(Update 2.2) The most effective interdiction process for political corruption is now here. It is called "Citizen Forensics" or "Cancel Culture". It is the process of crowd-sourced deep investigation of public officials, and their shills, followed by the global public exposure and shaming of their illicit deeds. Many publishers have recently forced their shills, mouthpieces and fake op-ed writers to wring their hands and cry overtly over Cancel Culture..... BECAUSE IT TOTALLY WORKS! It works totally, magnificently and effectively against evil people and scumbags!
We lost millions of dollars because our competitors, and their Senators, ran a self-profiteering organized crime operation within the State and Federal government. That's not ever going to happen again on our watch.
A corrupt political "crime family", for example, is the "Paypal Mafia":
The indisputable facts about them are the assertions that the Silicon Valley oligarchs:
1. Control business and politics like a crime Cartel
2. Are a white male fraternity who attack outsiders in organized manners
3. Come from dynastic families that systematically ran them through Stanford, Harvard and Yale men's clubs
4. Were socially trained and programmed to operate in a closed, tribal, exclusionary manner
5. Operated the "Angelgate" collusion scandal
6. Operated the "Silicon Valley High Tech Employee Collusion" for which they were sued in a famous class-action case
7. Controlled the Obama Administration and the Obama White House and traded most key staff with that Administration
8. Have been sued, indicted and charged in divorce proceedings with an unusually massive amount of sex trafficking matters
9. Use the same 10 law-firms who have been charged with public policy manipulation
10. Control internet news, media and information
11. "Own" certain U.S. Senators by virtue of direct bribe payments and securities/stock payola payments
12. Use a variety of tools like GUST, Private Google Docs sites, covert Facebook pages and similar, to secret conspire and plan collusion and organized monopolistic practices
13. Have their venture capitalists spy on entrepreneurs and copy their technology to be deployed by Google, or Facebook under a new name
14. Are a Mafia-like criminal organization
15. Have "command and control and exclusive beneficiary positions in
ongoing, coordinated, criminal and anti-trust activities involving
government and stock market funds...".
The sex crime victims of Cartel member Jeffrey Epstein reported him to
the DOJ a decade ago, yet nothing was done. We reported this Cartel in
2008, STILL, nothing has been done! These people are Ponzi-Scheming State
and Federal funds in "stimulus" after "stimulus"! They use free government
money, stock valuation pump-and-dump and black-lists to make certain that
no competitor can ever operate against them in any market. The public has
had enough of them. In addition to filing many formal federal
requests for FBI, SEC and FTC investigation, you as a member of the
public, can do much more:
YOU can fight back and destroy dirty oligarchs!
The tech Cartel is evil because they steal any technology they desire; they run a prostitution ring and sexually extort young women and interns in Silicon Valley; they are misogynists, ageists and racists as their history of abuses has proven; their Palo Alto Cartel operates AngelGate-type collusion and stock market insider trading schemes that harm independent business and the public; Their Cartel ran the "no poaching" CEO ring which was class-action sued by DOJ and tech workers; 90% of their divorce court files reveal horrific abuses and sex trafficking; They have an army of lobbyists that pay cash, stock market and revolving door bribes to U.S. Senators; They can even evade FBI & SEC investigations; They hire women to act as 'trophy wives' and 'beards'; they have lobbyists rig the U.S. Patent Office in order to block inventor patent rights because they are using stolen technologies; they have been caught on video and recordings beating, kicking and harming women hundreds of times; They have bought up all of the Tier-One tech law firms and order them to never help those who seek equal tech rights; they collude to abuse your privacy and make databases on the public for political control; they have to cheat to compete because they are only good with spread sheets instead of innovation; They run black-lists, character assassination attacks, collusion and other anti-trust violating acts in violation of RICO laws.
When the bad guys, and their lap-dog politicians, attack you because your products are better than theirs they are proving that they are frat boy scumbags, from Stanford and Yale, that operate in a little pack, like dogs! Their Sandhill Road operation should be raided by the FBI! The best thing that could come from the COVID pandemic is that they all are forced into bankruptcy!
When your Senator holds stock market shares in companies that exist to profit on the backs of consumers, then it is impossible for that Senator to ever do anything but be corrupt!
The crooks at Google, Facebook, Tesla, Linkedin, Netflix, etc., broke felony laws and the basic principles of Democracy.
They bribed your Senators, White House Staff, insider agency staff and operated a Silicon Valley Oligarch sociopath political Cartel.
As Mother Jones top editor says: "In 18 years of living here, I find zero evidence that the "City Family" is benefiting anybody but its members, developers, old-school socialites, and tech billionaires..."
— Clara Jeffery (@ClaraJeffery) February 14, 2020
"I can't even with how insular and incestuous and corrupt SF is. Mayor @londonbreed acknowledges she had relationship with DPW Nuru two decades ago and that they remained close friends https://t.co/HEhIlulkyj"
— Clara Jeffery (@ClaraJeffery) February 14, 2020Your public officials set-up, operated and maintained an organized crime scheme for personal profit at the expense of every taxpayer. They went after Five Trillion treasury dollars of your tax money for their personal interests via rigged stock market scams, rigged government contracts, exclusionary policy manipulations and other schemes that harmed American taxpayers.
YOU OWE IT TO YOURSELF AND THE NATION TO TAKE THEM DOWN!
YOU CAN WIPE THEM OUT, ALL BY YOURSELF, IN 100% LEGAL WAYS.
YOU CAN WIPE THEM OUT EVEN FASTER WITH CROWD-SOURCED FORENSICS AND
ANTI-CORRUPTION AI SOFTWARE! JOIN THE REST OF THE PUBLIC IN AN EPIC
ANTI-CORRUPTION EFFORT!
You will learn to write FBI-quality criminal activities reports and file those reports, by certified mail, with every law enforcement and regulatory agency in every country in the world, including the FBI, OSC, GAO, EU, Interpol, FSB, UN, etc. CC the social media sites with your reports.
You will use basic private investigator websites to track and back-ground every person, organization and company involved in the corruption and trace their RICO law violations. You can provide that data to The U.S. Congress and every agency, with a copy to every social media posting.
You will use open-source, free, collaborative NSA-class global databases that can track all of the locations, hookers, fake fronts, family trusts, bank accounts, stock market accounts, bribes and other goodies, of any corrupt public official, in minutes! You get that free anti-corruption software from GitHub, CodePen, Torrents, Onion Project, The Guardian, ICIJ and all over the web.
YOU will run your own private investigator/citizen sleuth crowd-sourced investigations into the following:
- Every stock market account they or their family owns
- Every Uber or Lyft ride they ever took for any meeting or transport of sex workers
- Every flight manifest they appeared on
- Every bank account they have ever held
- Every lawsuit, divorce record and police record they have ever appeared in
- Every trust fund they or their family holds
- Every shell corporation they, or their family holds
- Every person named in the Epstein Pedo book: https://www.scribd.com/document/416207833/Jeffrey-Epsteins-Little-Black-Book-Redacted cross referenced across all of the other databases and then supplied to the FBI and Child Protection Agencies
- Every item in the Swiss Leaks that cross connects to their holdings
- Every item in the Panama Papers Leaks that cross connects to their holdings
- Every item in the WikiLeaks that cross connects to their holdings
- Every item in the Snowden Leaks that cross connects to their holdings
- Every sex trafficking incident that connects to each of them alone, and in groups
- Every financial transaction between any of the parties on the master list and the character assassination and hit job firms of: Google, Univision, Gawker Media, Unimoda, Jalopnik, Gizmodo,Black Cube, Fusion GPS, Media Matters, Think Progress, IN-Q-Tel, K2 Intelligence, WikiStrat, Podesta Group, YouTube, Alphabet, David Drummond, Larry Page, Facebook, Correct The Recor, Stratfor, ShareBlue, Sid Blumenthal, David Brock, Eric Schmidt, Sunshine Sachs, Covington and Burling, Buzzfeed, Perkins Coie and Wilson Sonsini or their derivatives with common owners.
- Every item in the Quest Leaks that cross connects to their holdings
- Every tactical deployment, by a campaign financier, of the tactics listed in this manual: https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP89-01258R000100010002-4.pdf
- Every sex service that their credit card payments every connect too
- Every real estate transaction that any name or company they, or their family, were involved in, tracks to
..... and hundreds of thousands of other information points about them that prove that they benefit from crimes that they engage in for others who engage in crimes using the America public policy system.
It all goes into shared 100% legal public collaborative databases that work like XKEYSCORE, or MS Access, or Oracle Databases.
The proof of collusion, organized criminal actions and raw covert corruption is indisputable. The actors are all the same people. The beneficiaries are all the same people. The communications between the parties all coordinate the same actions.
Demand their arrests, indictments, exposures and bankruptcies in public ads, letters to the editor, blog posts, bumper stickers, lawsuits, flyers, newsletters, email and every other outreach manner.
Say "Fuck You" to the Silicon Valley Oligarch 'Illuminati' scumbags and the crooked Senators and Governor's they bribed.
Show these oligarch crooks what billions of taxpaying voters with collaborative FBI-class forensics investigation software can do to their corrupt tech Cartel!
https://www.amazon.com/Big-Book-Revenge-Serious-Getting/dp/0806521414
and many "How To Be A Private Investigator"-type books.- New open-source, and free, public software let's any citizen get any corrupt official arrested. Any voter can use the software from the comfort of their living room. The AI replicates itself (Like A benign digital version of Covid) across the entire web.
- You can download a copy of the software or build-your-own version of it from freely available code at Github, CERN and Linux repositories.
- We have consulted to the SEC and the GAO on this technology.
- After suffering millions of dollars of losses from public official's Insider Trading schemes, we decided to do something about that!
Illegal and corrupt Congressional insider trading tends to be something we don't hear about until it's hit the big news networks and newspapers as the SEC goes for the throat of the accused. By then, unfortunately, those committing it have made their gains, usually in the multi-millions of dollars, and the damage has been done to the stock, its company, investors and the American Way. Covert stock market trades are now the #1 form of bribes in California and Washinton, DC.
Quite frankly, the jail time assessed doesn't correct the damage done, and the fines rarely aid the investors, or the voters, in getting their money and their democracy back. Many of those hurt are Average Joe's and Jill's who were just trying to save their retirement nest eggs. Shame is the tool that works best on the corrupt!
These crimes involve an investment banker spouse and a Senator or other top official, using information, which was not available to the public, buying and selling a company's stock in an underhanded manner. In many cases bribes have been paid with Google, Tesla or Facebook stock in a covert manner. It is particularly onerous when a Senators buys Tesla, Google, Facebook or Solyndra stock, and makes laws that only benefits Tesla, Solyndra, etc, while sabotaging their competitor constituents. Because the dealings involved are pretty much done on the sly, it's been difficult, until now, for the governing body of the SEC to prove illegal insider trading, unless one of the cohorts tattles on the others or their actions become glaringly obvious. In some cases, a sharp mind around the action may take notice and become what's called a whistle-blower.
Previously, writes Andrew Beattie of Investopedia: "... insider trading is often difficult for the SEC to spot. Detecting it involves a lot of conjecture and consideration of probabilities." That was the 'old days', though. Today, the new AI software can bust through these scams like a hot knife through butter!
With this new open-source, free, public spy agency-class software, detecting illegal insider trading is actually less complicated than it sounds.
To the eyes of this new super-powerful AI observer server bot and
peer-to-peer databases, it is easy work.
You, the citizen, just type the politician or agency employee name into a
field and hit the "analyze" button. A few minutes later you receive
a multi-page PDF report similar to an FBI report on the target. You can
either research the subject in more detail or send copies of the report to
the FBI, GAO, OSC, SEC or other enforcement group.
The software is an automated AI temporal matching system which includes 24/7 analysis of all stock trades involving politicians to its information source, politician finances, communications and policy participators. it uses some of the same software code used by the CERN mega-research center in Switzerland.
The technology Core Evaluation Points:
One Way The AI Detects Congressional Insider Trades
Metricized signs of illegal insider trading occur when trades occur that break out of the historical pattern of share volume traded compared to beneficiary participation's of those connected to company and political entity. Another clue of the illegal insider trading is when a lot of trading goes on right before earnings announcements. That tends to be a sign that someone already knows what the announcement is going to indicate, and it's an obvious violation. One module of the new software hunts these trends around-the-clock in an unmanned manner like a detective who never needs to sleep.
The software red alerts are issued when trades are linked closer to the actual earnings and politicians bills instead of what the predicted earnings were. In a corruption case, it's clear the trades - especially made by politicians close to the company - stemmed from information that was not readily available to the general public.
In other words, at the time an insider makes a trade, the trade has a stronger relationship to earnings guidance rather than to earnings results achieved.
Part Of The Insider Trading Detection AI Uses 'Dynamic Time Warping (DTW)'
In econometrics, which is a concept frequently used by quantitative analysts to evaluate stock market prices, dynamic time warping (DTW) is an algorithm that can be used for measuring similarity between two data sequences by calculating an optimal match between the two. This sequence "matching" method is often used in time series classification to properly "line things up."
The method, coupled with AI machine learning ensemble methods, can provide a clear path between the trades made by insiders and public data used to make the trades.
This is a product of artificial intelligence that has been expanded by Indexer, Splunk, Palantir and other firms fast becoming experts in products that can be used to advance the art of manipulating political and social trends in business and markets by using social media, financial data and news stories. The new software process has taken that sort of approach to the next level and targeted every member of Congress, their staff, family and friends. The first emphasis is on California and Washington, DC public figures.
In a hypothetical example, a group of executives failed to trade by industry standards by leveraging material non-public information and policy manipulation. Although consensus estimates called for higher commodity prices at the end of 2015, it appears key executives traded for their personal accounts as a result of the forecast provided by a specialist system within the firm that was adept at predicting prices alongside lobbyist manipulations. Flash-boy trading is now dirtier and powered by Google-class server systems.
In the hypothetical scenario the software aggregates executive trades in 2014 and 2015 and finds a strong link between buys and sells of executive stock options, which line up with material non-public estimates of commodity prices that were provided by the specialist system.
For example, in a "Exec Sell and Exec Buys" graph, a green line represents sells, while a black line represents buys. In the corresponding period, one finds a red line represents unrevised prices provided by the specialist system, and green line represents consensus estimates.
During Q1-2014, there was $28M in purchases of executive stock options, while in Q2-2014, there was $25M in sales of executive stock options. The specialist system called for Q3-2014 commodity prices to make a precipitous decline going into the end of 2014. Remember, under this scenario, no revisions were made to the specialist systems' price forecast. In this example, executives were afforded a significant advantage using price predictions from the specialist system.
In a final bullet chart, there was a dynamic time warping distance between trades and consensus estimates of 7.23, but this distance is only 2.19 when comparing specialist system estimates and executive trades. Please note, the closer the distance score is to zero, the more similar the trades are to the estimates they are measured against.
We have applied this process to companies well-known for influence buying like, Google, Tesla and Facebook
It's obvious that the tech executives involved did not follow industry standards in their actions and make public the "insider" information they had access to prior to the trades they made. The lobbyists they hired promoted this rigged trend and paid off Senators with perks. These are the kind of violations the SEC and other governing bodies can look to in attempting to protect the trading public and the integrity of financial marketplaces. Artificial intelligence tools are a major factor in assisting the tracking of insider trading.
"Every facet of our everyday lives has been impacted, infiltrated and greatly influenced by artificial intelligence technologies," says Vernon A. McKinley, a multi-jurisdictional attorney, based in Atlanta. "In fact, the U.S. government and its multiple agencies have developed specialized intelligence units to detect, track, analyze and prosecute those unscrupulous individuals seeking to profit from the use of such tools, specifically in the financial industry, and to protect the integrity and strength of the U.S. economy and its investors." Now these tools are being turned against the corrupt!
The public can now detect trading anomalies in financial situations using this artificial intelligence software on their desktop computers. No public official will ever be able to do these kinds of corruptions, again, without getting caught.
This approach has already had an impact on how political insiders trade on Wall Street and in financial markets around the world.
This technology can end this corruption forever!
A module of the software uses data from The Center for Responsive Politics, ICIJ Panama Leaks records, Swiss Leaks records and FEC files to reveal covert routes. Famous politicians own part of Tesla Motors, Facebook, Google, Netflix, YouTube and other companies they helped get government money for. All of their competing constituents have suffered for it or been put out of business by exclusive deals that only Tesla Motors, Facebook, Google, Netflix and YouTube got. That is a crime and charges have been filed with federal law enforcement.
A large volume of forensic research proves that Silicon Valley Cartel tech firms receive benefits from politicians and politicians,at the same time, benefit from these firms.
This evidence on the exchange of benefits between politicians and firms proves an agreement between the politicians and the companies. This agreement, however, cannot be in the form of a written contract as writing direct fee-for-service contracts between a politician and a firm is considered bribery (Krozner and Stratmann 1998; 2000). In addition, either party to this agreement might renege on its promise and the other party cannot resort to the courts.
Procon.org, for example, reports: “Less than two months after ascending
to the United States Senate, and before becoming President, one Senator
bought more than $50,000 worth of stock in two speculative companies whose
major investors included some of his biggest political donors. One of the
companies was a biotech concern that was starting to develop a drug to
treat avian flu. In March 2005, two weeks after buying thousands of
dollars of its shares, this Senator took the lead in a legislative push
for more federal spending to battle the disease. The most recent financial
disclosure form this Senator . . . shows that he bought more than $50,000
in stock in a satellite communications businesswhose principal backers . .
. had raised more than $150,000 for his political committees.” See more
examples from the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington
(CREW) report (2009).)
The literature and eye-witness experience proves that
politically-connected Silicon Valley tech firms monthly obtain economic
favors, such as securing favorable legislation, special tax exemptions,
having preferential access to finance, receiving government contracts, or
help in dealing with regulatory agencies. The evidence proves that
Google's support, for example, can help in winning elections. For example,
firms can vary the number of people they employ, coordinate the opening
and closing of plants, and increase their lending activity in election
years in order to help incumbent politicians get re-elected. (SeeRoberts
1990; Snyder 1990; Langbein and Lotwis 1990; Durden, Shorgen, and
Silberman 1991; Stratmann 1991, 1995, and 1998; Fisman 2001;Johnson and
Mitton 2003; Ansolabehere, Snyder, and Ueda 2004; Sapienza 2004, Dinç
2005; Khwaja and Mian 2005; Bertrand, Kramarz,Schoar, and Thesmar 2006;
Faccio 2006; Faccio, Masulis, and McConnell 2006; Jayachandran 2006; Leuz
and Oberholzer-Gee 2006; Claessens,Feijen, Laeven 2008; Desai and
Olofsgard 2008; Ramanna 2008;Goldman, Rocholl, and So 2008, 2009; Cole
2009; Cooper, Gulen, and Ovtchinnikov 2009; Correia 2009; Ramanna and
Roychowdhury 2010;Benmelech and Moskowitz 2010.)
The software can see that the share ownership of politicians serves as a mechanism to quid-pro-quo their relationships with big tech firms, is as follows: The ownership of politicians plays multiple distinct (but not necessarily independent) roles; one that relies upon the amount of ownership and one that does not. First, as investors in firms, politicians tie their own interests to those of the firm. Thus, harming (benefiting) the firm means harming (benefiting) the politician and vice versa. By owning a firm's stock, politicians commit their personal wealth to the firm and reduce a firm’s uncertainty with regard to their actions toward the firm. This will,in turn, enhance the firm's incentive to support the politician-owner during both current and future elections in order to prolong the incumbency period for as long as possible. Firms have their lobbyists push to be able to know the amount of ownership likely to be material to politicians. This knowledge, in turn, enables them to judge whether the politician’s interest is aligned with the firm’s interest and optimize quid-pro-quo.
The Political Action Committee (PAC) contribution of firms (which is a direct measure of benefits flowing from firms to politicians) is a significant determinant of ownership allocations by members of Congress. The ownership of Congress members in firms that contribute to their election campaigns is roughly 32.8% higher than their ownership in noncontributing firms even after accounting for factors that are associated with both ownership and contribution (such as familiarity, proximity and investor recognition).
The committee assignments of politicians is a proxy for whether their relations with firms are enforced (Krozner and Stratmann 1998). Silicon Valley tech firms like Facebook, Tesla and Google obtain private benefits out of their mutual relations with politicians. When the strength of the association between ownership and contributions at the firm level increases, the provision of government contracts to those firms increases.
Members of Congress, candidates for federal office, senior congressional staff, nominees for executive branch positions, Cabinet members, the President and Vice President, and Supreme Court justices are required by the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 to file annual reports disclosing their income, assets, liabilities, and other relevant details about their personal finances.
Personal financial disclosure forms are filed annually by May 15 and cover the preceding calendar year. The Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) collected the 2004–2007 reports for Congress members from the Senate Office of Public Records and the Office of the Clerkof the House. The Center then scanned the reports as digital images, classified the politicians’ investments into categories including stocks, bonds, and mutual funds, and built a database accessible via a web query.
Using CRP's data, you can use the software to collect the shares in S&P 500 firms held by members of Congress between 2004 and 2007, for example.You can collect the stock ownership data for every firm that joined the S&P 500 Index any time between January 2004 and April 2009;regardless of when it joined the index, and the software can obtain all the available stock ownership data for that firm between 2004 and 2007. Likewise, if a firm dropped out of the index at any time during 2004–2008, the software, nevertheless, will retain the firm in a sample for the target period. As such, the sample would include stocks in hundreds of unique firms owned by politicians between 2004 and 2007, for example.
Politicians are required to report only those stocks whose value exceeds $1,000 at the end of the calendar year or that produce more than $200 in income. They are CURRENTLY not required to report the exact value of the holding, but instead must simply check a box corresponding to the value range into which the asset falls. The CRP then undertakes additional research to determine the exact values of these stocks. When the Center makes these determinations, it reports them instead of the ranges and I use these values in my study. When only the range is available, you should use its midpoint as the holding's value. You would, thus have data on the stock holdings of hundreds politicians for that time period.
Using the software, you can search for all Political Action Committees (PACs) associated with tech firms. It then collects data on each contribution these PACs made to candidates (both the winners and losers) running for the Senate and House elections. Tricky corrupt Silicon Valley firms establish several PACs, each in a different location, and each of these PACs can contribute to the same candidate. In such cases, the software would total, for each candidate, every contribution he or she received from PACs affiliated with the same firm. To parallel the investment data sample period, for example, the software collects every contribution made from the 2003–2004 cycle up to and including the 2007–2008 cycle. Many Silicon Valley tech firms use deeply covert Fusion GPS, Perkins Coie, BlackCube, Psyops-type service to make very hidden additional payola payments to California politicians.
For sources, for example, the software collects government contract data from Eagle Eye Publishers, Inc., one of the leading commercial providers of Federal procurement and grant business intelligence and http://www.usaspending.org. Eagle Eye collects its contract data from Federal Procurement Data System–Next Generation (FPDS-NG), the contract data collection and dissemination system administered by the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA). FPDS-NG provides data on procurement contracts awarded by the U.S. Government. When these contracts are awarded to company subsidiaries, Eagle Eye searches for the names of their parent companies and assigns each subsidiary to its appropriate parent. The software collects both the number and aggregate value of government contracts that were awarded to sample firms between 2004 and 2007 in this example time-frame..
The software reveals, for example, that one Representative is a ten-term member of Congress and a senior member of the House Financial Services Committee. They arranged a meeting between the Department of Treasury and One United Bank, a company with close financial ties to themselves, involving both investments and contributions.
“In September 2008, the Representative asked then-Secretary of the
Treasury Henry Paulson to hold a meeting for their friends in banks that
had suffered from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac losses.
The Treasury Department complied and held a session with approximately a
dozen senior banking regulators, representatives from those banks, and
their trade association. Officials of One United Bank have close ties to
the Representative and attended the meeting along with the
Representative's chief of staff. Kevin Cohee, chief executive officer of
One United, used the meeting as an opportunity to ask for bailout funds.
. . . Former White House officials stated they were surprised when One United Officials asked for bailout funds. . . . In December 2008, the Representative intervened again, asking Treasury to host another meeting to ensure their banks received part of the $700 billion allocated under the Troubled Asset Relief Program. . . . Within two weeks, on December 19, 2008, One United secured $12.1million in bailout funds. . . . This was not the first time the Representative used their position to advance the interests of the bank. the Representative's spouse became a shareholder in One United in 2001, when it was known as the Boston Bank of Commerce. In 2002, Boston Bank of Commerce tried to purchase Family Savings, a friend of the Representative in Los Angeles. Instead, Family Savings turned to a bank in Illinois. The Representative tried to block the merger by contacting regulators at the FDIC. The Representative publicly stated they did not want a major bank to acquire a bank that the Representative was friends with.
When the Representative's efforts with the FDIC proved fruitless, the Representative began a public pressure campaign with other community leaders. Ultimately,when Family Savings changed direction and allowed Boston Bank of Commerce to submit a winning bid, the Representative received credit for the merger. The combined banks were renamed One United. . . . In March 2004, the Representative acquired One United stock worth between $250,001 and $500,000, and the Representative's spouse purchased two sets of stock, each worth between $250,001 and $500,000. In September 2004, the Representative sold their stock in One United and their husband sold a portion of his. That same year, the husband joined the bank’s board. . . . One United Chief Executive Kevin Cohee and President Teri Williams Cohee have donated a total of $8,000 to the Representative's campaign committee. . . .On October 27, 2009, less than two months before One United received a $12 million bailout, the bank received a cease-and-desist order from the FDIC and bank regulatory officials in Massachusetts for poor lending practices and excessive executive compensation . . . the bank provided excessive perks to its executives, including paying for Mr. Cohee’s use of a $6.4 million mansion . . .” (Ref: CREW report 2009,pp. 123–125)
Thanks to Crony quid-pro-quo revelations by an earlier version of the software, you can also see that Fisker Automotive, Inc.'s $529 Million U.S. Taxpayer Loan Approval by the Department of Energy was dirty. Fisker Automotive's Chief Operating Officer Bernhard Koehler pleaded with the Department of Energy in a panicked Saturday midnight hour email to receive a $529 million loan as the company was 2 weeks from Chapter 7 liquidation, that it was laying off most of its employees, that no private sector investors would fund the company without DOE guarantees, and that Fisker was unable to raise any further equity funding from independent private-sector investors given the company's financial condition.These statements were made to a Loan Officer at the DOE . No private sector Loan underwriting (approval) committee would ever grant a low interest loan to a desperate buyer that had just confessed it was in a state of insolvency and was about to layoff most of its staff. Yet within a few weeks the DOE would approve a $529 Million Credit Facility to Fisker. Despite the DOE Loan Officer official's sworn testimony at April 24th's House Oversight Committee that the DOE used "same private sector underwriting standards when approving Fisker and other approved Taxpayer Funded Loans" - likely perjury based in documents.
In a 'U.S. GOVERNMENT CONFIDENTIAL EMAIL': FISKER AUTOMOTIVE: August 2009: Co-Founder Bernhard Koehler emails U.S. Dept. of Energy Loan Officer in Sat. midnight Panic admitting VC Firms all declined to invest, and company is out of cash. Weeks later the U.S.Department of Energy approves $529M U.S. Taxpayer Funded Loans to FISKER. NO PRIVATE SECTOR Lender would every authorize a Loan for even $5 Million let alone $529 Million after receiving this email stating private sector investors had examined the company and declined equity investments, that they might loan money as more secure Debt, and the Chief Operating Officer of the company further stating that the borrower is totally insolvent. (Weeks after this email the U.S. Federal Government Dept. of Energy Loan Committee Approves Fisker Automotive as a credit-worthy borrow for $529 Million in U.S. Taxpayer Funded Loans). Fisker got the cash because President Obama said to "give it to them" in order to please his campaign financiers.
The same thing happened with Tesla Motors. Elon Musk and Tesla Motors were broke when DOE gave them the money.
PrivCo CEO Sam Hamadeh stated in an official statement: “The documents obtained by PrivCo paint a picture of how an insolvent,unproven automaker received $192 million in taxpayer funding. The Department of Energy made a loan that no rational lender would have made. This loan was the equivalent of staying execution on a company that was terminally ill to begin with." Tesla and Fisker could not have been taxpayer funded unless bribes and criminal quid-pro-quo was underway by President Obama and the U.S. Senator insider traders.
Since its ruling in Buckley v. Valeo, the U.S. Supreme Court has expressed concern regarding corruption or the appearance of corruption stemming from political quid pro quo arrangements and the deleterious consequences it may have on citizens’ democratic behavior. However, no standard has been set as to what constitutes “the appearance of corruption,” as the Court was and continues to be vague in its definition. As a result, campaign finance cases after Buckley have relied on public opinion polls as evidence of perceptions of corruption, and these polls indicate that the public generally perceives high levels of corruption in government. The present study investigates the actual impact that perceptions of corruption have on individuals’ levels of political participation. Adapting the standard socioeconomic status model developed most fully by Verba and Nie (1972), an extended beta-binomial regression estimated using maximum likelihood is performed, utilizing unique data from the 2009 University of Texas’ Money and Politics survey. The results of this study indicate that individuals who perceive higher levels of quid pro quo corruption participate more in politics, on average, than those who perceive lower levels of corruption.
SOURCE CODE RESOURCES FOR YOU TO FORK OR MODIFY AS ANTI-CORRUPTION TOOLS:
-Spoke:
Spoke is a peer-to-peer texting platform for collaborative investigation
with several forks under active development.
-Pollaris, A
polling location lookup tool modified to track bad guys. You can
integrate this with your website and other tools. An API is provided.
-Caucus
App: A way to quickly calculate citizen and pro member
evidence sets and report results from each investigator.
-Switchboard (FE
and BE):
This software takes new potential volunteers, or "hot leads," from your
online channels and assigns them to state or section-based based volunteer
leads for personal follow up calls offering ways to get involved with the
investigations. This is also a great tool for investiagtion team
recruitment.
-Automated
organizing email: Your teams can work together to scale email
outreach to the widest possible audience and bypass any cover-up.
-Redhook:
Investigations run on data, and redhook is a tool that makes data happen.
As a system, Redhook ingests web hook data and delivers it to
Redshift/Civis in near real time.
-I90: This
tool makes a long file name or hard to remember legal evidence document
into a short, easy-to-remember, link.
- opendata.cern.ch: The CERN Database Open Source
- https://github.com: One
of the collaborative development nets
- https://citizensleuths.com: An example of over
1000 public forensic groups working on crowd-sourced crime-fighting
You are building a forensic anti-corruption version of XKEYSCORE and submitting your results reports to law enforcement and news outlets. Simply look in torrents and code databases like GITHUB, and similar sites, for forensic database and mass collaboration code and you will have a working module up in no time at all if you are a Tier 2 coder, or better.
In 2003, a picture of Barbra Streisand’s beachfront home hit the web as part of a public collection of images displaying coastal erosion. In response, in February 2003, Streisand sued the photographer for $50 million for invasion of privacy, claiming violation of a state law aimed at the telephoto lenses of paparazzi.
Ironically, the media attention surrounding the lawsuit made the photo of her house go viral (at least in 2003 terms). In the month before the lawsuit, the picture had been downloaded only six times, including twice by her lawyers—whereas the image was downloaded more than 420,000 times during the month following the lawsuit. This paradoxical result—where an attempt to silence, suppress, or stop something backfires—was dubbed the Streisand effect.
Let’s take a closer look at the Streisand effect.
Here are three different times the Streisand effect was apparently reified by real-world examples.
In 2012, a Scottish schoolgirl named Martha Payne started blogging about her school lunches and included pictures of the meals, which, as could be expected by anyone who has ever been to school, were unappetizing.
Soon, celebrity chef and food activist Jamie Oliver tweeted out his support, and the blog garnered three million hits in two months. Consequently, local government authorities banned Payne from taking photos of the lunches because (they claimed) cafeteria workers were worried about getting fired. Even though the authorities quickly reversed this decision, for them it was too late, and the British national media and the Internet ran with the story.
In 2013, Buzzfeed ran a list titled “The 33 Fiercest Moments From Beyoncé's Halftime Show.” Although the intention of the list was likely laudatory, some of the still photos were considered "unflattering."
Consequently, Queen Bey’s publicist contacted Buzzfeed to request that the unflattering photos, which were cited, be switched out. Buzzfeed responded with a follow-up piece titled “The 'Unflattering' Photos Beyoncé's Publicist Doesn't Want You To See,” which included an email from the publicist and the cited shots.
Subsequently, the Internet did its thing, and a meme was born. Countless “unflattering” shots of Beyoncé as a zombie, powerlifter, anime cartoon, and so forth popped up.
In 2014, cab drivers from across Europe went on strike to decry the lack of regulation of the ride-hailing app Uber. Without cabbies on the roads, riders turned to Uber, with downloads of the app increasing more than eight times in London alone.
In an article published in the International Journal of Education, Sue Curry Jansen and Brian Martin explained how the Streisand effect is a consequence of failed censorship attempts. These outrage-management processes include cover-up, defamation of the target, reframing events, false justice, and intimidation or rewards.
The authors also argued that censorship is a process that requires active maintenance to conceal the actions of powerful people. Furthermore, they wrote that a clearer understanding of outrage-management processes “stimulates awareness of tactics for challenging censorship by exposing its existence, validating the censored information, explaining the importance of free expression, not relying on official channels for solutions but instead mobilizing wider awareness and support, and resisting intimidation and rewards.”
By the way, you may be wondering how Babs's court case turned out. The chanteuse not only brought viral attention to her bluff-top estate by bringing the suit in the first place but the suit was dismissed in December 2003.
Google, YouTube and Facebook have commercialized "The Streisand Effect" by deploying computerized processes to steer the public towards, or away from, one product, candidate or point-of-view using manually programmed directions.
Former motor racing boss Max Mosley is suing Google for continuing to display photographs he says breach his privacy. But does pressing for information to be kept private, or suppressed, often have the opposite effect?
At first sight not much unites Beyonce and Max Mosley. But they, and several other celebrities and organisations, have become victims of the "Streisand effect".
In 2005, Mike Masnick, founder of the Techdirt website, coined the term. Two years earlier singer Barbra Streisand unsuccessfully sued photographer Kenneth Adelman, who was documenting the coastline of California, for including her clifftop home in Malibu. The resulting publicity helped drive 420,000 visits in a month to the site where the photo was published. According to documents filed in court, images of Streisand's house had been downloaded only six times before the legal action.
It's not always a fight over privacy. In February last year the Buzzfeed website published a selection of singer Beyonce's "fiercest moments" - mocking her facial expressions while performing at the Superbowl. Her publicist reportedly contacted it to ask that seven of the most "unflattering" photos be removed. Buzzfeed refused and republished exactly this selection with the headline: "The 'Unflattering' Photos Beyonce's Publicist Doesn't Want You To See". The exposure of the unflattering photos was magnified.
A few months later it was reported that lawyers for Pippa Middleton, sister of the Duchess of Cambridge, had asked for the removal of a parody Twitter feed, which offered ridiculously obvious lifestyle advice in her name, such as "Avoid getting lost by consulting with a map" and "A party isn't much fun without people attending". Its following increased.
In 2008 the Church of Scientology reportedly tried to get a video featuring film star Tom Cruise talking about his faith, designed for viewing by its followers only, removed from websites after it was leaked. The publicity meant it became shared more widely.
In 2012, Argyll and Bute Council banned nine-year-old Martha Payne from taking pictures of her school meals and posting them, along with dismissive ratings out of 10, on a blog. Her family complained and this was overturned, amid much publicity. To date the blog has had more than 10 million hits and Martha has raised more than £130,000 for charity.
You don't need to be famous to suffer from the Streisand effect. Spaniard Mario Costeja Gonzalez fought a long legal battle for the right to be forgotten. He complained that a search of his name in Google brought up newspaper articles from 16 years ago about a sale of property to recover money he owed. He enjoyed a landmark victory to establish the right to be forgotten. But it is unlikely he will ever be forgotten. As of this moment, his name conjures up hundreds of thousands of Google search results.
But Max Mosley is arguably the greatest example. He is suing Google for continuing to display in search results images of him with prostitutes at a sex party, citing alleged breaches of the Data Protection Act and misuse of private information. Every time he makes a legal move in his crusade over privacy, there's a danger it becomes more likely people will seek out the very images he is complaining about.
The 74-year-old former president of Formula One's governing body FIA wants Google to block pictures first published in the now-defunct tabloid News of the World, which he successfully sued in 2008. "As the gateway to the internet Google makes enormous profits and has great influence, so I have not taken this action lightly," he has said in a statement. His lawyers add that the company should not be allowed "to act as an arbiter of what is lawful and what is not". Google says it has been working with Mosley "to address his concerns".
But is there a risk that Mosley will cause himself more embarrassment by bringing a fairly old, and perhaps half-forgotten, news story back to people's attention? A survey of Twitter shows some users are posting the pictures that he is keen to remove.
"Anyone trying to get something banned is always going to be of more interest than something that people don't seem bothered by," says Jenny Afia, head of talent at the law firm Schillings. "It's a spark for curiosity."
In previous generations there's no doubt it was more straightforward to attempt to suppress information or images. The ease of sharing now almost means that nothing can really be suppressed.
You could argue that the internet makes attempts to guard your privacy risky on a scale proportional to the likelihood of your privacy being meaningfully breached in the first place. If there was a danger that lots of people would circulate a private photo of you doing something embarrassing, it's very likely that trying to suppress it will have the opposite effect. If there was little danger that the photo would have been circulated, an attempt at suppression might not trigger the Streisand effect.
There are endless mischief-makers who would dedicate themselves to propagating information that someone wanted hidden, just for the very fact of the attempt to hide it.
Mosley is a wealthy man used to publicity. Yet suing could mean a stressful, drawn-out court case, covered in detail by the media.
"It's a horrible dilemma for people who are faced with horrible or untrue stories," says Afia. "That's where Max Mosley is very brave to keep fighting. Many people decide to let it go."
For the likes of Mosley and Costeja Gonzalez, the principle surely supersedes the actual effect of legal action. They effectively end up fighting for the right of others to more easily safeguard their privacy. Even at the de facto cost of their own.
And there's a clear difference between those fighting for a right to privacy and those, like Beyonce's representatives, who are merely trying to manage a reputation or public image. There the Streisand effect is potent. If your reaction to mockery is to try and squash it, there will be lots more mockery.
Google's and Facebook's servers are built and programmed to manipulate the The Streisand Effect for commercial goals. Should Congress allow that?
By Andrew Cosgrove
When you bury a seed, it blooms, and blooms and blooms and millions like it fill the fields...
As American streets are flooded with protests so large that they have changed the course of history, eyes are now turned towards the exclusionary, misogynist, money-laundering, bribery-based, hooker-trafficking frat boys that run Silicon Valley.
In the latter half of the 19th century, before the advent of income tax, there existed a class of millionaires in this country who used many unscrupulous means to gain immense wealth, separating themselves from the working class of the country by previously unheard-of multiples.
The Vanderbilts, the Astors, the Carnegies, the Mellons, the Rockefellers and numerous other “industrialists” (today, we would call them globalists) were able to amass great fortunes and live like royalty, with much of their power enabled through the workings of the politicians they influenced via graft.
In their day and age, they were known as “robber barons,” after the wealthy lords of aristocratic Germany, where landowners charged commoners an illegal tax for passing over their land.
Historian Hal Bridges wrote that the robber barons were “business leaders in the United States from about 1865 to 1900… a set of avaricious rascals who habitually cheated and robbed investors and consumers, corrupted government, fought ruthlessly among themselves, and in general carried on predatory activities comparable to those of the robber barons of medieval Europe.”
Many students of history argue that America’s robber barons were only tamed by the introduction of antitrust laws such as the Sherman Act and the Clayton Act of 1890 and 1914, respectively, as well as the introduction of income tax in 1913 and the stock market crash of 1929. Until that time, the power of these business titans was left mostly unchecked.
Many politicians — especially in large cities like New York — were bought off by their riches and voted for (or even created) laws that would favor and broaden these men’s empires. Regulations, agreements, waivers and amendments were passed that allowed many of these wealth-hoarders to assemble legal monopolies that would almost certainly be outlawed today.
In fact, if one took the wealth of some of these men (like the Rockefellers) and adjusted it for inflation into today’s dollars, their riches would surpass those of even Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos.
But it’s these latter figures who now belong to today’s equivalent class of men that can be considered the “robber barons” of our own era — the billionaires of high-tech Silicon Valley.
When the Internet boom first occurred in the 1990s, Silicon Valley was quick to tell Congress that Internet sales should not be subject to taxes and that the Internet should not be regulated, lest this burgeoning marketplace be trampled to death before it could fully blossom.
But that was then. In the interim, fortunes have been made, and a very small number of players (Amazon, Google, eBay, Facebook, Craigslist, Netflix, Airbnb, Uber) have dominated specific product niches and made certain savvy players such as the aforementioned Bezos and Gates — along with Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt, Pierre Omidyar, Craig Newmark, Brian Chesky, Steve Ballmer and Larry Ellison, among others — insanely rich.
In fact, these people’s extreme wealth, along with the relatively unregulated and untaxed industry that gave them that wealth, has convinced many of them that they have the innate right to tinker with markets and monopolies without undue fear of being legislated against or taxed as other industry leaders have been.
In many cases — Bezos, Zuckerberg and Gates being some of the most notorious examples — they’ve been falling all over themselves to enter still further niches — automated cars, robotics and drones, for example — in order to dominate those markets also by using their tremendous fortunes to either acquire the leading players in these industries or to drive them out of business through ruthless competition.
Along the way, the enormous power their market monopolies have given them in terms of the data they’ve been able to compile and the information they’ve been able to acquire on ordinary American citizens has enriched them even further — some would say dangerously so.
In many ways, these men (there are virtually zero women among their number) are the proper inheritors of the “robber baron” title today; they’ve become so wealthy, most often through unique, once-in-a-lifetime opportunities of timing and markets, that the rest of us can’t ever hope to come anywhere near their gargantuan fortunes.
Their companies have a permanent presence in Washington, D.C. and rank among the very top retainers of lobbying firms. Left unencumbered, these “masters of the universe” could have a very real potential of ruling over the lives of nearly everyone on the planet in some way for the rest of our lifetimes.
Even now, rumors have been floated that tech billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and Mark Cuban might want to run for president in 2020 or 2024. Nearly all of these men are large contributors to the Democratic Party and have met with Democratic politicians, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris both one-on-one and in groups.
High among their concerns are that immigrants keep flowing across the country’s borders in order to keep their biggest costs — intelligent labor — low. Quick to outsource to foreign countries and even quicker to leave profits offshore to evade taxes, these billionaires are extremely adept at using the law and corrupt politicians to their advantage.
For most of them, the concerns of the common man (the users of their properties) rank far beneath whatever it is that will further expand and perpetuate their empires. The gap between their ilk and that of the working class has multiplied in the last two decades, at the expense of America’s middle class.
Like the robber barons of old, these men are addicted to money, and they can never have enough of it to satisfy their own egos. To them, the laws of the United States are just a tool to access more wealth, and whatever political levers and switches they need to throw in order to get their way are simply a means toward an ultimate end.
After more than 20 years in many cases, it’s now long past time to put the regulatory brakes on these people’s ventures and business power grabs before we turn into a society ruled by technology and a few men behind thin, oversized flat-panel displays. Companies that have too much power and too much wealth concentrated in too few hands may need to be broken up just as the railroad concerns, oil cartels and steel companies of the original robber baron days were by Washington. Trent Lapinski says: "Silicon Valley is run like a cartel, and they are essentially modern day robber barons....
"...I’ve actually been working on a similar article myself called “Is Silicon Valley A Cartel?” but I haven’t had a chance to finish writing it yet. Perhaps I need to revisit it and publish.
Most of the major tech companies are now using technology to segregate the masses, and social engineer the entire planet much like Hitler and the Nazis attempted previous to WW2, except now the technology exists to do this on a massive scale.
To understand Silicon Valley today, you have to look back to the past and understand how we got here. When Silicon Valley was first founded as a tech hub in the late 1940-50’s it was under the intention of developing computer technology for military industrial purposes. The intention was always to further America’s technological superiority over the rest of the world.
Many people do not realize that Google and Facebook were both initially funded with both VC and defense contractor money, and many of the tech companies like Amazon have contracts with the CIA and Deep State. Modern day Silicon Valley is the surveillance arm of the Deep State, and has always been an arm of the military industrial complex.
Meanwhile, social media has purposely been engineered to put people in echo chambers, and control the masses. Even Medium is guilty of this, I have nearly 13k followers, yet every time I publish I barely reach 10% of my following. Twitter and Facebook are even worse.
To make matters worse, it gets even more complicated politically. What a lot of people do not know or realize is that after the 2008 market crash Obama was financed by Silicon Valley to get him into office. Once he was in office he struck a deal with the Federal Reserve to bail the economy out and printed a bunch of money which was handed to the Silicon Valley VC firms and tech companies to rebuild the economy.
What those VC firms did with the money was inflate the current tech bubble with printed money by driving up housing costs, pricing out locals and Millennial’s outside the tech industry, and pretty much destroying the local economy in the Bay Area. While the Bay Area was arguably screwed anyway with the market crash, and the tech industry does provide many jobs, they ultimately didn’t give those jobs to the locals and brought in indoctrinated college grads to displace much of the local population and pay them just enough to survive but not enough to buy property.
They then invested in companies that either launder money to increase their power, collect everyones data, spy on their users, or distract and divide them with propaganda. They also invested heavily in machine learning and A.I. so that they can automate most jobs in the future, and we are now at a point where A.I. is advanced enough to censor the Internet (which Google/Youtube, and Facebook are already doing). This is enabling these companies to become complete and total monopolies, and push political ideologies on the masses with no basis in logic, reason, or reality.
Meanwhile, the billionaires, investors, and CEOs of these companies are so far disconnected from the struggles of every day Americans they actually believe what they’re doing is for the greater benefit of humanity. Many of them fancy themselves as superior to the rest of the country, and world, and all their political nonsense is mostly hypocritical virtue signaling rooted in identity politics. The very same identity politics the Nazis used so successfully to divide and conquer the masses during WW2 but with a hypocritical modern day left leaning political spin.
With all that said, what Silicon Valley billionaires are doing is wrong, and hypocritical. However, please don’t blame the people, even the tech bros, because even they’re all just brainwashed and trying to survive just like everyone else and most don’t even realize they’re slaves to a system that does not have their long-term interests in mind.
Source: Born and raised in the Bay Area..."
Bill Snyder of globally published InfoWorld Magazine says: " Silicon Valley: Land of the 21st-century robber barons... Apple, Amazon.com, eBay, Facebook, Google, and the other technorati believe someone else should pay taxes, hire Americans, or support the society they sell to. When it comes to paying taxes, Apple doesn't "think different." Like every other global corporation, it does its best to pay as little as is legally permissible. The difference, though, is that Apple does it better than most and tries to convince the people who are stuck with the bills that this is a perfectly normal state of affairs.
In just three years, Apple's tax avoidance ("evasion" is such a tacky word) efforts shifted at least $74 billion from the reach of the Internal Revenue Service, according to an explosive report by a Senate subcommittee.
I'm no Apple hater; it makes great products I'm happy to use, and it employs tens of thousands of people directly and in its supply chain. But the more I think about its role in public life, the angrier I get. Apple, in its own way, is un-American. Sadly, it has plenty of company in Silicon Valley.The new aristocracy lives in Silicon Valley, says Snyder. The princelings of technocracy aren't bad people, but their wealth insulates them from the shared experiences that create community. They are a class apart -- maybe even a nation apart. They're the 21st-century successors to the rail and banking tycoons that ruled in the late 19th and early 20th century: the robber barons.
Consider this anecdote told by George Packer in his thoughtful piece in the May 27 issue of the New Yorker: When state budget cuts threatened the quality of their local school, parents in Woodside, Calif. -- one of the wealthiest enclaves in Silicon Valley -- stepped up their fund-raising efforts. The Woodside School Foundation now brings in about $2 million a year for a school with fewer than 500 children. In a fund-raising auction, one parent bid $20,000 for a tour of the Japanese gardens of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, while others paid twice that much for seats at a Mad Men Supper Club dinner for 16 guests.
I'm sure that many of those people would be appalled and upset by the terrible conditions of the underfunded schools in nearby East Palo Alto, and they might even make donations to help out. But I doubt many of them connect the very obvious dots: When big companies and wealthy individuals fail to pay taxes, legally or not, the community suffers.
What makes this so galling in my mind is the hypocritical and egotistical belief in Silicon Valley itself that it is the most enlightened patch of real estate on the planet.
Silicon Valley won't pay fair share, then decries poor public results. As Alec MacGillis of the New Republic points out, it's a bit rich for Apple to argue -- as Steve Jobs did for years, and Tim Cook does now -- that the company needs more visas and green cards for foreign engineers because there aren't enough qualified Americans to fill tech jobs (patently false, by the way), while Apple does its damnedest to keep its contribution toward federal education aid as paltry as possible.
Comments Packer:
This is an example so blatant I couldn't have dreamt it up, of the self-deception that exists alongside the hard work, idealism, and engineering brilliance of Silicon Valley. It's the kind of blind spot to which young, self-confident, super-successful industries are especially prone.
One of the subsidiaries set up by Apple in Ireland has paid no corporate income tax to any nation for the past five years, although it reported $30 billion in net income from 2009 to 2012. Another subsidiary has paid a tax rate to Ireland of 0.1 percent or less in 2009, 2010, and 2011, far below the normal Irish corporate income tax rate of 12 percent, according to the Senate subcommittee's report.
Valley of the dolts
Zuckerberg, of course, had not conquered Gaul. He had not scattered the German armies nor subjugated Britain, nor crossed the Rubicon and become first consul. He had not visited death and terror upon a continent, nor brought an end to an old republic, setting off a chain of intrigues that would birth the mightiest empire in the history of the world. No. Mark Zuckerberg had made a shit ton of money.
By April of this year, Facebook stock was worth more than $116 a share, up from its initial offering of $38. The social network had made its early investors even richer than they had ever anticipated. That same month, The Economist put Zuckerberg on its cover for the second time but now without detectable irony. His face appeared on a marble statue of Augustus, seated in cape and laurel crown beside a tiny globe. “IMPERIAL AMBITIONS” roared the headline. Mark’s outstretched arm gave the imperial thumbs-up. He liked it.
The press enjoys excitedly praising tech titans by comparing them to fantastical and mythical figures. Zuckerberg is Caesar. Elon Musk, a wizard. Peter Thiel, who believes that he lives in the moral universe of Lord of the Rings, is a vampire. I do not know if these men believe that they have the supernatural powers the media claims. Maybe they do. I do know that they do not mind the perception, or at least have done nothing to combat it, even among those critics who believe that they’re cartoon villains.
The press enjoys excitedly praising tech titans by comparing them to fantastical and mythical figures.
This might not be so bad if the phenomenon were limited to daft profiles by fawning magazine writers. But this Hegelian fan fiction is nowhere more potent than from the mouths of the Disruptors themselves. Mark Zuckerberg speaks in the voice of God. Shane Smith, by his own account, is the Stalin of Vice. Silicon Valley investor Carl Icahn was called “evil Captain Kirk” by fellow billionaire Marc Andreessen, before he was himself dubbed Dr. Evil by Rod Dreher, who has evidently not absorbed a cultural reference since 1999. When Elon Musk worries that Larry Page is hurtling toward AI without a sufficient appreciation of the risks, he calls it “summoning the demon.” Seamless CEO Jonathan Zabusky, a typical case, says his food delivery application for depressed millennials is “disrupting the paradigm” by showing people that “the era of the paper menu” is over. AirBnB’s mission statement laments “the mechanization and Industrial Revolution of the last century,” which “displaced” “feelings of trust and belonging”; their mission is to turn the world back into the “village” of simpler eras by encouraging longstanding residents of gentrifying areas to rent out their homes to monied travelers. Some firms are more modest: HubSpot, a marketing and sales platform, is merely on a mission to make the whole world “more inbound,” which is to say, more reliant on their blogging tips for small businesses.
Even President Obama speaks of Silicon Valley as if it were an industry for madcap geniuses alone, a land of such earth-changing potential that it’s somewhere he might find himself once he’s left the Oval Office. When he chides citizens of the Valley, he chides them like a Dr. Frankenstein warning his monster about hubris: “Sometime we get, I think, in the scientific community, the tech community, the entrepreneurial community, the sense that we just have to blow up the system or create this parallel society,” he told the Frontiers Conference last October. The president believes that sense is wrong, of course, but where did he get the idea that tech CEOs were capable of these feats in the first place?
Let us state the obvious: None of these men are Roman Emperors, and they haven’t got the wherewithal to “blow up” anything but a stock market bubble. They are not Lex Luthors or Gandalfs or Stalins. Their products do not bring about revolutions. They are simply robber barons, JP Morgans and Andrew Mellons in mediocre T-shirts. I have no doubt that many are preternaturally intelligent, hardworking people, and it is a shame that they have dedicated these talents to the mundane accumulation of capital. But there is nothing remarkable about these men. The Pirates of Silicon Valley do not have imperial ambitions. They have financial ones.
The vast majority of Silicon Valley startups, the sort that project lofty missions and managed improbably lucrative IPOs despite never having graced the cover of The Economist or the frontal cortex of the president, work precisely like any other kind of mundane sales operation in search of a product: Underpaid cold-callers receive low wages and less job security in exchange for a foosball table and the burden of growing a company as quickly as possible so that it can reach a liquidation event. Owners and investors get rich. Managers stay comfortable. The employees get hosed. None of this is particularly original. At least the real robber barons built the railroads.
Like all slim ranks of oligarchy, the Silicon Valley billionaires hate and fear nothing more than ordinary people. This manifests itself in mundane ways, in their open, cartoonish class spite (why, they ask, must Innovators in San Francisco be burdened by the existence of homeless riff-raff?); it is revealed in their most contemplative moments too. Peter Thiel has said that when the history of the 21st century is written, René Girard will be remembered as one of its greatest intellectuals. Girard is best known for the contention that all human desire is mimetic, that not only aesthetic taste but even hunger and lust are modeled on the desires of others. Perhaps this is why Thiel does not believe that capitalism and democracy are compatible. We know which side he’s chosen. So long as he and his fellows can continue to exploit that same mimetic tendency to persuade people that they are superhuman and essential to their flourishing, his side will continue to win.
The sins of the prestige firms are no less mundane. While each at least can claim a real and viable product, their evil is nothing so spectacular as the demonic. As The New York Times, Guardian, and others have reported, even the well-compensated white-collar workers of companies like Amazon and Facebook face notoriously brutal labor conditions. For the warehouse workers and contract laborers required to keep those companies running, matters are even worse. “When you’re in shipping and they double or triple their workforce over the winter holidays, you’re working at times in below zero temps INSIDE the warehouse,” one Amazon warehouse worker wrote to Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan in 2013. Efforts to unionize employees have been met with duplicity beyond ordinary managerial resistance. Quartz reported in February on sinister attempts to thwart organization at Uber. Not content to resist their own employees’ efforts to unionize, Uber has also worked to undermine other labor guilds, including illegal operations in cities that have led to the destruction of local taxi businesses.
Like all slim ranks of oligarchy, the Silicon Valley billionaires hate and fear nothing more than ordinary people.
AirBnb, despite its Keatsian mission, has mainly succeeded in ravaging the housing market for low-income families. Seamless hasn’t disrupted the “paper menu world” half so much as it has disrupted tipping standards and wage prospects for its delivery workers.
The racist hiring practices of Silicon Valley prestige firms are an open secret, with only 5 percent of technical roles held by black or Latino workers. (“We are not where we want to be,” their diversity reports intone with all the sincerity of a Soviet bureaucrat adjusting potato projections down again). Their collusion with federal spy agencies, assisting in surveillance efforts and voluntarily turning over FISA-court-approved user data in exchange for cash, was a secret, until it wasn’t. Peter Thiel did not use magic to destroy Gawker; he used money.
In 2010, the Department of Justice exposed what it called an “overarching conspiracy” to suppress wages among companies like Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe, Intuit, eBay, and Pixar. The Silicon Valley supermen were aware as far back as 2005 that what they were doing was illegal. “[Google’s Eric] Schmidt instructed his Senior VP for Business Operation Shona Brown to keep the pact secret and only share information ‘verbally, since I don’t want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later?’” reported Mark Ames. “At times,” he said of the Disruptor’s behavior, “it reads like something lifted straight out of the robber baron era that produced those [anti-trust] laws. Today’s inequality crisis is America’s worst on record since statistics were first recorded a hundred years ago — the only comparison would be to the era of railroad tycoons in the late 19th century.” Although Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos takes only $81,000 in salary every year – barely more than the average Facebook intern! – he has managed to accrue a net worth in excess of $65 billion. Perhaps he really is a wizard.
The cultivation of power requires the projection of power in excess of its reality. When Julius Caesar – the real one – made up his mind to annihilate the German tribes who had once again invaded Gaul, he ordered his engineers to build a bridge over the Rhine as wide as a two-lane highway, big enough for 10 soldiers to march across side by side. He wanted the Germani “to experience fear… when they realized that the army of the Roman people was both capable of crossing the Rhine and brave enough to venture it.” It worked. When the bridge was finished, the Roman army marched across it as if on parade in the streets of Rome. They went slow with their horns blasting and their flags aloft, led by cavalry draped in ceremonial colors. They found no army on the other side. Terrified of the Roman engineering feat, the Germani had fled in terror, and for 18 days they cowered in the forest while Caesar pillaged every defenseless village he could find. When he was done he marched back to Gaul and ordered the bridge torn down.
If your enemies can convince you that they are an unprecedented species of madman, you will convince yourself that you need unprecedented weapons to fight back or that you may be better off just hiding in the forest. But you are not.
The rigged contracts and wage suppression, the racism and surveillance collusion (soon to be playing voluntary footsie with Donald Trump’s NSA, with further chicanery to follow), all these sins of Silicon Valley have come about and been overcome before in the short history of American capitalism. They require only the same weapons as before. Organization and agitation. Strikes and labor laws. The ordinary practice of radical politics. Some of these efforts have begun already, with militant organizing and unionization drives beginning to organize Silicon Valley laborers against their exploiters. But these movements require national and popular support, support that cannot begin until the pretense and terror of world-conquering wizards is abandoned and the truth is laid bare: These are only rich assholes, the same as they ever were. All that superman bullshit is just the cheap propaganda of the powerful, propaganda so thoroughly saturated in the American mind that its own inventors might believe it.
This fall, Silicon Valley Shakespeare (“Innovate • Illuminate • Inspire”) staged Julius Caesar for the first time in the company’s 16-year history. The press release promised that audiences would have a chance to “see this classic political thriller set in a modern world, showing the power and problem of the mob mentality, and how far people will go to rule a nation.”
This summary is instructive. To the entertainers of the Valley, Julius Caesar is a play about “mob mentality,” the dangers of unruly herds who upset the proper order of the world. This is an assessment that might surprise anyone who has read Shakespeare’s history and noticed that with the exception of a soothsayer and a single servant, every character in it is an aristocrat. But more than that, it is remarkable because as any high school student can tell you, Julius Caesar is not a play about the dangers of the mob; it is a play about the dangers of ambition and power. It is about hubris. You do not see the crowds that Brutus and Antony address because the crowds do not matter. They only exist to cheer the rivals as they sort out the pretense of the coming war. The fault that was not in their stars but in themselves has been corrected. They are underlings no more.
Julius Caesar is about a man believed to be a God, a man who cultivated divinity so well that he believed it himself. It is about a man who believed it until the mid-March afternoon when he discovered to his great surprise that even Caesar can be overthrown with old and ordinary weapons.
Per The United States Congress, The FBI and the FTC: The High-Tech Antitrust Black-Listing Litigation is a United States Department of Justice (DOJ) antitrust action and a civil class action against several Silicon Valley companies for secret collusion agreements which targeted high-tech employees. This case was one of the most famous federal lawsuits in Silicon Valley. Scam fronts for Silicon Valley oligarchs are being exposed daily.
The tech Cartel is evil because: they steal any technology they desire; they run a prostitution ring and sexually extort young women and interns in Silicon Valley; they are 'rape culture' take-what-they-want misogynists, ageists and racists as their history of abuses has proven; their Palo Alto Cartel operates AngelGate-type collusion and stock market insider trading schemes that harm independent business and the public; their Cartel ran the "no poaching" CEO ring which was class-action sued by DOJ and tech workers; 90% of their divorce court files reveal horrific abuses and sex trafficking; They have an army of lobbyists that pay cash, stock market and revolving door bribes to U.S. Senators; They can even evade FBI & SEC investigations; They hire women to act as 'trophy wives' and 'beards'; they have lobbyists rig the U.S. Patent Office in order to block inventor patent rights because they are using stolen technologies; they have been caught on video and recordings beating, kicking and harming women hundreds of times; They have bought up all of the Tier-One tech law firms and order them to black-list, and never help, those who seek equal tech rights; they collude to abuse your privacy and make databases on the public for political control; they have to cheat to compete because they are only good with spread sheets instead of innovation; They run black-lists, character assassination attacks, collusion and other anti-trust violating acts in violation of RICO laws.
Silicon Valley has become the largest assemblage of douche-bags and yuppie frat boy criminals in human history. Theranos is not the exception, it is the standard. Tesla, Google, Theranos, Wework, Facebook are lies backed by famous political insiders to protect their insider trading and covered-up by fake news operators. They are also fronts to fund political campaigns via the ill-gotten profits from their endeavors.
When the bad guys, and their lap-dog politicians, attack you because your products are better than theirs they are proving that they are frat boy scumbags, from Stanford and Yale, that operate in a little pack, like dogs! Their Sandhill Road operation should be raided by the FBI! The best thing that could come from the COVID pandemic is that they all are forced into bankruptcy!
When your Senator holds stock market shares in companies that exist to profit on the backs of consumers, via corruption, then it is impossible for that Senator to ever do anything but be corrupt! We have reported this in writing to winklerm@sec.gov, sanfrancisco@sec.gov and 30+ other federal officers but have yet to see our whistle-blower rewards...or any action! Do you wonder how big politician insider stock trading is? Take a look at how many TRILLIONS of dollars pass through the stock markets annually and then look at the reported, AND UNREPORTED, securities holdings of famous U.S. Senators and government agency staff. That is what Seth Rich and the people in the "In Memory Of" section, below, were disclosing. These are massive crimes!
The crooks at Google, Facebook, Tesla, Linkedin, Netflix, etc., broke felony laws and the basic principles of Democracy.
They bribed your Senators, White House Staff, insider agency staff and operated a Silicon Valley Oligarch sociopath political Cartel.
What kinds of people were some of these high tech oligarchs? Read their divorce Court Records about their Jeffrey Epstein, NXIVM sex trafficking; Andy Rubin and Goguen sex slaves; tax evasions; money laundering; intern abuses; misogyny; racism; political insider-trading stock market bribes to U.S. Senators; a 'Silicon Valley Tech Mafia' and other horrors.
What would you do if you found out that Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, Elon Musk, Sergy Brin, John Doerr and other dynastic elitist insider Stanford frat boys were running a mob-like Cartel? Over 60,000 engineers in Silicon Valley took the problem to Federal Court!
Ask Christopher Wray, John F. Bennett, Craig D. Fair and the other senior officials at the FBI, DOJ, SEC, FTC and other major federal investigation agencies: Organized crime in Silicon Valley is getting a harder look these days!
The defendants, in the first case, included Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay, all high-technology companies with a principal place of business in the San Francisco–Silicon Valley area of California where they collude together to harm competitors. It is a well documented fact that Facebook, Google, Netflix, Linkedin, etc. use sophisticated psychological testing on each applicant in order to filter out all but the most radical devotees of the founders ideologies. These companies then maintain an echo-chamber resonance, throughout the company, to reinforce their ideological message, much like Scientology does. In these companies one must praise Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and hate those who the founders target. The founders target their competitors, in violation of anti-trust laws.
The first civil class action was filed by five plaintiffs, one of whom has died in a curious incident; it accused the tech companies of collusion between 2005 and 2009. In Abolish Silicon Valley: How to liberate technology from capitalism we see another of thousands of insiders expose the fact that Silicon Valley is a pile of filth.
Additional cases are planned for filing. Formal complaints have been filed with The SEC, The DOJ, The GAO, The FBI, The FTC and The U.S. Congress. Active investigations into 'Angelgate' and related collusion and anti-trust matters are known to be under-way by federal, news outlet and private investigators as of 2020. U.S. Senators, and other politicians, who covertly own stock in these Silicon Valley companies, have been delaying enforcement against these corrupt companies. Consumer rights groups have pledged to take down each and every politician who owns these corrupt stocks and protects these corrupt companies!
Our alliance of investigators and agency staff have FBI-level investigated: Steven Chu, Larry Page, David Dummond, Lachlan Seward, Andy Rubin, Jeffrey Epstein, Elon Musk, Nicholas Guido Denton, Harvey Weinstein, Eric Schmidt and the rest of the RICO-violating "Club" and had them fired or removed from their positions. They will remain under public surveillance for the rest of their lives and their case files will be added to monthly via submissions to federal agencies and news entities.
What would an insane tech oligarch (Like Schmidt, Musk, Reid, Brin, Westly, Page, Khosla, etc.) do for trillions of dollars of criminal gain?
When you run the following query on the stock market volume for a single day, ie: "Select sum(Close*volume*0.001), count(*) from myTable where date = '9/27/2017'."..you get the following result: 7300 stocks were traded, Total Money flow: $271,072,334,824. This is how much was traded on that day.
The total world derivatives market has been estimated at about $791 trillion face or nominal value, 11 times the size of the entire world economy.
The World Bank publishes global data on stocks traded by $ value here. ie:
The Silicon Valley Cartel Hires
Gawker, Gizmodo, Jalopnik,
Black Cube, Fusion GPS, etc. to run "hit-jobs" on those who report their
crimes!
How much do you have to pay Google, Alphabet, YouTube and Black Cube to dedicate a portion of their servers to push a character assassination set of links, against a competitor, to all five billion people on Earth with internet access? How much did Obama, Clinton, Bloomberg spend using those exact same systems to attack their political enemies?
We know. We have their financial records, invoices and receipts and so does the FBI and the NSA.
How much do you have to pay to get them to lock those attack links on one of the first 4 lines of EVERY search result, in the same position in the search results, for over a decade (which proves that their search results are not "organic", they are manually manipulated by Google and YouTube)? How much did Obama, Clinton, Bloomberg spend using those exact same systems to attack their political enemies?
We know. We have their financial records, invoices and receipts and so does the FBI and the NSA.
How much does it cost to make a Disney-like animated movie about a whistle-blower? How much does the production and software and person-hour billings cost? How much does it cost to distribute that movie world-wide and lock it in the top line of all search results?
We know. We have their financial records, invoices and receipts and so does the FBI and the NSA.
How much does it cost to hire a warehouse full of Russian, Nigerian and Chinese click-farm operators who use Palantir and Google software to instantly be alerted of any mention of a person's name on the internet and to then go slam that person in the comment sections with endless troll remarks? Elon Musk uses these same people to hype his narcissistic need for attention. Obama, Clinton, Bloomberg and other politicians hire these same people to attack their political adversaries. How much does it cost to have anonymous trolls in foreign countries kill a person's brand globally?
We know. We have their financial records, invoices and receipts and a huge number of lawsuits, court records, federal investigation and investigative journalism reports have exposed those records and details. The FBI, NSA, SEC, FTC and Congressional investigators can also confirm these numbers!
So it turns out that it costs: $35,422,152.00 to have a person and their business killed!
That is how much they spent on their attack on the Plaintiff! The people at the top of the heap who organized the attacks were David Plouffe, Jay Carney, David Axelrod, Denis Mcdonough, Steve Rattner, Robert Gibbs, Rahm Emanual and their associates and they did it from The West Wing and The Oval Office in The White House.
Many of the political attacks were edited by Nick Denton and his seedy tabloid empire Gawker/Gizmodo. Investigations have revealed that the White House and California Senators hired IN-Q-Tel; Gawker Media; Jalopnik; Gizmodo Media; K2 Intelligence; WikiStrat; Podesta Group; Fusion GPS; Google; YouTube; Alphabet; Facebook; Twitter; Think Progress; Media Matters); Black Cube; Correct The Record; Orbis Business Intelligence, Undercover Global Ltd; Stratfor; Jigsaw; ShareBlue/Acronym; Cambridge Analytica; Sid Blumenthal; David Brock; Plouffe Consulting; PR Firm Sunshine Sachs; Covington and Burling; Buzzfeed; Perkins Coie; Advance Democracy Inc.; The Democracy Integrity Project; Popily, Inc; Bean, LLC.; Edward Austin; Istok Associates; Silicon Valley Community Foundation; Yonder and Wilson Sonsini to run hit-jobs, character assassinations, dirty tricks and economic reprisal attacks on any applicants who reported the crimes. Each of those companies are now under federal and civil investigation.These companies sell "kill services" that use CIA and KGB-style tactics to harm witnesses and whistle-blowers.
Media Matters for America founder David Brock is a hired media assassin who reaped illegal profits through the transfer of millions from a nonprofit he founded to a for-profit entity under his control, according to an IRS complaint filed by a watchdog group. The complaint details how Brock’s nonprofit group American Bridge Foundation (AB Foundation) transferred $2.7 million in tax-exempt assets to True Blue Media, a for-profit company owned by Brock that is the parent company of ShareBlue, a for-profit media company now known as The American Independent. The transfers violated IRS rules that prohibit nonprofit organizations from using their tax-exempt resources to pay personal or private expenses of any key figures connected to the nonprofit, the complaint stated. AB Foundation’s transfers to True Blue Media were disclosed in the nonprofit’s Form 990s filed to the IRS in 2017 and 2018. "Brock is a well-known hit man who took money to target our group in reprisal for whistle-blowing...." Said Team 7 staff.
The money was conduited and assisted for pass-through by political financiers Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, Sergy Brin, Elon Musk, John Doerr, Vinod Khosla, Steve Westly, Steve Spinner and their Silicon Valley oligarch Cartel black-listing operation.
It was a felony. It violated RICO, Anti-Trust and Constitutional laws.
So they spent over thirty five million dollars attacking the Plaintiff and shutting down a competitor that was targeted to make over six billion dollars in profits. The attackers then made the six billion dollars in profits for themselves, at the expense of the Plaintiff.
So how much do you think they owe the Plaintiff per previous court awards for such crimes against a member of the public?
The AngelGate Conspiracy ( https://venturecapitalcorruption.weebly.com/the-angelgate-conspiracy.html ); The Job Collusion Case ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation ) and hundreds of other cases, prove that the perpetrators regularly meet, conspire, collude and racketeer, in full view of law enforcement, without ever getting arrested by the FBI because they bribe public officials in order to avoid prosecution.
Demand the immediate divestiture of all stock market holdings of all politicians and their family members because that is how most bribes are now paid! The FBI needs to arrest these goons!
The High-Tech Antitrust Black-Listing Litigation is a United States Department of Justice (DOJ) antitrust action and a civil class action against several Silicon Valley companies for secret collusion agreements which restrained the recruitment of high-tech employees. What kinds of people were some of these high tech oligarchs? Read their divorce Court Records about their sex trafficking, sex slaves, tax evasions, money laundering, intern abuses, political insider trading stock market bribes to U.S. Senators and other horrors.
What would you do if you found out that Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, Elon Musk, Sergy Brin, John Doerr and other dynastic elitist insider frat boys were running a mob-like Cartel? Over 60,000 engineers in Silicon Valley took the problem to Federal Court!
The defendants are Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay, all high-technology companies with a principal place of business in the San Francisco–Silicon Valley area of California.
The civil class action was filed by five plaintiffs, one of whom has died; it accused the tech companies of collusion between 2005 and 2009 to refrain from recruiting each other's employees.
Additional cases are planned for filing. Formal complaints have been filed with The SEC, The DOJ, The GAO, The FBI, The FTC and The U.S. Congress. Active investigations into 'Angelgate' and related collusion and anti-trust matters are known to be under-way by federal, news outlet and private investigators as of 2020.
Cold calling is one of the main methods used by companies in the high-technology sector to recruit employees with advanced and specialised skills, such as software and hardware engineers, programmers, animators, digital artists, Web developers and other technical professionals.[1] Cold calling involves communicating directly in any manner with another firm's employee who has not otherwise applied for a job opening. Cold calling may be done in person, by phone, letter, or email.[2] According to the legal brief filed by a plaintiff in one of the class-action cases, cold calling is an effective method of recruiting for the high-technology sector because "employees of other [high-technology] companies are often unresponsive to other recruiting strategies... [and] current satisfied employees tend to be more qualified, harder working, and more stable than those who are actively looking for employment."[3]
Amy Lambert, Google's associate general counsel, noted in a blog post shortly after the DOJ's actions, that Google's definition of cold calling does not necessarily eliminate recruiting by letter or email, but only the process of calling on the telephone. By implication, recruiting through LinkedIn incurs recruiting by "InMail" - LinkedIn's own mail contact system: "In order to maintain a good working relationship with these companies, in 2005 we decided not to "cold call" employees at a few of our partner companies. Our policy only impacted cold calling, and we continued to recruit from these companies through LinkedIn, job fairs, employee referrals, or when candidates approached Google directly. In fact, we hired hundreds of employees from the companies involved during this time period."
The challenged "no cold call" agreements are alleged bilateral agreements between high technology companies not to cold call each other's employees. The DOJ alleges that senior executives at each company negotiated to have their employees added to 'no call' lists maintained by human resources personnel or in company hiring manuals. The alleged agreements were not limited by geography, job function, product group, or time period. The alleged bilateral agreements were between: (1) Apple and Google, (2) Apple and Adobe, (3) Apple and Pixar, (4) Google and Intel, (5) Google and Intuit,[4] and (6) Lucasfilm and Pixar.[5]
The civil class action further alleges that agreements also existed to (1) "provide notification when making an offer to another [company]'s employee (without the knowledge or consent of the employee)" and (2) "agreements that, when offering a position to another company's employee, neither company would counteroffer above the initial offer."[3]
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The United States Department of Justice Antitrust Division filed a complaint in the US District Court for the District of Columbia alleging violations of Section 1 of the Sherman Act. In US v. Adobe Systems Inc., et al., the Department of Justice alleged that Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, and Pixar had violated Section 1 of the Sherman Act by entering into a series of bilateral "No Cold Call" Agreements to prevent the recruitment of their employees (a similar but separate suit was filed against Lucasfilm on December 21, 2010[6]). The DOJ alleged in their Complaint that the companies had reached "facially anticompetitive" agreements that "eliminated a significant form of competition...to the detriment of the affected employees who were likely deprived of competitively important information and access to better job opportunities." The DOJ also alleged that the agreements "were not ancillary to any legitimate collaboration," "were much broader than reasonably necessary for the formation or implementation of any collaborative effort," and "disrupted the normal price-setting mechanisms that apply in the labor setting."[4] The same day it filed the suit, the DOJ and the defendants proposed a settlement.[7]
A final judgment enforcing the settlement was entered by the court on March 17, 2011.[8] Although the DOJ Complaint only challenged the alleged "no cold call" agreements, in the settlement, the companies agreed to a more broad prohibition against "attempting to enter into, entering into, maintaining or enforcing any agreement with any other person to in any way refrain from, requesting that any person in any way refrain from, or pressuring any person in any way to refrain from soliciting, cold calling, recruiting, or otherwise competing for employees of the other person", for a period of five years; the court can grant an extension.[8] The settlement agreement does not provide any compensation for company employees affected by the alleged agreements.[9] Lucasfilm entered into a similar settlement agreement in December 2010.[5]
In re: High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation (U.S. District Court, Northern District of California 11-cv-2509 [10]) is a class-action lawsuit on behalf of over 64,000 employees of Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar and Lucasfilm (the last two are subsidiaries of Disney) against their employer alleging that their wages were repressed due to alleged agreements between their employers not to hire employees from their competitors.[11][12] The case was filed on May 4, 2011 by a former software engineer at Lucasfilm and alleges violations of California's antitrust statute, Business and Professions Code sections 16720 et seq. (the "Cartwright Act"); Business and Professions Code section 16600; and California's unfair competition law, Business and Professions Code sections 17200, et seq. Focusing on the network of connections around former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, the Complaint alleges "an interconnected web of express agreements, each with the active involvement and participation of a company under the control of Steve Jobs...and/or a company that shared at least one member of Apple's board of directors." The alleged intent of this conspiracy was "to reduce employee compensation and mobility through eliminating competition for skilled labor."[13]
On October 24, 2013 the United States District Court for the Northern District of California granted class certification for all employees of Defendant companies from January 1, 2005 through January 1, 2010.[9]
As of October 31, 2013, Intuit, Pixar and Lucasfilm have reached a tentative settlement agreement. Pixar and Lucasfilm agreed to pay $9 million in damages, and Intuit agreed to pay $11 million in damages.[9] In May 2014, Judge Lucy Koh approved the $20 million settlement between Lucasfilm, Pixar, and Intuit and their employees. Class members in this settlement, which involved fewer than 8% of the 65,000 employees affected, will receive around $3,840 each.[14]
The trial of the class action for the remaining Defendant companies was scheduled to begin on May 27, 2014. The plaintiffs intended to ask the jury for $3 billion in compensation, a number which could in turn have tripled to $9 billion under antitrust law.[15] However, in late April 2014, the four remaining defendants, Apple Inc, Google, Intel and Adobe Systems, agreed to settle out of court. Any settlement must be approved by Judge Lucy Koh.[16][17]
On May 23, 2014, Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe agreed to settle for $324.5 million. Lawyers sought 25% in attorneys’ fees, plus expenses of as much as $1.2 million, according to the filing. Additional award payments of $80,000 would be sought for each named plaintiff who served as a class representative.[18] Payouts will average a few thousand dollars based on the salary of the employee at the time of the complaint.
In June 2014, Judge Lucy Koh expressed concern that the settlement may not be a good one for the plaintiffs. Michael Devine, one of the plaintiffs, said the settlement is unjust. In a letter he wrote to the judge he said the settlement represents only one-tenth of the $3 billion in compensation the 64,000 workers could have made if the defendants had not colluded.[19]
On August 8, 2014, Judge Koh rejected the settlement as insufficient on the basis of the evidence and exposure. Rejecting a settlement is unusual in such cases. This left the defendants with a choice between raising their settlement offer or facing a trial.[20]
On September 8, 2014, Judge Koh set April 9, 2015 as the actual trial date for the remaining defendants, with a pre-trial conference scheduled for December 19, 2014. Also, as of early September 2014, the defendants had re-entered mediation to determine whether a new settlement could be reached.[21]
A final approval hearing was held on July 9, 2015.[22] On Wednesday September 2, 2015, Judge Lucy H. Koh signed an order granting Motion for Final Approval of Class Action Settlement. The settlement website stated that Adobe, Apple, Google, and Intel has reached a settlement of $415 million and other companies settled for $20 million.
According to the settlement website, Gilardi & Co., LLC distributed the settlement to class members the week of December 21, 2015.
In early 2005, as demand for Silicon Valley engineers began booming, Apple's Steve Jobs sealed a secret and illegal pact with Google's Eric Schmidt to artificially push their workers wages lower by agreeing not to recruit each other's employees, sharing wage scale information, and punishing violators. On February 27, 2005, Bill Campbell, a member of Apple's board of directors and senior advisor to Google, emailed Jobs to confirm that Eric Schmidt "got directly involved and firmly stopped all efforts to recruit anyone from Apple."
Later that year, Schmidt instructed his Sr VP for Business Operation Shona Brown to keep the pact a secret and only share information "verbally, since I don't want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later?"
These secret conversations and agreements between some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley were first exposed in a Department of Justice antitrust investigation launched by the Obama Administration in 2010. That DOJ suit became the basis of a class action lawsuit filed on behalf of over 100,000 tech employees whose wages were artificially lowered — an estimated $9 billion effectively stolen by the high-flying companies from their workers to pad company earnings — in the second half of the 2000s. Last week, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals denied attempts by Apple, Google, Intel, and Adobe to have the lawsuit tossed, and gave final approval for the class action suit to go forward. A jury trial date has been set for May 27 in San Jose, before US District Court judge Lucy Koh, who presided over the Samsung-Apple patent suit.
In a related but separate investigation and ongoing suit, eBay and its former CEO Meg Whitman, now CEO of HP, are being sued by both the federal government and the state of California for arranging a similar, secret wage-theft agreement with Intuit (and possibly Google as well) during the same period.
The secret wage-theft agreements between Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe, Intuit, and Pixar (now owned by Disney) are described in court papers obtained by PandoDaily as "an overarching conspiracy" in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Clayton Antitrust Act, and at times it reads like something lifted straight out of the robber baron era that produced those laws. Today's inequality crisis is America's worst on record since statistics were first recorded a hundred years ago — the only comparison would be to the era of the railroad tycoons in the late 19th century.
Shortly after sealing the pact with Google, Jobs strong-armed Adobe into joining after he complained to CEO Bruce Chizen that Adobe was recruiting Apple's employees. Chizen sheepishly responded that he thought only a small class of employees were off-limits:
I thought we agreed not to recruit any senior level employees.... I would propose we keep it that way. Open to discuss. It would be good to agree.Jobs responded by threatening war:
OK, I'll tell our recruiters they are free to approach any Adobe employee who is not a Sr. Director or VP. Am I understanding your position correctly?Adobe's Chizen immediately backed down:
I'd rather agree NOT to actively solicit any employee from either company.....If you are in agreement, I will let my folks know.The next day, Chizen let his folks — Adobe's VP of Human Resources — know that "we are not to solicit ANY Apple employees, and visa versa." Chizen was worried that if he didn't agree, Jobs would make Adobe pay:
if I tell Steve [Jobs] it's open season (other than senior managers), he will deliberately poach Adobe just to prove a point. Knowing Steve, he will go after some of our top Mac talent...and he will do it in a way in which they will be enticed to come (extraordinary packages and Steve wooing).Indeed Jobs even threatened war against Google early 2005 before their "gentlemen's agreement," telling Sergey Brin to back off recruiting Apple's Safari team:
if you [Brin] hire a single one of these people that means war.Brin immediately advised Google's Executive Management Team to halt all recruiting of Apple employees until an agreement was discussed.
In the geopolitics of Silicon Valley tech power, Adobe was no match for a corporate superpower like Apple. Inequality of the sort we're experiencing today affects everyone in ways we haven't even thought of — whether it's Jobs bullying slightly lesser executives into joining an illegal wage-theft pact, or the tens of thousands of workers whose wages were artificially lowered, transferred into higher corporate earnings, and higher compensations for those already richest and most powerful to begin with.
Over the next two years, as the tech industry entered another frothing bubble, the secret wage-theft pact which began with Apple, Google and Pixar expanded to include Intuit and Intel. The secret agreements were based on relationships, and those relationships were forged in Silicon Valley's incestuous boards of directors, which in the past has been recognized mostly as a problem for shareholders and corporate governance advocates, rather than for the tens of thousands of employees whose wages and lives are viscerally affected by their clubby backroom deals. Intel CEO Paul Otellini joined Google's board of directors in 2004, a part-time gig that netted Otellini $23 million in 2007, with tens of millions more in Google stock options still in his name — which worked out to $464,000 per Google board event if you only counted the stock options Otellini cashed out — dwarfing what Otellini made off his Intel stock options, despite spending most of his career with the company.
Meanwhile, Eric Schmidt served on Apple's board of directors until 2009, when a DoJ antitrust investigation pushed him to resign. Intuit's chairman at the time, Bill Campbell, also served on Apple's board of directors, and as official advisor — "consigliere" — to Google chief Eric Schmidt, until he resigned from Google in 2010. Campbell, a celebrated figure ("a quasi-religious force for good in Silicon Valley") played a key behind-the-scenes role connecting the various CEOs into the wage-theft pact. Steve Jobs, who took regular Sunday walks with Campbell near their Palo Alto homes, valued Campbell for his ability "to get A and B work out of people," gushing that the conduit at the center of the $9 billion wage theft suit, "loves people, and he loves growing people."
Indeed. Eric Schmidt has been, if anything, even more profuse in his praise of Campbell. Schmidt credits Campbell for structuring Google when Schmidt was brought on board in 2001:
His contribution to Google — it is literally not possible to overstate. He essentially architected the organizational structure.
Court documents show it was Campbell who first brought together Jobs and Schmidt to form the core of the Silicon Valley wage-theft pact. And Campbell's name appears as the early conduit bringing Intel into the pact with Google:
Bill Campbell (Chairman of Intuit Board of Directors, Co-Lead Director of Apple, and advisor to Google) was also involved in the Google-Intel agreement, as reflected in an email exchange from 2006 in which Bill Campbell agreed with Jonathan Rosenberg (Google Advisor to the Office of CEO and former Senior Vice President of Product Management) that Google should call [Intel CEO] Paul Otellini before making an offer to an Intel employee, regardless of whether the Intel employee first approached Google.Getting Google on board with the wage-theft pact was the key for Apple from the start — articles in the tech press in 2005 pointed at Google's recruitment drive and incentives were the key reason why tech wages soared that year, at the highest rate in well over a decade.
Eric Schmidt has A psychotic need to control governments and society. Eric Schmidt does not think twice about hiring assassins, media hit-job operators, Black Cube and Fusion GPS hatchet job providers and bribe-positive lobbyistsIn July 2016, Raymond Thomas, a four-star general and head of the U.S. Special Operations Command, hosted a guest: Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google.
General Thomas, who served within the 1991 gulf war and deployed many times to Afghanistan, spent the higher half of a day showing Mr. Schmidt around Special Operations Command’s headquarters in Tampa, Fla. They scrutinized prototypes for a robotic exoskeleton suit and joined operational briefings, which Mr. Schmidt needed to study extra about as a result of he had recently begun advising the military on technology.
After the go-to, as they rode in a Chevy Suburban towards an airport, the conversation turned to a form of artificial intelligence.
“You absolutely suck at machine learning,” Mr. Schmidt informed General Thomas, the officer recalled. “If I got under your tent for a day, I could solve most of your problems.” General Thomas said he was so offended that he needed to throw Mr. Schmidt out of the car, however refrained.
Four years later, Mr. Schmidt, 65, has channeled his blunt assessment of the military’s tech failings into a private campaign to revamp America’s defense forces with extra engineers, extra software program and extra A.I. In the method, the tech billionaire, who left Google last year, has reinvented himself because of the prime liaison between Silicon Valley and the national security community.
Mr. Schmidt now sits on two government advisory boards aimed toward bounce beginning technological innovation in the Defense Department. His confidants embrace former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and ex-Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work. And by means of his personal enterprise capital agency and a $13 billion fortune, Mr. Schmidt has invested millions of {dollars} into more than half a dozen defense start-ups.
In an interview, Mr. Schmidt — by turns thoughtful, pedagogical and hubristic — stated he had embarked on an effort to modernize the U.S. military because it was “stuck in software in the 1980s.”
He portrayed himself as a successful technologist who didn’t consider in retirement and who owed a debt to the country for his wealth — and who now had time and perception to resolve one of America’s hardest issues. The purpose, he stated, “should be to have as many software companies to supply software of many, many different kinds: military, H.R. systems, email systems, things which involve military intelligence, weapons systems and what have you.”
Mr. Schmidt is urgent ahead with a Silicon Valley worldview the place advances in software program and A.I. are the keys to determining nearly any situation. While that philosophy has led to social networks that spread disinformation and different unintended penalties, Mr. Schmidt stated he was convinced that making use of new and comparatively untested technology to complex conditions — together with lethal ones — would make service members extra environment friendly and bolster the United States in its competition with China.
His techno-solutionism is difficult by his ties to Google. Though Mr. Schmidt left the corporate’s board final June and has no official working function, he holds $5.Three billion in shares of Google’s parent, Alphabet. He also stays on the payroll as an adviser, incomes a $1 annual wage, with two assistants stationed at Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters.
That has led to allegations that Mr. Schmidt is placing Google’s financial pursuits forward of different concerns in his protection work. Late final yr, a federal court ordered a congressional advisory committee he leads to flip over data that would make clear whether or not Mr. Schmidt had advocated his business interests whereas heading the group.
Mr. Schmidt stated he had adopted guidelines to keep away from conflicts. “Everybody is rule-bound at the Pentagon, and we are too,” he stated.
Google and the Defense Department declined to touch upon Mr. Schmidt’s work.
Even without these issues, shifting the military’s path isn’t any easy process. While Mr. Schmidt has helped generate reports and recommendations about know-how for the Pentagon, few have been adopted.
“I’m sure he’ll be frustrated,” stated Representative Mac Thornberry, a Republican of Texas who nominated Mr. Schmidt in 2018 to an advisory committee on A.I. “Unlike the private sector, you can’t just snap your fingers and make it happen.”
Mr. Schmidt acknowledged that progress was sluggish. “I am bizarrely told by my military friends that they have moved incredibly fast, showing you the difference of time frames between the world I live in and the world they live in,” he stated.
But he stated he had little intention of backing down. “The way to understand the military is that the soldiers spend a great deal of time looking at screens. And human vision is not as good as computer vision,” he stated. “It’s insane that you have people going to service academies, and we spend an enormous amount of training, training these people, and we put them in essentially monotonous work.”
Mr. Schmidt’s first brush with the military got here in 1976, whereas he was in graduate college on the University of California, Berkeley. There, he centered on research on distributed computing, funded by cash from Darpa, an analysis arm of the Defense Department.
The work catapulted Mr. Schmidt into his technology profession. After finishing his graduate studies in pc science, he labored at various tech firms for more than twenty years, together with the networking software maker Novell. In 2001, Google appointed him chief govt.
The search engine firm was then in its infancy. Its 20-something founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were contemporary out of a Stanford University doctorate program and had little business expertise. Mr. Schmidt was hired to assist information them, offering “adult supervision,” which he did — after which some.
Mr. Schmidt took Google public in 2004 and built it right into a behemoth, diversifying into smartphones, cloud computing and self-driving cars. The success turned him right into an enterprise movie star. In 2009, he served as a tech adviser to the Obama administration.
In 2011, with Google price almost $400 billion, the corporate introduced Mr. Page was able to resume the C.E.O. reins. Mr. Schmidt turned govt chairman.
In that function, Mr. Schmidt took on new tasks, many of which introduced him to Washington. In 2012, he participated in categorized briefings on cybersecurity with Pentagon officers as half of the Enduring Security Framework program. In 2015, he attended a seminar on the banks of the Potomac River, hosted by then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter, on the use of know-how inside the government.
“It was all interesting to me,” Mr. Schmidt stated. “I didn’t really know much about it.”
He additionally traveled to North Korea, Afghanistan and Libya whereas writing a guide about know-how and diplomacy, and dabbled in politics, lending technical assist to Hillary Clinton within the run-up to her 2016 presidential marketing campaign.
His enterprise capital fund, Innovation Endeavors, was lively too. It invested in start-ups like Planet Labs, which operates satellites and sells the imagery to protection and intelligence companies, and Team8, a cybersecurity firm based by former Israeli intelligence members.
At the 2016 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Mr. Carter requested Mr. Schmidt to fulfill. He had a proposal: Could Mr. Schmidt lead the Defense Innovation Board, a civilian advisory group tasked with bringing new technology to the Pentagon?
“We were in one of these dumpy hotels, and there he is with his small entourage walking in, and he basically said to me, ‘This is what I want to do. You’d be the perfect person to be chairman,’” Mr. Schmidt said.
Mr. Schmidt said he turned down the function as a result of he was busy and had no military background. But Mr. Carter argued that Mr. Schmidt’s tech experience was wanted, because the U.S. military — which had as soon as been a middle of innovation — was falling behind companies like Google and Facebook in software and A.I.
Mr. Schmidt finally agreed. (Mr. Carter didn’t reply to requests for remark.)
As head of the Defense Innovation Board, Mr. Schmidt started touring navy bases, plane carriers and plutonium strongholds. The journeys, which took Mr. Schmidt to about 100 bases in locations like Fayetteville, N.C., and Osan, South Korea, have been a definite break from his well-heeled life in Silicon Valley.
“You want to see these things,” Mr. Schmidt stated. “I received the nuclear missile tour. Things which are exhausting. I received a tour of Cheyenne Mountain so I might perceive what their actuality was.”
One of the primary journeys was to Tampa to go to General Thomas, who is named Tony, the place Mr. Schmidt saw maps and reside video feeds displayed on huge screens. “Eric’s observation was that a huge part of what the military does is it sits and watches,” stated Josh Marcuse, the then executive director of the Defense Innovation Board who was on the journey.
The visits made tangible what Mr. Carter had told Mr. Schmidt about how the military was lagging in technology. Mr. Schmidt quickly made ideas to vary that.
Some of his concepts have been impractical. Eric Rosenbach, then the chief of workers to Mr. Carter, recalled Mr. Schmidt as soon as telling him that the Pentagon can be higher off if it employed nobody however engineers for a year.
Others have been helpful. At an Air Force facility in Qatar in 2016, Mr. Schmidt visited officers who scheduled flight paths for the tankers that refueled planes. They used a white board and dry-erase markers to set the schedule, taking eight hours to finish the duty.
Mr. Schmidt stated he recalled considering, “Really? This is how you run the air war?” Afterward, he and others on the Defense Department labored with the tech company Pivotal to ship software to the officers.
On one other journey to a navy base in South Korea in 2017, an intelligence analyst complained to Mr. Schmidt that the software program he used to evaluate surveillance movies from North Korea was clunky.
“Let me guess,” Mr. Schmidt said, according to a Defense Department aide who traveled with him. “You don’t have the flexibility to change that.”
In December 2017, Mr. Schmidt stepped down as Google’s chairman however remained on the board. He said he was seeking a brand new chapter.
“If I stayed as chairman, then next year would have been the same as the previous year, and I wanted a change of emphasis,” said Mr. Schmidt. “As chairman of Google, what I did is I ran around and gave speeches, and went to Brussels and all the things that Google still does today. It’s much better to work on these new things for me.”
Google declined to comment on Mr. Schmidt’s departure as chairman.
By then, Mr. Schmidt’s ties to Google had induced issues in his protection work. In 2016, Roma Laster, a Defense Department worker, filed a complaint on the company elevating considerations about Mr. Schmidt and conflicts of curiosity, Mr. Marcuse stated.
In the complaint, earlier reported by ProPublica, Ms. Laster, who labored with the Defense Innovation Board, said Mr. Schmidt had requested a service member what cloud computing providers their unit used and whether or not they had thought-about options. She stated Mr. Schmidt confronted a battle of interest as a result of he worked for Google, which additionally gives cloud services.
Mr. Marcuse, who now works at Google, said Mr. Schmidt was “scrupulous and diligent” in avoiding conflicts. Mr. Schmidt said he adopted the principles forbidding conflicts of interest. Ms. Laster didn’t reply to requests for remark.
Mr. Schmidt quickly received caught up in one other situation between Google and the military. Google had signed a contract in 2017 to assist the Pentagon to construct methods to automatically analyze drone footage to identify particular objects like buildings, vehicles, and people.
Mr. Schmidt was a proponent of the hassle, known as Project Maven. He stated he inspired the Pentagon to pursue it and testified in Congress in regards to the undertaking’s deserves, however was not concerned within the company’s selection of Google.
But the effort blew up in 2018 when Google employees protested and stated they didn’t need their work to result in deadly strikes. More than 3,000 staff signed a letter to Mr. Pichai, saying the contract would undermine the general public’s belief within the firm.
It was a black eye for Mr. Schmidt. Military officers, who stated Project Maven was not getting used for deadly missions, condemned Google for abandoning the contract. Google staff additionally criticized Mr. Schmidt’s ties to the Pentagon.
“He has very different goals and values than the engineers at his company,” stated Jack Poulson, a Google worker who protested Mr. Schmidt’s military work and who has since left the company.
Mr. Schmidt said he sidestepped discussions about Project Maven as a result of of conflict-of-interest guidelines, however wished he might have weighed in. “I would have certainly had an opinion,” he stated.
Last April, Mr. Schmidt announced he deliberate to go away Google’s board. He had helped create an A.I. middle backed by the Pentagon in 2018 and had additionally turn into co-chair of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, a brand new group advising Congress on developing A.I. for defense.
A month after leaving Google, Mr. Schmidt invested in Rebellion Defense, a software program start-up based by former Defense Department staff that analyzes video gathered through drone. His enterprise agency later put more cash into the company, and Mr. Schmidt joined its board.
The funding led to extra bother. The Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit privateness and civil liberties group, sued the A.I. commission last September for failing to show over data. EPIC said the group was stacked with industry executives like Mr. Schmidt and others from Microsoft, Amazon and Oracle, who could potentially sway the government in favor of their companies’ interests.
Mr. Schmidt was underneath scrutiny as a result of of Rebellion Defense and the way he might push the government to make use of the start-up’s services, EPIC said.
“We don’t have any public disclosure about what information Eric has provided to the commission about his business interests,” said John Davisson, a legal professional at EPIC.
In December, a district court dominated the A.I. fee should disclose the data requested by EPIC. The fee has launched a whole lot of pages of paperwork, most of which don’t contain Mr. Schmidt or his companies. EPIC stated extra data are set to be launched.
Chris Lynch, the chief executive of Rebellion Defense, said Mr. Schmidt suggested the company solely on hiring and growth. Mr. Schmidt said he didn’t advocate for the Defense Department to purchase technology from the start-up.
He has continued plowing forward. In November, he unveiled a $1 billion dedication by means of Schmidt Futures, the philanthropic agency that he runs along with his spouse, Wendy, to fund education for those who want to work in public service.
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The following is a transcript of an interview with a Google/Facebook/DARPA insider that was conducted with a member of the Anonymous Patriots, a citizen journalist group aligned with the American Intelligence Media. The person interviewed wishes to remain anonymous and for purposes of the interview will be called Jane Doe. This conversation took place on…
Campbell helped bring in Google, Intel, and, in 2006, Campbell saw to it that Intuit — the company he chaired — also joined the pact.
From the peaks of Silicon Valley, Campbell's interpersonal skills were magical and awe-inspiring, a crucial factor in creating so much unimaginable wealth for their companies and themselves. Jobs said of Campbell:
There is something deeply human about him.And Schmidt swooned:
He is my closest confidant...because he is the definition of trust.Things — and people — look very different when you're down in the Valley. In the nearly 100-page court opinion issued last October by Judge Koh granting class status to the lawsuit, Campbell comes off as anything but mystical and "deeply human." He comes off as a scheming consigliere carrying out some of the drearier tasks that the oligarchs he served were constitutionally not so capable of arranging without him.
But the realities of inequality and capitalism invariably lead to mysticism of this sort, a natural human response to the dreary realities of concentrating so much wealth and power in the hands of a dozen interlocking board members at the expense of 100,000 employees, and so many other negative knock-off effects on the politics and culture of the world they dominate.
One of the more telling elements to this lawsuit is the role played by "Star Wars" creator George Lucas, who emerges as the Obi-Wan Kenobi of the wage-theft scheme. It's almost too perfectly symbolic that Lucas — the symbiosis of Baby Boomer New Age mysticism, Left Coast power, political infantilism, and dreary 19th century labor exploitation — should be responsible for dreaming up the wage theft scheme back in the mid-1980s, when Lucas sold the computer animation division of Lucasfilm, Pixar, to Steve Jobs.
As Pixar went independent in 1986, Lucas explained his philosophy about how competition for computer engineers violated his sense of normalcy — and profit margins. According to court documents:
George Lucas believed that companies should not compete against each other for employees, because '[i]t's not normal industrial competitive situation.' As George Lucas explained, 'I always — the rule we had, or the rule that I put down for everybody,' was that 'we cannot get into a bidding war with other companies because we don't have the margins for that sort of thing.'Translated, Lucas' wage-reduction agreement meant that Lucasfilm and Pixar agreed to a) never cold call each other's employees; b) notify each other if making an offer to an employee of the other company, even if that employee applied for the job on his or her own without being recruited; c) any offer made would be "final" so as to avoid a costly bidding war that would drive up not just the employee's salary, but also drive up the pay scale of every other employee in the firm.
Jobs held to this agreement, and used it as the basis two decades later to suppress employee costs just as fierce competition was driving up tech engineers' wages.
The companies argued that the non-recruitment agreements had nothing to do with driving down wages. But the court ruled that there was "extensive documentary evidence" that the pacts were designed specifically to push down wages, and that they succeeded in doing so. The evidence includes software tools used by the companies to keep tabs on pay scales to ensure that within job "families" or titles, pay remained equitable within a margin of variation, and that as competition and recruitment boiled over in 2005, emails between executives and human resources departments complained about the pressure on wages caused by recruiters cold calling their employees, and bidding wars for key engineers.
Google, like the others, used a "salary algorithm" to ensure salaries remained within a tight band across like jobs. Although tech companies like to claim that talent and hard work are rewarded, in private, Google's "People Ops" department kept overall compensation essentially equitable by making sure that lower-paid employees who performed well got higher salary increases than higher-paid employees who also performed well.
As Intel's director of Compensation and Benefits bluntly summed up the Silicon Valley culture's official cant versus its actual practices,
While we pay lip service to meritocracy, we really believe more in treating everyone the same within broad bands.The companies in the pact shared their salary data with each other in order to coordinate and keep down wages — something unimaginable had the firms not agreed to not compete for each other's employees. And they fired their own recruiters on just a phone call from a pact member CEO.
In 2007, when Jobs learned that Google tried recruiting one of Apple's employees, he forwarded the message to Eric Schmidt with a personal comment attached: "I would be very pleased if your recruiting department would stop doing this."
Within an hour, Google made a "public example" by "terminating" the recruiter in such a manner as to "(hopefully) prevent future occurrences."
Likewise, when Intel CEO Paul Otellini heard that Google was recruiting their tech staff, he sent a message to Eric Schmidt: "Eric, can you pls help here???"
The next day, Schmidt wrote back to Otellini: "If we find that a recruiter called into Intel, we will terminate the recruiter."
One of the reasons why non-recruitment works so well in artificially lowering workers' wages is that it deprives employees of information about the job market, particularly one as competitive and overheating as Silicon Valley's in the mid-2000s. As the companies' own internal documents and statements showed, they generally considered cold-calling recruitment of "passive" talent — workers not necessarily looking for a job until enticed by a recruiter — to be the most important means of hiring the best employees.
Just before joining the wage-theft pact with Apple, Google's human resources executives are quoted sounding the alarm that they needed to "dramatically increase the engineering hiring rate" and that would require "drain[ing] competitors to accomplish this rate of hiring." One CEO who noticed Google's hiring spree was eBay CEO Meg Whitman, who in early 2005 called Eric Schmidt to complain, "Google is the talk of the Valley because [you] are driving up salaries across the board." Around this time, eBay entered an illegal wage-theft non-solicitation scheme of its own with Bill Campbell's Intuit, which is still being tried in ongoing federal and California state suits.
Google placed the highest premium on "passive" talent that they cold-called because "passively sourced candidates offer[ed] the highest yield," according to court documents. The reason is like the old Groucho Marx joke about not wanting to belong to a club that would let you join it — workers actively seeking a new employer were assumed to have something wrong with them; workers who weren't looking were assumed to be the kind of good happy talented workers that company poachers would want on their team.
For all of the high-minded talk of post-industrial technotopia and Silicon Valley as worker's paradise, what we see here in stark ugly detail is how the same old world scams and rules are still operative.
One key tech voice responded: "When I was a young scientist working on the fledgling creation that came to be known as the internet, the ethos that defined the culture we were building was characterized by words such as ethical, open, trusted, free, shared. None of us knew where our research would lead, but these words and principles were our beacon.
We did not anticipate that the dark side of the internet would emerge with such ferocity. Or that we would feel an urgent need to fix it.
How did we get from there to here?
While studying for my doctorate at MIT in the early 1960s, I recognized the need to create a mathematical theory of networks that would allow disparate computers to communicate. Later that decade, the Advanced Research Projects Agency — a research funding arm of the Department of Defense created in response to Sputnik — determined they needed a network based on my theory so that their computer research centers could share work remotely.
My UCLA computer lab was selected to be the first node of this network. Fifty years ago — on Oct. 29, 1969 — a simple “Lo” became the first internet message, from UCLA to Stanford Research Institute. We had typed the first two letters of “login” when the network crashed.
This quiet little moment of transmission over that two-computer communication network is regarded as the founding moment of the internet.
During its first 25 years, the internet grew dramatically and organically with the user community seeming to follow the same positive principles the scientists did. We scientists sought neither patents nor private ownership of this networking technology. We were nerds in our element, busily answering the challenge to create new technology that would benefit the world.
Around 1994, the internet began to change quickly as dot-coms came online, the network channels escalated to gigabit speeds and the World Wide Web became a common household presence. That same year, Amazon was founded and Netscape, the first commercial web browser, was released.
And on April 12, 1994, a “small” moment with enormous meaning occurred: The transmission of the first widely circulated spam email message, a brazen advertisement. The collective response of our science community was “How dare they?” Our miraculous creation, a “research” network capable of boundless computing magnificence had been hijacked to sell … detergent?
By 1995, the internet had 50 million users worldwide. The commercial world had recognized something we had not foreseen: The internet could be used as a powerful shopping machine, a gossip chamber, an entertainment channel and a social club. The internet had suddenly become a money-making machine.
With the profit motive taking over the internet, the very nature of innovation changed. Averting risk dominated the direction of technical progress. We no longer pursued “moonshots.” Instead advancement came via baby steps — “design me a 5% faster Bluetooth connection” as opposed to “build me an internet.” An online community that had once been convivial transformed into one of competition, antagonism and extremism.
And then as the millennium ended, our revolution took a more disturbing turn that we continue to grapple with today.
By suddenly providing the power for anyone to immediately reach millions of people inexpensively and anonymously, we had inadvertently also created the perfect formula for the “dark” side to spread like a virus all over the world. Today more than 50% of email is spam, but far more troubling issues have emerged — including denial of service attacks that can immobilize critical financial institutions and malicious botnets that can cripple essential infrastructure sectors.
Other dangerous players, such as nation-states, started coming onto the scene around 2010, when Stuxnet malware appeared. Organized crime recognized the internet could be used for international money laundering, and extremists found the internet to be a convenient megaphone for their radical views. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, facial recognition, biometrics and other advanced technologies could be used by governments to weaken democratic institutions.
The balkanization of the internet is now conceivable as firewalls spring up around national networks.
We could try to push the internet back toward its ethical roots. However, it would be a complex challenge requiring a joint effort by interested parties — which means pretty much everyone.
We should pressure government officials and entities to more zealously monitor and adjudicate such internet abuses as cyberattacks, data breaches and piracy. Governments also should provide a forum to bring interested parties together to problem-solve.
Citizen-users need to hold websites more accountable. When was the last time a website asked what privacy policy you would like applied to you? My guess is never. You should be able to clearly articulate your preferred privacy policy and reject websites that don’t meet your standards. This means websites should provide a privacy policy customized to you, something they should be able to do since they already customize the ads you see. Websites should also be required to take responsibility for any violations and abuses of privacy that result from their services.
Scientists need to create more advanced methods of encryption to protect individual privacy by preventing perpetrators from using stolen databases. We are working on technologies that would hide the origin and destination of data moving around the network, thereby diminishing the value of captured network traffic. Blockchain, the technology that underpins bitcoin and other digital currencies, also offers the promise of irrefutable, indisputable data ledgers.
If we work together to make these changes happen, it might be possible to return to the internet I knew. "
Leonard Kleinrock is distinguished professor of computer science at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering.
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How the Internet lost its soul
This week, we celebrate what many consider the 50th birthday of the Internet. The underpinnings of the World Wide Web originated in an American communications network built for national defense and the pursuit of knowledge: ARPANET. Funded by the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency, the network was designed so that scientists could share computer hardware, software and data.
It worked. In the ensuing decades, the ARPANET, and after the 1980s, the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET), did indeed allow scientists to collaboratively build knowledge around networked tools and information. But expanding access to the Internet, combined with looser government regulations, ultimately produced a situation no one foresaw or intended. On today's Internet, conspiracy theories run rampant, identities can be faked and our real-life elections are vulnerable to manipulation. A network designed for spreading truth became a profit-driven industry, a public sphere that threatens to undermine the public good.
The original ARPANET was designed for a relatively small community of people united by a technical challenge. At the time, computers from different manufacturers ran incompatible software, and long-distance data communications links were costly and unreliable. Networks connected only a few identical computers within a small region.
But ARPANET had an audacious proposal: It would span the continental United States to connect 15 research sites encompassing a diverse array of computers.
"Almost every conceivable item of computer hardware and software will be in the network," project leader Larry Roberts pointed out. "This is the greatest challenge of the system, as well as its greatest ultimate value." As a leading funder of computer science research, ARPA was able to mobilize a talented group of faculty and graduate students to design, build and debug the network, sending the first message on Oct. 29, 1969.
Like many academic environments, the ARPANET community was open and informal, and security was lax; in the early 1970s, students were rumored to have used the network to conduct transcontinental drug deals alongside their official research. But the relatively closed world of networked computing was opened up with the introduction of personal computers in the 1970s. The Defense Department soon found "unauthorized penetrations" of the ARPANET by hackers, complaining that "the availability of inexpensive computers and modems have made the network fair game for countless computer hobbyists."
By 1983, security concerns were so acute that Defense split off military users into their own network, ceding the rest of the ARPANET to academic researchers. In 1990, the ARPANET was absorbed into a new network built by the National Science Foundation that consisted of several regional networks connected by a high-speed backbone. As a nationwide civilian network, NSFNET rapidly increased the size and visibility of the Internet.
Politicians and businesses wanted to capitalize on the potential of a national network to connect citizens and consumers. In the early 1980s, the general public, though not yet allowed on the Internet, had begun using commercial dial-up services such as CompuServe and AOL to access servers offering chat rooms, games and email. In 1986, Congress, prompted by Sen. Al Gore, began debating whether the nation needed an "information superhighway" to connect K-12 schools and libraries for all citizens. Congress included funding for a National Research and Education Network (NREN) in its High-Performance Computing Act of 1991.
Had this plan come to fruition, the Internet would have remained under federal control until the late 1990s, potentially allowing time to upgrade security or create regulations to protect users. But before the NREN could get underway, the industry contractors providing the NSFNET infrastructure rushed ahead with plans to offer commercial network services, ultimately causing Congress to abandon the NREN.
The result was the de facto privatization of the Internet. The nonprofit organizations that had operated the NSFNET's backbone and regional networks reinvented themselves as the first commercial Internet service providers, serving both the NSF and private customers. The NSF now had the option to outsource its networking needs to these commercial providers, which it did as it retired the old NSFNET in 1995. While this removed an administrative burden from the NSF, the hasty transition left little time to consider the policy implications. So a commercialized network developed without public oversight of the Internet's operation.
Privatization opened the floodgates for new services: social media, gaming, e-commerce, and millions of personal websites and blogs. Industry advocates insisted that the Internet should not be regulated, lest innovation be stifled. Regulatory models that had been developed for common carriers, publishers and broadcasters did not fit a new medium that combined aspects of all these media and whose services and business models were in constant flux. Online businesses were free to experiment with ways to make money, eventually landing on the advertising-based business model that led to escalating surveillance and collection of user data to better target ads.
None of this has prevented scientists - the Internet's original users - from continuing to build reliable knowledge based on networked data and computational tools. The scientific community has time-tested processes to validate and protect the information it shares. But the general public is in a more precarious position. Anyone can be a publisher online, and the obvious clues to legitimacy that came with print and broadcast media - the investment in reporting and fact-checking, obligations to paying customers, an identifiable organization that could be held liable for false content - can be absent or faked online. The same type of user profiling that stimulates business also enables bad actors to target inflammatory social issues and widen political divides. We have inadvertently created a culture where misinformation can be spread without accountability.
Long-term trends of increasingly open access and diminishing government oversight have fueled the Internet's growth and unleashed the creativity of millions. They have also left a vacuum where the public interest should be. Can we work together to build a better Internet for the next 50 years?"
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Court documents below...
[Illustration by Brad Jonas for Pando]The NY Times reported: "Ms.
Feinstein and her husband sold $1.5 million to $6 million worth of stock
in Allogene Therapeutics, a California-based biotech company, in
transactions that took place on Jan. 31 and Feb. 18." She did claim
that she has "no involvement in her husband’s financial decisions" to
avoid criticism. Do you really think that she has no idea about
multi-million dollar deals that her husband is involved in?
- A Plan To Increase Public Integrity At The Department of Energy And The U.S. Congress
These are the steps that the public must demand to strengthen public integrity by eliminating corrupt financial conflicts in Congress.
Congress must be ordered to eliminate both the appearance and the
potential for financial conflicts of interest. Americans must be confident
that actions taken by public officials are intended to serve the public,
and not those officials. These actions counter-act the actions taken by
Obama Administration staff and Department of Energy officials in illicit
coordination
with U.S. Senators. In other words, we experienced all of the damages from
each of the abuse-of-power issues listed below. These are the actions
needed to resolve those issues:
- Ban individual stock ownership by Members of Congress, Cabinet
Secretaries, senior congressional staff, federal judges, White House staff
and other senior agency officials while in office. Prohibit all government
officials from holding or trading stock where its value might be
influenced by their agency, department, or actions.
- Apply conflict of interest laws to the President and Vice President
through the Presidential Conflicts of Interest Act, which would require
the President and the Vice President to place conflicted assets, including
businesses, into a blind trust to be sold off
- Require senior Department of Energy government officials, employees, contractors and White House staff to divest from privately-owned assets that could present conflicts, including large companies like Tesla, Google, Facebook, Sony, Netflix, etc., and commercial real estate.
- Make it a felony to not respond to a filing by a citizen within 48
hours. Former White House and Energy Department staff use 'stone-walling'
to intentionally delay responses for a decade, or more.
- Apply ethics rules to all government employees, including unpaid White
House staff and advisors.
- Require most executive branch employees to recuse from all issues that
might financially benefit themselves or a previous employer or client from
the preceding 4 years
- Create conflict-free investment opportunities for federal officials with
new investment accounts managed by the Federal Retirement Thrift
Investment Board and conflict-free mutual funds.
- Close and lock the Revolving Door between industry and government and
stop tech companies from buying influence in the government or profiting
off of the public service of any official.
- Lifetime ban on lobbying by Presidents, Vice Presidents, Members of
Congress, federal judges, and Cabinet Secretaries; and, multi-year bans on
all other federal employees from lobbying their former office, department,
House of Congress, or agency after they leave government service until the
end of the Administration, but at least for 2 years ( and at least 6 years
for corporate lobbyists)
- Limit the ability of companies to buy influence through former
government officials
- Require income disclosures from former senior officials 4 years after
federal employment.
- Prohibit companies from immediately hiring or paying any senior
government official from an agency, department, or Congressional office
recently lobbied by that company
- Prohibit the world’s largest companies, banks, and monopolies (measured
by annual revenue or market capitalization) from hiring or paying any
former senior government official for 4 years after they leave government
service.
- Limit the ability of companies to buy influence through current
government employees
- Prohibit current lobbyists from taking government jobs for 2 years after
lobbying; 6 years for corporate lobbyists. Public, written waivers where
such hiring is in the national interest are allowed for non-corporate
lobbyists only.
- Prohibit corporate outlaws like Google, Tesla, Facebook, Linkedin,
Netflix, Sony, etc., from working in government
by banning the hiring of top corporate leaders whose companies were caught
breaking federal law in the last 6
years
- Prohibit contractor corruption by blocking federal contractor and
licensee employees from working at the agency awarding the contract or
license for 4 years
- Ban “Golden Parachutes” that provide corporate bonuses to executives for
federal service.
- Publicly expose all influence-peddling in Washington.
- Strengthen and expand the federal definition of a “lobbyist” to include
all individuals paid to influence government.
- Create a new “corporate lobbyist” definition to identify individuals
paid to influence government on behalf of for-
profit entities and their front-groups.
- Radically expand disclosure of lobbyist activities and influence
campaigns by requiring all lobbyists to disclose any
specific bills, policies, and government actions they attempt to
influence; any meetings with public officials; and any documents they
provide to those officials
- End Influence-Peddling by Foreign Actors such as that which occurred in
the ENER1, Severstal, Solyndra and related scandals
- Combat foreign influence in Washington by banning all foreign lobbying.
- End foreign lobbying by Americans by banning American lobbyists from
accepting money from foreign governments, foreign individuals, and
foreign companies to influence United States public policy.
- Prohibit current lobbyists from taking government jobs for 2 years after
lobbying; 6 years for corporate lobbyists. Public, written waivers where
such hiring is in the national interest are allowed for non-corporate
lobbyists only.
- End Legalized Lobbyist Bribery and stop lobbyists from trading money
for government favors.
- Ban direct political donations from lobbyists to candidates or Members
of Congress.
- End lobbyist contingency fees that allow lobbyists to be paid for a
guaranteed policy outcome.
- End lobbyist gifts to the executive and legislative branch officials
they lobby
- Strengthen Congressional independence from lobbyists and end
Washington’s dependence on
lobbyists for "expertise" and information.
- Make congressional service sustainable by transitioning Congressional
staff to competitive salaries that track other
federal employees
- Reinstate the nonpartisan Congressional Office of Technology Assessment
to provide critical scientific and technological support to Members of
Congress.
- Level the playing field between corporate lobbyists and government by
taxing excessive lobbying beginning at $500,000 in annual lobbying
expenditures, and use the proceeds to help finance Congressional mandated
rule-making, fund the National Public Advocate, and finance Congressional
support agencies
- De-politicize the rulemaking process and increase transparency of
industry efforts to influence federal agencies.
- Require individuals and corporations to disclose funding or editorial
conflicts of interest in research submitted to agencies that is not
publicly available in peer-reviewed publications.
- Prevent McKinsey-type sham research from undermining the public interest
by requiring that studies that present conflicts of interest to undergo
independent peer review to be considered in the rule-making process
- Require agencies to justify withdrawn public interest rules via public,
written explanations.
- Close loopholes exploited by powerful corporations like Google, Facebook, Tesla, Netflix, Sony, etc., to block public interest actions.
- Eliminate loopholes that allow corporations, like Tesla and Google, to
tilt the rules in their favor and against the public interest.
- Restrict negotiated rule-making to stop industry from delaying or
dominating the rule-making process by ending the practice of inviting
industry to negotiate rules they have to follow.
- Restrict inter-agency review as a tool for corporate abuse by
banning informal review, establishing a maximum 45-
day review period, and blocking closed -door industry lobbying at the
White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs
- Limit abusive injunctions from rogue judges, like Jackson, et al, by
ensuring that only Appeals Courts, not individual District Court judges ,
can temporarily block agencies from implementing final rules.
- Prevent hostile agencies from sham delays of implementation and
enforcement by using the presence of litigation to postpone the
implementation of final rules.
- Empower the public to police agencies for corporate capture.
- Increase the ability of the public to make sure their interests are
considered when agencies act
- Create a new Office of the Public Advocate empowered to assist the
public in meaningfully engaging in the rule-making process across the
federal government
- Encourage enforcement by allowing private lawsuits from members of the
public to hold agencies accountable for failing to complete rules or
enforce the law, and to hold corporations accountable for breaking the
rules
- Inoculate government agencies against corporate capture such as Google
undertook against the White House
- Provide agencies with the tools and resources to implement strong rules
that reflect the will of Congress and protect the public.
- Boost agency resources to level the playing field between corporate
lobbyists and federal agencies by using the proceeds of the tax on
excessive lobbying and the anti-corruption penalty fees to help finance
Congress-mandated rule-making and facilitate decisions by agencies that
are buried in an avalanche of lobbyist activity
- Reform judicial review to prevent corporations from gaming the courts by
requiring courts to presumptively defer to agency interpretations of laws
and prohibiting courts from considering sham McKinsey studies and research
excluded by agencies from the rule-making process
- Reverse the Congressional Review Act provision banning related rules
that prevent agencies from implementing the will of Congress based on
Congress’ prior disapproval of a different, narrow rule on a similar topic
- Improve judicial integrity and defend access to justice for all Americans.
- Strengthen Judicial Ethics Requirements.
- Enhance the integrity of the judicial branch by strengthening rules
that prevent conflicts of interest.
- Ban individual stock ownership by federal judges.
- Expand rules prohibiting judges from accepting gifts or payments to
attend private seminars from private individuals and corporations
- Require ethical behavior by the Supreme Court by directing the Court to
follow the Code of Conduct that binds all other federal judges
- Boost the transparency of Federal Courts
- Enhance public insight into the judicial process by increasing
information about the process and reducing barriers to accessing
information.
- Increase disclosure of non-judicial activity by federal judges by
requiring the Judicial Conference to publicly post judges’ financial
reports, recusal decisions, and speeches.
- Enhance public access to court activity by mandating that federal
appellate courts live-stream, on the web, audio of their proceedings,
making case information easily-accessible to the public free of charge,
and requiring federal courts to share case assignment data in bulk.
- Eliminate barriers that restrict access to justice to all but the
wealthiest individuals and companies.
- Reduce barriers that prevent individuals from having their case heard in
court by restoring pleading standards that make it easier for individuals
and businesses that have been harmed to make their case before a judge.
- Encourage diversity on the Federal Bench
- Strengthen the integrity of the judicial branch by increasing the focus
on personal and professional diversity of the federal bench.
- Create a single, new, and independent agency dedicated to enforcing
federal ethics and anti-corruption laws
- Support stronger ethics and public integrity laws with stronger
enforcement.
- Establish the new, independent U.S. Office of Public Integrity, which
will strengthen federal ethics enforcement
with new investigative and disciplinary powers
- Investigate potential violations by any individual or entity, including
individuals and companies with new subpoena authority
- Enforce the nation’s ethics laws by ordering corrective action, levying
civil and administrative penalties, and referring egregious violations to
the Justice Department for criminal arrest and enforcement.
- Receive and investigate ethics complaints from members of the public.
- Absorb the U.S. Office of Government Ethics as a new Government Ethics
Division tasked with providing confidential advice to federal employees
seeking ethics guidance.
- Consolidate anti-corruption and public integrity oversight over federal
officials, including oversight of all agency Inspectors General, all
ethics matters for White House staff and agency heads, and all waivers and
recusals by senior government officials.
- Remain independent and protected from partisan politics through a single
Director operating under strict selection, appointment, and removal
criteria.
- Provide easy online access to key government ethics and transparency
documents, including financial disclosures; lobbyist registrations;
lobbyist disclosures of meetings and materials; and all ethics records,
recusals, and waivers.
- Maintain a new government-wide Office of the Public Advocate, which
would advocate for the public interest in executive branch
rule-making.
- Enforce federal open records and FOIA requirements by maintaining the
central FOIA website and working with the National Archives to require
agencies to comply with FOIA.
- Strengthen legislative branch enforcement.
- Expand an independent and empowered ethics office insulated from
congressional politics.
- Expand and empower the U.S. Office of Congressional Ethics, which will
enforce the nation’s ethics laws in the Congress
and the entire Legislative Branch, including the U.S. Senate.
- Conduct investigations of potential violations of ethics laws and rules
by Members of Congress and staff with new subpoena power
- Refer criminal and civil violations to the Justice Department, the
Office of Public Integrity, or other relevant state or federal law
enforcement.
- Recommend disciplinary and corrective action to the House and Senate
Ethics Committees.
- Boost transparency in government and fix Federal Open Records laws, public official and candidate tax disclosure.
- Disclose basic tax return information for candidates for federal
elected office and current elected officials.
- Require the IRS to release tax returns for Presidential and
Vice-Presidential candidates from the previous 8 years and during each
year in federal elected office.
- Require the IRS to release t ax returns for Congressional candidates
from the previous 2 years and during each year in federal elected office.
- Require the IRS to release tax returns and other financial information
of businesses owned by senior federal officials and
candidates for federal office
- Require the IRS to release tax filings for nonprofit organizations run
by candidates for federal office
- Disclose the Cash behind Washington Advocacy and Lobbying.
- Prevent special interests from using secret donations from corporations
and billionaires to influence public policy
without disclosure
- Require nonprofit organizations to list donors who bankrolled the
production of any specific rule-making comment, congressional testimony,
or lobbying material, and to reveal whether the donors reviewed or edited
the document.
- Require individuals and corporations to disclose funding or editorial
conflicts of interest in research submitted to agencies that is not
publicly available in peer-reviewed publications.
- Prevent sham research from undermining the public interest by requiring
that studies that present conflicts of interest to independent peer review
to be considered in the rule-making process.
- Improve the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
- Close the loopholes in our open records laws that allow federal
officials to hide tech industry and Silicon Valley oligarch industry
influence
- Codify the default presumption of disclosure and affirmatively disclose
records of public interest, including meeting agendas; government
contracts; salaries; staff diversity; and reports to Congress.
- Require all agencies to use a central FOIA website that is searchable
and has downloadable open records databases with
all open FOIA requests and all records disclosed through FOIA.
- Strengthen FOIA enforcement by limiting FOIA exemptions and loopholes,
and by giving the National Archives the authority to overrule agency FOIA
decisions and to compel disclosure.
- Extend FOIA to private-sector federal contractors, including private
federal prisons and immigration detention centers, and require large
federal contractors to disclose political spending
- Make Congress more transparent by ending the corporate lobbyists leg up
in the legislative process. The
public deserves to know what Congress is up to and how lobbyists influence
legislation.
- Require all congressional committees to immediately post online more
information, including hearings and markup schedules, bill or amendments
text, testimonies, documents entered into the hearing record, hearing
transcripts, written witness answers, and hearing audio and video
recordings.
- Require Members of Congress to post a link to their searchable voting
record on their official websites
- Require lobbyists to disclose when they lobby a specific congressional
office; specific topics of visit; the official action being requested; and
all documents provided to the office during the visit.
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Do these seem like common-sense rules that should have already been in place? They are!
These anti-corruption rules have been blocked by your own elected officials because they work for themselves and not you!
By Mark Ames 