starting to see widespread failures. Experts say aging equipment is part of the problem at Newark and other airports across the country. Most Americans today walk around with more computing power in their pocket than air traffic controllers have at the ready. Air traffic controllers say staffing shortages are another concern. One who's on trauma leave from Newark says his team was stretched thin during last month's outage. Pushing people beyond their limits is not good business period. Such revelations might make some passengers nervous but experts say they shouldn't be. If you break it down uh you know flying versus taking a train taking a boat driving your car down the street statistically it's the safest mode of transportation. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang praised President Trump's move to do away with some of the Biden administration's chip export curves. Speaking in Taiwan at the yearly Computex conference he said the Biden rules cost his and other U.S. companies billions of dollars in sales. According to NBC he said the moves were too restrictive to U.S. chips in China and therefore created the opportunity for Chinese companies to fill in the gaps. Biden had said his restrictions were necessary to keep China from developing its chip technology. NBC reports Huang saying NVIDIA controlled 95% of the Chinese market at the beginning of the Biden administration compared with just 50% today. The Trump administration said it plans to remove some of the Biden restrictions and place them replace them with their own. While U.S. and China relations eased up over tariff negotiations things have quickly heated back up again. Now Beijing is lashing out over Washington's warnings to tech companies about using A.I. chips made by Huawei. And today's Sean Marshall has more details. Just last week China started criticizing a new rule against using a standard computer chips made by Huawei technologies anywhere in the world. They accuse the Trump administration of undermining agreements reached during recent trade talks in Geneva. An agreement to temporarily roll back tariffs and use a 90 day window to piece together a more wide reaching deal. The vast complexity of China U.S. relations shows its head in the conflict over Huawei's most advanced chips and serves as a reality check. Despite positive words shared by negotiators last week China's commerce ministry fired its latest shot at the U.S. and accusing it of abusing export controls to suppress and contain China and engaging in what it called typical acts of unilateral bullying and protectionism. China was responding to the Trump administration's announcement last week rescinding a set of Biden era curbs meant to keep A.I. chips out of the hands of foreign adversaries. As part of a Trump administration announcement last week the U.S. commerce department issued guidance on May 12th warning companies that using Huawei Ascend chips anywhere in the world would violate U.S. export controls. The department has since changed its wording to remove the reference of anywhere in the world in an updated version of the statement. Sean Marshall State lawmakers say Amazon is pushing back against efforts to block Chinese made tech from government offices. In Tennessee and Texas lawmakers are considering bills that would ban state agencies from buying products linked to Chinese companies. The Washington Examiner recently reported that Amazon which sells many of those items is lobbying hard to stop the legislation. But state lawmakers say the tech giant hasn't offered clear reasons for its opposition. In Tennessee state congressman Mark Cochran says Amazon has flooded the process with vague objections and questionable amendments while staying silent on specifics. Amazon has invested heavily in the state and employs tens of thousands there giving it significant political clout. But lawmakers say the public deserves answers if Amazon wants to protect Chinese linked goods in U.S. government offices. Amazon did not respond to the Washington Examiner's request for comment. Optimism coming from Stanley Morgan. The investment bank has turned bullish on most U.S. assets with one exception. The worst appears to be over. According to Morgan Stanley U.S. assets are expected to broadly outperform the rest of the world. The investment bank has turned bullish on most major U.S. assets. It upgraded its stance on stocks and treasuries to overweight. Morgan Stanley explained that these assets are getting a boost from reduced tariff uncertainty no chance of a recession and room for more rate cuts. As a result the financial services firm expects U.S. corporate earning revisions to reach their lowest points soon. But it's not all optimism for the Wall Street brokerage. It expects the dollar to remain under pressure. The dollar index is already down eight percent so far this year. Morgan Stanley is forecasting another nine percent drop over the next 12 months. It believes the dollar's weakness will be most pronounced against its safe haven peers the euro the Japanese yen and the Swiss franc. Next sunscreen is getting exposed. A health research organization found that many sunscreen products failed to fully protect. The environmental working group has published its annual guide to sunscreens. The organization tested more than 2,200 products. It found fewer than 500 effectively protect the user's skin. The guide warned that many products fall short due to misleading claims about protection and outdated formulas as well as some products using ingredients with potential health concerns. The group says it group tells consumers not to fall for high SPF labels stick to lotions over sprays and use products with EWG verified mark. Luxury brand Dior has agreed to pay 2.3 million dollars as part of a settlement of a labor probe by Italian antitrust officials. Dior was accused of using subcontractors suspected of mistreating their workers. The settlement also calls on Dior to improve supply chain transparency and oversight of labor practices. As part of the deal antitrust officials are closing their investigation without establishing any infringement. More than two million dollars will fund initiatives to identify and support labor exploitation victims. Italian antitrust officials are continuing a probe of Armani over similar allegations. And a ransomware attack has triggered a system-wide technology outage at a network of over a dozen medical centers in Ohio. In a statement Kettering Health said the cyber attack hit Tuesday morning creating a number of challenges at the network's 14 medical centers and its call center. Officials say emergency rooms and clinics are open and seeing patients but the attack has caused the cancellation of elective inpatient and outpatient procedures. Kettering Health serves a large portion of Ohio and employs more than 1,800 doctors. Burger King is sinking its teeth into its family first marketing strategy with the help of the Dragon Toothless. The restaurant brand's international chain is offering menu items inspired by the new live action remake of How to Train Your Dragon. The collaboration is part of Burger King's broad turnaround strategy to lift U.S. sales. Burger King's president says the fast food chain has made some progress with its family first marketing strategy. Movie collaborations with fast food chains are not a new idea. Burger King was actually one of the first to do a movie tie-in with Star Wars. How to Train Your Dragon hits theaters on June 13th while the new menu items will be available starting on Tuesday. Next it's out with the old and in with the new at Google. The search giant on Tuesday laying out its vision for the future of searching the web. This comes as Google works to compete with chatbots like ChatGPT and other search engines fueled by artificial intelligence. The company said the search engine will no longer just process keywords. They're adding so-called digital agents that can crawl the web and answer questions based on a person's real world surroundings, tastes, and preferences. Google did not say when the updates would take effect. Next Ticketmaster's parent company Live Nation has added Richard Grinnell to its board of directors. Grinnell is one of President Trump's advisors and was recently appointed president of the Kennedy Center. This comes as Live Nation is fighting an antitrust battle against the Justice Department. Prosecutors claim the company abused its concert industry dominance and should be broken up. Critics say Live Nation installed Grinnell to help it fend off the suit. The company disputes that and says Grinnell's career experience will help support its mission to bring more live music to the world. Some local film studios in Atlanta are welcoming President Trump's recent proposal of 100% tariffs on movies made outside the U.S. Trump said the U.S. movie industry was dying a very fast death due to the financial perks foreign governments have been offering filmmakers. There is some truth to that according to members of the film industry in Atlanta, Georgia last week including Crystal Carroll, director of operations at West End Production Park. Spider-Man when they leased the building, Spider-Man used his elevator shaft and did his cool tricks and things like that. Marvel's Avengers Endgame and Netflix's Ozark and Stranger Things all did some filming at West End according to their website. Carroll says she's seen production slip away firsthand as major studios film abroad to capitalize on incentives. Canada and I've lost them to Vancouver or Mexico. As we're waiting to get word back of where they're going to go then I get the final word that oh crystal I'm sorry they're going to go elsewhere out of the country because they're saving money. We're hoping that with the tariffs it will just bring the productions back to Georgia and let us compete amongst each other not internationally. Elon Brooks who owns a small studio also in Atlanta says he sees long-term gains in Trump's tariff proposal. Right now Malta is taking in so much of our production business and other countries that are offering these kinds of deals because the labor is cheaper, the locations are cheaper, there's just a lot of incentives across the board. The industry now relies on a global supply chain with shoots in Europe, post-production hubs in Canada and visual effects teams spread across Southeast Asia. Kate Fortmuller a Georgia State University associate professor of film worries other countries may retaliate against U.S. movies. Hollywood's a global industry. It's always been a global industry. It depends on global audiences. It depends on global labor. Historically Hollywood has been known for taking directors from other countries in the 30s and the 40s using right Germany had a great industry so let's take some German stars and directors and have them work for Hollywood. So it has always been global and it becomes very hard to disentangle that from its identity. She says films shot overseas are an intangible product a service not physical goods and so applying a traditional goods tariff on a service industry is also problematic. Fortnite is back on iPhones and iPads. Apple reinstated the popular video game five years after it was banned due to a legal battle. In 2020 Fortnite's developer Epic Games sued Apple over its requirement that users use Apple's payment system for in-app purchases which takes fees up to 30 percent. The fight over Apple's App Store policies is ongoing but on Monday a federal judge called on Apple to return Fortnite to the App Store or prove it had a legal basis for not doing so. On Tuesday Epic Games and Apple signed a joint statement to the court saying they resolved the dispute for now. Next a legal matter linked to Darth Vader has emerged in a galaxy that isn't so far far away. The SAG-AFTRA labor union has filed an unfair labor practice charge against the production company of Fortnite. This came after an announcement from the The company said the AI powered use of late actor James Earl Jones's voice was done after consulting with the actor's estate. But the union claims Fortnite's use of Jones's famous Darth Vader voice is an infringement on its right to negotiate changes to its collective bargaining deal. SAG-AFTRA says the AI voice prevents the hiring of real living actors. Next the Chinese regime is using social media more to bolster its image. This while slandering the US and groups that it's persecuting. Google is taking action to disrupt these YouTube accounts and others. Our data reporter Kevin Hogan has more on this story. Kevin, why is the Chinese Communist Party doing this and how prevalent is it? Party or CCP has at least two objectives. One, displace the United States as the world's leading superpower and two, persecute a group, a spiritual group in China. So that's part of the reason why it uses these influence operations and that's across platforms like YouTube. So we're going to delve into this and we see that YouTube has a policing group called Tag that has disbanded or disrupted almost 200,000 of these these groups that there's called the Dragon Bridge accounts. This is influence operation network that's tied back to the CCP. So that is a very big number and that's with from 2022 up until the first quarter of this year. So when you look at the data and you start to see how this trend is evolving, back in 2022 Google knocked down about 50,000 of these Dragon Bridge accounts but that has only gone up to over 60,000. So as you can see that trend is rising. So at the same time you say okay well it's bad that the CCP is using YouTube to spread its lies while Google here is doing the work to knock those down. Some good news though is that a lot of these accounts people just view them as trolls so they don't get much traction right but at the same time research from Rutgers suggests that YouTube has a pro-China bias as it and China analysts have said that there's even bloggers that go around parroting the propaganda lines of the current Chinese regime leader and then YouTube these analysts say promotes and shares and recommends those exact same kind of videos. So that's just a little bit of evidence to that point. Now in 2025 we only have Google's data for the first quarter but that's almost 20,000 accounts that they've knocked down just in the beginning of this year. So they could be on track to break a record this year again it's still a trend is rising but when you look at the monthly data for Google's policing analytics group that shows that 11,000 more than 11,000 of those those Dragon Bridge accounts have been taken down in just one month. So that right there is a monthly record so it just shows that the CCP is being more aggressive more active at pushing out these propaganda accounts. So back to one of the goals that we mentioned about how the CCP is persecuting a spiritual group in China here's how that works. So the CCP uses YouTube an American company to export its repression internationally of Falun Gong and a lot some of these Falun Gong members are or adherents are dancers within Shen Yun that's a performing arts group that tries to bring awareness to the persecution that's happening for over 25 years now in China at the hands of the CCP. So Valendafa Information Center has cited whistleblowers that show that the CCP's objective is to smear Shen Yun and Falun Gong again to keep justifying their persecution. Shen Yun sheds a light on that exact horrific or horrible human rights abuses that are happening inside China. So it's not just these troll accounts that are made on YouTube for that sole purpose of spreading propaganda what the CCP also does is they go to Western influencers people with big followings and they try to entice them to share their propaganda materials. I'll give you an example of that Tim Pool he's an American commentator he was given an you know an email from some unknown sender saying here's $200 just share this video disparaging Falun Gong. He didn't do it he wouldn't take the money he said what is this I'm not doing that. So that's just one of the examples of how the CCP is using a more sophisticated method of using YouTube to spread its lies and so our China analyst David Zhang he's the host of China Insider with David Zhang he puts a spotlight on this here's what he says he says the CCP has manipulated the public opinion space especially on YouTube in the past two three years to really focus on using foreign faces and not people from China to try to legitimize their claims. So this is happening and people who use YouTube or a blogger they need to be very vigilant to make sure that the content they're consuming is not procured by paid propagandists. Back to you.