US Justice Department and eleven states file antitrust lawsuit against Google
The US Department of Justice (DoJ)—supported by eleven state Attorneys General—filed its long-anticipated lawsuit against Google on Tuesday and charged the online search monopoly with violations of antitrust laws.
The 64-page DoJ lawsuit was filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia and says that Google is guilty of, “unlawfully maintaining monopolies in the markets for general search services, search advertising, and general search text advertising in the United States through anticompetitive and exclusionary practices.”
The essential argument of the lawsuit is that Google has used illegal business practices—such as exclusive agreements with tech partners like Apple to preinstall its search products on mobile devices—to effectively block competition and secure the company 90 percent of all internet search queries in the US.
The lawsuit is expected to go on for years. According to the Washington Post, the case is “likely to be a lengthy, bruising legal fight between Washington and Silicon Valley.” The company rejected the claims of the government as “deeply flawed,” saying that the US public has the choice to use competitive search products.
Although the DoJ suit says that it is seeking “to remedy the effects of this conduct” by Google, it does not spell out specifically what measures must be taken to do so. In its concluding section under the title “Request for Relief,” the DoJ asks the court for generalities such as “structural relief as needed to cure any competitive harm,” “enjoin Google from continuing to engage in the anticompetitive practices,” “restore competitive conditions in the markets affected by Google’s conduct” and “any additional relief that the Court finds just and proper.”
The federal lawsuit was joined by the Attorneys General—all Republicans—from the states of Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, South Carolina, and Texas.
In presenting the lawsuit, Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen said, “As with its historic antitrust actions against AT&T in 1974 and Microsoft in 1998, the Department is again enforcing the Sherman Act to restore the role of competition and open the door to the next wave of innovation—this time in vital digital markets.”
Attorney General William Barr issued a statement which accompanied the lawsuit and fraudulently claimed the case was filed on behalf of “the American consumer.” It is clear that the timing of the action by the DoJ is directly connected to populist posturing by President Trump in advance of the elections in three weeks. Barr claimed he was on the lookout for the “massive concentration of economic power in the digital economy” represented by Google—as well as the other tech giants such as Apple, Facebook and Twitter—as harmful to “users, advertisers, and small businesses.”
Barr reviewed how Google “no longer competes only on the merits but instead uses its monopoly power—and billions in monopoly profits—to lock up key pathways to search on mobile phones, browsers, and next generation devices, depriving rivals of distribution and scale.” There is something laughable about Attorney General Barr—the lapdog of billionaire President Donald Trump and defender of the capitalist system and US imperialism—spouting off about “billions in monopoly profits” being made by Google.
Barr also said that the antitrust lawsuit is “separate and distinct” from the “content moderation and political censorship issues” that are being taken up by the DoJ in other initiatives “including by advocating for Section 230 legislative reforms.”
Barr had previously submitted language to Congress that would strip social media companies of their Section 230 protections—a provision in US law that grants online service providers immunity from prosecution arising from content posted on their platforms by users—if their content moderation polices are determined by the DoJ to be violating free speech rights.
Finally, Barr also made reference to the DoJ’s lawsuit against Microsoft in 1998 and claimed that the case was responsible for “increased competition” that “enabled Google to grow from a small start-up to an Internet behemoth.”
However, what Barr and Rosen failed to mention was that the initial ruling against Microsoft was overturned in 2001 in exchange for minor adjustments in its business practices, such as sharing its application programming interfaces (APIs) with third party companies. In the end, Microsoft neither unbundled anything from its domination of personal computing nor was it “broken up” into separate operating system and desktop application companies.
Sen Kamala Harris is a product of Silicon Valley's billionaires and will enforce their agenda in DC.Eg, she's an author of the S.386 bill that allows the Fortune 500 to hire more white-collar workers from India for jobs needed by America's college grads https://t.co/gKCuD9DH5z
— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) August 12, 2020
Wall Street Praises Kamala Harris as Joe Biden’s VP: ‘What’s Not to Like?’
AP Photo/Richard Drew
13 Aug 2020996
4:20
Wall Street executives are praising Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden’s choosing Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) as his running mate against President Trump, feeling they dodged a bullet from a progressive insurgency.
In interviews with the Wall Street Journal, CNBC, and Bloomberg, executives on Wall Street expressed relief that Biden picked Harris for vice president on the Democrat ticket, calling her a “normal Democrat” who is a “safe” choice for the financial industry.
Morgan Stanley Vice Chairman Tom Nides told Bloomberg that across Wall Street, Harris joining Biden “was exceptionally well-received.”
“How damn cool is it that a Black woman is considered the safe and conventional candidate,” Nides said.
Peter Soloman, the founder of a multinational investment banking firm, told Bloomberg he believes Harris is “a great pick” because she is “safe, balanced, a woman, diverse, what’s not to like?”
As the Journal notes, many on Wall Street see Harris is another conscious decision by the Democrat establishment to stave off populist priorities to reform Wall Street:
To some Wall Street executives, Ms. Harris’s selection signals a more moderate shift for the Democratic Party, which its progressive flank has pushed to the left in recent years. [Emphasis added]
“While Kamala is a forceful, passionate and eloquent standard-bearer for the aspirations of all Americans, regardless of their race, gender or age, she is not doctrinaire or rigid,” said Brad Karp, chairman of law firm Paul Weiss, who co-led a committee of lawyers across the country who supported Ms. Harris during the primary. [Emphasis added]
Marc Lasry, CEO of Avenue Capital Group, called Harris a “great” pick for Biden. “She’s going to help Joe immensely. He picked the perfect partner,” Lasry told CNBC.
Executives at Citigroup and Centerview Partners made similar comments about Harris to CNBC and the Journal, calling her a “great choice” and “direct but constructive.”
Founder of financial consulting firm Kynikos Associates Jim Chanos was elated in an interview with Bloomberg over Harris joining Biden on the Democrat ticket:
“She’s terrific,” said Chanos, founder of Kynikos Associates. “She’s got force of personality in a good way. She takes over a room. She certainly has a charisma and a presence which will be an asset on the campaign.” [Emphasis added]
Harris is no stranger to praise from Wall Street executives. In the 2019 Democrat presidential primary, Harris won over a number of financial industry donors, even holding a fundraiser in Iowa that was backed by Goldman Sachs Group, Inc.
While criticizing “the people who have the most” in Democrat primary debates, Harris raked in thousands in campaign cash from financial executives from firms such as the Blackstone Group, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and Wells Fargo.
This month, the New York Times admitted the “wallets of Wall Street are with Joe Biden” in a gushing headline about the financial industry’s opposition to Trump:
Financial industry cash flowing to Mr. Biden and outside groups supporting him shows him dramatically out-raising the president, with $44 million compared with Mr. Trump’s $9 million.
Harris’s views on trade and immigration, two of the most consequential issues to Wall Street, are in lockstep with financial executives’ objective to grow profit margins and add consumers to the market.
On trade, Harris has balked at Trump’s imposition of tariffs on foreign imports from China, Mexico, Canada, and Europe — using the neoliberal argument that tariffs should not be used to pressure foreign countries to buy more American-made goods and serve as only a tax on taxpayers.
Likewise, the Biden-Harris plan for national immigration policy — which seeks to drive up legal and illegal immigration levels to their highest levels in decades — offers a flooded labor market with low wages for U.S. workers and increased bargaining power for big business that has long been supported by Wall Street.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
KAMALA HARRIS STATE OF CALIFORNIA
UNDER TECH-OPPRESSION AND SUPRESSION
In truth, the Golden State is becoming a semi-feudal kingdom, with the nation’s widest gap between middle and upper incomes—72 percent, compared with the U.S. average of 57 percent—and its highest poverty rate. Roughly half of America’s homeless live in Los Angeles or San Francisco, which now has the highest property crime rate among major cities.
“Open border advocates, such as Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, claim illegal aliens are a net benefit to California with little evidence to support such an assertion. As the CIS has documented, the vast majority of illegals are poor, uneducated, and with few skills. How does accepting millions of illegal aliens and then granting them access to dozens of welfare programs benefit California’s economy? If illegals were contributing to the economy in any meaningful way, CA, with its 2.6 million illegals, would be booming.” STEVE BALDWIN – AMERICAN SPECTATOR
While America’s working and middle class have been subjected to compete for jobs against a constant flow of cheaper foreign workers — where more than 1.2 million mostly low-skilled immigrants are admitted to the country annually — the billionaire class has experienced historic salary gains." Sen. Josh Hawley
Analysis conducted last year reveal that 71 percent of tech workers in Silicon Valley are foreign-born, while the tech industry in the San Francisco, Oakland, and Hayward area is made up of 50 percent foreign-born tech workers.
"This is how they will destroy America from within. The leftist billionaires who orchestrate these plans are wealthy. Those tasked with representing us in Congress will never be exposed to the cost of the invasion of millions of migrants. They have nothing but contempt for those of us who must endure the consequences of our communities being intruded upon by gang members, drug dealers and human traffickers. These people have no intention of becoming Americans; like the Democrats who welcome them, they have contempt for us." PATRICIA McCARTHY
“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of today.”
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
The Biden Crisis
If you want to know why early voting stinks, the burgeoning Biden crisis should inform you. Estimates are that about 50 million Americans have voted, as of this writing. That’s before or as the gravest scandal in the history of presidential politics unfolds.
The allegations against Joe Biden are stunning. They involve corruption and the risk of treason. Influence-peddling with the Chinese, Russians, and Ukrainians, to the tune of multimillions of dollars pocketed by Biden and his family. The PRC, Putin, and others appear to have the goods on Biden. That makes the former vice president subject to blackmail.
At Thursday night’s presidential debate, NBC News’ Kristin Welker asked one softball question of Biden about the burgeoning scandal:
“Vice President Biden, there have been questions about the work your son has done in China and for a Ukrainian energy company when you were vice president. In retrospect, was anything about those relationships inappropriate or unethical?”
Biden responded, “Nothing was unethical.”
But the evidence of Biden’s treachery is trickling in, thanks to Hunter Biden’s laptop and the emails and texts of associates. If voters elect Joe Biden president, the nation lurches toward an unprecedented mega-crisis, the outcome of which is unpredictable, but most certainly hazardous to the nation’s health.
The latest explosive allegation is from a former Hunter Biden colleague, a guy named Tony Bobulinski. From the Epoch Times, October 22, 2020:
The email published by the Post details “remuneration packages” for several Hunter Biden associates, including “850” for Hunter Biden and “500,000” for “James,” an apparent reference to James Biden, the brother of former Vice President Joe Biden.
The message, written by Hunter Biden associate James Gilliar on May 13, 2017, goes on to detail “a provisional agreement that the equity be distributed as follows:
20 H
20 RW
20JG
20 TB
10 Jim
10 held by H for the big guy?”
Bobulinski said that the “big guy” in the email was a reference to Joe Biden, the current Democratic presidential nominee, while the “Jim” referred to James Biden, Joe Biden’s brother.
Imagine this horror show: On January 20, 2021, Joe Biden places his hand on a bible and is sworn in as the nation’s 46th president. But the evidence of wrongdoing continues to mount and is irrefutable. President Biden is terribly compromised. The Chinese, at will, can drop the most incriminating evidence of payoffs on an American president. The stakes for the U.S. are high. At risk: the status of the South China Sea as international waters, Taiwan’s independence, and trade protection for U.S. businesses and workers. Otherwise, America’s ability to work with and promote U.S. interests in concert with its allies and friends throughout Asia and across the globe -- destroyed.
Never before in U.S. history have we had a prospective president in such jeopardy. President Bill Clinton, to anyone’s knowledge, was never compromised in this way with America’s enemies -- and yes, the PRC is really a U.S. enemy. Putin, who’s no friend, doesn’t pose the existential threat to the U.S. that Xi Jinping does. Putin is principally an oligarch, seeking to enrich himself and his allies, seeking opportunities to gain leverage in that quest. Both are dangers to a vulnerable President Biden, but China is far worse.
While conservative news and alternative media outlets intrepidly expose Biden’s corruption and compromise, the mainstream media not only buries revelations of Biden’s perfidy, they dismiss honest efforts by the New York Post, Fox News, and others to get to the truth. Whatever the mainstream media’s sins, this will prove to be their greatest betrayal of a free press’s mission: root out wrongdoing wherever it’s found – particularly in the highest places -- inform citizens, and speak truth to power. When the full extent and depth of Biden’s corruption are understood by Americans, the mainstream news media will suffer a mortal wound.
Big Tech, which has been censoring conservatives
on its platforms in the runup to the elections, has
famously shutdown the New York Post’s coverage
of Biden family corruption. There’s been
blowback from conservatives, and Senate
Republicans have voted to subpoena Jack Dorsey
(Twitter) and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)
to testify before Congress about their innocuously
named “content-moderation practices.”
Both social media giants -- and YouTube -- have done their level best to censor speech about COVID -- when users’ opinions deviate from the narrative they’re hawking for Democrats. They’re now attempting to put a lid on the Biden scandal, hoping to run the clock until the polls close on November 3.
Not incidentally, Big Tech are also crossing their fingers for a Biden election, because a President Biden would squash any efforts to repeal social media’s Section 230 protection. Antitrust action against Big Tech? Forget it. Big Tech is an ally of Democrats and the left in wanting to restrict Americans’ freedoms. Watch in the coming months as Democrats and the left talk up the PRC’s social credit system, where “unacceptable” speech is censored, and behaviors monitored and penalized if deemed inappropriate.
Joe Biden flat-out lied about having no knowledge of his son’s Burisma dealings. Evidence is showing that the former vice president not only had knowledge of his son’s shady business activities, but played roles in those dealings. As the New York Post reported on October 14, 2020:
Hunter Biden introduced his father, then-vice president Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company, according to emails obtained by the Post.
Xi Jinping most certainly stands to lose. China, having unleashed the COVID virus on the world, and thanks to its exploitive trade practices, is finding U.S. public opinion sharply turning against it. Shady business deals with Hunter Biden and skims from those deals by the “Big Guy,” completely exposed, would strip any pretense about China’s intentions vis-Ã -vis the U.S. Powerful interests in the U.S. stand to lose big.
A final note. President Biden needn’t happen. Tens of millions of ballots remain to be cast. The mainstream media’s and Big Tech’s censorship of Biden scandal news is running smack against the “Streisand Effect.” Hiding news, in this instance, only makes people curious to learn about it. Help family, friends, and neighbors find the news about what is developing into the worst scandal in presidential election annals. Help reelect President Trump.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Silicon Valley investors are
uniting with the Koch network’s consumer and
industrial investors to demand a huge DACA
amnesty
The Heritage Foundation has continued to defend big tech against efforts to strip them of their special legal privileges, which were given to them by Congress in the 1990s and are enjoyed by no other type of company.
This is despite the fact that Google publicly snubbed the foundation last year, canceling the formation of a planned “A.I ethics” council after far-left employees of the tech company threw a hissy fit over the fact that Heritage president Kay Coles James was set to be one of its members.
Are you an insider at Google, Facebook, Twitter or any other tech company who wants to confidentially reveal wrongdoing or political bias at your company? Reach out to Allum Bokhari at his secure email address allumbokhari@protonmail.com.
Google Insider: Bombshell Book ‘Deleted’ Will ‘Shake the Foundations of Silicon Valley’
31 Aug 20202,335
3:20
An upcoming book from Breitbart News investigative reporter Allum Bokhari is set to “shake the foundations of Silicon Valley,” according to a Big Tech source who has worked at numerous tech giants including Google.
The book, #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal the Election, will be published by Center Street on September 22, and is currently available for preorder at Barnes & Noble and other retailers.
“When voters find out what big tech companies have done to meddle in the coming election, they’ll be rightly furious” said the source, who worked on key Google products for several years.
“The level of covert manipulation is breathtaking. Every American who’s worried about the future of free and fair elections should read this book.”
The book’s author, Allum Bokhari, has worked as a tech reporter at Breitbart News since 2015. He has helped whistleblowers within Google, Facebook, and YouTube release damning leaks exposing Big Tech’s political bias.
In 2018, he obtained “The Google Tape,” a one-hour recording of Google’s top executives reacting to the election of Donald Trump in 2016. The most powerful people at the company, including co-founder Sergey Brin, CEO Sundar Pichai, and chief legal officer Kent Walker expressed dismay over Trump’s election, with Walker pledging to make the populist movement a “blip” in history.
Just over a month later, Bokhari obtained “The Good Censor,” an 85-page document from within Google admitting to Silicon Valley’s “shift towards censorship.” Sen. Ted Cruz later grilled representatives of Google about the leak during a congressional hearing.
Bokhari also revealed the existence of YouTube’s “controversial query blacklist,” a secret file used by the company to manipulate political search results. The leak revealed that YouTube adjusted search results on terms like “abortion” and “federal reserve” in response to complaints from left-wing journalists.
He also obtained Facebook’s “hate agents review” list — a hit list of high-profile political figures that the platform considers potential “hate agents.” Facebook keeps regular tabs on these people, including monitoring their offline activities. The list included Candace Owens, Brigitte Gabrielle, and other prominent conservatives.
#DELETED, the product of Bokhari’s five years of investigating Silicon Valley, reportedly reveals even more of Big Tech’s secrets.
Sources and whistleblowers who work or have worked for Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other tech giants were extensively interviewed for the book. They reveal Big Tech’s secretive, AI-controlled methods to control and manipulate information, methods that unlike overt bans and censorship, cannot be readily observed by outsiders.
They also explain how virtually every Big Tech company was pulled to the radical left after the 2016 election, with radical elements within Google, Facebook, and Twitter now obsessively pursuing an overriding goal: stopping Trump’s reelection.
#DELETED will be released on September 22. Click HERE to preorder.
Josh Hawley: GOP Must Defend Middle Class Americans Against ‘Concentrated Corporate Power,’ Tech Billionaires
JOHN BINDERThe Republican Party must defend America’s working and middle class against “concentrated corporate power” and the monopolization of entire sectors of the United States’ economy, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) says.
In an interview on The Realignment podcast, Hawley said that “long gone are the days where” American workers can depend on big business to look out for their needs and the needs of their communities.
Instead, Hawley explained that increasing “concentrated corporate power” of whole sectors of the American economy — specifically among Silicon Valley’s giant tech conglomerates — is at the expense of working and middle class Americans.
“One of the things Republicans need to recover today is a defense of an open, free-market, of a fair healthy competing market and the length between that and Democratic citizenship,” Hawley said, and continued:
At the end of the day, we are trying to support and sustain here a great democracy. We’re not trying to make a select group of people rich. They’ve already done that. The tech billionaires are already billionaires, they don’t need any more help from government. I’m not interested in trying to help them further. I’m interested in trying to help sustain the great middle of this country that makes our democracy run and that’s the most important challenge of this day.
“You have these businesses who for years now have said ‘Well, we’re based in the United States, but we’re not actually an American company, we’re a global company,'” Hawley said. “And you know, what has driven profits for some of our biggest multinational corporations? It’s been … moving jobs overseas where it’s cheaper … moving your profits out of this country so you don’t have to pay any taxes.”
“I think that we have here at the same time that our economy has become more concentrated, we have bigger and bigger corporations that control more and more of our key sectors, those same corporations see themselves as less and less American and frankly they are less committed to American workers and American communities,” Hawley continued. “That’s turned out to be a problem which is one of the reasons we need to restore good, healthy, robust competition in this country that’s going to push up wages, that’s going to bring jobs back to the middle parts of this country, and most importantly, to the middle and working class of this country.”
While multinational corporations monopolize industries, Hawley said the GOP must defend working and middle class Americans and that big business interests should not come before the needs of American communities:
A free market is one where you can enter it, where there are new ideas, and also by the way, where people can start a small family business, you shouldn’t have to be gigantic in order to succeed in this country. Most people don’t want to start a tech company. [Americans] maybe want to work in their family’s business, which may be some corner shop in a small town … they want to be able to make a living and then give that to their kids or give their kids an option to do that. [Emphasis added]
The problem with corporate concentration is that it tends to kill all of that. The worst thing about corporate concentration is that it inevitably believes to a partnership with big government. Big business and big government always get together, always. And that is exactly what has happened now with the tech sector, for instance, and arguably many other sectors where you have this alliance between big government and big business … whatever you call it, it’s a problem and it’s something we need to address. [Emphasis added]
Hawley blasted the free trade-at-all-costs doctrine that has dominated the Republican and Democrat Party establishments for decades, crediting the globalist economic model with hollowing “out entire industries, entire supply chains” and sending them to China, among other countries.
“The thing is in this country is that not only do we not make very much stuff anymore, we don’t even make the machines that make the stuff,” Hawley said. “The entire supply chain up and down has gone overseas, and a lot of it to China, and this is a result of policies over some decades now.”
As Breitbart News reported, Hawley detailed in the interview how Republicans like former President George H.W. Bush’s ‘New World Order’ agenda and Democrats have helped to create a corporatist economy that disproportionately benefits the nation’s richest executives and donor class.
The billionaire class, the top 0.01 percent of earners, has enjoyed more than 15 times as much wage growth as the bottom 90 percent since 1979. That economy has been reinforced with federal rules that largely benefits the wealthiest of wealthiest earners. A study released last month revealed that the richest Americans are, in fact, paying a lower tax rate than all other Americans.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
Tucker Carlson Exposes D.C. ‘Conservatives’
for Doing Big Tech’s Bidding
Rich Polk/Getty
21 Dec 20190
3:53
Fox News host Tucker Carlson slammed establishment conservatives for taking money from big tech companies to do their bidding, on Tucker Carlson Tonight, Friday night.
The popular host, known for his no-holds-barred denunciations of establishment conservatives as well as Democrats, revealed massive spending by the establishment conservative Koch Foundation to protect big tech in Washington.
Tucker revealed that Americans for Prosperity, a “purportedly conservative group” controlled by the Kochs, launched an ad campaign trying to stave off the closing net of antitrust enforcement against Google and Facebook. The ads targeted Republican and Democrat state attorneys general that were investigating alleged antitrust violations by big tech companies.
The Koch-funded group also targeted members of the Senate Judiciary Committee with digital ads urging them to “oppose any effort to use antitrust laws to break up America’s innovative tech companies,” reported Carlson.
The Fox host ran through a laundry list of allegedly “conservative” D.C. think tanks that take money from big tech, and often advocate against regulating them over political bias or any other matter.
“In all, the Koch network quietly spent at least $10 million defending Silicon Valley companies that work to silence conservatives.”
Tucker Carlson Slamming Conservative Inc. for Defending Big Tech
Tucker Calls Out
-Kochs
-Heritage Foundation
-American Conservative Union
-AEI
"Big Tech Companies silence Conservatives, Conservative Non-Profits try to prevent the government from doing anything about it."
2,315 people are talking about this
“Google has given money to at least 22 right-leaning institutions that are also funded by the Koch network,” reported Carlson.
“Those institutions include the American Conservative Union, the American Enterprise Institute, the National Review Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Mercatus Center.”
Carlson explained that this spending gets results.
“In September of 2018, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and three other groups funded by Google and the Kochs sent a joint letter to the Attorney General at the time, Jeff Sessions, expressing grave concerns over the DoJ’s plans to look into whether search engines and social media were hurting competition and stifling speech.”
Carlson also called out The Heritage Foundation, arguing that its shilling for big tech meant that it “no longer represents the interest of conservatives, at least on the question of tech.”
“A recent paper by Heritage, entitled ‘Free Enterprise Is the Best Remedy For Online Bias Concerns,’ defends the special privileges that Congress has given to left-wing Silicon Valley monopolies. And if conservatives don’t like it, Heritage says, well they can just start their own Google!”
Evidence of big tech’s efforts to co-opt establishment conservatives has been accumulating for some time. In March, Breitbart News published leaked audio from a senior director of public policy at Google, talking about using funding of conservative institutions to “steer” the movement. Another part of the leaked audio transcript was also revealed on Tucker Carlson’s show at the same time.
The Heritage Foundation has continued to defend big tech against efforts to strip them of their special legal privileges, which were given to them by Congress in the 1990s and are enjoyed by no other type of company.
This is despite the fact that Google publicly snubbed the foundation last year, canceling the formation of a planned “A.I ethics” council after far-left employees of the tech company threw a hissy fit over the fact that Heritage president Kay Coles James was set to be one of its members.
Are you an insider at Google, Facebook, Twitter or any other tech company who wants to confidentially reveal wrongdoing or political bias at your company? Reach out to Allum Bokhari at his secure email address allumbokhari@protonmail.com.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News.
December 20, 2019
California Preening
The Golden State is on a path to high-tech
feudalism, but there’s still time to change course.
“We are the modern equivalent of the ancient city-states of Athens and Sparta. California has the ideas of Athens and the power of Sparta,” declared then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2007. “Not only can we lead California into the future . . . we can show the nation and the world how to get there.” When a movie star who once played Hercules says so who’s to disagree? The idea of California as a model, of course, precedes the former governor’s tenure. Now the state’s anti-Trump resistance—in its zeal on matters concerning climate, technology, gender, or race—believes that it knows how to create a just, affluent, and enlightened society. “The future depends on us,” Governor Gavin Newsom said at his inauguration. “And we will seize this moment.”
In truth, the Golden State is becoming a semi-feudal kingdom, with the nation’s widest gap between middle and upper incomes—72 percent, compared with the U.S. average of 57 percent—and its highest poverty rate. Roughly half of America’s homeless live in Los Angeles or San Francisco, which now has the highest property crime rate among major cities. California hasn’t yet become a full-scale dystopia, of course, but it’s heading in a troubling direction.
This didn’t have to happen. No place on earth has more going for it than the Golden State. Unlike the East Coast and Midwest, California benefited from comparatively late industrialization, with an economy based less on auto manufacturing and steel than on science-based fields like aerospace, software, and semiconductors. In the mid-twentieth century, the state also gained from the best aspects of progressive rule, culminating in an elite public university system, a massive water system reminiscent of the Roman Empire, and a vast infrastructure network of highways, ports, and bridges. The state was fortunate, too, in drawing people from around the U.S. and the world. The eighteenth-century French traveler J. Hector St. John de CrèvecÅ“ur described the American as “this new man,” and California—innovative, independent, and less bound by tradition or old prejudice—reflected that insight. Though remnants of this California still exist, its population is aging, less mobile, and more pessimistic, and its roads, schools, and universities are in decline.
In the second half of the twentieth century, California’s remarkably diverse economy spread prosperity from the coast into the state’s inland regions. Though pockets of severe poverty existed—urban barrios, south Los Angeles, the rural Central Valley—they were limited in scope. In fact, growth often favored suburban and exurban communities, where middle-class families, including minorities, settled after World War II.
In the last two decades, the state has adopted policies that undermine the basis for middle-class growth. State energy policies, for example, have made California’s gas and electricity prices among the steepest in the country. Since 2011, electricity prices have risen five times faster than the national average. Meantime, strict land-use controls have raised housing costs to the nation’s highest, while taxes—once average, considering California’s urban scale—now exceed those of virtually every state. At the same time, California’s economy has shed industrial diversity in favor of dependence on one industry: Big Tech. Just a decade before, the state’s largest firms included those in the aerospace, finance, energy, and service industries. Today’s 11 largest companies hail from the tech sector, while energy firms—excluding Chevron, which has moved much of its operations to Houston—have disappeared. Not a single top aerospace firm—the iconic industry of twentieth-century California—retains its headquarters here.
Though lionized in the press, this tech-oriented economy hasn’t resulted in that many middle- and high-paying job opportunities for Californians, particularly outside the Bay Area. Since 2008, notes Chapman University’s Marshall Toplansky, the state has created five times the number of low-paying, as opposed to high-wage, jobs. A remarkable 86 percent of new jobs paid below the median income, while almost half paid under $40,000. Moreover, California, including Silicon Valley, created fewer high-paying positions than the national average, and far less than prime competitors like Salt Lake City, Seattle, or Austin. Los Angeles County features the lowest pay of any of the nation’s 50 largest counties.
No state advertises its multicultural bona fides more than California, now a majority-minority state. This is evident at the University of California, where professors are required to prove their service to “people of color,” to the state’s high school curricula, with its new ethnic studies component. Much of California’s anti-Trump resistance has a racial context. State Attorney General Xavier Becerra has sued the administration numerous times over immigration policy while he helps ensure California’s distinction as a sanctuary for illegal immigrants. So far, more than 1 million illegal residents have received driver’s licenses, and they qualify for free health care, too. San Francisco now permits illegal immigrants to vote in local elections.
Such radical policies may make progressives feel better about themselves, though they seem less concerned about how these actions affect everyday people. California’s Latinos and African-Americans have seen good blue-collar jobs in manufacturing and energy vanish. According to one United Way study, over half of Latino households can barely pay their bills. “For Latinos,” notes long-time political consultant Mike Madrid, “the California Dream is becoming an unattainable fantasy.”
In the past, poorer Californians could count on education to help them move up. But today’s educators appear more interested in political indoctrination than results. Among the 50 states, California ranked 49th in the performance of low-income students. In wealthy San Francisco, test scores for black students are the worst of any California county. Many minority residents, especially African-Americans, are fleeing the state. In a recent UC Berkeley poll, 58 percent of black expressed interest in leaving California, a higher percentage than for any racial group, though approximately 45 percent of Asians and Latinos also considered moving out.
Perhaps the biggest demographic disaster is generational. For decades, California incubated youth culture, creating trends like beatniks, hippies, surfers, and Latino and Asian art, music, and cuisine. The state is a fountainhead of youthful wokeness and rebellion, but that may prove short-lived as millennials leave. From 2014 to 2018, notes demographer Wendell Cox, net domestic out-migration grew from 46,000 to 156,000. The exiles are increasingly in their family-formation years. In the 2010s, California suffered higher net declines in virtually every age category under 54, with the biggest rate of loss coming among the 35-to-44 cohort.
As families with children leave, and international migration slows to one-third of Texas’s level, the remaining population is rapidly aging. Since 2010, California’s fertility rate has dropped 60 percent, more than the national average; the state is now aging 50 percent more rapidly than the rest of the country. A growing number of tech firms and millennials have headed to the Intermountain West. Low rates of homeownership among younger people play a big role in this trend, with California millennials forced to rent, with little chance of buying their own home, while many of the state’s biggest metros lead the nation in long-term owners. California is increasingly a greying refuge for those who bought property when housing was affordable.
After Governor Schwarzenegger morphed into a progressive environmentalist, climate concerns began driving state policy. His successors have embraced California “leadership” on climate issues. Jerry Brown recently told a crowd in China that the rest of the world should follow California’s example. The state’s top Democrats, like state senate president pro tem Kevin DeLeon, Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti, and billionaire Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer, now compete for the green mantle.
Their policies have worsened conditions for many middle- and working-class Californians. Oblivious to these concerns, Greens ignore practical ideas—nuclear power, natural gas cars, job creation in affordable areas, home-based work—that could help reduce emissions without disrupting people’s lives. Ultra-green policies also work against the state’s proclaimed goal of building more than 3.5 million new housing units by 2025. In accordance with its efforts to reduce car use, the state mandates that most growth occurs in already-crowded coastal areas, where land prices are highest. But in cities like San Francisco, the cost of building one unit for a homeless person surpasses $700,000. California’s inland regions, though experiencing population gains, keep losing state funding for decrepit highways in favor of urban-centric, mass transit projects—yet transit use has stagnated, especially in greater Los Angeles.
The state, nevertheless, continues its pursuit of policies that would eliminate all fossil fuels and nuclear power—outpacing national or even Paris Accord levels and guaranteeing ever-rising energy prices. Mandating everything from electric cars to electric homes will only drive more working-class Californians into “energy poverty.” High energy prices also directly affect the manufacturing and logistics firms that employ blue-collar workers at decent wages. Business relocation expert Joe Vranich notes that industrial firms account for many of the 2,000 employers that left the state this decade. California’s industrial growth has fallen to the bottom tier of states; last year, it ranked 44th, with a rate of growth one-third to one-quarter that of prime competitors like Texas, Virginia, Arizona, Nevada, and Florida.
Similarly, the high energy prices tend to hit the interior counties that, besides being poorer, have far less temperate climates. Cities like Bakersfield, capital of the state’s once-vibrant oil industry, are particularly hard-hit. High energy prices will cost the region, northeast of the Los Angeles Basin, 14,000 generally high-paid jobs, even as the state continues to import oil from Saudi Arabia.
California’s leaders apply climate change to excuse virtually every failure of state policy. During the California drought, Brown and his minions blamed the “climate” for the dry period, refusing to take responsibility for insufficient water storage that would have helped farmers. When the rains returned and reservoirs filled, this argument was forgotten, and little effort has been made to conserve water for next time. Likewise, Newsom and his supporters in the media have blamed recent fires on changes in the global climate, but the disaster had as much to do with green mandates against controlled burns and brush clearance than anything occurring on a planetary scale. Brown joined greens and others in blocking such sensible policies.
Few climate advocates ever seem to ask if their policies actually help the planet. Indeed, California’s green policy, as one paper demonstrates, may be increasing total greenhouse-gas emissions by pushing people and industries to states with less mild climates. In the past decade, the state ranked 40th in per-capita reductions, and its global carbon footprint is minimal. Renewable energy may be expensive and unreliable, but state policy nevertheless enriches the green-energy investments of tech leaders, even when their efforts—like the Google-backed Ivanpah solar farm—fail to deliver affordable, reliable energy.
It’s not so surprising, given these enthusiasms, that progressive politicians like Garcetti—who leads a city with paralyzing traffic congestion, rampant inequality, a huge rat infestation, and proliferating homeless camps—would rather talk about becoming chair of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group.
Reality is asserting itself, though. Tech firms already show signs of restlessness with the current regulatory regime and appear to be shifting employment to other states, notably Texas, Tennessee, Nevada, Colorado, and Arizona. Economic-modeling firm Emsi estimates that several states—Idaho, Tennessee, Washington, and Utah—are growing their tech employment faster than California. The state is losing momentum in professional and technical services—the largest high-wage sector—and now stands roughly in the middle of the pack behind other western states such as Texas, Tennessee, and Florida. And Assembly Bill 5, the state law regulating certain forms of contract labor, reclassifies part-time workers. Aimed initially at ride-sharing giants Uber and Lyft, the legislation also extends to independent contractors in industries from media to trucking.
At some point, as even Brown noted, the ultra-high capital gains returns will fall and, combined with the costs of an expanding welfare state, could leave the state in fiscal chaos. Big Tech could stumble, a possibility made more real by the recent $100 billion drop in the value of privately held “unicorn” companies, including WeWork. If the tech economy slows, a rift could develop between two of the state’s biggest forces—unions and the green establishment—over future levels of taxation. More than two-thirds of California cities don’t have any funds set aside for retiree health care and other retirement expenses. The state also confronts $1 trillion in pension debt, according to former Democratic state senator Joe Nation. U.S. News & Report ranks California, despite the tech boom, 42nd in fiscal health among the states.
The good news: some Californians are waking up. A recent PPIC poll found that increasing proportions of Californians believe that the state is headed in the wrong direction—a figure that exceeds 55 percent in the inland areas. And voters dislike the state legislature even more than they dislike Donald Trump. Newsom’s approval rating stands at 43 percent, placing him toward the bottom among the nation’s governors. A conservative-led campaign to recall him is unlikely to succeed, but surveys reveal growing opposition to the new tax hikes proposed by the legislature. There’s a growing concern about the state’s expanding homeless population.
And a rebellion against the state’s energy policies is already under way. Recently, 110 cities, with total population exceeding 8 million, have demanded changes in California’s drive to prevent new natural gas hookups. The state’s Chamber of Commerce and the three most prominent ethnic chambers—African-American, Latino, and Asian-Pacific—have joined this effort.
Californians need less bombast and progressive pretense from their leaders and more attention to policies that could counteract the economic and demographic tides threatening the state. On its current course, California increasingly resembles a model of what the late Taichi Sakaiya called “high-tech feudalism,” with a small population of wealthy residents and a growing mass of modern-day serfs. Delusion and preening ultimately have limits, as more Californians are beginning to recognize. As the 2020s beckon, the time for the state to change course is now.
Sold Out: How High-Tech Billionaires & Bipartisan Beltway Crapweasels Are ScrewingAmerica's Best & Brightest
By Michelle Malkin and John Miano
Mercury Ink, 480 pp.
Hardcover, ISBN: 1501115944, $16.80
http://smile.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1501115944/centerforimmigra
Kindle, 10644 KB, ASIN: B00VBW3SYQ, $14.99
Book Description: The #1 New York Times bestselling author and firebrand syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin sets her sights on the corrupt businessmen, politicians, and lobbyists flooding our borders and selling out America’s best and brightest workers.
In Sold Out, Michelle Malkin and John Miano reveal the worst perpetrators screwing America’s high-skilled workers, how and why they’re doing it—and what we must do to stop them. In this book, they will name names and expose the lies of those who pretend to champion the middle class, while aiding and abetting massive layoffs of highly skilled American workers in favor of cheap foreign labor. Malkin and Miano will explode some of the most commonly told myths spread in the media like these:
Lie #1: America is suffering from an apocalyptic “shortage” of science, technology, engineering, and math workers.
Lie #2: US companies cannot function without an unlimited injection of the most “highly skilled” and “highly educated” foreign workers, who offer intellectual capital and entrepreneurial energy that American workers can’t match.
Lie #3: America’s best and brightest talents are protected because employers are required to demonstrate that they’ve made every effort to hire American citizens before resorting to foreign labor.
For too long, open-borders tech billionaires and their political
enablers have escaped tough public scrutiny of their means and
motives. Sold Out is an indictment of not only political corruption
in Washington, but also the journalistic malpractice that enables it.
It’s time to trade the whitewash for solvent. American workers
deserve better and the public deserves the unvarnished truth.
She sees a dark side of Silicon Valley tech — U.S. engineers replaced by lower-cost H-1B visa holders. All workers suffer, she said: The system unfairly pushes down salaries, while foreign-born engineers remain heavily dependent on their employers.
Bay Area dissatisfaction: Rich, poor, young and old unhappy here
Poll: More residents now want to leave than stay
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/02/23/bay-area-dissatisfaction-rich-poor-young-and-old-unhappy-here/
Bay Area dissatisfaction: It reaches every county — and more residents are planning to leave.
By LOUIS HANSEN | lhansen@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group
PUBLISHED: February 23, 2020 at 7:00 a.m. | UPDATED: February 23, 2020 at 7:19 a.m.
Bay Area residents — despite being swept up in an unprecedented economic boom — are growing ever unhappier with the place they call home.
Nearly 3 in 4 residents think the quality of life in the Bay Area has gotten worse in the last five years, according to a new poll of registered voters conducted for this news organization and the Silicon Valley Leadership Group. That marks an astonishing 10-point jump in dissatisfaction from last year.
In another dramatic shift from last year, more residents are thinking about moving, 47 percent, than staying, 45 percent. Nearly 10 percent say they have definite plans to leave this year.
The survey unearths a remarkable paradox — high wages, an expanding economy, record growth in home values, coupled with natural wonders have failed to alleviate the crushing toll of longer commutes, spreading homeless encampments, and budget-breaking prices for houses, apartments, childcare and date nights.
Sara Leslie, a Bay Area native living in Los Gatos, sees the mounting stress in her friends and family, made worse by rapidly changing neighborhoods and an eroding sense of community. “I know so many people moving,” said Leslie, 46. “I don’t see that the financial gain is worth the stress.”
Dave Metz of FM3 Research, which conducted the poll, said the high levels of dissatisfaction are almost unprecedented given the region’s strong economy. Last year, 44 percent of residents said they expected to leave in a few years, while half expected to stay. The new survey follows a trend of growing unrest found in 2016 and 2017 polls by the Bay Area Council, where residents saying they planned to move grew from about 33 to 40 percent.
“Nobody is really happy with the way things are going,” Metz said.
The survey of 1,257 registered voters in five core Bay Area counties reflects deep misgivings across the social strata — wealthy, established homeowners, middle-class workers, poor people and younger residents in apartments all sense a decline in their quality of life:
· Rich and poor: About 77 percent of respondents making less than $60,000 and 74 percent making more than $120,000 felt the region was getting worse;
· Political affiliation: Republicans (81 percent) and Independents (80 percent) were more pessimistic than Democrats (70 percent)
· Young and old: Roughly 76 percent of surveyed residents between the ages of 18 and 49 said the quality of life has declined, similar to those between 50 and 64 (73 percent) and over 65 (75 percent);
· Homeowners and renters: And despite record gains in home values and personal wealth since 2012, homeowners (73 percent) agree with renters (76 percent) that Bay Area life has gotten worse.
Angst about the future also runs deep. About 65 percent of Bay Area residents surveyed say the region is headed in the wrong direction, up from 47 percent last year. Residents now are almost as worried about the region’s future as the country’s future, with 72 percent pessimistic about the direction of the United States.
Residents say they’ve grown frustrated with the inability of state and local leaders to fix long-standing and obvious problems — homeless and RV camps popping up along city streets, rising housing costs sinking the working poor and middle class, and traffic and transit solutions running the bureaucratic gauntlet for years until comatose or dead.
The poll reflects a growing concern about homelessness. This year, nearly 9 in 10 residents called it an extremely or very serious problem, up from 8 in 10 last year. “That is about as bright a flashing red light as you can see,” said Metz.
“It’s the cumulative weight, like rock after rock placed on your chest, that’s come to a breaking point for many of our neighbors, friends and family members,” said Silicon Valley Leadership Group CEO Carl Guardino. “These challenges won’t be solved overnight.”
Carl Guardino, President and CEO, Silicon Valley Leadership Group, worries about how many people have definite plans to leave. (Gary Reyes/ Bay Area News Group)
Guardino is concerned that nearly 10 percent of residents say they have concrete plans to move. They’ve decided other cities are better places to live and work than the Bay Area.
“The choice we have is, are we going to fight or flight?” said Guardino. “I still think our area is worth fighting for.”
Richard Hallsted, 62, recently retired as an operations manager for a manufacturing company in the East Bay. He and his wife have lived in Palo Alto for more than 40 years and raised their two daughters in the city.
During a recent family walk through their neighborhood, he saw four homeless people pushing shopping carts along the streets. It was a new sight in their community.
“What do you do?” Hallsted asked and sighed. “I don’t know. If you built a bunch of condos on El Camino (Real), they couldn’t afford them.”
Hallsted feels the big issues — transit, infrastructure, fixing state pension obligations — have been ignored by politicians more interested in small battles and identity politics. “They need to get back to basics,” he said.
But even the litany of daily annoyances fails to dislodge many long-term residents. Homeowners and those over 65 say they’re likely to stay put.
Donald Prestosz, 71, a retired high school teacher and businessman living in Half Moon Bay, said the Bay Area he has called home since 1969 has become too liberal. He hates one-party, Democratic rule in Sacramento. “If you don’t have diversity of thought,” said Prestosz, a Republican, “you’ll never get anywhere.”
But Prestosz has no plans to leave his mobile home a short walk from the ocean. His doctors and favorite golf courses are all nearby. He’s sliced his handicap to 12. “My quality of life,” he said, “is great.”
Irene Yen, 55, a public health professor at UC Merced, bought her home in north Oakland 20 years ago. The family raised their two sons and sent them to very good public schools, she said. But she’s worried about public employees and other workers getting priced out.
Much has changed — once a predominantly black neighborhood, her community has gentrified as techies and other professionals priced out of San Francisco move in. Yen loves the energy and plans to stay: “I have a lot of affection for Oakland.”
For renters, the prospect of putting down roots in the Bay Area — even if they grew up here — seems bleak. Roughly 6 in 10 renters say they expect to move in the next few years.
Austin Rickli, 22, grew up in Antioch and Brentwood and expects to finish his computer science degree at Sonoma State in a few months. Despite good grades, low student debt and a marketable degree, his hopes of staying in the Bay Area after graduation are waning.
Most entry salaries at smaller tech companies range around $50,000 — a healthy paycheck at a glance, but one quickly eaten up by rent and loan payments, he said.
He could move back home, he said, but he might choose another city. “I want to do anything in my power to start my own life,” Rickli said.
Many feel they’re reaching the breaking point.
Robert Nueding and his wife, Kelly, arrived in the Bay Area a decade ago from central Ohio with optimism and career opportunities. But in the last few years, Nueding, 38, lost his job at Walmart and his wife, suffering from anxiety, left a well-paid position at Apple. They live in an old RV with a roommate along the streets of Fremont.
“It’s just like being trapped in a corner,” said Nueding, who holds a master’s degree in literature.
They considered moving back to their hometown, but jobs are scarce and pay poorly. Nueding worries that a local school or university would not hire a homeless person to teach classes, even as a substitute. “Until I have an actual legal residence,” he said, “I feel homeless.”
Leslie, the Bay Area native in Los Gatos, lives with her husband in a farmhouse in the foothills. Each has more than an hour-long commute on good days.
Related Articles
Leslie has spent two decades in the tech industry and enjoys her job. Her mother and sister have already been priced out in the past few years. The Santa Cruz native would leave if other family members weren’t still here.
She sees a dark side of Silicon Valley tech — U.S. engineers replaced by lower-cost H-1B visa holders. All workers suffer, she said: The system unfairly pushes down salaries, while foreign-born engineers remain heavily dependent on their employers.
Leslie said many of her friends, especially with young children, are over-stressed. She sees them trying to ease the anxiety with prescription medication and therapy just to navigate daily life.
Leslie rides her three horses or goes to the beach with her four dogs to cope. But she’s not sure how much longer that therapy will work.
The poll of 1,257 registered voters in Alameda, Contra Costa, San Francisco, Santa Clara, and San Mateo counties, was conducted by FM3 Research for the Silicon Valley Leadership Group and Bay Area News Group. The poll, conducted Jan. 11-19, has a margin of error of +/- 2.8 percentage points.
No comments:
Post a Comment