| Experian Consumer Direct With FamilySecure.com Sponsors the Joyful ...
IRVINE, Calif., Oct. 15 /PRNewswire/ -- Experian Consumer Direct(SM), the leading provider of online direct-to-consumer credit reports, scores and monitoring products including FamilySecure.com, today announced its support of The Joyful Feast, a fundraising event designed to celebrate The Joyful Child Foundation's accomplishments and raise funds to expand its efforts to prevent predatory crimes against children. The event takes place Oct. 24 at 6 p.m. at The Grove of Anaheim, Calif. and features a live, half-hour acoustic performance by Grammy-winning artist Cyndi Lauper. The Joyful Child Foundation is a nonprofit, for public benefit organization dedicated to preventing child sexual abuse and abduction through programs that unite and uplift communities. The foundation was inspired by the life of Samantha Runnion, whose life was cut short after being abducted in front of her Orange County, Calif.
Chartered to protect the henhouse, has the FTC turned into a fox?
I rarely get e-mail from the USA Today's Byron Acohido (who from time to time interviews me for my opinions on tech). But today, Acohido drew my attention to a story that he has co-authored with Jon Swartz under the headline FTC under fire as credit bureaus sell consumers' data. The story draws attention to a complex Web of potentially conflicting interests involving Federal Trade Commission Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras, the law firm she used to work for, her husband who still works for it, how that law firm represents one of the big three credit reporting bureaus, and whether or not the FTC has morphed into an agent of the credit reporting bureaus' success from the consumer guardian that The People have entrusted it to be. While the targets of this follow-the-money like inquest deny any impropriety, I can certainly understand the position of Robert Kuttner, author of The Squandering of America: How the Failure of Our Politics Undermines Our Prosperity who, who in response to the USA Today inquiry, said: Federal agencies that are supposed to be looking out for the consumer are really protecting the companies that do bad things the agencies were set up to prevent.
Slippery slope of sledging
Few adages are more blatantly fallacious than the old refrain that tells us all bullies are cowards at heart. Many are, of course, but for some the aggression and the urge to dominate maliciously are such raging constants in their natures that they would shout threats down the barrels of a firing squad. It is only in second-rate fiction that bold confrontation is guaranteed to make the bully dissolve into a puddle of insecurity. Yet, obviously, the tendency to hound and abuse others is most likely to flourish when the prospect of retribution is minimal. And those are certainly the circumstances that encouraged the sledging controversy now engulfing the Indian cricket team’s tour of Australia and spreading anxiety about standards of sportsmanship to every country involved in the game.
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