THE CASE AGAINST HIGH TECH BILLIONAIRES AND THEIR WAR ON AMERICA

Silicon Valley Poverty Is Often Ignored By The Tech Hub's Elite

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2013/03/obamas-america-is-silicon-valley-of.html

The Dreamers in the Valley

By Lev Stesin

Silicon Valley has lost its charm. From being a darling of the political class it has slowly morphed into the most dangerous public enemy. That attitude is shared across the entire political spectrum, but nowhere is it more pronounced than with the couple of Democratic Party frontrunners: Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Their accusing finger pointing at the omnipotent one-percenters equates that menacing bunch with the Valley, its success and, more importantly, its capitalism. Given that overt hostility, one would expect to find the most passionate critics of the current socialist revival among the infotech industry leaders. And there are a few, such as Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, but only because of his being explicitly singled out. Yet, the pages of many prominent newspapers are full of exposes and opinion pieces supporting the claim to the contrary. The public data showing where the donations from the Valley are going provides additional support to the written word. This is a highly irrational behavior. It is not. The high-tech revolution of the late 90s has, as all revolutions do, abandoned its original ideals with its greed for power and success turning against its spirit.

The last ten years has seen the rise of many internet companies that have become household names: WeWorks, Uber, Lyft, AirBnb, Pinterest, Tesla, just to name a few. They do very different things. However, there are a few peculiar aspects of those enterprises that makes them very similar. For one, they are not businesses in the common sense of the word. They don’t make money. They do spend a lot of dollars, at times billions of them per quarter. But they have no real plans to make profits in the future. Hence, as business enterprises they have been absolute failures. But that is not the only aspect of their business models that unites them all. Not least importantly, they claim their products make our societies better, healthier, and colder (as far as global warming is concerned). When you listen to the founders and CEOs of those companies, you realize they are not talking about places that generate profit, give people employment, and engage in philanthropy. Instead, they are talking about their companies as the force of the good, the executive arm of progress. 

Anyone familiar with the rhetoric employed by the architects of the socialist experiments of the past hundred years will find those words horribly familiar. The early years of the Soviet state, and its Five Years Plans in particular, were an excellent example of how to create business models that would employ many people, burn a tremendous amount of money, have no sustainable future and yet declare its raison d'etre to be the progress of humankind and the creation of a more just and equal society. The leaders of the Soviet industrialization efforts sounded exactly like many leaders of the Valley of today. Their inspirational speeches directed at the masses of young workers (currently a favorite employee category of the Valley) urged the naive for more personal sacrifices and promised a better world soon to come. Were one to replace the communist ideals of yesteryear with the sustainable future and stock options of today, one would realize that agitprop has not died; it has become less strictly ideological. 

What Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are proposing is not very much different from the approaches the Valley is taking to further its pseudo enterprises. Warren and Sanders are talking about scale, a favorite term among internet founders and CEOs. As current Valley thinking holds, to succeed, one needs to build something everyone uses. It doesn't matter a bit if the company loses money each time such usage takes place, because somehow, perhaps in a distant future, a miracle will occur and the sum of all losses will add up to a cumulative profit. With the proposals coming from the two Democratic candidates, whether the Green New Deal or Medicare for All, the claim is that at the end the money will materialize against all known rules of economics. And as with many hot companies of today, one does not even have to prove the simple arithmetic behind the proposals: even if no money is ever made, the world, as a result, will become a much better place. In Liz and Bernie, the Valley is sensing kindred spirits: leaders with bold ideas, deployed at scale, with unlimited funding and unburdened by consequences. If everyone gets an almost free ride, buys an electric car below its manufacturing price, and gets food delivered below the price of the food itself, then why not have free healthcare and get electricity from thin air? Once money stops being an issue, all issues disappear. 

Visiting Vladimir Lenin back in 1920, H. G. Wells found the leader of the Bolshevik coup talking about connecting remote villages of Russia to the power grid. Mesmerized by the leader of the Proletarian Revolution, the author called him “The Dreamer in the Kremlin.” But one man’s dream is a nightmare for the millions. As the Valley, together with senators Warren and Sanders, dream of a new world where the good is deployed at scale, almost everything is free, the power is green, and cars are electric, let us hope their wild imagination remains in the confines of hyper-growth companies and the speeches of the primary season.

Could 'Move to Amend' Destroy Corporate Independence?

By Dave Rybarczyk

The New York Times is annoyed that FedEx paid no income taxes in 2018.  Leftists have always despised corporations:  Greedy, evil enterprises that exploit their workers, swindle their customers, pollute the environment, abuse their power, and much worse, all in the pursuit of unjust, obscene profits.

But put aside for a moment the distortions in the Times article, and the fact that the Times itself paid no income taxes in 2017.  The writers omit an important and critically relevant dimension of the story:  A longstanding progressive movement to strip corporations completely of all rights.

"Move to Amend" is a proposed constitutional amendment that would do just that.  Ultimately it would enable material government control of every U.S. corporation -- and establish the basis for constitutionally-protected socialism in this country.

The relevant provisions of the proposed amendment, documented at movetoamend.org, are these:

[Section 1]  [Artificial Entities Such as Corporations Do Not Have Constitutional Rights]  Artificial entities established by the laws of any State, the United States, or any foreign state shall have no rights under this Constitution and are subject to regulation by the People, through Federal, State, or local law.

[Section 2]  [Money is Not Free Speech] Federal, State, and local government shall regulate, limit, or prohibit contributions and expenditures, including a candidate's own contributions... to influence in any way the election of any candidate for public office or any ballot measure… The judiciary shall not construe the spending of money to influence elections to be speech under the First Amendment.

The movement stems from the left’s outrage over the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, in which the Court struck down key portions of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law.  This decision was extremely unpopular with the left because it permitted new freedom for corporate election influence.  Barack Obama famously insulted the members of the Supreme Court as they sat before him during his 2010 State of the Union address over the decision.

The stated rationale for "Move to Amend" is that "corporations wield ever-increasing control" over a number of areas of human conduct.  But while analogous claims can be made for government, the left never seems to notice, or mind, the egregious abuses of power that arise in government.  Never mind that a consumer's relationship with a corporation is optional, while the citizen-government relationship is necessarily one of compulsion.  Unlike corporations, whose "power" ultimately is feeble and fleeting in the face of constant competition and consumer choice, only government can define crime and compel citizen behavior.  A corporation cannot put you in jail if you fail to buy its product.  A government can.  And governance throughout history exhibits a recurrent, inexorable tendency toward totalitarianism. 

On the politics of the matter, the Citizens United decision enabled groups nominally on the right to raise money and have election influence merely equal to that of labor unions habitually aligned with the left -- a former advantage reversed, constituting a major setback for the left.  An examination of the proposed amendment, however, shows that it does much to advance the cause of pure socialism in the U.S.

The amendment would eliminate a long-standing legal principle known as "corporate personhood" that gives corporations many of the same rights that individuals have under the Constitution.

At its simplest, "Move to Amend" puts leftist hypocrisy on stark display.  There is apparently no inconsistency in progressive thinking that a corporation should pay taxes, but have no voice in the matter, no opportunity for representation, and no rights.  If we have a constitutional amendment that extinguishes "corporate personhood," then intellectual honesty and a sense of justice and fairness demand the simultaneous elimination of all corporate taxes, at a minimum.  "No taxation without representation" is a fair claim even for "artificial entities."

But the reality here is considerably worse.  Thoughtful citizens ought to be alarmed by the sweeping nature of the proposed amendment -- "[Corporations] shall have no rights under this Constitution."  Equal protection of the law?  Due process?  Integrity of contracts?  Property rights?  Shareholder rights?  Sorry, no guarantees.

If the Times exhibits no cognitive dissonance on this point, maybe it is because of the last provision of the proposed amendment:

[Section 3]  Nothing in this amendment shall be construed to abridge freedom of the press.

Perhaps the tax-avoiding Times corporation believes it will escape the destruction.

Ultimately, the amendment raises the very question of "control of the means of production" -- a defining point of socialism.  "No rights" means no enforceable barrier to eventual de facto government control of the private sector.  "No rights" means that free-market capitalism continues to exist only at the whim of politicians and bureaucrats.

Perhaps it will not come to that.  But why should we suppose otherwise?  We see that the Times prefers to have it both ways.  The left is not known for intellectual honesty.

Despite a booming economy, many U.S. households are still just holding on

https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2019/05/the-recovery-that-never-happened-except.html

"One of the premier institutions of big business, JP Morgan Chase, issued an internal report on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the 2008 crash, which warned that another “great liquidity crisis” was possible, and that a government bailout on the scale of that effected by Bush and Obama will produce social unrest, “in light of the potential impact of central bank actions in driving inequality between asset owners and labor."  

This bipartisan immigration bill will change the face of America

By Joshua Foxworth

In July of this year, the U.S. House overwhelmingly passed H.R. 1044, the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act.  The bill had broad bipartisan support, with Democrats voting 224-8 in favor of it and Republicans voting for the act by a measure of 140-57.  The legislation represents one of the most horrific acts of aggression against the American worker in decades.  It reveals that American immigration policy is really just a competition among various groups struggling for supremacy, with Congress ceding control of immigration to the most powerful foreign actors: India and China.

Currently, a cap is in place that limits the number of H-1B tech visas so that no more than 7% of the total number of those visas come from any one country.  H.R. 1044 eliminates this cap.  The primary benefactors of this removal are the Indian tech workers who have been brought over to this nation and face a backlog due to this cap as well as the workers in India who seek to come to the U.S.  It is estimated that once this legislation goes into effect, India will receive more than 90% of these visas for the next decade.  The legislation also increases the per-country cap on family-based immigrant visas from 7% to 15%. 

As if this were not enough, the legislation also alters the number of EB-5 investment visas that a nation can purchase — opening the door to mass migration from China.

In 2017, the U.S. issued roughly 180,000 H-1B Visas.  Assuming that each of those visa-holders brought over a wife and two children and 90% of those Visas came from India, this would mean an addition of roughly 6.5 million new Indian residents over the next decade.  This would more than triple the Indian population in the U.S. even before chain migration kicked in.

The average pay for tech workers in the US is $39,000 a year.  The effect this legislation would have on this already low salary as well as to the established culture of the nation will be catastrophic, to say the least.

The list of congressional representatives who support and oppose this legislation shows that politics does indeed make strange bedfellows.  Included among the narrow swath of opponents are the normal cadre who oppose mass migration as well as those who oppose the bill for personal reasons, such as Congresswoman Ilhan Omar from Minnesota and Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib from Michigan.  Omar is an immigrant from Somalia, and Tlaib is the daughter of Palestinian immigrants. 

So why does an immigrant and the daughter of immigrants oppose legislation that would open a massive door to large numbers of immigrants?  The answer to this question is as simple as it is painful.  These representatives want immigration to come from their native lands, and H.R. 1044 reduces or eliminates immigrants from those nations in favor of India and China.  In effect, America is up for grabs, and Congresswoman Omar and Congresswoman Tlaib see this legislation as detrimental to their people's ability to gain a larger foothold in America.

Ten of the 23 Republican representatives from Texas cosponsored the bill (the state with the highest Republican support).  A total of 16 of those 23 voted for the legislation.  Texas already has an immigration problem, and this legislation would exacerbate this problem for the Republican party.

Ernst and Young and Deloitte LLP are two of the largest recipients of H-1B Visas.  These two companies have donated an average around $10,000 to 16 or 17 Texas Republican congressional representatives in each of the last few election cycles.  The interesting part about this is that many of the representatives who received this money voted against the legislation, and some that received none of it voted in favor of the bill.

Newly elected congressman Dan Crenshaw (District 2) cosponsored the legislation.  He and Congressman Weber (District 14) are two notable exceptions to the list that received money from Deloitte and E&Y.  Congressman Crenshaw's third highest donor is a firm that specializes in real estate known as Ilan Investments.  The company donated more than $11,000 to Congressman Crenshaw's campaign and is owned by an Indian-American named Chowdary Yalamanchili.  Congressman Randy Weber (District 14) voted for the legislation and received more than $13,000 over two election cycles from the Azhar Chaudhary Law Firm — which specializes in H-1B visas.

In addition to this, there was a great deal of lobbying around this bill.  The examples of Crenshaw and Weber show that if you sorted through the maze of money around direct donations, PAC money, and lobbyists, you would eventually find something that could be seen as revealing a quid pro quo for every congressman who voted for the legislation.

What was needed in this case was for each congressman to explain why he feels the need to drastically alter immigration policy in this manner.  There was very little debate on this legislation, and this is the single most revealing aspect of it.  For reasons that no one can really nail down, Congress feels the need to alter immigration to heavily favor two nations in support of an employment field that is already overcrowded and should be a staple of the American middle class.  The fact that they seemed to feel no need to consult with the American people or explain this action reveals the true nature of the relationship between Congress and the American people.

Joshua Foxworth is a congressional candidate in Texas.  Facebook.  Twitter.

Seventy percent of US Millennials say they are likely to vote socialist

The fourth annual report on “US Attitudes Toward Socialism, Communism, and Collectivism,” commissioned by the anticommunist Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and conducted by YouGov, found a sharp growth in interest in socialism among youth in the US over the past year.

The study has been conducted annually since 2016 and bases itself on interviews with over 2,000 people.

Young person in Michigan supporting Socialist Equality Party candidate Niles Niemuth in 2018

This years’ results reveal a significant radicalization taking place among youth, particularly in the Millennial Generation (those aged 23-38) and Gen Z (aged 16-22). Compared to last year’s report, favorable views of capitalism dropped 6 percentage points and 8 percentage points for Gen Z and Millennials, respectively.

Other notable findings include:

* 70 percent of Millennials say they would be “somewhat likely” or “extremely likely” to vote for a socialist candidate. The percentage of Millennials who say they would be extremely likely to vote for a socialist candidate has doubled (from 10 percent in 2018 to 20 percent in 2019).

* Overall, 83 percent say they know at least a little about socialism, and 39 percent of Americans say they “know a lot”—a nearly 40 percent increase from 2018.

* Nearly half of Millennials think the government should provide a job to everyone who wants to work but cannot find it.

* Forty percent of Americans (45 percent of Gen Z and Millennials) think all higher education should be free.

* Around one in five Millennials thinks society would be better off if all private property were abolished.

* Seventy percent of Americans say the divide between the rich and the poor is a serious issue.

* Of the more than half (63 percent) of Americans who think the highest earners are “not paying their fair share,” 54 percent think increased taxes are part of the answer, and 47 percent say a complete change of the economic system is needed.

* Thirty-seven percent of Millennials think the US is one of the most unequal societies in the world.

* Over a quarter of Americans across all generations said Donald Trump is the biggest threat to world peace.

The source of this radicalization is not hard to find. The chief characteristic of life for Millennials and Gen Z has been skyrocketing social inequality. Many are forced to work two, three or even four jobs to make ends meet. One in five millennials is living below the poverty line.

The growing interest in and support for socialism coincides with a significant growth of class struggle and social protest internationally. In Lebanon, massive protests have brought an estimated one quarter of the country’s six million people onto the streets. In Chile, millions of people continue to flood the streets protesting social inequality and state violence in the largest demonstrations in the country’s history.

In the US, the strike by 32,000 Chicago teachers and support staff is in its second week, following the largest autoworker strike in 30 years by GM workers.

This eruption of the class struggle on a global scale terrifies the ruling class. They are acutely aware of social tensions and the growing interest in socialism.

The response of the Trump administration has been an open turn towards fascistic and authoritarian forms of rule. His hysterical denunciations of socialism, now a feature of nearly every rally, express the growing fear of the rich that demands for social reform will set off a mass movement for social equality.

On the other hand, the Democrats, speaking for another faction of the ruling elite, are determined to avoid anything that would mobilize popular anger against Trump. They are systematically keeping out of their impeachment inquiry any reference to Trump’s brutal crackdown on immigrants and refugees, unending war and the social catastrophe confronting workers and youth. Instead, they have focused their impeachment campaign on issues of foreign policy.

It is within this framework that the Democratic Party’s elevation of figures such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez must be understood. In order to provide a left cover for their right-wing policies, these self-proclaimed “socialists” have been brought forward to direct growing social anger back behind the Democratic Party.

In this latest campaign rally in Detroit on Sunday, Sanders once again directed his remarks against social inequality, listing many of the social ills confronting workers and youth. Most significant, however, was what was not said.

Sanders made no reference to the more than month-long strike by General Motors workers, which was just shut down by the United Auto Workers on the basis of a contract that facilitates the massive expansion of temporary workers, which has become the “new normal” for young people. Sanders also made no reference to the ongoing Chicago teachers strike.

The omissions were not accidental. The Democratic Party, through figures like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, propose a “socialism” (though they almost never use the word) that does not involve the class struggle. Ending the domination of the “billionaire class” is supposedly to be achieved without any mass social movement or any challenge to the economic domination of the capitalist class.

And it is supposedly to be done within the framework of the Democratic Party, which is no less responsible than the Republicans for the social conditions confronting workers and young people.

The critical question is to build a socialist leadership in the working class and youth, to explain what genuine socialism is and how it must be fought for. The fight for socialism means the fight to establish democratic control of the giant banks and corporations by the working class. It means an end to social inequality through a radical redistribution of wealth and the expropriation of the ill-gotten gains of the corporate and financial aristocracy. It means an end to war and abolition of the military-intelligence apparatus.

The foundation for a socialist movement is the working class, in the United States and internationally. The reorganization of economic life on a world scale, on the basis of social need, not private profit, requires the independent mobilization of the working class to take power and establish a workers’ government.

Homeless In Seattle, Part 1: High-Tech & The Homeless

Ilana Mercer

Big Tech and the other multinationals are exacerbating the problem of homelessness in Washington state. For these stateless corporations are the major importers, into King County and the surrounds, of a high-tech, feudal elite, thus compounding the homeless quagmire. 

The corporations who straddle the globe rely on immigration ignoramuses to perpetuate the single-cause theory of homelessness: addiction or mental illness. 

However, even if drug addiction and mental illness are seen as necessary in causing homelessness, they are seldom sufficient. Substance abuse and mental anguish can, in themselves, be the consequence of other exogenous, existential and intractable circumstances.

Like being priced out of your homeland’s housing market. For good.  

Big Tech must be quite pleased to see homelessness attributed exclusively, by the usual cast on TV, to addiction and mental illness—when, in fact, homelessness is driven, primarily, by the systematic and permanent eviction from the housing market of vulnerable, working-class people. 

In truth, our country is consigning its economically weakest members to the homeless encampment, through the never-ending importation of a high-rolling, high-tech elite, which, in turn, artificially inflates the price of housing. In perpetuity. 

According to the Seattle Times, “fewer than 50 percent of people without homes are addicts.” “There are more families with children than chronically homeless people” in the encampments. 

Underlying homelessness are factors such as “loss of a job,” “eviction,” medical bills and foreclosure, the last of which “destroys credit ratings, making former homeowners no longer eligible for loans or, in many cases, rentals.” Forever. 

“We must no longer allow politicians, policy influencers and the media to get away with the laziness of conflating substance abuse and homelessness,” inveighs Lola E. Peters.

Peters, a local writer, is correct. Alas, while implicating the tech-driven population explosion in our state’s housing crisis, Ms. Peters frames the unrelenting influx from China and India as though it were organic; a natural, made-in-America population explosion.

It isn’t! Seventy-one percent of Washington state’s population growth is attributed to net migration!

It isn’t! Seventy-one percent of Washington state’s population growth is attributed to net migration!

It isn’t! Seventy-one percent of Washington state’s population growth is attributed to net migration!

It isn’t! Seventy-one percent of Washington state’s population growth is attributed to net migration!

In guarded language, the Washington State Office of Financial Management divulges that, “Migration continues to be the primary driver behind Washington [State’s] population growth. From 2017 to 2018, net migration (people moving in versus people moving out) to Washington totaled 83,700, … … The state has grown by an average of 87,900 persons per year this decade, exceeding that of 83,000 in the previous decade."

King County, where the aforementioned “global beasts with vast balance sheets” live, "is the main contributor, with a total growth of 259,000 persons over eight years, compared to 194,200 persons between 2000 and 2010," the report adds. 

Fueled in large part by the technology industry, an average of 236 people are moving to the Seattle area each day,” seconds Geekwire.com, a Seattle-based website that covers tech news.

Only those unfamiliar with America’s work-visa labyrinth would claim that the unremitting population influx comes mainly from other states in the Union, rather than from other countries in the universe.

Certainly, the town where I live is unrecognizable. What was a small and friendly hamlet is flooded with newly imported H-1B labor, living on six-figure salaries, while young Washingtonians struggle to pay the mortgage, or are evicted when their rental units are demolished to make way for fields of pricey, garish condominiums, to house Satya Nadella’s preferred—and privileged—workforce.