basquebromance
Diamond Member
- Nov 26, 2015
- 109,396
- 27,066
- 2,220
- Banned
- #1
i wish he were president
www.politico.com
excerpts:
“It started with tuna,” explains Congressman Ken Buck, when asked why he doesn’t use Google.
Buck, 62, is a four-term Republican who represents the ranching country of eastern Colorado, and he was recalling a time 30-odd years ago when he learned that dolphins were being killed in Japanese tuna fisheries’ drift nets. It stuck in his brain, he says, until one day he was getting a bite to eat at the deli. On the spot, he decided: Unless it was the more sustainable albacore variety, no more tuna for him. That day he got the chicken salad instead
What followed was a series of personal boycotts: He opted to drive a Ford after GM and Chrysler took federal bailout money; he cut the Nike logo out of his favorite shorts over Colin Kaepernick.
“When I see something that I consider an injustice, I just don’t buy the product,” says Buck, sitting behind his desk in the Rayburn House Office Building. He wore a dark, lightly checked suit, his gray hair cropped close; he dipped into his oatmeal breakfast from the House carryout, a “Make America Great Again” hat on the shelf behind him.
For the past nearly two years, Buck has been staging, or trying to stage, a one-person Capitol Hill boycott of a set of companies most of Washington would find it nearly impossible to give up: Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Twitter. Those corporations, he argues, use their incredible power to unfairly crush small competitors, abuse users’ privacy for profit, indulge the Chinese government with impunity and censor conservatives. (The companies, of course, deny doing any of those things.)
Buck has called on his Republican colleagues to swear off taking campaign contributions from those companies. But Buck is personally taking things a bit further. He doesn’t search the web with Google, he says. He directs his staff not to order from Amazon. He doesn’t use Facebook, even to communicate with family. “If they want to talk to me, they call,” he says. It is, says Buck, a “conscience thing.”
Joe Biden’s Washington is right now grappling with what to do about the American tech industry, and this summer Buck’s own subcommittee approved a sweeping set of bipartisan bills aimed at reining in the big four, as they’re known. (Twitter, a much smaller company than the others, largely escapes antitrust scrutiny.) Buck is optimistic that at least some of them will become law, but in the meantime, he’s waging what he calls “my little personal protest.”
The Congressman Who Doesn’t Use Google
Is it possible to swear off the tech giants and still function in the Capitol? Ken Buck is trying to find out.
www.politico.com
excerpts:
“It started with tuna,” explains Congressman Ken Buck, when asked why he doesn’t use Google.
Buck, 62, is a four-term Republican who represents the ranching country of eastern Colorado, and he was recalling a time 30-odd years ago when he learned that dolphins were being killed in Japanese tuna fisheries’ drift nets. It stuck in his brain, he says, until one day he was getting a bite to eat at the deli. On the spot, he decided: Unless it was the more sustainable albacore variety, no more tuna for him. That day he got the chicken salad instead
What followed was a series of personal boycotts: He opted to drive a Ford after GM and Chrysler took federal bailout money; he cut the Nike logo out of his favorite shorts over Colin Kaepernick.
“When I see something that I consider an injustice, I just don’t buy the product,” says Buck, sitting behind his desk in the Rayburn House Office Building. He wore a dark, lightly checked suit, his gray hair cropped close; he dipped into his oatmeal breakfast from the House carryout, a “Make America Great Again” hat on the shelf behind him.
For the past nearly two years, Buck has been staging, or trying to stage, a one-person Capitol Hill boycott of a set of companies most of Washington would find it nearly impossible to give up: Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Twitter. Those corporations, he argues, use their incredible power to unfairly crush small competitors, abuse users’ privacy for profit, indulge the Chinese government with impunity and censor conservatives. (The companies, of course, deny doing any of those things.)
Buck has called on his Republican colleagues to swear off taking campaign contributions from those companies. But Buck is personally taking things a bit further. He doesn’t search the web with Google, he says. He directs his staff not to order from Amazon. He doesn’t use Facebook, even to communicate with family. “If they want to talk to me, they call,” he says. It is, says Buck, a “conscience thing.”
Joe Biden’s Washington is right now grappling with what to do about the American tech industry, and this summer Buck’s own subcommittee approved a sweeping set of bipartisan bills aimed at reining in the big four, as they’re known. (Twitter, a much smaller company than the others, largely escapes antitrust scrutiny.) Buck is optimistic that at least some of them will become law, but in the meantime, he’s waging what he calls “my little personal protest.”
