HOW GREAT OF A DANGER TO AMERICA IS JOE BIDEN'S TECH CRONY DONORS AMAZON, GOOGLE, FACEBOOK, TWITTER AND APPLE?

 

Steel: ‘Zuckerbucks’ Corrupted the 2020 Election for Big Tech

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Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

SHAWN STEEL

30 May 202164

5:13

Dark Money. Citizens United. The Koch Brothers.

Remember when Democrats used to decry the corrupting influence of corporate money in politics?

“Today, the Supreme Court kept open the floodgates to uninhibited special interest spending in our campaigns and in our politics,” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi lamented following a 2012 Supreme Court decision to uphold Citizens United. “Their disappointing decision to uphold Citizens United deals yet another blow to a fundamental American value: that the voices of the people determine the outcome of our elections, not the checkbooks of the few.”

Nine years later, the Democrat Party is content to see American elections outsourced to “the checkbooks of the few” – so long as the checks are signed by Big Tech.

While mainstream media headlines have focused on President Trump’s bans from Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram after the election, Big Tech’s greatest election manipulation came well before voters cast their ballots and in a decidedly traditional way.

Good old-fashioned money in politics.

Too late to affect the outcome, the public is slowly learning more about how Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and his wife, Priscilla Chan, funneled more than $419.5 million through two non-profit organizations to influence the 2020 election.

At the time, Zuckerberg framed the donation as necessary to help election officials prepare for unforeseen challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet far from personal protective equipment for poll workers and contactless voting, Zuckerberg’s millions bankrolled get-out-the-vote campaigns.

The public should be deeply troubled by the partisan affiliation of the private groups tapped by Zuckerberg to enhance voter participation. The bulk of the Zuckerberg money – $350 million – was channeled to the Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL). The group’s founder and executive director, Tiana Epps-Johnson, is a former Obama Foundation Fellow and Election Administration Director of the far-left New Organizing Institute. According to CTCL’s own report, election officials spent the funds on “social media and advertising” and allowed government officials to “purchase thousands of dollars in billboards, television commercials, radio, etc.”

The second group receiving Zuckerberg election funds, the Center for Election Innovation and Research, spent $69.5 million in 23 states. Its funding was inequitably distributed to aid battleground states. More than half of CEIR grants were distributed to just four swing states: $13.2 million to Pennsylvania, $11.9 million to Michigan, $5.6 million to Georgia; and $4.8 million to Arizona.

New York has double the population of Michigan, yet received just $5 million – less than half of Michigan’s funding. If the funds were truly meant “to provide nonpartisan, accurate, and official voting information to the public,” why did more populous but uncompetitive states receive less money?

More than six months after the election, the public still doesn’t have a full accounting of the full extent of how these organizations spent nearly a half-billion dollars. The only available accounting: a locked Google spreadsheet that identifies the 2,500 government agencies that received funding, but that doesn’t share how much each entity received or how the funds were spent.

“The full extent of the grants isn’t known,” NPR News concluded in its December 2020 investigation into the unprecedented privatization of the 2020 election administration. “The Center for Tech and Civic Life declined repeated interview requests from APM Reports to discuss the funding and how it was used. In late October, the group listed the jurisdictions that received funding on its website but didn’t disclose dollar amounts or funding priorities for each jurisdiction.”

In addition to the partisan affiliations of its founders and lack of transparency for how the money was spent, the public should be concerned that the group’s voter turnout efforts were heavily concentrated in Democrat strongholds in swing states.

The Associated Press confirms that CTCL distributed “$6.2 million to Wisconsin’s five largest cities, $10 million to Philadelphia, and $6 million to Fulton County, which includes Atlanta.” A March 2021 report by the Foundation for Government Accountability found that Democrat counties received 92 percent of CTCL’s funding in Pennsylvania.

“It just doesn’t pass the smell test,” says Nicholas Horton, research director for the Foundation for Government Accountability. “Government should be a neutral, fair arbiter of the election process, and the public should have no doubts and full confidence in that process when going to vote in the polls.”

Shawn Steel, a former chairman of the California Republican Party, is a member of the Republican National Committeeman.

Rubio: 'Five Companies in America Now Have the Power to...Silence Anyone'

By Susan Jones | June 4, 2021 | 6:08am EDT

 

 

 

(Photo Illustration by Chesnot/Getty Images)

(CNSNews.com) - Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) says the nation's five largest social media companies -- Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Apple -- are the new "gatekeepers of the public square in American politics."

"We've never been here before," Rubio told Fox News's Sean Hannity Thursday night.

Five companies in America now have the power to basically wipe anybody out and silence anyone.

You know, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter, you know, they all get together, and they decide -- Apple -- they get together and decide, we're going to wipe somebody out, you're done. There's nowhere for you to communicate. You can't even get web services, and you can't communicate to the outside world your views.

More than that, they now have put themselves in a position of determining what news can be re-reported. We remember those articles about Hunter Biden, and they quashed "The New York Post" stories. They wouldn't let it be spread.

And now for the first time, we've seen them have to go back and remove a ban on stories about the origins of the COVID-19 virus because they've proven to be untrue. This is the danger here is, you have a bunch of unelected, unaccountable, anonymous people deciding what we're allowed to say to one another and what we're allowed to share.

That's a very dangerous moment. They have assumed basically governmental type powers without being accountable to anyone.

One year ago, Rubio joined Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and other Republicans in introducing a bill that would allow Americans to sue Big Tech companies for acting in bad faith by selectively censoring political speech and hiding content created by their competitors.

The Limiting Section 230 Immunity to Good Samaritans Act would prohibit Big Tech companies from receiving Section 230 immunity unless they update their terms of service to operate under a clear good faith standard and pay a $5,000 fine if they violate those terms.

“Recent actions by Big Tech call into question the legal immunities that social media companies enjoy under Section 230 and whether these firms live up to their obligations,” Rubio said at the time, in June 2020.

“It is time to take a fresh look at the statute and clarify the vague standard of ‘good faith’ for which technology companies receive legal protections. That is exactly what this bill does. While Section 230 serves an important purpose, it should not protect unrelated activities such as censorship and political activism.”

MAGE BELOW: BEZOS WAS ASKED TO SHOW US HOW BIG HIS WEENIE IS. 

Report: Amazon Warehouse Injuries ‘80% Higher’ Than Competitors

AFP Photo/Alex Wong

LUCAS NOLAN

3 Jun 202111

2:13

Workers at Amazon warehouses in the U.S. are injured at a much higher rate than those working similar jobs at other companies, according to a recent report from the Strategic Organizing Center, a coalition of labor unions.

BBC News reports that a union-backed study of safety data claims that Amazon workers had 5.9 serious injuries per 100 people, almost 80 percent higher than the rest of the industry. The study’s organizers blamed Amazon’s “obsession with speed” as the main cause of the issue.

The new study comes from the Strategic Organizing Center (SOC), which is a coalition of labor unions. Amazon faced criticism earlier this year for falsely denying that its drivers are forced to urinate in plastic bottles.

The new study found that “workers at Amazon warehouses are not only injured more frequently than in non-Amazon warehouses, they are also injured more severely.” Workers that are forced to take time off for injuries were absent for an average of 46.3 days, a week longer than the average across the warehouse industry, according to the report.

Compared to its largest retail competitor, Walmart, Amazon’s overall injury rate was more than double at 6.5 per 100 employees compared with just 3 at Walmart.

The SOC characterized its report as an “epidemic of workplace injuries.” In a statement, Amazon said that it invested more than $1 billion in workplace safety last year.

“While any incident is one too many, we are continuously learning and seeing improvements through ergonomics programs, guided exercises at employees’ workstations, mechanical assistance equipment, workstation setup and design, and forklift telematics and guardrails – to name a few,” a spokesman said.

Read more at BBC News here.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com

Chamber CEO to Congress: Import Workers for Us, Pay Them with Citizenship

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Joe Raedle/Getty Images

NEIL MUNRO

3 Jun 2021579

9:38

The U.S. government should import foreign workers for home construction jobs and also pay them with shares of American citizenship, an industry executive demanded Wednesday at an advocacy event held by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

“We, right now, this year, need 430,000 workers [and] over the next couple years by 2023, we’re going to need probably another million,” said Michael Bellaman, the president and CEO of the Associated Builders and Contractors trade group. He continued:

We need a merit-based, market-based, rule-of-law worker visa system that provides the necessary opportunities for [foreign] people that want to work in the United States, as well as for our employers to take those trained [foreign] individuals that have spent three years [working] in their companies, with the opportunity to sponsor them to a pathway to citizenship, a legal form of status, something more permanent, that will be a value to our industry.

The demand is a deep betrayal of fellow Americans by the business interests, responded Roy Beck, the former journalist who founded NumbersUSA to oppose the outsourcing of jobs to migration.

“There’s an ethical bond that connects” Americans, he said, “but what people from George Bush, especially George W. Bush, on through President Biden have done — with some exception for President Trump — is to disconnect and basically free the elites of this country from any sense of ethical obligation to their fellow citizens.”

The betrayal is sharper because “construction jobs have become the great prize for Americans who don’t have a college education,” he said, adding:

A large percentage of the manufacturing jobs that created middle-class life have disappeared, but construction work remains. It can’t be shipped overseas. It’s the prize for our American workers who don’t have college degrees which by the way, two-thirds of Americans don’t have college degrees. So this idea is one that basically says, “The middle class belongs only to those who get a college degree,” and we’ve seen just one occupation after another [that] the robber barons of our age have decided they’re not going to let Americans have.

American workers have been hard hit by the eagerness of construction CEOs to hire low-wage crews of economic migrants. In March 2018, Breitbart News reported:

Blaine Taylor, the whistleblower, said the construction industry in California once offered a starting wage of about $45 an hour in the late 1980s. Fast-forward to 2018 — nearly two decades into when illegal aliens began flooding the industry — he now says that wages have fallen by more than half, standing at just $11 an hour.

Construction CEOs are now complaining they face a shortage of Americans who are willing to train for construction jobs. But that shortage is partly caused by Americans’ recognition that many construction CEOs will replace them as soon as they can find a cheaper migrant.

The current shortage of construction workers was created by President Donald Trump’s repeated rejections of business demands for more workers. That low-migration policy was a big shift from prior GOP presidents, including President George W. Bush, who pushed his “Any Willing Worker” plan to let companies hire foreigners whenever Americans rejected wages for being too low.

Bush is now campaigning to include his “Any Willing Worker” plan in any comprehensive amnesty bill passed by President Joe Biden and Congress.

So far, GOP legislators — quietly backed by some Democratic legislators — are blocking another giveaway to employers, investors, and migrants. For example, the farm sector is pushing for a bill that would supply them with an unlimited number of H-2A visa workers, and also allow them to pay the workers with Americans’ citizenship. If passed, the bill would reduce the marketplace pressure on farm companies to invest in labor-saving, wealth-producing, American-built, robot technology.

Because of the populist opposition to an amnesty, construction companies are being forced to compete for American workers with offers of higher wages and free training.

“Since COVID happened a lot of workers that we would use went back to Mexico or where they were from, and they’ve stayed over there, so that’s been a big shortage too,” Tiffany Albarez told KVUE in Austin, Texas.

ABC’s News9 reported June 2 from Rossville, Ga.:

“I want to get a job working outside, because I’m tired of working inside,” said Fredrick Williams, who went to Talley Construction’s hiring event in Rossville, Ga., on Wednesday afternoon.

Talley Construction is increasing wages to at least $14 per hour for every worker, and also improving benefits. At a hiring event hosted Wednesday, the company also says it’s not requiring prior experience to fill open positions.

“You don’t even have to know what you’re doing [at first]. We’ll teach you,” Kasha Williams said.

On May 28, Buden praised the tight labor market, saying:

Rising wages aren’t a bug; they’re a feature.  We want to get — we want to get something economists call “full employment.”  Instead of workers competing with each other for jobs that are scarce, we want employees to compete with each other to attract workers.  We want the — the companies to compete to attract workers.

Commerce secretary Gina Raimondo spoke at the U.S. Chamber meeting.

While lobbying for an amnesty, CEOs are also finding innovative ways to replace Americans in better-paid skilled jobs, including many white-collar jobs favored by women.

For example, the wealthy Democratic governor of Colorado, Jared Polis signed a bill on May 31 that allows illegal immigrants to get professional licenses for skilled blue-collar careers, such as electricians, plumbers, welders, ironworkers. New Jersey’s Democratic governor Phil Murphy signed a similar bill in August 2020, with minimal visible opposition from the progressive-dominated trade union movement.

The law would help foreign contractors to fly workers into the U.S. on tourist visas for skilled construction jobs, just as Donald Trump reportedly used Polish workers in 1980 for union construction jobs in New York.

The laws allow companies to discard Americans in a wide range of white-collar and blue-collar jobs, including teaching, therapy, and counseling.

The licensing laws are backed by FWD.us, which was created by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in 2013 to lobby for more migration.

Also, FWD.us is fighting to preserve the migration of new workers, consumers, and renters into the U.S. economy. In April, roughly 70,000 new migrant workers were allowed through the border by Biden’s deputies or sneaked past the distracted border guards.

For their own self-interest, white-collar Americans should stop ignoring the economic damage done to blue-collar Americans, said Beck. He added:

Some people thought for many years that maybe we should just step aside and let [business groups] just flood these professional jobs markets. Then you would have the people in those professions crying out, and you’d have all of these middle class and upper-middle-class parents whose kids either in college or are headed to college, start to cry foul.

Just after the construction industry executive asked for more than one million foreign workers, an executive in the tech industry asked for the government to supply her sector with an unlimited inflow of foreign graduates for technology jobs.

“We need workers from the high-tech arena, we need workers in customer service, we need workers in-house technical expertise,” said Susan Bitter Smith, the executive director of the Southwest cable communications Association. She continued:

There are many things that could be done to help us fill those needed positions, starting with expanding the annual quota of H-1B visas for high-tech workers…  In addition, allowing international students who graduate from the U.S. — we have great engineering and tech programs here — allowing them to stay here [with Optional Practical training work permits] to fill those positions in my industry.

For many years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.

This opposition is multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity Americans owe to each other.

The voter opposition to elite-backed economic migration coexists with support for legal immigrants and some sympathy for illegal migrants. But only a minority of Americans — mostly leftists — embrace the many skewed polls and articles pushing the 1950’s corporate “Nation of Immigrants” claim.

The deep public opposition to labor migration is built on the widespread recognition that legal and illegal migration moves money away from most Americans’ pocketbooks and families.

Migration moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to investors, from technology to stoop labor, from red states to blue states, and from the central states to the coastal states such as New York.

 

 FUCKING LIAR!

Facebook Will No Longer Protect Politicians from Content Moderation

MANDEL NGAN/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

LUCAS NOLAN

4 Jun 20215

2:36

Tech giant Facebook has stated that it will stop protecting politicians on its platform from content moderation and will inform world leaders when they receive a “strike.”

The Daily Mail reports that Facebook plans to stop shielding politicians on its platform from content moderation following the suspension of former President Donald Trump from the platform. The tech giant is set to announce the policy reversal as soon as this week.

Facebook has faced criticism recently for its hands-off approach to moderating government officials and now appears to be taking proactive measures. Sources told the Verge that Facebook plans to reveal details about its secretive policies under which strikes that can lead to suspensions are issued for breaking content rules. Facebook will reportedly tell politicians when they’ve been given a strike.

The company will also now disclose when a politician’s post violates its rules and has been given a newsworthiness exemption. Facebook first unveiled policies in 2019 that allowed political leaders certain exemptions, claiming that even their false comments are newsworthy.

Posts made by politicians will still now be reviewed by fact-checkers for truthfulness as many have accused Facebook’s independent fact-checkers of bias in the past. The policy change comes after Facebook’s independent Oversight Board announced in May that it was upholding the platform’s decision to suspend former President Trump on January 7.

“However, it was not appropriate for Facebook to impose the indeterminate and standardless penalty of indefinite suspension. Facebook’s normal penalties include removing the violating content, imposing a time-bound period of suspension, or permanently disabling the page and account,” the Oversight Board wrote in its decision.

At the time, the Oversight Board called for Facebook to review its policies and recommended that the company develop “clear, necessary, and proportionate policies that promote public safety and respect freedom of expression.” The Oversight Board added: “The Board stated that it is not always useful to draw a firm distinction between political leaders and other influential users, recognizing that other users with large audiences can also contribute to serious risks of harm.”

Read more at the Daily Mail here.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com

Big Tech, Chamber of Commerce, Outsourcing Industry Unite to Keep Foreign Workers in American Jobs

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Graeme Jennings-Pool/MANDEL NGAN/MICHAEL REYNOLDS/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

JOHN BINDER

31 May 20211,379

3:19

The nation’s biggest tech corporations joined forces with the United States Chamber of Commerce and the outsourcing industry to keep foreign visa-holders in American jobs even as about 16.4 million Americans remain jobless.

Executives with Google, Amazon, Apple, IBM, HP, the Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, the Microsoft Corporation, Twitter, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us, Michael Bloomberg’s New American Economy, and other corporations have filed an amicus brief in a lawsuit to ask a federal court to keep more than 90,000 foreign visa-holders in the U.S. workforce.

The lawsuit was first filed in 2015 by Save Jobs USA, a group of former American workers at Southern California Edison who had their jobs outsourced to foreign visa workers, to block the Obama administration from giving work permits to H-4 visa-holders who are the spouses of H-1B visa workers.

The outsourced American workers argue that the executive action by Obama wrongly gives the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) the authority to provide work permits to tens of thousands of H-4 visa holders. Congress, they argue, did not authorize such authority to DHS and thus, the agency does not have the authority to provide the work permits.

“There is no statutory authorization for an alien possessing an H-4 visa to work,” Save Jobs USA’s initial complaint states.

Today, close to 100,000 foreign spouses of H-1B visa-holders have American jobs in the U.S. labor market thanks to the H-4 visa work permit authorization that the Obama administration began. That has been continued throughout the Trump and Biden administrations.

The cheap foreign labor pipeline, Save Jobs USA argues, unjustly increases foreign labor market competition against America’s white-collar workforce who are forced to compete for jobs against such visa-holders.

“Save Jobs USA members are injured by DHS’s new H-4 Rule because they will compete with H-1B and H-4 guest workers for jobs,” their complaint states. “DHS’s findings for the H-4 Rule repeatedly state that it will increase the number of Save Jobs USA’s H-1B competitors.”

The corporate alliance between tech conglomerates, the Chamber of Commerce, and the outsourcing industry, though, is hoping to convince the court that throwing out work permits for H-4 visa-holders will “undercut” the American economy.

The H-4 visa, like the and Optional Practical Training (OPT) program and the H-1B visa program, helped flood the U.S. white-collar labor market by providing a constant flow of foreign workers to which corporations can outsource jobs rather than hiring Americans. In many cases, American workers who already hold the job and are merely fired, replaced, and forced to train their foreign replacements.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here. 

Facebook Board Rejects Proposal to Curb Mark Zuckerberg’s Power

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Anthony Quintano/Flickr

LUCAS NOLAN

28 May 2021392

1:43

Facebook’s board of directors has rejected two proposals aimed at reducing the power held by CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Bloomberg reports that Facebook’s board has rejected two proposals aimed at diminishing the power that CEO Mark Zuckerberg has over the company. The rejection was expected but largely disappointing to many who hoped to reign in the CEO’s power.

The board stated on Wednesday that it turned down a proposal to replace Zuckerberg as chairman with an independent representative. Zuckerberg has served as chairman of the board since 2012 and controls around 58 percent of Facebook voting shares, according to regulatory filings.

During Facebook’s annual meeting, the board rejected a proposal to eliminate the special class of super-voting shares that give Zuckerberg a controlling stake in the company. Under the plan, investors would have been awarded one vote per share. Similar motions have been rejected by the Zuckerberg-controlled board in the past.

The results of the votes are likely to frustrate shareholders that argue that Zuckerberg has too much power as Facebook faces calls for more independent oversight to address regulatory threats, privacy scandals, and general public controversies.

Facebook has agreed to reappoint its current board directors including Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg and Palantir Technologies co-founder Peter Thiel.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com

Google, Amazon, and Israel in the New America

Tech giants unite in their hostility toward Israel.

Fri Jun 4, 2021 

Caroline Glick

 2 comments

America is changing before our eyes. But the Israeli Finance Ministry apparently hasn’t paid it any mind.

Last week, the head of procurement at the Finance Ministry’s Accountant General’s Office formally announced that Amazon and Google had won the government tender to provide cloud services to the government as Israel moves forward with the first phase of the Nimbus Project. Tender bids submitted by Microsoft and Oracle were rejected.

The Nimbus Project is a massive, multiyear project that will replace the data management infrastructure of government ministries and the IDF. To date, government ministries have used decentralized servers and dozens of independently operating websites to house and manage their data. The Nimbus Project will move all government computing data and applications to commercial clouds provided by technology giants.

When the government computer systems migrate to Google and Amazon’s data clouds, these firms will manage all of official Israel’s non-classified data and computerized applications. This will include everything from government and military payrolls to welfare payments, to government pensions. It will include the medical files of all Israelis. It will include their personal and corporate tax returns.

It’s possible that from the technical and financial perspectives, the General Accountant’s tender committee’s decision to award the cloud contracts to Google and Amazon was reasonable. The two corporations are the industry leaders in cloud technologies. But even on the technical and financial levels, there are differing opinions about the committee’s decision.

Oracle’s bid was allegedly lower than those submitted by Google and Amazon. Moreover, the tender requires that the clouds be physically located inside of Israel. Oracle and Microsoft have both built cloud centers in Israel. Oracle’s is set to open in August and Microsoft’s is scheduled to open in January 2022. Google and Amazon, for their part, have yet to begin building their data centers, so for the next two years, and more likely the next three-four years, contrary to the stipulations of the tender, Israel’s government and IDF data will be housed in Europe.

Then there is the issue of redundancy. The trend today among governments and large corporations is to spread their data out among several cloud providers. Israel could have chosen to award the contract to all four companies and kept costs lower by forcing them to compete over pricing every year. Redundancy in cloud servers also lowers the risks of sabotage and technical failures that can lead to loss of data or failure of computing systems.

At any rate, assuming the tender committee followed the best practices from both financial and technical perspectives in granting the cloud contract to Google and Amazon exclusively, the decision is disconcerting all the same. The problem is not financial or technological. The problem with Google and Amazon is cultural. The organizational culture of both corporations raises significant questions about the wisdom of granting them exclusive control over Israel’s government data for the next seven years.

During this month’s “Operation Guardian of the Walls,” some 250 Google employees who identified as anti-Zionist Jews wrote a letter to Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai. They began by asking that Google reject the determination that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism and that the company fund Palestinian organizations.

The “Jewish Diaspora in Tech” called for “Google leadership to make a company-wide statement recognizing violence in Palestine and Israel, which must include direct recognition of the harm done to Palestinians by Israeli military and gang violence.”

Then they turned to the Nimbus contract.

“We request a review of all … business contracts and corporate donations and the termination of contracts with institutions that support Israeli violations of Palestinian rights, such as the Israeli Defense Forces.”

Shortly after the Google employees published their letter, some five hundred Amazon employees entered the anti-Israel fray. They signed a letter that was almost identical to the Google employees’ letter. They called for Amazon to reject the definition of anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism. They insisted that Israel is a racist colonial project and that the land of Israel belongs to the Palestinians. They called for Amazon to financially support Palestinian organizations. And they asked that the firm “commit to review and sever business contracts and corporate donations with companies, organizations, and/or governments that are active or complicit in human rights violations, such as the Israeli Defense Forces.”

Another employee group, called “Amazon Employees for Climate Justice,” tweeted a long chain of posts denouncing the company’s participation in the Nimbus Project. Among other things, they wrote, “We stand in solidarity with Palestinians who went on a historic general strike to protest Israel’s deadly assault on Gaza. Amazon and Google recently signed a $1B deal supporting Israel’s military. Amazon is complicit in state killings and human rights abuses.

“Amazon’s workers didn’t sign up to work on projects that support militaries and policing forces. We didn’t sign up to be complicit in state killings and human rights abuses in the US, Israel, and around the world,” they concluded.

The workers’ protests in both companies are deadly serious. In 2018, Google employees discovered that the company was working with the Pentagon to develop an artificial intelligence system to improve the accuracy of U.S. military drones. Some 4,000 Google employees, including dozens of senior engineers, signed a petition to Pichai demanding that Google end its involvement in the project. As they put it, “We believe that Google should not be in the business of war.”

Google management caved to the pressure and canceled the contract with the Defense Department.

In January, Amazon canceled its cloud service contract with the social media platform Parler, which was identified with Republicans. Amazon justified the move by claiming that Parler contained “violent content.” The fact that violent content is also contained on other social media platforms—including Amazon itself—was neither here nor there.

Notable as well is the fact that Amazon’s CEO and founder Jeff Bezos is a close friend of musician Brian Eno. Like Roger Waters, Eno is a prominent proponent of the anti-Semitic BDS campaign that seeks to boycott Israel and demonize and silence its Jewish supporters worldwide.

The senior officials at the Finance Ministry, the National Cyber Authority and the Defense Ministry who granted Google and Amazon the government and IDF cloud contracts may simply not understand the dire implications for Israel’s national security posed by the antagonistic positions of some Google and Amazon employees.

In a press conference this week, the heads of the Finance Ministry actually presented these statements as testaments to the credibility of the contracts. The fact that the leaders of Google and Amazon signed the deal with Israel despite the hatred their employees express towards the Jewish state is proof of the companies’ commitment to the project, they insisted.

The Finance Ministry added that there is no cause for concern because the contracts require that Google and Amazon set up subsidiary firms in Israel to actually manage the clouds. As Israeli registered companies, the subsidiaries will be bound to the requirements of Israeli law. And as such, they will have no option of sabotaging the work or otherwise breaching the contract, no matter how anti-Israel the Google and Amazon employees outside of Israel may be.

The problem with this argument is that the subsidiaries in Israel will be wholly owned by their mother corporations. All of their equipment will be owned by Google and Amazon in the United States. If the mother corporations decide to pull the plug on the Nimbus contract, the local subsidiaries will be powerless to maintain them.

The same Google management that blew off the artificial intelligence project with the Pentagon three years ago to satisfy their workers should be expected to repeat their actions in the future. If their employees unite to demand that Google abrogate the Nimbus contract, management can be expected to absorb a few hundred million dollars in losses to keep their workers happy.

The polarization of opinion on Israel that we are witnessing in American politics between Republicans who support Israel and Democrats who oppose Israel is an expression of a much larger division within American society. The heartbreaking but undeniable fact is that today you can’t talk about “America” as a single political entity.

Today there are two Americas, and they cannot abide one another. One America—Traditional America—loves Israel and America. The other America—New America—hates Israel and doesn’t think much of America, either.

Traditional America believes that the United States brought the promise of liberty to the world and that even though it is far from perfect, the United States is the greatest country in human history. In the eyes of the citizens of Traditional America, Israel is a kindred nation and the United States’ best friend and most valued ally in the Middle East.

New America, by contrast, believes that America was born in the sin of slavery. New Americans insist America will remain evil and an object of scorn at home and abroad so long it refuses to exchange its values of liberty, capitalism, equal opportunity and patriotism with the values of racialism and equity, socialism, equality of outcome, and globalization. For New Americans, just as the United States was born in the sin of white supremacy, so Israel was born in the sin of Zionism. In New America, Israel will have no right to exist so long as it clings to its Jewish national identity, refusing to become a “state of all its citizens.”

New America’s power isn’t limited to its control over the White House and Congress. It also controls much of corporate America. Under the slogan, “Stakeholder Capitalism,” corporate conglomerates whose leaders are New Americans use their economic power to advance the political and cultural agendas of New America. We saw stakeholder capitalism at work in March following the Georgia statehouse’s passage of a law requiring voters to present identification at polling places. Major League Baseball, Coca Cola, Delta and American Airlines among others announced that they would boycott the state, denying jobs to thousands of Georgians in retaliation.

Silicon Valley is the Ground Zero of Stakeholder Capitalism. Its denizens are the loudest and most powerful proponents of using technological and economic power to advance the political and cultural agendas of New America.

Microsoft and Oracle are appealing the Nimbus tender award. They are basing their appeals on what they describe as technical and other flaws in the tender process. Israel should view their appeals as an opportunity to reverse course.

In light of New America’s hostility towards Israel generally, and given the proven power of Google and Amazon employees and their expressed antagonism towards Israel, the Finance Ministry should reconsider the tender award. Technical considerations aside, the decision to grant Google and Amazon exclusive control over the State of Israel’s computer data did not give sufficient weight to all the relevant variables.